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

assemblies. People like that pastor at the church gaining more and more power. Otis Redding dying. The station getting threatening mail for playing “hippie-nigger” music.

Come for us, O wise flyers of the bright ships of ancient Atlantis. Come and take me and my son away with you to live among the giant blue stars. You won’t be sorry. We aren’t like the rest of these dumbfucks.

But the bright ships of ancient Atlantis did not come. Neither did anything else. Mother and I remained in Topeka, waiting to see what could possibly happen in 1968 that had not happened already.

Dawn on Saturday, February 4, 1989, was a signal for cold drizzle to enshroud the state of Oklahoma. That was all I needed to make me want to curl up in the nearest ditch.

Peggy Sue and I had spent the night zigzagging among back roads, trees, and barns in an effort to shake the Jaguar off our tail. The woman who was now driving the beast had proven to be even more tenacious than the bald man had been, and the bike and I had both been pushed to our limits. I had tried doubling back, hiding under bridges, and outright speed, but still the woman had stayed within a mile of us.

Finally, I had killed our lights and cut crosscountry, running the bike over a downed barbed-wire fence and bouncing across a pasture. It had been a dangerous move, because we could have run into a gully, a badger hole, a cow, or a coyote, but it had worked. The mirrors had shown the Jaguar’s headlights standing still at the place where Peggy Sue and I had left the road.

As soon as we’d put a hill between us and the car, I had switched the bike’s lights back on, found a cowpath, and followed it for a couple of winding miles until it intersected with an oil-pumper road. That in turn had taken us to a township road of graded red dirt, and I had steered Peggy Sue in the direction that I was pretty sure was south.

By that time, the bumps of the pasture had almost neutered me, Peggy Sue sounded as if she were choking, and we had made no progress toward Lubbock. Then the sky brightened from black to gray, and the drizzle started. The Moonsuit and the bike were both splattered with red mud before we found pavement again.

It was time to find a place to hide for the day, but first I had to figure out where the hell we were. A shotgun-peppered road sign read “Kingfisher, 6 miles,” and although I didn’t know where that was, it was definitely somewhere.

Kingfisher was at the junction of a state highway and a U.S. highway, and the map I swiped from a box outside a closed gas station showed me that I was only about thirty miles northwest of Oklahoma City. That was as close as I wanted to get. Aside from the danger of the usual Authorities, Oklahoma City was the home base of the Reverend William Willard and his Corps of Little David, who had probably not appreciated having their ministry preempted. The Bill Willyites would be marching in the streets today.

I studied the map for a few minutes—luckily, Kingfisher was as still as death this early in the day—and then Peggy Sue and I headed west on the state highway. Despite my fatigue and soreness, I had resolved that our hiding place would not be within city limits this time.

The drizzle worsened, and I had to wipe my faceplate every fifteen seconds. Maybe leaving Kingfisher hadn’t been such a good idea after all. The combination of my weariness, Peggy Sue’s occasional stumbling, and the cruddy weather were going to add up to Oliver Vale smeared on the pavement if I didn’t stop soon.

Ten miles out of Kingfisher, we reached a black-topped crossroad with a sign indicating that the “Chisholm Trail Rest Stop Waterbed Motel” was only a short distance south. I swerved the bike onto the crossroad, and a few miles later we reached the promised motel.

The FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES had been a luxury resort compared to this place. The wooden building leaned, its paint was a peeling yellow-gray, and the parking lot was mud. Surprisingly, though, the lot was packed with cars and pickup trucks. I wouldn’t be able to pull the same get-a-room-free trick that I had pulled in El Dorado. I rode Peggy Sue to the south end of the motel, shut her down, and then pushed her behind the building (where there were no rooms). She would have to sit parked in mud, but at least she wouldn’t be seen from the road.

Now I would have to pay for a room and hope that I wasn’t recognized. The wet, muddy ride had probably helped me in that regard; the Moonsuit hardly looked blue anymore, and my face couldn’t have been more than a blur behind the helmet faceplate. I slogged around to the front of the building and tracked red mud down the crumbling sidewalk to the office. As I passed occupied rooms, I heard noises and comments from within: “Not again, honey-bunch, I gotta sleep sometimes, don’t I? Ow!” “Wazzat a motorsickle outside? Goddamn it, my wife’s brother rides a motorsickle.” “Gonna ask for half our money back. Ain’t no poochy on the TV.” “Where’s the beer? What happened to the fuckin’ beer? Did you drink all my fuckin’ beer, bitch?” “Sorry, baby, if you’re out of rubbers, you’re out, period. This girl don’t take no chances.” By the time I got to the office, I had a good idea of why the Chisholm Trail Rest Stop Waterbed Motel was well off the main road.

There was a doormat outside the office, but wiping my feet on it only made my shoes muddier. I shouldered open the swollen door and found myself inside a closet filled with cigarette smoke. Through the haze, I saw an ancient man in need of a shave sitting on the other side of a low counter. His eyes were fixed on a black-and-white TV watching Buddy perform, but he might have been seeing anything.

“Need a room,” I said, taking my wallet from a Moonsuit pocket. My tongue was still sore from having been bitten.

“Six dollars for four hours, ten for eight,” the old man said without looking at me. His voice was phlegmy.

I put a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

“Tape machine ain’t working today,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

He took the ten and unhooked a key from one of twelve cardboard clock faces on the wall, then adjusted the clock’s hands to read three-thirty. “Room eleven,” he said, dropping the key on the counter. “Second from the end. Have a good time.” He still hadn’t looked at me. My head and body ached, but I felt lucky.

Room 11’s door banged into the waterbed as I entered, and when I found the light switch, I saw that the room was the same size as the office and that it had not been cleaned since its previous occupants had left. Beer cans, whiskey bottles, cigarette butts, condom wrappers, and a few used condoms were scattered on a grimy, colorless surface that had once been a carpet. The bed was unmade, and one glance at the sheets told me that I didn’t want to lie on them. The smell of the place was reminiscent of stale smoke, beer puke, and soured bodily fluids. At least the heat was working.

All things considered, I couldn’t have asked for a better hideout, I thought as I removed my helmet and gloves and shrugged out of the junk-food-laden Moonsuit. Only a pervert would think to look for me here.

After taking two stolen plastic tubes of breath mints from the Moonsuit, I scrunched around the waterbed, bumped against a shelf that held a small TV set, and squeezed into a bathroom that was the same size as the wall indentations that once held ironing boards. There was no shower or mirror, and the sink was set into the wall above the toilet tank. It was impossible to sit without thunking my head.

After flushing the toilet and washing my hands (no soap), I poured all of the breath mints into my mouth. While I was sucking on the pellets, I popped out my contact lenses and dropped each into one of the empty plastic tubes. Then I filled each tube with water, hoping that I would remember that peppermint was right and wintergreen was left. Again, I wished for my glasses.

I set the tubes on the toilet tank and returned to the waterbed cubicle, where I kicked the mess on the floor into one corner, suppressing screams when things stuck to my shoes. Once that chore was done, I put on my gloves again and stripped the sheets and pillowcases from the bed, throwing the resulting wad into the same corner as the rest of the trash. I saved one pillowcase to wipe the mud from the Moonsuit.

Finally, I pulled off my shoes and lay on the waterbed (which was so underfilled that my rump touched the floor), wrapping myself in the bedspread and a blanket. These had been tangled at the foot of the bed and seemed cleaner than the sheets, but I kept my clothes on anyway. Once I was bundled, I curled up on my side with one bare pillow under my head and the other under my hip. Despite my stinging eyes, a headache, a bitten tongue, a sore throat, various bruises, and a thumpata-thumpata noise coming from room 10, I fell asleep quickly. My last conscious thought was that although I lay in squalor, my mouth was minty fresh.

I had several interlocking dreams. First I was riding Peggy Sue down a highway that melted to become a broad gray plain; then Jupiter rose, and the Great Red Spot winked and fluttered its eyelashes; a satellite-dish-headed creature appeared and began chasing me, firing popcorn and breath mints from its block converter; I tried to accelerate and flee, but discovered that I was twisting Sharon Sharpston’s right ear instead of Peggy Sue’s throttle. Sharon reached up and flipped me onto my back in the dust, then sat on my chest and began choking me.

“Buckethead,” she said.

I awoke thrashing, and found that it was not Sharon Sharpston who sat on my chest, but the curly-haired, muscular woman whom I had thought I had eluded.

“Snakefart,” she growled, squeezing hard and shaking me. “Dirty thieving criminal welfare cheat.”

I tried to beg her to stop, but the only sound I could manage was a squeak. My head felt as though it were about to pop open like, well, like a head being popped open.

“Lousy ratfink motorcyclist,” the woman said.

My hands slapped her arms, beating out a coded plea for mercy. The thought of slugging her in the face crossed my mind, but I didn’t have the strength. If I had, and I had actually tried it, she probably would have killed me.

“You want to say something, lizard piss?” she asked, loosening her grip on my throat enough for me to breathe.

“Please get off,” I wheezed.

“Why? You got me mixed up with a guy with a gun, didn’t you? You ride a motorcycle, don’t you?”

“Well, yes,” I said, answering the second question.

“All right, then,” the woman said. “I hate motorcycles. I hate men who ride motorcycles. My ex-boyfriend rode a motorcycle. At least, the ancient Mongolian entity he channeled for did.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. I was sorry to hear anything that made her want to kill me.

“Whenever I come across a motorcycle under five hundred cc,” she said, “I throw it against a wall. Whenever I come across