Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton (my reading book .txt) 📕

say so. But maybe we ought to divert him before he catches your boy and chows down.”

Eisenhower shook his head. “He won’t do that. At least, I don’t believe so. In any case, he too is part of Fate’s random plan, and therefore we shouldn’t interfere.”

” ‘Fate’s random plan’?” Khrushchev said. “Sounds like more bullshit to me. I mean, how can a plan be random? How can randomness be planned?”

Eisenhower leaned forward and turned up the TV’s sound. “Let’s stay tuned and find out, shall we?”

Khrushchev sat down again. “You’ve been here too long, Ike. Your brain’s turning to video kibble.”

“Hush. I want to hear whatever Buddy’s going to play next.”

“You don’t already know?”

“Of course not.” Eisenhower picked a popcorn hull from his teeth with a fingernail. “He belongs to himself too.”

part 2 - the pilgrimage of the physically fit

4

OLIVER

My grandfather died in April 1965 as the result of an accident at the Goodyear plant. No one would tell me what happened, and Mother didn’t explicate it in her diary, so I have always imagined that he went to work drunk (as he often did), fell into a vat of bubbling black goo, and ended up rolling down the highway under somebody’s Ford. The closed casket at the funeral made a hollow sound when I knocked on it, so I wasn’t convinced that he was in there.

Five-year-olds do things like that. At least, I did. Four months had passed since Sam Cooke’s demise, and a portion of my fear of death had metamorphosed into an intense curiosity about just what it was that separated death from life. So I knocked on the casket to see whether anyone was home.

Fortunately, Grandmother was talking with the pastor in the vestibule when I did that. If she had witnessed it, she would have whipped the snot out of me. As it was, the only witness was Mother, and she knocked immediately after I did.

“Knock, knock,” she whispered.

“Who’s there?” I asked. I had become a skilled straight man at knock-knock jokes.

“Coffin,” she said.

“Coffin who?”

“Coffin your handkerchief or don’t coffat all!”

I giggled. I was only five.

On Mother’s birthday, Thursday, May 13, Grandmother left for Des Moines for a two-week visit with Uncle Mike, who was supposed to have come to Topeka for the funeral but who had missed it because the Greyhound bus bringing him had broken down. Mother and I were specifically not invited along on Grandmother’s trip, because she felt that our sinful and illegitimate presences would have a deleterious effect on her seventeen-year-old son.

Mother cried the night before Grandmother left. She had not seen her brother in six years, and now he was almost grown up and she didn’t even know him.

Being denied a trip to Des Moines turned out to be only a prelude. As we said good-bye to Grandmother at the bus station, she informed Mother that by the time she returned, we had better be out of the house.

I remember that much. For further details, I must refer to Volume III of Mother’s diary:

So there I was this afternoon, just turned twenty-four without so much as a Happy Birthday, waiting with Mama and Oliver at the bus station. Oliver was sitting on the floor playing with his Matchbox fire truck, and Mama said, “Get that child off the floor, Michelle, what’s the matter with you? He’ll catch a disease.” So I picked him up and held him on my lap, although he’s getting big. It’s always best to let Mama feel like she’s running things. Which she is. Except for not getting to go see Mikey so that Oliver could meet his uncle, I was looking forward to the next two weeks without her.

Then the man with the microphone announced the bus, and we all stood. I was still holding Oliver, so I hugged Mama with one arm. She didn’t hug back, which had been typical for a long time now. She is still Mama, though, just like Daddy was Daddy and I miss him even though he was pretty awful for the last five years.

Mama picked up her little blue suitcase and said, just as if she were commenting on the weather, “When I come back, you have to be gone.”

I said, “Huh?”

“You are an adult,” Mama said, but in a tone of voice that meant Like Hell You Are. “You have a child. It is time you took responsibility. Out of respect for your father’s feelings, I tolerated you under our roof. But your father was a more generous Christian than you had a right to expect, and he’s gone now, God bless him. You can go to work and take care of yourself. You and your things and your boy had better not be in the house when I get back.”

As she walked for the bus, I hurried after her, still carrying Oliver, who was fidgeting. “Just let us stay until he starts first grade in the fall,” I said. “How could I get a job before then? What would we live on?”

I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have crawled to her. She is my mama and somewhere in my chest full of hate I must still love her a little, but I should never have crawled to her.

She looked back at me and said, “I don’t know, but if you think you’ll use some of your father’s insurance money, you can forget it. It all comes to me, and I might give a few thousand to Mikey if he needs it, but never to you. Not after what you did.”

Mama got on the bus and went away. She should be in Des Moines by now. She’s probably giving Mikey and the relatives all of the smiles and hugs she’s been hoarding since we came to Topeka.

Oliver is asleep as I write. He doesn’t look like a bastard. Just before I put him to bed, he hugged me around the legs and said, “Happy burfday, Muvver.” He can talk better than that, but not when he’s sleepy.

Absolutely, I thought. Happy goddamn birthday.

How am I going to be able to alter this reality? If I deny Mama’s existence, will she be unable to come back and throw us out?

I had thought that it would be nice for me and Oliver to have the house to ourselves for a while, but I was wrong. I can smell Daddy’s cigarettes and beer even though he is dead and buried. I expect to see Mama frown at me when I get a glass of milk even though she has gone to Des Moines. Even when they aren’t here, they’re here.

Time for us to go, Oliver. Where to, though, beats the hell out of me.

I wish we could go to England. That’s where all the rock ‘n’ roll is these days. All you need is a rubber soul, baby, and I surely do have that.

I was a ball and chain bolted to Mother’s ankle. If it hadn’t been for me, she would have gone to London. She would have found a way.

As it was, she had to pick me up from kindergarten every day and then take me along as she searched for a job. That alone ensured that she was rejected by several employers who might not have rejected her otherwise. Amazingly, though, she found something a few days before Grandmother was to return. A small pop radio station happened to need someone to handle paperwork at just the time that Mother happened to be looking, and thus she became the lone secretary at KKAP, “The Hop of the Heartland.” The management and disc jockeys were stuck in 1959, but that was okay because Mother was too. (Not quite fair. At this point in her life, Mother was as progressive as it was possible to be in Topeka. It was at her suggestion, in fact, that KKAP finally decided to take a bold step forward and start playing the Beatles.)

That solved one problem. Mother had a job, and she was scheduled to start with a training day on Friday, May 28, the day after Grandmother was to return. That left only two other problems: where to live, and what to do with yours truly.

Neither was solved by the time Grandmother showed up. She came home from the bus station in a cab on the evening of May 27, and Mother began to tell her about the job.

“And I suppose you want me to babysit your brat while you’re off making your fortune,” Grandmother said.

“Well, no,” Mother said, looking at me anxiously. She still didn’t completely trust Grandmother alone with me, and I felt the same way. “But tomorrow’s his last morning of kindergarten, so maybe you could just have him tomorrow afternoon. That would give me the weekend to find a regular sitter.”

I wanted to scream, No! Not even one afternoon! but I knew that wouldn’t help matters. Either that, or I was just too scared of Grandmother.

“You’re forgetting one important thing, Michelle,” Grandmother said grimly. “You and Oliver don’t live here anymore. You not only don’t have a free babysitter, but you’ve lost your free housekeeper as well.”

Then she went back into our bedroom, pulled the drawers from the dresser and bureau, and began flinging our clothes into the hallway.

Some crying and screaming followed, but the next thing I remember clearly is that Mother and I ended up standing on the front walk while she struggled to hold four grocery sacks full of clothes.

I was bawling. When I could, I sobbed, “Grandmother doesn’t mean it, does she?”

“No, she doesn’t,” Mother said. Her voice sounded firmer than I had ever heard it before. “She thinks she’ll let us stand out here for a few hours or maybe overnight, where the neighbors will see us. She thinks I’ve never been properly repentant, so she wants us to feel humiliated and learn our lesson. Then she’ll let us back in and expect us to be grateful and humble.”

Mother paused. I looked up and saw her glaring at Grandmother’s house. Her eyes flashed with wet heat.

“Well, fuck that,” she said.

She strode off down the sidewalk, and I toddled along with her, wondering what she had meant. She dropped one of the grocery sacks, so I picked it up and carried it with both arms, hugging it as if it were a stuffed animal.

We took a city bus, and the driver and passengers stared at us. Mother stared back, and they stopped.

We went to the radio station, a small brick building north of the Kaw River. By the time we arrived, only three people were still there. The two-to-six disc jockey was just coming off the air, and the six-to-ten man was just going on. The engineer was dozing in the control room, letting the deejays fend for themselves.

The two-to-six man was a skinny, stooped guy with pale skin. His name, Mother told me, was Jeff. We met him as he came out of the booth.

“Hey, that front door’s supposed to be locked after five,” Jeff said.

“It wasn’t,” Mother replied. “I’m the new secretary. I start tomorrow. This is my son Oliver.”

Jeff looked at us. “So you’re bringing in sacks of clothes?”

“We need a place to stay,” Mother said.

“Well, you sure can’t stay here,” Jeff said. “Better call in some favors from friends.”

“I’ve been too busy raising my son to make friends,” Mother said.

“That’s me!” I said brightly. I had surmised that this occasion called for cuteness.

“Isn’t he something?” Mother asked, tousling my hair. She dropped one of her