Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  Dad held up his right hand to his face, as if to shield it from Mom’s riveting gaze. “Jim, it’s okay,” he said reassuringly. “I’m going to take care of it.”

  “Homer—” Mom said in her warning tone.

  “Elsie—” Dad said back in his don’t-mess-with-me tone.

  Jim stood up. “Somebody better do something!” he wailed.

  I made my move. The football boys, even my brother, were so easy. “You could move to Charleston and play up there,” I suggested virtuously.

  Jim turned on me, his fists tightly balled. “You’re dead, Sonny.”

  “Jim, go to your room,” Mom ordered. She waited until Jim stalked off and then gave me a threatening look before turning back to Dad. “Homer, just let it go,” she said.

  Dad rolled his head on his neck. I could hear it creak. Ducking his head in the mine all day probably didn’t do it a lot of good. “This is none of your affair, Elsie,” he said.

  “Just stop and think, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “The Football Fathers—”

  “If you put the brains of every one of the Football Fathers in my coffee cup, they wouldn’t fill it up. You’ve got to think for all of them.”

  “We’ve made up our minds, Elsie. We’re going to Welch.”

  Mom knew the Bible pretty much by heart, and she was quite capable of using it on Dad like a club. “And if the blind leadeth the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,” she told him, making her argument unassailable because it was clearly on the side of the Lord.

  After an evident moment of confusion, Dad replied, “Thank you for your vote of confidence, Reverend Lavender.” Then the black phone rang, ever the convenient way to end discussion in our house. Dad yelled at whoever was on the other end and then headed out the door, throwing on his coat and hat as he went. I had no doubt he was grateful for the interruption. He didn’t come home until past midnight. Sometimes when he did that, I wondered if he wasn’t just sitting around his office, checking his watch, until Mom went to bed.

  A week later, as Mom had feared, the Football Fathers had themselves a proud little suit. The championship game was only a week away, so it was necessary to press the court to act fast. Three days after it was filed, a state judge in Bluefield took one look at the case and threw it out of court on a technicality. There was no precedent, he wrote, for a private organization to sue a state entity in his court. The championship game was held as scheduled in Charleston, and the season was officially over. Jim was so mad he locked himself in his room all day, except to come downstairs to eat and watch television and talk to some girls on the home telephone. I kept out of his way, retreating to a chair in the living room to read Dad’s latest Newsweek.

  “I’m glad it’s over,” Mom said, watching Jim stomp morosely up and down the steps.

  “We’re going to appeal,” Dad said from his easy chair. He was reading the paper. “We’re going to go over that judge’s head.”

  “But the game’s been played!”

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” Dad replied.

  Mom went into the living room and stood over him. “What principle? It’s high-school football!”

  Dad turned the page, as if he had just finished an article. I noticed, from my position, that he had turned to the comic page, which he never read. When Mom kept looking at him, he finally said, his eyes still firmly planted on the funnies, “This is man’s work, Elsie.”

  “Maybe so, Homer,” Mom replied, “but this woman is telling you it’s going to lead to disaster.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, stealing her phrase.

  WINTER came to West Virginia late that year. It was a splendid fall; the leaves kept their bright burnt color well into November, and the sky turned a pale but pretty blue, like a robin’s egg. Just before Thanksgiving, the first of the cold fronts from Canada finally reached us, and the trees abruptly dropped their leaves and turned black and skeletal. Winter storm clouds scudded in, got snagged on our hills, and stayed. Everything just seemed to turn black, brown, and gray after that.

  Coalwood had its routine for the beginning of winter, just as it did for every season. Mrs. Eleanor Marie Dantzler, the wife of Mr. Devotee Dantzler, the company-store manager, started to plan her winter piano recital, an annual social event. Company coal trucks made the rounds of the houses, stocking the coal boxes. The Coalwood Women’s Club built a float for the Veteran’s Day parade in Welch. In 1957, Jim and the other football boys wore Marine uniforms and pretended to be raising the flag on Iwo Jima. A lot of veterans were seen sobbing on the Welch streets as it went by. Just behind the Coalwood float, the Big Creek band marched, with me proudly playing the snare drum, one of five drummers in a line. Standing with Mom on the curb, Dad clapped and cheered the Coalwood float as it went past. His eyes were on Jim the whole time. Before I got there, he turned to talk to somebody behind him and didn’t see me as I paraded past. “Attaboy, Sonny,” I heard Mom call above the rat-a-tat-tat of my drum.

  THE union leader in Coalwood was a man named Mr. John Dubonnet, a classmate of my parents at Gary High School. During World War II, many Coalwood miners, including my father, were exempted from service because of the need for coal in the war effort. Mr. Dubonnet could have probably also stayed in West Virginia, but instead joined the Army. While he was landing on Normandy, my dad was opening up a new part of the mine, an incredibly rich vein of “high” coal, so-called because it was so thick a man could stand straight up in the tunnel left after its removal. By war’s end, the Coalwood mine was a lucrative little operation, ehvied across the county. That was when the UMWA finally turned its attention to Mr. Carter’s mine. The labor peace that Coalwood had enjoyed for more than fifty years came to an abrupt end. When Mr. Carter resisted the union’s attempts to organize, the union ordered a strike. In retaliation, Mr. Carter instituted a lockout, closing the mine to everybody. There was some pushing and brawling around the tipple and rumors of gunfire up the hollows. To calm things down, President Truman sent in the United States Navy to reopen the mine. After six months of military occupation in Coalwood, Mr. Carter was forced to sign a contract with the union and, soon afterward, sold Coalwood in disgust. The Captain, and my father, stayed behind.

  In the decade that followed, an edgy peace between labor and management settled on our town, broken only by intermittent strikes, usually quickly settled. The Coalwood operation became even richer. When the Captain retired, my father, at the Captain’s insistence, took over his position of mine superintendent. Since he was only a high-school graduate, many people in Coalwood—and in the union and the steel company that owned us too—thought my father was not qualified. Dad set out to prove them wrong by the sheer volume of his work and application of every particle of his energy and intelligence. He also continued to carry the Captain’s vision of the town long after nearly everyone else had forgotten it.

  By 1957, most of the old union leaders had followed the Captain into retirement, and a new crop was eager to show their worth to the rank and file. Mr. Dubonnet was one of them, quickly rising to lead the Coalwood UMWA local. Although nobody noticed it until it was too late, having Mr. Dubonnet and my dad on opposite sides was a prescription for conflict.

  As Mom had predicted, one day in early winter Dad stood outside the tipple and called out the names of men to be cut off. A national recession was under way, steel orders were reduced, and Coalwood was producing more coal than the steel company needed. Twenty-five men were cut off from the company. The phrase was apt. Not only were the men separated from their work, they were cut off from their homes, credit at the company stores, and identification as a Coalwood citizen. The miners cut off were required to leave their houses within two weeks. A few of them surreptitiously moved up past Snakeroot and built shacks along the fringe of the woods, hoping someday to be rehired. My father was later ordered by the steel company to bulldoze them out, but he never did. The church put together baskets of food at Thanksgiving and Christmas for these
families. For the first time I could remember, I heard little children were showing up in Coalwood classrooms needing clothing and food.

  After the cutoff, the union local, not certain what else to do about it, threatened to strike. Mr. Dubonnet showed up on our doorstep one evening and Mom answered his knock. “Why, John, come in!” she exclaimed, evidently pleased to see him. I was sprawled on the rug in the living room, reading The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt. He had written a lot about the rocket his heroes were voyaging in, but nothing on how it worked. That was a disappointment.

  “Elsie,” Mr. Dubonnet greeted her grimly, taking off his black helmet. He stayed on the porch. “Is Homer home?”

  Dad was in the kitchen, probably getting an apple. After his cancer was cut out of him, the doctor had prescribed as many apples as he could stand, and he ate a lot of them. Dad came to the front door. “You want to talk to me, Dubonnet, come see me at my office.” He said it in as mean a tone of voice as I ever heard him use.

  “What’s gotten into you, Homer?” Mom gasped. “Please come in, John!”

  The union man stood his ground. “It’s okay, Elsie. Homer, could you step outside? We need to talk before I go down to the union hall for the meeting.”

  Dad frowned, but went out and closed the storm door behind him. I couldn’t hear what was being said between him and Mr. Dubonnet, but I got up and came into the foyer so I could watch. Mom gave me a disapproving look and I retreated back to the living room, carefully positioning myself to where I could still see what was going on. I remembered that Mom, Dad, and Mr. Dubonnet had all come out of Gary. I also recalled that Mr. Dubonnet had been the valedictorian of their class and a star football player. It had never exactly been said, but I think Mr. Dubonnet had even taken my mom out a few times way back then. After a while, Dad opened the storm door to come back inside. “The company’s given you a good job, a house, and a decent life, Dubonnet,” he was saying, “and all you want to do is tear it down.”

  “The cutoff was not done properly according to our contract,” Mr. Dubonnet said reasonably. “You know that, Homer.”

  Dad put his hand on the doorknob. “The company did what it had to do.”

  “How they turned you into such a company man I’ll never figure,” Mr. Dubonnet said. This time his voice was hard and bitter.

  “Better than to throw in with a bunch of John L. Lewis commies!” Dad shot back.

  Mr. Dubonnet shook his head. “The trouble with you, Homer, is that you don’t know who your real friends are. When the company gets into trouble, it’ll throw you out like a dead mouse.”

  Dad stepped back onto the porch. “And the trouble with you, Dubonnet, is you can’t get over I got the Captain’s job.” Dad was about to say more, when he started to cough and grabbed his chest.

  “That’s it, Homer,” Mr. Dubonnet chided him, “cough your lungs out. You might be the mine superintendent, but you’ve got the common miner’s disease.”

  “Stop it, both of you!” Mom spat.

  “Stay out of this, Elsie,” Dad gasped and took a big, strangled breath.

  “Look at him,” Mr. Dubonnet said to my mother. “You think the company cares anything about his lungs or anybody else’s? Hell, no! This is what the great Captain did for us with his continuous miners.”

  Dad shook his head and searched for air. “You lay off the Captain,” he gasped. “He was a great man. I’ve got allergies, that’s all. Look at my daddy. Look at yours too. They worked in the mine all their life, and they never had any problems with their lungs.”

  “Our daddies dug coal out with picks, Homer,” Mr. Dubonnet said, back to being calm again. “The continuous miners grind the coal up, fill the air with dust. After we get this cutoff settled, it’s the next thing I want to talk to you about. We need some way to protect the men from the dust.”

  “I’ll thank you to get off my porch,” Dad choked.

  “John, maybe it would be best,” Mom said softly, putting her hand on Dad’s arm. He shrugged it off.

  Mr. Dubonnet put his helmet back on. “Elsie, you’re a fine woman. I always thought you deserved better.” He turned and went out the gate and walked across the street toward the gas station.

  Dad lurched back inside and slumped into his easy chair. “Damned union John L. Lewis sonuvabitch,” he muttered. “Still thinks he’s the great football player. Well, I could’ve played, but I had to work, picking coal at the tipple after school.”

  “I know that, Homer,” Mom said, watching him from the foyer. Her gentle tone surprised me.

  Dad’s hands were trembling as he reached for his paper. “You’re a good woman, Elsie,” he said.

  “I know that too, Homer,” she replied softly.

  “You could’ve had your pick.”

  “I did.” She looked at me, probably just noticing I was in the living room. “Go to your room,” she barked. “Study!”

  I nodded and went up the stairs, two steps at a time. Outside, a line of cars rumbled into the gas station, and I looked out the window to see what was going on. Mr. Dubonnet got into one of the cars and then they all headed down Main Street. I guessed they were headed to the union hall.

  JUST before Thanksgiving, Doc Lassiter ordered Dad to get an X ray. When he refused, Doc went to Mr. Van Dyke, the only man in town who could tell Dad what to do. Mr. Van Dyke was the mine’s general superintendent, a courtly man with silver hair who had been sent by the steel company to keep watch on its holdings. Dad, a company man through and through, had no choice but to comply with Mr. Van Dyke’s orders. He went over to Stevens Clinic in Welch. When he came home, I was upstairs in my room, reading. “A spot,” I heard him tell Mom. “About the size of a dime.”

  “Oh, Homer, for God’s sake,” I heard her say in a small and worried voice I hadn’t ever heard her use before. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not going to do anything,” he replied blandly. “Why’re you looking at me like that? Don’t worry about it. I’m only telling you because you’ll find out anyway. The only way to keep a secret in this town would be if I tore down every backyard fence in it.”

  Dad went into the living room and sat down and snapped open the Welch Daily News. Mom looked up and saw me. She scowled, crossed her arms, and went back to her kitchen. She was soon rattling pots and pans. I went back to my room and stared at nothing, feeling a little panicky. I’d been around Coalwood long enough to know miners with spots on their lungs were supposed to quit the mine. It was not unusual to see them sitting on the Big Store or post office steps during the day, quietly hacking up black spit. For some reason, if it was their lungs that made them quit, they were allowed to stay in Coalwood as long as they could afford the rent for their houses. But I never imagined the common disease of the mine could affect my dad. He seemed far too tough for that. He had a spot on his lungs the size of a dime. I’d have to ask somebody about how bad that was. Maybe Roy Lee. His older brother worked up around the face where the coal dust was the thickest. Yes, I would ask Roy Lee. He would know.

  IN December 1957, the United States made its first attempt to put a satellite into orbit with its Vanguard. I saw the result on television. Vanguard managed three tentative feet off the pad, lost thrust, and then blew up. According to the papers, the whole country was shocked and disappointed. I was too. I read some newspaper editorials and listened to television commentary that wondered if perhaps western civilization itself might soon be at an end with the technologically superior Russians taking over. I might have worried even more about Vanguard’s failure if I hadn’t had rocket problems of my own. Vanguard, after all, had managed to fly a yard higher than I had. There were a lot of smart people working on that project, and I guessed they’d figure things out, sooner or later. I, on the other hand, was all alone. That’s why I decided, like it or not, I had to talk to Quentin.

  5

  QUENTIN

  QUENTIN WAS THE class joke. He used a lot of big words often delivered in a pse
udo-English accent, and he carried around an old, cracked-leather briefcase, stuffed to overflowing with books and who-knew-what-else. While the rest of us played dodgeball or did calisthenics in phys. ed., he always had some excuse not to participate—a sprained ankle or a headache or some such—and sat in the bleachers and read one of his books. While all the other students traded gossip and nonsense in the auditorium in the morning and at lunch, Quentin always sat alone. He had no friends as far as I could tell. Although everybody, including me, made fun of him, I was pretty certain he was some sort of a genius. He could expound on nearly any subject in class until the teacher had to ask him to stop, and if he’d ever made less than a hundred on a test, I wasn’t aware of it.

  I figured if there was anybody who might know how to build a rocket, it was Quentin. The next morning before classes, I sat down beside him in the auditorium. Startled, he pulled his book down from his face. “I don’t let anybody copy my homework,” he said suspiciously.

  “I don’t want to copy your homework,” I replied, although I would have taken his algebra if he had offered. “Do you know anything about rockets?”

  A little smile crossed his face. Quentin wasn’t a bad-looking kid for a genius. He had a narrow face, a sharp nose, crisp blue eyes, and jet-black hair that looked as if it had been plastered down with about a quart of Wildroot Cream Oil. “I wondered how long it would take for you to come to me with that question. I heard about your rocket, old boy. Blew up, did it? What made you think you could build a rocket? You can’t even do algebra.”

  “I’m getting better,” I muttered. It was amazing to me that everybody, even Quentin, knew my business.

  “One of my little sisters can already do algebra,” he advised me. “I taught her. It’s really quite simple.”

  In less than a minute, he’d already pretty much irritated me. “So what do you know about rockets?” I asked him. “Anything?”