by Homer Hickam
Jim wandered outside and contemplated Roy Lee and me. He was eating a Moon Pie. “Idiots,” he concluded. “Tenth-grade morons.” Jim always had such a way with words. He squashed the entire pie in his mouth and chewed it contentedly. One of the neighbor girls down the street saw him and came over and stood as close to him as she dared. He smirked and rubbed his hand along the small of her back while she shivered in nervous delight. Roy Lee stared in abject admiration. “I don’t care if they break every bone in my body, I got to go out for football next year.”
“Look, look!” O’Dell suddenly cried, jumping up and down and pointing skyward. “Sputnik!”
Roy Lee sprang to his feet and yelled, “I see it too!” and then Sherman whooped and pointed. I stumbled off the steps and squinted in the general direction everybody was looking. All I could see were millions of stars. “There,” Mom said, taking my head and sighting my nose at a point in the sky.
Then I saw the bright little ball, moving majestically across the narrow star field between the ridgelines. I stared at it with no less rapt attention than if it had been God Himself in a golden chariot riding overhead. It soared with what seemed to me inexorable and dangerous purpose, as if there were no power in the universe that could stop it. All my life, everything important that had ever happened had always happened somewhere else. But Sputnik was right there in front of my eyes in my backyard in Coalwood, McDowell County, West Virginia, U.S.A. I couldn’t believe it. I felt that if I stretched out enough, I could touch it. Then, in less than a minute, it was gone.
“Pretty thing,” Mom said, summing up the general reaction of the backyard crowd. She and the other ladies went back to talking. It was a good hour before everybody else wandered off, but I remained behind, my face turned upward. I kept closing my mouth and it kept falling open again. I had never seen anything so marvelous in my life. I was still in the backyard when Dad came home. He opened the gate and saw me. “Aren’t you out late?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to break the spell Sputnik had cast over me.
Dad looked up at the sky with me. “Are you still looking for Sputnik?”
“Saw it,” I said finally. I was still so overwhelmed I didn’t even tag on a “sir.”
Dad looked up with me for a little longer, but when I didn’t elaborate he shook his head and went down into the basement. I soon heard the shower running and the sound of him scrubbing with brushes and Lava soap. He’d already showered at the mine, most likely, but Mom wouldn’t let him in the house if he had a molecule of coal anywhere on him.
That night, in my room, I kept thinking about Sputnik until I couldn’t think about it anymore and fell asleep, waking in the night to hear the men miners scuffling their boots and talking low as they went up the path to the tipple. I climbed up on my knees and looked through the window at their dark shapes walking alongside the road. The hoot-owl miners were the safety and rock-dust crew, assigned the task to spray heavy rock powder into the air to hold down the explosive coal dust. They also inspected the inside track, the support timbers, and the roof bolts. It was their job to make certain the mine was safe for the two coal-digging shifts. The way they looked in the moonlight, slogging in the dust, I could imagine them to be spacemen on the moon. The tipple, lit up by beacons, could have been a station there. I let my imagination wander, seeing the first explorers on the moon as they worked their way back to their station after a day of walking among craters and plains. I guessed it would be Wernher von Braun up there, leading his select crew. The men crossed the tracks and I saw the glint of their lunch buckets in the tipple light, and I came slowly back to reality. They weren’t explorers on the moon, just Coalwood miners going to work. And I wasn’t on von Braun’s team. I was a boy in Coalwood, West Virginia. All of a sudden, that wasn’t good enough.
ON November 3, the Russians struck again, launching Sputnik II. This one had a dog in it—Laika was her name—and by her picture in the paper, she looked a little like Poteet. I went out into the yard and called Poteet over and picked her up. She wasn’t a big dog, but she felt pretty heavy. Mom saw me and came outside. “What are you doing to that dog?”
“I just wondered how big a rocket it would take to put her into orbit.”
“If she don’t stop peeing on my rosebushes, she’s going into orbit, won’t need any rocket,” Mom said.
Poteet whined and ducked her head in my armpit. She might not have known every word, but she knew very well what Mom was saying. As soon as Mom went back inside, I put Poteet down and she went over and sat by one of the rosebushes. I didn’t watch to see what she did after that.
My dad got two magazines in the mail every week, Newsweek and Life. When they came, he read them from cover to cover and then I got them next. In a November issue of Life, I found, to my great interest, drawings of the internal mechanisms of a variety of different kinds of rockets. I studied them carefully, and then I remembered reading how Wernher von Braun had built rockets when he was a youngster. An inspiration came to me. At the supper table that night, I put down my fork and announced that I was going to build a rocket. Dad, musing into his glass of corn bread and milk, said nothing. He was probably working through some ventilation problem, and I doubt if he even heard me. Jim snickered. He probably thought it was a sister thing to do. Mom stared at me for a long while and then said, “Well, don’t blow yourself up.”
I gathered Roy Lee, O’Dell, and Sherman in my room. My mom’s pet squirrel, Chipper, was hanging upside down on the curtains, watching us. Chipper had the run of the house and loved to join a gathering. “We’re going to build a rocket,” I said as the little rodent launched himself at my shoulder. He landed and snuggled up against my ear. I petted him absently.
The other boys looked at one another and shrugged. “Where will we launch it?” was all that Roy Lee wanted to know. Chipper wiggled his nose in Roy Lee’s direction and then hopped off my shoulder to the bed and then to the floor. The sneak attack was Chipper’s favorite game.
“The fence by the rosebushes,” I said. My house was narrowly fitted between two mountains and a creek, but there was a small clearing behind Mom’s rose garden.
“We’ll need a countdown,” Sherman stated flatly.
“Well of course we have to have a countdown,” O’Dell argued, even though no one was arguing with him. “But what will we make our rocket out of? I can get stuff if you tell me what we need.” O’Dell’s father—Red—was the town garbageman. On weekends, O’Dell and his brothers helped out on the truck and saw just about every kind of stuff there was in Coalwood, one time or another.
Sherman was always a practical boy with an orderly mind. “Do we know how to build a rocket?” he wondered.
I showed them the Life magazine. “All you have to do is put fuel in a tube and a hole at the bottom of it.”
“What kind of fuel?”
I had already given the matter some thought. “I’ve got twelve cherry bombs left over from the Fourth of July,” I said. “I’ve been saving them for New Year’s. We’ll use the powder out of them.”
Satisfied, Sherman nodded. “Okay, that ought to do it. We’ll start the countdown at ten.”
“How high will it fly?” O’Dell wondered.
“High,” I guessed.
We all sat around in a little circle and looked at one another. I didn’t have to spell it out. It was an important moment and we knew it. We boys in Coalwood were joining the space race. “All right, let’s do it,” Roy Lee said just as Chipper landed on his D.A. Roy Lee leapt to his feet and flailed ineffectually at his attacker. Chipper giggled and then jumped for the curtain.
“Chipper! Bad squirrel!” I yelled, but he just closed his beady eyes and vibrated in undisguised delight.
Roy Lee rolled up the Life magazine, but before he could raise his arm, Chipper was gone in a flash, halfway down the stairs toward the safety of Mom in the kitchen. “I can’t wait for squirrel season,” Roy Lee muttered.
I appointed myself chief
rocket designer. O’Dell provided me with a small discarded plastic flashlight to use as the body of the rocket. I emptied its batteries and then punched a hole in its base with a nail. I cracked open my cherry bombs and poured the powder from them into the flashlight and then wrapped it all up in electrical tape. I took one of the cherry-bomb fuses left over and stuck it in the hole and then glued the entire apparatus inside the fuselage of a dewinged plastic model airplane—I recall it was an F-100 Super Sabre. Since Sherman couldn’t run very fast—and also because it was his idea—he was placed in charge of the countdown, a position that allowed him to stand back. Roy Lee was to bring the matches. O’Dell was to strike the match and hand it to me. I would light the fuse and make a run for it. Everybody had something to do.
When night came, we balanced our rocket, looking wicked and sleek, on top of my mother’s rose-garden fence. The fence was a source of some pride and satisfaction to her. It had taken six months of her reminding Dad before he finally sent Mr. McDuff down from the mine to build it. The night was cold and clear—all the better, we thought, for us to track our rocket as it streaked across the dark, starry sky. We waited until some coal cars rumbled past, and then I lit the fuse and ran back to the grass at the edge of the rosebushes. O’Dell smacked his hand over his mouth to smother his excited giggle.
Sparkles of fire dribbled out of the fuse. Sherman was counting backward from ten. We waited expectantly, and then Sherman reached zero and yelled, “Blast off!” just as the cherry-bomb powder detonated.
There was an eyewitness, a miner waiting for a ride at the gas station across the street. For the edification of the fence gossipers, he would later describe what he had seen. There was, he reported, a huge flash in the Hickams’ yard and a sound like God Himself had clapped His hands. Then an arc of fire lifted up and up into the darkness, turning and cartwheeling and spewing bright sparks. The way the man told it, our rocket was a beautiful and glorious sight, and I guess he was right as far as it went. The only problem was, it wasn’t our rocket that streaked into that dark, cold, clear, and starry night.
It was my mother’s rose-garden fence.
3
MOM
WOODEN SPLINTERS WHISTLED past my ears. Big chunks of the fence arced into the sky. Burning debris fell with a clatter. A thunderous echo rumbled back from the surrounding hollows. Dogs up and down the valley barked and house lights came on, one by one. People came out and huddled on their front porches. Later, I would hear that a lot of them were wondering if the mine had blown up or maybe the Russians had attacked. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything except a big orange circle that seemed to be hovering in front of my eyes. When I regained some sensibility and my vision started to come back, the circle diminished and I started to look around. All the other boys were sitting in the grass, holding their ears. With relief, I noted that it didn’t look as if any of them had suffered any serious damage. Roy Lee’s D.A. needed work though, and O’Dell’s eyes were as wide as the barn owls that nested on the tipple. Sherman’s glasses were nearly sideways on his face. The dogs had retreated to the farthest corner of the yard. They were crawling on their bellies back toward us when Mom came out on the back porch and peered into the darkness. “Sonny?” she called. Then I think she saw the burning fence. “Oh, my good Lord!”
Dad, holding his newspaper, came out beside her. “What happened, Elsie?”
At my father’s appearance, the other boys suddenly jumped up and ran off. I guess he had such a fierce reputation at the mine they didn’t want any part of his wrath. I fleetingly caught a glimpse of Roy Lee leaping over the still-standing part of the fence, clearing it by a good yard. The others went through the gap we’d just blown out. I could see them clearly because the standing part of the fence was on fire. I thought to myself, I ought to follow them, maybe take up residence in the woods for a year or two. But I was caught. Running would just put off the inevitable. I answered Mom with a croak, my mouth not working quite right yet. She replied, “Sonny Hickam. You get over here!” Rubbing my ears in an attempt to stop them from ringing, I lurched over to the back porch and waited expectantly for one of my parents to come down off it and kill me.
“Elsie, do you have any idea what’s going on here?” Dad asked.
Mom, bless her, had figured it all out. “Sonny asked us if he could build a rocket, Homer,” she replied, as if she were amazed he had not perceived the perfectly obvious.
Dad puzzled over her statement. “Sonny built a rocket? He doesn’t even know how to put the sprocket chain back on his bike when it slips off.”
“We’ll see,” Mom sniffed. “Sonny, what happened to the other boys?”
I had learned that sometimes when I was in trouble with Mom, the best thing to do was to adopt the complete-idiot strategy. “Other boys?” I asked, most sincerely. Even under the greatest duress, my capability to dissemble was scarcely diminished. Once, when I had used Mom’s best and only wheelbarrow as a kind of summertime sled to go careening down a gully on Substation Mountain, and then misplaced the legs I had removed and the screws that bolted them on, and then dented the barrow almost beyond recognition on a boulder that popped up in my way, and flattened the tire of the wheel, what I’d said then when I came home with the remnants of the thing was that I’d spotted some great flower dirt up in the mountains and would’ve brought Mom some home with me “if this blame ol’ ‘wheelbare’ hadn’t fallen apart!” Mom wasn’t fooled, but she got to laughing too hard to swat me at full power. Whatever it took, sometimes, is what I did.
“Elsie, I don’t care about any other boys,” Dad told her. “Just take care of this one before he embarrasses me all over Coalwood.”
Mom laughed—a short, bitter bark. “Oh, my, yes. Heaven forbid you be embarrassed! Why, the next thing you know, the men would stop shoveling coal for you!”
He stared at her. “They don’t shovel. They haven’t shoveled in twenty years. They use machines.”
“Isn’t that interesting!”
I recognized that Mom and Dad were about to go off onto one of their standard quarrels and eased back into the darkness of the yard and stood with the dogs. Dandy nuzzled my hand and Poteet leaned against my legs. I could feel her trembling, or maybe it was me. Dad gave Mom one of his standard speeches about how the mine provided for her and us boys, and she said back her usual piece about how the mine was just a big, dirty death trap. When Dad went back inside, shaking his head, Mrs. Sharitz next door called softly to Mom and she went over and leaned on the fence. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could guess. I could see Mrs. Todd waiting patiently at the next fence beyond. Mrs. Sharitz would cross her yard with the news from Mom and pass it on to Mrs. Todd and so on down the fence line. I knew within an hour all of Coalwood would know about my semi-sort of rocket and how I’d roped the other boys into more of my foolishness, and everybody in town would have a good laugh at my expense. When Mom signed off with Mrs. Sharitz, she walked over and stood beside me. She looked at the smoldering ruin of her fence and sighed deeply. I braced myself. Now that we were alone, she was free to deliver her scorn with both barrels. “Didn’t I tell you not to blow yourself up?” she asked in a surprisingly soft voice.
Just then, I heard the black phone ring and saw Dad through the living-room window as he ran to answer it. I hoped it wasn’t anybody complaining about the noise. Mom looked at the window and then up the road to the tipple. I knew the best thing I could do was to stay quiet while she was chewing things over in her mind. After a while, she pointed at the back porch and said, “Go sit on the steps. We need to talk, you and me.”
“I know what I did was wrong, Mom,” I said in a bid to preempt whatever she had in mind.
“Homer Hadley Hickam, Junior. It wasn’t wrong. It was stupid. I said go sit!”
I did as I was told with the enthusiasm of a prisoner going to his own beheading. Dandy crawled up beside me, whimpered briefly, and laid his head on my feet. Poteet was off chasing bats. I watc
hed her launch herself into the air, do a double twist, and come down running, a big grin on her black muzzle.
I thought to myself, I’m really in for it this time. Mom was a master at delivering creative punishment. Once, after Sunday school, and in my usual rush to get outside and play, I wore my church shoes in the creek to hunt crawl-dads with Roy Lee. When Mom cast an eye on my soggy Buster Browns, she said, “I swear, Sonny, if your head gets any emptier, it’s going to float off your head like a balloon.” For punishment, she dictated that the next week I had to go to church in my stocking feet. It didn’t take long before everybody in town got wind of what I was going to have to do. I didn’t disappoint, walking down the church aisle in my socks while everybody nudged their neighbor and snickered. The thing was, though, I had picked out the socks, and my big toe poked through a hole in one of them. Mom was mortified. Even the preacher couldn’t keep a straight face.
Mom stood before me and crossed her arms and stuck her chin out. Dad said she looked just like a Lavender when she did that, and it usually always meant trouble. “Sonny, do you think you could build a real rocket?”
She so startled me by her question that I forgot my usual coyness. “No, ma’am,” I said, straight up. “I don’t know how.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know you don’t know how. I’m asking you if you put your mind to it, could you do it?”
I searched for her trap to make me do something I didn’t want to do. I was sure it was there. It was just a matter of finding it. I thought I’d better say something. “Well, I guess I could—”
Mom stopped me. She knew I was just going to ramble. “Sonny,” she sighed, “you’re a sweet kid. I love you. But, doggone it, you’ve just been drifting along like you were on a cloud your whole life, making up games and leading Roy Lee and Sherman and O’Dell off on all your wild schemes. I’m thinking maybe it’s past time you straightened up a bit.”