Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  When a Coalwood mother told her son maybe he needed to “straighten up a bit,” it was usually in a direction he didn’t necessarily want to go. I started to squirm. She was about to make it ten times worse. “I was worrying about you the other night to your dad,” she said. “I was just kind of wondering out loud what you were going to do with yourself when you grew up. He said for me not to worry, he’d find you a job on the outside up at the mine. You know what that means, Sonny? You’d be some kind of clerk working for your dad, sitting at a typewriter pecking out forms, or writing in a ledger about how many tons got loaded in a day. That’s the best your dad thinks you can do.”

  A question just seemed to jump out of my mouth. It surprised even me. I guess I’d been wondering about it for a long time and didn’t know it. “Why doesn’t Dad like me?” I asked her.

  Mom looked as if I had slapped her in the face. She was quiet for a moment, obviously chewing over my question. “It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” she said at length. “It’s just with the mine and all, he’s never had much time to think about you one way or the other.”

  If that was supposed to make me feel any better, it didn’t work. I knew Dad thought about Jim all the time, was always telling people what a great football player my brother was, and how he was going to tear up the world in football when he went to college.

  Mom sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders. I twitched at her unfamiliar touch. It had been a long time since she’d hugged me. We just didn’t do much of that kind of thing in our family. “You’ve got to get out of Coalwood, Sonny,” Mom said. “Jimmie will go. Football will get him out. I’d like to see him a doctor, or a dentist, something like that. But football will get him out of Coalwood, and then he can go and be anything he wants to be.”

  She clutched my shoulder, pulling me hard against her side. For a little bit, I would’ve put my head on her shoulder, but I sensed that would be going too far. “It’s not going to be so easy for you,” she said. “You and me, we’ve got to figure out some way to make your dad change his mind about you, see his way clear to send you to college. I’ve been saving money right along and probably have enough for you to go, but your dad would have a hissy right now if I said that’s what I was going to do, say it’s a waste of good money. He’s got it in his head you’re going to stay around here, have some little job at his mine.”

  “I’d like to go to college, sure—” I began.

  “Well, you’d better!” she snapped, cutting me off. She dropped her arm off my shoulder. I felt suddenly chilled without it. “Coalwood’s going to die,” she announced, “deader than a hammer.”

  “Ma’am?” She had lost me with that one.

  She stood up. I saw that her eyes were glistening. By her nature, she wasn’t a crier. In an instant, she brought herself back under complete control. “You can’t count on the mine being here when you graduate from high school, Sonny. You can’t even count on this town being here. Pay attention, will you? Look at the kids at Big Creek from Berwind, Bartley, Cucumber.… Their fathers are out of work, and those towns are just falling down around them. It’s the economy and it’s the easy coal playing out and it’s … I don’t know what all it is, but I’ve got sense enough to know it’s just a matter of time before the same thing happens here in Coalwood too. You need to do everything you can to get out of here, starting right now.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at her. She sighed. “To get out of here, you’ve got to show your dad you’re smarter than he thinks. I believe you can build a rocket. He doesn’t. I want you to show him I’m right and he’s wrong. Is that too much to ask?”

  Before I could reply, she sighed deeply once more, glanced over at her fence (the fire had burned itself out), and then stomped past me and went inside. I eased my foot out from under Dandy’s head so he wouldn’t be disturbed and came off the steps and stood alone in the deep blackness of the backyard, the old mountains looming over me. I tried to think, to catch up with all she had said. Dandy got up and sidled over to me and licked my hand. He was a good old dog. Poteet had stopped chasing bats and was asleep under the apple tree.

  When I went inside, Dad was still on the black phone. He said nearly everything over the company phone in exclamations. “Get Number Four back on line, and I mean now!” Number Four was undoubtedly one of the huge ventilators on the surface that forced air through the mine. Whoever was on the other end apparently wasn’t giving him the response he wanted. “I’m leaving the house right now, and it better be going by the time I get there!” He slammed the receiver down. I watched him throw open the hall closet and snatch his jacket and hat. He rushed past me without a glance, just as if I didn’t exist, and went out the back door. I heard the gate unlatch and close, and he was gone into the night.

  I went up the stairs and found Mom waiting for me in the hall. She wasn’t through with me yet. “Has anything I’ve said tonight made any sense to you at all?”

  I guess I looked blank. “Well …” I began.

  “Oh, God, Sonny,” she groaned in exasperation. She touched me on the nose with her finger. “I-am-counting-on-you,” she said, tapping my nose with each word. “Show him you can do something! Build a rocket!” Then she looked at me in a significant way and went inside her bedroom.

  It was past midnight when Dad returned. I had just dozed off after a round of thinking about all that Mom had said. I heard him creep up the stairs and then I started thinking all over again. I carefully lifted Daisy Mae, my little calico cat, out of the crook of my arm and placed her at the foot of the bed and got up and opened my window. The tipple loomed before me like a giant black spider. According to Mom, Dad thought all I was good for was working there as a clerk. A gasp of steam erupted from an air vent beside the tipple, and I followed the cloud skyward, watched the water droplets disperse. A big golden moon hovered overhead, and the vapor formed a misty circle around it. Sparkling stars flowed down the narrow river of sky the mountains allowed. I looked at the tiny pricks of light so far away. I didn’t know one star from the other, didn’t know much of anything about the reality of space. I knew less than nothing about rockets too. I suddenly felt as stupid as Dad apparently thought I was. Mom had said for me to build a rocket, show him what I could do. I had already been thinking about learning enough to go to work for Wernher von Braun. Her Elsie Hickam Scholarship, if approved by Dad, would fit right in with that.

  Then I remembered what Mom had said about Coalwood dying. That was the hardest thing to understand of all the things she had told me. All around me, Coalwood was always busily playing its industrial symphony of rumbling coal cars, spouting locomotives, the tromping of the miners going to and from the mine. How could that ever end?

  The black phone interrupted my thoughts. Dad had probably just let his head touch his pillow when it rang. I heard his muffled voice as he answered it and then a string of what I was certain were curses. Within seconds, his door banged open and I heard him thumping down the stairs almost as if someone was chasing him. At the bottom of the stairs, he started to cough, a racking, deep, wet hack. He’d lately been complaining a lot about his allergies, even though in the fall you’d think there wouldn’t be much pollen in the air. I’d often awoke to hear him coughing at night, but I’d never heard it so bad before. I watched him out of my bedroom window a few minutes later as he walked quickly toward the mine, his head down and a bandanna to his face. He stopped once and bent nearly double, a great spasm rocking him. Those allergies were really getting to him, I thought. He straightened and hurried on. As he neared the track, a long line of loaded coal cars trundled out of his way as if in recognition of his approach. As soon as he hopped the rails and disappeared up the path, the cars moved back to block my view. Mom’s bedroom was beside mine, and I heard her pull her window shade down. She’d been watching him too.

  4

  THE FOOTBALL FATHERS

  FOR THE NEXT week, the destruction of Mom’s rose-garden fence by m
y rocket dominated conversation in Coalwood. Mr. McDuff came down from the mine to restore the fence and reported it had been reduced to splinters. “Maybe Elsie better get my Mister to build her next fence out of steel,” Mrs. McDuff said to a friend at the Big Store. Soon ladies in their backyards were repeating that remark, fence by fence, from one end of the valley to the other. On the way to the tipple or in the man-trips, on the main line, in the gob (the mix of rock and coal dust that lay in the old part of the mine), and even at the face, the miners were talking about the great blast.

  “You little sisters are idiot morons,” Buck Trant, the big, ugly fullback, announced from the back bench of the morning school bus. He laughed at himself, thinking his observation brilliant. The other players joined in. “Little idiot moron sisters!”

  Buck added, after a moment of concentration, “You sisters couldn’t blow your noses without your mamas!”

  Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell bowed their heads in impotent rage. Not me. Buck Trant was too easy. Not only was he a dimwit, he was vulnerable. “At least we know where our mamas are,” I shot back. Buck’s mother had run off with a vacuum-cleaner salesman a few years before. Just as soon as I’d said my mean thing, I regretted it, but it was too late. Outraged, Buck jumped to his feet, but when Jack stomped on the brakes, he went tumbling. We were halfway up Coalwood Mountain. Without a word, Jack pulled the bus off the road, turned in his seat, and pointed at me. “Out!” he ordered. He looked at Buck.

  “You too, Buck!”

  “Me?” Buck whined. “What did I do? Sonny started it. He’s always starting stuff, you know that.”

  Jack didn’t take guff off anybody on his school bus, even big overgrown football players. “Don’t make me have to kick you out the door, son,” he growled.

  Buck looked for support from the other football boys, but they all had their heads down. He walked meekly down the aisle and got out, standing forlornly in the dirt. I followed him and we stood beside each other while Jack slammed the door shut. Before the bus rounded the curve, Buck was after me. I threw down my books, ducked his bear hug, and scampered up the mountainside and disappeared into the woods. “I’m going to murder you, you little four-eyed freak,” he yelled after me.

  “You and what army?” I challenged him from deep within a thicket of rhododendron. Buck huffed around along the road, but didn’t come after me, probably because he was wearing blue suede shoes and didn’t want to get them dirty. After a while, a car came along and Buck stuck his thumb out and climbed in. I came down and did the same, hitching to Big Creek, just making it in time for the first class. I avoided Buck all day, which was not easy since his locker was beside mine. Roy Lee and the other boys caught me at lunch. “We aren’t going to build another rocket,” Roy Lee said.

  “Fine,” I replied. I was already mad at him and the others for not backing me up on the bus. “I’ll build one by myself!” I said it with such certainty, it surprised even me. Whether I liked it or not, I was committed to do it.

  “Have at it,” Roy Lee muttered, and he and O’Dell and Sherman walked away. I knew I’d really messed up. I needed their help. I had to build a rocket and I didn’t have a clue where to start.

  THAT night, while I was puzzling over my algebra, Jim stuck his head in my room. “I just want you to know how really great it is to have a brother who’s a complete moron.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I replied lamely.

  “Everybody’s laughing at the family because of you.”

  “Just go away,” I growled. “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?” he chided. “Trying to decide what dress to wear?”

  Jim ducked when I threw my pencil at him and then pulled my door shut. Unbidden, a little bubble of brotherly jealousy gurgled up inside me. Who cared what Jim thought about anything? He didn’t even have to think. Dad would take care of everything for him, see that he got everything he wanted. Jim thought I was some kind of a sister. Well, at least I didn’t go around wearing pink shirts and a peroxide curl in my hair!

  My first rocket had caused me to be harassed on the school bus, at school, and now in my own room. There was more to come. The following Saturday, when I went to the Big Store to buy a bottle of pop, I ran afoul of Pooky Suggs.

  Pooky Suggs’s history was common knowledge in Coalwood. His father had been crushed by a slate fall about a dozen years back on a section where Dad was the foreman. To stay in Coalwood, Pooky had quit the sixth grade and gone into the mine. To anybody who’d listen, Pooky was forever complaining about having to quit school to go to work, blaming it all on Dad for getting his daddy killed. He didn’t get much sympathy. It had been his daddy’s fault, after all, that he had gone under an unsupported part of the roof to urinate, and anyway, Pooky had already been in the sixth grade for five years when he quit. Nobody in town much thought he’d ever have reached the seventh. Still, for as long as I could remember, I’d heard Pooky’s name around the house, Dad telling Mom about something that Pooky had done that was stupid, or that he’d caught him idling back in the gob again, and Mom telling Dad back he should just fire Pooky and get it done with. For some reason, Dad had never taken her up on it. Maybe he felt a little guilty about Pooky’s father, I don’t know, but he seemed to tolerate Pooky more than he did other complainers and idlers.

  I avoided Pooky whenever I could, but hadn’t noticed him among the men gossiping on the Big Store steps. “Well, looky what we got here—Homer’s little rocket boy,” he said nastily. “Heard the damn thang blew up. Did your daddy help you build it?”

  The men sitting on the steps turned to look at me. They were all holding paper cups for their chewing-tobacco spit. “You gonna build another one?” asked Tom Tickle, one of the single miners who lived in the Club House.

  Tom was friendly. “Yes, sir, I am,” I said.

  “Well, attaboy!” the step group chorused.

  “Shee-it. All he can do is build a bomb,” Pooky said.

  “Well, it was a damn good bomb!” Tom laughed. Pooky stood up and kicked his way through the assembly. If he had hoped to heap scorn on me, it hadn’t worked. He shoved his helmet back on his head and leaned into me, his breath mostly alcohol fumes. “You Hickams think you’re so hot, but you ain’t no better’n me or nobody else in this town.”

  “Sonny didn’t say no different, Pooky,” Tom said. “Whyn’t you go sleep it off afore you get into trouble?”

  Pooky turned, rocking unsteadily in his hard-toe boots. His face was all angles, with a sharp, pointed nose and a triangular chin covered with stubble. Despite the easy availability of Dr. Hale, the company dentist, his teeth were yellow and cracked. His voice was a whine that sounded like an untuned fiddle. “We need to go on strike, I’m tellin’ ya. That bastard Homer’s gonna work us all to death!”

  “I don’t believe work’s ever going to kill you, Pook.” Tom grinned, and the step miners erupted in laughter.

  “All y’all can just go to hell!” Pooky muttered. He probably meant it to sound tough, but it came out sort of pitiful. I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. He gave me another dirty look. “Your daddy killed my daddy,” he said. “I ain’t never gonna forget that!”

  Tom stood up and tugged Pooky away from me, turning him around and pointing him across the street. “You better get on home, Pook.”

  I took the opportunity to slip through the men to go inside the Big Store. I got my bottle of pop, then leaned on the counter and drank it slowly, watching through the glass doors what was going on outside. Pooky and Tom looked like they were dancing, with Pooky trying to come inside the Big Store and Tom turning him back around. To my relief, Tom finally won and Pooky staggered off. Soon afterward, all the men got up, their gossiping done. When the steps were clear, I ran outside and grabbed my bike and pedaled toward home. Near the Coalwood School, I went past a line of miners making their way to the tipple. With big grins on their faces, they all yelled “Rocket boy!” as I flashed by. What had I gotten myself into? I�
��d told too many people I was going to build another rocket, and now I had to do it. But how? What was the blamed secret that made a rocket fly?

  THE final regular season football game ended with Big Creek winning big over Tazewell High School, just across the Virginia border. Jim sent two quarterbacks to the sidelines on stretchers and intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown. With that victory, the team had won all its games. Then the state high-school athletic association did exactly what it said it was going to do and ruled that Coach Gainer’s boys were not eligible to play in the state-championship game. Although it was no surprise, there was still an instant uproar all over the district. The Football Fathers were besieged with demands from fans and the football team to do something. Jim asked Dad every night at supper for a week after the last game what he was going to do. Dad kept saying he was looking into it. Finally, one night at supper he said he was going to go see a lawyer in Welch.

  Mom put down her fork and stared at Dad in disbelief. “Homer, I don’t think that’s wise.”

  Dad shoveled in a spoonful of beans and corn bread. “Elsie, I know what I’m doing,” he replied nonchalantly. He didn’t look at her.

  Mom settled into a deep frown. “No, you don’t. The Charleston muckety-mucks don’t want us to play and they’re not going to let us play. No lawyer’s going to change that. You’re just asking for trouble.”

  “Mom, Dad’s got to do something!” Jim begged. “We deserve to play!”

  “I know you do, Jimmie,” Mom replied softly. “But sometimes we don’t get our way even when we deserve it. That’s true for everybody, even you. I know that amazes you, but that’s the way it is.”

  Jim’s face went dark and he shoved his chair back from the table. “I want to be excused,” he said sullenly.