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

glasses, was the one who got her. I asked her out before I knew what I was doing, and she said yes.

Cheryl and I went out every Saturday night for the next seven weeks, and starting with Week Two we clambered into the Dart’s back seat and screwed like maniacs. The first time really was my first time. She was patient up to a point and then aggressive. I was grateful.

I had always thought that I would have to rely on pity to have a First Time, but the actual event was more like a delirium-induced coincidence: Cheryl and I happened to meet while we were each experiencing intense late-adolescent summer horniness, and so neither of us had a choice, nor wanted any. It would never happen that way again.

I used a condom the first time, and most of the others. My fifteenth birthday present notwithstanding, I’d had too many nightmares about accidental babies to do otherwise. On August 13 (Week Seven), however, Cheryl and I had the luxury of her bed because her parents and siblings were at the movies, and we were stripped and tangled before I realized that the Peacocks were still out in the Dart. Cheryl, undaunted, untangled and dashed from the room, returning with a can of foam from her parents’ dresser. I was horrified, but she only laughed and gave me my next lesson.

There was one week of hay hauling left, and I would leave for Manhattan the next Sunday, so after making a mess with the foam, Cheryl and I made plans for a last summer romp together. We would meet on Saturday, August 20, drive to Perry Reservoir, and spend the night there. It would be our last time together until I came back to Topeka for a weekend visit. Then we would pick up where we left off.

So we told each other; but Week Seven, in Cheryl’s bed, was the last. If I had known, I would have stayed longer and made love to her again despite my fear that her parents would return.

But I didn’t know, for I had no way of divining that in Memphis, Tennessee, the forty-two-year-old King of Rock and Roll had less than three days left to live.

On Tuesday, August 16, the hay crew hauled late into the evening because we were all leaving the next Sunday and still had several fields to clear. The portable radio’s batteries died before sundown, so I didn’t hear the news until I got home. Ready Teddy greeted me, as always, by performing a mad dance punctuated by yips. He had grown into a cocker-spaniel-size, dustmop-colored mutt, and I loved him. I would miss him while I was at K-State. He and I went into the house, and I headed for the bathroom.

But Mother was in there, and she had the door locked, so I went into the kitchen to have a can of soda and to wait. I waited thirty-five minutes, and at a quarter to ten I returned to the bathroom and knocked on the door.

“Are you all right?” I called.

Silence.

Heart attack, I thought. Stroke. A slip in the tub. Concussion. Coma. Death.

“Mother! Answer me or I’ll break down the door!”

The latch clicked, the knob turned, and the door opened. Mother stood in the doorway, still wearing her radio-station-secretary clothes.

I rolled my eyes and leaned against the wall. “Jesus, Mother, I thought you were dead or something.”

She looked at me steadily, and I saw that the rims of her eyelids were red.

“Why do you always call me ‘Mother’?” she asked. “Why haven’t I ever been ‘Mom’? Not even once, not even when you were little, have you ever called me ‘Mom.’ “

“I, uh, I don’t know,” I said.

She nodded, as if I had said what she had expected, and stepped into the hall.

“Elvis is dead,” she said.

Then she turned away and walked to her bedroom. She went inside and closed the door. I stood in the hall, not thinking, not doing anything. Ready Teddy came to me, his toenails clicking on the hardwood, and nuzzled my hand.

Eventually, I took a shower and went to bed. That night I dreamed of a bloated corpse singing “Hound Dog.” Naked, it writhed on its back, its fingers coming off as they clawed at the stage. Cheryl appeared wearing nothing but cutoff jeans and went down on the corpse, her breasts bobbing with the music. I awoke in the dark, my chest thundering, my erection hard as diamond.

I was still awake when the alarm went off at 5:00 A.M. I got up, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, fed Ready Teddy, and ate cereal and toast. I heard the newspaper hit the driveway just before 5:30, and I went out for it. Before bringing it inside, I read the front-page headlines. One of them was HEART ATTACK CLAIMS ELVIS PRESLEY. It was not in particularly big type.

I took the paper inside and found Mother in the living room. She was wearing her terry-cloth robe and kneeling before the album rack. Her copies of The Sun Sessions, Elvis Is Back!, and Elvis—TV Special lay on the carpet beside her.

“The station got rid of a lot of records last year,” she said, “so I thought I’d take some of ours, just for today. The disc jockeys will want them.”

“Good idea,” I said. I lay the paper on the coffee table and left for the fields.

All through the hot day, the guys and I listened to the radio that was hung over the truck’s outside mirror. On every station we tuned in, even the country ones, we heard Elvis; but only KKAP was playing the really good stuff, the stuff he’d recorded in the days before the high-collared, jeweled jumpsuits… back when he was Elvis the Pelvis, every boy’s sexual role model and every girl’s fantasy.

“If I hear ‘Love Me Tender’ one more time I’m gonna puke,” someone said.

That evening, Cheryl called. “I’ve been thinking about this Saturday,” she said. Her voice dripped with promise. “I’ve been thinking about it so much that I can’t wait until then. I know it’s late and you’ve been working, but… let’s go for a drive.”

I had been tired, but Cheryl’s voice revitalized me. I said that I would pick her up in ten minutes, and then I ran to my room for my car keys and a couple of Peacocks.

“Mother!” I yelled as I charged back through the house. “I’m going out!” I had my hand on the knob of the front door before I realized that there had been no answer. Mother always answered.

I yelled again, and still there was no answer, so I looked for her. She wasn’t in the house, but her ‘74 Nova was still in the garage.

I found her in the backyard. She was sitting on the ground and gazing up at the just-emerged stars.

“You’re going to get chiggers,” I said.

She remained silent.

“Mother, Cheryl called. We’re going for a drive.”

Still she said nothing.

I glanced up at the patch of sky she seemed to be gazing at. “What are you looking for?”

“Elvis.”

“No such constellation.” I was trying to joke. But of course she was serious.

“When Buddy died,” she said, as if I had not spoken, “Elvis was in the Army. In Germany. He sent a telegram of sympathy to the Holleys, in Lubbock. He’d been on the road a lot too, and he knew that it could have been him.”

I turned to go. Cheryl was waiting.

“Elvis played in Lubbock more than once in his early days,” Mother said. “He met Buddy before Buddy became a star. Buddy was encouraged and inspired by him. They were so different, and so much alike. Elvis sent the telegram from Germany, knowing what had been lost. So I’m looking for him in the sky now, to wave good-bye. He’ll appear like a shooting star in reverse. I would have seen Buddy’s star too, but it was cloudy that night.”

Cheryl was waiting. I turned back and sat down a few yards away from Mother.

“Elvis’s star would have appeared yesterday, wouldn’t it?” I asked.

“No. A man like Elvis would wait a day, to be sure he was really supposed to go.”

We waited and watched. Soon, we saw a meteor.

“There,” I said. “We should go in before the chiggers eat us alive.”

“That wasn’t him. It fell. Elvis will be going the other way.”

Another meteor fell then, and another, and another. Later, I discovered that they were the stragglers of the annual Perseid shower, but Mother had another explanation. “Ancient Atlanteans,” she said. “They’re flying down to show Elvis the way.”

Chiggers were chewing my ankles, mosquitoes biting my arms and neck. In Topeka, a suntanned girl waited to make love to me, and I was sitting in the backyard, staying with my lunatic mother until her crisis passed. I had the bitter thought that her crisis would never pass until she herself flew up to join Elvis and Buddy, so I might as well take off. Then I hated myself for thinking that, and I knew that I wouldn’t budge. Not even to telephone Cheryl and tell her that I couldn’t make it.

Hours later, we saw Elvis leave the planet. He was a ball of orange light with flickers of blue that shot up from the southeastern horizon—from Memphis—and disappeared near the zenith. I had never seen anything like it.

Mother waved.

We went inside then. After Mother went to bed, I sat in the kitchen for another hour, staring at the phone. I hadn’t heard it ring while I had been in the yard. Cheryl hadn’t called to ask where I was, and I couldn’t call her now because it was 2:00 A.M. and her parents would throw a shit fit. In three and a half hours I would have to leave for the fields, and it would still be too early to call. I wouldn’t have a chance to explain until evening.

And what explanation would I give? That I had preferred sitting in chigger-infested grass to thrashing in a back seat with Cheryl? That I had turned my back on carnal nirvana to watch for the ghost of Elvis?

Thursday dragged on for months, but when it was over, the summer was over too. We cleared our last field, and at 9:45 P.M. I threw the last bale from the truck to my buddies in the hay shed. Our boss told us to come by his place Friday or Saturday, and he’d give us our final checks.

I didn’t care about that. All I cared about was getting home and calling Cheryl before it was too late.

Her mother answered the phone and told me that I shouldn’t be calling after ten, and in any event Cheryl didn’t want to speak with me. Before I could protest, or plead, the line clicked.

I tried again in the morning, and I did speak to Cheryl this time, but it would have been better if I hadn’t. She and her parents had fought about me on Wednesday evening, she said. They had charged that I had a crazy mother and that I was no good either. Then, when I hadn’t shown up for our drive, Cheryl had decided that they were right.

She told me that she wouldn’t keep our rendezvous the next day because she had another date. I called her a bitch and slammed down the receiver.

That afternoon I picked up my check and went out with my hay-hauling buddies. One of them was eighteen, so he took some of our money and converted it into five cases of Coors. We drank a case, and then we bought our way into the various