Part 4 (1/2)

Seven hours after Buddy appeared on my Sony, Peggy Sue and I found ourselves 115 miles southwest of there, riding through a treeless prairie on U.S. 54, aiming for the city of El Dorado. (p.r.o.nounced El Doraydo, not El Dorahdo. This was still Kansas.) We had traveled farther than 115 miles, though, because whenever possible we had taken country roads and state highways to avoid the troopers cruising the U.S. highways and the Kansas Turnpike. The snow had stopped at dawn and hadn't acc.u.mulated, so the roads hadn't been bad, but the cold had been harder on me than I'd expected. My body was chilled almost to the point of numbness, and my feet were already there. The dull gray sky wasn't helping me think warm thoughts.

In addition, Peggy Sue was thoroughly grumpy. She'd started sputtering and stumbling a few miles south of Emporia, and switching the fuel valve to the reserve tank hadn't helped. I begged her to hold out just long enough for us to find a hiding place for the day. I didn't want to keep traveling while the sun was up because we might be spotted by a Kansas Highway Patrol airplane, and if we had to stop on the prairie, we were as good as caught.

The Ariel's engine died a half mile short of the El Dorado city limits sign, but we were able to coast into a self-service gas station. The hands of a cracked Pepsi-Cola clock attached to the FUEL-U-PUMP sign said that the time was twenty minutes past eight o'clock. Cowboy Carl's would open in forty minutes, and the boys would wonder why I was late for work again. I had not slept in twenty-six hours.

The red column of mercury in a Dr Pepper thermometer on the stucco building topped out at forty-one degrees. That was almost twenty degrees warmer than it had been at home when I'd left, but even inside the Moonsuit I felt as though I had spent the night packed in dry ice. Dismounting was an adventure in pain because my knees didn't want to bend back straight and because putting weight on my feet was like stabbing them with pickle forks. I was beginning to suspect that there was no way in h.e.l.l that Peggy Sue and I could make it to Lubbock.

I filled the bike's tank from the lone Regular pump, then staggered into the building and gave five dollars to the shriveled man behind the counter. That left me with a little over fifty-three bucks. A radio beside the cash register was playing mournful country music, heavy on the steel guitars and slow on the beat.

I had removed my gloves to accept the few cents of change due me, but my cold fingers fumbled the coins and dropped them. The counterman peered at me through inch-thick eyegla.s.ses and said, ”You okay to keep riding that Harley?” My faceplate was fogging, so I flipped it up as I squatted, knees popping, to retrieve the coins. ”It's not a Harley,” I said.

He glanced out the smudged window. ”Triumph?”

I lost my balance and fell onto my rump, realizing that I shouldn't have corrected the old man. I should have let him think Peggy Sue was anything but what she was. ”Yeah,” I lied. ”A 1962 Triumph Thunderbird.”

He frowned as I sc.r.a.ped up the coins and lurched to my feet. ”I see you've got a Shawnee County sticker on your plate,” he said. If his eyes were sharp enough to see that, they were sharp enough to see that there were no Triumph emblems on Peggy Sue's fuel tank. At least there were no Ariel emblems there either.

My right hand knotted around the coins, and their edges bit into my fingers. ”Yeah,” I said, heading toward the door.

”Bet you could use a cup of coffee,” the old man said.

I shook my head and pushed open the door.

”Only fifty cents,” he called after me. Just then the country music stopped and a news bulletin began: ”For those of you who haven't turned on your TV sets yet today...”

I hurried outside, shoving my change into a Moonsuit pocket and pulling on my gloves. As I straddled my bike and snapped up the kickstand, I thought,Everyone is an enemy.

Peggy Sue didn't want to fire, and I jumped furiously on the starter. I was sweating now, and my eyes stung. My body's numbness had disappeared and been replaced by an itching heat. I glanced at the stucco building and saw the old man staring out at me.

I dismounted, grasped the Ariel's handgrips, and pushed. If I could find a hill, I might get up enough speed for a clutch-popping start-but at that moment I didn't care if I had to push forever as long as we got away from that gas station. I felt the old man's gaze drilling into my back as I shoved Peggy Sue's five hundred pounds out of the drive and began trudging down the shoulder of the highway. I was breathing hard, and for the first time I noticed that the air was tinged with a stink of burning crude oil.

I stopped beside the city limits sign and tried to kick-start the bike again, but all she did was sputter.

Inside the Moonsuit, my clothes were sticking to my skin, and inside my helmet, my hair was wet. Even my feet were hot. I resumed pus.h.i.+ng.

A few hundred yards inside the city limits, we pa.s.sed a windbreak of evergreens that lay perpendicular to the highway on the north side. West of that windbreak was a two-story white building with seven gray doors visible on each floor. A flaking sign out front displayed the words FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES outlined in dead neon tubes. The ”Vacancy” appendage hummed and flickered, but it was a redundancy. The only vehicle in the parking lot was a battered Pinto in front of the door labeled ”Office” at the west end. As I paused, an obese woman carrying a plastic trash bag emerged from around the building's southeast corner. An access road branched off from the parking lot there, running between the motel and the trees. That might mean that there was a second lot and more rooms on the north side, hidden from the highway. I began pus.h.i.+ng Peggy Sue again, but I kept watching the woman. The bike and I were barely thirty yards away from her, but she didn't even glance at us. She was gazing down at the concrete walkway, mumbling words that I couldn't make out. When she reached the office, she took a keyring from her coat pocket, unlocked the door, and went inside. The curtains over the window beside the door stayed closed.

I looked behind me and saw that the highway had curved so that the FUEL-U-PUMP station had vanished behind the row of evergreens. Even if he was still watching, the old man wouldn't see me now, so I guided my motorcycle onto the spa.r.s.e gravel of the motel parking lot. To my helmet-encased ears, the noise made by her tires sounded like thunder.

I parked the bike beside the Pinto and approached the office cautiously to observe and evaluate my enemy. If the obese motel manager caught me, I would never make it to Lubbock. I would never discover whether Buddy had truly arisen, and I would never know why his image had singled me out for persecution or glory.

Understand: I didn'twant to break into a room and sleep there without paying. Despite what the FCC thought of me, I had never willingly broken any law except the occasional speed limit or controlled substances statute. I had never stolen from anyone. At least, not much. But fatigue and fear go a long way toward breaking down the superego.

There was just enough s.p.a.ce between the curtains to let me see into the office. The woman was lying on a couch below the window, watching the snow-speckled screen of a color TV atop the registration desk.

Buddy was on the screen, and the sound was turned up loud enough that I could hear him doing his version of ”Bo Diddley.” The Great Red Spot floated above his tousled hair like a halo.

The woman lay as still as a lump of dough; the volume of the television had kept her from hearing my bike's tires on the gravel. I returned to Peggy Sue, pushed her down the length of the building to the access road, and sure enough found an empty northern parking lot and fourteen more rooms.

At the lot's far edge, a chain-link fence threaded with dead vines marked the boundary of a salvage yard. The scabrous skulls of three GMC pickup trucks grinned at me through the links. Their winds.h.i.+elds were intact. They had made it to the Spirit Land.

A blue dumpster with stenciled letters indicating that it was emptied on Tuesdays sat in the lot's northeastern corner. I hid Peggy Sue behind it.

”Talk to her if she gets lonely,” I told the nearest truck skull.

Then I crossed to the motel and climbed metal stairs to the second-floor walkway. I was feeling an echo of the primitive urge for height, of our ancestors' need to see danger approaching at a distance... which made little sense in my situation, because once inside a room, I would keep the curtains drawn. Also, if my enemies blocked the stairs, my only escape would be to jump over the walkway railing. Ignoring these facts, I chose the corner room, number 15.

As I had hoped, the FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES had lousy door locks, the kind that will open to a credit card slid between the jamb and the spring bolt. Unfortunately, I was so tired that my coordination was screwed, so after a few tries I gave up on that method and rammed the door with my shoulder. The wooden jamb was rotten, and the bolt ripped through it as if it were moist cardboard. The break-in made only a small noise, so I didn't think the woman at the other end of thebuilding could have heard it.

Once inside number 15, I fumbled in the gray light filtering through the curtains and chained the door.

Then I started laughing. The base plate of the chain was nailed into a jamb with the strength of frozen pudding, andI had chained the door.

I laughed so hard that I was barely able to unbuckle and pull off my helmet, and I collapsed face-first onto the bed to m.u.f.fle myself. The pebbled bedspread smelled like day-old dinner rolls. The bedsprings sagged and squeaked. I laughed until the only sound I could make was a strangled wheeze. My abdomen ached. Tears tickled my nose. I couldn't move. I slept.

I was awakened by pain in my crotch. I hadn't stopped to p.i.s.s during the ride down from Topeka, and Peggy Sue and the road had pounded my bladder and kidneys the whole way. I'd been so cold and tired that I hadn't even been aware of the problem until now.

I sludged out of bed, supported myself with a hand on the wall, and shuffled around a corner into the closet-size bathroom. When I flipped the light switch, a buzzing white fluorescence almost slammed me to the floor. The glare wouldn't be seen outside number 15, but from where I stood, it hurt almost as much as the urine pressure.

I threw my gloves into the main room, squirmed out of the Moonsuit and kicked it after the gloves, then shoved my jeans and shorts to my knees in a panic. I was grateful that the toilet didn't have a lid. The relief was momentary, however. My guts twisted, and I had to finish in a hurry in order to turn around.

Diarrhea. An ache began pulsing behind my left eye.

After flus.h.i.+ng the toilet, which made ominous gurgling noises, I tried to throw up. All I could do was heave. The last thing I'd eaten had been a few handfuls of microwave popcorn just before leaving home.

When the heaving stopped, I struggled up from my knees, pulled up my underwear and jeans, and saw my face in the speckled mirror over the sink. My hair was rumpled, and I looked a lot like Buddy might look without gla.s.ses, except that the whites of my eyes were tracked with crimson veins. I glanced at my wrist.w.a.tch; the time was a little after 3:00 P.M. I had been wearing my gas-permeable contact lenses for thirty-two hours. With that realization, I experienced a sensation like having Comet shoved under my eyelids.

I removed the lenses and rinsed them in the ochre water that jitterbugged from the faucet. I had neither a storage case nor wetting solution. Sharon Sharpston wore the same type of gas-permeable lenses, so I had planned to borrow those things while I stayed at her apartment.

What might Sharon be doing at that moment? I wondered. I pictured her sitting on a straight-backed chair in a police station in Topeka, her chopped auburn hair standing at attention, her violet eyes looking down her impossibly straight nose at the Authority who was trying to question her.

”My professional ethics prevent me from discussing my client's psychological profile,” she would be saying. ”However, I can tell you that he is an intriguing person whom I find tremendously exciting s.e.xually. Now, if you badger me any further, my boyfriend Bruce will give you a sound thras.h.i.+ng with the Const.i.tution.”

The pain behind my left eye increased. In the almost three years that I had known Sharon, I had neverbeen able to visualize her naked. Bruce always came into the picture before I was able to unfasten anything.

I went back into the main room and placed my contact lenses on the palm of one of my gloves, which had landed beside the TV on the desk. The set was an ancient black-and-white Zenith, and when I snapped it on, it filled the room with pale flashes. Only one channel displayed a viewable picture, but one channel was all that I or anyone else would need today.

”-Southwest 163rd Street, Topeka, Kansas,” Buddy was saying. His fuzzy image scrolled up a few times, then came to an unsteady rest. ”You know, folks,” he continued, shaking his head, ”it's no fun being stranded. I'd appreciate some help soon, please, either from this Oliver Vale or from whoever can think of anything.”

He took a deep breath, then shook his head again and began playing ”What to Do.”

I sat on the foot of the bed, staring at the screen and feeling guilty. We hadn't even managed to hustle our lazy b.u.t.ts to Mars yet, so how could we ever hope to get to Ganymede to save a kid who couldn't do much for us anyhow except write songs and play the guitar?

At that thought, I became afraid that I knew what the pain behind my left eye was. It was apes.h.i.+t insanity trying to bore up into my forehead and spread through my brain like a metastasizing carcinoma.

It couldn't be sane to think of the video-Ganymede as reality. It made much more sense to believe that the image on the Zenith, and the one at home on my Sony, were random outpourings of electrons following the same logic as the infinite number of monkeys with the infinite number of typewriters cranking outJulius Caesar andI, the Jury. In a universe chockful of chaotic energies, didn't the Uncertainty Principle and the Laws of Thermodynamics predict that a televised rock 'n' roll ghost was bound to pop up sooner or later?

I wished that I had toughed it out in my one attempt to take physics at K-State.