He pulled my head toward him, and my terror snapped back to anger. I kicked his shin and then flailed away from him, backing up against the wall.

"Stay away from me or I'll kill you!" I screamed.

The pastor went back to his chair. He didn't seem to have felt my kick. "Boys who say things like that get sent to reform school, just like Mrs. Stummert says," he said in a voice that was now weirdly calm.

"So do boys who tell tales. Be sure not to tell any tales, son. No one would believe you, and you'd end up sorry you'd done it."

I stayed against the wall, breathing hard, tears on my face, my fists knotted, even after Mrs. Stummert returned with her record book.

She hardly gave me a glance. "His mother has a job outside the home, apparently," she said, holding out the book to the pastor. "She gave two numbers and wrote 'work' beside one with a circle around it."

The pastor took the book. "Where do your father and mother work, son?" he asked.

"I don't have a father," I said, "and I don't need one either."

The pastor and Mrs. Stummert gave each other looks that made me want to pound their faces into pulp.

"What about your mother, then?" the pastor asked.

"KKAP radio," I said. This time the pastor and Mrs. Stummert looked at me. Their expressions were mixtures of disgust and smugness.

"Might have known," the pastor said. He picked up his phone.

Mother came quickly. I don't know how she was able to drop everything at the station and take off, but she did. I loved her for it.

Still, I wanted to make my position plain from the outset. The moment that she stepped into the pastor's office, I said, "I'm not coming back here. Not ever."

She squatted before me so that our eyes were on a level. "Why? What happened?"

Mrs. Stummert and the pastor took turns lecturing Mother then, talking as if I were a hundred miles away. Mrs. Stummert told Mother what I had done, and Mother asked what was so bad about that. The pastor replied that so-called music like that Beatles poison was destroying the Christian fiber of the nation. He also said that any radio station that played tings like that was under the influence of Communists and drug addicts.

Mother told him thatshe worked for a radio station that played things like that, that no one she knew was either a Red or a junkie, and what the h.e.l.l made him think he knew his head from his a.s.s, anyway?

The pastor almost exploded. "We don't need you LSD hippies in our community!" he cried, his face shaking. "We won't let you raise your b.a.s.t.a.r.d children to destroy us! We can tell the Authorities about you! We have Jesus on our side!"

"I'll bet He's just thrilled to pieces aboutthat," Mother replied, taking my hand. "Let's get out of here, Oliver. You won't have to come back. I'll either find baby-sitters, or you can come to work with me.

We'll hide you in a filing cabinet."

As we left, I looked over my shoulder and yelled, "Fat b.u.t.t!" at the quaking pastor. Ordinarily, Mother would have disapproved of that out of a sense of maternal duty, but this time she looked over her shoulder and yelled the same thing.

Once we were inside our creaky old Ford Falcon, Mother gazed at me with a seriousness that startled me.

"Oliver," she said, "this is important: Did they hurt you? Did they hurt you at all, in any way? Did they even just scare you?"

I opened my mouth to tell her about my arm, which was probably going to bruise where Mrs. Stummert had grasped it, and about the pastor grabbing my head.

"Because if they did," Mother said before I could speak, "we'llget them."

There was an edge to her voice that made me stop. Considering, I asked, "How do you mean?"

She stared out the windshield. "That depends on what they did to you. At the very least, we'll slice their tires. We'll put sugar in their gas tanks. We'll break into their houses and flush explosive chemicals down their toilets. We'll put dead skunks in their ovens and set the temperature at five hundred degrees. We'llcapture pigeons, feed them blueberries for a week, and set them loose in their living rooms. We'll telephone them and blow police whistles.

We'll send them cow p.o.o.p by fourth-cla.s.s mail. We'll hound them until they go berserk and do something crazy anddie."

I thought about the pastor saying,We can tell the Authorities about you. I wasn't sure who the Authorities were, but if they were meaner and more powerful than the pastor, I didn't want to find out.

"They didn't hurt me," I said. I didn't want Mother to go to jail, or worse. "We don't have to do any of that stuff. I just don't want to go back there, that's all."

Mother looked disappointed. "Okay," she said. "Let me know if you change your mind."

Her summertime entries in Volume III indicate that she was indeed disappointed, and not just about the fact that I had vetoed the fourth-cla.s.s-mail cow p.o.o.p.

That bloated walrus called me a hippie,she wrote.Would that it were so. If I could, I would go out to San Francisco and find out what this Movement is all about, and whether there might be a place in it for me. I would even try LSD. Wouldn't that be something to shock Mama; I would do it just for that. I could probably try it right here in Topeka, Kansas, if I wanted, because Ted at the station has hinted that he knows people over in Lawrence who can get him pretty much anything.

But I'll never do it. I have Oliver. He has me. If I dropped acid and went tripping tra-la-la across the rooftops and danced at the peak of the Statehouse dome, what would happen to him? Mama would probably get custody of him, and Great Chuck Almighty, I don't want that.

Besides, I'm twenty-six. I'm too old to be a hippie. Another four years, and no one in Haight-Ashbury will trust me. I'm not sure that they would now.

Mother's frustration at being a single parent trapped in Topeka in 1967 is in evidence throughout the rest of Volume III, which she completed late that fall. She began to buy more and more books and magazines devoted to UFO investigations and speculations concerning the lost continent of Atlantis, apparently figuring that if she couldn't indulge in hippie-type weirdness, she'd settle for any kind of weirdness she could find.

And there was plenty to be found, as ill.u.s.trated by the diary entry Mother wrote on October 21: Today is the day that the Pentagon will rise one hundred feet into the air and that its evil spirits will be exorcised. I cannot be there to see it, but I will be here adding my energy to the effort, humming and chanting whatever feels right for a levitation spell. They sent Mikey to Vietnam last month, but maybe if we can do this thing, they will bring him back and he won't be killed. In the name of ancient Atlantis, in the name of Zeus and Poseidon, in the name of the star creatures who visit in their ships of light, we command you, arise.

The Pentagon either didn't budge an inch or only rose a mere ten feet, depending on who you ask.

The Apollo tragedy, the Vacation Bible School incident, Mother's growing weirdness, and the general state of Everything in 1967 served to make me one miserably confused little seven-year-old boy. I began to throw tantrums, break things, and stick pencils down my throat to make myself throw up. It was a good thing that Mother and I almost never saw Grandmother during this time, or I might have really gone crazy. Sharon Sharpston has suggested that the lack of a positive male role model during this period might be the primary reason for my behavior, but I think that this theory is largely manure.

After all, I did have positive male role models. Always, I had Buddy. I also had the Beatles, and along about this time, The Who. Townshend and Daltrey were added to our pantheon, and Mother and I sang "I Can See for Miles" every night one week while she was cooking supper.

I had one other male role model, although I had never met him and had never heard his voice: Uncle Mike. Mother had been receiving letters from him since February, some of them with snapshots included, and she read them to me. At least, she read all except the parts that she thought I shouldn't hear.

Here is one of those letters, which I found stuck into Volume III. I remember Mother reading it aloud one evening in November. I do not remember the fifth paragraph.

Dear Sis, Well I sure feel bad I couldn't see you before I got sent over but that's the way it goes sometimes I guess. I'll make up for it when I get back. I especially wish I could see that boy of yours, I bet he's something.

I have been here at Da Nang for two weeks now and know most of the guys pretty good. The food is mostly bad but it was in Des Moines too ha ha ha. Say you haven't learned how to cook yet have you? because if you have some cookies or something would sure make me popular around here hint hint.

The weather here is about like at home only hotter and wetter. Another week here and then my unit goes out to do stuff like making sure the enemy stays clear of strategic roads. That should be easy because I hear they mostly hide out in the jungle anyway.

So how are things at the radio station? We got one guy in the unit, Pete is his name, who is a real Rolling Stones fan. He says you must have the best job in the world. He says to tell you "better than our jobs, anyway." He is just joking since we haven't had to work too awful hard yet.

The only tough thing so far was I saw two dead guys yesterday. It was two guys who got caught in some kind of b.o.o.by trap that blew up on them. They got put into plastic bags, not even boxes but bags, and the guys doing it couldn't figure out which feet went with which guy so they had to guess. Don't worry I won't end up that way you can bet because they taught us at camp new methods how to tell b.o.o.by traps when you see them.

Say in to that Oliver kid of yours for me and tell him I'll give him all my medals when I get home.

Pete says the only medal he wants is the Meritorious Eating Prize. He is the one who made me ask you to send cookies.

Your brother, Mike I didn't understand Vietnam, or the levitation of the Pentagon, or any of it. The whole business was one of those things that I figured I would understand once I got older. I was wrong. Since I had been born in 1959, I had lucked into the eye of the hurricane. I would never have to worry about being drafted or about seeing my friends drafted. War was not something I would ever have to deal with in a direct, personal way.

Why do I feel guilty about that?

Back then, Uncle Mike's letters were nothing more than the words of a stranger in a faraway land. They had no more effect on me than the incomprehensible events Walter Cronkite described on the evening news. Death is meaningless unless it happens to someone you know.

It happened to someone I knew on December 10, two days after my eighth birthday. Otis Redding and four of the Bar-Kays were killed when the twin-engine Beechcraft in which they were flying crashed into a lake near Madison, Wisconsin.

Mother and I sat silently in our tiny living room when we heard the news. I was on the floor beside the furnace vent, and the hot air coming out dried my eyes so that I couldn't cry. I don't know whether I could have anyway; I was almost more scared for myself than I was sad for Otis.

He had died within a few days of my birthday, just as Sam Cooke had three years before. In addition, Otis had died a death eerily similar to Buddy Holly's. (Buddy's plane hadn't gone into a lake, but it had crashed near a town named for one, which struck me as being almost the same thing.) And Mother had told me any number of times that Buddy and I were spiritually linked.

I began to fear that the link was Death, which made me wish that I would never grow up. The more birthdays I had, the more G.o.ds we would lose.

Mother, however, had another explanation for Otis's death.

I was right about last year's tornado,she wrote in her final entry in Volume III.It was a harbinger of more horrible things to come. The fire that killed the astronauts (itself an omen). Mikey in Vietnam. The war getting worse, the police and military cracking down on public a.s.semblies.

People like that pastor at the church gaining more and more power. Otis Redding dying. The station getting threatening mail for playing "hippie-n.i.g.g.e.r" music.

Come for us, O wise flyers of the bright ships of ancient Atlantis. Come and take me and my son away with you to live among the giant blue stars. You won't be sorry. We aren't like the rest of these dumbf.u.c.ks.

But the bright ships of ancient Atlantis did not come. Neither did anything else. Mother and I remained in Topeka, waiting to see what could possibly happen in 1968 that had not happened already.

Dawn on Sat.u.r.day, February 4, 1989, was a signal for cold drizzle to enshroud the state of Oklahoma.

That was all I needed to make me want to curl up in the nearest ditch.

Peggy Sue and I had spent the night zigzagging among back roads, trees, and barns in an effort to shake the Jaguar off our tail. The woman who was now driving the beast had proven to be even more tenaciousthan the bald man had been, and the bike and I had both been pushed to our limits. I had tried doubling back, hiding under bridges, and outright speed, but still the woman had stayed within a mile of us.

Finally, I had killed our lights and cut cross-country, running the bike over a downed barbed-wire fence and bouncing across a pasture. It had been a dangerous move, because we could have run into a gully, a badger hole, a cow, or a coyote, but it had worked. The mirrors had shown the Jaguar's headlights standing still at the place where Peggy Sue and I had left the road.

As soon as we'd put a hill between us and the car, I had switched the bike's lights back on, found a cowpath, and followed it for a couple of winding miles until it intersected with an oil-pumper road. That in turn had taken us to a township road of graded red dirt, and I had steered Peggy Sue in the direction that I was pretty sure was south.

By that time, the b.u.mps of the pasture had almost neutered me, Peggy Sue sounded as if she were choking, and we had made no progress toward Lubbock. Then the sky brightened from black to gray, and the drizzle started. The Moonsuit and the bike were both splattered with red mud before we found pavement again.

It was time to find a place to hide for the day, but first I had to figure out where the h.e.l.l we were. A shotgun-peppered road sign read "Kingfisher, 6 miles," and although I didn't know where that was, it was definitely somewhere.

Kingfisher was at the junction of a state highway and a U.S. highway, and the map I swiped from a box outside a closed gas station showed me that I was only about thirty miles northwest of Oklahoma City.

That was as close as I wanted to get. Aside from the danger of the usual Authorities, Oklahoma City was the home base of the Reverend William Willard and his Corps of Little David, who had probably not appreciated having their ministry preempted. The Bill w.i.l.l.yites would be marching in the streets today.

I studied the map for a few minutes-luckily, Kingfisher was as still as death this early in the day-and then Peggy Sue and I headed west on the state highway. Despite my fatigue and soreness, I had resolved that our hiding place would not be within city limits this time.

The drizzle worsened, and I had to wipe my faceplate every fifteen seconds. Maybe leaving Kingfisher hadn't been such a good idea after all. The combination of my weariness, Peggy Sue's occasional stumbling, and the cruddy weather were going to add up to Oliver Vale smeared on the pavement if I didn't stop soon.

Ten miles out of Kingfisher, we reached a black-topped crossroad with a sign indicating that the "Chisholm Trail Rest Stop Waterbed Motel" was only a short distance south. I swerved the bike onto the crossroad, and a few miles later we reached the promised motel.

The FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES had been a luxury resort compared to this place. The wooden building leaned, its paint was a peeling yellow-gray, and the parking lot was mud.

Surprisingly, though, the lot was packed with cars and pickup trucks. I wouldn't be able to pull the same get-a-room-free trick that I had pulled in El Dorado. I rode Peggy Sue to the south end of the motel, shut her down, and then pushed her behind the building (where there were no rooms). She would have to sit parked in mud, but at least she wouldn't be seen from the road.

Now I would have to pay for a room and hope that I wasn't recognized. The wet, muddy ride had probably helped me in that regard; the Moonsuit hardly looked blue anymore, and my face couldn't have been more than a blur behind the helmet faceplate. I slogged around to the front of the building andtracked red mud down the crumbling sidewalk to the office. As I pa.s.sed occupied rooms, I heard noises and comments from within: "Not again, honey-bunch, I gotta sleep sometimes, don't I? Ow!" "Wazzat a motorsickle outside? G.o.dd.a.m.n it, my wife's brother rides a motorsickle." "Gonna ask for half our money back. Ain't no poochy on the TV." "Where's the beer? What happened to the f.u.c.kin' beer? Did you drink all my f.u.c.kin' beer, b.i.t.c.h?" "Sorry, baby, if you're out of rubbers, you're out, period. This girl don't take no chances." By the time I got to the office, I had a good idea of why the Chisholm Trail Rest Stop Waterbed Motel was well off the main road.

There was a doormat outside the office, but wiping my feet on it only made my shoes muddier. I shouldered open the swollen door and found myself inside a closet filled with cigarette smoke. Through the haze, I saw an ancient man in need of a shave sitting on the other side of a low counter. His eyes were fixed on a black-and-white TV watching Buddy perform, but he might have been seeing anything.

"Need a room," I said, taking my wallet from a Moonsuit pocket. My tongue was still sore from having been bitten.

"Six dollars for four hours, ten for eight," the old man said without looking at me. His voice was phlegmy.

I put a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

"Tape machine ain't working today," he said.

"That's okay."

He took the ten and unhooked a key from one of twelve cardboard clock faces on the wall, then adjusted the clock's hands to read three-thirty. "Room eleven," he said, dropping the key on the counter.

"Second from the end. Have a good time." He still hadn't looked at me. My head and body ached, but I felt lucky.

Room 11's door banged into the waterbed as I entered, and when I found the light switch, I saw that the room was the same size as the office and that it had not been cleaned since its previous occupants had left. Beer cans, whiskey bottles, cigarette b.u.t.ts, condom wrappers, and a few used condoms were scattered on a grimy, colorless surface that had once been a carpet. The bed was unmade, and one glance at the sheets told me that I didn't want to lie on them. The smell of the place was reminiscent of stale smoke, beer puke, and soured bodily fluids. At least the heat was working.

All things considered, I couldn't have asked for a better hideout, I thought as I removed my helmet and gloves and shrugged out of the junk-food-laden Moonsuit. Only a pervert would think to look for me here.

After taking two stolen plastic tubes of breath mints from the Moonsuit, I scrunched around the waterbed, b.u.mped against a shelf that held a small TV set, and squeezed into a bathroom that was the same size as the wall indentations that once held ironing boards. There was no shower or mirror, and the sink was set into the wall above the toilet tank. It was impossible to sit without thunking my head.

After flushing the toilet and washing my hands (no soap), I poured all of the breath mints into my mouth.

While I was sucking on the pellets, I popped out my contact lenses and dropped each into one of the empty plastic tubes. Then I filled each tube with water, hoping that I would remember that peppermint was right and wintergreen was left. Again, I wished for my gla.s.ses.

I set the tubes on the toilet tank and returned to the waterbed cubicle, where I kicked the mess on thefloor into one corner, suppressing screams when things stuck to my shoes. Once that ch.o.r.e was done, I put on my gloves again and stripped the sheets and pillowcases from the bed, throwing the resulting wad into the same corner as the rest of the trash. I saved one pillowcase to wipe the mud from the Moonsuit.

Finally, I pulled off my shoes and lay on the waterbed (which was so underfilled that my rump touched the floor), wrapping myself in the bedspread and a blanket. These had been tangled at the foot of the bed and seemed cleaner than the sheets, but I kept my clothes on anyway. Once I was bundled, I curled up on my side with one bare pillow under my head and the other under my hip. Despite my stinging eyes, a headache, a bitten tongue, a sore throat, various bruises, and athumpata-thumpata noise coming from room 10, I fell asleep quickly. My last conscious thought was that although I lay in squalor, my mouth was minty fresh.

I had several interlocking dreams. First I was riding Peggy Sue down a highway that melted to become a broad gray plain; then Jupiter rose, and the Great Red Spot winked and fluttered its eyelashes; a satellite-dish-headed creature appeared and began chasing me, firing popcorn and breath mints from its block converter; I tried to accelerate and flee, but discovered that I was twisting Sharon Sharpston's right ear instead of Peggy Sue's throttle. Sharon reached up and flipped me onto my back in the dust, then sat on my chest and began choking me.

"Buckethead," she said.

I awoke thrashing, and found that it was not Sharon Sharpston who sat on my chest, but the curly-haired, muscular woman whom I had thought I had eluded.

"Snakefart," she growled, squeezing hard and shaking me. "Dirty thieving criminal welfare cheat."

I tried to beg her to stop, but the only sound I could manage was a squeak. My head felt as though it were about to pop open like, well, like a head being popped open.