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

would not have been so hard if I had not been a bastard; Mother would not have become obsessed with her “other world” if her life had not been so hard.

She would not have died as she did.

I knew that Mother thought of the “other world” as a place where one’s spirit would live on, where Buddy Holly and Sam Cooke and John Lennon all sang without tiring. I knew that she believed her mission on the corporeal plane had ended when I became an adult, and that she was only marking time until she could rejoin her lover and her gods. I knew that the twenty-fifth anniversary of my conception, and of Buddy’s and C.‘s deaths, would be a critical day.

I did nothing.

On Thursday, February 2, 1984, a coworker took me to lunch and introduced me to a twenty-seven-year-old bank secretary named Julie Calloway, with whom I made a date for that evening. I had ridden my motorcycle to town, so I would meet Julie at her apartment, and we would go out in her car. I called Mother to tell her that I wouldn’t be home for supper. She said that was fine.

By the time Julie drove us back to her place that night, it was after twelve. We both had to go to work in the morning, so we agreed that I wouldn’t come in… but as we kissed, we wound up in the same bucket seat. Julie murmured that she was on the pill and that she hadn’t done it in a car in ages. Neither had I. It was like going back in time.

The car radio was tuned to KKAP, and as Julie and I struggled, we were bombarded with pop rock. REO. Billy Joel. Van Halen. Huey Lewis. Then, as we were about to climax, the soundtrack changed.

“It’s one A.M.,” the disc jockey said. “Twenty-five years ago at about this moment—”

I fell into ice water.

“What is it?” Julie asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, opening the door and grabbing the Moonsuit from the back seat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

As I ran for Peggy Sue, I heard the opening riff of “I’m Gonna Love You Too.” I ached to stay so that I could listen with Julie for the chirping cricket at the end.

I found Mother in the garage, sitting in the Dart with the engine and radio on. Buddy was singing “Heartbeat.” The garage was full of fumes. Mother’s skin was cold.

I dragged her into the yard, where I forced my breath into her lungs and pummeled her heart. I shouted for a neighbor to call an ambulance, but the nearest houses were dark, and no one shouted back.

I ran inside, leaving Mother on the dead grass, and found Volume VII of her diary lying open on the kitchen table. Beside it was a white sticker on which she had written, “January 19, 1981 to February 3, 1984. Conclusion.”

The entry on the last page was brief:

My son will do well without me. Buddy’s spirit sings in his blood, and he is old enough now that he needs no other protector. I am free to do as I wish. C. is waiting.

Remember, world: Even Jesus had to die at least once, but rock and roll lives forever.

I pasted the sticker on the spine and telephoned for an ambulance.

By the time I returned from the hospital, the Dart was out of gas and its battery was dead. Eight days later, I sold it.

I sent a telegram to Grandmother, who in 1980 had written a letter saying that she was moving back to Des Moines and that she wanted nothing further to do with us. We’d had no contact with her since, and I wasn’t even sure that she was still alive. In any case, she neither appeared at the memorial service nor sent flowers.

The service was held at the funeral home and had only myself, some KKAP employees, and three of Mother’s seance companions in attendance. The organist refused to play any Buddy Holly songs, so the whole thing was a waste of time.

Afterward, I rode Peggy Sue to Clear Lake, where I scattered Mother’s ashes in a field that a farmer told me was the one where the Bonanza had crashed. Even if it wasn’t, it was close enough. I had done the best I could.

But only in that.

I could have helped her find a way to make her corporeal life worth living. Instead, I had abandoned her on the most crucial night of her adult life, and she had died.

After I came home from Clear Lake, that thought recurred with increasing frequency. Whenever it did, I got on Peggy Sue and rode far away until my only thoughts were of the road, and the trees, and the sky. Until my Ariel and I became a meteor burning through the night.

In April, Julie Calloway called. She didn’t make love on the first date with just anyone, she said. Something special had passed between us, and she would not let it get away if she could help it.

Which she couldn’t. We began seeing each other again, but whenever a problem or argument seemed imminent, I rode away. Sometimes I was gone for two or three days.

Julie was patient. She knew what it was like to lose a mother, she said, and would give me the time I needed to overcome my grief. My grief, however, had dissipated at the moment that I had scattered Mother’s ashes in a holy place. Grief is easy. Guilt is hard.

We were together for almost five years. She even lived with me for a year in the middle. When she moved back to her own apartment, she warned that if I ever ran away again, we were finished. She told me this in colorful, obscene terms that made me love her more than I already did.

I ran away six more times. After the sixth time, I brought her a bag of cheeseburgers, and she told me to eat shit and die. I took the burgers home and snarfed them while watching Beat the Devil via satellite from Vancouver. When they were gone, I rode away again, but I returned after a few hours. I felt too heavy to run anymore. Besides, Cowboy Carl was getting pissed at his star salesman for missing so many days. A man has to make a living. Mother’s house still wasn’t paid for.

Boog halted our convoy a half mile south of SkyVue. The night was dominated by searchlight beams and the flame of the refinery tower, and the taste of burning fuel scorched my mouth. It was almost 1:00 A.M.

Boog dismounted his Harley and walked back to the Kamikaze. “You sure you want to go in?” he asked me.

The crowd of Willyites was hidden behind the theater’s wooden fence, but an oceanic murmur of voices gave me an idea of its size. I did not want to go in, but the tugging sensation that had drawn me here had become overwhelming, as if I were a lemming unable to stop running for a seaside cliff. I still couldn’t imagine what I was supposed to find, but I knew, just as I knew the locations of my feet and hands, where it was.

“I have to get to the snack bar,” I said.

Pete was watching the rearview mirror. “Better hurry.”

I looked back. Two of the bikers were immediately behind us, but beyond them, a Chevrolet sedan was coming to a stop. Even through the flare of its headlights, I saw that the driver was the Bald Avenger.

“Go!” I yelled, ducking. “Go go go!”

Boog ran for his bike, and his gang charged forward. The two that had been behind us sped past.

Our radio dial exploded, throwing plastic flak. I glanced up and saw that the Barracuda’s rear window had a bullet hole. The Kamikaze leaped ahead.

The gang swerved into SkyVue’s driveway, formed a ragged phalanx, and paused as Boog’s Harley and the Kamikaze pulled up behind the pickup truck at the point. Ahead was a ticket booth lit by yellow tubes. Two men wearing the dark brown suits of the Corps of Little David stood beside it. One of them waved, and ten more brown-suited men emerged from behind the satellite dishes on the lawn. Out on the road, the Bald Avenger’s car was approaching the entrance.

Boog brought his machine alongside the Barracuda and grinned in at me. “A good fuckin’ day to die!” he said, and raced his engine. His gang did likewise. A woman ran from the ticket booth and hid behind a satellite dish. I pulled on my helmet.

“I hate this,” Gretchen said, gripping her tire iron. “I really hate this.”

Boog popped his clutch, and the phalanx surged. The Kamikaze screamed like a tyrannosaur, and I was slammed back in my seat. Sixteen representatives of dead technology burst from their collective grave and raced to meet the forces of SkyVue.

One of the pickups hit the ticket booth, which burst into a shower of plaster and glass, and the two Corps ministers in the drive scrambled away. The fence splintered as the lead pickup rammed it, and then we were past, and through, and swallowed by chaos.

The way to the snack bar was clogged with men, women, and children, and our phalanx disintegrated to avoid plowing into them. Two pickups collided, and three motorcycles went down. The Kamikaze slid sideways, pinning Boog’s Harley against a post. The third pickup and the rest of the bikes veered off among the rows of cars.

Pete killed the Barracuda’s engine, and he and Gretchen crawled out via the windshield hole. I clambered through the glassless passenger window and slumped across the fuel tank of Boog’s motorcycle.

Boog pointed up at the movie screen. There, the forty-foot visage of the Reverend William Willard, looking like the offspring of Edwin Meese and a Komodo dragon, glared in displeasure.

“WHAT IS THIS?” he demanded, his voice thundering. “YOU CAN’T DISRUPT A PEACEFUL GATHERING OF GOD-FEARING AMERICANS. WE HAVE A PERMIT.”

Gretchen, standing with Pete on the hood of the Kamikaze, raised a fist and extended the middle finger. For an instant, I was six years old again, watching my mother defy the elemental beast that would try to kill us.

The crowd roared and began to gravitate toward us, compressing its mass as if we were a singularity at the heart of a black hole. Four members of Boog’s gang were caught in the crush and beaten with flashlights.

As they approached, the Willyites gathered white rocks from the theater lot. The first one they threw shattered the Harley’s headlight, and the second ricocheted from my helmet. Then there were too many to count. Gretchen swung her tire iron and batted away an incredible number, but it wasn’t enough. We were going to be killed.

Boog leaped from his bike and dove at the rock throwers, swinging fists like sledgehammers, while I jumped onto the Kamikaze’s hood and tackled Pete and Gretchen. A searchlight beam swung down to trap us in brilliance.

“What do you think you’re doing, shithead?” Gretchen screamed beneath me.

“Protecting you from the rocks! I’m wearing a magic spacesuit!”

“But we already have something better,” Pete said. ” ‘Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light!’ ” He broke free of me and stood. The rocks came flying faster and thicker than ever, but Pete smiled in the electric blaze and was not touched.

I relaxed my grip on Gretchen, and she stood as well. When she swung her tire iron at a flying stone, it curved away as if repulsed by a magnetic field.

“BROTHERS AND SISTERS, STOP,”