Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  Tex gave me some news, and it wasn’t good: “We ain’t gonna win nothing up here, Sonny. Look around. All the prizes go to the big, expensive projects.”

  Feeling small and lost in the huge hall amidst all the hurrying people going to and fro, I walked with Tex through the other displays and saw what he meant. Most of them were huge, complex, and obviously very expensive. One of them even featured two monkeys in a self-contained biosphere complete with oxygen-generating plants and a food-pellet delivery mechanism. I had never seen a live monkey before, and here were two in, of all things, a science-fair display. THE WAY TO MARS, it proclaimed. I was stunned. The boys and girls who built them were, I realized, the competition we West Virginia kids were going to have to face once we went out into the world. All of a sudden, my future seemed cloudy and my shiny new nozzles crude.

  “Most of these monster displays are from New York or Massachusetts.” Tex shrugged. “Lots of money involved, and these guys are just plain smart anyway. Something else too. The judges don’t like rocket projects. They figure them to be too dangerous. I knew when I came up here I didn’t have a chance to win anything.”

  “Then why’d you come?” I blurted out. I could feel the likelihood of ever getting a trophy in the Big Creek display case evaporating.

  “Because it’s fun. You’ll see.”

  Tex was right. It was fun. He and I wowed the people who came to see our exhibits, telling them about our studies and what it was like to fire off a real rocket. I used my hands a lot and made big, whooshing noises. It was as if I were an actor on a stage, and I found I enjoyed the attention as long as people didn’t press in too close. I had that West Virginia need for a certain amount of space between me and a stranger. I noted to Tex that we always had crowds around our displays, more than most of the big, expensive projects. “Sure, we’re popular,” Tex said, “but that won’t impress the judges.”

  The judges were to make their review on the fourth day of the fair. The night before the third day, we were all treated to a big dinner and then packed off to our hotel rooms. Tex and I had already swapped with our assigned roommates and were sharing a room. We walked the streets of Indianapolis, which seemed to me a huge metropolis with cars whizzing past and crowds on the street—friendly, but too many of them for me to feel comfortable. I also felt a vague discomfort at the space around me, and then I realized I was missing the mountains. In West Virginia, they were always there, setting real, physical boundaries between the towns and the people. In Indianapolis, people from anywhere could just come up and bump into you.

  I told Tex what I was feeling and he laughed. “Man, you should come to Texas if you want to know about flat.” He told me about life in Texas and I told him more about West Virginia. When I finished, he said I worried him. “You’re not up here just to compete in a science fair,” he said. “You’re up here to win for all those people back in your little town. What are you going to do when you come back empty-handed?” He shook his head. “Man-oh-man. I’m gonna have to think about this one.”

  The next morning, Tex and I got off the bus to stand in front of our displays for another day of fun. To my astonishment, I found my nozzles, casements, and nose cones gone.

  I just couldn’t understand it. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for it. How could they be gone? Who could have taken them and why? Tex came over. “You didn’t lock up your stuff?”

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to!” I cried, my voice nearly cracking.

  “Where are you from, Sonny? Oh, yeah. West Virginia, I almost forgot.” He showed me the wooden case he’d brought with him and the lock on it. “This is a city. You lock up everything.” He gave me a sympathetic look. “You need to report this to security. Come on. I’ll take you.”

  When we finally found a guard, he heard me out and then said there had been a bunch of kids who had come in the night before. They had probably swiped my things. I heard what he was saying, but I couldn’t believe it. “But why would they do that?” I asked.

  The guard looked at me. “Where are you from, son?”

  “West Virginia,” Tex said as if that explained everything, and I guess it did.

  I went back, despairing, to my display. I still had the pictures of all the rocket boys, Miss Riley and the physics class, the machine shop, Mr. Bykovski, Mr. Ferro, Mr. Caton and all the machinists, the mine tipple, my house, the basement lab with Daisy Mae perched on the washing machine, all there along with my pages of nozzle calculations and my autographed photo of von Braun. I still had O’Dell’s piece of black velvet and Roy Lee’s three-by-five cards. But without the nozzles, casements, and nose cones, my display made no sense. When the judges came tomorrow, I would have nothing to show them. Tex was busy setting up his display. People were starting to come in. I felt paralyzed. Everything that had happened—our rockets, Mr. Bykovski, Cape Coalwood, calculus, even poor Daisy Mae—had all been leading up to this judgment, and now, even though I already knew I wasn’t going to win, I had this terrible sense of a chain of inevitable events leading toward some conclusion being broken. “Tex, what am I going to do?” I cried.

  Tex stopped working on his display and came over. He took off his cowboy hat and scratched his head. “Reckon that little town of yours has a telephone?”

  I had never made a long-distance call in my life. Tex took me to a phone booth and I dialed zero and told the operator the number and yes, this was a collect call. Mom answered and I told her what had happened. She was speechless. “Mom, I’ve got to get more rocket stuff somehow, Could you talk to Dad or somebody?”

  There was a long pause at the other end. “Sonny, the strike’s gotten even uglier this week. Some union men chased a foreman off mine property yesterday. Tag’s up at the tipple now, guarding it. Your dad’s threatening to go punch John Dubonnet in the nose. I heard him tell Clyde the company might call in the state police.”

  I was desperate. “Mom, I need help.”

  She sighed. “I’ll do what I can.”

  I felt suddenly foolish and selfish. Here she was telling me the whole town was falling apart, that my dad and Mr. Dubonnet were about to get in a fistfight, and that maybe the state police were going to come in, and I was whining that I wanted my rocket stuff. “Mom,” I said, struggling against the part of me that wanted to scream, cry, and beg, “it’s okay. Honest. I’m sorry I called.”

  “No, no, Sonny,” she said. “You’re right to call. I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not promising anything, you understand?”

  I hung up and went back to my display. People glanced my way and kept going to the other contestants. I found a box and sat down on it. Anyway, I thought, Tex was right. Nobody in the propulsion area was going to win anything. I would just have to go home and accept the fence-line gossip that I’d been too big for my britches and got what had been coming to me, sort of like my dad all these years.

  That night, Tex answered the hotel phone and called me. It was Mom. “Can you get to the Trailways bus station in Indianapolis by eight o’clock in the morning?”

  My heart skipped a beat. “I think so.”

  “There will be a box aboard it for you.”

  “What happened?”

  She laughed, but to me it didn’t have a happy ring to it. “Sonny, let it wait for another time.”

  The next morning, I put on my blue suit and my cardinal tie and had my first taxi ride. After I picked up the wooden crate addressed to me at the bus station, I told the driver I was in a hurry and we went careening through the streets as if we were in the Indianapolis 500. We skidded to a halt in front of the exhibition center, and the driver helped me with the box and we went running to my display area. Tex came over and helped me set up, and I reached in my pocket to pay the driver. He had been looking at my photos and shook his head. “I’m from West Virginia,” he said. “You don’t owe me a thing except to do good!”

  “Got a surprise for you, Sonny,” Tex said, his eyes widening a bit at my tie. “I been talking to
the committee that runs this thing.” He nodded to the other boys and girls in the propulsion-display area and they grinned back at us. “All of us did while you were worrying over your stuff. We told ’em if we didn’t get a fair shake, we were going to protest, make up signs and parade around just like students do over in Europe and Japan. Scared ’em so much they agreed to put propulsion in our own little separate category.”

  I was astonished. “Tex, I hope you win!” I blurted out, and then was pleasantly surprised to find I actually felt that way.

  Tex looked at my nozzles, nose cones, and casements. “Yours is the class act here, Sonny. Go get ’em.” He paused. “Gawd, I love that tie. Where’d you get it?”

  Less than an hour later, a dozen adults marched into our area. They were the judges. One of them was a young man who spoke in a Germanic accent. I was flabbergasted when he said he was on von Braun’s team. “You mean you actually know Wernher von Braun?” I gasped. I couldn’t imagine that. It was like being interviewed by St. Paul or somebody out of the Bible.

  He laughed. “I work with him every day.” Then he started asking me hard questions. I was ready, my pitch rolling off my tongue. My interpretation of the definitions of specific impulse and mass ratio especially seemed to impress him.

  When the other judges were finished with me, the young man turned and said, “You know Dr. von Braun’s here today, don’t you?”

  My mouth dropped open. “No, sir! Where?”

  He waved vaguely toward the center of the auditorium. “I saw him last over by the biological-display area.”

  “Tex, will you watch my stuff?”

  Tex laughed. “Sure. Get an autograph for me!”

  I took off in search of the great man himself. I wandered the aisles, getting myself lost, asking people if Dr. von Braun was nearby. Always, it seemed, I had just missed him. An hour later, defeated, I returned to my display. Tex regarded me sadly. “Man, I hate to tell you, but he was just here. He picked up that nozzle, Sonny.” Tex pointed at the special contoured one Mr. Caton had reproduced, “He said it was a marvelous design and wished he could meet the boy who built it.”

  I ran in the direction that Tex pointed, but it soon became apparent that Dr. von Braun was gone. Disappointed, I returned to find that I had missed another visit, this one from the judges to leave a certificate of my prize and a beautiful gold and silver medal. Tex pounded my back with the joy of it. He’d come in second, but as far as I was concerned, we’d both won. I went to make my second long-distance call ever.

  I STEPPED off the bus in Bluefield to a sea of familiar faces accompanied by applause and cheers, brandishing the surprise medal I had garnered. The first thing I heard was, “The strike’s settled!” from Mr. Caton. Before I could ask what had happened or how my hardware got made in time, Roy Lee pulled me aside. “Sonny, Miss Riley’s in the hospital.”

  Mom came over. Dad waited at the Buick. Mr. Dubonnet and Mr. Caton were loading my stuff in its trunk. “Go on with the boys,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything later.”

  QUENTIN, Roy Lee, Sherman, O’Dell, Billy, and I crept down the quiet, polished halls of Stevens Clinic in Welch. We found Jake sitting beside Miss Riley’s bed. She was propped up, looking very pale, and there was a tube leading into her arm. “Hi, boys,” she whispered to us. “Sonny. Back from the fair. How did you do?”

  I showed her the medal. “You did it,” she said. “I always knew you would.” She found a little smile for each of us. “I’m so proud to be your teacher.”

  “Miss Riley—” I realized suddenly that I loved her, that I had never known and never would know anyone as good as she.

  “Can I hold the medal?” she asked.

  “It’s yours,” I managed to choke out. “We wouldn’t have won it without you.” I pinned it to her pillow.

  She turned her pretty face to look at it. “I just got you the book—”

  “You did so much more than that!” I tried without success to swallow the thickness in my throat. I was raging inside. Why had God made her sick? Where was the grace of the Lord that Reverend Lanier and Little Richard talked about? Was this an example of it, knocking down a young woman who wanted only to teach?

  When she closed her eyes and seemed to drift away, I looked at Jake. He shook his head and led us outside. “She’s just gone to sleep. They keep her pretty well doped up.”

  “Is she going to die?” I asked, nearly inaudibly. I had trouble saying the words.

  He didn’t answer me directly. “She’ll be back teaching after the doctors build her up a bit. Your medal will give her a good boost, I know.”

  Jake walked us outside to Roy Lee’s car. He split me off from the others. “Don’t let this spoil what you did,” he said. “You should be proud.”

  I shook my head. “Jake, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  Jake jammed his hands in his pockets, sighed, and looked up at the mountains. “I’m not a religious man, Sonny. You want parables and proverbs, go to church. But I believe there’s a plan for each of us—you, me, Freida too. It doesn’t help to get mad about it or want to whip up on God about it. It’s just the way it is. You’ve got to accept it.”

  “Is that you, Jake?” I asked him scornfully. “You accept things the way they are? Is that why you drink?”

  He faced me. “I drink sometimes so I don’t have to think,” he said. “Other times just because it feels good. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know—feeling good. You ought to give it a try sometime, maybe give beating up on yourself a rest.”

  I sagged inwardly. “You know, I’d give my right arm to be like you, to take pleasure from life.”

  “I know you love living, Sonny. It shows right through you.” He looked around. “These old mountains can weigh anybody down. When you get away from them … well, there’s a whole other world out there. You’ll see.”

  I thought about what he was saying, about what lay ahead of me. I didn’t mean to say it. I thought it and it just popped out. “I’m scared of the future, Jake.”

  Jake turned toward me, but hesitated. He’d been in West Virginia long enough for our terrible stolidity to rub off on him. Then, with a laugh, he threw his arm over my shoulders and hugged me close. “Old son, we’re all scared of that.”

  Gratefully, I leaned against him and thought of Saturday nights long ago when once my father carried me up the stairs.

  26

  ALL SYSTEMS GO

  Auks XXVI-XXXI

  June 4, 1960

  IT TOOK ME a while, but I finally managed to piece together what happened in Coalwood after my nozzles got stolen. The boys gave me their version, Mr. Caton told me about his part, and then I heard the rest from my mother. In less than an hour, the fence-line telegraph had alerted the whole town that I was in trouble. Mr. Caton headed for the machine shop, but a line of union men, including Mr. Dubonnet, stopped him. Although Dad said the best thing to do was nothing, Mom made him drive her to the machine shop. Then he saw Mr. Dubonnet and got out of the Buick and went nose to nose with him. Roy Lee said it was as if the two of them were finally where they wanted to be, with nothing to keep them apart.

  Mom was ready to let them fight it out, she said, but Mr. Caton pushed in between and said, “Now, look here, you won’t find a better union man than me and I know we don’t have no contract, but we’ve got to help that boy. He’s not up there just for himself. He’s up there for Coalwood.”

  That was when Mr. Bundini showed up in his jeep and told everybody to break it up. O’Dell said Mr. Bundini had a big smile and went over and tapped Mr. Dubonnet on the shoulder and said, “How about we talk a little, John?”

  “Oh, your dad was mad,” Mom said, frowning at the memory. “Martin Bundini just left him standing there and went off with his arm over John’s shoulder. He was so mad he started to cough, and that made him even madder.”

  Roy Lee, who heard most of the inside union talk from his brother, said Mr. Dubonnet told Mr. Bundini there wasn’t al
l that much to talk about, that the men would be back to work as soon as a unionmanagement panel was set up that would approve the list of men who were to be cut off.

  “That’s not all he wanted,” Sherman shrugged, telling me the side he heard from his father, which was the management side. “He also wanted all the men who had been cut off last time to be hired back because it had been done wrong.”

  “Well, that’s all John said he wanted,” Mom told me in her version. “But John’s smart. He wanted something else, something personal out of your dad. Your dad’s smart too. He knew it.”

  “Mr. Bundini was in his glory,” Sherman laughed. “He was being the great peacemaker. But he wasn’t telling the union everything he knew either.”

  “Let’s see if I understand you correctly, John,” Mom imitated Mr. Bundini’s Yankee accent. “The company still says the number of miners who will be cut off. Then this panel agrees who those men will be, based on seniority and union rules. Is that it? And hiring back the men too?”

  Roy Lee rolled his eyes. “Your dad finally stopped coughing and grabbed Mr. Bundini and argued with him. ‘Don’t do it, Martin!’ he said right out loud. Mr. Dubonnet was laughing the whole time. He’d already won and he knew it.”

  I hated that it was my rockets that had made Dad give in to the union. “Don’t you worry about that, Sonny,” Mom said. “This time he needed to give in.”

  “Mr. Bundini took your dad aside and they started whispering back and forth,” Roy Lee said. “Your dad was shaking his head back and forth just as hard and fast as Mr. Bundini was nodding his up and down.”