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

and have you dissected.”

Laura came into the kitchen. “Who’s dissecting what?”

“Here’s one now,” Mike said. “Run for your life.”

Laura gave him a puzzled look, then came to the table and sat in the chair beside me. She put my garage-door remote control in front of me.

“You can call Ringo from up to half a mile away,” she said, pressing the bar.

Ringo romped into the room, put his front paws on the tabletop, and nosed the remote control into my lap.

“Impressive,” Pete said.

“Uh, yeah,” I mumbled, drawing back from Ringo’s fetid breath and picking up the remote. “You should keep this, Laura. Ringo’s staying with you, right?”

Laura frowned. “Aren’t you too, Mr. Vale?”

Pete cleared his throat. “Oliver’s got to get on to Lubbock, honey.”

“I know,” she said. “But he’s coming back, isn’t he? Since he’s your friend’s nephew, I thought…” Her voice trailed off.

Pete gave me a meaningful look. “He’s welcome here any time, as one of the family. But he has his own home, too.”

I wasn’t sure that was true anymore, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I held out the remote control to Laura.

She shook her head. “I want you to have it. You can used it whenever you visit. It’ll help you and Ringo become friends.” She stood and patted the dog, who lowered his front paws to the floor, and then she crossed the room and looked into the oven.

I left the table and went to the utility room to replace the remote in its Moonsuit pocket. Pete followed.

“She has a crush on you,” he said.

“I don’t know why.”

“Me either. Hell, what father ever knows his daughter’s mind? But my guess is that she sees you as some romantic, questing Don Quixote figure.”

“Don Quixote was a deluded fool.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I won’t do anything to encourage her. Even if she weren’t your daughter, she’s way too young.”

“Got that right,” Pete said. He looked at the floor and stroked his lower lip. “Y’know, it just occurred to me that there’s a smaller age difference between you and Laura than there is between me and Gretchen.”

“Laura’s sixteen. Gretchen’s twenty-three. The comparison isn’t valid.”

“Maybe not, but it’s still a sobering thought.”

“Not as sobering as the thought that the human race is trapped under the thumb of extraterrestrial video dictators.”

“Says you. Bug-eyed monsters are easy compared to women.”

I disagreed. It seemed to me that they were about the same.

From the kitchen, Mike called, “Supper!”

During the meal, I had no thought of the rioting in the cities or of those who might be behind it. I sat with the Holdens, and with Gretchen, and even with Ringo, and savored the chicken. Whatever would happen to me was coming fast, and time was draining like water, but I relaxed in that house in Oklahoma and took my time. Time, after all, is an illusion. At least, that’s what they say.

CATHY AND JEREMY

Jeremy clapped a hand over his dog-eye and gasped.

Cathy glanced at him as she drove. “What is it?”

Jeremy swallowed. “He’s gone. The eye-link has been removed.”

Cathy clutched the steering wheel. “You can’t feel him? You can’t see what he sees?”

Jeremy shook his head.

Cathy drove on for another mile, then said, “But you know how to get to where he is now, right?”

Jeremy popped out the dog-eye. It glistened in his palm like a black jewel. “I think I saw the whole route in his memory. I think I can remember it.”

“All right, then. Are we still on track?”

Jeremy looked out at the countryside. “We’re in Oklahoma,” he murmured.

“I know that. Are we still on Ringo’s route?”

“I think so.”

Cathy glared. “I wish you’d stop saying that. Saying ‘I think’ is like saying ‘I’m guessing.’ “

Jeremy replaced the dog-eye in his socket. “Still nothing. Damn it, Cath, I might as well be guessing. Even if I can get us to where Ringo and Vale were when the link was cut, Vale won’t be there anymore.”

“If he’s not, we’ll catch up at Lubbock.”

Jeremy gave her a grim look. “He’ll never reach Lubbock. If he leaves his current hiding place, he’ll be lynched before reaching Texas.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If I don’t, then what am I doing here? And if you don’t, what are you doing here?”

Cathy’s jaw muscles bulged. “I’m driving,” she said. “And you’re whining.”

Jeremy popped out the dog-eye again and placed it in his shirt pocket. “Not anymore,” he said.

RINGO

The girl named Laura gave him the supper leftovers, and although he wasn’t hungry, he ate enthusiastically. While he was eating, the boy, Mike, attempted to replace the human-eye, but Ringo turned his head so the thing wouldn’t go in. With its removal, the last of his wariness of these people had vanished, and he had realized that the eye was what had made him suspicious of people in the first place. He had only used the Windex incident as a rationalization. His reaction to the man named Boog had been the true one.

He had made up his mind: He would stay with the Holdens. He wouldn’t miss Cathy and Jeremy.

The only uneasiness that he felt now was a sense of guilt for having damaged Vale’s motorcycle. Pete, Laura, and Mike Holden all liked Ringo, as did the woman named Gretchen, but Vale was still wary.

So when the people went to lounge in the living room, Ringo trotted in and lay at Vale’s feet. Vale stiffened. To reassure him, Ringo sat up and licked his hand. Vale made a noise in his throat, and Ringo realized that the man thought he was being tasted.

Gretchen laughed and called Vale a name.

Ringo knew now that it would take more than friendly gestures to make Vale his friend. I would take a gift.

He belched his last can of Budweiser onto Vale’s lap. All of the people were immediately interested.

“Looks like a peace offering,” Pete said.

Ringo barked to indicate that Pete was right.

“Uh, well, uh, thanks,” Vale said. He was still nervous, but at least he was smiling.

“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” Pete asked.

Vale picked up the can and popped the tab, and beer sprayed everywhere. The people yelped like puppies.

When the can stopped spraying, everyone was spattered with white flecks. Mike and Laura went to the kitchen for paper towels. Ringo sniffed the can in Vale’s hand and found that it was empty.

He lay down and put his head on his paws. His gift had been worthless. Vale would dislike him more than ever now.

Instead, Vale leaned down, laughing, and patted Ringo’s back. “Listen,” he said, “it’s the thought that counts.”

Ringo raised his head and let his tongue hang out. He had been forgiven. Everything in his world was good.

9

OLIVER

I graduated from high school in 1977 at the age of seventeen. It had been a good spring, the highlight being when a friend and I drove to Lawrence to hear Lynyrd Skynyrd on the KU campus. Seeing Ronnie Van Zant and the band perform their fourteen-minute-plus concert version of “Free Bird” was a transcendental experience. I was probably the only member of the audience, though, who felt guilty because he hadn’t brought his mother along. She would have appreciated the show more than most of the people there.

Following commencement (my four-year GPA was 2.8; I was forty-third in a class of a hundred and twelve), I went to work hauling hay. Tossing bales at four cents a piece was dirty, sweaty, itchy work… work to sweat the poison out, as my custom-cutter boss said. I and the other four guys on the crew alternated between complaining that the baler was packing the bales too heavy, and bragging about how well we were going to do with the women come fall. All of us would be going away to college, and none of us were able to think of that event in any context other than sex. Or if we were, we didn’t talk about it.

I was heading for Kansas State University in Manhattan. The campus was only fifty-five miles west of Topeka, but Mother seemed to think it was on the dark side of Neptune. She couldn’t believe that I was grown-up enough to leave home. (This was the same woman who had given me a box of prophylactics for my fifteenth birthday.)

Mother’s UFO/Atlantis/occult obsessions had been getting worse, leaning toward spiritualism and entrail reading, and as my departure date drew near, she began holding seances in the basement. I made it a point not to learn the names of any of the middle-aged women who joined her for these things, and I counted the minutes until I could jump into my ‘69 Dart and head west.

It’s easy now to look back at my seventeen-year-old self and feel ashamed, particularly after reading some of Mother’s thoughts as recorded in Volume VI:

I am thirty-six years old. I have no husband or lover. Since 1959—except for one brief interlude with a man named Keith—only three things have mattered in my life: my son; rock and roll; and a belief that beings with powers beyond those of Earth will someday come in their ships of light to transform the world. Now my son is leaving home (hard to comprehend that he is the same age that I was when I became pregnant with him), and I am too old and solitary to make a life of rock ‘n’ roll, for it is the music of youthful tribes. In fact, because he was conceived in that energy, the last of the music may leave me when my son leaves. All that will be left is what Oliver calls my “weirdnesses. “All that will be left is the hope that human beings will not be allowed to mangle themselves.

I’ll still have my records. But what is music if you listen to it alone?

Even if I were younger, I couldn’t rejoin the tribes, for the tribes have dissolved. The stuff the kids listen to these days (“disco”) would drive me to self-evisceration in a matter of hours. Even KKAP plays it; I wear earplugs at my desk. I have begun haunting used record stores after work so that I can buy the artifacts that may soon be extinct. Thank Chuck, my son was raised right. He is leaving, but he is leaving with the Beatles, not the Bee Gees, in his heart. C. would be proud.

I will miss him.

Meanwhile, I was having the best summer of my life. I was making money, and the work became easier as the summer progressed. My stamina increased each day and made the bales seem ever lighter. Hard work does that for you when you’re seventeen. Shirtless, I swung my hay hook as if it were a part of me and tossed seventy-pound bales onto a flatbed as if they were made of cotton candy. My arms and back became brown, and my sweat smelled of salt and prairie hay.

What was mainly responsible for my joy, however, was a girl named Cheryl. She was the cousin of one of the guys on the hauling crew, and on Friday, July 1, she came out to the field where we were working and, as a favor to his mother, gave him the lunch that he had forgotten that morning.

Sun-blonded. Tanned skin. Cutoff jean shorts. Long legs. White blouse not buttoned all the way.

“Owwww,” one of the guys groaned as we watched her crossing the greenish-brown expanse of the field.

All of us, with the possible exception of her cousin, wanted her—and I, with my ridiculous black-framed