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

hanging on its peg beside the dresser, looking like the husk of an alien criminal.

The blue waffle-stitched coverall filled with goose down had been Mother’s Christmas gift to me in 1983, just a month and nine days before her death. She had sewn “Oliver” in red thread over the left breast pocket. The “Oli” was gone now, but the “ver” was intact.

I made sure that my wallet and keys were still in the left breast pocket and that the garage door’s remote control was still in the right, and then I took the Moonsuit down from its peg and stepped inside. After zipping up, I felt warm and invincible. If the G-men from the FCC came for me, I would simply envelop each one in an enormous hug and waffle him to death.

Walking like a bear on its hind legs, I went back through the living room and waved to Buddy, who was still singing “Everyday.” “Bye, Dad,” I said. “See you over at Sharon’s, okay?”

Buddy nodded. Given that he was there in the first place, I wasn’t surprised.

I bear-walked to the utility room and opened the door to the garage. I switched on the light as I entered—and there, in all of her unsurpassed and cantankerous beauty, waited Peggy Sue.

I don’t know how many adult males have either openly or secretly given their motorcycles feminine names, but I would bet my SkyVue that they number in the millions. Peggy Sue is a black 1957 646 cc Ariel Cyclone, and I love her as much as it is possible for a man to love a machine, which is an embarrassing amount. Unlike most of my other possessions, she was not made in Japan, but in Birmingham, England.

I acquired her in July 1982, three weeks after my faithful flop-eared mongrel dog, Ready Teddy, was run down and scraped up by a road grader. The bike was sitting in some old guy’s yard with a cardboard “4-Sale” sign taped to her handlebars, and except for the fact that the oval Ariel emblems were missing from her fuel tank, she appeared to be in great shape. I bought her for eight hundred dollars within two minutes of seeing her. Mother was furious with me for wasting money on my own death, as she put it, but I knew that I had done the right thing. If Peggy Sue happened to be run over, she could be put back together, unlike poor Ready Teddy, who had gone to the Spirit Land almost instantaneously. If I happened to be on Peggy Sue when she was run over… well, at least one of us would have an afterlife.

Less than a month after buying the motorcycle, I was looking through Mother’s rock ‘n’ roll books and rediscovered that Buddy Holly had owned two motorcycles in his short lifetime. The first was a Triumph that he’d acquired shortly after seeing Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin beat the crap out of each other in The Wild One. The second was a bike he’d purchased in Dallas in 1957 or ‘58 and had ridden home to Lubbock. It was a 646 cc Ariel Cyclone.

This was yet another piece of evidence demonstrating that my life was inexorably linked with Buddy’s. Mother seemed less disapproving of Peggy Sue once I showed her the relevant paragraphs. Even she—_especially_ she—could not argue against Fate.

As I stood looking at Peggy Sue on the night of Buddy’s video resurrection, the thought came to me, not for the first time, that she was not simply a bike like the one Buddy had owned, but that she was the bike Buddy had owned. It’s possible. The current title of ownership isn’t the original, but was printed by the State of Kansas in 1980. According to this title, “Boog’s Hog Works of El Dorado” purchased Peggy Sue from an unnamed salvage source and overhauled her, retitling her soon thereafter and selling her to the old guy from whom I bought her. Before El Dorado, she might have come from anywhere.

Like my father C.‘s true identity, Peggy Sue’s history would probably be easy enough to investigate… but a belief in the purposeful complexity of Fate is always more comforting than random, straightforward facts. This may be why Mother preferred to believe in Atlantis and UFOs rather than in virtually everything else.

I closed the door to the utility room, then took cowhide gloves from the Moonsuit’s back pockets and wriggled my hands into them. “Ready to roll,” I said with forced cheerfulness as I approached Peggy Sue. “How about you?”

Peggy Sue’s answer was negative. After unbuckling the white full-face helmet from the handlebars and pulling it on, I straddled the leather seat, opened the fuel valve, yanked the choke, and jumped up and down on the kick start, but all I could coax from her were wheezes. Peggy Sue, for all her beauty and significance, can be a real bitch in cold weather. In fact, she can be a real bitch in warm weather too. Anything made in 1957 is occasionally unreliable—witness Julie “Eat shit and die, Oliver” Calloway—but Peggy Sue often seems determined to elevate unreliability to high art.

On this particular night, the night when I had to get to Sharon’s before the FCC fuzz came after me, Peggy Sue was being especially petulant. The fuel tank was full and every crucial part was in place, but she didn’t care. Kick. Cough. Kick. Sputter. Kick. Urgh. Kick. Blatt. After ten minutes of this, I was almost ready to go back into the living room to ask Buddy whether he had any ideas about what an Ariel Cyclone wanted.

I kicked Peggy Sue’s starter several more times and then stopped, startled by the noise of someone pounding on my garage door. The sound was remarkably like that produced by whanging on the SkyVue’s block converter.

The cold, gnarled hand of terror closed on my heart. The Authorities had come for me. I didn’t know whether they were county, state, or Federal, but they were here. Sharon and her eyebrow-mutant attorney couldn’t help me now.

“I didn’t do it!” I cried. “I swear, I’m not a computer-video genius! I’m as surprised as you are! Honest!” Because I was wearing my helmet, my voice sounded as though I were shouting from inside a Quaker oatmeal box.

On the other side of the garage door, something began growling, and an angry female voice shouted, “What business do you have messing up our TV?”

“Yeah, what business?” a male voice cried, harmonizing with the other.

The hand around my heart squeezed harder. The people outside were not the Authorities, but my neighbors who owned the cow-sized Doberman. The growling meant that they had brought the beast with them.

“Oliver Vale has been taken to prison,” I yelled, “so go away and let us do our jobs! We’re dusting for fingerprints and scanning for bugging devices!”

The growl became louder, and the garage door shook as my neighbors tried to open it. I wished that I could remember their names, or even what they looked like.

“Don’t give us that!” the woman’s voice snarled. “We heard you trying to start your motorcycle! You’re in there, all right!”

“Yeah, you’re in there!” the male voice emphasized.

“May I ask who’s calling?” I shouted.

“You know damn well who’s calling! It’s Cathy and Jeremy from next door, and we brought Ringo with us, so you’d better not do anything threatening or he’ll rip open your crotch!”

“Uh… he’ll get you,” the male voice said. Jeremy was less enthusiastic about crotch-ripping than was Cathy.

I dismounted Peggy Sue and approached the garage door. “Listen, guys,” I said, loud enough so that they could hear me over Ringo’s growling. “I know that Buddy gave out my address, but I had nothing to do with what happened to your TV. It happened to mine too, and I don’t like it any better than you do. As a fellow satellite-dish owner—down with scrambling!—I sympathize completely.”

“Oh, sure!” Cathy said. “That really makes me feel a lot better about missing the World Curling Championships!”

“I thought we were going to watch the dirty movie channel from Portugal,” Jeremy said.

“Shut up!” Cathy shrieked.

I saw my chance. “A fine pair you are!” I said. “I’ve a good mind to report you to Bill Willy!” Oklahoma City’s infamous Reverend William Willard was, among many other things, the leader of Oklahomans and Kansans Righteously Against Pornography (OKRAP), and he and his elite “Corps of Little David” were notorious for harassing smut consumers both at home and at their places of employment. Once, in ‘82, he had arranged a sit-in at a funeral home because two of its employees had been accused of removing clothing from total strangers. Mother, for reasons I never understood, sent Bill Willy a five-dollar check after this incident.

There was silence for a moment (Ringo even stopped growling) and then Cathy said, in a much calmer voice, “There’s no need to call anyone, Mr. Vale, We just naturally assumed that you were responsible for the problem with the TV, since your name was announced and you’re known to be handy with electronics. We’re sorry to have bothered you. Come on, Jeremy. Ringo, heel. Heel, damn it!”

I heard their shoes and paws crunch away down the gravel driveway. My bluff had worked. Nobody wanted to risk tangling with Bill Willy.

I returned to Peggy Sue, tinkered with her throttle and choke, then mounted and tried to kick her to life again. This time, she sputtered for thirty or forty seconds before I realized that she was running, sort of. While she warmed up, I checked the chain slack and lubrication and decided that the machine would probably haul me the twelve miles to Sharon Sharpston’s apartment without too much trouble.

I switched on the headlight and toe-tapped Peggy Sue into first gear, then wheeled her around and let her idle up to the garage door. She almost died when I took my right hand off the throttle grip, and I patted her fuel tank as she recovered.

Then I pushed my thumb against the Moonsuit’s right breast pocket to activate the garage door’s remote control, and the white aluminum wall began to rise as if it were the hull of an anti-gravity spaceship. That thought triggered another, and I wondered just how Buddy Holly could have gotten to Ganymede in the first place.

I would’ve thought about that further, but as the door opened, spilling yellow light into the driveway, I discovered that Cathy, Jeremy, and Ringo had returned under cover of Peggy Sue’s engine noise.

Although Cathy and Jeremy were bundled in coats and stocking caps, I could see that they were an attractive WASPish couple in their forties. Cathy was taller than Jeremy, but other than that I didn’t notice their specific physical characteristics. I was too busy noticing Ringo’s.

The Doberman was as tall as Peggy Sue’s handlebars, and he was wearing a collar of galvanized chain suitable for anchoring an aircraft carrier. His ears stood straight up, his eyes glittered, and his upper lip pulled back from teeth that looked strong and white from biting through countless femurs.

“All right, Vale!” Cathy cried. “You’re going to fix our TV or our dish or whatever you screwed up, and you’re going to do it now! You don’t scare us, and neither does Bill Willy!”

“That’s right!” added Jeremy.

I licked my lips. I truly would have liked to go over to Cathy and Jeremy’s to do what they demanded. Under normal circumstances, I would have assumed that if crescent-wrench-whanging worked for my SkyVue, it would also work for their more widely known model. But these were not normal circumstances. There was nothing I could do for them, and I was running out of time to