Part 22 (1/2)

”If I don't, then what am I doing here? And if you don't, what areyou doing here?”

Cathy's jaw muscles bulged. ”I'm driving,” she said. ”And you're whining.”

Jeremy popped out the dog-eye again and placed it in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. ”Not anymore,” he said.

RINGO.

The girl named Laura gave him the supper leftovers, and although he wasn't hungry, he ate enthusiastically. While he was eating, the boy, Mike, attempted to replace the human-eye, but Ringo turned his head so the thing wouldn't go in. With its removal, the last of his wariness of these people had vanished, and he had realized that the eye was what had made him suspicious of people in the first place.

He had only used the Windex incident as a rationalization. His reaction to the man named Boog had been the true one.

He had made up his mind: He would stay with the Holdens. He wouldn't miss Cathy and Jeremy.

The only uneasiness that he felt now was a sense of guilt for having damaged Vale's motorcycle. Pete, Laura, and Mike Holden all liked Ringo, as did the woman named Gretchen, but Vale was still wary.

So when the people went to lounge in the living room, Ringo trotted in and lay at Vale's feet. Vale stiffened. To rea.s.sure him, Ringo sat up and licked his hand. Vale made a noise in his throat, and Ringo realized that the man thought he was being tasted.

Gretchen laughed and called Vale a name.

Ringo knew now that it would take more than friendly gestures to make Vale his friend. I would take a gift. He belched his last can of Budweiser onto Vale's lap. All of the people were immediately interested.

”Looks like a peace offering,” Pete said.

Ringo barked to indicate that Pete was right.

”Uh, well, uh, thanks,” Vale said. He was still nervous, but at least he was smiling.

”Well, aren't you going to open it?” Pete asked.

Vale picked up the can and popped the tab, and beer sprayed everywhere. The people yelped like puppies.

When the can stopped spraying, everyone was spattered with white flecks. Mike and Laura went to the kitchen for paper towels. Ringo sniffed the can in Vale's hand and found that it was empty.

He lay down and put his head on his paws. His gift had been worthless. Vale would dislike him more than ever now.

Instead, Vale leaned down, laughing, and patted Ringo's back. ”Listen,” he said, ”it's the thought that counts.”

Ringo raised his head and let his tongue hang out. He had been forgiven. Everything in his world was good.

9.

OLIVER.

I graduated from high school in 1977 at the age of seventeen. It had been a good spring, the highlight being when a friend and I drove to Lawrence to hear Lynyrd Skynyrd on the KU campus. Seeing Ronnie Van Zant and the band perform their fourteen-minute-plus concert version of ”Free Bird” was a transcendental experience. I was probably the only member of the audience, though, who felt guilty because he hadn't brought his mother along. She would have appreciated the show more than most of the people there.

Following commencement (my four-year GPA was 2.8; I was forty-third in a cla.s.s of a hundred and twelve), I went to work hauling hay. Tossing bales at four cents a piece was dirty, sweaty, itchy work...

work to sweat the poison out, as my custom-cutter boss said. I and the other four guys on the crew alternated between complaining that the baler was packing the bales too heavy, and bragging about how well we were going to do with the women come fall. All of us would be going away to college, and none of us were able to think of that event in any context other than s.e.x. Or if we were, we didn't talk about it.

I was heading for Kansas State University in Manhattan. The campus was only fifty-five miles west of Topeka, but Mother seemed to think it was on the dark side of Neptune. She couldn't believe that I was grown-up enough to leave home. (This was the same woman who had given me a box of prophylactics for my fifteenth birthday.) Mother's UFO/Atlantis/occult obsessions had been getting worse, leaning toward spiritualism and entrail reading, and as my departure date drew near, she began holding seances in the bas.e.m.e.nt. I made it a point not to learn the names of any of the middle-aged women who joined her for these things, and I counted the minutes until I could jump into my '69 Dart and head west.

It's easy now to look back at my seventeen-year-old self and feel ashamed, particularly after reading some of Mother's thoughts as recorded in Volume VI: I am thirty-six years old. I have no husband or lover. Since 1959-except for one brief interlude with a man named Keith-only three things have mattered in my life: my son; rock and roll; and a belief that beings with powers beyond those of Earth will someday come in their s.h.i.+ps of light to transform the world. Now my son is leaving home (hard to comprehend that he is the same age that I was when I became pregnant with him), and I am too old and solitary to make a life of rock 'n' roll, for it is the music of youthful tribes. In fact, because he was conceived in that energy, the last of the music may leave me when my son leaves. All that will be left is what Oliver calls my ”weirdnesses. ”All that will be left is the hope that human beings will not be allowed to mangle themselves.

I'll still have my records. But what is music if you listen to it alone?

Even if I were younger, I couldn't rejoin the tribes, for the tribes have dissolved. The stuff the kids listen to these days (”disco”) would drive me to self-evisceration in a matter of hours. Even KKAP plays it; I wear earplugs at my desk. I have begun haunting used record stores after work so that I can buy the artifacts that may soon be extinct. Thank Chuck, my son was raised right.

He is leaving, but he is leaving with the Beatles, not the Bee Gees, in his heart. C. would be proud.

I will miss him.

Meanwhile, I was having the best summer of my life. I was making money, and the work became easier as the summer progressed. My stamina increased each day and made the bales seem ever lighter. Hard work does that for you when you're seventeen. s.h.i.+rtless, I swung my hay hook as if it were a part of me and tossed seventy-pound bales onto a flatbed as if they were made of cotton candy. My arms and back became brown, and my sweat smelled of salt and prairie hay.

What was mainly responsible for my joy, however, was a girl named Cheryl. She was the cousin of one of the guys on the hauling crew, and on Friday, July 1, she came out to the field where we were working and, as a favor to his mother, gave him the lunch that he had forgotten that morning.

Sun-blonded. Tanned skin. Cutoff jean shorts. Long legs. White blouse not b.u.t.toned all the way.

”Oing off as they clawed at the stage. Cheryl appeared wearing nothing but cutoff jeans and went down on the corpse, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s bobbing with the music. I awoke in the dark, my chest thundering, my erection hard as diamond.

I was still awake when the alarm went off at 5:00 A.M. I got up, dressed in jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt, fed Ready Teddy, and ate cereal and toast. I heard the newspaper hit the driveway just before 5:30, and I went out for it. Before bringing it inside, I read the front-page headlines. One of them was HEART ATTACK CLAIMS ELVIS PRESLEY. It was not in particularly big type.