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

Mother and I were in our room listening to the radio and finishing off the last of my chocolate birthday cake. As a song ended, the disc jockey said, “Now let’s spin a few in tribute to the late Sam Cooke, who died last night in Los Angeles at the age of twenty-nine.”

The radio started playing “You Send Me.”

Mother was sitting on the floor with a piece of cake in her hand, staring at the radio on her dresser. She was so still and quiet that I was scared.

“Mother?” I said.

She didn’t acknowledge me. She just kept staring at the radio.

I crawled onto her lap and hugged her. She didn’t hug me back.

“Everything dies,” she said.

I pressed my face into her sweater. She smelled of baby powder, and the sweater made my eyes itch. I began to cry.

She held me then and stroked my hair and face. Her hands were cold. My grandparents didn’t believe in wasting money on heating the house.

“Not you, Oliver,” Mother murmured as she rocked me. “Not you, baby, not you.”

I could hear the lie.

I knew what death was. I had seen a squirrel run over in the street. It had lain there for weeks until it had become a virtual part of the blacktop. That had happened to Sam Cooke. That was going to happen to me.

Years later, I learned that Sam Cooke’s demise had been even less glorious than that of the squirrel. In the reported version of reality, he was shot three times by the owner of a motel where he had been trying to make it with a woman who didn’t want to be made.

But even if I had heard that and had been able to understand it at the age of five, the knowledge wouldn’t have made any difference in how I felt. After all, I wasn’t mourning for Sam Cooke. His voice was still alive, and I would hear it again and again. I wasn’t even mourning for Buddy Holly, because Mother had told me that he still lived inside me, and that his music was immortal.

I was mourning for Mother. I was mourning for me.

We were not immortal.

This was not an easy revelation for my five-year-old self. I had nightmares for months afterward. They usually involved my being run over, like the squirrel, while “You Send Me” echoed in the street as I was mashed.

That day in the bedroom, my chocolate cake sticky in my throat, I learned that only the music lasts. From that moment on, I paid closer attention to the songs on the radio, listening for the secret of eternal life.

Volume II reveals that Sam Cooke’s death was a turning point for Mother as well. It was the impetus that started her down the path to true weirdness. She wrote, All things beautiful are doomed. The purer the voice, the truer the vision, the more vibrant the song, the sooner death comes for the perpetrator.

The only way to escape this truth is to deny the reality from which it has been created, to exist in some other universe altogether.

So it is time to believe in flying saucers. Dianetics is worth serious consideration. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Mississippi welcomes visiting Jews. Vietnam will become the fifty-first state. My son Oliver is the reincarnation not only of Buddy Holly, but of the Buddha. Mama is the reincarnation of Lot’s wife. I can fly to the moon if I tape a photograph of John Glenn to my forehead.

Rereading that passage makes me realize something: The mention of Lee Harvey Oswald is the only reference to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in any of Mother’s diary entries, and I have no recollection of November 22, 1963, even though I was almost four years old at the time. Maybe if Kennedy had cut a record.

Seven hours after Buddy appeared on my Sony, Peggy Sue and I found ourselves 115 miles southwest of there, riding through a treeless prairie on U.S. 54, aiming for the city of El Dorado. (Pronounced El Doraydo, not El Dorahdo. This was still Kansas.) We had traveled farther than 115 miles, though, because whenever possible we had taken country roads and state highways to avoid the troopers cruising the U.S. highways and the Kansas Turnpike. The snow had stopped at dawn and hadn’t accumulated, so the roads hadn’t been bad, but the cold had been harder on me than I’d expected. My body was chilled almost to the point of numbness, and my feet were already there. The dull gray sky wasn’t helping me think warm thoughts.

In addition, Peggy Sue was thoroughly grumpy. She’d started sputtering and stumbling a few miles south of Emporia, and switching the fuel valve to the reserve tank hadn’t helped. I begged her to hold out just long enough for us to find a hiding place for the day. I didn’t want to keep traveling while the sun was up because we might be spotted by a Kansas Highway Patrol airplane, and if we had to stop on the prairie, we were as good as caught.

The Ariel’s engine died a half mile short of the El Dorado city limits sign, but we were able to coast into a self-service gas station. The hands of a cracked Pepsi-Cola clock attached to the FUEL-U-PUMP sign said that the time was twenty minutes past eight o’clock. Cowboy Carl’s would open in forty minutes, and the boys would wonder why I was late for work again. I had not slept in twenty-six hours.

The red column of mercury in a Dr Pepper thermometer on the stucco building topped out at forty-one degrees. That was almost twenty degrees warmer than it had been at home when I’d left, but even inside the Moonsuit I felt as though I had spent the night packed in dry ice. Dismounting was an adventure in pain because my knees didn’t want to bend back straight and because putting weight on my feet was like stabbing them with pickle forks. I was beginning to suspect that there was no way in hell that Peggy Sue and I could make it to Lubbock.

I filled the bike’s tank from the lone Regular pump, then staggered into the building and gave five dollars to the shriveled man behind the counter. That left me with a little over fifty-three bucks. A radio beside the cash register was playing mournful country music, heavy on the steel guitars and slow on the beat.

I had removed my gloves to accept the few cents of change due me, but my cold fingers fumbled the coins and dropped them. The counterman peered at me through inch-thick eyeglasses and said, “You okay to keep riding that Harley?”

My faceplate was fogging, so I flipped it up as I squatted, knees popping, to retrieve the coins. “It’s not a Harley,” I said.

He glanced out the smudged window. “Triumph?”

I lost my balance and fell onto my rump, realizing that I shouldn’t have corrected the old man. I should have let him think Peggy Sue was anything but what she was. “Yeah,” I lied. “A 1962 Triumph Thunderbird.”

He frowned as I scraped up the coins and lurched to my feet. “I see you’ve got a Shawnee County sticker on your plate,” he said. If his eyes were sharp enough to see that, they were sharp enough to see that there were no Triumph emblems on Peggy Sue’s fuel tank. At least there were no Ariel emblems there either.

My right hand knotted around the coins, and their edges bit into my fingers. “Yeah,” I said, heading toward the door.

“Bet you could use a cup of coffee,” the old man said.

I shook my head and pushed open the door.

“Only fifty cents,” he called after me. Just then the country music stopped and a news bulletin began: “For those of you who haven’t turned on your TV sets yet today…”

I hurried outside, shoving my change into a Moonsuit pocket and pulling on my gloves. As I straddled my bike and snapped up the kickstand, I thought, Everyone is an enemy.

Peggy Sue didn’t want to fire, and I jumped furiously on the starter. I was sweating now, and my eyes stung. My body’s numbness had disappeared and been replaced by an itching heat. I glanced at the stucco building and saw the old man staring out at me.

I dismounted, grasped the Ariel’s handgrips, and pushed. If I could find a hill, I might get up enough speed for a clutch-popping start—but at that moment I didn’t care if I had to push forever as long as we got away from that gas station. I felt the old man’s gaze drilling into my back as I shoved Peggy Sue’s five hundred pounds out of the drive and began trudging down the shoulder of the highway. I was breathing hard, and for the first time I noticed that the air was tinged with a stink of burning crude oil.

I stopped beside the city limits sign and tried to kick-start the bike again, but all she did was sputter. Inside the Moonsuit, my clothes were sticking to my skin, and inside my helmet, my hair was wet. Even my feet were hot. I resumed pushing.

A few hundred yards inside the city limits, we passed a windbreak of evergreens that lay perpendicular to the highway on the north side. West of that windbreak was a two-story white building with seven gray doors visible on each floor. A flaking sign out front displayed the words FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES outlined in dead neon tubes. The “Vacancy” appendage hummed and flickered, but it was a redundancy. The only vehicle in the parking lot was a battered Pinto in front of the door labeled “Office” at the west end. As I paused, an obese woman carrying a plastic trash bag emerged from around the building’s southeast corner. An access road branched off from the parking lot there, running between the motel and the trees. That might mean that there was a second lot and more rooms on the north side, hidden from the highway.

I began pushing Peggy Sue again, but I kept watching the woman. The bike and I were barely thirty yards away from her, but she didn’t even glance at us. She was gazing down at the concrete walkway, mumbling words that I couldn’t make out. When she reached the office, she took a keyring from her coat pocket, unlocked the door, and went inside. The curtains over the window beside the door stayed closed.

I looked behind me and saw that the highway had curved so that the FUEL-U-PUMP station had vanished behind the row of evergreens. Even if he was still watching, the old man wouldn’t see me now, so I guided my motorcycle onto the sparse gravel of the motel parking lot. To my helmet-encased ears, the noise made by her tires sounded like thunder.

I parked the bike beside the Pinto and approached the office cautiously to observe and evaluate my enemy. If the obese motel manager caught me, I would never make it to Lubbock. I would never discover whether Buddy had truly arisen, and I would never know why his image had singled me out for persecution or glory.

Understand: I didn’t want to break into a room and sleep there without paying. Despite what the FCC thought of me, I had never willingly broken any law except the occasional speed limit or controlled substances statute. I had never stolen from anyone. At least, not much. But fatigue and fear go a long way toward breaking down the superego.

There was just enough space between the curtains to let me see into the office. The woman was lying on a couch