The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai by Earl Mac Rauch Page B

“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
    “Nope. Reno,” I replied. “Where’s your spurs, New Jersey?”
    He knitted his brow. “You making fun of me?” He grinned, and in that approximate instant I knew we were friends. There followed the usual flourishes of boisterous banter, although compared to other occasions, it was relatively artificial for reasons I have cited. Having no way of knowing it, Sidney had joined us at a troubled hour, a fact he may have divined when halfway through his offer of congratulations to Buckaroo Banzai for accomplishing the apparently impossible, i.e., traveling through solid matter, B. Banzai excused himself suddenly as if a precipitant pain were felt and walked toward the police station with Perfect Tommy.
    For what occurred within the building before I belatedly arrived, I have to rely upon the recollection of Perfect Tommy, who accompanied Buckaroo and a female jailer to the cell where the pitiable girl sat with her back turned to all who might enter, her indescribable solitude seeming less a function of the steel and mortar that enclosed her than the anticipated futility of life. She was certainly not the proverbial little bird in a gilded cage. She was not so congenial as that.
    Even when the jailer announced to her that she had a visitor, her head did not turn. There was, however, a humble vanity mirror in one corner of the chamber, and it was this that B. Banzai ingeniously used to step into her line of sight. Positioning himself so that she might see him in the glass, he began to talk as to an old friend, of subjects ranging from the commonplace to the recent coronation of a Nepalese monarch at which he had been in attendance. By dint of persistence, he succeeded in irritating her to such a degree that she sprang up full and shouted with a sneer on her face, “What are you doing here? Whadda you want?”
    It was his first unencumbered look at her, and it staggered him. He flushed to the temples. True to Rawhide’s words she was inexplicably the very reincarnation of Peggy—a perfect stranger, and yet someone he had loved and loved again the moment he saw her. Those were the irreconcilable facts. Perfect Tommy, like the rest of us, a doubting Thomas who wished not even to consider the existence of such a girl, lest she might somehow supplant the memory of our Peggy, had managed indifference to this point. But now . . . he stood gazing on her as in a profound sleep, unable to utter a sound. In those first seconds of close quarters with her, he later told me, he felt a recurrence of the same arctic frigidity he had experienced the night of the final seance when Mrs. Johnson had charaded as Peggy’s ghost. But the woman standing before him now was no mechanical contrivance of hooks and wires illuminated by the moon. She was—how else to put it?—the reincarnation of our slain sister, the same creature, the same particulars down to the minutest corner of her face. If it were a guise, some trick of surgery that had transformed her thus, the shadowy supposition was that the Creator, Himself, must have been in envy of the hand that had wielded the scalpel. It was no wonder Perfect Tommy thrilled in silence.
    Of Buckaroo, himself, what words of this or any writer could give a fair accounting of the exquisite agony he must have felt? His feelings beyond register, his doubts at once long passed and only beginning, he was in too sorry a state to speak. Noting their extreme reaction for as long as she lingered upon their vision, Penny Priddy must have been moved to curiosity herself and at some length asked: “Will somebody tell me what the hell’s going on?”
    “Suppose you tell us,” said Tommy. “Who are you?”
    “Penny Priddy. You’re Perfect Tommy.”
    “That’s right.”
    “In the company of Buckaroo Banzai,” she said, moving closer to the steel bars which separated them. Buckaroo withdrew slightly as she advanced, a small triumph she did not fail to notice and which in an