"Bradley Denton - Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denton Bradley)

When I first read this passage I was terribly confused, but one of the kids at school explained it to me
the next day. That was the occasion of my first fight, and my first split lip.

Throughout our life together, up to and including the day she died, I was careful to never let Mother
know that I think "Heartbeat" is a lousy song.

The next entry in Volume I told me that my father, referred to as "C.," committed suicide less than twelve
hours after impregnating Mother... when he heard the news from Clear Lake. He was found in his
parents' garage in the Chevrolet, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Mother was the only person in Des Moines who believed that he had intentionally killed himself. She
wrote:His mama and daddy say that C. had the engine on so that he could listen to the radio
without running down the battery, but he had a radio in his room, so why would he go out to the
car if the radio was the reason? He must have left me a note, but they won't let me see it. I hate
them and plan to poison their Chihuahua.

She probably did, too.

One other thing I should mention now: I have always felt that the moment of my conception must have
coincided exactly with the moment that the V-tailed red Beechcraft Bonanza hit the frozen Iowa soil,
smashing life from the mortal bodies of Ricardo Valenzuela, J. P. Richardson, and Charles Hardin Holley.
Whenever I try to imagine what my father may have looked like, the only face I can see is that of a skinny
Texan wearing glasses with black plastic frames.

I have avoided discovering my father C.'s true identity, although it would be easy to do.

That's enough to begin.

My name is Oliver Vale. I live in the one-story Kansas ranch-style house Mother willed to me. It is full
of rock 'n' roll memorabilia, Japanese appliances, and Volumes I through VII of Mother's diary, dated
from May 13, 1957 (her sixteenth birthday) to February 3, 1984 (her last day of life). I pasted the white
date sticker on the spine of Volume VII myself. Then I called the ambulance to come and get her.



At 1:03 A.M. on Friday, February 3, 1989, the picture displayed by my twenty-five-inch Sony color
television dissolved into bright speckles of static. I was immediately aware of the significance of the time
(displayed in glowing blue numerals by the Mitsubishi VCR), and for a few moments I sat frozen in my
recliner like a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Buddy Holly had died at about this moment in 1959, just as the
most determined of my father C.'s umpteen zillion sperm had plunged into Mother's eagerly waiting
ovum. As a multicellular process, I was exactly thirty years old, and my Sony was delivering white sparks
in celebration. Mother had been dead five years.

I tried to ponder the significance of it all, and convinced myself that therewas no significance. The Sony
had been presenting static of this sort with increasing frequency over the past several weeks, and it was
only coincidence that it was doing so again at this particular moment. Unfortunately, this particular
moment was rottenly inconvenient, because I had remote-controlled the Sony to life hoping to see John
Wayne inThe Searchers, the 1956 John Ford western that gave Buddy Holly the phrase that led to his
first hit single. I had seen the movie only once before, so I'd been ecstatic whenDish Digest told me that