On the first page of Volume II, she wrote:Mama says we're moving because Daddy can get a better job at the Goodyear plant in Topeka, but when I asked Daddy if that was true he just gave me a dirty look and went to get another Falstaff. I shouldn't have asked, because I know the real reason. They want to get out of town before people know about C.'s baby. When we get to Topeka, they will no doubt tell folks that I was married but that my husband died a tragic death, which is true in a way, so I suppose I won't deny it.

I feel bad that they are leaving Mikey in Des Moines to live with Grandma. He is a brat, but he is also my brother and I don't like knowing that he is being left because of me, although he says he wants to stay anyway. But since when does an eleven-year-old boy know what he wants? I don't know whether he knows about the baby yet, but if he did come to Topeka he would find out soon, and I guess Mama and Daddy don't want to put him through the humiliation. I feel angry with them, but really, they are acting about as well as could be expected. At least they haven't thrown me into the street, although I can't say that I would be surprised if they did. What better place for a wh.o.r.e than on the street? Not that I would know.

Mother never saw Uncle Mike again. He finally started answering her letters in 1967, after he was drafted, and the two of them became closer than they had ever been when they'd lived in the same house.

They probably would have seen a lot of each other when he got back from Vietnam, except that he didn't. Someone turned a Claymore mine the wrong way, and Uncle Mike, who was huddling right where he was supposed to be safe, was killed anyway.

Long afterward, I learned that some Claymore mines were stenciled on one side with the words DO NOT EAT; apparently, they looked a lot like field rations. When I related this fact to Mother, she sighed and said, "That probably wouldn't have made any difference to Mikey."

After moving to Topeka, my grandfather took a job at the Goodyear plant as planned, and the fractured family settled into a small house in the Highland Park section of town to await my arrival. Mother didn't write much in Volume II during that summer or fall, so I have only a vague idea of what those months must have been like for her. From what little she did write, I know that the tension between her and my grandparents increased in direct proportion to the size of her belly. Her sole entry for the month of August reads:It is so hot that the insides of my thighs are covered with p.r.i.c.kly heat and I wish I could die. Mama is a sweating, complaining b.i.t.c.h. Daddy drinks too much beer and smells like burning tires. I am fat and my hair is stringy. C. took the easy way out. I am going to listen to "Heartbeat" on the record player again even though Mama says it is driving her loopy. The flip side is "Well All Right" and she likes it no better, so I'll play it too. With Mother in this state of mind, it should have come as no surprise to her that I refused to emerge on time. I was safe and comfortable where I was, and I had no desire to splurt out into a world where p.r.i.c.kly heat existed and "It's So Easy" hadn't even madeBillboard's Top 100. I was due in early November, but Thanksgiving came and went with me still barricaded in the uterus, ignoring the fact that I was getting bigger all the time and causing Mother considerable discomfort. Seventeen years later, she told me that I had been extremely selfish in my refusal to be born, and I apologized. (I was humoring her.

She was wrapped up in her UFO/Atlantis "research," and I had serious doubts about her stability.) Finally, on the eighteenth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Mother decided that it was time to teach me some discipline. That evening, she wrote:This is it, you little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I'm going to fake contractions and scream b.l.o.o.d.y murder until Mama and Daddy take me to the G.o.d d.a.m.ned hospital. I'll figure out what to do next when we get there, but count on it, your ride is over. Ten months is about three months too many if you ask me. I want to remember C., all right, but not to the point where I f.u.c.king explode. There, I used the f word, and if you read this, Mama, f you too.

Mother did not record the details of the following twenty-four hours, mainly because she spent much of the time anesthetized. All I'm certain of is that everybody eventually gave up on the idea that I would ever comply in a normal fashion, and the doctors performed a cesarean section.

I was dragged out of the wound into the open air on the evening of Tuesday, December 8, 1959. I wasn't happy about it. The only silver lining was that now I might get to hear something besides "Heartbeat." My birth certificate lists my official name as Oliver C. Vale. According to Volume II, Mother had already chosen my first name and initial (no full middle name), and my grandmother lied to the hospital about my last name, which has nothing to do with Jerry Vale. It's Vale as in "of Tears."

Needless to say, I grew up less than crazy about my grandmother.

Buddy was singing "Everyday" out in the living room while I was in the bedroom pulling on a sweatshirt and swapping my sweatpants for jeans. The song didn't sound quite right without the celeste, but a celeste was probably hard to come by on Ganymede. Buddy tried to make up for it by plinking his guitar strings, and it almost worked.

I decided not to change from my worn Nikes into cycle boots because I didn't want to waste time with laces. Sharon Sharpston, convinced as she was that I was the mental equivalent of mashed graham crackers, would worry if I took too long getting over to her place. There was no way, though, that I was going anywhere on a cold night without first zipping myself into the Moonsuit. It was hanging on its peg beside the dresser, looking like the husk of an alien criminal.

The blue waffle-st.i.tched coverall filled with goose down had been Mother's Christmas gift to me in 1983, just a month and nine days before her death. She had sewn "Oliver" in red thread over the left breast pocket. The "Oli" was gone now, but the "ver" was intact.

I made sure that my wallet and keys were still in the left breast pocket and that the garage door's remote control was still in the right, and then I took the Moonsuit down from its peg and stepped inside. After zipping up, I felt warm and invincible. If the G-men from the FCC came for me, I would simply envelop each one in an enormous hug and waffle him to death.

Walking like a bear on its hind legs, I went back through the living room and waved to Buddy, who was still singing "Everyday." "Bye, Dad," I said. "See you over at Sharon's, okay?" Buddy nodded. Given that he was there in the first place, I wasn't surprised.

I bear-walked to the utility room and opened the door to the garage. I switched on the light as I entered-and there, in all of her unsurpa.s.sed and cantankerous beauty, waited Peggy Sue.

I don't know how many adult males have either openly or secretly given their motorcycles feminine names, but I would bet my SkyVue that they number in the millions. Peggy Sue is a black 1957 646 cc Ariel Cyclone, and I love her as much as it is possible for a man to love a machine, which is an embarra.s.sing amount. Unlike most of my other possessions, she was not made in j.a.pan, but in Birmingham, England.

I acquired her in July 1982, three weeks after my faithful flop-eared mongrel dog, Ready Teddy, was run down and sc.r.a.ped up by a road grader. The bike was sitting in some old guy's yard with a cardboard "4-Sale" sign taped to her handlebars, and except for the fact that the oval Ariel emblems were missing from her fuel tank, she appeared to be in great shape. I bought her for eight hundred dollars within two minutes of seeing her. Mother was furious with me for wasting money on my own death, as she put it, but I knew that I had done the right thing. If Peggy Sue happened to be run over, she could be put back together, unlike poor Ready Teddy, who had gone to the Spirit Land almost instantaneously. If I happened to be on Peggy Sue when she was run over... well, at least one of us would have an afterlife.

Less than a month after buying the motorcycle, I was looking through Mother's rock 'n' roll books and rediscovered that Buddy Holly had owned two motorcycles in his short lifetime. The first was a Triumph that he'd acquired shortly after seeing Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin beat the c.r.a.p out of each other in The Wild One. The second was a bike he'd purchased in Dallas in 1957 or '58 and had ridden home to Lubbock. It was a 646 cc Ariel Cyclone.

This was yet another piece of evidence demonstrating that my life was inexorably linked with Buddy's.

Mother seemed less disapproving of Peggy Sue once I showed her the relevant paragraphs. Even she- especiallyshe-could not argue against Fate.

As I stood looking at Peggy Sue on the night of Buddy's video resurrection, the thought came to me, not for the first time, that she was not simply a bike like the one Buddy had owned, but that she wasthe bike Buddy had owned. It's possible. The current t.i.tle of ownership isn't the original, but was printed by the State of Kansas in 1980. According to this t.i.tle, "Boog's Hog Works of El Dorado" purchased Peggy Sue from an unnamed salvage source and overhauled her, ret.i.tling her soon thereafter and selling her to the old guy from whom I bought her. Before El Dorado, she might have come from anywhere.

Like my father C.'s true ident.i.ty, Peggy Sue's history would probably be easy enough to investigate... but a belief in the purposeful complexity of Fate is always more comforting than random, straightforward facts. This may be why Mother preferred to believe in Atlantis and UFOs rather than in virtually everything else.

I closed the door to the utility room, then took cowhide gloves from the Moonsuit's back pockets and wriggled my hands into them. "Ready to roll," I said with forced cheerfulness as I approached Peggy Sue.

"How about you?"

Peggy Sue's answer was negative. After unbuckling the white full-face helmet from the handlebars and pulling it on, I straddled the leather seat, opened the fuel valve, yanked the choke, and jumped up and down on the kick start, but all I could coax from her were wheezes. Peggy Sue, for all her beauty and significance, can be a real b.i.t.c.h in cold weather. In fact, she can be a real b.i.t.c.h in warm weather too.Anything made in 1957 is occasionally unreliable-witness Julie "Eat s.h.i.t and die, Oliver" Calloway-but Peggy Sue often seems determined to elevate unreliability to high art.

On this particular night, the night when I had to get to Sharon's before the FCC fuzz came after me, Peggy Sue was being especially petulant. The fuel tank was full and every crucial part was in place, but she didn't care. Kick.Cough. Kick.Sputter. Kick.Urgh. Kick.Blatt. After ten minutes of this, I was almost ready to go back into the living room to ask Buddy whetherhe had any ideas about what an Ariel Cyclone wanted.

I kicked Peggy Sue's starter several more times and then stopped, startled by the noise of someone pounding on my garage door. The sound was remarkably like that produced by whanging on the SkyVue's block converter.

The cold, gnarled hand of terror closed on my heart. The Authorities had come for me. I didn't know whether they were county, state, or Federal, but they were here. Sharon and her eyebrow-mutant attorney couldn't help me now.

"I didn't do it!" I cried. "I swear, I'm not a computer-video genius! I'm as surprised as you are! Honest!"

Because I was wearing my helmet, my voice sounded as though I were shouting from inside a Quaker oatmeal box.

On the other side of the garage door, something began growling, and an angry female voice shouted, "What business do you have messing up our TV?"

"Yeah, what business?" a male voice cried, harmonizing with the other.

The hand around my heart squeezed harder. The people outside were not the Authorities, but my neighbors who owned the cow-sized Doberman. The growling meant that they had brought the beast with them.

"Oliver Vale has been taken to prison," I yelled, "so go away and let us do our jobs! We're dusting for fingerprints and scanning for bugging devices!"

The growl became louder, and the garage door shook as my neighbors tried to open it. I wished that I could remember their names, or even what they looked like.

"Don't give us that!" the woman's voice snarled. "We heard you trying to start your motorcycle! You're in there, all right!"

"Yeah, you're in there!" the male voice emphasized.

"May I ask who's calling?" I shouted.

"You know d.a.m.n well who's calling! It's Cathy and Jeremy from next door, and we brought Ringo with us, so you'd better not do anything threatening or he'll rip open your crotch!"

"Uh... he'll get you," the male voice said. Jeremy was less enthusiastic about crotch-ripping than was Cathy.

I dismounted Peggy Sue and approached the garage door. "Listen, guys," I said, loud enough so that they could hear me over Ringo's growling. "I know that Buddy gave out my address, but I had nothing todo with what happened to your TV. It happened to mine too, and I don't like it any better than you do.

As a fellow satellite-dish owner-down with scrambling!-I sympathize completely."

"Oh, sure!" Cathy said. "That really makes me feel a lot better about missing the World Curling Championships!"

"I thought we were going to watch the dirty movie channel from Portugal," Jeremy said.

"Shut up!" Cathy shrieked.

I saw my chance. "A fine pair you are!" I said. "I've a good mind to report you to Bill w.i.l.l.y!" Oklahoma City's infamous Reverend William Willard was, among many other things, the leader of Oklahomans and Kansans Righteously Against p.o.r.nography (OKRAP), and he and his elite "Corps of Little David" were notorious for hara.s.sing s.m.u.t consumers both at home and at their places of employment. Once, in '82, he had arranged a sit-in at a funeral home because two of its employees had been accused of removing clothing from total strangers. Mother, for reasons I never understood, sent Bill w.i.l.l.y a five-dollar check after this incident.

There was silence for a moment (Ringo even stopped growling) and then Cathy said, in a much calmer voice, "There's no need to call anyone, Mr. Vale, We just naturally a.s.sumed that you were responsible for the problem with the TV, since your name was announced and you're known to be handy with electronics. We're sorry to have bothered you. Come on, Jeremy. Ringo, heel.Heel, d.a.m.n it!"

I heard their shoes and paws crunch away down the gravel driveway. My bluff had worked. n.o.body wanted to risk tangling with Bill w.i.l.l.y.

I returned to Peggy Sue, tinkered with her throttle and choke, then mounted and tried to kick her to life again. This time, she sputtered for thirty or forty seconds before I realized that she was running, sort of.

While she warmed up, I checked the chain slack and lubrication and decided that the machine would probably haul me the twelve miles to Sharon Sharpston's apartment without too much trouble.

I switched on the headlight and toe-tapped Peggy Sue into first gear, then wheeled her around and let her idle up to the garage door. She almost died when I took my right hand off the throttle grip, and I patted her fuel tank as she recovered.

Then I pushed my thumb against the Moonsuit's right breast pocket to activate the garage door's remote control, and the white aluminum wall began to rise as if it were the hull of an anti-gravity s.p.a.ceship. That thought triggered another, and I wondered just how Buddy Holly could have gotten to Ganymede in the first place.

I would've thought about that further, but as the door opened, spilling yellow light into the driveway, I discovered that Cathy, Jeremy, and Ringo had returned under cover of Peggy Sue's engine noise.

Although Cathy and Jeremy were bundled in coats and stocking caps, I could see that they were an attractive WASPish couple in their forties. Cathy was taller than Jeremy, but other than that I didn't notice their specific physical characteristics. I was too busy noticing Ringo's.

The Doberman was as tall as Peggy Sue's handlebars, and he was wearing a collar of galvanized chain suitable for anchoring an aircraft carrier. His ears stood straight up, his eyes glittered, and his upper lip pulled back from teeth that looked strong and white from biting through countless femurs. "All right, Vale!" Cathy cried. "You're going to fix our TV or our dish or whatever you screwed up, and you're going to do itnow! You don't scare us, and neither does Bill w.i.l.l.y!"

"That's right!" added Jeremy.

I licked my lips. I truly would have liked to go over to Cathy and Jeremy's to do what they demanded.

Under normal circ.u.mstances, I would have a.s.sumed that if crescent-wrench-whanging worked for my SkyVue, it would also work for their more widely known model. But these were not normal circ.u.mstances. There was nothing I could do for them, and I was running out of time to do something for myself. I had to get to Sharon's before someone with a badge came to take me away to less comfortable accommodations.

"Out of my way!" I shouted. "I've got to get to a psychologist in Topeka!"

I popped Peggy Sue's clutch and twisted the throttle, and-uncharacteristically-she roared and leaped forward, spinning her rear tire on the cement floor with a sound like a banshee's wail. Cathy, Jeremy, and Ringo scrambled aside, and the Ariel and I blasted into the darkness toward the Spirit Land.

As we hit the gravel, I kicked up to second gear, then kept my right hand on the throttle while I crossed my chest with my left to tap the garage door control. Glancing back, I saw that the door came down before Cathy or Jeremy could get inside, which pleased me until I noticed that Ringo wasn't with them.

For the briefest of moments I worried that the dog might have run into the garage and been trapped there-but then, in the pink wash of Peggy Sue's taillight, I glimpsed the black ma.s.s that was rushing down the driveway after me.

I faced forward and gunned Peggy Sue onto the pavement of Southwest 163rd Street without checking for traffic, but we weren't fast enough. As I leaned to the left to make the turn toward Topeka, Ringo's jaws clamped on the left exhaust pipe.

Peggy Sue and I began to go over. The front fork twisted to the left, and I saw specks of green gla.s.s glittering in the asphalt. I cried out, my voice like that of a steer being slaughtered. My left hand came off the grip and reached for the pavement, but my right hand spasmed on the throttle, rapping out the engine.

My eyes locked with Ringo's, and I saw that they were nothing like the eyes of any other dog I had ever seen. They were black, faceted stones with blue sparks at their center.

The Doberman's teeth were sinking into the exhaust pipe as if it were pizza dough.

My fingertips brushed the pavement.

And then everything-Ringo, the exhaust pipe, the gla.s.s-speckled asphalt, my Moonsuited arm-began to strobe with a scarlet glare.

Ringo jerked, lifting Peggy Sue's rear wheel into the air and twisting me and the bike upright again. My head snapped away from the dog and the pavement, and I saw a car with flashing red lights top the hill a quarter mile away. It was straddling the center line.

My left hand grabbed the clutch lever, and my right hand reversed the torque on the throttle. Peggy Sue's roar subsided, and I heard the sirens. The first car was followed by a second, and a third, and a fourth. The road to Topeka, and to Sharon's, was blocked.

Ringo, growling, lowered the rear wheel to the pavement again. As it touched, I gunned the engine,popped the clutch, and jerked the bike into a right-hand U-turn. As much as the Doberman frightened me, the four cop cars frightened me more. I didn't know whether they contained state troopers, sheriff's deputies, highway patrolmen, or FCC enforcement officers, and I didn't care. They were bearing down fast, and they would either run me over or take me in.

I find it difficult to deal with Authorities.

Peggy Sue was sluggish for a moment, as if her rear brake were on, but then she burst free and we shot away like a missile. A half minute later, clipping along at eighty miles per hour, I risked looking in the left mirror. The flashing lights were after me, but they were much farther back than I had feared they would be. They must have stopped at my driveway before figuring out who the guy on the motorcycle was.

Ringo was nowhere in sight.

I put three hills between us and the cop cars, slowed to forty, and cut off the bike's lights. Then we whipped west onto the next gravel road and almost went into the ditch because I could hardly see. The night was becoming cloudy, and if the moon was out, it was hidden.

"Make like the moon," I told myself, and turned this way and that on gravel and dirt roads until I was sure that the Authorities and their sirens couldn't find me.

I stopped under the bare branches of a walnut tree beside an ice-encrusted low-water bridge, letting Peggy Sue idle while I tried to think. My feet were freezing, and I wished that I hadn't decided against wearing boots for the trip to Sharon's.

That trip was out of the question now. I had stupidly told Cathy and Jeremy that I was hurrying to a psychologist, and even if the Authorities didn't question my neighbors, they would surely decide to investigate Sharon as soon as they found her number taped to my phone.

I couldn't go back home either. The cops would spend hours searching my house for evidence that I had mucked up the entire world's television broadcasts, and even when they found nothing, they would put the place under surveillance in the hope of nabbing me when I showed up. I had watched enough cop operas on the tube to know that much about police procedure.

"Whattaya think, Peggy Sue?" I asked.

Peggy Sue coughed. She didn't like to sit still, idling in the cold. I was afraid to shut her down, though, because she might not start again. Then I'd be stuck without wheels in rural Shawnee County with no place to go and nothing to look forward to except having my feet amputated.

I had no family. Mother was gone, and so were her parents and Uncle Mike. Besides, the only one I had really known besides Mother was Grandmother, and we hadn't liked each other. There were great-aunts and great-uncles in the Des Moines area, but I didn't even know their names.

Sharon wasn't the only friend to whom I could conceivably go for help. There were others-coworkers at Cowboy Carl's, mostly-but I was sure that the cops would start watching them almost as soon as they started watching my house and Sharon's apartment. Ditto for Julie "Eat s.h.i.t and die, Oliver"

Calloway. There was no sanctuary in the area for me.

Turning myself in to the FCC wasn't an option either. Aside from the fact that I didn't believe I would betreated with const.i.tutional fairness, I wasn't entirely sure that I wasn't guilty and that sooner or later some evidence to that effect might turn up.

So I only had two possible destinations. On some level, I must have known that from the first moment that Buddy appeared on my Sony.

I could go to Clear Lake, Iowa, where he had played his last concert. But my feet were too cold already, and Clear Lake was four hundred miles northeast of where I sat by the low-water bridge. Even with the Moonsuit, I would be a fugitive popsicle before making it as far north as Ames. Besides, what could I do at Clear Lake? Start looking for UFOs to come down and save me, the way Mother did? I had already made my pilgrimage there, and there wasn't much to see. The Surf Ballroom was a run-down brick building, and the field where the Bonanza had hit was only a field.

The other possibility was that I could try to reach Lubbock, Texas, where Buddy had been born and raised. The city lay a few hundred miles farther to the southwest than Clear Lake lay to the northeast, but at least the weather would get a little warmer as I went. And once I arrived, if I arrived...

Long after Buddy's death, a statue of him had been erected across the street from Lubbock City Hall. It was placed in the center of a large flower bed, a rarity in that part of the country. I could go in among those flowers and stand with him awhile.

And when I had done that, there was something else I could do.

Buddy Holly's body had been flown to Lubbock for burial on Thursday, February 5, 1959. I knew from a photograph in one of Mother's books that the ground-flush headstone that came later had been inscribed with these words: IN LOVING MEMORY.

OF OUR OWN.

BUDDY HOLLEY.

SEPTEMBER 7, 1936.

FEBRUARY 3, 1959.

To the right of those words was a carving of an abandoned electric guitar. It was leaning against a column that looked as if it had belonged in a temple of Apollo.

Until now, I had seen no point in undertaking the long journey for so little reward. Dead was dead, and Charles Hardin Holley would not come back to life for me simply because I spent a day or two on the road for him. I had seen photographs of the grave and the statue, and I hadn't been able to think of anything the objects themselves could do for me that the photographs couldn't. Buddy's true legacy, after all, lay in his music, and I could hear that anytime I liked. Compact disc technology would preserve it with crystal clarity until we wiped ourselves out as a species, and even then those digital codes might survive and give pleasure to whatever took our place. Besides, who the h.e.l.l wanted to go to Lubbock, Texas? Might as well head into Topeka for a hot night at Taco Bell.