by Homer Hickam
We decided to test two of our best mixtures inside devices we hoped resembled rockets. There was some one-inch-wide aluminum tubing under the back porch that Dad had brought home from the mine to make a stand for Mom’s bird feeders. I appropriated it with a clear conscience since it looked as if he were never going to get around to it. I hacksawed off two one-foot lengths. Quentin called the lengths our “casements.” We hammered in a short length of broom handle at one open end and then poured in our powder mixes, crimping the other end with pliers to form a constriction the Life magazine diagram called the rocket “nozzle.” The result was obviously crude, but it was for testing purposes only. We attached triangular cardboard fins with model-airplane glue. We knew the fins would probably burn off, but they would at least give our rockets something to sit on. “We need to see how the powder acts under pressure,” Quentin said. “Whatever the result, we’ll have a basis for modification.”
I was becoming used to Quentin’s way of putting things. What he was saying was that we had to start somewhere, either succeed or fail, and then build what we knew as we went along. It seemed to me, considering all the rockets that I read about blowing up down at Cape Canaveral, that was the way Wernher von Braun and the other rocket scientists did their work too. Without Quentin, I might have been too embarrassed to fail in front of God and everybody. With him, no matter what happened, I felt “scientific.” Failure, after all, just added to our body of knowledge. That was Quentin’s phrase too. Body of knowledge. I liked the idea that we were building one.
After the fins dried, I decided we would test our creations behind my house, over by the creek. I didn’t think there was anything over there anybody would care about if we blew it up. To my surprise, Roy Lee appeared, claiming he just happened to be in the neighborhood. I think he’d actually been hanging around waiting for me and Quentin to come out.
The first rocket emitted a boil of nasty, stinking, yellowish smoke and then fell over, the glue on its fins melted. “Wonderful,” Roy Lee muttered, holding his nose. Quentin silently wrote the result down on a scrap of notebook paper. Body of knowledge.
The second rocket blew up. A good-size chunk of shrapnel twanged off the abandoned car we were hiding behind. A cloud of oily smoke covered us. Dad came out on the back porch and yelled, “Sonny! Get over here right now!” Obediently, we followed the smoke, reaching him as it did. He wrinkled his nose. “Didn’t I tell you not to do this again?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer. Mom came out. “Homer, telephone.” She gave us boys a little smile while she waved the smoke away from her.
Dad went after the call and then came back out on the porch. He ignored Quentin and Roy Lee, his eyes on me. “As soon as I put the phone down, it rings again. People are complaining about the stink and smoke. I want this stopped. Do you understand me?”
Mom quickly amended his meaning. “Not behind the house, dear. You need to find a better place.”
Dad turned on her. “Elsie, they’ve got to stop trying to burn Coalwood down!”
She kept her smile on us boys. “Okay. I’ll make them promise. You won’t burn this wonderful, beautiful city down, will you, boys?”
“No, ma’am!” we chorused.
“You see?”
Dad stared at her and then shook his head and went inside. She followed him, leaving us boys to contemplate what had been, after all, our scorched, stinking failures. Quentin finished his notes. “First sample was too weak, the second too strong,” he said. “Now we know where we are. This is good, very good.”
Across the creek, some younger children gathered—dirty, snot-nosed urchins all. “Hey, rocket boys! Why don’t your rockets fly?” they chorused.
Roy Lee picked up a rock and they scattered, giggling.
I HITCHHIKED to War on Sunday afternoon. Dorothy’s house was across the railroad tracks on the mountain that overlooked the town. Her mother welcomed me with a delighted grin, as if she never wanted to see anybody more in her life. I could see a little of Dorothy in her face, but, unlike her daughter, she was a big, robust woman. Although Dorothy’s hair was a sandy color, her mother’s hair was the color of an orange. Dorothy’s father, a lanky, nearly bald man, stepped in from the kitchen and listlessly shook my hand. The owner of a gas station in War, I could tell he was used to Mrs. Plunk doing most of the talking. Both parents disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me and Dorothy in the living room with our biology books. As it turned out, we didn’t study much. She wanted to know all about my rockets. “I’m so proud just to know somebody who does something so interesting!”
Emboldened, I told her I was going to try to learn as much as I could and go down to Cape Canaveral and join up with Wernher von Braun. “Oh, Sonny,” she said, “I know you’re going to be an important person someday. When you get to Florida, will you write me and tell me all about it?”
I struggled to find the nerve to tell her I didn’t want to write her, that I wanted her to be there by my side. But before I could find my voice, she said, “I want to be a teacher and a mom, the best one there ever was. I so love children—”
“So do I!” I exclaimed, although it was news to me. If Dorothy wanted it, I did too.
We continued talking, about friends and our parents. I told her about my mother—all the little funny things she did, about Chipper, her squirrel she kept in the house, and her mural on our kitchen wall. When I described Dad, all I could say was that he was in charge of the mine and worked a lot at it and, yes, he had caused the suit to be filed on behalf of the Big Creek team. “What’s it like to be Jim’s brother?” Dorothy asked, even though I hadn’t mentioned him.
I really had never given that particular subject much thought. “Okay, I guess” was the best I could do.
“He’s such a good football player!”
I shrugged. “Uh huh …”
“I think you’re much more interesting,” she said.
That brightened me up. It seemed like the right moment to ask her out on a date. “Dorothy, you know Roy Lee has a car, and I was just thinking that maybe you and me—”
“Do you know what, Sonny?” she interrupted. “I’ve never been outside of West Virginia. Isn’t that sad? How about you?”
Her question caused my own to die on my lips. I told her I had been several times to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Mom loved it there. And Dad had driven the family to Canada when I was in the third grade, all the way to Quebec.
She seemed thrilled. “Tell me about Quebec.”
I remembered how clean everything was. The French language had also made an impression. “It sounded real pretty to hear it,” I told her.
“Someday I’ll go there and hear it too,” Dorothy said solemnly.
I was halfway home before I realized Dorothy had diverted me from asking her out. I resolved to do it the next morning. I scanned the auditorium and found her with a group of her girlfriends huddling around a trio of senior football players. Dorothy was wearing a tight pink sweater and a black poodle skirt and was on her knees in the chair in front of them, her hands covering her mouth as she laughed at something one of the boys had said. I edged in beside her and stood awkwardly while she bantered back and forth with him. “Saturday night, then?” he asked, and she nodded eagerly.
“Oh, hi, Sonny!” she said brightly and then slipped past me, to join her future date on a stroll up the aisle. I just stood there, my heart sinking to my toes.
6
MR. BYKOVSKI
Auks I-IV
ON JANUARY 31, 1958, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), led by Dr. von Braun, was ready to launch the Explorer-1 satellite aboard a Jupiter-C rocket. It was to be a night launch, so I stayed up to watch television, hoping for good news. Around 11:00 P.M., a bulletin interrupted the Tonight Show with an announcement that the launch had been a success. Film of the launch was promised momentarily. I started a vigil, lying on the rug in front of the television set, staring at the set, which displayed nothing but a sign stating STA
ND BY. Mom, Dad, and Jim had long since gone to bed. Daisy Mae joined me on the rug, curling up behind me in the bend of my knees. The bitter cold outside had also chased our old tom Lucifer in, and he was curled up in Dad’s easy chair. It was good to have them as company. I reached back and patted Daisy Mae’s head. “Good old girl,” I told her. “Good old cat.” She rewarded me with a purr and a lick on my hand.
Daisy Mae was a pretty cat, a fluffy calico, and was special to me. Four years earlier, when she had wandered in from the mountains, I hid her for a day, secretly feeding her in the basement. When Mom discovered her, she said I’d have to find the kitten another home, pointing out we already had two dogs, a squirrel, and a cat, and that was enough animals. After I pouted about it for a day, Mom gave in. “If you want this kitten,” she said, “you’ll have to take care of her.” I readily agreed, easy enough to do (the agreeing part). Daisy Mae had kittens right off, a pretty litter quickly snapped up by the neighbors. By then, Mom had completely adopted her into the family and, as I knew she would, took care of her as she did all the other animals, feeding her and spending hours picking fleas out of her coat. Mom thought Daisy Mae was such a pretty but delicate cat that she decided we’d have her fixed. To my knowledge, no other cat or dog in Coalwood had ever been neutered before. Mom drove Dad’s Buick with me holding Daisy Mae on my lap all the way to the veterinarian over in Bluefield, forty miles and six mountains away. It was the first time any of our animals had ever seen a vet. After she healed, Daisy Mae became even more loving, waiting for me to come home from school and sleeping on my bed at night. I often talked to her before I went to sleep, especially when I was frightened, or worried. She was just a comfort when everybody else in the family seemed at odds. Of course, I never told anyone else I talked to my cat, certainly not any of the other boys. I’d have never lived it down.
Around midnight (it was a Friday and not a school night), I was surprised by a knock on the front door, and in came Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell to join me. They bedded down on the couch and the floor. We talked some, mostly about girls, but then O’Dell and Sherman kind of drifted off. I’d been meaning to ask Roy Lee about the spot on Dad’s lung, so I took the opportunity. He tucked himself in the corner of the couch and gave me a worried look. “I’ll ask Billy,” he said. Billy was his brother.
“Don’t tell him why. Dad doesn’t want anybody to know.”
Roy Lee gave me a funny look. “Sonny, I already knew. I guess everybody in Coalwood knows.”
I put my head down on the rug and pretty soon I went to sleep. I woke during the night, finding the picture on the television turned to snow. I kept waking up and falling back to sleep. At dawn, I was awake when the picture flickered back on and an announcer said to stand by. I woke the others up and then, without preamble, film of the launch was run. Dr. von Braun’s rocket lifted off the pad in a caldron of fire and smoke and went right up into the night sky without a moment of hesitation. We whooped and cheered at the sight of it. O’Dell got up and did a little jig and then fell back on the couch and put his feet up in the air and made like he was riding a bicycle. I wasn’t so demonstrative, but I felt proud and patriotic. Dad came downstairs, let Lucifer and Daisy Mae out, and found us boys clustered around the set. He looked us over. “Did it work?”
It was the first time I remember him ever expressing any interest in space. “Yessir!” we roared.
He stared at the television, where Dr. von Braun’s rocket kept taking off again and again. “I don’t know what to make of it,” he said. I’d never heard him say anything like that before.
“We’re going into space, Dad,” I said, by way of an explanation.
“Little man,” he replied, “in your case, I think sometimes you’re already there.” I took that as a compliment and beamed. He looked back at me with his eyebrows raised.
Mom appeared in her housecoat. She smiled drowsily at me and the other boys. “Did it work?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“I think that’s wonderful. Don’t you, Homer?”
Dad had gone to the kitchen. “Wonderful,” he said, his voice afar.
Mom looked us over. “You boys want some breakfast? How about some waffles?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Later that same day, I gathered Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell in my room. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said.
Roy Lee fell back on the bed and groaned. “Every time you say that, we always end up in trouble.”
I laid out my plan. I was forming a rocket club to be called the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA), named in imitation of von Braun’s ABMA. Quentin and I were going to be in it. We were going to learn all there was about rockets and start building them. This was to be a serious thing, not playing. If the others wanted to join us, they were welcome. I figured Roy Lee would get up and walk out rather than belong to anything with Quentin in it, but instead he sat up on the bed and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Sonny, I like it. It sounds like fun. Count me in.” I think he was inspired by the success of the Explorer. Sherman and O’Dell readily agreed too.
“The Big Creek Missile Agency is hereby formed,” I said. “I’m the president. O’Dell, I’d like for you to be the treasurer and in charge of supplies. Roy Lee, because you’ve got a car, we’ll need for you to handle transportation. Sherman, if you’d take care of publicity and setting up our rocket range, I’d appreciate it. Quentin is going to be our scientist. Any questions?”
Roy Lee said, “Any girls in this club, or do you have to have a rocket in your pocket?”
“Or in your case a pencil,” O’Dell jeered at Roy Lee.
“You oughta know,” Roy Lee replied, his eyebrows dancing. O’Dell blushed. Trading insults with Roy Lee was never a good idea, even for a bright kid like O’Dell.
“Where’s our rocket range going to be?” Sherman asked me.
“We’ll have to think on that,” I said.
“There’s an old slack dump up behind the mine,” Sherman said. “That might do.”
Slack was the tailings of the mine, coal with too much rock in it. Wherever it was dumped, nothing grew. I thought Sherman had a good idea. “We’ll try it,” I agreed.
“So what do we do now?” O’Dell asked.
“We build a rocket.”
“How?”
“Got to work on that,” I admitted.
After we finished our meeting, not deciding anything else except what time we were going to meet the following weekend, the boys went home. I stopped Roy Lee at the door. “Don’t ask your brother about Dad’s spot,” I said.
Roy Lee nodded. “You don’t want to know how bad it is?”
“No, I don’t.” That about summed it up. I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
AT lunch during the following days, Quentin and I worked on how to build a rocket, sketching out crude drawings and theorizing. We were proceeding mostly by instinct. Despite a search from top to bottom at the McDowell County Library, Quentin still couldn’t find any books to help us. While we worked, both of us ate out of my lunch bag. He told me he usually skipped lunch because eating too much was unhealthy. I noticed, however, that his health regimen didn’t keep him from eating more than half of my food. When I mentioned this to Mom, she started putting in an extra sandwich because, she said, “You’re a growing boy.” I wasn’t fooled. She might as well have written QUENTIN on it in big capital letters.
One day, on our way to class after lunch, Quentin and I were walking past the Big Creek football trophy case, just outside the principal’s office, when he stopped and put his hand on the glass. “Maybe one day we’ll have a trophy in here, Sonny, for our rockets.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Absolutely not. Every spring, science students present their projects for judging at the county science fair. If you win there, you go to the state and then to the nationals. Big Creek’s never won anything, but I bet we could with our rockets.”
Quentin and I saw their refle
ctions in the case when they came up behind us—Buck and some of the other football boys, looking huge in their green and white letter jackets. “What the hell you two morons doing in front of our trophies?” Buck demanded. He squinted past us. “Oh, no! Is that your filthy handprint on our trophy case?”
“Let’s murder these sisters,” a tackle snarled. A growl of agreement rose from the assembled giants.
We turned to face them. “I assure you chaps—” Quentin started to explain.
“I assure you chaps!” Buck mocked Quentin. “You really are a little sister, ain’t you?” He bulled his face in close to us, his chin prickly with whiskers. There was a brown chewing-tobacco stain in the lower left corner of his mouth. I could smell its sweetness on his breath. “I assure you I’m gonna kick your chapped tails. You especially, Sonny. I still owe you, big time.”
Jim came by, his latest girl on his arm. He eased her on down the hall and came over to see what was going on. He saw it was me and said, “Leave them alone, Buck.”
Jim could take him apart and Buck knew it. “I wasn’t going to hurt your little four-eyed sister moron brother,” Buck said, lying through his teeth. “But this little sister,” he said, nodding at Quentin, “I’m going to kick his tail.”
“You can kick both their tails for all I care, but do it somewhere else,” Jim said, dispelling any thought I might have had that he cared anything about me. He nodded toward the principal’s office. “I just don’t want the team to get into any trouble.”
Mr. Turner strutted out of his office at that moment. A young woman was with him. I recognized her as Miss Riley, a Concord College senior assigned to Big Creek as a student science teacher. If what I heard was correct, she would be teaching us chemistry next year. Mr. Turner was a banty-rooster kind of man who kept the entire school under his thumb. He took one look at the assembly in front of the trophy case and said, “If this hall isn’t cleared of boys with letter jackets in two seconds, I know who won’t be playing football anymore.”