MRS. BOGGS DROVE a white 1959 Buick that was in perfect condition and had fins and decorative holes in the side, like cars in a book of New Yorker cartoons my father had. In one cartoon, a mother bird, who has made her nest in one of the holes, is shown with worm in beak flying desperately after her open-mouthed chicks as the car speeds down the road. Mr. Boggs, an electrical engineer at the Cape, liked to fix up odd or old cars. Their other one was a Saab, a make of car no one had ever even heard of. He was also building a real one-man plane on their dining-room table, ruining the TV reception for the whole neighborhood by running power tools most evenings, not to mention forcing his family to eat all their meals on the breakfast bar in the kitchen.
On Saturday morning, Marly and I slid into the backseat of the Buick, while Mrs. Boggs got in behind the wheel and adjusted the pillow she sat on so she could see over the dashboard. She was like a miniature mom. Marly was already taller than her mother, and I almost was. Mrs. Boggs clicked her tongue disapprovingly when she saw I was wearing shorts. She and Marly both had on long pants, and Mrs. Boggs was carrying a sweater. It was a typical Florida January day, cloudless blue sky, little humidity, maybe eighty degrees, the kind of weather that fooled people who visited in winter into moving to Florida from the frozen North. It seemed perfect to me as well. For real Floridians, eighty seemed chilly. If it dipped to seventy-five, Mrs. Worthington wore a wool coat when she walked her beagle, Sir Galahad, and she made him wear one as well.
“My shirt’s got long sleeves,” I said to fend off any request on Mrs. Boggs’s part that I go back into the house and change. I was wearing a white pressed cotton shirt with a button-down collar, a Lady Manhattan, which I had borrowed, more or less permanently, from Carol. It was my current favorite, and I liked to wear it with the sleeves rolled up. Mrs. Boggs smiled; she had a great smile. “Well, then here we go,” she said, and we backed down their curved driveway.
On TV, with all the cameras showing close-ups of a smoking, soon-to-be launched rocket, the Kennedy Space Center looked densely inhabited, as if the rockets and gantries were thick as skyscrapers in Manhattan. Driving across it that day with the Boggses, at first all I saw was swamp. Except for the two-lane road we were on, the Space Center looked as Florida must have before the Spanish came, or even the Seminoles. An alligator was swimming in the ditch beside the road. A flock of white cattle egrets strolled in the tall grass.
The Space Center was on Merritt Island, that finger of land between the mainland and the beach, and not on Cape Kennedy proper, which belonged to the Air Force, though all the Mercury and Gemini shots had gone from there, as would Apollo 1. Even I, no daughter of a space flight engineer, knew that much. Soon though, all the manned flights would blast off from new pads being built here. We followed the signs for the visitors’ center, passing a few low cement-block buildings that weren’t nearly as nice or as new as the ones at my father’s junior college. In front of one, in the middle of a sandy lawn, stood a flagpole and a couple of very tiny, barely more than flagpole-size, rockets. Still, they were rockets. It was amazing to think there were men inside those drab tan buildings planning a trip to the moon. I found the thought both scary and oddly touching, as if I’d found out the whole thing was being run by brave children still too short to reach the water fountain without a boost from their mom.
Marly pointed out the window. “That’s the administration building, and over there is the astronaut training building where my dad works.” The first had three stories and the second had two. As we passed, I spotted Mr. Boggs’s dark green Saab in the freshly black-topped parking lot.
“He’s working on a Saturday?” I said, surprised, though I don’t know why. My own father had been heading out to the office as I left to go to the Boggses’ this morning. Marly nodded.
“They’re running some Apollo 1 tests,” she said.
We parked in front of the visitors’ center. “Stay together,” Mrs. Boggs said as Marly and I tumbled out of the backseat and raced for the door. Inside was a Mercury capsule to peer into, the hull still blackened from its fiery return through the atmosphere to Earth. I pressed my face to the glass of the window. The inside was hardly bigger than a garbage can.
“Wow,” Marly said, exchanging glances with me. It was hard to imagine someone our size inside it, let alone a full-grown man, some kid’s dad, tumbling through space. Behind me I heard the clickity-clack of Spanish and of other languages I couldn’t begin to guess. Mrs. Boggs heard the Spanish, too, and was soon deep in a conversation with a couple of science teachers from Madrid. We all filed into an auditorium for a quick movie about the challenges of sending men into space. Two volunteers got to taste a bite of freeze-dried scrambled eggs, just like the astronauts ate. I waved my hand like crazy, but the tour guide, a college girl, picked two cute boys her age. Then we piled onto a blue-and-white bus for a tour.
Even though it was still a cool day, the bus was baking inside. It had too many windows that let in too much Florida sun for its air-conditioning to keep up. It was a greenhouse on wheels. Someone had stuck gum in the air-conditioning vents by the seats Marly and I chose in the front of the bus, blocking what air there was. We sat sweating, waiting for the tour guide to finish checking tickets and get on board, so we could head wherever we were supposed to be going. The bus driver, an older man with a faded blue Marine Corps tattoo on his right arm, took off his hat and wiped the back of his neck with a red bandanna. Even Mrs. Boggs, who worked on her lawn on the hottest of summer days, was fanning herself with a pamphlet titled Food in Outer Space. “Help!” Marly said, banging on the window, trying to attract the guide’s attention. She made a face, sticking out her tongue and rolling her eyes horribly. “We’re burning up in here!” The tour guide frowned over her shoulder at us and took her time.
“You may have noticed we’re having a little trouble with the air-conditioning on these buses,” she announced over the intercom when she was finally on board and we began moving. “But we’ll be getting off at regular intervals, so I hope you will all bear with me”—she glanced in Marly’s direction—“and be a little patient.”
Luckily, it didn’t take us five minutes to reach our first stop, the Vehicle Assembly Building, which our guide said was the world’s largest building. “Is tallest?” someone asked in accented English.
“Not the tallest,” the guide said. “The largest. In volume,” she added. She sounded a little vague about that, and since Mrs. Sack hadn’t gotten to volume in our science class yet, I couldn’t help her. But it was so big that when I stood next to it, one hand touching its metal skin, I couldn’t tilt my head back far enough to see the top. Through the giant bay doors, tall enough for a Titan rocket to roll through, I could see men in blue jumpsuits moving across a vast concrete floor. I thought maybe they were astronauts. I asked Marly.
“I doubt it,” she said. “But they are here. My dad said they were. They have their own jets they fly in from Houston just before a launch or for tests. Those are probably just engineers like my dad.”
When the VAB was first built, our tour guide was saying, the building had an unexpected problem. It was so vast that clouds formed inside and it actually began to rain. They’d solved that problem with giant fans that circulated the air and blew the clouds away. Now a bald eagle, maybe confusing the building with a mountain, had built a nest on the roof. Everyone who worked at the Kennedy Space Center—she touched her own breast to include herself in that number—was proud to have on hand their own living national symbol. Besides, the Center was an official bird sanctuary. Science living side by side with nature. Now, if we would get back on the bus …
We all backed across the parking lot, going slowly, hoping to see the eagle and not eager to get back in our baking seats. No bird appeared to thrill us and delay boarding. “If I die, you can have my Classics comic books,” Marly whispered to me as we climbed back in. We drove the length of the crawlway, the two miles of crushed rock highway that later Apollo rockets would have to
creep down to reach their new launchpad, which we could see in the distance, still under construction.
Then we crossed the causeway over the Banana River, onto the sandy reaches of the Cape itself. The vegetation was browner here, and as soon as we stepped out of the bus, I could smell the salt air, hear the waves breaking on the beach just beyond the sand dunes. No wonder they had to build the VAB, a giant garage, to put together the Apollo rockets. Salt air was hell on metal. On the new boardwalk on Cocoa Beach where my dad liked to go to swim, the nails had bled great rust stains across the wood, and the heads were already popping off, leaving the boards warped and loose.
We piled off the bus at each successive empty pad, the one where Alan Shepard had blasted off, then John Glenn, Gus Grissom, the Gemini shots. They looked rusty and abandoned. Mercury was ancient history, Gemini already yesterday’s news. At one, a black turkey vulture, as big as a dog, sat on top of the blockhouse. One of the cute boys who had gotten my bite of freeze-dried scrambled eggs threw a chunk of concrete at him, but he didn’t move. He looked like he was waiting for something. The tour guide checked her watch. I sensed our tour was taking longer than it should, no doubt because of everyone’s reluctance at every stop to get back in the oven. Even the driver seemed happy to just stand there in the shade of the gantry, watching the tourists burn up film, in no hurry to get back inside a vehicle he had more reason to despise than we did. Mrs. Boggs had drifted back to speak Spanish with the schoolteachers, maybe translating what our guide had said about this particular launch site, maybe talking about Castro and Cuba. Marly stood beside me, uncharacteristically silent and frowning.
“We’ll have to hurry,” our tour guide said finally, making shooing motions with her hands. “If we want to get close to Pad 34 and see Apollo 1. They’re running tests this afternoon, and they’ll close that road soon to buses.” Then we did hurry, all of us. This was what we had been waiting for. We wanted to see the moon ship on its gigantic Titan rocket.
We were already too late. “Darn,” our tour guide said when she saw the striped wooden barricades blocking the road. The bus driver started a wide, clumsy U-turn, the bus swaying as the front right tire bumped off the road into the sand. “If you’ll just look out the right window …” our guide started, but everyone had already spotted the gantry, the tall red-and-white rocket, and piled to my side of the bus. Even at that distance, a good half mile at least, it looked huge. When it took off, the ground we were on would shake as if the Titan were a volcano. I looked over at Marly, but her eyes were closed. She wasn’t looking at Apollo 1 at all.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m hot,” Marly said.
“Don’t worry,” I said, not taking her complaint very seriously. My shirt was stuck to my back with sweat, but Marly’s was perfectly dry. “You won’t melt.”
The bus engine revved as we finished our laborious turn, and there was an audible moan from the passengers as we headed away from Apollo l’s launch pad. Just then I saw what looked like a delivery van coming toward us, heading for the pad. None of the other passengers seemed to notice. “Marly?” I said, poking her. She sat up.
“It’s them,” she said. “It’s the crew bus.” Our bus driver honked as the van passed. Through the small rear windows I could just make out three men inside, dressed in NASA white. I waved, and the closest one raised his hands and waved back. “That,” Marly said, “was Gus Grissom.” The rest of the passengers, belatedly realizing the van was not full of tourists or mere technicians, rushed to the back trying to see what Marly and I had seen. Behind us the barricades across the road were moved aside for the Apollo 1 crew.
“Stop the bus,” one of the Spanish schoolteachers called out. “Por favor.”
The tour guide clapped her hands. “Now, now,” she said. “That was exciting, but we have to keep going. We still have lots to see. We’re heading back to the Astronaut Training Center where you’ll get to view a replica of the Command Center in Houston as well as a diorama depicting astronauts landing on the moon.”
Coming back across the causeway, the Space Center looked like a barely settled colony on some distant, half-drowned planet. We parked not far from Mr. Boggs’ Saab and went in to see the fake control room. I knew that the real one was in Houston for no other reason than that, as a Texan, President Johnson had wanted it to be. Replica or no, Mission Control looked just like it did on TV. The far wall was a map of the world crisscrossed with lighted flight paths, flanked on either side by boards that during countdown ticked off each system as it went Go. I leaned on the metal railing of the balcony and imagined the noise, sweat, and cigarette smoke that must fill the real one during a launch, flight, and splashdown. I wished my father was a real engineer. I thought about Gus Grissom’s sad dog-brown eyes, and wondered what it would be like to have an astronaut for a dad. Could he take you up in his private jet?
Then we went through a metal door into a large, darkened room whose floor and walls had been painted the flat black of space. On a pile of Florida beach sand was a mock-up of the Lunar Excursion Module, a little aluminum travel trailer on stilts, that would take the astronauts down to the moon itself. A mannequin just like one in the men’s department at Sears, but wearing a space suit, was backing down a ladder from the module, one silver-booted foot poised above the sandy surface of the moon. Our guide was talking about the benefits to mankind that space travel would bring. Already there had been such scientific progress. “If someone tries to tell you that NASA is a waste of money,” she said, “you tell them that without the Space Program, we wouldn’t have Teflon.”
I looked up, trying to see how tall the room was. It seemed to disappear a story or two up in darkness. I wondered what it had originally been used for. I turned to ask Marly. Since her father worked here, I figured she would know, but she wasn’t beside me. Then I heard a thud, and for a second I thought the mannequin astronaut must have slipped off his ladder and fallen backward onto the lunar sand. The silver man was still holding on, one foot away from being the first mannequin to leave a footprint on a planet besides ours. Then I heard Mrs. Boggs.
“Yi, yi, yi,” she said from somewhere behind me. Everyone swiveled. There was Marly lying on the black floor, eyes closed, arms outstretched, hands limp above her head. The sound I had heard, like a melon falling off the back of a truck, had been that of my best friend’s unconscious body hitting the ground.
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Marly moaned, her hands moving slightly. Mrs. Boggs rushed to her. I heard her knees hit the concrete floor as she knelt at Marly’s side. I tried to go, too, but the tour guide grabbed me by the shirt collar and pulled me back. “Give her room,” she said. A guard appeared from somewhere, then an ambulance. By then, Marly was sitting up, head between her knees, still very pale. “I think she just fainted,” the tour guide said to the ambulance attendant. “But better safe than sorry.” She clapped her hands to get the group’s attention. “Because of the ambulance, we’ll exit by the rear door,” she said. “If you’ll all just follow me.” They did, casting glances at Marly, still sitting on the ground with her mother beside her. I hesitated, unsure what to do. If I went back to the visitor’s center with the others, how would I get home? Just then Mrs. Boggs saw me and waved for me to come over.
She looked tiny, very worried. “I’m going in the ambulance with Marly,” she said. “Mr. Frank”—she pointed at the gray-haired guard—“will take you upstairs. Mr. Boggs will drive you home, or, if he can’t, he’ll call your mother.” She kissed me quickly on the forehead, then followed Marly, who was strapped onto a gurney, into the ambulance.
The guard tapped me on the shoulder. He looked about five minutes away from retirement, like maybe he was already someone’s great-granddad. “This way, Missy,” he said. We went through an unmarked door, climbed one flight of concrete stairs, and came out in the middle of a large room filled with metal desks. It was almost empty. “Everybody’s busy with that test,” the guard said. “Hope your dad isn’t
out there too.”
“My dad?” I said. Obviously Mrs. Boggs’s rapid, accented English had left him a bit confused about just who was who. “Mr. Boggs’s not my dad.”
“Here you go,” he said, not listening to me. He pointed at a metal desk with a black-and-white name plate that read PAUL BOGGS. On one side of the desk there was a gold-framed picture of Mrs. Boggs with little curling snapshots of Marly and her two brothers stuck into the corners. The chair behind the desk was empty. “I’d better ask when he’s due back,” the guard said. He went away, spoke to a man in a white short-sleeved shirt and bow tie at a desk on the far side of the room, nodded, then made his way back to me. “He’ll be back in an hour if everything goes as scheduled. You be okay?” I nodded. “If you need a rest room,” he said, naming the one thing that in his experience all kids needed sooner or later, “there’s one out that door and down the hall on the right. Don’t go off this floor though. Not without no ID.”
So I sat. Men came and went, none taking much notice of me. Maybe people often brought their kids out on Saturdays, on days when there were astronauts to see. I looked through Mr. Boggs’s drawers, but except for some rubber bands and a slide rule there wasn’t much. This was just as boring as hanging around my own dad’s office at the college, where the only excitement on weekends was sneaking in to look at the urinals in the deserted men’s bathrooms. I wished I could be out at the pad where the tests were being done. That would be exciting. The man with the bow tie went out and came back with a couple of cold Cokes. He set one on Mr. Boggs’s desk as he passed. “Here,” he said. “Your dad may be awhile. Control is taking their own sweet time on this one.”
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