FINIS
FINALE
In other words,
THE END.
—From “My Autobiography,” written by Buddy Holly for his sophomore English class, 1953
The year The Searchers was released, John Wayne filmed another movie, The Conqueror, in St. George, Utah, downwind of the Nevada Test Site. Before the filming, shot Harry, later called Dirty Harry, was exploded. The movie’s action, set in Mongolia, required several scenes with blowing sand, and maybe nobody thought much of it when they brushed the dust from their hair and eyes, shook it from their shirtsleeves, wiped it from their feet. They had work to do. Years later, when John Wayne died of cancer, he blamed his smoking habit, and maybe he was right. But ninety other actors and crew from The Conqueror were also diagnosed with cancer, over 40 percent of those who worked on the movie, along with uncounted extras, most of them local people.
In the last scene of The Searchers, Ethan Edwards returns the kidnapped girl, now a woman, to her neighbors, the closest thing to kin she has left. The movie’s theme song rises—Ride away, ride away—and Ethan turns his back on the camera. As he walks slowly out of frame, the white rectangle of sun in the door grows brighter and brighter, until finally the door closes. By the time The Searchers was playing in movie theaters from Lubbock to Clear Lake, John Wayne was in Utah, fighting through swirls of dust to finish that day’s scene. He just wanted to get a good take. Buddy just wanted to wash his clothes and take a shower.
Hardly worth dying over, but then what is? One of Apple-2’s objectives was to determine blast effects on different types of clothing. Today, historians list Apple-2 as one of the dirtiest atomic tests; its fallout made its way into children’s bodies in disproportionate numbers. No matter how many times you click through these images, they don’t change.
When asked what “American Pie” meant, McLean replied, “It means I don’t ever have to work again.”
—Alan Howard, The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly With His Songs
Does Buddy go on the road to sell records, or does he sell records to go on the road? Does he savor these giddy minutes of getting ready in a strange place, cement-floored dressing rooms with chipped green paint, hand-me-down dressers, and mirrors fastened to the wall with daisy-shaped rivets? He carries with him what he needs: guitar strings, fuses, handkerchiefs, nail file, pencil stub. Safety pins. Nobody ever has one. He could make a fortune if he started a new safety-pin factory; the world desperately needs more. And outside, the scurf of people talking, waiting for the show. Waiting for him.
Waiting for him, Maria Elena, back in their little apartment, lighting the pilot on the stove and talking to her mother in a warm haze of gas fumes and soup. Blue feathers of flame under the pot, telephone on the wall, push button to light the kitchen: all of these cost money. The honeymoon in Acapulco. The property in Bobalet Heights; he’s signed his real name on the deed, Charles “Buddy” Holley, with an e. The stage manager says it’s time, high time. He finds his mark, waits for the curtain, and when the stagehand hauls it up he can’t hear the creaking of the rope for the screams, and he’s playing the first chords of “Peggy Sue” without even realizing it, diving deep into a pool. Feeling the crowd stomping through the soles of his feet, shaking with the bass like he’s hooked to it, and between songs he has to take off his glasses and wipe the sweat from his eyes. Hey, he says, we sure are glad to be here. The crowd’s a blur but he can see the mike, its woven mesh familiar as his own fingerprint. Whew! That’s better. Slides the glasses on. Looks back. “Oh Boy,” do you think? When you’re with me, the world can see. That you were meant for me.
Every day
It’s a-getting closer
Going faster
Than a roller coaster.
—Buddy Holly, “Everyday,” 1957
Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone lived, once, on the land that became the Nevada Test Site. But by now, clicking through this third reel, “The Test Site Today,” it’s hard to believe anyone ever lived under this acid sun at noon. Here’s one of the few Doom Town houses still standing, its siding burned brown, windows empty. Here’s a bank vault, slung the length of two football fields. Here’s a shot tower, never used, abandoned after the moratorium in ’92. Tumbleweeds rest on the broken tarmac against the guardhouse. It all looks so ordinary, the orange plastic webbing seen in countless construction zones, the ground bristling with rusty rebar. If you stare at these things, even from this remove, you carry something of them with you. Brilliant blue sky; the dust the photographer breathed, close now as the tongue in your mouth. Turn the knob of your own front door and observe how it smokes in the heat’s first blast. Stand at the kitchen sink and watch the window bow inward and break, the eyelet curtain tumbling out and tearing free. Wake suddenly from your last dream to the fireball’s flash and realize the shock wave is coming, will be here in a single second’s tick.
Click. The guitar case snaps shut. Click. He opens a stiff new pair of glasses. Click. Dog tags rattle in the soldier’s hand. Click. A photographer documents the crash scene. Click. The arm of the record player drops a 45 on the turntable. Click. A soldier stacks cans in the pantry, bottom to rim. What’s still there, in that dark, silent room? A stray jug of water; an empty coffee cup. In a crack in the floor, a safety pin.
All I got here is a bunch of dead man’s clothes to wear.
—The Searchers, 1956
That’ll be the day. When Ethan Edwards says it, it’s cynical; he’s seen it all, and none of it’s good. But in Buddy’s voice, the words change. Baby, I got your heart, he’s saying; you ain’t gonna leave me. It’d kill me if you did, you know that. He’s brave, but vulnerable, too, and maybe that’s his gift, turning bitterness into hope, an alchemy possible only because he’s so young, clean-cut, the favorite son. Will you say goodbye; will I cease to be? Not a chance.
Close your eyes. They’re in the studio in Clovis, in rooms close in summer and drafty in winter; a studio that was formerly a grocery store, smelling of paint and mice. He sits in a corner, threading a fresh string onto the guitar and tightening it, adjusting, tightening again. Meanwhile, Jerry’s working on the drum part. Norman Petty, the producer, says, “That cha-cha isn’t going to work,” and he’s right. He charges not by the hour, but by the song, and they like that; gives you time to get it right. They try different things until they hit on the idea of paradiddles, tacka tacka tacka tacka, a rhythm that rolls like breakers, and when they try a take they have to wait because a passing truck makes the windows rattle. Outside, it’s a hundred dark miles back to Lubbock, and nobody’s in the mood to quit. Grab dinner, come back, and work some more, and later they’ll stretch out on the narrow beds in back and sleep.
Maybe sometime during the night one of those big old thunderstorms rolls up out of the west, and maybe they stand outside the studio and watch it come. Forks of cloud-to-ground lightning silhouette long reefs of cloud, flashing on eighteen-wheelers barreling toward Vegas with a ways yet to go. Arc, crack, boom. Moist wind presses the boys against the wall, the smoke from their cigarettes swirling around their heads and shunting up into the downdraft. Time stops cold in moments like this, everything sharper in the strange light, the ambient electricity strong enough to raise the hair on your arms. Rain on gravel, hot smoke in your throat. When they say, We better go in, you say, Give me a minute. Lean against the still-warm cinderblock and feel the storm coming. If it’s got your number, ain’t nothing you can do. It’s late by now, the night almost gone, but you’re swinging with
