Waiting for the Galactic Bus
Read Waiting for the Galactic Bus Online
Authors: Parke Godwin
Waiting for
the Galactic Bus
Parke Godwin
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN 0-385-24635-8
LCCN: 87-33069
Copyright © 1988 by Parke Godwin
All rights reserved
These 
ePub, Mobi 
and LIT 
editions v1.0 by Dead^Man November 2011
dmebooks at live dot ca
Jacket illustration © 1988 Chris Hopkins
Jacket design by Jamie S. Warren
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
To Marvin Kaye,
for more Incredible Umbrellas
1
–
This was a real nice clam bake...
2
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Killing time: genius ad lib
5
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Management problems among the mad
6
–
Slouching toward Plattsville
8
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The hero is the one who just wants to finish his drink and go home
10
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The woman taken in adultery, and other set pieces
II
–
The Eduction of Charity Mae Stovall
13
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Yonder lies the castle of my father
16
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Problems of the whore/madonna syndrome (Aryans at the half-mast)
17
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Faith, hope and Charity Stovall
18
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This can’t be hell, the plumbing works
19
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Money can’t buy happiness, but why not be miserable in comfort?
22
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The rewards of faith and their avoidance
23
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The clear vistas of paranoia
24
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Romanticism as theology: Is there hope for the spiritual drunk
?
25
–
Meanwhile, back at reality...
28
–
Everyone comes to the Banal
29
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The treadmills of your mind
30
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Barion explains; it doesn’t help
31
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Roy Stride and the First Amendment
32
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Blossoms and thorns of the media culture
33
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All this significance – what does it mean?
35
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The higher education of Roy Stride
36
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Perks for the upwardly mobile
38
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The new, the terrible and the maybes
39
–
Back to the drawing board...
Charity, by way of prologue
Charity Mae Stovall spent her childhood in a county orphanage. Yearning for a mother or any kind of palpable parent, she sublimated in adolescence to a rigid Christianity. Charity was — and still is — a highly intelligent young woman, although for her first twenty years she never thought herself acute in this regard, nor was the quality noted by the school system that passed her through its portals and curricula without a second glance. Since she didn’t read much and no one ever required her to think, Charity’s potential remained a string unsounded in the decaying factory town of Plattsville.
She was very active in the house of her chosen faith, the Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior, where she accompanied congregational hymns on the hammer-worn piano, was wooed by an aggressive young man named Roy Stride and, to a more retiring extent, by Roy’s self-effacing friend, Woody Barnes. Woody furnished trumpet obbligato for these musical effusions. He played well, Charity with more precision than talent. She was a Fundamentalist and earnest about it, distributing leaflets for the removal from libraries of harmful books like
The Wizard of Oz
and
The Diary of Anne Frank
. On a personal basis, Oz didn’t do much for Charity one way or the other, though she did wonder why the Tabernacle was against
Anne Frank
. Outside of her being a Jew, the day-to-day life and thoughts of Anne were pretty much like her own at thirteen. Nevertheless, Reverend Simco thundered against it as an alien blot on a Christian land already imperiled. Dutifully, Charity demonstrated against an abortion clinic, opposed the teaching of evolution as a dastardly onslaught of secular intellect upon defenseless children and believed herself a direct descendant of Adam.
Not entirely without justification.
Barion found her earliest direct ancestor by a Pliocene water hole, a creature with no likeness to Adam other than health, appetite and uncertainty. Unlike Adam, the ape was quite savage. Anything outside its immediate family group was a dangerous enemy. The crucial difference in this primate, for Barion’s purposes, was a brain verging on but not quite ready to be called a mind. In this regard, the creature had much in common with its descendant, Charity Mae Stovall.
I 