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

turn away and head for the shower room. The tears had come anyway. Pain had defeated sex.

By the time I had recovered enough to emerge from the shower room, the guy with the radio had ratted on me, and I was thrown out too—but just for the afternoon, since no one in charge had any hard evidence against me. Riding my bike home while trying to hold my busted glasses on my injured face was tough, but I felt triumphant. I had kicked butt, had mostly gotten away with it, and had brushed against a seventeen-year-old girl’s boob.

It was a good summer.

Nixon resigned on August 9, and I didn’t care. I was fourteen and had better things on my mind.

Mother’s attitude wasn’t much different. She wrote, Nixon has resigned. Big deal. He was only a figment of my imagination anyway. Not surprisingly, she had shown more interest in the death of Mama Cass Elliot eleven days before. She had written, Despite the sadness that I feel, I must admit that after all of the overdose deaths of the past five years, it is refreshing to see a pop star phase herself into another plane of existence via a ham sandwich.

Then the summer was gone, and I started high school with a new pair of black frames and my first truly hideous pimples. With the move to the house, my school district had changed, and instead of going to Topeka High, I wound up at a rural unified-district school. My classmates were strong, rawboned farmers’ kids, and I didn’t fit in too well. Not that I would have fit in any better elsewhere. The summer of 1974 was the only oasis in the desert of my early adolescence, and it would have been so no matter where I had gone to school.

My grades were okay—no A’s, but not many C’s either—and my social relationships were about the same. I made a few friends, but none were close. I made the junior varsity basketball team and played for a total of fifteen minutes in five games. None of the girls I wanted were disgusted by me, but none were attracted either.

If I was the reincarnation of a rock ‘n’ roll star, I thought, I was not living up to it. It was only later, after Mother bought the first biographies of Buddy to hit the stands, that I discovered he hadn’t been a superstar in high school either.

Like every other male I knew, I spent my days in agony. My hard-on would start on the school bus in the morning and take only five-minute breaks between then and my arrival home in the late afternoon. My blue jeans were a torture chamber. Basketball practice helped, but only when we didn’t have to share the gym with the girls’ team.

These were not the sort of things that I discussed with Mother. Yet for my fifteenth birthday, she gave me two presents: a mongrel puppy and a box of condoms.

I was delighted at the first and horrified at the second. Rubbers, for the love of Christ. Peacocks, made down the road in Kansas City. From my mother. For my birthday. As if I had a use for them. Didn’t I wish.

I named the scruffy black-haired pup Ready Teddy, after the Little Richard song that Buddy had covered a la rockabilly, and I took both him and the condoms into the backyard. While Ready Teddy growled puppy growls and chewed on my shoelaces, I removed the twelve prophylactics from their packets and stuffed them inside each other until I had a rubber ball. Then I taught Ready Teddy to chase it, and chew on it, and play keep-away with it in the cool December air.

When Mother came outside to tell me that it was time for supper, she saw what I had done, and for the one and only time in her life she became furious with me.

“Do you think it’s a joke?” she shouted. “Is that it, Oliver? Do you think it’s a goddamn joke?”

In those days we had no neighbors closer than a quarter mile away, for which I was grateful. “I don’t know,” I said sullenly. Ready Teddy was at my feet chewing on the condom-ball.

“You don’t know,” Mother said. “You don’t know. Fucking-A right you don’t know!”

I yelled back at her. “Don’t talk like that! Other people’s mothers don’t talk like that!”

Her hands became fists. “I’m not other people’s mother, shithead! And I didn’t give you those to be funny. I gave them to you because you’re fifteen. I gave them to you because in the next few years things are going to happen. I gave them to you because I want you to take responsibility for those things. Do you understand?”

I glared. “No.” It was a lie, but I was pissed.

Some of the fury went out of Mother’s eyes, and when she spoke again she didn’t shout. But the words cut deeper than the yelling had. “That’s the only box I’ll ever buy for you, Oliver,” she said. “You have to buy the next one yourself. Whether you think it’s worth it, or whether you take the trouble, is up to you. But know this: If you get a girl pregnant, you no longer have a home. Got it?”

I squatted to pet my puppy, not wanting to look at Mother anymore.

“I asked you a question,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. Ready Teddy nipped at my fingers. “I’m never going to be stupid enough for that.” This last was a slap at her, because she had been stupid. Even as I said it, though, I was thinking, I’m never going to be lucky enough for that.

A long silence followed as I petted Ready Teddy and pretended that I couldn’t feel Mother’s eyes on me. Then she said, “Promise.”

I couldn’t help looking up. “Promise what?”

Now she was the one who looked away. “Promise that you won’t get anyone pregnant. If you don’t promise, I’ll have to leave. On a UFO. A ship of light. The world is hard enough as it is. I couldn’t stay knowing that my son had made it worse.”

I picked up my dog and stood. “I promise,” I said. It seemed the quickest way to get the whole scene over with.

Mother looked at me again and smiled, her eyes glistening. “You’re a good boy,” she said, turning to go inside. “Come in and eat. Pot roast and baked potatoes.”

Of all the meals we ate together, that is the one I can still taste.

Reading Mother’s letters to Uncle Mike was a lot like reading Volumes III and IV, except that her isolation comes through even more strongly. She missed her brother, and in seven of the twenty-two letters she even tells him that “sometimes I miss Mama almost as much”—a statement that has no equivalent in the diary. Yet it rings true, especially since Mother and Grandmother did begin to spend time together after Uncle Mike’s death (a trend that was destroyed, of course, when Grandmother brought me home to find Mother and Keith making love on the carpet).

I sat at Pete’s desk going through the letters for two hours and was beginning to think that perhaps I would emerge from the experience unchanged. Parts of the letters were tough going, but I hadn’t come across anything startling.

Then I came to the last letter in the stack, dated August 29, 1968. It could not have arrived in Vietnam until after Uncle Mike’s death.

It begins with the usual letter-from-home news, but concludes with this:

I am going to tell you something now, Mikey, that I have not told anyone else. I have not even put it into my diary because I don’t want to read it again after writing it down, but I have to let it out this once because it has been preying on my mind. When you come home, pretend I never told you.

I had a dream during the Democratic National Convention that did not seem to be a dream at all. I dreamed that I was walking along a sidewalk in Chicago when I became trapped between a mob of anti-war protesters and another mob of riot police. Both sides converged on me, and a policeman, thinking that I was one of the protesters, clubbed me. I fell, and they all began trampling me. I tried to crawl away, and then there were bodies falling on me, smothering me. There was blood on my mouth and nose. My eyes were closed. I was being killed. The whole world was watching.

Then, just as I could feel the last of my life about to be crushed, all of the weight disappeared, and I floated up, up, up. I opened my eyes and saw that I was suspended in the center of a sphere of light high above the street. I could see through the sphere, and I looked at the riot below me. The shouts and screams had become one loud rumble.

I though that I was dead, that I had left my body. But then I felt a vibration in the sphere that surrounded me, and a voice burrowed into my head, saying, “You must remain until twenty-five years have passed.”

The sphere carried me higher and flew me home, depositing me in my bed here in Topeka. When I awoke the next morning, there was blood on my pillow from a cut on my lower lip, and I had a bruise on my forehead. I covered the bruise with makeup and went to work.

I have thought about it a lot, and I am sure that I know what the sphere of light meant: I am to die on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly.

It is not an easy thing to know when you will die, even if it will not happen until 1984. That is why I had to tell you, Mikey—you, who must think of death every day and find a way to live with it. I am sorry to give you more.

And now that I have written it, I will find a way to live with it myself. Pretending that I don’t know will, I think, be the wisest course. Whatever works.

I read those paragraphs over and over again.

“Why didn’t you tell me too?” I murmured.

But I knew that Mother never would have told me anything that she wasn’t even able to tell her diary. Besides, I had been eight years old. I couldn’t have understood. Now I was twenty-nine, and I still couldn’t.

When I heard Pete’s truck drive up outside, I gathered the letters and replaced them in the metal box, glad that I had finished before he had returned. Then I stood and opened the blinds over the window to the left of the desk. Pete had stepped out of the truck and was petting an enormous Doberman pinscher with a galvanized chain collar.

I yelled and burst out of the room, colliding with Gretchen, who shoved me into a wall. “Watch where you’re going, lardbrain,” she said.

Mike and Laura appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Is something wrong, Mr. Vale?” Laura asked.

“Do you own a rifle?” I gasped.

“Dad has a shotgun,” Mike said, “but I hid the shells so he wouldn’t hurt himself.”

“Find them! My neighbor’s dog is here!”

The sound of the back door slamming shut echoed through the house. “Hey, kids, look what I’ve got,” Pete called. “I gave him a piece of jerky, and he seems to have decided that I’m God.” A moment later he came into the dining room with Ringo trotting by his side.

I tried to become part of the