Страница 7 из 41
jerked like a living thing, the wheels locked sideways, Ardmore was yelling and—
A sound that Conrad felt, rather than heard, a sound and a brief moment of frenzied motion. His power.
Jerk-stop to blank. Black. The horn was blowing. The horn was stuck. He was in a barbed-wire fence and the car was wrapped around a black locust tree and Jim was lying still.
“Hey, Jim,” Conrad screamed. The horn wouldn’t stop. The bleat of that stuck horn was driving him nuts. “Jim, wake up!”
“Don’t get hysterical, Conrad.” Ardmore sat up and looked around. He hadn’t been thrown as far as Conrad had. “Let’s tear out the wires to the horn.”
They did that, and things got a little better. Some time passed. Conrad’s parents came, and they took him home. So that he wouldn’t have to face them, he went to bed early, but it took him a long time to go to sleep. It was the black space that bothered him the most, the black space when he’d been unconscious.
If I had died, thought Conrad,it would have been just like that ... except I wouldn’t have woken up. Dead black nothing with no time left.
He flinched away from that and began struggling to reconstruct the details of the accident, trying to fit it into some rational frame.
The tree had been on the right side of the road. The VW’s left front fender had hit the tree. Momentum made the car slew to the left, and Conrad had been thrown out of his door. He’d flown past the tree and landed in that barbed-wire fence.
The fu
By all rights, Conrad should have sailed into the tree and broken his neck. He struggled to remember the details. How had he managed to miss the tree? The power. Somehow he hadlevitated his way around it . Yes.
Just as he was dropping off to sleep, Conrad realized he was floating above the mattress again. He flash-jerked, and jolted back down. All night he dreamed about the flame-people.
“You should thank God you’re alive,” his mother told him the next morning on their way to church.
“I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” said Conrad, trying to keep a quaver out of his voice. “I madesure to stay alive. Like a cat landing on its feet. I think maybe I have psychic powers, Mom. What does God have to do with it?”
“Plenty. God is everything, Conrad. God takes care of us in different ways. You should stop imagining that you’re so great, and thank Him for saving your life.”
“If He’s so wonderful, then He doesn’t need my thanks, does He?”
“No, God doesn’t need your thanks. Praying is something you do for your own self.”
“But what good is praying? There’s no afterlife. I saw yesterday. When I hit that fence, everything just got black. It wasn’t like dreaming or like being asleep. It was just black nothing. I think that must be what happens when you die, no matter what.Nothing. You don’t believe in heaven and hell, do you, Mom?”
“I think heaven and hell are right here in our own lives. And that’s enough. What happens after you die doesn’t matter.”
Conrad’s father took him for a walk after lunch.
“I’m sorry about the car, Pop. It’s practically totaled.”
“I don’t care about thecar , Conrad. I care aboutyou .”
When the Bungers had moved to Louisville, Conrad’s father had started calling himSausage . “Where’s my Sausage?” he might shout when he came home from work. That first Louisville summer had been hot, and old Caldwell had bought Conrad a giant wading pool. On Saturday, the two of them would soak in it, Conrad with the hose, and Pop with a long-necked bottle of Oertl’s beer. The old man’s amazing bulk took up most of the pool, but happy Conrad would splash in the empty spaces, yelling whatever popped into his head.
“I don’t care if you don’t go to church, Conrad,” his father was saying now. “You’re free to rebel and think whatever you want to. Butdon’t get yourself killed. If you’re too drunk to drive, then phone me up.”
“You’d get mad at me.”
“Conrad, I was a teenager, too. I got drunk and made trouble. But my father always told me,The main thing is don’t get killed. Call a cab if you have to.”
“Did you ever call a cab?”
“Once or twice. There was one morning when I woke up and I didn’t know where the car was. My father was waiting for me at the breakfast table. He was the kindest man, Conrad; I wish you could have met him. That morning he just looked up at me and said, ‘Well, son, let’s go find the car. What’s the last thing you remember?’ ” Mr. Bunger’s distant gaze wandered back to Conrad. “Don’t do this again, Conrad. Don’t get killed. All my and Mom’s relatives are dead. It would destroy us to lose you.”
“OK, Pop. It might not look that way, but even yesterday, I was careful not to get killed.” Conrad wondered if he should try to explain about his power ... oh, why bother, it would only sound like crazy bragging. “You really don’t care if I don’t believe in religion?”
“You wouldn’t be much of a person if you believed everything that grown-ups tell you, Conrad. It’s natural to rebel. But you’ve also got to learn to control yourself, instead of wrecking cars, and spouting this silly stuff that you wish the Russians would blow us up. You can’t just tear down. If you’re going to rebel, it’s up to you to find something better than what the grown-ups have.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Conrad. This was not the time to say what he really thought, to say that nothing made sense at all and that it would be better for everyone to admit it. This was not the time to push his father any further. “I guess I should be grounded for wrecking the car?”
“Three weekends.”
“Counting this one?”
Chapter 6:
Friday, July 5, 1963 “You do know who Bo Diddley is, don’t you, Dee?” They were in Conrad’s mother’s car—repaired to the tune of $700—and on their way to a holiday-weekend rock and roll show at the State Fairgrounds.
“He had that hit on the radio.Hey, Bo Diddley. ”
“And the new one.You Can’t Judge a Book by Lookin’ at Its Cover. He’s the best. He even builds his own guitars. You know I have four Bo Diddley albums at home, Dee?”
“That many! Tell me about the deeper meanings of Bo Diddley, Conrad.” Dee looked pretty good tonight. She wore a thin white cardigan, and a print dress with a Villager collar. Usually she wore sweatshirts.
“Well, my favorite song of his is calledCrackin’ Up . It goes like this.”
Conrad proceeded to sing the first few lines of the song, capturing the sense, if not the exact sound of Bo Diddley.
He sang it loud, with just the right number ofdit-duh-duh-dit-duuh-dit-dit-dits , his voice rising to a hoarse shout on the last line “You crackin’ up.”
“What’sbuggin’ you?” said Dee repeating the line from the song. “I should play that for my parents.”
Dee’s father was a career engineer for GE. He and his family were due to be transferred out to California in only one month. Conrad’s family was moving at the end of the summer. It was all ending fast.
“I first got that record when I was fourteen,” said Conrad. “I remember listening to it one day; it was the day that I really got the idea of rock and roll. I was alone at home, and I put onCrackin’ Up real loud, and I went and stood in front of my parents’ full-length mirror and danced a little, singing along, you know. As I watched myself, I realized that someday I’d be cool.”
“Are you cool yet?”
“I thought people might think I was cool after I wrecked the car. But no one outside my parents cared, not even Ardmore. And my parents didn’t exactly think it was cool.”
“How about your friends at St. X?”
“Oh, them. Thank God graduation is over.”
“Sue Pohlboggen told me you took her to the senior prom. She said it was awful.”