I mumbled an apology, and they moved away and sat cross-legged on the floor to read the paper.

"You'll be happy to hear that you're still the top story, Mr. Vale," Mike said dryly. "You've managed to make everyone with a television set forget everything in the world except you and Buddy Holly. You've made them forget the thousands of innocent people being murdered by neo-n.a.z.is and oligarchical theocrats in Chile, South Africa, Israel, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Iran, Ulster, and Sri Lanka. All of the major protest marches and riots this past weekend were the result of worldwide anger over the current h.o.m.ogenous state of video entertainment."

"You know who I am too?" I asked, sitting up.

"Mind like a trap," Laura muttered.

"Of course we know who you are," Mike said. "We found you last night because we were looking for you. What did you think we were doing, riding around in the middle of the night because we enjoyed it?"

"How-" I began.

Laura dropped her section of the paper. "It wasn't tough. In fact, I'm surprised we got to you before anyone else did. Once we decided that you must be heading to Lubbock, Texas-an obvious choice, and I don't know why the authorities have only now started to consider it-"

"They have?" I asked. Mike tapped a front-page headline and held it up close enough for me to read: TEXAS OFFICIALS THINK VID-PIRATE COULD HEAD FOR ROCK STAR'S HOMETOWN.

It wasn't the lead story, but it was there.

Laura was still talking. "-calculated that the odds were seven to three that you would pa.s.s within fifty miles of here sometime between Sat.u.r.day noon and Sunday morning, so I monitored various CB, police, and two-way bandwidths, and when I caught a CB signal that suggested you were near the transmitter, I metered it and calculated your approximate distance on the basis of signal strength."

"Which was silly," Mike said, "because the guy came right out and said where you were."

Laura glared at him. "And you said that he wasn't even talking about Mr. Vale. You said that the motorcycle in a roadside park beside a 'rich b.i.t.c.h's' Jaguar was a coincidence. I, on the other hand,calculated that the odds were three to two that a motorcycle in that location at that time would be Mr.

Vale's. And I was right."

My stomach tightened. "You didn't go to that park, did you?"

"Sure," Mike said. "We got there via the road that Dad figured would be your first-choice route after leaving the place, and when we didn't see you there or at the park, we came back on the highway, which was where we found you."

"Did you see anyone at the park?" I asked. "A bald man with a gun, a huge robot dog with electric eyes?"

Laura and Mike exchanged glances. "We saw the Jaguar," Laura said, "but its back tires were flat and no one was inside. We honked our horn and yelled, and when no one responded, we left. We didn't see a dog."

I slumped and closed my eyes.

"I was surprised at your choice of companions when we finally found you," Mike said. "This Gretchen person strikes me as being a self-centered, materialistic tool of the gluttonous consumerist profiteering machine."

My eyes opened. "How old are you?"

"Thirteen," he said. "How old did you think?"

Laura grinned. "You're boring enough to be sixty."

"And you're politically naive enough to be a Baby Boomer."

Pete's bedroom door opened, and Pete shuffled out. He was wearing baggy coveralls. "d.a.m.n it, I was up late last night," he said, his voice thick with sleep.

"Sorry, Dad," Laura and Mike said in unison.

I stood. "Why'd you do it?" I asked Pete.

He looked at me groggily. "Do what?"

"Search for me. Bring me here. Granted, you knew my uncle, but..."

He shuffled toward the kitchen. "Coffee. Food. Maybe a shower. Then we'll talk." He wrinkled his nose.

"And do your laundry."

I followed him. The mention of food had made me smell the pot roast again, which in turn had made me hungry. The mention of laundry had made me realize that I'd been wearing the same pair of briefs since Thursday, which in turn had made me itch.

"Should we wake Miss Laird at any particular time?" Laura asked.

I shrugged. Gretchen had made it plain that she no longer wanted anything to do with me, so I saw noreason to have anything to do with her.

"Let the fascist sleep," Mike said.

After putting in my contacts and having breakfast (pancakes and sausage), I put on a pair of coveralls that Pete loaned me and threw my other clothes into his Kenmore. Then he and I went out to the garage, and I gave the Ariel a few test kicks while he listened to her wheeze. Then he took a toolbox from a shelf and got to work. "Sounds like fouled plugs," he said, fitting a sparkplug socket to a ratchet and squatting beside the bike.

I grunted and looked away. It's embarra.s.sing when someone else has to do your work for you, no matter what the circ.u.mstances. My eyes lit on the white car.

"Nice vehicle," I said.

Pete began loosening a plug. "Yeah, that's the Oklahoma Kamikaze. A 1968 Barracuda with a 426 Hemi. My special project."

"It isn't finished?"

"Oh, yeah, he's finished," Pete said. "But a Hemi always needs adjustments. He's temperamental, like a stud thoroughbred."

"He?"

"Named after your uncle." The plug came free. "See, look at that spark gap-carbonized all to h.e.l.l."

I looked. It was. "I'd sort of figured that your son was named after my uncle," I said.

"He is. But he's also heavily into politics, which the old Mikey definitely was not."

"Young Mike's into politics? Never would have guessed."

Pete chuckled. "He says he's a founder of a club called the New Radicals, and he claims that the 1990s are going to be the sixties all over again. He's his own man."

He pointed at the Barracuda. "Now,that, on the other hand, is my old friend. We called him Kamikaze Mikey- Jesus, twenty-one years ago: He was going to move down here after we got out, and we were going to go into the welding business together. He said he was going to become theOklahoma Kamikaze."

"Why 'Kamikaze' in the first place?"

"Because he was, man. Full-bore, all eight cylinders hammering, wild-a.s.sed, look-out-motherf.u.c.kers-I'm-heading-down-your-G.o.dd.a.m.n-throats, bug-eyed, s.h.i.t-fire crazy."

"I don't remember his letters being anything like that."

"Well, I guess not," Pete said, loosening the second plug. "I read them all before he sent them, andsometimes I made him do them over again so they'd sound normal. Now, don't get me wrong; he could be as sane as anyone. But he knew when a situation called forin sanity, and it wasn't something he could just turn off like that." Pete snapped the fingers of his free hand.

Something like recognition welled up in me. "I remember you! I mean, I remember him writing about you. You were the guy who thought about food all the time."

Pete nodded. "Uh-huh. We all had our things. Some guys had women or pot or whatever. Mikey had craziness. I had food. Would've gotten fat if I hadn't had the s.h.i.ts so often." He grinned. "Except near the end of my tour, we got some stuff in d.i.n.ky cans that, G.o.d, had to have been Korean War surplus.

Cheese stuff with bacon. We called it choke-a.s.s. First few guys who ate it got so constipated that no one but me wanted any."

He held up the second plug, and it was worse than the first. "Think they'll be okay if we clean them?" I asked.

Pete shook his head. "Better get new ones if you want to make it to Lubbock without breaking down again."

I was disgusted. "Does everybody in the world know where I'm going?"

"Maybe," Pete said, standing and tossing the cruddy spark plugs into a bucket of junk. "Laura knew right away. She'd no sooner seen the broadcast on Friday when she asked me all sorts of questions about Buddy Holly. When I said that I thought he was buried in Lubbock, she said, 'Then that's where Oliver Vale is going.' "

"Smart girl."

He walked to a rack of drawers and began opening and closing them, looking inside each. "Yeah, she's only sixteen, but she'll graduate from high school this spring, a year early. Then she figures on heading off to MIT. She already knows more about computers than most engineers, and on top of that, she's just a solo flight short of her pilot's license. She wants to be an astronaut, if NASA ever gets it act together again, and she figures that flying'll be a good complement to brain power." He looked at me. "Sorry. I tend to go on about my kids."

"Sounds like they're something to go on about. Besides, you're fixing my bike, so I'll listen to anything."

He turned back to the drawers. "Well, Ihope I can fix it. I'm more comfortable with things that run on a decent number of wheels. Tell you what, though-if we can't get the bike up and chugging again, I'll run you to Lubbock in the Kamikaze." He looked into the last drawer. "I don't have the right plugs, so I'll have to go to town. You won't be able to leave until tonight at the earliest. a.s.suming nothing else is wrong."

"Wouldn't count on it," I said. "Peggy Sue's old, and I'm not much good at preventive maintenance."

"Peggy Sue, huh?" Pete scratched his neck as he gazed at the bike. "What happened to the left pipe?"

"Doberman pinscher cyborg. A big one."

"It'd have to be." We walked back to the house, and Pete told Laura and Mike that he was going into Lawton for parts.

While he was gone, they were to treat me and Gretchen as honored guests.

I followed Pete to the mud room, and as he was putting on his coat, I again asked, "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Come on, Pete. The same 'why what' as an hour ago. Why treat me like an 'honored guest'? Why search for me in the first place?" I hesitated. "Look, if you knew my uncle, you also know that he and I never met, so it doesn't make sense for you to do this for his sake. We were related by blood, but nothing else."

Pete stared at the floor. "You were related by things stronger than blood," he said, "but I'm not sure I can put a name to any of them. Not and have them make sense." He opened the door, and the rush of cold air made my eyes water. "There's a metal box on the desk in my room. It has all the letters your mother wrote to Mikey. He told me to keep them if something happened to him, because he knew I liked reading them as much as he did."

"You've kept them twenty-one years?"

"Couldn't throw them away. Emily, my wife, was going to once, because she thought they were from an old girlfriend. But I explained it to her, and she let me keep them. Still, she always knew that she was right, in a way."

"You fell in love with my mother?" I was starting to shiver, and I hugged myself.

Pete was silent for a moment. "Not love," he said then. "Fascination. I fell into fascination with her, with all of that wild stuff about Atlantis and s.p.a.ce beings who flew around in bubbles of light. Stuff about how you were the spiritual reincarnation of Buddy Holly. I got to feeling like I was as much your uncle as Mikey was." He shook his head. "Never had the guts to get in touch with either of you after I made it home, though. I was afraid that the reality wouldn't live up to the fascination. Boy, was I wrong." He started to close the door. "Go read the letters. Me, I've got to buy some off-size spark plugs."

The door closed, but I opened it again. Pete was walking toward the flatbed truck.

"Mother died five years ago," I blurted.

He stopped, saying nothing.

"I didn't know whether you knew," I said.

Pete looked back. "I knew," he said. Then he went to the truck and drove away.

I wandered back through the kitchen and dining area. My eyes avoided the door to Pete's room.

"Is everything all right, Mr. Vale?" Laura asked as I came into the living room and sat on the couch. She was lying on the floor reading a book filled with diagrams and equations.

"Fine," I said. "Except for the worldwide chaos that's being blamed on me, I mean." "Glad to hear it."

Mike came into the room from the bas.e.m.e.nt. "It's ten o'clock," he said. "Does Ms. Laird always perform auto-erotic acts at about this time?"

"I wouldn't know," I said. "How do you?"

"I was wondering how she could sleep so long, so I went downstairs and used a stethoscope to listen to the spare room's floor. A lot of thumping and b.u.mping."

"She's probably exercising. She seems to place great value on having a strong body."

"I'm not surprised," Mike said. "Right-wingers have little else of value in their lives."

Laura looked up from her book with a sour expression. "Give it a rest. You don't know anything about her."

"I know enough."

"Dad said we were to be polite."

"And I will be, when she shows her face. If you weren't so concerned with numbers and gadgets, you might have some small awareness that people like her are responsible for most of the world's pain and suffering, not to mention the decline of art and culture."

As Laura retorted, I stood and crossed into the dining area. Then, before Mike retorted to Laura's retort, I opened the door to Pete's room and stepped inside.

The light was on. The room contained only a bed, a bureau, and a desk with a wooden chair. On the desk was a PC and a metal doc.u.ment box.

I closed the door and stood still, unwilling to go to the desk. When I had first read the pa.s.sage in Volume I that described my conception, my life had changed, and not for the better. Then, after Mother's death, I had read the entire diary, and that had changed things further. Again, the change had not been for the better... a.s.suming that "better" means increased happiness and peace of mind. Reading Mother's words had never given me either of those.

Now here I was again, with more of her words before me, knowing that the things she might have said to a brother she missed terribly, a brother trapped in a world of s.h.i.t, might reveal things about her, and about me, that even her diary had failed to reveal. If I read these words, I would again be changing all the changes of my life.

I stepped forward and opened the box. I always had.