by Homer Hickam
“Wonderful!”
“Well, there you are. Rocket scientists feel wonderful too, and who else you gonna want to share wonderful feelings with if it ain’t a girl?”
“It is nice to be able to tell somebody when our rockets work,” I admitted. I involuntarily thought of Dorothy. It had meant so much to me to tell her about each rocket. Now there was no one except Daisy Mae.
“If you’d got yourself a date for tonight, you could impress the hell out of her about this rocket. She wouldn’t be able to get out of her panties fast enough!”
“Roy Lee, you are so full of it.”
“Maybe so,” he said, grinning, “but I get my share.”
There was a cold wind coming down the valley. We ran up our launch flag on the blockhouse and tilted our launch rod accordingly. Billy ran down to the far theodolite this time, and Roy Lee went over to the crowd along the road to chase them off the slack. We were about the only amusement left in town, it seemed. The traffic had increased to the point that Tag had to come down and direct it.
Roy Lee’s date for the formal was there, having come across the mountain to be properly impressed. She was one of the majorettes, a shapely, happy girl. I saw Roy Lee put his arm around her. She slapped his hand away when he let it drift down over her breast.
We went through our countdown and I turned the firing switch. There was a puff of smoke at the rocket’s base, but nothing else happened. I checked the connections in the blockhouse and tried again. Nothing. I ran a bare wire across the battery terminals and got a rewarding spark. The problem wasn’t there. “Don’t go out there,” Quentin told me even as I walked outside the blockhouse and studied the rocket with binoculars. “It could be smoldering.”
The crowd of people on the road was restless. I saw Pooky come out of the crowd, unlimbering a .22 rifle from his shoulder. He knelt behind a rock and took a bead. “Boss’s boy!” he yelled. “You want me to shoot?” With just those few words, I could tell he was drunk.
I waved Pooky off. I thought I knew what had happened. “I think the cork fell out. The curved throat probably doesn’t hold it as well.”
“So what do we do?” O’Dell worried, looking over at our audience, which was audibly grumbling about the delay. Other men had joined Pooky, and they didn’t look entirely friendly. I wondered if they were the unemployed men he led.
Pooky moved in a little closer, holding his little rifle at the ready as if our poor old Auk was going to attack him. “Gawddamned Homer’s boy. Can’t do anything right,” he called.
“We’ve got to go out and fix it,” I said.
“And get our butts blown up?” Roy Lee asked. “I don’t think so.”
“I know what we can do,” Sherman said, and he did.
Sherman and I crawled on our bellies, pushing in front of us our makeshift armor of corrugated fin taken from the blockhouse roof. Pooky laughed at us, and the men with him hooted. “Y’all boys look like some kind of silver turtle,” Pooky yelled.
I ignored his taunts. When Sherman and I got within arm’s reach of our Auk, I inspected its base. There was a smudge of soot there, spreading up onto the fins. There was no sign of smoke. The Nichrome wire was lying in the charred remains of the cork, which had either slipped or been pushed out of place by the aborted exhaust. I carefully pulled the wire back and inspected it. It was oxidized and useless. I had carried some old firecracker fuse with me and carefully threaded it up into the nozzle until I could feel it stick in the zincoshine compound. “Sherman, this fuse is three years old. My guess is it’s going to burn real fast. As soon as I light it, we’ve got to make a run for it. Are you ready?”
Sherman nodded. “Ready.”
I lit the fuse. It flashed. There was no time to do anything but dig our faces into the slack. Pooky, who had crept in closer, didn’t even have time for that. The shock wave of the launch knocked him down, and he got up, howling, and ran to the blockhouse and leapt behind it. Auk XXIV zipped out of sight, the crowd ahhing and the other boys running out to Sherman and me to pick us up. “Time?” I yelled, my ears still ringing as they peered into our slack-smudged faces.
“Thirty seconds and counting,” Roy Lee called.
“Don’t see it yet!” Billy reported from his theodolite. “Wait, there it is!”
I looked up at a small, dim yellow line of smoke. The highsulfur zincoshine at the top was doing its job, showing us where the rocket was. It was still climbing. “Forty-eight seconds,” Roy Lee called when the rocket finally hit downrange, this time on the slack.
“Eighty-five hundred feet,” I said after a moment of mental calculation.
Pooky stood by the blockhouse, brushing his nasty old coveralls off, holding his .22 by the barrel. “You boys are crazy, aintcha?” he said, and spat tobacco juice on the side of our building. He pulled the rifle up and aimed it skyward, jerking off a round. “Now, looky there, I just put somethin’ up prob’ly higher’n you.” He inspected us, squinting, his yellow upper teeth grimacing in a smile. “Ol’ Homer’s boy got the money to build rockets while the rest of the town’s starvin’ to death.”
Quentin whooped downrange, and I let myself forget Pooky and raced down the slack. Quentin already had the rocket dug up and was inspecting the nozzle. I stuck my nose in it too. There were pits, but the erosion was much reduced. We grinned at each other. “Superprodigious,” Quentin whistled.
THAT night, I sat in the auditorium watching the boys and girls dancing at the Christmas formal. The band, a colored one out of Bradshaw, was lively. All the girls were dressed in pastels, formal dresses with lots of petticoats their mothers had sewn for them or they had sewn for themselves. The boys were in coats and ties. A vision in pink and lace came down the steps from the gym floor and sat down beside me. Melba June Monroe, an eleventh grader, looked me over. She was a pretty girl. I had always liked her. “Hi, Sonny,” she cooed. “Boy, is my date boring. I don’t even know where he is. Why is a tough little rocket boy going stag to the formal? Do you wanta dance?”
I wanted to dance, and I wanted to take her home in Roy Lee’s backseat afterward. Did both, as it turned out. Rocket-boy fame.
IN January 1960, the newspapers ran small articles about the arrival in Charleston of a senator from Massachusetts who was running for president of the United States. His name was John F. Kennedy. Another senator, Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, was also planning appearances in the state. The articles said the West Virginia primary was going to be a battleground between the two men for the presidency. The photographs of Kennedy showed a man with a boyish grin and a pile of hair, and I thought he looked more than a little out of place standing in a crowd of West Virginians, even the polished crowd up in Charleston. When I heard him answer questions on the television shows coming out of Charleston and Huntington, he sounded nasal, with a strange, peculiar accent that wasn’t even standard Yankee. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever feeling comfortable voting for him. One snowy evening in late February, when even Dad was trapped in the house, he suddenly erupted over the newspaper. “Old Joe Kennedy made money bootlegging and now he figures to buy West Virginia for his son. Well, he’ll probably be able to. Democrats in this state can be bought about as cheap as they come.”
I had sudden insight that maybe Dad and I could talk politics, even if no other subject worked for us. I gave it a try. “If he’s rich, maybe he’ll bring some money into the state,” I offered, speaking of old Joe or John F. Kennedy, take your pick. “We could sure use some around here.”
“These people are the worst kind there is in the world,” he said. “And their money’s dirty.”
I thought it pretty good that Dad and I had actually traded a thought. I kept going, saying I thought the worst thing there was in the world had to be the Russians. Didn’t we walk around every day waiting for one of their H-bombs to be dropped on us out of the sky, even down here in southern West Virginia? I sat back, waiting for him to tell me how bad he thought the Russians were too, but he surprised me.
“There are Americans I’m a lot more afraid of than the Russians,” Dad said. “Like those who think it’s okay to use the government to force you to do what’s against natural law.”
“What’s natural law?” I wondered, too late for an answer, because Dad was on a tear.
“Greedy men are the others to keep your eye out for. They’ll buy up a company just to run it into the ground. They’ll let you work only four days a week, but demand the production of seven.”
I knew Dad was speaking from experience. I opened my mouth to reply, but he went on. “Some will tell you that greedy and compassionate men are in competition,” he said, “but I’m here to tell you they’re not. They run in different but parallel packs, but both will destroy this country before they’re done.”
I remembered then all his books upstairs in the hall. He had places in his head I couldn’t go, and didn’t want to either. While I was trying to think up an excuse to leave, Dad leaned forward and predicted, “Dwight David Eisenhower will be the last good president this country will have for a very, very long time.”
Just then a bullet pinged through a pane in the living-room window, skipped across the top of his chair where his head had been not a moment before, and lodged in the far wall.
23
SCIENCE FAIRS
Auk XXV
MOM AND DAD looked at the hole in the wall and then at the little crater in the windowpane and talked quietly about what it would take to fix the damage. The bullet had been accompanied by the sound of screeching tires, so apparently whoever had shot at us had taken off down the valley. “A little plaster and paint will take care of it,” Dad said of the hole in the wall. “There’s glass at the tipple carpentry shop. I’ll get McDuff to cut us a pane.”
Mom considered the upholstery of the chair. The bullet had left a ragged tear. “I’ll scissor off the threads. You won’t be able to tell it.”
I couldn’t believe their calm. I was shaking with both anger and apprehension. Somebody had shot at us! “Let’s call Tag!” I demanded. “He’ll figure out who did it.”
Dad looked at me as if I had just crawled out from under a stump. “If it wasn’t Pooky Suggs, it was one of those men who hang around him and drink their courage out of a fruit jar. Tag? We’ll just leave him out of this. Wouldn’t want to see him get hurt.”
Mom silently swept up the glass into a dustpan. At her order, I fetched the vacuum cleaner for her and she ran it underneath the window to make certain she got the tiniest shards, this so the cats wouldn’t get them in their paws. Then she put a piece of tape over the hole in the window. Dad went down in the basement and brought back a can of putty and patted it over the hole in the wall. “After it dries, I’ll sand and paint it,” he said, standing back and observing his work critically. “You won’t even notice it’s there.”
When Mom finished tidying up the living room, she came into the living room and planted herself in front of Dad, who had retreated to another chair and reopened his paper. “Homer, we need to go to Myrtle Beach,” she announced. It was a bolt from out of the blue.
Dad looked up from his paper. “We are going,” he said, frowning. “Miners’ vacation.”
“I mean before. We can leave this Saturday, stay Sunday, and come back on Monday,” she said. “The mine will get along without you for that long.”
Dad was still mystified. “Why do we need to go to Myrtle Beach now?”
Mom put her hands on her hips. “I’m going to buy a house down there.”
It was one of the few times I had ever seen Dad flustered. His paper deflated into his lap. “Wh-why do we need a house in Myrtle Beach?”
“It’s not for us. It’s for me. I just need for you to come and sign the papers. They won’t sell it to me without your signature.”
“Elsie, we couldn’t possibly afford to buy a house in Myrtle Beach or anywhere else.”
Mom pulled a small black book out of her apron pocket and tossed it in his lap. “That’s my savings account over at Welch. For the last twenty years, you’ve given me your paycheck every month and depended on me to pay all the bills. Well, I’ve done that, but I’ve also invested what I could in the stock market. I could buy two houses if I wanted to.”
Dad opened the book and looked it over with his good eye. He turned the pages until he got to the last one that had writing in it. “My God, Elsie! Where did you get all this money?”
“I told you. The stock market.”
“Stock market? Like in New York?”
Mom nodded. “My broker’s in Bluefield. He’s been calling me all these years while you’re at work.”
Dad struggled to make sense of the news. “What stocks did you buy—coal and steel?”
Mom laughed heartily. “Homer, please. Give me some credit. No, I paid attention to what worked with the boys—like Band-Aids. I bought a ton of stock from the company that made the best ones.”
Mom had passed Dad’s grasp of reality. “Well, I always figured after retirement—”
“I can’t wait until then,” Mom said sadly. “Anyway, you’ll work here until you drop. Not me. I’ll be at Myrtle Beach.”
Dad was shocked. “You’re leaving me?”
“Let’s say I’m setting up our retirement house in advance. I’ll come back here for holidays, or when you really need me.”
“But what about the boys?”
“Jim’s gone. I’ve got plenty of money to pay Sonny’s way to college if that’s what he wants. I’ll stay until the day he leaves.”
Dad still couldn’t make any sense of it. “But what will the people in Coalwood say?”
My mother’s answer startled us both. “Homer,” she answered sweetly, “I don’t give a shit what they say.”
DURING our BCMA meeting in the Big Creek auditorium the next morning, I kept interrupting Billy, sure that my news was more important than whatever it was he was trying to say. I told the boys all about the shooting, concluding, “It broke out the window, went through Dad’s chair, and dug a big hole in the far wall.” It was only a slight exaggeration. I left out Mom’s Myrtle Beach announcement. That still wasn’t real to me.
“What kind of bullet was it?” O’Dell asked.
“A twenty-two! Mom dug it out of the wall.”
“A twenty-two?” O’Dell laughed. “That’s a pop gun.”
“Well, it came that close to Dad’s head,” I said, pushing two fingers together. I was miffed that O’Dell took the shooting so lightheartedly.
Billy finally managed to get his news in edgewise during my continuing elaborations. “Did you hear Miss Riley’s sick? Some kind of cancer.”
I stopped talking, my mouth hanging open. I felt as if I had been turned inside out. “What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“Mrs. Turner told Emily Sue. Emily Sue told me.”
Everything suddenly fell into place. Since Christmas vacation, Miss Riley had stopped standing during class, teaching instead from her chair behind her desk and asking one of us boys to come up and perform her experiments. Once, in February when snow covered the ground, she’d left class and hadn’t returned. Mr. Turner came to the classroom to tell us to finish reading the chapter we were on and to be quiet. He gave no explanation for Miss Riley’s absence. He looked pale, as if he’d seen something that frightened him, and none of us could imagine anything that could scare Mr. Turner.
In physics class that day, I tried not to stare at Miss Riley, but I couldn’t help it, and she caught me at it more than once. She looked wan and her eyes were puffy. After class, she made me stay behind to talk to her. “It seemed like you were a million miles away today,” she said.
I resisted asking her about her cancer. It had been ingrained in me by my mother to never poke my nose into anybody’s business. If Miss Riley wanted me to know, she would tell me. “I was thinking about the science fair,” I said. That was at least partly true. It had crossed my mind. I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to display or
how I was going to display it.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the fair,” she said. “You know, only one name can go on an entry. You put all the boys in your club down on the form. I changed it. You’re the one.”
“But all of us work on our rockets,” I protested. “I guess I’d look pretty bad if it was just me at the fair.” I thought about Quentin’s hope to be recognized by someone enough to get money for college.
“You’ll represent us at the fair,” she said firmly. “Because you’re the one who knows the most.”
“Quentin could do it,” I said. “He knows as much as I do.”
“Maybe,” she smiled. “But you know Quentin. He’d try too hard, probably lose the judges with his vocabulary.”
When I just stood there, dumbly watching her, she lost her smile and said, “I presume you’ve heard I’m sick.”
She had dropped it on me like ten tons of coal. “Yes!” I blurted out. “What’s wrong?”
She began to teach me. “What I have is called Hodgkin’s Disease. It’s a form of cancer that attacks the lymph nodes. Here.” She took my hand and placed it on her neck. “This is where I first noticed that I had swelling. Feel that lump? That’s one of the places where it is. I’ve been tired the whole school year, so I knew something was wrong. The doctors ran tests until they were certain what I had.”
I drew my hand away, frightened at touching such an awful thing inside her. I didn’t know anything about cancer except it killed you. But then I remembered Dad had survived his colon cancer. Maybe Miss Riley could survive this Hodgkin’s thing too. “Are you going to be all right?”
She put an elbow on her desk and cradled her head in her palm. She raised an eyebrow and looked into my eyes. “I don’t know. Hodgkin’s Disease can go into remission. That means I’ll still have it, but I won’t be sick. Right now, I’m holding my own.”