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

the outset. The moment that she stepped into the pastor’s office, I said, “I’m not coming back here. Not ever.”

She squatted before me so that our eyes were on a level. “Why? What happened?”

Mrs. Stummert and the pastor took turns lecturing Mother then, talking as if I were a hundred miles away. Mrs. Stummert told Mother what I had done, and Mother asked what was so bad about that. The pastor replied that so-called music like that Beatles poison was destroying the Christian fiber of the nation. He also said that any radio station that played tings like that was under the influence of Communists and drug addicts.

Mother told him that she worked for a radio station that played things like that, that no one she knew was either a Red or a junkie, and what the hell made him think he knew his head from his ass, anyway?

The pastor almost exploded. “We don’t need you LSD hippies in our community!” he cried, his face shaking. “We won’t let you raise your bastard children to destroy us! We can tell the Authorities about you! We have Jesus on our side!”

“I’ll bet He’s just thrilled to pieces about that,” Mother replied, taking my hand. “Let’s get out of here, Oliver. You won’t have to come back. I’ll either find babysitters, or you can come to work with me. We’ll hide you in a filing cabinet.”

As we left, I looked over my shoulder and yelled, “Fat butt!” at the quaking pastor. Ordinarily, Mother would have disapproved of that out of a sense of maternal duty, but this time she looked over her shoulder and yelled the same thing.

Once we were inside our creaky old Ford Falcon, Mother gazed at me with a seriousness that startled me.

“Oliver,” she said, “this is important: Did they hurt you? Did they hurt you at all, in any way? Did they even just scare you?”

I opened my mouth to tell her about my arm, which was probably going to bruise where Mrs. Stummert had grasped it, and about the pastor grabbing my head.

“Because if they did,” Mother said before I could speak, “we’ll get them.”

There was an edge to her voice that made me stop. Considering, I asked, “How do you mean?”

She stared out the windshield. “That depends on what they did to you. At the very least, we’ll slice their tires. We’ll put sugar in their gas tanks. We’ll break into their houses and flush explosive chemicals down their toilets. We’ll put dead skunks in their ovens and set the temperature at five hundred degrees. We’ll capture pigeons, feed them blueberries for a week, and set them loose in their living rooms. We’ll telephone them and blow police whistles.

We’ll send them cow poop by fourth-class mail. We’ll hound them until they go berserk and do something crazy and die.”

I thought about the pastor saying, We can tell the Authorities about you. I wasn’t sure who the Authorities were, but if they were meaner and more powerful than the pastor, I didn’t want to find out.

“They didn’t hurt me,” I said. I didn’t want Mother to go to jail, or worse. “We don’t have to do any of that stuff. I just don’t want to go back there, that’s all.”

Mother looked disappointed. “Okay,” she said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

Her summertime entries in Volume III indicate that she was indeed disappointed, and not just about the fact that I had vetoed the fourth-class-mail cow poop.

That bloated walrus called me a hippie, she wrote. Would that it were so. If I could, I would go out to San Francisco and find out what this Movement is all about, and whether there might be a place in it for me. I would even try LSD. Wouldn’t that be something to shock Mama; I would do it just for that. I could probably try it right here in Topeka, Kansas, if I wanted, because Ted at the station has hinted that he knows people over in Lawrence who can get him pretty much anything.

But I’ll never do it. I have Oliver. He has me. If I dropped acid and went tripping tra-la-la across the rooftops and danced at the peak of the Statehouse dome, what would happen to him? Mama would probably get custody of him, and Great Chuck Almighty, I don’t want that.

Besides, I’m twenty-six. I’m too old to be a hippie. Another four years, and no one in Haight-Ashbury will trust me. I’m not sure that they would now.

Mother’s frustration at being a single parent trapped in Topeka in 1967 is in evidence throughout the rest of Volume III, which she completed late that fall. She began to buy more and more books and magazines devoted to UFO investigations and speculations concerning the lost continent of Atlantis, apparently figuring that if she couldn’t indulge in hippie-type weirdness, she’d settle for any kind of weirdness she could find.

And there was plenty to be found, as illustrated by the diary entry Mother wrote on October 21:

Today is the day that the Pentagon will rise one hundred feet into the air and that its evil spirits will be exorcised. I cannot be there to see it, but I will be here adding my energy to the effort, humming and chanting whatever feels right for a levitation spell. They sent Mikey to Vietnam last month, but maybe if we can do this thing, they will bring him back and he won’t be killed. In the name of ancient Atlantis, in the name of Zeus and Poseidon, in the name of the star creatures who visit in their ships of light, we command you, arise.

The Pentagon either didn’t budge an inch or only rose a mere ten feet, depending on who you ask.

The Apollo tragedy, the Vacation Bible School incident, Mother’s growing weirdness, and the general state of Everything in 1967 served to make me one miserably confused little seven-year-old boy. I began to throw tantrums, break things, and stick pencils down my throat to make myself throw up. It was a good thing that Mother and I almost never saw Grandmother during this time, or I might have really gone crazy. Sharon Sharpston has suggested that the lack of a positive male role model during this period might be the primary reason for my behavior, but I think that this theory is largely manure.

After all, I did have positive male role models. Always, I had Buddy. I also had the Beatles, and along about this time, The Who. Townshend and Daltrey were added to our pantheon, and Mother and I sang “I Can See for Miles” every night one week while she was cooking supper.

I had one other male role model, although I had never met him and had never heard his voice: Uncle Mike. Mother had been receiving letters from him since February, some of them with snapshots included, and she read them to me. At least, she read all except the parts that she thought I shouldn’t hear.

Here is one of those letters, which I found stuck into Volume III. I remember Mother reading it aloud one evening in November. I do not remember the fifth paragraph.

Dear Sis,

Well I sure feel bad I couldn’t see you before I got sent over but that’s the way it goes sometimes I guess. I’ll make up for it when I get back. I especially wish I could see that boy of yours, I bet he’s something.

I have been here at Da Nang for two weeks now and know most of the guys pretty good. The food is mostly bad but it was in Des Moines too ha ha ha. Say you haven’t learned how to cook yet have you? because if you have some cookies or something would sure make me popular around here hint hint.

The weather here is about like at home only hotter and wetter. Another week here and then my unit goes out to do stuff like making sure the enemy stays clear of strategic roads. That should be easy because I hear they mostly hide out in the jungle anyway.

So how are things at the radio station? We got one guy in the unit, Pete is his name, who is a real Rolling Stones fan. He says you must have the best job in the world. He says to tell you “better than our jobs, anyway.” He is just joking since we haven’t had to work too awful hard yet.

The only tough thing so far was I saw two dead guys yesterday. It was two guys who got caught in some kind of booby trap that blew up on them. They got put into plastic bags, not even boxes but bags, and the guys doing it couldn’t figure out which feet went with which guy so they had to guess. Don’t worry I won’t end up that way you can bet because they taught us at camp new methods how to tell booby traps when you see them.

Say in to that Oliver kid of yours for me and tell him I’ll give him all my medals when I get home. Pete says the only medal he wants is the Meritorious Eating Prize. He is the one who made me ask you to send cookies.

Your brother, Mike

I didn’t understand Vietnam, or the levitation of the Pentagon, or any of it. The whole business was one of those things that I figured I would understand once I got older.

I was wrong. Since I had been born in 1959, I had lucked into the eye of the hurricane. I would never have to worry about being drafted or about seeing my friends drafted. War was not something I would ever have to deal with in a direct, personal way.

Why do I feel guilty about that?

Back then, Uncle Mike’s letters were nothing more than the words of a stranger in a faraway land. They had no more effect on me than the incomprehensible events Walter Cronkite described on the evening news. Death is meaningless unless it happens to someone you know.

It happened to someone I knew on December 10, two days after my eighth birthday. Otis Redding and four of the Bar-Kays were killed when the twin-engine Beechcraft in which they were flying crashed into a lake near Madison, Wisconsin.

Mother and I sat silently in our tiny living room when we heard the news. I was on the floor beside the furnace vent, and the hot air coming out dried my eyes so that I couldn’t cry. I don’t know whether I could have anyway; I was almost more scared for myself than I was sad for Otis.

He had died within a few days of my birthday, just as Sam Cooke had three years before. In addition, Otis had died a death eerily similar to Buddy Holly’s. (Buddy’s plane hadn’t gone into a lake, but it had crashed near a town named for one, which struck me as being almost the same thing.) And Mother had told me any number of times that Buddy and I were spiritually linked.

I began to fear that the link was Death, which made me wish that I would never grow up. The more birthdays I had, the more gods we would lose.

Mother, however, had another explanation for Otis’s death.

I was right about last year’s tornado, she wrote in her final entry in Volume III. It was a harbinger of more horrible things to come. The fire that killed the astronauts (itself an omen). Mikey in Vietnam. The war getting worse, the police and military cracking down on public