Part 13 (2/2)

I pulled on my helmet and gloves, and we got going, leaving the TV on. Buddy watched us longingly as we left. He was singing ”Send Me Some Lovin'.”

Outside, I saw that the Jaguar was the only vehicle in the parking lot. Apparently, eight o'clock was still too early for the Chisholm Trail Rest Stop Waterbed Motel's Sat.u.r.day night trade to begin. Gretchen got into the car and started it while I went around back for my bike.

Peggy Sue was leaning over in the mud, looking battered and bruised. ”Bitten by a Doberman and kicked over by an Amazon,” I said as I pulled her upright. ”And I b.i.t.c.h when you don't feel like starting.

Some life, huh?” I rolled her down the sloppy path to the parking lot. Inside the Jaguar, her face lit by the bluish glow of the dash displays, Gretchen looked impatient.

I had hoped that by speaking words of sympathy, I would persuade Peggy Sue to start with a minimum of difficulty, but it was not to be. I kicked the starter thirty or forty times before Gretchen emerged from the Jaguar and ordered me to let her try. As she straddled the bike and started kicking, it occurred to me that I could enter the idling Jaguar and be gone. But that would have meant abandoning Peggy Sue.

The bike's engine started on Gretchen's sixth or seventh kick. ”Oh, sure,” I said as Gretchen walked past me to the car. ”It was easy after I got her primed.” She did not reply, but reentered the Jaguar and took off. I climbed onto Peggy Sue and switched on the headlight, and we followed. The Ariel sounded ragged. I worried.

Gretchen's route soon became incomprehensible to me, and I had to take it as an article of faith that we were making progress toward Lubbock. My sense of direction was destroyed by the turns, twists, and backtracks of the Jaguar, and the cloud cover made it impossible to regain my bearings by looking at the stars.

A few hours away from the motel, we stopped for gas at a self-service store in the middle of nowhere, and I filled Peggy Sue's tank without shutting off the engine. The way she was sounding, I was more afraid of trying to restart her than I was of blowing up. I even asked Gretchen to reduce speed for the rest of the night because the Ariel was having trouble cruising any faster than fifty. Something was going wrong, and I didn't think that crescent-wrench-whanging would make it right this time. Even if I'd had that tool with me.

I was glad to finish refueling and get back to the highway. Out there, the only things that existed besides me and Peggy Sue were the road, the cold wind, and the red lights that we followed. Occasionally, other lights would pa.s.s us from either direction, but they were only temporary phenomena. They were hardly even here before they were gone, like UFOs. I saw them, but I had no proof that they were anything but illusions. Neither did I have any proof, other than phantom memories, that Buddy Holly had ever appeared on my television, or even that there was such a thing as television.

On a motorcycle at night (even a sputtering motorcycle that might die at any moment) the rest of the world fades toward noncorporeality; toward the Void. The rider becomes an astronaut in a Moonsuit, shooting through that Void on a rickety s.p.a.ce sled.

It's wonderful.

Just as I was beginning to feel truly separate from the planet, as if Peggy Sue and I were fusing to become a meteor, the Jaguar's taillights left the highway again and entered a roadside park in a cl.u.s.ter of trees. I didn't want to stop, but if I went on, Gretchen would hold to her promise to find me and break my fingers and toes. You cannot control a motorcycle if you have broken fingers and toes. I slowed Peggy Sue and leaned into the paved split that the Jaguar had taken, and we were surrounded by the dark cones of evergreens.

The Jaguar had stopped on a sandy patch beside a picnic table with a concrete canopy, and I steered Peggy Sue in beside it. The car's lights went off.

”What's wrong?” I yelled as Gretchen emerged from the Jaguar. Peggy Sue's engine was still running,and I had to shout to be heard over the coughing.

”Nothing, dork,” Gretchen answered, stepping over to stand in the bike's headlight beam. She was wearing a blue warm-up jacket and carrying her backpack. ”Turn that freaking thing off before it gives me a headache.”

”If I do, she might not start again,” I said. ”She's not running right. I think we should keep going while it's still dark.”

Gretchen reached out to Peggy Sue's right handlebar and hit the kill switch. The engine wheezed and died. I switched off the headlight, snapped down the kickstand, and dismounted. ”She's not going to like this,” I said.

” 'She'?” Gretchen spat. The park had no lights, but I didn't need to see Gretchen's expression to know what it was. ”You call a machine 'she'? I thought I heard you do that before, but I didn't want to believe it. It's insulting, degrading, and perverted. Men like you make me blow chow. You think with your d.i.c.ks, and what your d.i.c.ks think is that you can f.u.c.k an internal combustion engine.”

”Sorry,” I said, backing away.

”Why the h.e.l.l a supernatural being would come on TV and nameyou as someone special is beyond me,”

Gretchen said.

”Me too.” I paused, in case she had anything further to add on the subject of my unworthiness, and then asked, ”Why did we stop? I'm not protesting, understand. Just curious.”

Gretchen made a dangerous noise in her throat. ”I feel weak and cramped,” she said. ”I haven't had a workout since I left Minneapolis, and if I'm going to face G.o.d or whatever when we get to Lubbock, I want to be in shape.” Her dark form went to the picnic table and set the backpack on it. ”Not that you would know anything about that, big b.u.t.t.”

”I donot have a big b.u.t.t.”

”Tell it to G.o.d when we get there,” Gretchen said, unzipping the backpack. ”We'll see what Her opinion is.”

”Buddy Holly is male,” I pointed out.

”Most errand boys are.”

”Buddy isn't an errand boy. He's a rock and roll pioneer.”

”Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I'm snapping on earphones to blast some old Whitesnake, and if you come close enough for me to hear you, you'll get smacked with a hand weight. I suggest you get into the Jag and take a nap. The seats recline. I'll take a short rest on my side when I'm finished out here, and then we'll get going again.”

The noise of latter-day heavy metal (shrunk to munchkin-like decibel levels) began pulsing from Gretchen's head, and I blundered away to a shadow that proved to be an open-pit rest room. When I had finished there (tricky business in the dark), I returned to the Jaguar and entered on the pa.s.senger side. When the door was closed, I stretched my left leg across the center console to touch the brakepedal, and adjusted the mirror so that I could see out the back window.

Gretchen was exercising on the narrow strip of pavement behind the car, and I watched her dance in the red glow for a few seconds. Her back was to me, and I don't think she knew that I could see her. Her hair bounced to a rhythm that I couldn't hear, and as her arms swung, her jacket stretched across her shoulders and back. Below that- ”Forget it,” I told myself.

I pulled off my helmet and then fumbled with the console until I found the switch that made the seat recline. The compartment was warm, and I would have fallen asleep immediately had I not started worrying about Peggy Sue's increasingly poor performance and our overall lack of progress. The Ariel and I had only fled a total of four hundred miles in forty-eight hours, and thanks to the zigzagging nature of our route, some of that distance was wastage. At best, we were now halfway to Lubbock-and here I was counting on Gretchen Laird, a potentially homicidal stranger who was currently bouncing around in the cold night like a spastic kangaroo, to get me the rest of the way there.

It made as much sense as anything else.

The next thing I was aware of was a blaring noise and a bright light, and I woke up yelling, ”No, Julie!

Don't run over me!” I had apparently been dreaming of Julie ”Eat s.h.i.+t and die, Oliver” Calloway.

Julie was long gone now, but the blaring noise and the light were real. They belonged to a Peterbilt semi-tractor-trailer that had pulled into the rest stop and that was now being stared down by Gretchen Laird. Using the mirror, I saw that Gretchen was standing in the center of the access road exactly where I had last seen her. Her arms were crossed, her hair was darkened with sweat, and her eyes gleamed. The semi's headlights gave her a whole-body halo.

I looked at the rig and saw the trucker emerge and amble toward the open-pit toilet I had visited earlier.

He seemed to be ignoring Gretchen, Peggy Sue, and the Jaguar, so I lay back again and closed my eyes expecting that he would leave soon. I hoped that Gretchen would see the wisdom of getting out of the way and letting the Peterbilt drive on through.

She must have, because when I heard her voice threatening the trucker's life, it was coming from the picnic-table shelter. I opened my eyes, knowing that I would hate whatever I saw.

The trucker had returned from the toilet, but he had not reentered his truck. I had been wrong in a.s.suming that he had ignored Gretchen.

”Get away from me or I'll rip off your b.a.l.l.s and stuff them up your nose,” she told him.

He grinned down at her. Gretchen is a large person, but the trucker was larger. He was Bigfoot in blue jeans and a down vest. I scrunched down in my seat and prayed to Chuck Berry (a former hairdresser) that the trucker would decide Gretchen was ugly. If he didn't, the idiotic masculine imperatives that had been conditioned into me by both DNA-triggered testosterone and society would demand that I get out of the Jaguar and be killed.

”Now, sugarplum,” the trucker said in a voice like a bull's. He reached out to stroke her face. Gretchen grabbed his thumb and twisted. The trucker went down to his knees like a man who had suddenly gotten religion, and Gretchen, still holding his thumb, began walking toward the idling semi. The trucker was forced to shuffle on his knees across the picnic table's concrete pad, and then across the dead gra.s.s to the road. When they were on the pavement, Gretchen released him and started back toward the table.

The trucker got to his feet and said something, but he was far enough away now that I heard it only as an angry mumble. Gretchen kept walking and said nothing.

He went after her, and I began fumbling for the door handle without having any idea of what I would do when I got outside. I may have had a vague hope that the Moonsuit would make me look bigger than I actually was and that the trucker would flee upon seeing me.

But before I could get the door open, the trucker grabbed Gretchen's arm, and she had popped her elbow into his face. He released her and staggered away, but this timeshe went afterhim. When she caught him, she knocked him down with a shove, grabbed his ankles, and bounced his head on the pavement twenty or thirty times. Then she dropped him and returned to the picnic table, where she put on her headphones, picked up her hand weights, and resumed her exercises. Slowly, the trucker got to his knees, and then to his feet. For a moment I thought that he was considering another try at Gretchen, but then he turned and went to his semi. He did not walk there in a straight line.

The semi hissed, then roared away. When it was gone, the only sounds left were those of my own breathing and of Gretchen's aerobics. I tried to sleep again, but Gretchen was huffing closer to the Jaguar now, and I found my respiration rate accelerating to match hers.

Hoping for distracting music, I leaned forward and twisted various k.n.o.bs on the dash until I found the radio. When it came on, it told me that civil unrest had begun in major cities across the nation and around the globe as the result of the Buddy Holly broadcast. The video takeover was in its fiftieth hour, and people were beginning to realize that it was more than a prank. Already it had deprived them ofDallas, Sat.u.r.day Night Live, several basketball games, and countless other necessities, and they were getting p.i.s.sed. TV stations the world over were being picketed despite the fact that the nonvideo media had made it clear that the broadcasters were not responsible.

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