One hundred fifty hours sweeping the streets. Picking up garbage from the interstate. People dropped diapers along the shoulder and scuffed up tennis shoes. They left crates behind and headless Barbie dolls and broken TV sets. Mason gathered them up and bagged them. He walked through the weeds, and all he thought about was a piece of pipe.
Bean wasn’t the same, not even after the bones in his ears had healed. He talked about his body and how it was a vessel. There was a city by the river, and the river was of gold. They cleaned roads together on Thursdays. They filled up their bags, and Mason asked him for more shells. Just a few, he said, just to tide me over, but Bean shook his head. God had saved him for a reason, Bean said. It was time to set his face like flint. He had no need for shells anymore. He wanted no more fires.
Mason’s mother wore amethyst and smoky quartz to help her concentration. Sometimes if he had a cough she set a rutilated crystal beside his bed. It’s as good as Robitussin, she’d say. It’ll clear up all your passages. She believed in chakras and Chinese herbs and the healing powers of talk therapy. Another three credits and she’d have her counseling degree.
She had a talk with him right after the sentencing. She talked about his needs and how she was here to help and not to judge because she’d made plenty of her own mistakes. She sat at the foot of his bed and sandwiched his hand between hers. “You were trying to tell me something,” she said. “I should have listened more.” She smiled a little, but her face was serious the way it used to be in church. She hugged him, and he pulled away and that was how it went.
•
The rocket club met on Thursdays in the soccer field behind the school. Sometimes he watched them from the bleachers. They used model rockets mostly, with single-use motors no bigger than a G. No metal parts and no liquid fuel and they had less than 125 grams of propellant. And still it was something when the rockets lifted. They made a beautiful ripping sound. Mr. Duffy the physics teacher ran between the launch pads. He was checking all the igniters and the fins. He waved to Mason and when Mason didn’t come, he waved again and waited. His sweatshirt was tight across his belly. It said, “No Smoking. Unless you’re on fire.”
“Get over here,” he said. “You can’t see from where you are. You have to be real close.” He set his hands on his hips and squinted, and his hair stuck to his forehead in wisps.
Mason stood beside him and watched some sophomores get their rocket ready. Theirs was bigger than the others, and they worked around it like surgeons. Three boys and a girl in overalls, but even through the loose bib he could see the outline of her breasts. The kids were kneeling around the pad and checking the fit of the airframe against the lugs. The rocket was painted red and it said “Copperhead” along the side. “Theirs is special,” Duffy was saying. “They made it all by hand. They’ll go to nationals with that one. They’ll take an egg up 750 feet and bring it back unbroken.” He left Mason and went over to the three kids to see about the switch.
Everybody stepped behind the orange cones that marked the safety zone. They shaded their eyes and waited. The sky was clear, but the wind was blowing from the mountains. He should have brought a jacket. He stood with the others and watched Duffy fuss with the solenoid switch. The taller boy had his arm around the girl’s waist. He pulled her close, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hair looked like copper in the sun.
Duffy started the countdown at ten instead of five. He shouted out the numbers, and everybody shouted with him. Mason joined in without meaning to. The air smelled sweet like chemicals and burning paper, and the rocket tore upward when they reached one. It was perfect the way stingrays are, perfect like eagles and diamondback snakes. It moved toward the sky with a predator’s grace.
They caught the rocket when it floated back down. It barely missed some trees. The red-haired girl came running. She held it high like a trophy. “Look at that,” she said. “Look how sweet she landed.” She was talking about the bulkhead and the o-rings in the chamber, but Mason wasn’t listening. Who cared if the chute deployed or if the rocket made it back. It was the fire that mattered. It was the propellant and the blast and that sweet white chemical smoke. It was better than the black cats he’d shot off last July with Bean, better even than the canister that blew up Foster’s mailbox.
Duffy came back to where Mason was standing. He was drinking coffee from a dented thermos. “Don’t be so shy,” he said. “We could use another set of hands.” He gave Mason a serious look. “I’ve got a monster in my garage. You should come and see. The next one will be liquid fuel. Kerosene and liquid oxygen and there’s nothing that kicks better.”
He dreamt of perchlorate and igniters. He dreamt of Caroline’s red hair. That was her name, that girl in the overalls. She took all the advanced classes. He was in remedial geometry and she was taking trig already and she’d be in college math by the time she was a senior. She was perfect how she laughed and how she held her books. The light followed her across every room. When she left she took it with her.
He wanted a lathe and a KitchenAid mixer. A small oven to bake propellant discs. He posted diagrams on his bedroom wall and lists of binders and bonding agents. He collected articles for Duffy, who listened carefully when he talked. For the first time he paid attention in chemistry class. He didn’t doodle or look around the room. He worked at his computer every night and downloaded propellant handbooks. He heated up soup and Tater Tots so he could eat at his desk.
All the equations and the variables and it came down to a simple thing. It came down to the pressure inside the chamber. Give it an opening and you’ve got thrust. It will lift you if you let it. It will take you over the fields and the old brick school and the elm trees on Cascade that were dying from Chinese beetles. Those GoFast guys in Denver sent their rocket up 77 miles. That was fifteen more than they needed to set the record. The distance to outer space was the same as the distance to Denver, 62 miles give or take. How strange to think about things that way. It wasn’t really that far. With enough power things could break free from the curve of the earth. They wouldn’t feel its pull. Pressure is all they needed. Pressure and an outlet, and now he had them both.
They took Route 24 to the wheat fields just past Calhan. Six of them in Duffy’s old jeep and the sun shone in their eyes the whole way out. Everything looked rusty. The cars and the dirt and the storage sheds in the fields. As if the earth itself were made of iron and the ore was bleeding its way out.
There were at least a hundred people gathered in the field. They came in trucks and motor homes, and there was a school bus from a district out in Limon. Fathers stood with their sons, and everyone wore hand-printed name tags with rockets on them. Duffy’s rocket was the star here. People pointed and gathered around the platform. With its five engines it weighed almost two hundred pounds. It looked like a half-scale patriot missile.
A father brought his son up close and lifted him higher so he could see. “That’s a beauty,” he said. “That one there can go up a mile.” The boy smiled at that and the father swung him round, and Mason wanted to follow them. His father had lifted him like that once. They’d gone together to the fair and watched the rodeo cowboys. The air had been sweet with the smell of kettle corn and manure. Everything was touched with grace that day, and that’s how today was, too. He wanted to slow things down. He wanted them to linger. The volcanic rumble of the rockets lifting and their trailing chemical vapors and Caroline who was pink from the sun. She was standing beneath the canopy with her hands behind her back.
Duffy’s rocket went up almost eight thousand feet. Straight as an arrow shot from a bow. Mason felt the force of it through his sneakers. As if it were something living and not just cardboard and PVC. Duffy walked through the field like a conquering soldier. He ate sunflower seeds from a bag and spit them back out, and people came from all around to congratulate him. Somebody from the Western Rocketry newsletter interviewed him and took pictures of him with all his students. Five guys and Caroline at the center
, Caroline who tilted her head at the camera and smiled.
They drove back together, sunburnt and laughing. Duffy dropped them off at his house, and they went home in their own cars, except for Mason who had walked. Duffy gave him a ride home. The house was dark because his mother was finishing up her last practicum so she could graduate in May. Some nights she didn’t get home until eleven. Duffy set his hand on Mason’s shoulder. “You were great today,” he said. “You really helped me out.” He leaned in close, so close that Mason could smell the coffee on his breath and the salt from the sunflower seeds.
There are so many ways a chamber can fail. This is what he learned from all his reading. The burn time can be too long, and the metal will start to erode. The nozzle bolts can fail or the weld up by the payload. Tiny cracks can form in the grain or air pockets that will increase the surface area of the burn. Flaws so small you’d need a microscope to see them, but the pressure inside will find them. It will always work its way out.
They’d gone together to spread the ashes up near the Continental Divide. She wore her hair loose because that was how his father had liked it. His father had been Mason and his grandfather, too. Three Mason Rigbys and two of them were dead. She played Elvis Costello and the Stones and all the others they’d listened to when they were young. I can feel him, she said. I feel his spirit in the car, and his plastic urn was strapped in the back seat like it was a baby. Mason looked out the window at the elm trees coming into bud. He didn’t want to turn back and catch a glimpse of his father. It wasn’t right to burn him, to turn him into powder. He knew this right away. What if the resurrection day came and everybody else rose up from their graves.
She said an Ojibwa prayer at the spot they picked. She talked about a Great Spirit and she could hear His voice and there were lessons to learn in every leaf and rock and tree. Mason didn’t cry when they opened the urn. He waited for the wind. His father passed from his hand to the air and down the empty bluffs.
Gone to powder as if he’d never been. Gone to the hillsides where there weren’t any trees. No trees or flowers or fishing ponds. The wind carried him and the snows would cover him and he was going to the Atlantic now and the Pacific, too, because the Divide was the place where all the waters branched.
Duffy’s basement had a wet bar and a dart board and a pool table with serious water damage. “I’ll get around to fixing it,” Duffy said. “It’s somewhere on my list.” His wife never came down there, so it belonged to him. It was better than a clubhouse. The other boys came sometimes, too, and they sat around the low table and watched movies and footage of other launches. Just before the end of the spring semester he gave them beer to celebrate. He swore them to keep it secret. “I drank when I was your age,” he said. “It didn’t hurt me any.” There was a shine in his eyes. They looked warm as honey in the light.
Mason stayed after all the others had left. He didn’t want to go home, and he didn’t want to stay. He leaned back against the cushions, and Duffy brought out a stack of rocketry magazines. Rockets and Extreme Rocketry and Sport Rocketry and Launch. Some went back to the ’90s. “You can borrow some if you like,” he said. He spread them on the table, and there was a magazine with naked women, too. Its cover was creased, and the girl on the cover sat like an Indian with her legs open wide.
Duffy sat down beside him. “You can borrow that one, too.” He reached for it and opened it and laid it across Mason’s lap. He moved closer so he could turn the pages. He ran his finger along Mason’s cheek, and Mason knew that feeling when it came. He knew it and closed his eyes. The wind was blowing again. It was turning things to powder.
Something was unfolding inside his chest. Every day he felt it growing. It expanded like a balloon and squeezed against his ribs. It was alive. Alive and mechanical, and it took away his air. He stood in the middle of the hallway. The others went around him. A few of them were running. They were laughing and swinging their books because the semester was almost over and the air outside was warm. At some point things went quiet and the classroom doors all closed. The teachers were reviewing their lesson plans. They were prepping the students for final exams, but Mason didn’t go to his class, not even when the late bell rang. He walked through the front doors instead and down the concrete steps. The igniter wasn’t ready yet. It was almost summer, and he had to finish it.
There was a reason his father had walked to lunch that day and a reason he crossed against the light. His mother said things were meant to be. They were printed on us before we were born. She seemed happy when she said it, as if it were a comfort. She talked about life plans and reincarnation and how it was better not to wonder why.
She was wrong, of course. There were always reasons, even if nobody ever saw them. The city bus had come too fast for a reason and the ambulance had been delayed, and sometime soon Duffy’s rocket would launch before he was ready. He’d be hooking up the alligator clips. He’d be standing right there, and the exhaust would hit his skin. It would be hard afterward to figure out what happened. People might wonder if Duffy got sloppy with the wires. They’d ask about the e-match. Did he use a low current igniter by mistake? The continuity circuit could set it off if he did. It was just a little thing. Just a light bulb in the series, but with the wrong igniter it would be enough. They’d inspect the wreckage and look for reasons and miss the one that mattered.
He didn’t go the next time they went to Calhan to shoot off Duffy’s rocket. He stayed with his mother who was finally getting her degree. She was having a party and two dozen of her classmates were there, and they were therapists, all of them. Therapists married to more therapists. They sat on pillows and talked about processing things and progressive muscular relaxation. They looked serious when they talked about relaxing. There were cakes on the table and homemade sugar cookies, and his mother smiled when she cut the shortcake and passed the plates around. Five years, she was saying, I can’t believe how fast they went, and her face was shiny. She winked at Mason the way she did when he was little. And look how big my baby is. Next year he’ll be a junior.
It was hot outside. Three o’clock in the afternoon and not a cloud above the mountains. Mason stood alone by the window, and Foster was out there washing his old Lincoln. He wore rubber gloves and garden shoes. He worked the hose, and the droplets shone in the sun. In a little while Duffy would be setting up the rocket. The others would be back behind the cones. That’s where he made them go, where he always made them go because he didn’t joke about safety.
He could call Caroline and tell her to check the igniter. There was still a little time. He could call Duffy who carried his cell phone in a holster, but he drank his lemonade instead and stayed beside the window. Get a little closer, somebody said. I need you guys to lean. A group of graduates was standing with their diplomas. His mother’s was framed already, and she held it against her chest as if it were a shield. All the books she read and all the seminars, and she didn’t understand. Things happen for a reason, sure, but we make the reasons ourselves.
His mother came and stood beside him after the picture was done. She set her hands around his waist, and they looked together out the window. Foster walked down his driveway and rinsed off his new mailbox. It was shaped like a fire truck with a ladder and a hose. He dried it when he was done and made sure the latch was shut.
“I’m proud of you,” she said. “All the work you’re doing.” She squeezed his waist, but he didn’t turn around. He was a head taller than she was. Taller than his father had been, and he wasn’t done growing.
They’d gone fishing once at the Eleven Mile Reservoir. They sat together on the rocks even after the wind picked up and churned the gray waters. The first drops fell, and the other people were packing up their gear. The fish don’t know it’s raining, his father said. To them it’s all the same. They stayed until the sun went down. Until it was cold enough to need a jacket. His father smoked on the drive home. The tip of the cigarette was a perfect orange circle, and Mason fell asleep in
the car. His father carried him inside.
The photographer came up to them. “Turn around, you two,” he said. “This’ll be a good one.” He had one of those expensive digital cameras with a stabilizing lens.
They moved from the window to the entryway where the light was better. His mother leaned into him for the picture. Mason looked past the camera, past the deli platters and the people holding mimosas and Bloody Marys. He could feel it in his chest again. It was working its way out. He wanted things to stop, and he wanted them to burn. He wanted his father back from the mountains. The flash was dazzling when it went off. It lit up the whole room.
Shelter
He ignored their cats and how they stalked his fish pond and fouled his tomato beds. He ignored their music, too, and the sounds of breaking bottles. He tried to be neighborly. They didn’t water the grass. They left their snowmobiles out the whole year long, and he said hello anyway. He left bags of tomatoes on their steps. Sometimes in winter he ran his blower up their walk because they were lazy when it came to shoveling. The husband Travis was built like a little fireplug and he wasn’t more than forty, but he didn’t bestir himself. Not even on his days off. The wife either, though she was home all day. And then in March they bought that fishing boat and parked it a foot over his property line. He didn’t say anything that first afternoon or the next day. He was hoping it was only a temporary spot. But when they set down cinderblocks to keep the trailer from rolling, he steeled himself.
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