Rocket Science

by Jay Lake

  ROCKET

  SCIENCE

  JAY LAKE

  Fairwood Press

  Bonney Lake, WA

  ROCKET SCIENCE

  A Fairwood Press Book

  August 2005

  Copyright © 2005 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

  by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

  or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  5203 Quincy Ave SE

  Auburn, WA 98092

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Cover image © Getty Images

  Cover and Book Design by Patrick Swenson

  ISBN: 0-9746573-6-0

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-091-0

  First Fairwood Press Edition: August 2005

  Printed in the United States of America

  Also by Jay Lake

  Greetings From Lake Wu

  American Sorrows

  Dogs in the Moonlight

  Green Grow the Rushes-Oh

  For Floyd and Lois Bryant, whose secret history this almost isn’t, and Uncle Paul, a tiny piece of whose real history this is, and everyone else in my family who hopes no one notices them in this book.

  Introduction

  Deborah Layne

  Who Needs the Yellow Brick Road?

  Oz has got nothing on Kansas. At least it’s got nothing on Kansas Jay Lake Style. You don’t need to travel a yellow brick road to get to the Weird Stuff. You’ve just taken the first step on a path to a strange and wonderful — well maybe wonderful isn’t the right word, but strange definitely comes in here — place.

  In this Kansas, you won’t find good-natured farmhands dispensing life wisdom. No cute little dogs either. Instead, you’ll find a recently returned WWII vet with a somewhat variable moral compass, a gang of elderly enforcers, the local police, the state police, Army CID, Nazis, Reds, and just wait until you meet Pegasus.

  Rocket Science is Jay Lake’s first full length novel and it more than delivers on the vast promise of his short fiction. Nearly all the obsessions that drive Jay’s short fiction are on display in Rocket Science. He loves gadgets, and the gadget at the center of this story is one of his best. Jay’s fascination with United States history is on full display here as well. Jay is fascinated by conspiracy theories (and theorists), secret identities, spies, and gadgets. Did I already mention the gadgets?

  I’ve known Jay as a short-story writer since late 2000. Indeed, I published his first two collections, Greetings From Lake Wu and American Sorrows. In 2004, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer on the strength of his short fiction. Here, in Rocket Science, Jay has a chance to engage his vast imagination and follow the trails of “what ifs” that drive his storytelling.

  If you’ve read much of Jay’s work, you can probably guess that his background is...well...diverse. His father’s career in the foreign service took Jay and his sister all over the world. He’s lived in Taiwan, Nigeria, and even Texas. He survived high school at a New England prep school (Choate) and college at the University of Texas.

  These early experiences inform much of Jay’s work. He writes about people who are not exactly in their natural element. He writes about the weirdness that underlies the ordinary. And yes, there is weirdness everywhere. Even in Kansas. Rocket Science is your ticket to glimpse a little of it. Enjoy.

  Deborah Layne

  Portland, Oregon

  May, 2005

  Chapter One

  When my best friend Floyd Bellamy came home from the war in Europe, Augusta, Kansas had a parade for him. The city meant to honor all the returning veterans, but the parade happened just as Floyd got off the troop train at the Santa Fe depot on the east side of town. There he was — healthy, tanned, fit, blond hair and white teeth gleaming in the Kansas summer sun, turned out in his best khakis with a chest full of medals and a jaunty scar on one cheek.

  Floyd’s Nazi bayonet instantly won the loyalty of every boy in town, while his casual good looks won the heart of every girl. Mary Ann Dinwiddy had a prior claim that she quickly enforced with a long, slow kiss in front of Mayor Cooper, Bertha Shore from the Augusta Daily Gazette, and various assembled dignitaries on the reviewing stand.

  So Floyd stood there in front of the reviewing stand on the bricks of State Street with Mary Ann, prom queen of 1940, hanging on his arm in her best silk stockings and a polka dot dress. He waved at the high school band, smiled at the Masons and the Shriners, saluted the VFW. Half of Butler County was out to watch the parade, and Floyd took center stage in their minds.

  Later, we sat in Lehr’s having coffee and cherry pie, on the house for Floyd. The whole restaurant bustled around us, dishes and steam and the smell of fryer grease conspiring to leave a little zone of respect and quiet for the war veteran and his friends. My bad leg bothered me more than usual, the ghost of childhood polio, and I felt crabby from the heat. Floyd and Mary Ann looked as if they had stepped out of a Hollywood poster. He’d picked up a couple of female admirers, who managed to ignore me completely — even Lois, who I’d taken out from time to time over the years.

  The way it had always been with Floyd.

  He was telling us about the Battle of the Bulge, him trapped in burnt-out tank while half the German army marched by in one direction, then marched back the other two days later. “You should have been there, Vernon. Half the gosh darned Wehrmacht — oh, golly girls, I’m sorry. Pardon my French.” Floyd actually blushed. I remembered him in junior high school, practicing that blush in a mirror. He could wiggle his ears, too. Anything for the girls.

  Sometimes I hated my best friend.

  “I’m trapped in this tank with these two poor Gusses who got it when our tank took a shell, and —”

  “Floyd,” I interrupted. I’d had enough. “You were in the Air Corps. What were you doing inside a tank?”

  Floyd gave me one of his patented double-edged looks, the kind that had promised Indian burns or wedgies when we were kids. “I was on detached duty. Intelligence work, you know.” He winked at the girls. “They had a picked crew of us flyboys on the ground looking for secret German aeronautical stuff OSS thought was hidden in Belgium. Hush-hush, can’t discuss.”

  Floyd was no pilot, I knew that for sure. He had shipped over as a mechanic, maintaining those big Pratt & Whitney engines on the B-24. But I wasn’t going to bother my best friend with facts again. He had a story to tell, and he was going to tell it come hell or high water.

  Floyd cleared his throat. “As I was saying, I’m trapped in this burnt out tin can with two dead GI’s — God rest their souls.” He paused to bow his head in a brief moment of respect. “There I am peering out through the driver’s periscope, watching the Jerries beat a retreat from our boys, when something really unusual went by.”

  “What did you see?” asked Lois, on cue. Floyd was getting her best face for free, the look that I had to pop for a dozen roses and dinner in Wichita to see. I loved Floyd like I loved my brother Ricky, but right then I could have blackened both his eyes for him. Of course, my brother broke my arm once, before the big creep went off and got killed under MacArthur on some jungle trail in the Philippines.

  “It was a cargo convoy, pretty small — just three vehicles. But there were SS troopers escorting it, and the troops were letting it by. That was kind of unusual, you see. By that time in the war the Germans were having a rough time of it, so combat units always got top priority. The SS had better things to do than ride herd on supplies.”

  “What was on the trucks?” asked Mary Ann.

  Floyd winked
again. “I can’t rightly tell you. That’s a matter of national security and I’ve been sworn to secrecy. But you can bet I followed those trucks and snooped a look at their cargo that night.”

  As a matter of fact, I did have a security clearance, because of my work in the aircraft industry. I knew perfectly well that people involved in security matters never talked about it. All through the latter part of the war, since I graduated from Kansas State, Lois thought I was a parts manager at the Boeing plant in Wichita. I really did that job, part-time, but I had actually been working with a combined team from Boeing and North American on improving ordnance deployment from bomb bays. Still, there wasn’t much point in stopping Floyd when he got going. I could tell from the soft, shiny look in Mary Ann’s eyes that Floyd was going to get whatever he wanted tonight.

  Floyd settled back in at his parents’ farm out east of town, about halfway between Augusta and El Dorado on Haverhill Road. His dad’s health had broken while Floyd was away, so like the good son Floyd pitched in with fixing the run-down farm equipment that was all Mr. Bellamy could afford. Harvest time wasn’t far off, even in August, and Floyd was needed.

  I was proud of him. Whatever Floyd had or hadn’t done in the war, even if he was the biggest liar God ever placed on His green Earth, Floyd loved his folks and did every dirty, nasty or just plain dumb job that had to be done on a small farm. All of it without a word of complaint, not even to me in private. Every Saturday night he would come into town in his dad’s Willys pickup truck. He and Mary Ann and me — and sometimes even Lois — would drag State Street, just like we were back in high school again. If we were feeling flush, we’d pile into my ’39 Hudson 112 and head to Wichita for steaks and beer.

  Fall came and brought the end of the Pacific War with it, along with the harvest. Ever since I went off to college, I had managed to avoid working the fields. First there was school, then the war work. But V-J Day had come and gone, with Harry S Truman’s atomic gamble paying off handsomely. Being from Missouri, Harry S was almost a Kansas boy, so we were as proud of him as if he were truly one of our own.

  Now, with the war over, things were slowing down. I managed to keep my job at the plant, working full-time as a parts buyer now, but I had evenings and weekends free for the first time in years and a chance to use up some vacation time. So I took two weeks off to help the Bellamys with their corn harvest, bad leg and all. Heck, they’d done so much for me over the years it was the least I could offer.

  “Hey, Vernon,” Floyd puffed from the top of the silo. Poor or not, the Bellamys had a lot of corn. “Guess what?”

  I killed the clattering engine of the battered Farm-All tractor, leaned on the steering wheel and wiped my forehead. “What?”

  “Remember that German convoy I told you kids about?”

  Floyd had never mentioned the Battle of the Bulge again, so I figured the whole story had been bravado, the returning hero showing off for his hometown chums. “Yeah...” I said cautiously.

  Floyd had his exasperating I’ve-got-a-secret grin. “Borrow one of your old man’s trucks tomorrow. I’ve got something coming on the Kansas City train.”

  My dad ran an on-again, off-again cartage business and had a couple of old medium-duty Mack trucks — a 1932 AC model and a 1929 off-highway AP model — which more or less worked. If you were lucky and it hadn’t rained lately. “What — a panzer tank?”

  “Nah,” said Floyd, still smirking. “Something much better. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

  I drove the grumbling old AC stakebed up to the freight platform at the Santa Fe depot. Though my bad leg was on the gas pedal side, I never was much for the pressure of a clutch, but Dad’s old monsters speed-shifted anyway. Kansas weather is unpredictable in late September, and Wednesday’s warm fall day had turned into a damp, windy Thursday. If it started raining, the Mack might well decide to develop one of its innumerable electrical shorts and refuse to run until Thanksgiving. The weather bothered my game leg as well, tugging at the muscle and joints like a pair of harsh hands until simply bouncing along in the cab was sheer torture.

  Floyd was already at the station, sitting on hood of the rusted Willys pickup rolling a cigarette. “Hey, Vern,” he called, waving his handiwork. “Smoke?”

  “No, thanks. Trying to quit.” Truth be told, I had never enjoyed cigarettes much. Floyd didn’t drink or smoke before he went off to Europe, but nearly four years in the Army Air Corps had turned him into a connoisseur of bad habits.

  “Train’s late,” Floyd said. He cupped his cigarette to light it in the damp wind.

  “I can see that.” I stretched my back and studied the ragged gray sky. How soon would it rain?

  Floyd finally got his cigarette lit and took a deep drag. “You didn’t tell your old man what you were doing with the truck, did you?”

  I laughed, trying to disguise the bitterness. “He was sleeping.”

  Floyd smirked. “Drunk again?”

  “Yeah, drunk.” I didn’t like to talk about that. Dad’s drinking was one reason I took a room in Mrs. Swenson’s boarding house on Broadway Street. I hadn’t liked stepping over him on the hall floor, or under the kitchen table, or on the porch steps — wherever he was when his drinking finally overcame his muscle control. My polio had disturbed him enough — Dad always called it “the disease that ruined my son.” But Dad had given up and crawled inside his bottles since Mom died.

  Floyd studied the railroad tracks. “What are you gonna do now?”

  “About Dad? Not much I can do.” Except clean his side of their joint cemetery plot, I thought.

  “No, no,” Floyd waved a hand. “I mean, the war’s over, America’s getting back on its feet, all that stuff. Everybody will go off rationing soon, the service is discharging a million guys just like me, jobs are tough to get. What are you gonna do?”

  Floyd knew I had a good job at Boeing, and a college degree and pilot’s license to go with it. I figured he was really talking about himself. Floyd didn’t much like to ask for help, or even advice. I spoke carefully. “Well...I figure I’ll marry the right gal, maybe buy a house here in town. Keep working in Wichita.” Watch my Dad die from drinking. “What about yourself? Got plans with Mary Ann yet?” Plans more complicated than condoms and a mattress in the back of the Willys, at any rate. He kept both in the barn at home when he wasn’t planning to use them.

  “Yeah, we’ve talked.” Floyd flashed me his million-dollar smile. He really ought to move to California and go into movies. “She wants kids, dogs, a flower garden. I don’t know...”

  Floyd was rarely uncertain of anything. It was almost charming to watch him wonder. Every now and then I could still see the rough-edged farm boy who’d carried me around school and town on his back, that first year after the polio got me. “So, what’s on your mind?”

  “Well, you know...take you, Vern.”

  I hated being called Vern. He knew that.

  “While I was off getting my gourd shot at in Europe, fellows like you were safe back here going to college and getting swank jobs you could keep after the war. A poor Gus like me, never even finished high school, I don’t have a chance unless I want to run my father’s farm. Any fool can see that’s a losing game these days.”

  I was too surprised at Floyd’s comment about high school to be angry for what he said about me. We’d get back to that later. “Floyd, you finished school. I remember. You were sick for graduation, but so what?”

  Floyd shook his head, then took a deep drag off his cigarette. “No. That was just a story. I failed senior English and American History that spring. I was ashamed, so I didn’t tell no one. Then I went off in the service the week after everybody graduated. It never came up again.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, but I tried. “Still, a guy like you — you’ve got a clean service record, you know aircraft engines. You could get on at Boeing or Beech Aircraft in Wichita real easy. I can put in a word for you in personnel if you’d like. Maybe get you on my team, even
.” I tried to sound enthusiastic. He might be the nearest thing I had to a brother these days, but Floyd working under me was not high on my list.

  “Yeah, well, about that service record...” Floyd broke off and stared down the tracks. He looked like he might bust into tears right there. Then we both glanced up at the scream of a train whistle, coming in from the east.

  “What happened?” I asked gently.

  “Nothing.” Floyd wiped some dust from his eyes. He gave me another million-dollar smile. “I’ll tell you sometime when we’ve got nothing better to do. There’s plenty of work coming for both of us on that train.”

  The Santa Fe Baldwin 4-8-4 oil-burner sat just past the platform, chuffing and wheezing. It was a big steam engine, fairly new, black as Tojo’s heart with white and gold lettering. Even though my life was about aircraft, I appreciated the design compromises and manufacturing know-how that had gone into that magnificent beast belonging to the previous century. This was the age of flight, and my heart always wanted to soar.

  Odus Milliken the railway agent, a cadaverous veteran of the Spanish-American War who seemed likely to live forever, had told us that this route would be getting the new diesels soon, so we’d better say goodbye to the steam trains. As much as I admired the old machines, I could live without the noise.

  Odus and Bertie the switchman had conspired to drop two flat cars off onto the depot’s freight siding. One was loaded with an enormous crate, the other had something bulky secured under a tarp. Floyd and some of the old guys from the Otasko Club strained with the swing-arm block and tackle on my Dad’s stakebed truck to shift the massive crate from the first flat car. With my bad leg and all I stayed out of the way. The crate was almost too big for the truck — easily large enough to contain a small omnibus. I couldn’t imagine what something so massive and heavy could actually be. Had he shipped home artillery? I wouldn’t put it past Floyd.