by Homer Hickam
There was one other awful thing that had happened on 11 East, too, now that I thought about it. That was where Poppy got his legs cut off.
ONE afternoon after school, I rode my bike down to the Big Store to get a bottle of soda pop. Mr. Dubonnet was talking to some of his union men over by the cigar counter when I walked into the drugstore section. He came over and leaned on the counter beside me. “How about I buy you a pop?” he said, shoving his hand in his pants pocket after change.
“No, thanks, sir,” I said, showing him I had my own fifteen cents.
Mr. Dubonnet ignored my show of money and called Junior over and ordered me a Royal Crown. He took off his hat and laid it on the counter and ordered himself a Dr Pepper and a bag of peanuts, which he proceeded to pour into the bottle. Then he leaned backward with his elbows on the counter and perused the passing scene through the store windows. A couple of his men started to come up to him, but with an almost imperceptible shake of his head he sent them away. “How’s your mother?” he asked after a while. “I guess the Veterans Day float took some wind out of her sails.”
“You don’t know my mother if you think that,” I said. Of course, he did know her. He’d gone through Gary High School with her—and Dad.
Mr. Dubonnet drank his pop and peanuts and then rubbed his chin. He had something on his mind, no doubt about it. “Sonny, if there’s ever . . .” He hesitated. “. . . ever anything I can do for you and . . . your mother . . .” He looked around. I guess it was to see if anybody was listening. “. . . you’ll let me know?”
I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything.
“So . . .” Mr. Dubonnet pursed his lips. “So, your dad’s opening up 11 East.”
Now I thought I knew why he was talking to me. “I don’t know anything about 11 East, sir!” I fairly shouted.
Mr. Dubonnet’s face clouded and he looked around again. Shoppers moved past, women intent on groceries with kids in tow. “No, I expect you wouldn’t,” he said after a bit. “Sonny, I’ve always thought your father was a good man. He isn’t a fair man, he’s too hard-shelled in what he believes to be fair, but he’s still a good man. I want you to know that I know that. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir, I guess.”
“Opening 11 East is going to cause trouble. Best you get ready for it.”
I was astonished a Coalwood adult could be so frank to an adolescent not in his family. “Sir?”
He shrugged. “Union trouble, surely, at my level. The men assigned to the section have already come to me. They’re afraid of it and I’ll make their case for them. These Germans come to work here, even if they are under contract, are breaking union rules. You have to be a member of the UMWA to work in this mine and I’ll shortly be reminding your dad of that. It’s not only me, Sonny. People in this town are going to get after your dad on this one. After your family, too, I expect.”
I thought then I knew what he was getting at. There had been boys, sons of union men, who over the years had cornered me at school and tried to beat me up because of what Dad had done at the mine. They had been wasting their time. Every boy in Coalwood could stomp me to a pulp and I’d never tell my dad about it, one way or the other.
“Just so you know,” Mr. Dubonnet said grimly. “Your dad’s out to prove something on this one, that’s what I figure. Maybe he’s just trying to show that the Captain was right after all these years. I don’t know, but just be careful is all I’m saying.” Then he put on his canvas snap-brim fedora, nearly identical to the kind Dad wore, laid his finger on its brim, and walked out of the store, leaving me with my pop to finish and another mystery to unravel.
AS the days counted down to Thanksgiving, Dad continued to stay at the mine until far into the night, going back to work before I got up. One morning, on the way to my rocket laboratory, I found him asleep on the basement stairs. Lucifer had climbed up beside him, his big black tomcat head on Dad’s leg. I woke Dad and he looked at his watch, got up, grabbed his white helmet, and headed back up to the mine. Lucifer and I watched him go.
As much as I wanted to, being fundamentally curious, I never asked Dad about 11 East. The mine was a subject I couldn’t talk to him about in any form. On a spring Sunday in 1958, he had taken me inside the mine while Mom was at church. On the man-trip ride to the face, he had explained to me what the mine meant to him, and how proud he was to be a miner and a leader of miners. At the face, he’d explained the mechanical choreography of the work there, how the continuous miners ate at the seam like great carnivorous dinosaurs, how the crablike loading machines moved in behind to scoop up the coal and scuttle back to the waiting trams. On the way out, he’d put the question to me: Did I want to become a mining engineer? Because if I did, he said, he’d see that I went to college. Jim was going to play football, maybe be a coach. He wasn’t coming back to Coalwood. But Coalwood needed its sons, he explained, and he needed at least one of his to get that “piece of paper” denied him, and then perhaps take his place to keep the good work of coal mining alive so that steel could stay alive and the country, too. I had never seen my dad so earnest, so hopeful, so ready to hear what I had to say. Everything he thought that was right and holy about what he did for a living, and his hopes for Coalwood, he had placed like a sacrifice before me.
On the lift back to the surface, I told my father that Coalwood wasn’t in my future, that I wanted to work for Dr. von Braun. It had been one of the hardest things I had ever done. Because of that, and because I had been a coward when Poppy died, Dad’s present opinion of me was something of a mystery. I had my suspicions, though. I was now, and probably forever, Sonny, the unforgiven son.
11
A DISASTER OF SQUIRRELS
I VISITED JUNIOR, the Big Store drugstore clerk, to see about Quentin’s water putty. “Water putty,” he mused, repeating the words a couple of times. “Water putty, water putty.”
“Water putty,” I said. “If you don’t have any . . .” I almost hoped he didn’t. I could tell Quentin and get back to my studies.
Junior brightened. “Be right back,” he said.
Five minutes later, Junior reappeared, a small paper sack in his hand. He plunked it down on the counter. “Water putty,” he pronounced. “It’s a powder. Just add water, comes out rock hard.”
I was astonished. Was there nothing the company store didn’t stock?
“I guess we’re in business, eh?” Junior grinned, his eyes bright behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.
I guessed we were, indeed. As I went out the door, Junior called out, “Hey, Rocket Boy. Don’t blow yourself up!”
The purchase of the water putty inspired me to take another big step. I was ready to open Miss Riley’s book and begin the calculations required for a more sophisticated nozzle. Quentin hitched over to Coalwood to supervise. It took all night but, after some false starts, I managed to work the equations in the book. Quentin looked it over and nodded. “It’ll do,” he said. “It’ll do.”
The next thing I had to accomplish was an engineering drawing for the machine shop to follow. The new design called for complex angles to be precisely drawn. While I was working, my tongue protruding out of the corner of my mouth, I heard Dad come up the steps. I hadn’t seen him home for days. He glanced in my room and saw me bent over my desk. “Rockets, huh?” he said, coming in to look over my shoulder. I didn’t know why he was taking any interest.
“New nozzle,” I said as the lead in my pencil snapped.
While I sharpened the pencil with a plastic Hopalong Cassidy sharpener, he picked up my drawing, frowned over it for a moment, and then put it down. “Your lead is too soft,” he said. “The thickness of your lines should be consistent.” He pointed at the edge of the nozzle. “See how the line gets wider as you draw it? That’s not professional.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, withdrawing my pencil from the sharpener and blowing the carbon dust from its tip.
“Here,” he said, taking the pencil. He put its point down
on another sheet of paper and turned it back and forth a few times, then showed it to me. “See how that rounds the point? The line will stay the same width longer that way.”
He handed me the pencil and then left, heading for bed. I inspected the point and then put it to paper. He was right. The line was steady and strong. Not for the first time, I wondered what Dad might be able to teach me if only he took the time. I got out the list I was making of things that were bothering me. Pencils, I wrote just below Poppy, Leaving Coalwood, 11 East, and Quentin. As an afterthought, I wrote down Girls, too, but then I thought—no, that was too general a category. I crossed it out, but it was still there where I could see it.
AT Quentin’s insistence, I scheduled an official Big Creek Missile Agency meeting on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Quentin, Roy Lee, Sherman, O’Dell, and I gathered in my room. O’Dell reported that Billy couldn’t make it. He had something he had to do at his house.
Chipper was hanging upside down on the window curtains, watching us intently, and every few seconds irritably flipping his half of a tail. Chipper had half of a tail because he had caught it in the exercise wheel Mr. McDuff, the mine carpenter, had made for him as a gift to my mom. The wheel had chopped Chipper’s tail off clean as a razor, but Chipper never seemed to mind. He loved his little wheel. I’d wake up sometimes at night and hear it churning downstairs. Mom said Chipper might not be going anywhere but he was getting there fast.
I could tell Chipper was thinking about jumping down on Roy Lee, a favorite target, and causing confusion, which was about all he was good for, except for eating up the Hickam family Bible. He’d done a fair job of that, shredding generations of Hickam genealogy for all time. When I pointed him out, Roy Lee frowned over his shoulder at the little gray squirrel. “I’m going to kill him if he jumps on my hair again,” he said, smoothing the slick sides of his DA with both his hands. I didn’t take the threat seriously. Roy Lee would have to deal with my mom if he got after Chipper and he knew it.
It had snowed overnight, and the temperature plummeted. Winter, always long and tenacious in Coalwood, had arrived. Still, it was stifling hot in my room. Mom had gone down to the basement and really stoked the furnace. It was chugging. Sweat was streaming down our faces. “Let’s open the window,” Roy Lee said, pointing at the fogged-up window that faced the tipple.
“Not with Chipper in the room,” I said. “He might decide to get out. My mom would kill all of us.”
“I hate that squirrel,” Roy Lee said. I didn’t hear anybody argue with him, although I could have, a little. I’d always admired Chipper mainly because, for some reason, he seemed to have it in for my brother. Before Jim had gone off to college, Chipper had made a habit of ambushing him on a regular basis. His primary technique was to hang on a curtain and leap on Jim as he went by. A quick bite on my brother’s neck and then a run for Mom completed the squirrel’s modus operandi. Jim might sputter and swear but he knew better than to harm one gray hair on Chipper’s bony head. One time when Jim was asleep on the couch in front of the television, Chipper sneaked up and bit him on the earlobe. That had to hurt. Jim came flying off the couch like a devil had stuck a pitchfork in his britches. I saw the whole thing develop from start to finish, but when Jim looked at me, I was all wide-eyed innocence. It made me ashamed to remember it, which I did, often.
Quentin started off our meeting with a harangue about the new nozzle. “Now is the time for greater strides,” he said. He was sitting on the bed. The other boys were arranged around the room in chairs or on the floor. “I should like an immediate test of the heat-sink ceramic liner that Roy Lee proposed. I have repeatedly suggested to Sonny that he begin the process.” Quentin gave me the sly eye and then continued. “If the test is successful, and I’m confident it will be, we should then construct a rocket of an order of magnitude greater than our present dimensional constructs and proceed to gross elevations and ultimate recognition of our rigor at the national level.”
The other boys looked at each other with puzzled expressions. I translated the Quentinese. “He wants us to test a new nozzle based on calculations according to Miss Riley’s book” (I pointed out the Principles of Guided Missile Design on top of my dresser) “and then also coat it with water putty. Two pretty big chores,” I said grumpily, “and he wants us to do it yesterday. Then he wants us to build a great big rocket, fly it to the moon, and win the national science fair.”
“Precisely so,” Quentin said, “your satirical commentary notwithstanding.”
I took up for myself. “I’ve got the water putty. You know I’ve worked the calculations. I’m doing the drawings the best I can.”
Quentin gritted his teeth and looked at the floor in the manner he had when he was disappointed with me. “And why is your work incomplete?”
“I have to sleep sometimes,” I said. “And study.”
“Sleep?” Quentin sniffed. “My dear Sonny, there will be time for sleep when we work for NASA. But to get there, we must win the science fairs, beginning at the local level. Miss Riley insists that we have a full body of knowledge before we attempt them this spring. To date, we have something quite a bit less than that.”
“I’m working as fast as I can, Quentin,” I said, my blood rising.
Quentin laid his arm across his eyes. It was a Hollywood kind of dramatic gesture. Quentin didn’t get to go to too many movies, but he paid attention to the ones he saw. “Sonny, will you never take our enterprise seriously?” he said beneath his arm. “Perhaps it doesn’t mean much to you whether we do well in these science fairs, you being the superintendent’s son who will undoubtedly be able to afford to go to college, but it makes a great difference to me. My hopes for college depend on these contests!”
I started to remind Quentin that, to my knowledge, no scholarships were handed out in any science fair, including the nationals, but O’Dell, Sherman, and Roy Lee all chimed in, agreeing with Quentin. “You can get the machine shop going on Monday,” O’Dell said. “Why, I bet we can test the nozzle by next weekend if you’d just get on with it.”
“Why don’t you do it, O’Dell?” I demanded.
O’Dell looked puzzled. “Since when am I allowed to go down to the machine shop and tell them to do anything?”
I got up on my high horse. “I don’t tell them. I ask them.”
Roy Lee saw through my posturing. “So ask them. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that I have other things to do.”
“You do, indeed,” he said, giving me the Big Creek lovemaster grin.
“Be sure to run your drawings by me before you give them to the machinists,” Quentin reminded me. “I must ensure their accuracy.”
“Yes, your eggheadedness,” I said. There was no use trying to argue with him and everybody else, so I gave up. It didn’t mean I was going to do what they wanted me to do, but it did mean I was tired of talking about it.
“That’s the style,” Quentin said.
I heard Mom calling me. I held up my hand for Quentin to hold his thought (he always had another one) and then went downstairs to see what Mom wanted. She asked me if the boys wanted cookies and milk. If so, she was prepared to bring up a tray. “No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t think they’re staying long.” It was my hope, in any case.
“I thought I’d ask them to help out on the Christmas Pageant,” she said.
“I’ll send them down to you,” I promised. She looked disappointed I hadn’t said I’d changed my mind about helping her, but I still wasn’t ready to tell her that, even if it was true. It was the West Virginia stubborn streak in me, I supposed.
I went back to my room and was slapped in the face by a gale of frigid air blasting through a wide-open window. The boys gave me a sheepish look, the boys who were in the room, that is. I poked my head outside and saw Roy Lee on the roof, looking over the edge. “What in the world, Roy Lee?”
Roy Lee turned around, and I could see his hair was messed up. O’Dell climbed out bes
ide me. “He let Chipper out,” he said, pointing at Roy Lee and summing up the disaster.
Roy Lee patted his hair. “Damned thing attacked me.”
Nobody needed to say a thing more. I knew what had happened. Roy Lee had opened the window to cool things down, Chipper had sneak-attacked Roy Lee’s hair. Then Roy Lee had chased him and Chipper had become the prodigal squirrel of Coalwood, going out the window into the big bad world to have himself a nice little adventure that would probably end up killing him—and me. “Did you see where he went?” I asked, desperation seeping into my voice.
“I did,” Sherman said, climbing out of the window. He pointed at the mountain behind the house. “He jumped in the maple tree and ran across your yard, through your mom’s rose garden, over the fence, and across the back alley.”
Quentin leaned out the window. “It was interesting watching Chipper make up his mind,” he said. “He looked at the open window for a long time before he decided to go off on his escapade.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” I demanded.
“I felt a certain mammalian connection with his desire for freedom,” Quentin replied archly.
At that moment, I felt a certain mammalian desire to kick Quentin in the seat of his pants, but what was done was done. There was a creek between the back alley and the mountain. I had a rush of hope. Maybe that would stop Chipper! I ducked back into the window, and all the boys followed me as I ran down the stairs and through the front door to avoid Mom in the kitchen. I didn’t have any shoes on and I got my socks wet running through the snow in the yard, but I didn’t care. Retrieving our shoes on the back stoop, we ran across the back alley. I spotted Chipper up a tree that leaned over the creek. There was another tree on the opposite side that was leaning toward it, making sort of a natural limb bridge. “Roy Lee, get on the other side,” I said. “We’ve got to keep him from jumping across.”