Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  “I know everything,” he replied.

  He had said it too easily. “Let’s hear it, then,” I said, doubtfully.

  He raised one of his bony shoulders in a shrug. “What’s in it for me?”

  “What do you want?”

  “To help you build the next one.”

  That was a surprise. “If you know so much, why don’t you build your own?” I demanded.

  Quentin built a little church with his hands. “I’ve considered building a rocket for some time, if you must know. Practical reasons, unfortunately, have prevented me from taking action. It takes teamwork to build a rocket, and materials. My observation of you is that you have certain … leadership abilities that I do not.” He locked his eyes on me. They were intense, almost like they were capable of shooting rays. “The other boys will follow you,” he said. “And you, being the Coalwood superintendent’s son, can probably get all the materials you need.”

  His ray-gun eyes made me want to look away, but I didn’t. “What’s your angle?” I demanded.

  “Ho-ho!” he exclaimed. “The same as you, old chap! If I learn how to build a rocket, I’ll stand a better chance of getting on down at the Cape.”

  “First you’ve got to go to college,” I reminded him.

  “I’ll go to college,” he said resolutely. “But it won’t hurt to get some good practical rocket-building experience under my belt.” He put out his hand. “How about it? You want to team up?”

  It was the best offer I’d gotten since I’d started my rocket-building career, but I was still a little reluctant. I didn’t have much of a reputation at Big Creek, but it was still better than Quentin’s. When I didn’t respond to his hand, he grabbed mine and shook it, big strokes up and down. I hastily pulled my hand away and looked around to see if anybody had noticed. I knew the football boys would accuse me of holding hands with Quentin if any one of them had seen it.

  “So what do you know?” I demanded, my face flushed with the potential embarrassment of it all.

  “Calm down, old chap,” he said. “All shall become perfectly clear.” He leaned back and took a deep breath and then began to talk just as if he was reading something straight from a book. “The Chinese are reputed to have invented rocketry. Something called ‘Chinese arrows’ are mentioned in Europe and the Middle East as far back as the thirteenth century. The British used rockets later aboard their warships during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. That’s where ‘the rocket’s red glare’ comes from in ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ Then there was the Russian Tsiolkovsky, Goddard the American, and von Braun, of course. Each of them added to the body of rocket knowledge. Tsiolkovsky was a theorist, Goddard applied engineering principles, and—”

  I stopped him. “I don’t need to know this stuff. I need to know how a rocket works.”

  Quentin cocked his head. “But that’s so elementary. Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  I remembered from one science class or another something about Newton, but I couldn’t put my finger on his laws. “How do you know that?”

  “Read it somewhere.”

  “Read it where?”

  Quentin frowned, disturbed at my attempt to cut through his bull. “A physics book, I suppose,” he said stiffly. “Can’t exactly say which one. I thumb over to Welch every Saturday to the county library. I tend to pick out random shelves and just read every book on it until I’m done.”

  I could see it was going to be necessary to be more specific with Quentin. “What kind of fuel does a rocket use?”

  “The Chinese used black powder.”

  “Black powder?”

  He looked at me carefully, as if to determine if I was joking. “Black powder. It contains potassium nitrate—saltpeter, you know—and charcoal and sulfur.”

  Saltpeter? Quentin sighed and then explained in some detail the chemical’s properties. It was an oxidizer, which, when combined with other chemicals, produced heat and gas, necessary to make a rocket fly. “It can also kill you down there,” he finished up, pointing at his crotch.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It fixes men so they can’t … you know.”

  “What?”

  Quentin flushed. “You know.” He straightened a crooked finger. “That.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, that’s what I read.”

  I thought I’d better get back to rockets. “Where can I buy some of this black powder?”

  “You can’t buy it, far as I know,” he said. “You’ve got to mix it up. Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, that’s what we need. Can you get it?”

  I wasn’t certain, but I wasn’t going to let him know it. “I’ll get right on it.”

  Quentin grinned broadly and suddenly started to rattle on like I was his best friend. He opened up his briefcase and showed me all the books within, most of them on general science, but one of them a novel titled Tropic of Cancer. “You want to know about girls? This is the one,” he said slyly.

  “I already know about girls.”

  He tapped the book. “No, you don’t.”

  When the bell rang and we stood up, I noticed for the first time Quentin’s worn, faded shirt, thin at the elbows, and his patched cotton pants and his scuffed, ankle-high shoes. Quentin wasn’t a Coalwood boy. He came from Bartley. He was one of the kids my mother told me to notice. The mine at Bartley was always having cutoffs and strikes, and in the last few years, many Bartley families had slid into poverty and misery. Quentin’s father was probably out of a job. In 1957 southern West Virginia, you wouldn’t likely starve if you didn’t have any money. There was always bread and commodity cheese you could get from the government. But that was about all there was.

  Roy Lee stopped me in the hall. “What were you talking to that moron Quentin about? And did I see you holding his hand?”

  I was peeved enough at Roy Lee to not answer, but then I figured it would aggravate him more to tell the truth. “We’re going to build a rocket, him and me.”

  A surge of kids passed us, Dorothy Plunk among them. “Hi, Sonny, Roy Lee,” she called angelically. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  Roy Lee shook his head and leaned against the lockers. “Gawd almighty. You want to stop all chance of ever having any kind of social life? Dorothy Plunk sees you and Quentin hanging out together, she’s going to lose interest right there.”

  I looked after her, trying not to stare at her cute little bottom swinging back and forth down the hall. “Dorothy doesn’t care anything about me, anyway,” I said, sort of breathless.

  Roy Lee didn’t try to hide what he was looking at. He watched Dorothy all the way down the hall. “Whew,” he whistled. He pulled his eyes back to me. “You got good taste anyway, Sonny. Why don’t you ask her out? Double date with me next weekend. We’ll go parking at the Caretta fan.”

  “She’d just say no.”

  Roy Lee shook his head again as if I was the burden of his life. “If you don’t ask her out, I will.”

  “You wouldn’t do that!” I bleated.

  He wiggled his eyebrows at me, his crooked grin clearly salacious. “Oh, but I would!”

  Roy Lee had me in a box. If he asked Dorothy out and she went, I wasn’t sure I could live through it, knowing what Roy Lee was likely to try with her. And what if she did it—or if Roy Lee claimed she did? My life would be pretty much ruined forever. I had no choice. I chased after Dorothy, catching her with Emily Sue at the entrance to biology class. “I’m sorry I got sick over the worm,” Dorothy said, first thing.

  “Dorothy,” I said, my heart pounding in my ears, “would you like to go to the dance with me Saturday night? With Roy Lee? I mean, in his car? I mean—”

  Her big blues blinked. “But I already have plans!”

  The blood drained from my face. “Oh …”

  “But if you’d come over to my house on Sunday afternoon,” she purred, “I’d love to study biology with you.”
<
br />   To her house! “I’ll be there!” I swore. “What should I bring? I mean—”

  “Just yourself, silly.” She looked me over, studying me, and I kind of thought she liked what she was seeing. “We’ll have so much fun,” she concluded.

  Emily Sue had been observing all this. “Be a little careful with this one, Dorothy,” she said.

  “Whatever do you mean?” Dorothy asked her friend.

  They talked to each other as if I weren’t even there. “Sonny’s nice,” Emily Sue said succinctly.

  “Well, so am I!” Dorothy said back. She went on into the classroom.

  Roy Lee had been loitering nearby, listening. He came up and stood beside Emily Sue. “What do you think?” he said.

  They were talking as if I weren’t there too. “Dangerous,” Emily Sue told him. “But probably not fatal.”

  During class, I couldn’t help but sneak looks at Dorothy at her desk while she worked on a drawing of frog intestines. She had the adorable habit of letting the pink tip of her tongue protrude from her full, delectable lips while she concentrated. She was wearing a white pinafore blouse with a blue ribbon around its collar, which made her look so very innocent, yet the way she filled the blouse out troubled me with indecent thoughts. She caught me looking once and gave me a demure little smile while I blushed. I couldn’t figure out how so much perfection could wind up in one person. Then a little misery inserted itself. If Dorothy had plans for Saturday night, I didn’t imagine it was to bake cookies with her mother.

  THERE was a company-store system in most of the towns in southern West Virginia. They usually featured easy credit and inflated prices. If a miner got into enough debt with a company store, the company stopped paying the miner with U.S. dollars and issued his pay in the form of scrip—company money good only in the company store. It was an insidious system. A popular song across the country in the late 1950’s was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” where he sang about a miner owing his soul to the company store. That was just about the truth for a lot of West Virginia miners.

  As part of his social agenda, the Captain abolished the worst aspects of the company-store system in Coalwood. He brought in a college-educated manager—Mr. Devotee Dantzler, a Mississippi gentleman—to make certain prices were kept fair and no miner was gouged. The Captain dictated that credit could be given, when necessary, but the books were to be watched closely. No miner was allowed to get himself too far into debt. Scrip in Coalwood was issued sparingly. Smaller stores were built around the town for the convenience of the population. Under Mr. Dantzler, the Big Store became a source of town cohesiveness and a social gathering spot.

  The Big Store contained a little bit of everything: hard-toe boots, leather utility belts, helmets, coveralls, and the cylindrical lunch buckets the miners favored; clothes for the whole family, groceries, and umbrellas; refrigerators, baby carriages, radios, and television sets with free installation onto the company cable system; pianos, guitars, record players, and a record department too. It had a drugstore where you could get Doc’s prescriptions and a wide variety of patent medicines, and a soda fountain where you could get pop and candy and a milk shake so thick a spoon would stand straight up in it. It had auto parts and lumber; shovels, picks, rakes, and seeds for the little gardens the miners scraped into the sides of the mountains. It even had a limited choice of coffins, hidden away in a back room. It was technically illegal to bury anyone on company property, but the colored people had a cemetery somewhere up Snakeroot Hollow. My father, and the company, looked the other way on it.

  The Big Store had just about everything anybody in Coalwood needed, but would it have rocket fuel? With my cigar box of dollars and scrip left from my defunct newspaper delivery business, I went to Junior, the clerk at the drugstore counter, to find out. Junior was a rotund little man with a cherubic face, who was as smart as a whip and liked all over the town. When Junior worked on the store truck that delivered heavy things (like refrigerators) in the afternoon, he was welcome to come right into anybody’s house, even though he was a Negro. Most of the ladies loved him, even petted on him a little. He rarely got away from them after a delivery without some tea or coffee and cake. I saw him once in Mom’s kitchen, admiring her mural. Mom was beaming. It was rumored that Junior had once attended college, which put him ahead of even my father. Junior heard my order and cocked his head doubtfully. “Saltpeter?” he demanded in his raspy voice. “Your folks sent you after that?”

  “It’s for me,” I said forthrightly. “Science project. I need sulfur and charcoal too.”

  Junior adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles and seemed to make a mental calculation. Then he went into the back and brought out a can each of sulfur and saltpeter and a ten-pound bag of cooking charcoal. “Listen, rocket boy,” he said. “This stuff can blow you to kingdom come. I think you know what I’m saying.”

  I mumbled, “Yessir,” and paid with scrip. I loaded my treasures on my bike and rode home. As I passed a line of miners walking to work, Mr. Dubonnet hailed me down. “I hear you’re going to build another rocket,” he said.

  “Yessir. I’m thinking about going down to Cape Canaveral and joining up with Wernher von Braun.”

  He seemed to brighten at the news. “That’s a good thing. You’re too smart to stay here.”

  The line of coal cars beside us suddenly began slamming against each other, just before being pushed to the tipple. It was as loud as a hundred car wrecks happening all at once, but no one, including me, even bothered to look in its direction. We heard that sound every day. “Mr. Dubonnet, you’re smart too,” I said in an attempt to figure out why everybody lately seemed to want me out of town. “After the war, why did you come back to West Virginia if it’s so bad?”

  He laughed. He had a deep, rich, ho-ho-ho kind of laugh that was wonderful to hear. “You got me there, Sonny.” He began to walk and I pushed my bicycle beside him, “I guess these old mountains, the mines, the people get in your blood,” he said. “When I got back from overseas I couldn’t wait to get home to McDowell County. It’s where I belong.”

  There was the thing. He’d hit right on what I’d been wondering about since Mom’s backyard lecture. “How do you know I don’t belong here too?” I wondered.

  He stopped and raised his eyebrows as if I had said the most amazing thing. I guess my ignorance was a continuing surprise to everyone in Coalwood. “Well, you do, of course,” he answered. “Anybody raised here belongs here. You can’t belong anywhere else.”

  The empty coal cars shrieked as the locomotive, perhaps a mile down the track, began to push them toward the waiting tipple. I shouted to be heard. “Then I don’t understand why I’m supposed to leave!”

  He stopped again, the other miners passing us by at a hard slog, the shift-change hour approaching. “Don’t you understand?” he yelled. “In just a few years, all this will be gone, almost like it never existed.” The coal cars began to roll and the noise lowered to a deep rumble. Mr. Dubonnet lowered his voice with them. “Even the union can’t put the coal back in the ground.”

  I knew I probably shouldn’t ask him anything about my father, considering the row I’d observed between them, but I couldn’t resist. “Does my dad know this?”

  Mr. Dubonnet grimaced. “He knows. But he acts like he don’t.”

  “How come?”

  “Now, that’s something you should ask him,” Mr. Dubonnet said, his face turning as hard as concrete. “Good luck with your rockets, Sonny.” He joined the line of men and quickly disappeared, one black helmet in a river of black, bobbing helmets, all going up the path to the tipple. I looked back down the valley at all the houses. Women were out on their front porches with their mops and buckets, waging their never-ending battle against the coal dust. The coal cars kept trundling past until a big black steam locomotive, puffing huge gouts of white smoke, finally appeared. It churned past, its engineer giving me a wave. I waved back distractedly. With all this activity, I just couldn’t ima
gine it ever ending. Maybe Dad and I had a similar blind spot.

  Beside the washing machine in the basement was a wide counter and a deep steel sink. I had decided it would be my rocket laboratory. As soon as I set my chemicals on the counter, the upstairs door opened. “Sonny?” Mom called, and I yes-ma’amed her. “Remember what I said. Don’t blow yourself up.”

  News in Coalwood traveled a lot faster than a boy on a bike.

  QUENTIN hitchhiked over on Saturday and I introduced him to my mother. He made a short bow at the waist to her, an Errol Flynn kind of move I’m sure he had seen in the movies. Mom was impressed by it, however, her hand going to her mouth almost like a bashful girl’s. She rarely baked cookies, but I soon smelled their aroma drifting down from the kitchen. When she thumped down the basement steps with them and two glasses of milk, the plate she handed Quentin was piled twice as high as mine. “These are marvelous, undoubtedly the most delicious cookies I have ever tasted in the entire history of my life,” Quentin told her after a nibble. Mom looked tickled. She wondered what else she could do for us.

  “Nothing, Mom,” I answered. I just wanted her to leave so we could get to work.

  She seemed to want to loiter. “If you need anything, just call me.”

  “We will, Mom. See you later, Mom.”

  After my mother had gone back to the kitchen, Quentin worked on his cookies for a while while I waited impatiently. Finally, he took a final swig of milk, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and picked up the bag of saltpeter. He looked inside it. “Looks pure,” he said. I wondered how he would know.

  With Dandy and Poteet watching us furtively from a dark nook beside the coal furnace, we began to work. First, we mixed up several small batches of what we hoped was black powder and, as a test, opened the grate and threw a spoonful of each into the coal-fired hot-water heater beside the washing machine. The ingredients hissed feebly, but it was impressive enough for the dogs to beg to be let out. I opened the basement door and they bolted outside. “What do you think?” I asked. Quentin shrugged. Neither of us knew how rocket fuel was supposed to burn.