"I hope so. When the Fed tried to shoot him, I was afraid that we'd waited too long, but-"

"But Ringo responded to your commands, as I predicted."

Jeremy frowned. "Maybe...."

"Whattaya mean 'maybe'? He stopped the attack, didn't he? He gave Vale the chance to escape and hide, didn't he?"

Jeremy began scratching his ear again. "Yes. But it felt as if he might be acting on his own."

"He's not smart enough to do that," Cathy said. "The hardware didn't include any free-will circuits, and the rest of him is plain old dog."

"Maybe 'plain old dog' has more to it than we thought. I didn't tell him to put a bullet into the Fed's leg."

"That was just a reflex, and no real harm done. Vale escaped, and the G-man survived. All's well that ends well."

"It hasn't ended yet. The agent won't quit."

"But he won't get to Vale again before we do."

"a.s.suming our car holds up." Cathy pounded on the dashboard. "d.a.m.n it, why'd you have to say that? The heater's stopped again!

What an existence-putrid stenches, bodies that ache and collapse, machines that don't work. How do the fleshbound stand it?"

Jeremy shrugged. "By taking one day at a time, I suppose, so the agony doesn't acc.u.mulate. That's no more than a guess, mind you."

Cathy gritted her teeth. "Just a little longer," she said. "Just a little longer, and then we can go back to taking life the civilized way-onemillennium at a time."

Jeremy squirmed and began biting his shoulder. "Right now," he said around a mouthful of his shirt, "I'd settle for taking life with no fleas."

8.

OLIVER.

In 1974, when I was fourteen and Mother was working on Volume V, we moved to the house south of the city where I still live. The move came as a surprise to me, for I had always a.s.sumed that Mother's salary barely covered necessities and record alb.u.ms. Somehow, though, she had saved enough in nine years at the radio station to cover a down payment. (Of course, a down payment in 1974 was somewhat less than the fortune required now.) We moved in the spring, right after the end of the school year. I had finished junior high, and it was a good time for change.

The Apollo program was over, and while the Skylab missions had been fascinating, they hadn't been as exciting as the lunar adventures, and my interest in s.p.a.ce exploration had waned. That waning, however, wasn't entirely due to the change in NASA's priorities, because my own priorities had shifted. By the end of my ninth-grade school year, if a genie had given me the choice of becoming either the first man on Mars or the first man to fornicate with Valerie Frackner from my English cla.s.s, I would have agonized for about six seconds and then tackled Valerie.

It was a good summer. I was old enough that Mother trusted me to take care of myself while she was at work, and I was young enough that I didn't have to find a job of my own yet. I spent my mornings either reading in my new room or shooting a basketball at the hoop over the garage door, and on every sunny afternoon I changed into swim trunks and rode my bicycle nine miles to the community pool on the city's south side. There I could lounge with three or four other males my own age, drinking soda pop and swimming, but mainly ogling the seventeen-year-old female lifeguards.

I had been wearing black-framed gla.s.ses for over a year, but those afternoons at the pool made me yearn for contact lenses. For one thing, I was the only boy my age who knew, or cared, who Buddy Holly had been, and the fact that my gla.s.ses made me look like him was an irrelevancy in my social circle. For another thing, the guys told me that the gla.s.ses were dorky, and that the girls thought so too.

Mother told me that what with house payments and everything, contact lenses were just too expensive, especially since our optometrist said that my eyes were still changing. She was afraid of spending a few hundred dollars just to have to do it all over again. "Besides," she said, "your gla.s.ses make you look like Buddy." Mother and Buddy had been on a first-name basis ever since he had died. I was beginning to resent the dominating influence of Charles Hardin Holley in my life in much the same way that other adolescent males resented the dominating influence of their fathers in theirs, and sometimes at night I would lie awake and curse him. I wanted to live in 1974, not 1958; I wanted to be Oliver Vale, not an avatar of a man who had been dead for fifteen years.

And yet, just as the adolescent male who resents his father will fight when his father is slandered, so I fought when Buddy was slandered. One afternoon at the pool, someone had a transistor radio tuned to KKAP's Oldies Hour, and one of the oldies was the original version of "Rave On." A guy I didn't know asked what sort of c.r.a.p that was supposed to be, and the radio owner answered that it didn't matter because the singer was dead.

"Good riddance," answered the other guy.

I shoved him into the water. Neither of the lifeguards saw me do it, but theydid see him come up out of there and punch me in the face, busting my gla.s.ses at the bridge. He was thrown out and forbidden to return for the rest of the summer, and a bikinied lifeguard named Sh.e.l.ley came to me while I was holding my nose, put her hand on my arm, and asked if I was hurt.

I was struggling to keep the pain from bringing tears to my eyes. "Nah, he didn't hit me hard," I said, leaning close so that Sh.e.l.ly's left breast touched my shoulder. What I wanted to do then was drop my hand from my nose and gaze into her eyes, but what I had to do instead was turn away and head for the shower room. The tears had come anyway. Pain had defeated s.e.x.

By the time I had recovered enough to emerge from the shower room, the guy with the radio had ratted on me, and I was thrown out too-but just for the afternoon, since no one in charge had any hard evidence against me. Riding my bike home while trying to hold my busted gla.s.ses on my injured face was tough, but I felt triumphant. I had kicked b.u.t.t, had mostly gotten away with it, and had brushed against a seventeen-year-old girl's b.o.o.b.

It was a good summer.

Nixon resigned on August 9, and I didn't care. I was fourteen and had better things on my mind.

Mother's att.i.tude wasn't much different. She wrote,Nixon has resigned. Big deal. He was only a figment of my imagination anyway. Not surprisingly, she had shown more interest in the death of Mama Ca.s.s Elliot eleven days before. She had written,Despite the sadness that I feel, I must admit that after all of the overdose deaths of the past five years, it is refreshing to see a pop star phase herself into another plane of existence via a ham sandwich.

Then the summer was gone, and I started high school with a new pair of black frames and my first truly hideous pimples. With the move to the house, my school district had changed, and instead of going to Topeka High, I wound up at a rural unified-district school. My cla.s.smates were strong, rawboned farmers' kids, and I didn't fit in too well. Not that I would have fit in any better elsewhere. The summer of 1974 was the only oasis in the desert of my early adolescence, and it would have been so no matter where I had gone to school.

My grades were okay-no A's, but not many C's either-and my social relationships were about the same. I made a few friends, but none were close. I made the junior varsity basketball team and playedfor a total of fifteen minutes in five games. None of the girls I wanted were disgusted by me, but none were attracted either.

If I was the reincarnation of a rock 'n' roll star, I thought, I was not living up to it. It was only later, after Mother bought the first biographies of Buddy to hit the stands, that I discovered he hadn't been a superstar in high school either.

Like every other male I knew, I spent my days in agony. My hard-on would start on the school bus in the morning and take only five-minute breaks between then and my arrival home in the late afternoon. My blue jeans were a torture chamber. Basketball practice helped, but only when we didn't have to share the gym with the girls' team.

These were not the sort of things that I discussed with Mother. Yet for my fifteenth birthday, she gave me two presents: a mongrel puppy and a box of condoms.

I was delighted at the first and horrified at the second. Rubbers, for the love of Christ. Peac.o.c.ks, made down the road in Kansas City. From my mother. For my birthday. As if I had a use for them. Didn't I wish.

I named the scruffy black-haired pup Ready Teddy, after the Little Richard song that Buddy had covered a la rockabilly, and I took both him and the condoms into the backyard. While Ready Teddy growled puppy growls and chewed on my shoelaces, I removed the twelve prophylactics from their packets and stuffed them inside each other until I had a rubber ball. Then I taught Ready Teddy to chase it, and chew on it, and play keep-away with it in the cool December air.

When Mother came outside to tell me that it was time for supper, she saw what I had done, and for the one and only time in her life she became furious with me.

"Do you think it's a joke?" she shouted. "Is that it, Oliver? Do you think it's a G.o.dd.a.m.njoke?"

In those days we had no neighbors closer than a quarter mile away, for which I was grateful. "I don't know," I said sullenly. Ready Teddy was at my feet chewing on the condom-ball.

"You don't know," Mother said. "Youdon't know. f.u.c.king-Aright you don't know!"

I yelled back at her. "Don't talk like that! Other people's mothers don't talk like that!"

Her hands became fists. "I'm not other people's mother, s.h.i.thead! And I didn't give you those to be funny. I gave them to you because you're fifteen. I gave them to you because in the next few years things are going tohappen. I gave them to you because I want you to takeresponsibility for those things. Do you understand?"

I glared. "No." It was a lie, but I was p.i.s.sed.

Some of the fury went out of Mother's eyes, and when she spoke again she didn't shout. But the words cut deeper than the yelling had. "That's the only box I'll ever buy for you, Oliver," she said. "You have to buy the next one yourself. Whether you think it's worth it, or whether you take the trouble, is up to you.

But know this: If you get a girl pregnant, you no longer have a home. Got it?"

I squatted to pet my puppy, not wanting to look at Mother anymore. "I asked you a question," she said.

"Don't worry," I said. Ready Teddy nipped at my fingers. "I'm never going to be stupid enough for that."

This last was a slap at her, because shehad been stupid. Even as I said it, though, I was thinking,I'm never going to be lucky enough for that.

A long silence followed as I petted Ready Teddy and pretended that I couldn't feel Mother's eyes on me. Then she said, "Promise."

I couldn't help looking up. "Promise what?"

Now she was the one who looked away. "Promise that you won't get anyone pregnant. If you don't promise, I'll have to leave. On a UFO. A ship of light. The world is hard enough as it is. I couldn't stay knowing that my son had made it worse."

I picked up my dog and stood. "I promise," I said. It seemed the quickest way to get the whole scene over with.

Mother looked at me again and smiled, her eyes glistening. "You're a good boy," she said, turning to go inside. "Come in and eat. Pot roast and baked potatoes."

Of all the meals we ate together, that is the one I can still taste.

Reading Mother's letters to Uncle Mike was a lot like reading Volumes III and IV, except that her isolation comes through even more strongly. She missed her brother, and in seven of the twenty-two letters she even tells him that "sometimes I miss Mama almost as much"-a statement that has no equivalent in the diary. Yet it rings true, especially since Mother and Grandmother did begin to spend time together after Uncle Mike's death (a trend that was destroyed, of course, when Grandmother brought me home to find Mother and Keith making love on the carpet).

I sat at Pete's desk going through the letters for two hours and was beginning to think that perhaps I would emerge from the experience unchanged. Parts of the letters were tough going, but I hadn't come across anything startling.

Then I came to the last letter in the stack, dated August 29, 1968. It could not have arrived in Vietnam until after Uncle Mike's death.

It begins with the usual letter-from-home news, but concludes with this: I am going to tell you something now, Mikey, that I have not told anyone else. I have not even put it into my diary because I don't want to read it again after writing it down, but I have to let it out this once because it has been preying on my mind. When you come home, pretend I never told you.

I had a dream during the Democratic National Convention that did not seem to be a dream at all.

I dreamed that I was walking along a sidewalk in Chicago when I became trapped between a mob of anti-war protesters and another mob of riot police. Both sides converged on me, and a policeman, thinking that I was one of the protesters, clubbed me. I fell, and they all began trampling me. I tried to crawl away, and then there were bodies falling on me, smothering me.

There was blood on my mouth and nose. My eyes were closed. I was being killed. The whole worldwas watching.

Then, just as I could feel the last of my life about to be crushed, all of the weight disappeared, and I floated up, up, up. I opened my eyes and saw that I was suspended in the center of a sphere of light high above the street. I could see through the sphere, and I looked at the riot below me.

The shouts and screams had become one loud rumble.

I though that I was dead, that I had left my body. But then I felt a vibration in the sphere that surrounded me, and a voice burrowed into my head, saying, "You must remain until twenty-five years have pa.s.sed."

The sphere carried me higher and flew me home, depositing me in my bed here in Topeka. When I awoke the next morning, there was blood on my pillow from a cut on my lower lip, and I had a bruise on my forehead. I covered the bruise with makeup and went to work.

I have thought about it a lot, and I am sure that I know what the sphere of light meant: I am to die on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly.

It is not an easy thing to know when you will die, even if it will not happen until 1984. That is why I had to tell you, Mikey-you, who must think of death every day and find a way to live with it. I am sorry to give you more.

And now that I have written it, I will find a way to live with it myself. Pretending that I don't know will, I think, be the wisest course. Whatever works.

I read those paragraphs over and over again.

"Why didn't you tell me too?" I murmured.

But I knew that Mother never would have told me anything that she wasn't even able to tell her diary.

Besides, I had been eight years old. I couldn't have understood. Now I was twenty-nine, and I still couldn't.

When I heard Pete's truck drive up outside, I gathered the letters and replaced them in the metal box, glad that I had finished before he had returned. Then I stood and opened the blinds over the window to the left of the desk. Pete had stepped out of the truck and was petting an enormous Doberman pinscher with a galvanized chain collar.

I yelled and burst out of the room, colliding with Gretchen, who shoved me into a wall. "Watch where you're going, lardbrain," she said.

Mike and Laura appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Is something wrong, Mr. Vale?" Laura asked.

"Do you own a rifle?" I gasped.

"Dad has a shotgun," Mike said, "but I hid the sh.e.l.ls so he wouldn't hurt himself."

"Find them! My neighbor's dog is here!" The sound of the back door slamming shut echoed through the house. "Hey, kids, look what I've got,"

Pete called. "I gave him a piece of jerky, and he seems to have decided that I'm G.o.d." A moment later he came into the dining room with Ringo trotting by his side.

I tried to become part of the wall. "Are you crazy?" I shrieked. "That's the monster that bit off my tail pipe!"

Pete looked at me and back to the dog. "No kidding?"

Gretchen got down on her knees and began petting the Doberman. "I don't care," she said. "He saved my b.u.t.t from the Bald Avenger, and yours too."

"Only so he could have us for himself," I said. "It was one killer battling another."

"Yeah, some killer," Gretchen said, reaching up to scratch behind Ringo's ears. His eyes were closed, and his bobbed tail was wagging.

"He's beautiful," Laura said, joining Gretchen in petting him.

Mike crossed his arms. "Looks like a four-legged Gestapo officer."

"Oh, shut up," Laura said. "He can't help that."

"Who's the Bald Avenger?" Pete asked.

"Somebody who's after me," I said. "Just like Ringo's been after me."

Mike gave me a look. "Ringo?"

"I told you, he belongs to my neighbors. That's what they call him."

Mike looked back at the Doberman. "I don't see the resemblance. Still, a dog named Ringo isn't likely to be a fascist." He joined Gretchen and Laura in stroking the animal, which quivered with pleasure.

"Don't trust him," I said. I was beginning to feel foolish for standing against the wall while everyone else was falling all over the creature. "I'm telling you, this dog ate a chunk of my motorcycle and has been following me ever since."