Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  I didn’t know if I was drunk or not but I was definitely sick. I had just spent an hour bowing before a ditch with O’Dell. Tag drove each of us home in turn. Punishment, swift and sure, was left to the family. Roy Lee’s mom reached up and grabbed Roy Lee by the ear and dragged him inside the house. Red came out onto the porch, heard the story, and pointed at the shed in the backyard. The last I saw of O’Dell was him going down the path, head down, his dad close behind.

  While Mom contemplated me, I held with crossed arms to my chest the sack with our four quarts of precious ’shine. Tag had let us keep it when we had explained its real purpose. Amazingly, he’d believed us. “Gawdalmighty, boys,” he cried. “Whyn’t you tell me? I’d of bought you some!”

  I wasn’t so drunk or sick that I had forgotten how to manipulate Mom. “Mom, I’m really, really, really sorry!”

  She laughed. “Not this time, buster. There’s no way you’re going to wash the dishes or clean up your room or cook kidneys or anything else to get out of it. You’re going to take John Eye’s firewater down to the basement—oh, I know it’s for your rockets—and store it with all the other crazy stuff you’ve got down there that could probably blow this house to kingdom come. Then you’re going to go upstairs and take a shower and brush your teeth and get the smell of liquor off you and then you’re going to bed.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it until I figure how I can do some real damage to you,” she said with relish.

  “But I’ve got to get this over with!” I cried.

  “Well, that’s just tough, isn’t it? Now get out of my sight. I never could stand a drunk.”

  “Mom …” I was whining. “Hit me or think up something I got to do!”

  She shook her head, smiling. “Nope.”

  I sunk to my knees and put my head in her lap. “I’m sorry,” I said into the folds of her dress. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Mom touched my hair and then chuckled. “Sonny, I’m not going to punish you at all,” she said. I looked up, stifling a smile. She saw the look on my face. “You little brat. I ought to hit you with a two-by-four. But promise me you’ll never drink that stuff again and we’ll call it square. Now, take it into the basement and then do what I told you.”

  I stood up stiffly, nodded, and went down into the basement with my white lightning. When Dad got home, he saw the jars and recognized them for what they were. He was in the kitchen with Mom when I came out into the hall after worshiping the toilet bowl again. “Elsie, did you know—”

  “Yes, Homer.”

  “You plan on providing him an olive for his martini next?”

  “We’ll see.”

  God bless my mother, I thought, and went right back inside the bathroom. Even with my head inside porcelain, I heard her and Dad laughing. It was the first time I’d heard either one of them laugh for a very long time. I wished I could have joined them.

  THE temporary general superintendent sent down by the steel mill in Youngstown was a man named Fuller. He talked like a machine gun and had about as much charm. He didn’t move into the turreted house on the hill, but took up lodging in the Club House, reinforcing his status as a temporary fixture. He called in Mr. Dubonnet and the other union leaders and told them that fair terms were to be given, but the houses were going up for sale immediately and if anyone didn’t like it, he’d have to get out. Fuller dared the UMWA to go on strike, waving the last union agreement. “There’s nothing in here that says we have to provide you a house, water, electricity, or anything else. Any man says different is a damn fool idiot.”

  Mr. Dubonnet had to back down, and the sale proceeded. A utility out of Bluefield snapped up the sewer and the water lines, and within a month, the people in Coalwood started receiving bills for what they had always thought was naturally free. FOR SALE signs also went up in front of the churches. It felt, I heard people say at the Big Store, as if the company had chased even God out of town.

  Reverend Richard and his congregation scraped up enough money to buy his church and save it. Reverend Lanier, however, lost his job when the Methodists took up the mortgage on his church. Although the Reverend was a Methodist too, he had been a salary man for the company, and the denomination considered him tainted and wanted no part of him. The poor man had to pack up and leave. Mom said he went to California. I later heard he was on the radio out there. While the Methodists cast around for someone willing to come and serve in the wilds of West Virginia, the Coalwood Community Church, for the first time anyone could remember, was padlocked.

  Then things really got bad. Mr. Fuller ordered a big cutoff and many men were given their pink slips. Mr. Dubonnet called an emergency meeting at the union hall and invited the company to explain. Mr. Fuller didn’t show. I heard Dad tell Mom he had been ordered not to go either. Mr. Dubonnet came once more to our house. Dad let him inside, and their fight was loud and long. I listened from my basement lab as they shouted at each other for nearly an hour, neither man giving an inch. I heard Mom finally go into the living room and order them both out. “I just won’t abide this yelling in my house, Homer, John,” she said. They were still arguing as they went out the door, bound for who-knew-where.

  I just kept working on my rockets. I mixed the moonshine into a zinc-and-sulfur compound and was rewarded with a thick gray composite that could be shaped like modeling clay. I squeezed it inside a toilet-paper roll and let it dry under the hot-water heater until the next weekend. With the other boys in attendance, I tossed the tube in the fire and had the door half closed when it went off with a huge whoooosh! The velocity of the burn was such that it flung the door open, blew the stovepipe loose, and sent white smoke gushing into the yard, along with us and the dogs. If that wasn’t bad enough, when I went inside the kitchen, smoke had billowed through there too. I raced through the house, throwing open every window. The boys followed me inside and started flapping magazines and towels to clear it out.

  Mom and Dad weren’t home. Dad was at the mine. Mom was shopping in Welch. Men hanging around the filling station jumped the fence and came running, sure the house was on fire. Someone yelled that they had called the fire department in Welch. “Call back and stop them!” I pleaded. “There’s no fire! It’s okay!”

  I heard stomping on the back porch, and Tag came inside followed by a short man shaped like a powder keg. I hadn’t met him, but I knew who he was. “What the hell is going on here?” Mr. Fuller demanded, a stogie between his clenched teeth.

  “Aw, it’s just them rocket boys,” Tag said, grinning. “You boys didn’t set your white lightning on fire, didja?”

  “White lightning?” Mr. Fuller shifted his cigar, giving me the evil eye.

  With the other boys still fanning smoke out the windows, I quickly explained to the new general superintendent about our rocket-building and what the alcohol was for. He scowled. “Where do you fire these things?”

  “Way out of town,” I assured him. “A long way away.”

  “Still on company property?”

  “Just barely,” I said, wincing. His disapproval was made clear by the sour expression on his face.

  Mr. Fuller turned on his heel and left, with the constable close behind. When Mom got home, she wrinkled her nose at the sulfurous odor, then went into the basement and looked at the ruined hot-water heater. Quentin and I came down and stood beside her, waiting for the wrath this time I knew I wouldn’t escape. Her shoulders were shaking—I thought from crying—but then I saw she was actually laughing. She put her arm around my waist and then pulled in Quentin too. “You boys really are the light of my life,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to get rid of this old coal-fired thing for years. I’m going to make Homer get me an electric one now. Why, I’ll just open up the spigot anytime I like and there’ll be all the hot water in the world. Just like the Rockefellers!”

  Quentin stopped at the gate as he was leaving. “You have the greatest mom in the world,” he said.

  I looked o
ver my shoulder. “She’s got her ways,” I said. I was just hoping she’d use them on Dad when he got home and saw what we had done.

  Although I’m certain Mr. Fuller filled his ear about it, Dad made no comment on our abortive test. Junior from the Big Store arrived the next day with an electric hot-water heater. It was installed and humming happily as I loaded Auk XXII-A on top of the washing machine. I had decided to do the loading of our new propellant in sections, a few inches at a time. I pushed the zinc-sulfur-moonshine gumbo I had dubbed zincoshine into the casement with a broom handle. After each section, I placed the open end of the casement toward a fan to dry. After three hours of drying, I loaded another section. It was slow going, but after a week I had the rocket ready. We put up our posters and Basil wrote us up in his paper. Over two hundred people showed up the next weekend. The word was out that either we were going to have a great flight or we were going to blow the hell out of Cape Coalwood, just as we had Elsie’s hot-water heater. Either way it was going to be a great show.

  Auk XXII-A didn’t disappoint. It leapt with savage energy from the pad, zinged up the guide pole, and split the valley with its thunder. The crowd backed away and ahhed as the rocket disappeared at the top of a tremendous column of white, boiling smoke. Quentin spilled out of the blockhouse and aimed his theodolite skyward. “Where is it?” he screamed. “I can’t see it.”

  None of us could. It had flown out of sight, its huge smoke trail abruptly terminated. A little belatedly, I started to worry over where it might land. I looked at our audience. “Get in your cars!” I yelled at them, waving my hands. Some of them waved back.

  “Time!” Quentin yelled out.

  “I’ve got it!” Sherman replied, looking at his father’s watch, which he had borrowed.

  I kept searching the sky for any sign of the rocket, but I knew with my poor eyes I wasn’t likely to be the one who saw it first. The crowd across from us was likewise engaged in searching the skies. I was starting to sweat. Where was it? Billy spotted it first. “There!” he yelled, pointing. I looked, but I still couldn’t see it. Then I heard it. It was whistling as it came in. It sounded as if it were coming right on top of us. We ducked back into the blockhouse. A tree cracked behind us, and then there was the unmistakable sound of steel slamming into packed mountain earth. Whump!

  “Thirty-eight seconds!” Sherman said.

  Roy Lee looked at Sherman. “What good is knowing the time?”

  Sherman explained our new calculations to Roy Lee. Quentin and Sherman and I had discussed it after Miss Riley had begun to teach us a little Newtonian physics. A falling body accelerated toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second. The equation for finding how far it fell was S = ½at2, or sixteen times the square of the time it took to fall. If one assumed a rocket took approximately the same time to reach altitude as it did to come back down—a good assumption, since zincoshine burned so fast our rockets were essentially free flyers the moment they left the pad—then dividing the total time of flight in half, squaring it, and multiplying the result by sixteen gave us a rough estimate of the altitude reached. Half of thirty-eight was nineteen, the square of nineteen was 361, and sixteen times that was … “Five thousand seven hundred and seventy-six feet!” Sherman announced gleefully.

  We had done it! We had broken the mile barrier! Billy had run after the rocket and came racing across the creek holding it high over his head. The crowd cheered from the road while we danced. “A mile! A mile! We flew a mile!”

  “We’re going into space,” Quentin said after we stopped to take a breath. “We’re really going.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you all about that,” I said. I gathered the boys in close. “I read where space begins at thirty miles. I think we can reach it.”

  At that moment, everybody was taken with the idea, even Roy Lee. “Let’s do it!” he roared at the sky.

  “Prodigious!” Quentin bellowed back. “We’ll be on the cover of Life magazine for sure!”

  After we’d calmed down a little, we cleaned up around the blockhouse and carried our rocket and our other gear to Roy Lee’s car. I saw the last truck of the observers leaving. It was a company truck, and the man driving it was Mr. Fuller.

  The silvery cylinder burst forth in a fiery column of smoke and flame, racing the very wind as it soared into the sky, a messenger of these boys of Big Creek, these boys who use their brains, not brawn, who play not football but with Apollo’s fire. Oh, fleet rocket, your thunder wanders down the valleys, startling deer and mountaineer alike. How high? the crowd cries. How high will it fly? The boys race from their bunker and go running down their slack-dump firing range, the joy of youth and scientific interest playing across their delighted faces. Oh, Rocket Boys, oh, Rocket Boys, how sweet thy missile’s delight against the pale blue sky. A mile, a mile, they cry. We’ve flown a mile!

  The McDowell County Banner, October 1959

  To take our next steps, we needed to work the nozzle equations in my book. But we were missing an important number—the specific impulse of zincoshine. Specific impulse was, my book said, the thrust a rocket produced when it burned a pound of fuel in one second. To make this calculation, we needed a way to hold a rocket in place while we measured its thrust. O’Dell talked Mr. Fields, the butcher at the Big Store, into lending us a scale—the kind that hung from a ceiling and was used to weigh sides of beef—with the promise that it would be returned without so much as a scratch.

  At Cape Coalwood, we clamped the scale to the underside of a plank that sat on two sawhorses. Then we ran a wire from the hook of the scale to the back side of one of our rockets, which lay inside a slightly wider tube, which was in turn clamped to the plank with a piece of fashioned strap steel. The idea, which was Quentin’s, was that the rocket would move down the tube when ignited and be tugged to a stop by a cable attached to a spring, which was attached to a vertical stake in the ground. We’d watch the spring with binoculars and see how much thrust was produced and then divide the answer by the pounds of propellant burned and how long it took. The result would be the specific-impulse number.

  We had a good idea, but we got a bad result, a situation not totally unknown to the BCMA. When we lit the rocket (we called it Auk XXII-B), it threw out a plume of flame and smoke and zipped down the tube, jerked the plank off the sawhorses, dived into the slack, bounced once, and then, with unerring accuracy, turned in our direction. It whizzed over the blockhouse, the scale on its stake following on the cable, bounced off a rock in the creek, and then flew up into the woods, where it was stopped by a hornet’s nest. The hornets, not pleased, chased us up the mountain on the other side of the slack. We crouched there and watched as they marauded up and down the slack like a tornado. It was nearly dusk before they finally dissipated. We found the scale in pieces. The BCMA spent the next four Saturday afternoons cleaning up the butcher shop to work off our debt. Mr. Fuller came up from his office and watched us. He didn’t say anything, just watched, and we knew he knew what we had done.

  Our next attempt at measuring thrust was a variation on the theme, this time using Mom’s bathroom scale. I was absolutely certain that I would return it unscathed, because this time we had a better test-fixture design (it happened to be mine). Using some channel iron found behind the machine shop, we built what looked like a miniature oil derrick and placed it over the scale as a brace for a tube that held the rocket. We positioned a mirror on the “derrick” so that we could read the scale with binoculars. We put the rocket, this one named Auk XXII-C, nose-down inside the tube and ignited it. The scale and the concrete pad was in its way, so all it could do was push. I knew it would work, and it did. In the first seconds of the firing, we were able to read the scale. Then, unfortunately, Auk XXII-C became a rocket jackhammer. It bounced up and down in its tube, attacking the scale. The scale survived the first few impacts, but then we heard a big sproinggg and it flew apart. When the propellant hissed down to completion, Mom’s bathroom scale was scattered all over the pa
d.

  I tried to put the scale back together as best I could, managing to at least fit all the parts back inside and pound the frame back into a rough semblance of its previous shape. I put it back where I found it, hoping Mom wouldn’t notice. The toilet was still flushing when Mom banged open the door to my room. “I want a new scale,” she announced. “And I want it within one day.”

  O’Dell came up with the new bathroom scale for Mom. I didn’t know where he got it and I didn’t ask him. I just placed it in the bathroom and backed out.

  We’d gotten ourselves into trouble—no surprise by then—but we also had a shiny new working specific-impulse number for zincoshine. Almost anything was possible now.

  THE flight of Auk XXII-D was to be the final flight in the series that used countersunk nozzles. I had the machinists make just one minor adjustment with Auk XXII-D, to shrink the size of its fins. I had noticed our old rocket-candy rockets wobbling when they broke the plane of the mountains and got caught in the wind stream coming across the ridgeline. Smaller fins, I thought, would keep that from happening and make them fly truer. What I didn’t know was that O’Dell and Sherman, who had taken on the job of setting our rockets up on the pad, had also noted the wind’s effect on flight. They had been compensating for it by aiming our rockets at a small angle against whatever direction the wind was coming. It was, as it happened, a very windy day when Auk XXII-D made its flight. The wind was whistling across the slack dump. I studied the clouds. They were scudding along in the same direction, toward the west away from the center of Coalwood.

  In an attempt to compensate, O’Dell and Sherman leaned the launch rod more than usual against the wind. I was too busy getting the blockhouse organized to notice what they were doing. I ran our ignition wire, made sure Quentin and Billy had set up their theodolites, checked with Roy Lee that our new fancy-looking firing console was in working order, and then called for the boys to go to their stations.