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

I closed my eyes. This was just the sort of thing I would dream up on this night. For the forty-millionth
time, I wished that I had never read any of Mother's diary, and for the forty-millionth time, I replied that it
wouldn't have made any difference if I hadn't. After all, I had spent my first ten months of multicellular
existence listening to "Heartbeat" over and over again (which may account for my loathing of it), and I
had spent every year after that listening to the dozens of other songs that the gangly kid from Lubbock
had written and/or recorded between 1955 and 1959....

I opened my eyes. Buddy was still inside the Sony, looking around as though he might have dropped his
guitar pick.

"Leave me alone, Dad," I said.

He looked out of the set then, straight at me. "Oh," he said. "The red light's on. Got a little distracted,
Mr. Sullivan." He spoke with a down-home, West Texas twang, and his smile was shy but honest. This
was clearly a boy who would offer to fix your flat tire on a long, empty stretch of road. He wasn't like
your Elvis Presley or your David Lee Roth, thrusting his pelvis out there and daring the girls on the front
row to touch it. This was agood boy.

As Mother wrote in Volume I:Just before C. and I did you-know-what, he told me that he thought
Buddy Holly, unlike all the others, spoke directly to us. Bill Haley and Chuck Berry and Elvis
Presley were great, C. said, but they were great because they were different and wild. (I didn't tell
him that I thought Bill Haley was just plain ugly; with all that grease on his forehead curl, it looks
like a sow's tail). Buddy, though, was special because he wasn't so different. He was like us. And if
he was sometimes a little wild, like with "Oh, Boy!" ...well, that meant that maybe we could be
that way sometimes too. Which I guess is how I wound up carrying C.'s little bastard, come to
think of it. Not that I mind, since with C. dead I might as well have something around to
remember him by.

Buddy began strumming his Strat and singing "Well All Right" in a voice that was low and quiet. He had
spoken to "Mr. Sullivan," but he and the Crickets had never performed that song onThe Ed Sullivan
Show.

I bolted from the recliner, throwing the afghan at the Sony, and grabbed the crescent wrench from the
coffee table again. Thirty-year anniversary or not, this wasn't the show my SkyVue was supposed to be
bringing me tonight. If I wanted to go crazy, I could do it without any help from a phantom in a picture
tube.

Oblivious to the cold, I charged out to the earth station, climbed the ladder, and whanged on the
converter forty, fifty, sixty times, then lost count and whanged some more. The sound bounced back
from the dish and pounded at me as if my head were in a bucket being pelted with rocks, and the dog at
the nearest neighbor's house began barking as if he were cursing me: "Knock off the noise! Asshole!
Have some respect! Buddy Holly died tonight! Cat lover! Shut up! I'll mangle you! You dope!"

Finally, exhausted, numb, and afraid that the dog—a Doberman pinscher the size of a Guernsey—was
coming to get me, I dropped from the ladder, scraping my shins on the rungs, and stumbled back to the
house. By now, John Wayne was probably shooting the eyes out of a dead Comanche warrior (so the
warrior couldn't find his way to the Spirit Land), and I was missing it.

I paused in the utility room and listened. I heard neither music nor gunshots from the living room, and I