Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Bradley Denton [libby ebook reader .txt] 📗

least like an ideological concentration camp in all of Topeka. We were given two bathroom breaks and one snack period per six-hour day, and twice a week we were allowed to go outside to play sinners and saints in the church parking lot. (Sinners and saints was a religious version of the playground staple called dodgeball or bombardment. My class of Vacation Bible Schoolers would count off, one, two, one, two, and the teacher would designate the ones as saints and the twos as sinners. The sinners would line up against the brick wall of the church and try to dodge the melon-size red inflate-o-balls that the saints threw at us. I always tried to be a sinner, because if a sinner managed to catch a ball that was thrown at him, the saint who had thrown it was either out of the game or had to become a sinner—and I was good at catching.)

It really wasn’t too bad, as long as I turned off my ears during the lectures and focused on artistic perfection during the crafts periods. I wasn’t allowed to draw, paint, or cut-out-and-glue just anything that I wanted to, of course, but had to follow Mrs. Stummert’s assignments. Thus I had to find what joy I could in the work itself. Once I drew a picture of David and Goliath that I thought was almost good enough to be in Mad magazine, and another time I did a finger painting of Jesus Walking on the Water that might have been done by Salvador Dali when he was my age (seven). Mrs. Stummert generally frowned whenever she took a look at my finished work, but she could hardly complain because I had done what she had asked to the best of my abilities. She couldn’t punish me just because my interpretations happened to be a little bizarre.

My masterpiece was going to be a huge construction-paper collage of the Destruction of Sodom. Mrs. Stummert had told us to reconstruct a biblical scene that illustrated the Power of God in Action, and for me the choice was easy. In my opinion, turning Lot’s wife into a slab of rock salt while simultaneously wasting a city was the best trick God had ever pulled.

The beginning of the end of my Vacation Bible School career came as I was putting the finishing touches on the collage one Friday in late July. I had worked on the project during crafts period for five days in a row, lavishing care on details and striving for perfection as I had never done before. I had cut the buildings of Sodom out of purple and red paper, the smoke from gray and tan, the flames from orange and yellow, the tiny screaming Sodomites from brown, and Lot’s wife from white. I was finishing by carefully pasting each piece on a big sheet of black, and I thought it looked terrific. I actually felt happy.

I should not have let myself feel that way. Not in Vacation Bible School. When I felt happy, I hummed or sang without being aware of it, and the songs I hummed and sang (although they were my prayers) were extremely secular in nature.

Several weeks earlier, Mother had brought home a new Beatles album: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ever since she had first played it, the lyrics had been jostling about in my head like soccer players. One of them scored a goal that day while I was working on the Destruction of Sodom, and I sang.

To me, it was nothing more than a happy song about being in good ol’ Sergeant Pepper’s band. But to Mrs. Stummert, it was something else. It was a sign that the long-haired freakish enemies of all that was good and decent had invaded Topeka.

“What are you singing?” she asked. She was standing behind me, her voice quavering over my head with outrage and doom.

I had learned enough in grade school to know when a teacher had already made up her mind that you were in trouble. The only defense in that situation was to act humble while displaying as much ignorance about your supposed crime as possible.

In this case, I really was ignorant of my crime. I knew that I was in trouble, but I didn’t know why.

“Just a song,” I said in a tiny voice.

“What kind of song?” Mrs. Stummert demanded.

“A Beatles song,” I squeaked.

Mrs. Stummert clamped my right arm in one fat red hand, pulled me out of my chair, and marched me around the table where my entire Vacation Bible School class was working. The kids were all staring, although they kept their heads down and tried to pretend that they weren’t.

“Please continue working, children,” Mrs. Stummert said. “This is none of your business.” She propelled me into the hall, and the church echoed with the sound of the heavy wooden door banging shut behind her.

Still holding my arm, Mrs. Stummert put her free hand under my chin and tilted my head so that I had to look directly at her rouged face.

“Where did you hear that song?” she asked fiercely. “Were some older kids playing their radio where you could hear it?”

“No,” I said, my voice distorted because Mrs. Stummert’s fingers were clamped on my jaw.

“Where, then?” she said, shaking me. “Where did you hear filth like that?”

I twisted my head out of her grasp and tried to pull away altogether, but she held my arm tight. “It’s not filth,” I said, my voice shaking with the tears that were climbing up my throat to my eyes. “It’s just a song about being in a band. Sergeant Pepper’s band.”

Mrs. Stummert’s eyes bulged, and her flaccid lips trembled. “Oliver! Do you know who Sergeant Pepper is?” She said “Sergeant Pepper” as though she were spitting out something rancid.

“Just a sergeant, I guess,” I said, hating her. “One who runs a band.”

Mrs. Stummert shook her head, and her cat’s-eye glasses went crooked. “No, Oliver! It’s another name for someone who sells bad drugs, and that song and all of those other Beatles songs are about people who aren’t married but who all live in the same house together and, and—” She gulped for air.

Meanwhile, I was pissed. “Says who?” I yelled. When Mrs. Stummert insulted the Beatles, she might as well have been insulting me and my mother. After all, the Beatles were Buddy Holly’s disciples, and so were we.

At that point, Mrs. Stummert took off down the hall like a speeding blimp, dragging me to the pastor’s office. Naturally, he was in.

He was a broad, big-bellied man with a pockmarked nose and hair as black and gleaming as shoe polish laced with Vaseline. He wore a dark blue suit with a tightly knotted necktie that was partially covered by the pouch of skin under his chin. “Well, well, what have we here?” he said as Mrs. Stummert yanked me forward to stand in front of his desk. I swear, that’s what he said.

“We have a young man who has been singing hippie drug songs in Bible School,” Mrs. Stummert said.

The pastor’s eyebrows pulled together, his eyes narrowed, and his face darkened to a deep red. He stood and came around the desk to stand towering over me. “Is this true, young man?” he thundered. I swear: He thundered.

When you’re a kid, this is what they do to you. One adult accuses you of a crime, and another demands, “Is this true?” If you say no, then you’ve just called adult number one a liar, and you’re in for it. If you say yes, then you’ve confessed your guilt to adult number two, and you’re in for it.

Come to think of it, that process stays pretty much the same after you’ve grown up. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, between a rock and a hard place, good cop/bad cop, Scylla and Charybdis.

I said nothing.

“I asked you a question, son,” the pastor said.

“I’m not your son, fat butt,” I blurted.

“Fat butt” was an insult I had learned in second grade. I was horrified at myself for having used it on the pastor, who for all I knew would kill me; but regardless of that, it was appropriate.

Mrs. Stummert shrieked and shook me, telling me that I would wind up in either Hell or reform school and nearly dislocating my arm. The pastor raised his hand as if he were going to swat my head from my shoulders, but then he walked around the desk and sat down again. From there he glared at me with the most intense expression of hatred that I have ever seen. I became scared.

“Mrs. Stummert,” he said.

Mrs. Stummert stopped shaking me. “Yes, Pastor?” she asked. Even she sounded a little frightened now.

“Please bring me your record book,” he said. “I need the boy’s home number to call his mother.”

“Yes, Pastor,” Mrs. Stummert said, pulling me toward the door.

“Leave him here,” the pastor said.

Mrs. Stummert released my arm and left the office, closing the door. I stood before the pastor’s desk and rubbed the red spots her fingers had left.

“Stand still,” the pastor said.

I stopped rubbing and stood still.

The pastor stood again and came around the desk. He put one meaty hand on my head.

“You little piece of dogshit,” he said. His voice was a low growl. “You’re going to grow up like those others, aren’t you? The un-Christian, un-American ones in California and New York with their dirty hair and filthy clothes and their diseased whores who commit perversions with their mouths.”

My stomach tightened with a sick terror. Even what I had felt at the sight of the tornado the year before was better than what I felt now. I wanted to run, to get out of there and never go back, but I couldn’t move.

“If your teacher would just wait a few minutes before coming back,” the pastor continued, “I’d show you what it’ll be like for you. That’d teach you.”

He pulled my head toward him, and my terror snapped back to anger. I kicked his shin and then flailed away from him, backing up against the wall.

“Stay away from me or I’ll kill you!” I screamed.

The pastor went back to his chair. He didn’t seem to have felt my kick. “Boys who say things like that get sent to reform school, just like Mrs. Stummert says,” he said in a voice that was now weirdly calm. “So do boys who tell tales. Be sure not to tell any tales, son. No one would believe you, and you’d end up sorry you’d done it.”

I stayed against the wall, breathing hard, tears on my face, my fists knotted, even after Mrs. Stummert returned with her record book.

She hardly gave me a glance. “His mother has a job outside the home, apparently,” she said, holding out the book to the pastor. “She gave two numbers and wrote ‘work’ beside one with a circle around it.”

The pastor took the book. “Where do your father and mother work, son?” he asked.

“I don’t have a father,” I said, “and I don’t need one either.”

The pastor and Mrs. Stummert gave each other looks that made me want to pound their faces into pulp.

“What about your mother, then?” the pastor asked.

“KKAP radio,” I said.

This time the pastor and Mrs. Stummert looked at me. Their expressions were mixtures of disgust and smugness.

“Might have known,” the pastor said. He picked up his phone.

Mother came quickly. I don’t know how she was able to drop everything at the station and take off, but she did. I loved her for it.

Still, I wanted to make my position plain from