by Homer Hickam
Jim and Buck and the football players disappeared, almost as if they got sucked up into the ceiling, leaving Quentin and me standing exposed. Mr. Turner looked us over. “Are you two boys plotting something nefarious?”
Quentin was frightened into honesty. Besides that, he understood what nefarious meant. “I was just telling Sonny,” he said, “I think someday there will be a trophy in here for the Big Creek Missle Agency.”
Mr. Turner frowned deeply. “And what, pray tell, is the Big Creek Missile Agency?”
“Our rocket club,” I said when Quentin hesitated.
He looked at me closely. “Mr. Hickam, isn’t it? Jim’s brother? Did I not hear that you blew up your mother’s rose-garden fence? That sounds much more like a bomb than a rocket. Gentlemen, let me make this perfectly clear to you. I will not tolerate a bomb club in my school. And as for trophies, Mr. Hickam, your brother and the football team don’t need your help.”
“But I think these boys have a wonderful idea, Mr. Turner,” Miss Riley said. She smiled at me. She had an impish, freckled face. “I graduated from this high school,” she said, “and all I ever heard was football, football, football. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if science was another way to get in this trophy case?”
“That’s just what I was saying, Miss Riley!” Quentin blurted out.
“I am disciplining these boys at present, Miss Riley,” Mr. Turner said, shooting Quentin a warning look. The bell rang and students started to stream into classrooms up and down the hall. “Well?” Mr. Turner demanded of us. “Don’t you have classes?”
“I’m in charge of helping students prepare for the county science fair,” Miss Riley said to us over the noise of the throng. “If you boys are interested, come and talk to me.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Quentin chirped.
I felt like strangling Quentin. All we had done was blow up a fence and stink up Coalwood with our failures. It was embarrassing. “We can’t be in any science fair,” I muttered.
Miss Riley studied me. It felt as if she could see right through me. “Why not, Sonny?”
“We just can’t,” I repeated stubbornly. I didn’t want to explain. I just wanted to get off the subject.
“Go away, boys,” Mr. Turner waved. “Quickly, now.”
I was grateful for the excuse to get away and ran for it. With his big briefcase practically dragging on the floor, Quentin couldn’t get anywhere too fast, but he caught me while I waited for the other students to file inside the door to history class. “Listen, Sonny,” he gasped, catching his breath, “we win the science fair with our rockets, it’s got to help us get on down to the Cape.”
Besides the fact we didn’t know how to build a rocket, I told him my main objection. “Quentin, we’d just embarrass ourselves. We’d be up against Welch High School students.” This was self-explanatory, I thought. Welch students came from families with fathers who were doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and bankers, and their high school was the newest, best-equipped school in the county. The Welch Daily News had stories all the time about Welch students going off to college and winning honors. Although we routinely knocked the tar out of them in football, there was no way any Big Creek student was going to beat Welch students head to head in a science fair. “You want it in the paper and everywhere else how we got stomped? How would that look to Dr. von Braun? If you have an ounce of common sense, you’ll drop this idea,” I told him, perfectly aware that he lacked that ounce.
“It’s not like you to be a pessimist,” Quentin said coldly. “I’m totally dumbfounded by your attitude. Dismayed too.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Astonished, chagrined, and saddened.”
I wasn’t going to let him bait me with his vocabulary. I just shook my head and left him standing in the doorway. I didn’t want to hear any more about it.
NEARLY every Sunday afternoon that year, I thumbed rides to War to visit Dorothy for study sessions. She seemed to enjoy my company, and it wasn’t her fault, after all, that I was in love with her. One Sunday, she stopped studying and looked across the coffee table at me. “Oh, Sonny, I’m so glad we’re such good friends!” she gushed.
“Me too, Dorothy,” I answered, lying. Never had friend been such an awful word.
Emily Sue caught me staring unhappily at Dorothy in the auditorium one morning. Dorothy was holding hands with her latest, a senior basketball player, and I had my lip out about it. Emily Sue sat down in front of me and put her arm up on the seat, looking over it at me. Because she was plump, was a brilliant scholar, and had big, round glasses that gave her face an owllike appearance, it might have been expected that Emily Sue wasn’t popular with the boys, but she was. For one thing, she was one of the best dancers in school. But to me, Emily Sue was what I came to think of as a forever friend, somebody I could tell the truth to without fear of reproach. I just instinctively knew that about her. She also seemed to possess a wisdom far beyond our years. “So what are you going to do about her?” she asked me, nodding toward Dorothy.
“Nothing I can do.” I shrugged, working hard to be nonchalant.
Emily Sue inspected me. “She likes you, Sonny, but to her you’re just her special little friend. That’s probably not ever going to change.”
Her words were like knives plunged into my heart. I abandoned all pretense. “But why?” I whined. “What’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Emily Sue said. “You’re one of the nicest, friendliest kids in this school. Everybody likes you, Sonny. You know why? You like yourself. Look at your brother. He dresses great, he’s a football star, he’s a wonderful dancer—God knows, I love to dance with him—and there’s a lot of girls after him all the time. He’s a big man on campus, but he doesn’t really have any friends. That’s why I think he goes out with so many girls. He’s trying to find someone who will like him for who he is, not because he’s a big football star. Dorothy’s the same way. She’s happy you’re her little friend but she’s going to keep looking somewhere else for love.”
While Emily Sue was talking, I was sliding deeper into my seat. Jim and Dorothy alike? I wasn’t buying that. And me forever just Dorothy’s friend and nothing else? The thought of it plunged me into a melancholy as deep as the coal mine. The bell rang and I thanked Emily Sue for the nice things she said about me, didn’t argue with her about the rest, and then made my getaway. I didn’t want to, but all that day I thought about nothing else but what Emily Sue had said. I just couldn’t believe it. There had to be a way to win Dorothy, some strategy, some ploy. It was like building a rocket. I could figure it out. If only I was smart enough.
OVER the next few weekends, Quentin and I continued our practical work, testing different black-powder mixes in the hot-water heater. I was grateful when he didn’t bring up the science-fair idea again. Finally, our trial-and-error method resulted in a combination of ingredients that seemed to have the most flash and smoke to it. Quentin had an idea on the propellant. “I’ve been thinking, old boy,” he said. “I don’t like this loose mix. It seems to me we ought to put some kind of combustible glue in it so it can be shaped. We could run a hole up through the center of it, get more surface area burning at once. That ought to give us more boost.”
A boost sounded good to me. I went to the Big Store and waited until Junior had served the other drugstore customers and then asked him if he knew of anything that was like a glue but would burn. He questioned me closely until I admitted exactly what I was trying to do. He brought out a can of powdered glue. To this day, I still can’t imagine why it was stocked at the Big Store, but there it was. “This is the same stuff that’s on the back of postage stamps. Mix a little of it in your powder and add water. Let it dry. I think it’ll burn. That’ll be fifteen cents.”
“Thanks, Junior,” I said, counting out the change. I was almost out of scrip. I’d soon be cutting into my paltry stash of U.S. dollars.
“I hear you plan on going to work down at Cape Canaveral,” he said. “I
was in that part of Florida once. Swam in the ocean. Coloreds-only beach.”
It had never occurred to me that colored people needed their own beach. I guess it should have, considering in Coalwood they had their own schools and their own church, but it hadn’t. “Did you like it?” I asked.
Junior looked uncomfortable. “I liked it just fine. But I took my mother, and she didn’t hold with it at all. Said she couldn’t wait to get back to the mountains.” He pondered a bit. “When she died, we buried her on the mountain behind Little Richard’s church.”
“Tell Reverend Richard I said hi,” I said.
“I don’t go to that colored church,” he snapped. “I go up on the mountain to pray.” He frowned at me. “Go on and build your rocket. But be careful, hear?”
I had upset Junior, but I didn’t know how. “I will, sir,” I promised.
Junior hurried over to attend to customers lining up at the counter. “I’ll tell Little you said hello,” he relented just as I went out the door.
Once home, I got out measuring spoons, cups, a mixing bowl, and an egg beater from Mom’s cupboard and carried them to the basement. I mixed up what Quentin and I had calculated to be our best black-powder mix and then added the powdered glue to it along with a little water until I had a thick black paste. I wrote down everything that I had done in a notebook. Body of knowledge. I poured the slurry in a dish and then set it underneath the water heater to dry. Two days later, it had formed into a hard cake. In search of her missing cups, spoons, and mixing things, Mom came down, looked over my laboratory, sighed, and went down to the Big Store to buy replacements. She told me later she and Junior had a big laugh over it. When Quentin and I threw the black-powder cake in the hot-water heater on the following Saturday, it flashed vigorously. “Prodigious, old man!” he cried, using his latest big word for anything he liked.
We kept trying to figure out the “why” of rockets as well as the “how.” Although he hadn’t found a rocket book, Quentin had finally found the physics book he’d read in the library in Welch that defined Newton’s third law of action and reaction. The example given in the book was a balloon that flew around the room when its neck was opened. The air inside the balloon was under pressure, and as it flowed out of the opening (action), the balloon was propelled forward (reaction). A rocket, then, was sort of a hard balloon.
Instinctively, we knew that the nozzle (the opening at the rocket’s bottom), like the neck in the balloon, needed to be smaller than the casement. But how much smaller, and how the nozzle worked, and how to build one, we had no idea. All we could do was guess. “How about we weld a washer or something at the bottom of the casement to be our nozzle?” I proposed to Quentin at lunch one day.
Quentin pondered that while chewing on the cookies Mom had sent him in my lunch bag. “Yes. I think that might work. But who would do the welding?”
I knew of three welders in Coalwood. Two of them worked in the big machine shop across from the creek down by the Big Store. Mr. Leon Ferro was their supervisor. I didn’t think he’d help us, since he was a company man, like my father. There was, however, a machinist-welder who worked alone up at the tipple shop during the hoot-owl shift. His name was Mr. Isaac Bykovski. Mr. Bykovski’s daughter, Esther, had been in my class until she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and had to go away to a special school. My mom said Mr. and Mrs. Bykovski were always asking about me, how I was doing in school and so on. And when we had school plays, I’d sometimes look out and there they’d be, Ike and Mary Bykovski, smiling at me just like I belonged to them. I thought maybe I had our welder.
That night, after the hoot-owl miners had descended into the mine and the evening shift dispersed, I slipped out the back door and up the tipple path. Just in case Dad was called out by the black phone, I angled away into the trees so he wouldn’t see me. I was also heading for a secret entrance to the mine area we kids had discovered years before, playing cowboys and Indians. The tipple area was locked at night, but just inside the tree line on the mountain, there was a deep drainage ditch that went underneath the fence. Nearby was also a locked gate with a seldom-used path that led to the little shop. I found the path and groped my way in the darkness until I came to the gate. I gripped the chain-link fence and edged down the mountain until I stood on the precipice of the ditch. There was a big drainage pipe there that jutted out on the other side. I gripped the links of the fence with one hand and swung down until my feet got a purchase on the pipe, then ducked underneath the fence and came up on the other side. The machine shop was no more than a dozen yards away, its lights illuminating the gate and the path.
I peeked through a dirty glass pane in the back door. Mr. Bykovski, in a baggy one-piece coverall, was working at a lathe. He was a skinny little man with tiny ears that stuck out so far it looked like his helmet was resting on them. Screwing up my courage, I opened the door and walked in. He saw me and nodded, and I waited until he finished what he was doing. “How are you, Sonny?” he asked, as if it were a normal thing for me to appear before him in the middle of the night.
Mr. Bykovski had a trace of an accent, which didn’t seem strange to me. There was a sizable immigrant population in Coalwood. Italians had come in to the county as strikebreakers during the 1920’s and 1930’s and then joined the UMWA during World War II. Hungarians, Russians, and Poles had come in after the war. There were also a couple of Irish and English families and one Mexican. Although the parents in these families spoke with accents, none of their children did. The Great Six made certain of that, our daily lessons filled with the importance of the spoken and written English word. Old-timey West Virginia children fared no better than immigrant children. If we said “far” instead of “fire,” or “born-ded” instead of “born,” or even “holler” for “hollow,” we were instantly corrected and made to say the word over and over again until we understood such pronunciations were not to be tolerated. And only heaven itself could help a Coalwood grade-schooler if he said “liberry” instead of “library.”
I told Mr. Bykovski I was building a rocket and needed a washer or something welded to the bottom of a tube. “And you want me to do it?” he asked.
“Will you?” I held my breath.
He took off his helmet and wiped the sweat off his nearly bald head with his sleeve. “I have some aluminum tubing I could use. But welding on a washer—that is difficult. Soldering it would be easier.”
“That would be fine,” I said. As long as my washer was well attached, soldering sounded good to me, although I wasn’t exactly certain what soldering was.
He looked at me sharply. “I am not supposed to do work in this shop unless your father tells me to. Does he know you are up here?”
I shook my head. “No, sir.” I had kind of an instinct about Mr. Bykovski. It was best to tell the absolute truth with him, no shading. “He’s against me building rockets, but Mom thinks it’s okay. I need help, Mr. Bykovski. You’re my only hope.”
He considered me for a moment, his face grim. I know I must have looked pitiful, because that’s the way I felt. “Do you know how to solder?” he said at length.
“No, sir.”
“Then I will teach you. Your dad should not have a problem with that. Come on. You can work while I work. How long should your tube be?”
I wasn’t certain, so I said a foot. He then asked how wide and I wasn’t certain about that, so I said an inch. He cut off a foot of one-inch-wide aluminum tubing, and it looked awfully small. He went for a larger diameter, an inch and a quarter, and that looked better. He also increased the length to fourteen inches, and that looked about right to me. He then gave me a quick lesson in soldering. It seemed simple enough. All you had to do was hold a hot iron rod to a coil of solder, which was like a soft metal, melt it, and let the silvery material flow into place. It proved harder than it looked. I gobbed on the melted liquid, but I made a mess of it, the solder dripping down the tubing and the washer not on straight. After an hour, Mr. Bykovski came over to see h
ow I was doing. “It is not bad for your first time,” he lied. “I will finish it up for you during my break. Come back tomorrow night and I will have it ready.”
He didn’t have to make that suggestion twice. I was almost ready to pass out from the lack of sleep. The next night I again went up my secret path and found my rocket waiting for me in a cardboard box outside the gate. The solder was a perfect circle around a perfectly aligned washer at the base, and he had also soldered a metal cap to the top of the tube and glued on a wooden bullet-shaped nose cone. It was the most beautiful rocket I’d ever seen. I used electrical tape to attach cardboard fins to the casement and then borrowed Mom’s fingernail polish to paint a name on the side. I named it Auk I, after the great auk, an extinct bird that couldn’t fly. Quentin, for no apparent reason, had gone on and on the day before about extinct birds, so I was up on them. I had a purpose in the name. I wanted to make it clear to the other boys that we were adding to our body of knowledge even if all this rocket did was spew on its launchpad.
I loaded Auk I with the black-powder/postage-stamp-glue slurry mix, inserted a pencil through the nozzle, and then left the rocket to dry under the hot-water heater. The pencil was to form a hole in the powder, increasing its surface area, according to Quentin’s idea.
On Saturday, Quentin hitchhiked to my house, and after the other boys arrived, we inspected Auk I. “Love the name,” Quentin said. “Maybe the gods will help us, thinking we are suitably respectful of pernicious fate.”
The other boys looked at him blankly. “It’s bad luck to be overconfident,” I translated.
“I believe we’re making progress,” Quentin continued, talking to me as if the other boys didn’t exist. He ran his fingers around the base of the rocket, studied carefully the soldered washer, sniffed speculatively at the cured black-powder mix. Then he said, “But we cannot simply proceed by trial and error. This rocket may fly. If not, then the next one shall. But what will we have learned, seeing this tube shoot up in the sky like nothing more than a Fourth of July skyrocket? That’s not what this is about. We have to learn why it flies.”
