Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Bradley Denton (best thriller books to read TXT) 📗

Her next suggestion was that I spend the holiday weekend with Grandmother.

She wasn’t deliberately sending me into the lion’s den, because things had changed between Mother and Grandmother—at least, they seemed to have changed. Ever since Uncle Mike’s death, they had spoken to each other on the telephone at least once a week, and recently, Grandmother had been expressing a wish to know her grandson better.

So that Thursday afternoon, Mother drove me to Grandmother’s house. I was to stay until Sunday evening. I refused to kiss Mother good-bye when she left.

“Well, young Oliver,” Grandmother said when she had me seated at the kitchen table, “what would you like to do today?” Her voice was so stern that I had the impression that I wasn’t supposed to like to do anything.

I shrugged. I saw no reason to treat Grandmother any better than I was currently treating Mother. In fact, I could think of several reasons for treating her worse.

Across the table from me, Grandmother frowned the way that God must have frowned when He heard about Adam and the apple. “A polite young man answers when he’s asked a direct question,” she said.

“I guess I’m not a polite young man.”

She reached across the table and smacked my ear, almost knocking me out of my chair.

I cried. I hated myself for that, but I couldn’t help it. Too much had happened—my discovery of Volumes I through II, the fight with Steve, “Ollie the Bastard,” Mother and Keith, and now this.

“A polite young man does not talk back,” Grandmother said. “Neither does he bawl like a baby when punished.” She stood. “You will sit here and think about that until I say you may get up.” She left the kitchen.

I put my head on the cool tabletop. When I couldn’t cry anymore, I kept my head down and imagined that I was a poisonous turtle. I would dart from my shell and bite off the hand of anyone who came close.

After a long time, Grandmother returned.

“Have you learned anything?” she asked.

“I hate you,” I said.

She raised her hand to smack me again, but I was ready for it and didn’t cringe. She lowered her arm without hitting me.

“You’ll go without supper until you apologize,” she said. “You’ll remain at the table.”

She went away again. The sky outside the kitchen window became dark. I had to pee, but I swore that I would explode before I would ask for permission to go to the bathroom.

Finally, Grandmother came into the kitchen with her purse on her arm and her car keys in her hand. “Get up,” she said. “I’ll not put up with a sinful child. You’re going home.”

That was fine with me. If Mother wasn’t back from her date yet, I would watch TV late into the night.

Grandmother made me sit in the back seat of her car while we crossed the city. The pain in my abdomen was so awful that I was afraid I might pee my pants, but I clenched my jaws and held it. I wouldn’t give Grandmother anything else to say about me.

When the car stopped, I flung open the door and ran for our building. As I reached the main door, I could hear Grandmother telling me to wait, but I ignored her and went inside, charging up the stairs to the apartment.

Mother kept a spare key hidden in a crack beside the doorjamb; so I grabbed it, put it into the lock, and opened the door. I wanted to get to the bathroom fast.

I stopped after two steps. A lamp was on in the living room, and Mother and Keith were clutching each other on the floor. They were naked.

Keith saw me first. “Oh, shit,” he said.

Then Mother saw me too, but she didn’t say anything.

I stumbled out backward, slammed the door, turned, and collided with Grandmother. She was staring at the apartment door, her lips pursed. She had seen. I was sure that she had seen.

She went down the stairs and out to her car. I stood alone on the landing, dizzy and sick, and would have vomited if there had been anything in my stomach.

After a while, Mother came out, wearing clothes, and took me inside. Keith left as soon as I was in. Mother closed the door behind me, and at that sound I looked down and saw that I had wet my pants.

Mother did not go out with Keith again. Instead, she bought more books on UFOs, Edgar Cayce, and spiritualism.

She had been healing herself, and I had destroyed it.

Yet even while Mother was slipping back into weirdness and I was roiling with anger and guilt, there was something in which we both rejoiced: On Sunday, July 20, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon.

I bounced around the apartment trying to duplicate a moon walk, and I jumped off a kitchen chair to simulate the “giant leap” off the LEM. Meanwhile, Mother sat in the living room, watching the television and smiling wistfully.

“Maybe they’ll let us join them now,” she said.

I was bounding through the living room. “Who?”

She didn’t answer, and I bounced into the kitchen again.

She wasn’t able to go to Woodstock.

Gretchen Laird took command of the pilgrimage. She told me what to do, and I did it. It was comforting, because it relieved me of responsibility. Yes, officer, I fled to Oklahoma, but after the Chisholm Trail Rest Stop Waterbed Motel, I was only following orders.

We prepared to leave the motel at eight o’clock Saturday evening. Gretchen would drive the Jaguar and choose our route, and I would follow on Peggy Sue. According to Gretchen, the Jaguar had a computerized map display in the dashboard, so it only made sense that she should be in charge of navigation. In addition, she said, if I attempted to take off on my own, she would hunt me down and break my fingers and toes.

The bathroom in our odious room had no shower, so I tried to make do with dunking my head in the sink. As I did so, I became aware of the itch caused by the stubble on my throat and cheeks.

“Hey,” I called, “do you shave your legs?”

Gretchen, who had been watching Buddy on TV, appeared in the bathroom doorway with murder in her eyes. “What’s it to you?”

I tried to look ingenuous. “I thought I could maybe borrow a razor.”

She glared a bit longer and then left, returning in a moment with a disposable razor. “Think fast,” she said, tossing it. It landed atop the toilet tank beside the plastic tubes containing my contact lenses.

“Anything else?” Gretchen asked sardonically.

“You wear contacts?” I asked. “I need some wetting solution.”

“I have perfect twenty-twenty vision,” she said. “I have perfect everything. Now hurry it up. The night won’t last forever.” She left the doorway again.

The bathroom had no mirror, so I shaved blind with soap and water, scraping my throat in the process. As I finished, a small plastic bottle flew past my head and landed in the grungy water in the sink.

“Eye drops,” Gretchen said behind me. “The kind that gets the red out. I figured it’d be better than nothing.”

I thanked her and took my lenses from the tubes, rubbing them with the eye drops before inserting them. They still hurt.

Then, with Gretchen telling me to get the lead out of my ass, I left the bathroom and pulled on the Moonsuit. For breakfast, I took a squashed package of chocolate cupcakes from a pocket, wolfed one, and offered the other to Gretchen.

She sneered. “No wonder you’re in such rotten shape. I’ve got trail mix in my backpack, and I’ll eat in the car so you don’t try to swipe any. Can we please get going now, junkgut?” She dropped the room key onto the bed for the manager to find.

I pulled on my helmet and gloves, and we got going, leaving the TV on. Buddy watched us longingly as we left. He was singing “Send Me Some Lovin’.”

Outside, I saw that the Jaguar was the only vehicle in the parking lot. Apparently, eight o’clock was still too early for the Chisholm Trail Rest Stop Waterbed Motel’s Saturday night trade to begin. Gretchen got into the car and started it while I went around back for my bike.

Peggy Sue was leaning over in the mud, looking battered and bruised. “Bitten by a Doberman and kicked over by an Amazon,” I said as I pulled her upright. “And I bitch when you don’t feel like starting. Some life, huh?”

I rolled her down the sloppy path to the parking lot. Inside the Jaguar, her face lit by the bluish glow of the dash displays, Gretchen looked impatient.

I had hoped that by speaking words of sympathy, I would persuade Peggy Sue to start with a minimum of difficulty, but it was not to be. I kicked the starter thirty or forty times before Gretchen emerged from the Jaguar and ordered me to let her try. As she straddled the bike and started kicking, it occurred to me that I could enter the idling Jaguar and be gone. But that would have meant abandoning Peggy Sue.

The bike’s engine started on Gretchen’s sixth or seventh kick. “Oh, sure,” I said as Gretchen walked past me to the car. “It was easy after I got her primed.” She did not reply, but reentered the Jaguar and took off. I climbed onto Peggy Sue and switched on the headlight, and we followed. The Ariel sounded ragged. I worried.

Gretchen’s route soon became incomprehensible to me, and I had to take it as an article of faith that we were making progress toward Lubbock. My sense of direction was destroyed by the turns, twists, and backtracks of the Jaguar, and the cloud cover made it impossible to regain my bearings by looking at the stars.

A few hours away from the motel, we stopped for gas at a self-service store in the middle of nowhere, and I filled Peggy Sue’s tank without shutting off the engine. The way she was sounding, I was more afraid of trying to restart her than I was of blowing up. I even asked Gretchen to reduce speed for the rest of the night because the Ariel was having trouble cruising any faster than fifty. Something was going wrong, and I didn’t think that crescent-wrench-whanging would make it right this time. Even if I’d had that tool with me.

I was glad to finish refueling and get back to the highway. Out there, the only things that existed besides me and Peggy Sue were the road, the cold wind, and the red lights that we followed. Occasionally, other lights would pass us from either direction, but they were only temporary phenomena. They were hardly even here before they were gone, like UFOs. I saw them, but I had no proof that they were anything but illusions. Neither did I have any proof, other than phantom memories, that Buddy Holly had ever appeared on my television, or even that there was such a thing as television.

On a motorcycle at night (even a sputtering motorcycle that might die at any moment) the rest of the world fades toward noncorporeality; toward the Void. The rider becomes an astronaut in a Moonsuit, shooting through that Void on a rickety space sled.

It’s wonderful.

Just as I was beginning to feel truly separate from the planet, as if Peggy Sue and I were fusing to become a meteor, the Jaguar’s taillights left the highway again and entered a roadside park in a cluster of trees. I didn’t want to stop,