Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  Dad slapped open the screen door and came out on the porch as if to argue with her. Mom turned away from him and I saw his eyes, usually a bright hard blue, soften into liquid blots. I snuggled my face into her neck while Mom continued to rock and hold me, still singing her quietly insistent song: No, you’re not. No, you’re not. All through my growing-up years, she kept singing it, one way or the other. It was only when I was in high school and began to build my rockets that I finally understood why.

  2

  SPUTNIK

  I WAS ELEVEN years old when the Captain retired and my father took his position. The Captain’s house, a big, barnlike wood-frame structure, and the closest house in Coalwood to the tipple, became our house. I liked the move because for the first time I didn’t have to share a room with Jim, who never made any pretense of liking me or wanting me around. From my earliest memory, it was clear my brother blamed me for the tension that always seemed to exist between our parents. There may have been a kernel of truth to his charge. The story I heard from Mom was that Dad wanted a daughter, and when I came along he was so clearly disappointed, and said so in such certain terms, she retaliated by naming me after him: Homer Hadley Hickam, Junior. Whether that incident caused all their other arguments that followed, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that their discontent had left me with a heavy name. Fortunately, Mom started calling me “Sunny” right away because, she said, I was a happy child. So did everybody else, although my first-grade teacher changed the spelling to the more masculine “Sonny.”

  Mr. McDuff, the mine carpenter, built me a desk and some bookshelves for my new room, and I stocked them with science-fiction books and model airplanes. I could happily spend hours alone in my room.

  In the fall of 1957, after nine years of classes in the Coalwood School, I went across the mountains to Big Creek, the district high school, for the tenth through the twelfth grade. Except for having to get up to catch the school bus at six-thirty in the morning, I liked high school right off. There were kids there from all the little towns in the district, and I started making lots of new friends, although my core group remained my buddies from Coalwood: Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell.

  I guess it’s fair to say there were two distinct phases to my life in West Virginia: everything that happened before October 5, 1957 and everything that happened afterward. My mother woke me early that morning, a Saturday, and said I had better get downstairs and listen to the radio. “What is it?” I mumbled from beneath the warm covers. High in the mountains, Coalwood could be a damp, cold place even in the early fall, and I would have been happy to stay there for another couple of hours, at least.

  “Come listen,” she said with some urgency in her voice. I peeked at her from beneath the covers. One look at her worried frown and I knew I’d better do what she said, and fast.

  I threw on my clothes and went downstairs to the kitchen, where hot chocolate and buttered toast waited for me on the counter. There was only one radio station we could pick up in the morning, WELC in Welch. Usually, the only thing WELC played that early was one record dedication after the other for us highschool kids. Jim, a year ahead of me and a football star, usually got several dedications every day from admiring girls. But instead of rock and roll, what I heard on the radio was a steady beep-beep-beep sound. Then the announcer said the tone was coming from something called Sputnik. It was Russian and it was in space. Mom looked from the radio to me. “What is this thing, Sonny?”

  I knew exactly what it was. All the science-fiction books and Dad’s magazines I’d read over the years put me in good stead to answer. “It’s a space satellite,” I explained. “We were supposed to launch one this year too. I can’t believe the Russians beat us to it!”

  She looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “What does it do?”

  “It orbits around the world. Like the moon, only closer. It’s got science stuff in it, measures things like how cold or hot it is in space. That’s what ours was supposed to do, anyway.”

  “Will it fly over America?”

  I wasn’t certain about that. “I guess,” I said.

  Mom shook her head. “If it does, it’s going to upset your dad no end.”

  I knew that was the truth. As rock-ribbed a Republican as ever was allowed to take a breath in West Virginia, my father detested the Russian Communists, although, it should be said, not quite as much as certain American politicians. For Dad, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Antichrist, Harry Truman the vice-Antichrist, and UMWA chief John L. Lewis was Lucifer himself. I’d heard Dad list all their deficiencies as human beings whenever my uncle Ken—Mom’s brother—came to visit. Uncle Ken was a big Democrat, like his father. Uncle Ken said his daddy would’ve voted for our dog Dandy before he’d have voted for a Republican. Dad said he’d do the same before casting a ballot for a Democrat. Dandy was a pretty popular politician at our house.

  All day Saturday, the radio announcements continued about the Russian Sputnik. It seemed like each time there was news, the announcer was more excited and worried about it. There was some talk as to whether there were cameras on board, looking down at the United States, and I heard one newscaster wonder out loud if maybe an atomic bomb might be aboard. Dad was working at the mine all day, so I didn’t get to hear his opinion on what was happening. I was already in bed by the time he got home, and on Sunday, he was up and gone to the mine before the sun was up. According to Mom, there was some kind of problem with one of the continuous miners. Some big rock had fallen on it. At church, Reverend Lanier had nothing to say about the Russians or Sputnik during his sermon. Talk on the church steps afterward was mostly about the football team and its undefeated season. It was taking a while for Sputnik to sink in, at least in Coalwood.

  By Monday morning, almost every word on the radio was about Sputnik. Johnny Villani kept playing the beeping sound over and over. He talked directly to students “across McDowell County” about how we’d better study harder to “catch up with the Russians.” It seemed as if he thought if he played us his usual rock and roll, we might get even farther behind the Russian kids. While I listened to the beeping, I had this mental image of Russian high-school kids lifting the Sputnik and putting it in place on top of a big, sleek rocket. I envied them and wondered how it was they were so smart. “I figure you’ve got about five minutes or you’re going to miss your bus,” Mom pointed out, breaking my thinking spell.

  I gulped down my hot chocolate and dashed up the steps past Jim coming down. Not surprisingly, Jim had every golden hair on his head in place, the peroxide curl in front just so, the result of an hour of careful primping in front of the medicine-chest mirror in the only bathroom in the house. He was wearing his green and white football letter jacket and also a new button-down pink and black shirt (collar turned up), pegged chino pants with a buckle in the back, polished penny loafers, and pink socks. Jim was the best-dressed boy in school. One time when Mom got Jim’s bills from the men’s stores in Welch, she said my brother must have been dropped off by mistake by vacationing Rockefellers. In contrast, I was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, the same pair of cotton pants I’d worn to school all the previous week, and scuffed leather shoes, the ones I’d worn the day before playing around the creek behind the house. Jim and I said nothing as we passed on the stairs. There was nothing to say. I would tell people some years later that I was raised an only child and so was my brother.

  This is not to say Jim and I didn’t have a history. From the first day I could remember being alive, he and I had brawled. Although I was smaller, I was sneakier, and we had battled so many times over the years that I knew all his moves, knew that as long as I kept inside the swing of his fists, he wasn’t going to kill me. By the fall of 1957, Jim and I were about two months into a period of uneasy truce. Our last fight had scared us both into it. It began when Jim found my bike lying on top of his in the backyard. My bike’s kickstand had collapsed (I probably hadn’t levered it all the way down) and my bike had fallen on top of his, taking th
em both down. Furious, he carried my bike to the creek and threw it in. Mom was over in Welch shopping and Dad was at the mine. Jim stomped up to my room, where I was lounging on my bed reading a book, slammed open the door, and told me what he had done and why. “If anything of yours ever touches anything of mine again,” he bellowed, “I’ll beat the ever-loving hell out of you!”

  “How about right now, fat boy?” I cried, launching myself at him. We fell into the hall, me on the inside punching him in the stomach and him yowling and swinging at the air until we rolled down the stairs and crashed into the foyer, where I managed a lucky hit to his ear with my elbow. Howling, he picked me up and hurled me into the dining room, but I got right up and hit him with one of Mom’s prized cherry-wood chairs, breaking off one of its legs. He chased me into the kitchen, whereupon I picked up a metal pot off the stove and bounced it off his noggin. Then I made for the back porch, but he tackled me and we fell through the screen door, ripping it off its hinges. We wrestled in the grass until he got up and then leapt back on top of me. That’s when I felt my ribs creak. My chest hurt so bad I started to cry, but I didn’t say anything mainly because I couldn’t breathe. His leg was in my face, so I bit him as hard as I could to make him get off me. He screamed and jumped up while I rolled over onto my back and gasped for air. My ribs felt like they were caved in. Blood flowed from my nose. A knot on Jim’s head was rising, and there was going to be a nice purple welt on his leg. We had managed some real damage to each other and knew we’d gone too far at last.

  When Mom came home, she found our bikes parked neatly beside each other in the backyard and Jim and I sitting innocently together in the living room. Jim had his hand on his head, idly cradling it while he read the sports page of the Welch Daily News. I was sitting nearby, watching television, trying not to scream from the pain each time I breathed. My ribs ached for a month. The dining-room chair was back in its place, well-glued. Jim and I watched it for days to keep anyone from sitting on it until it dried. The dogs got the blame for the screen door. Either Mom never noticed it or chose not to mention the dent in her pot.

  Jim was already at the bus stop while I was still rushing around getting ready. I was in and out of the bathroom in two minutes flat, pausing only to brush my teeth and run a wet hand through my hair. I had my mother’s hair—black, thick, and curly. She had started turning gray in her thirties, so I knew that was likely to happen to me too. It didn’t look like I’d gotten anything from Dad’s family tree. Mom said I was a Lavender like her through and through. Dad never argued with her about it, so I guessed it was so. That was fine with me. The Hickams always seemed a nervous bunch to me. Dad and his brother Clarence and sister Bennie never seemed able to quite settle down, always jumping up to walk real fast to wherever they were going, and talking fast too. The Lavenders were a more relaxed bunch, although Mom’s father, my “Ground-Daddy,” was shot in the arm crawling into some lady’s bedroom while her husband was supposed to be working the hoot-owl shift over in Gary. My mom said her mama helped her daddy put his coat on while his winged arm healed. Mom also said Ground-Daddy would have gone naked out in the snow before she would’ve helped him.

  On the first school day after Sputnik, I threw on one of Jim’s hand-me-down cotton jackets, grabbed my books off the banister, and snatched the brown-bag lunch Mom held out for me at the front door. I had to run for it. The big yellow bus was already at the stop in front of the Todds’ house, and Jack Martin, the driver, waited for no one. He watched sourly, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, as I scrambled aboard an inch ahead of the closing doors. “Any later and you’d be walking, Sonny boy,” he said. I knew he wasn’t kidding. Jack ran his bus in dictatorial fashion. The slightest breach in decorum would find the perpetrator kicked off on the side of the road, no matter where we were. I found a two-inch sliver of a seat on a bench and squeezed in beside Linda DeHaven and Margie Jones, girls who had been in my class since the first grade. They shifted minutely and fell back asleep. Jack changed gears and we were off. My friend and fellow former Coalhican O’Dell was snoozing up front, just behind Jack. O’Dell was small and excitable. His hair was the pale, nearly translucent color of spun silk. In the seat behind him, Sherman, a compact, muscular kid with a wide, intelligent face, was also sleeping. Sherman’s left leg was shriveled and weak, the result of polio. During all our years growing up together, he never complained about his affliction and I never gave it any mind. He either kept up with the rest of us or he didn’t.

  Roy Lee, thin and long-legged, got on the bus at the next stop, easing down the aisle until he squeezed in behind me. For as long as I could remember, Roy Lee and I had been friends. He’d show up at my house or I’d go up to his and we’d be off to the mountains, playing cowboys or spacemen or pirates or whatever we could think up. Roy Lee was unique among us. He had his own car, the result of an insurance settlement after his father had died in the mine. His mother, wanting to keep Roy Lee in Coalwood, had campaigned to keep her company house. Surprisingly, she and Roy Lee had been allowed to stay. Maybe it was because Roy Lee’s brother still worked in the mine. Roy Lee was a good-looking kid, and he knew it. His hair was coal black, and he kept it swept back and greased and teased into what we called a D.A. (duck’s ass). He looked a bit like a very young Elvis. Roy Lee thought he was pretty much girl bait, and I guess he was, seeing as how he had a date nearly every weekend. Owning a car probably helped too.

  I was grateful to have Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell as friends. When I entered the first grade, I found myself in a community of boys from all over the town, and it became apparent that, as my father’s son, I was marked by his position. Around the kitchen tables at night, union fathers often identified Homer Hickam as the enemy, and the boys from those families sometimes went out looking for revenge. Jim was always big for his age and known for his terrible temper. I was a much easier target, caught at recess behind the school or loitering around the Big Store. Though I came home bloody, I never told my mother who attacked me, and my father never knew of it at all. Coalwood boys didn’t carry tales on one another. I did the best I could for a small, nearsighted kid and each year got to be a little tougher nut to crack. I even managed to bloody a few noses myself. For some reason, Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell never seemed to mind who my dad was. As far as they were concerned, we were all just Coalwood kids together.

  The road out of town led past the coal mine, and Jack blew the bus horn at the tipple. Those of us still awake waved at the men at the man-hoist, and then we kept going for about a mile until we stopped for the few students that came out of the hollow at Six (named after the sixth ventilation shaft sunk for the mine; there were some houses built up around it). They were the last students to pick up. Then we started up the first of the mountains. Between Coalwood and Big Creek High School were eight miles of twisting, potholed roads. Unless it was snowing, it took Jack about forty-five minutes to cover the distance.

  The road up Coalwood Mountain turned through one steeply inclined switchback after another. Wedged three to a seat, most of us dozed, leaning against one another at each turn. At the top of the mountain, the road dropped precipitously and swung back and forth until it bottomed out into a long, narrow valley. Here was the longest stretch of straight road in the district, nearly a mile of asphalt. About midway down it, behind a barbed-wire fence, was one of the big fans that ventilated the mine. On Saturday nights, this straight stretch—nicknamed Little Daytona—was a racetrack for those few teenagers with wheels, and the fan a favorite place to park and make out. Since I had neither a driver’s license nor a girlfriend, I knew both those things only by hearsay. Roy Lee was my most likely source. He had told me he took his dates to park there after going to the Dugout. The Dugout was in the basement of the Owl’s Nest restaurant across from the high school, and there were dances there every Saturday night. I’d never been to the Dugout, but from what I’d heard it was a lot of fun. One of the Big Creek janitors, Ed Johnson, was the disc jockey, and R
oy Lee said he had one of the best record collections this side of American Bandstand.

  After a sharp turn at the end of Little Daytona, we entered the town of Caretta. Caretta was owned by the same company that owned Coalwood. Its tunnels had broken through to our mine the previous year. There had been a massive slab of sandstone between the two mines, and my father had fought through it like he was in a war. Once opened, the combined mines caused so many ventilation problems, Dad had to take over both of them. According to what I heard Mom tell Uncle Joe during a visit, a lot of people in Caretta had said some real nasty things about that, calling Dad “uppity.” There seemed to be so many people who just couldn’t forgive Dad for not having a college degree like the Captain. That seemed strange to me since they didn’t have a degree either. Mom told Uncle Joe that, as far as she was concerned, those Caretta people weren’t “much punkin’ and funny turned too.” Mom sometimes seemed to lapse into a different dialect when one of her brothers was around. I remember Uncle Joe nodding his head in solemn agreement.

  After we passed through Caretta, we reached a fork in the road at a little place called Premier, where there was an old run-down whitewashed brick building called the Spaghetti House. I’d never been in there, but Roy Lee had. He said there were whores in there, old skaggy ones that would give you the clap. I didn’t know what the clap was, but it didn’t sound like I wanted it. Roy Lee said he’d only been in there one time to get change for a dollar and they had given him four rubbers instead. He still had all four. I knew because he’d shown them to me. He carried one of them in his billfold. It looked pretty old to me.