Buddy Holly Is Alive And Well On Ganymede Part 22

"If I don't, then what am I doing here? And if you don't, what areyou 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 rea.s.sure 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 cla.s.s 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 s.e.x. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 b.u.t.toned 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 gla.s.ses, was the one who got her. I asked her out before I knew what I was doing, and she said yes.

Cheryl and I went out every Sat.u.r.day night for the next seven weeks, and starting with Week Two we clambered into the Dart's back seat and screwed like maniacs. The first time really was my first time. She was patient up to a point and then aggressive. I was grateful. I had always thought that I would have to rely on pity to have a First Time, but the actual event was more like a delirium-induced coincidence: Cheryl and I happened to meet while we were each experiencing intense late-adolescent summer horniness, and so neither of us had a choice, nor wanted any. It would never happen that way again.

I used a condom the first time, and most of the others. My fifteenth birthday present notwithstanding, I'd had too many nightmares about accidental babies to do otherwise. On August 13 (Week Seven), however, Cheryl and I had the luxury of her bed because her parents and siblings were at the movies, and we were stripped and tangled before I realized that the Peac.o.c.ks were still out in the Dart. Cheryl, undaunted, untangled and dashed from the room, returning with a can of foam from her parents' dresser.

I was horrified, but she only laughed and gave me my next lesson.

There was one week of hay hauling left, and I would leave for Manhattan the next Sunday, so after making a mess with the foam, Cheryl and I made plans for a last summer romp together. We would meet on Sat.u.r.day, August 20, drive to Perry Reservoir, and spend the night there. It would be our last time together until I came back to Topeka for a weekend visit. Then we would pick up where we left off.

So we told each other; but Week Seven, in Cheryl's bed, was the last. If I had known, I would have stayed longer and made love to her again despite my fear that her parents would return.

But I didn't know, for I had no way of divining that in Memphis, Tennessee, the forty-two-year-old King of Rock and Roll had less than three days left to live.

On Tuesday, August 16, the hay crew hauled late into the evening because we were all leaving the next Sunday and still had several fields to clear. The portable radio's batteries died before sundown, so I didn't hear the news until I got home. Ready Teddy greeted me, as always, by performing a mad dance punctuated by yips. He had grown into a c.o.c.ker-spaniel-size, dustmop-colored mutt, and I loved him. I would miss him while I was at K-State. He and I went into the house, and I headed for the bathroom.

But Mother was in there, and she had the door locked, so I went into the kitchen to have a can of soda and to wait. I waited thirty-five minutes, and at a quarter to ten I returned to the bathroom and knocked on the door.

"Are you all right?" I called.

Silence.

Heart attack,I thought.Stroke. A slip in the tub. Concussion. Coma. Death.

"Mother! Answer me or I'll break down the door!"

The latch clicked, the k.n.o.b turned, and the door opened. Mother stood in the doorway, still wearing her radio-station-secretary clothes.

I rolled my eyes and leaned against the wall. "Jesus, Mother, I thought you were dead or something."

She looked at me steadily, and I saw that the rims of her eyelids were red. "Why do you always call me 'Mother'?" she asked. "Why haven't I ever been 'Mom'? Not even once, not even when you were little, have you ever called me 'Mom.' "

"I, uh, I don't know," I said.

She nodded, as if I had said what she had expected, and stepped into the hall.

"Elvis is dead," she said.

Then she turned away and walked to her bedroom. She went inside and closed the door. I stood in the hall, not thinking, not doing anything. Ready Teddy came to me, his toenails clicking on the hardwood, and nuzzled my hand.

Eventually, I took a shower and went to bed. That night I dreamed of a bloated corpse singing "Hound Dog." Naked, it writhed on its back, its fingers coming off as they clawed at the stage. Cheryl appeared wearing nothing but cutoff jeans and went down on the corpse, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s bobbing with the music. I awoke in the dark, my chest thundering, my erection hard as diamond.

I was still awake when the alarm went off at 5:00 A.M. I got up, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, fed Ready Teddy, and ate cereal and toast. I heard the newspaper hit the driveway just before 5:30, and I went out for it. Before bringing it inside, I read the front-page headlines. One of them was HEART ATTACK CLAIMS ELVIS PRESLEY. It was not in particularly big type.

I took the paper inside and found Mother in the living room. She was wearing her terry-cloth robe and kneeling before the alb.u.m rack. Her copies ofThe Sun Sessions, Elvis Is Back!, andElvis-TV Special lay on the carpet beside her.

"The station got rid of a lot of records last year," she said, "so I thought I'd take some of ours, just for today. The disc jockeys will want them."

"Good idea," I said. I lay the paper on the coffee table and left for the fields.

All through the hot day, the guys and I listened to the radio that was hung over the truck's outside mirror.

On every station we tuned in, even the country ones, we heard Elvis; but only KKAP was playing the really good stuff, the stuff he'd recorded in the days before the high-collared, jeweled jumpsuits... back when he was Elvis the Pelvis, every boy's s.e.xual role model and every girl's fantasy.

"If I hear 'Love Me Tender' one more time I'm gonna puke," someone said.

That evening, Cheryl called. "I've been thinking about this Sat.u.r.day," she said. Her voice dripped with promise. "I've been thinking about it so much that I can't wait until then. I know it's late and you've been working, but... let's go for a drive."

I had been tired, but Cheryl's voice revitalized me. I said that I would pick her up in ten minutes, and then I ran to my room for my car keys and a couple of Peac.o.c.ks.

"Mother!" I yelled as I charged back through the house. "I'm going out!" I had my hand on the k.n.o.b of the front door before I realized that there had been no answer. Mother always answered. I yelled again, and still there was no answer, so I looked for her. She wasn't in the house, but her '74 Nova was still in the garage.

I found her in the backyard. She was sitting on the ground and gazing up at the just-emerged stars.

"You're going to get chiggers," I said.

She remained silent.

"Mother, Cheryl called. We're going for a drive."

Still she said nothing.

I glanced up at the patch of sky she seemed to be gazing at. "What are you looking for?"

"Elvis."

"No such constellation." I was trying to joke. But of course she was serious.

"When Buddy died," she said, as if I had not spoken, "Elvis was in the Army. In Germany. He sent a telegram of sympathy to the Holleys, in Lubbock. He'd been on the road a lot too, and he knew that it could have been him."

I turned to go. Cheryl was waiting.

"Elvis played in Lubbock more than once in his early days," Mother said. "He met Buddy before Buddy became a star. Buddy was encouraged and inspired by him. They were so different, and so much alike.

Elvis sent the telegram from Germany, knowing what had been lost. So I'm looking for him in the sky now, to wave good-bye. He'll appear like a shooting star in reverse. I would have seen Buddy's star too, but it was cloudy that night."

Cheryl was waiting. I turned back and sat down a few yards away from Mother.

"Elvis's star would have appeared yesterday, wouldn't it?" I asked.

"No. A man like Elvis would wait a day, to be sure he was really supposed to go."

We waited and watched. Soon, we saw a meteor.

"There," I said. "We should go in before the chiggers eat us alive."

"That wasn't him. It fell. Elvis will be going the other way."

Another meteor fell then, and another, and another. Later, I discovered that they were the stragglers of the annual Perseid shower, but Mother had another explanation. "Ancient Atlanteans," she said. "They're flying down to show Elvis the way."

Chiggers were chewing my ankles, mosquitoes biting my arms and neck. In Topeka, a suntanned girl waited to make love to me, and I was sitting in the backyard, staying with my lunatic mother until her crisis pa.s.sed. I had the bitter thought that her crisis would never pa.s.s until she herself flew up to join Elvis and Buddy, so I might as well take off. Then I hated myself for thinking that, and I knew that I wouldn'tbudge. Not even to telephone Cheryl and tell her that I couldn't make it.

Hours later, we saw Elvis leave the planet. He was a ball of orange light with flickers of blue that shot up from the southeastern horizon-from Memphis-and disappeared near the zenith. I had never seen anything like it.

Mother waved.

We went inside then. After Mother went to bed, I sat in the kitchen for another hour, staring at the phone. I hadn't heard it ring while I had been in the yard. Cheryl hadn't called to ask where I was, and I couldn't call her now because it was 2:00 A.M. and her parents would throw a s.h.i.t fit. In three and a half hours I would have to leave for the fields, and it would still be too early to call. I wouldn't have a chance to explain until evening.

And what explanation would I give? That I had preferred sitting in chigger-infested gra.s.s to thrashing in a back seat with Cheryl? That I had turned my back on carnal nirvana to watch for the ghost of Elvis?

Thursday dragged on for months, but when it was over, the summer was over too. We cleared our last field, and at 9:45 P.M. I threw the last bale from the truck to my buddies in the hay shed. Our boss told us to come by his place Friday or Sat.u.r.day, and he'd give us our final checks.

I didn't care about that. All I cared about was getting home and calling Cheryl before it was too late.