by Homer Hickam
“That’s your job, Quentin,” I snapped angrily. I thought I had done everything he wanted, and here he was criticizing. “When are you going to find us a book?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know where else to look. Maybe it’s so secret they don’t write it down.”
The other boys shifted restlessly. “Can we just go launch the damn thing?” O’Dell demanded.
“O’Dell,” Quentin replied, in all sincerity, “I’m worried that your insatiable cupidity will ultimately prove to be something less than a virtue for our club.”
O’Dell stirred from his seat menacingly. “How about I use my insatiable cupidity to beat the crap out of you?”
I knew I’d better head off trouble. I didn’t mind when Quentin showed off his vocabulary, but I suspected the other boys thought he was just being obnoxious, which, of course, he was. “Let’s go. Sherman, lead the way. O’Dell, you carry the rocket. Roy Lee, you got the matches? Quentin, you stay with me.”
Sherman led us up Water Tank Mountain to the old slack dump. We were at least two hundred yards above the mine. I could just make out the top of the tipple above a stand of trees. O’Dell sat the rocket on its base and then used a rock to hold it steady. We all found hiding places behind big boulders around the clearing. O’Dell took a match from Roy Lee. “A rocket won’t fly unless somebody lights the fuse!” he declared. Sherman settled in behind a rock. O’Dell lit the fuse and ran and fell down beside me. We grinned at one another.
The fuse sizzled up inside, and Auk I leapt into the air in a shower of sparks. Six feet off the slack, it made a poot sound and then fell back in a cloud of gray smoke and landed heavily, breaking off its nose cone. There it lay until the powder quit burning. Quentin got to it first, getting down on his hands and knees and peering at the rocket’s base. “The solder melted,” he announced, wrinkling his nose at the sulfurous stench. “It was flying, but the solder melted.”
When it cooled, I picked up the aluminum tube. It stunk, but it had flown. It had gotten only six feet off the ground. But it had flown!
“Prodigious,” Quentin said.
ON Sunday night, I once more went under the fence to see Mr. Bykovski, carrying Auk I with me. He examined it. “Rockets get too hot for solder, looks like. It’s going to take a weld after all.” He pushed his helmet back on his head, a cogitative move. “It is a hard thing to weld aluminum. Steel would be better.”
He went over to his racks of materials, selected a steel tube, and cut off fourteen inches of it with a hacksaw. He handed it to me and I hefted it. “Feels heavy,” I said dubiously.
“Yes, but steel is strong, Sonny,” he said. “An aluminum tube, to be as strong, requires a very thick wall. With steel, the wall of the tube can be thinner. I recommend it to you. I have been thinking, also, about the washer. That is not a good metal. I think we must cut off a thin piece of steel-bar stock, drill a hole in it, and weld it to the base.”
I absorbed all that he had said. “Will you teach me how to cut steel bars and drill them and how to weld?”
Mr. Bykovski looked at his watch. “It would be quicker if this time I do it for you. I will teach you how to do it yourself another time.”
My conscience was pricked, just a little. “I wouldn’t want to get you into any trouble,” I said.
He shrugged. “Your father will not find a better machinist than me, especially one who will work the hoot-owl shift. I think, anyway, you should tell your father. He ought to be proud of what we do here.”
“When our rocket flies—really flies—I’ll tell him then,” I promised halfheartedly.
He beamed. “Good. This next one will fly, I think. I will have it ready by this Wednesday.”
I decided to push my luck. “Mr. Bykovski, could you make me two?”
He made me three. On the following Saturday, Auks II, III, and IV were ready, built exactly as he had described. Once more we went up to the clearing behind the mine. “A rocket won’t fly unless somebody lights the fuse!” O’Dell said, explaining since he’d said it when our first rocket flew, he thought maybe it was a good-luck thing to keep saying it.
Sherman wanted to light the fuse, but I worried whether he could get away from it fast enough. “Don’t you worry about me,” he said with such intensity that I instantly gave in. In a lot of ways, Sherman was the least handicapped person I’d ever known. He lit the fuse and ran back to a rock. Flames burst from Auk II. It sat for a moment, spewing smoke and sparks and rocking on its fins. Then it jumped ten feet into the air, turned and zipped into the woods behind us, ricocheted off an oak tree, rebounded back to the slack, twisted around once, twanged into the boulder Quentin and I were hiding behind, jerked twenty feet into the air, coughed once, and dropped like a dead bird. I had kept my eye on it the whole way, but Quentin had more wisely buried his face in the slack, his hands over his head. I tapped him on his shoulder and he jerked his head up, slack spilling out of his nose. “It’s down,” I told him as I crawled to my feet. O’Dell ran to Auk II and began a wild little dance over it. “It flew! It flew!” he sang.
“It almost killed us,” Roy Lee said hoarsely as he climbed out of the ditch he’d thrown himself into. He walked up to O’Dell and waited patiently until the boy had stopped gyrating. He kicked at the hot rocket. “But it did fly, didn’t it?”
We were all shaking with delight. “I lit the fuse!” Sherman crowed.
Quentin brushed himself off and inspected Auk II. His nose was smudged black. “We need to come up with a better guidance system before launching again,” he said.
The rest of us weren’t having any of it. Our rocket had flown! We ached to see what the next one would do. This time, Roy Lee lit the fuse and tripped, cursing. He barely made it to a boulder before the rocket blasted off, twirled around once, twanged off a maple tree, bounced off the ground near us, and then thudded into the side of the mountain above us, nearly burying itself into the dirt.
While the rest of us joined O’Dell in another celebratory dance, Quentin dug out Auk III. “I’m telling you we’d better not launch again until we figure out how to make these things go straight,” he said.
Roy Lee gleefully set Auk IV up. “We came up here to fly these rockets, and that’s what we’re going to do.” Without further ado, he lit the fuse. Caught unawares, the rest of us had to scramble to get behind our rocks before the fuse reached the powder.
With a whoosh, Auk IV climbed smoothly into the air and headed down the mountain. I raised a cheer that turned into a strangled yelp when I realized the rocket was heading for the mine. I had a momentary vision of our rocket falling down the shaft like a torch being dropped into a deep tank of gasoline. When I saw that the smoke trail was angling off to the left of the tipple, I knew we’d escaped at least that particular disaster. Still, I had little doubt there was going to be trouble. I felt a deep heaviness in my stomach, like all my insides were going to come out through my toes. I felt like kicking myself for launching so close to the mine. I was the leader of the BCMA, and it was my fault. How could I have been so stupid? I knew the answer, couldn’t blame it on anybody but myself. I’d agreed to launch it close to the mine because I didn’t really think our rockets were going to work.
There was no sense in all of us going after our rocket, so after a brief discussion, it was decided Quentin and I would go. He and I, after all, had designed what had suddenly become to O’Dell “the blamed thing.” The others headed off to circle around the mine to the road. I steeled myself for what was going to happen next, hoping that maybe, just maybe, Auk IV had fallen somewhere where we could retrieve it without being seen. We silently stole down the mountain and slipped like ambushing Indians through the open gate in the back of the tipple area, where Dad’s grimy little brick office was. It was Saturday, but Dad was at his office as he often was on the weekend. He saw us before we saw him. The miners had a special yell, a “whoop,” when they wanted to get attention in the mine, and they often used it on the surface too. I h
eard Dad’s whoop and looked up and saw him on his office porch with two other men. They were dressed in coats and ties. They had to be men from the Ohio steel mill that owned us, since they were the only men I ever saw wearing a coat and tie in Coalwood except at church or the Club House when there was a party. I spotted Auk IV lying forlornly in the coal dust beside the railroad track. There was a big chunk out of the brick wall of Dad’s office. It didn’t take a genius to realize what had happened, or how it would be perceived. The BCMA had rocket-attacked the coal company.
In the darkness of the mine, the signal from one miner to another to approach was a roll of the head so the light from his helmet lamp made a circle. They were so used to doing it, I’d seen helmetless miners, forgetting they were outside in the full daylight, roll their heads when they wanted somebody to come in their direction. Dad rolled his head at me, and I got to him in a hurry. He was so mad he was huffing and puffing. I was afraid he was about to go off into another one of his coughing fits. “I told you to stop this, didn’t I?” he barked. “You could have killed somebody with that thing!”
I was at least relieved to hear our rocket hadn’t hit anybody. Dad came off the porch and picked the rocket up. “This looks like company property to me. Where did you get it?”
I was too scared to reply. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being hit or anything like that. My father had hit me only once in my entire life. I was about seven years old and playing with my dog Littlebit around the old mine shaft down from the tipple. I climbed inside the old shack that enclosed it, just to look down the deep, dark hole. Littlebit came inside and ran to me. I don’t think he even noticed the hole until he was almost on it. He leapt for me and almost made it. It was a six-hundred-forty-foot drop, straight down. Dad brought Littlebit’s limp body home that night and, while I wailed, turned me over his knee and gave me three good whacks. Then he helped me bury Littlebit on the other side of the tracks. I made him take his helmet off so I could say a prayer. “Dear God,” I whimpered inconsolably. “Please kill me too, because I got Littlebit killed.”
“That’s a terrible prayer!” Dad gasped. “Do it over. Pray for Littlebit’s soul or something.”
“All right,” I said dutifully. “Dear God, please let Littlebit be happy in heaven, and please don’t kill me even though I deserve it.”
“Gawdalmighty, what do they teach you in that church?” My father only made rare appearances at the Coalwood Community Church. He put his big hand on my shoulder. “God, he’s a child. Bless him”—he hesitated—“as best You can.” Then he plopped his helmet back on. “Come on. Let’s go see what your mom’s got for supper.”
Now one of the Ohio men laughed and the other one joined in, their laughter like braying mules. “Looks like your boy wants to be a rocket scientist, Homer!”
“He doesn’t know what he wants to be,” Dad said, leveling a steely gaze at me. “But I know what he is.” He held up the rocket. “He’s a thief.” He inspected the weld at the base. “And so is the man at this mine who helped him.”
7
CAPE COALWOOD
DAD WASN’T INTERESTED in him, so Quentin escaped from Coalwood, hitching a ride at the mine entrance. The other boys, I assumed, had gone home to hunker down for the day, hoping without much hope that their parents wouldn’t hear about our errant rocket. Dad ordered me to walk home. He followed about an hour later and called me out into the yard. I waited while he went down in the basement and returned with my chemicals in a cardboard box. “Come with me,” he said. “I want you to see this.” I followed him out the back gate and then watched as he poured everything into the creek. I knew he was justifiably angry, considering how stupid I’d been to launch our uncontrolled missiles so close to the mine. On the other hand, these were my chemicals paid for with my money. I’d gotten up on a lot of cold, snowy mornings to deliver the paper and earn that money. “This is the end of it,” he said over his shoulder as he shook out the last bag of saltpeter, “and this time I mean it. Collect stamps, catch frogs, keep bugs in a jar, do whatever you want. But no more rockets.” He handed me the box filled with empty bottles and bags. “Now, who helped you?”
I remained silent, but he said, “Bykovski. Got to be.” I felt my face involuntarily slide into an expression of dismay. Was there anything in Coalwood my dad didn’t know about? “I’ll take care of him,” he assured me.
“What are you going to do?” I asked urgently.
“That’s none of your business, little man. Now go up to your room and stay there until your mother gets home.”
When Mom got home, Dad stopped her at the door. I could hear them talking, but not exactly what was being said. Then I heard her thump up the stairs. She came into my room. “Tell me what happened,” she said wearily.
I gave her the whole story, about Mr. Bykovski and everything. “I wondered where you were sneaking off to in the night,” she said after I finished. “Don’t look so surprised. You think I don’t know what goes on in this house?”
“Are you going to help me?”
She shook her head. “I don’t see how I can. The Ohio men told Mr. Van Dyke what happened. Your dad’s pretty embarrassed, and I guess he has a right to be.”
“What should I do?”
“I don’t know. You messed up pretty good this time.”
“I guess I’m finished,” I said.
“If you give up that easy,” she replied with a shrug, “I guess you are.”
“I’m worried about Mr. Bykovski,” I said, looking for sympathy.
“You should be,” she answered coldly. “You used him. Ike and Mary have always had a special liking for you, and you knew it. You should have thought of what could happen to him before you got him involved.”
I sweated out the rest of the day and then, as soon as the shift change was made, slunk up to see Mr. Bykovski. I was relieved to see him in his shop. He was working on the big steel-cutting maw of a continuous mining machine. He saw me at the door and waved me inside. “You see, Sonny?” he said, pointing at the maw. “The operator hit rock instead of coal. The teeth have been broken off. I will build new ones.”
I picked up one of the broken teeth on his worktable and fingered it. “Did—did my dad talk to you?”
“Your father was pretty mad,” he said over the shriek of a milling machine. “This is my last night in the machine shop. He reassigned me to the mine. I’ll be operating a loader on the evening shift.”
Revulsion and shame welled up inside me. I had acted stupidly, but Dad’s reaction was vile and despicable. “My dad’s the meanest man in this town!” I erupted angrily.
Mr. Bykovski stopped the milling machine and came over and grabbed me by my shoulder, giving me a good shake. “You must not say this about your father. He is a good man. I acted without his permission, and I deserve to be punished.” He released me and patted me on the side of my arm. He smiled a sad smile. “Anyway, perhaps it is a good thing he has done. I will make more money loading coal.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bykovski,” I said. “Mom said I took advantage of you, and she’s right.”
“Look, I have something for you,” he said. He went to the tool crib and carried out a cardboard box. Inside were four new Auks, complete with wooden nose cones. “I already had them made up. They should keep you going for a while. Now, go on. I have much work to do.”
I clutched the box as if it were filled with gold and diamonds. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”
“You want to thank me?” He nodded toward the box. “Make these fly. Show your dad what you and I did together.”
My father had clearly, in no uncertain terms, told me to stop building rockets. The BCMA was now an outlaw organization. I don’t know why, but that felt good. I had the urge to hug Mr. Bykovski, but resisted it. Instead, I stood straight and tall and said firmly, and what I hoped was manfully, “Yes, sir. You can count on me.”
He nodded and went back to work. So did I.
ON the fo
llowing Monday, I gathered the boys in the Big Creek auditorium before morning classes. As expected, the gossip fence had instantly informed their parents about our assault on the tipple. Surprisingly, all of the other boys had gotten off without punishment. Roy Lee’s mother had laughed it off. O’Dell’s father thought it was pretty amazing the rockets had flown at all and, after all, no harm had been done. Sherman’s father had counseled him to think about things a little more before he did them, but that was all. I was the only one who’d been yelled at. When I reflected on it, I suspected the other parents thought it was funny that we had spooked the Ohio men, who were not exactly beloved by the average Coalwoodian. I’d heard Roy Lee, who got the union talk from his brother, say the steel mill muckety-mucks were far more interested in themselves than us, that they’d sell us down the river in a second. My father, on the other hand, believed a major part of his job was keeping the men from Ohio happy. Well, I had myself to keep happy. “We’ve got to get a new rocket range, someplace out of Coalwood,” I told the boys.
“You mean we’re not quitting?” O’Dell asked.
“We’re outlaws now,” I said, savoring the word. “We’re not ever going to quit.”
Sherman was with me. “They clear-cut all the timber off Pine Knob,” he said. “It’s not on company property. We could go up there.”
“Are you kidding?” Roy Lee griped. “We’d have to climb two mountains to get up there.”
“Do you have a better plan?” Sherman countered.
“I sure do. How about we stop all this rocket stuff and get us some girlfriends?”
That interested O’Dell. “How do we do that?”
“First I’d need to teach you the ropes.”
“Like what?”
Roy Lee’s eyebrows went up and down. “Like unsnapping a bra with one hand.”
“Pine Knob it is,” I decided, ignoring Roy Lee’s nonsense. “This Saturday, meet at my house. We’ll leave from there. Quentin?”