Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  “Yo,” Quentin answered, shaken from some distant reverie.

  “We need to figure out a better way to test our mixes other than just throwing them into the hot-water heater. You’re supposed to be our scientist. Can you think of some way to do that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do it.”

  On Saturday, while Dad was at the mine, the BCMA met in my room. Quentin had labored over a way to test our powder all week and proudly presented his plan. It was a complicated test stand with tubes and springs and pistons. I was impressed. It looked like something Wernher von Braun himself might have dreamed up. O’Dell was the first to speak after Quentin’s breathless explanation of how it all worked. “How about we just put the powder in a pop bottle and see how big an explosion it makes?”

  A chorus of agreement followed. Everybody looked at me to make the decision. “Pop bottle,” I decided. I hated to disappoint Quentin, but we had no way to build his design with our limited resources. “But good job anyway, Q,” I said. I had already figured out it never hurt to give somebody a pat on the back.

  Quentin protested. “Sonny, we must approach this enterprise in a scientific manner!”

  “We are, Quentin,” I told him calmly, “but we have to sometimes take into account we’re not at Cape Canaveral.”

  Quentin appealed to the other boys lounging around the room. “We’re trying to learn how to build a rocket, gentlemen. This isn’t for fun.”

  “How right you are, Quentin,” Roy Lee said, winking at me. “That’s what girls are for.” From his jacket pocket, he brought out a brassiere and wrapped it around a chair. “Okay, as I promised you, it is time to watch and learn, boys.”

  Quentin sighed in exasperation. I crowded in with Sherman and O’Dell. We were eager to learn Roy Lee’s adult secrets. Roy Lee sat down in a chair beside the one with the bra and draped his arm around its top. After a moment of deftly fingering the attachments in the back, the bra fell apart. “Wow,” we all said in unison, even Quentin. He picked up the bra and inspected the complicated hooks and loops in the back. “You know,” he cogitated, his brow furrowing, “there should be a better system.” He plucked a beggar’s lice—endemic in West Virginia—off his pants leg and inspected the tiny fuzzy seed that hitched rides on anything or anybody who walked through the woods. Dandy and Poteet used to come back from chasing rabbits covered with them, and I’d spend hours picking them off. Quentin put the seed back on his pants and then pulled it off again. “I’d like to look at this under a microscope. If you could figure out what makes it stick to your pants, you could maybe put it on cloth straps and—”

  “Shut up, Quentin,” Roy Lee said, snatching the bra from him and strapping it to the chair again. “You think too much.”

  One by one, we each took our turn at the thing. I’d seen lots of brassieres hanging outside on washlines up and down Coalwood, but had never had occasion to touch one before. Unhooking it one-handed wasn’t nearly as easy as Roy Lee had made it look. The top hook was the hardest. “Dorothy would have slapped you silly by now,” Roy Lee told me.

  “Don’t talk about Dorothy that way,” I bristled.

  “Why? She’s no angel. I heard she’s dating some boy over in Welch.”

  That was news to me. The kids in Welch were considered “fast” by the rest of us in the county. If she was going out with a boy from there … I felt butterflies in my stomach. “Just let it be, Roy Lee,” I snapped, suddenly miserable. It seemed everything about Dorothy either made me very happy or very sad.

  Roy Lee gave me his best innocent look and held up his hands. “Okay. But don’t say you didn’t know about it.”

  We kept up our bra work for the rest of the afternoon until we all had it down to a science, even Quentin, who finally gave in to Roy Lee’s vivid descriptions of what might occur if you could master such a handy talent. After the other boys filed out of the house, Roy Lee with the bra hidden back in his jacket, Mom stopped Quentin and asked him to stay for supper. He gave her his little bow. “I’d be delighted, Mrs. Hickam, just for the pleasure of your company.”

  She grinned with delight. “Sonny, why don’t you have manners like Quentin?”

  “My upbringing?” I asked.

  “A smart mouth could get a boy in trouble,” she warned. “You’ve really got the basement in a mess. You want to clean it up down there?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and reminded myself that my mother was never a person to cross, even a little.

  Over the next week, O’Dell gathered the pop bottles. There were always plenty in the garbage. Quentin and I mixed up a variety of black-powder samples. We began our excursion up to Pine Knob the following Saturday, each of us carrying a paper bag full of bottles filled with different mixes. We had to first climb Water Tank Mountain, so called because of the two cylindrical steel water tanks on top that held Coalwood’s drinking water. Once we reached the tanks, we had to go down the back side of it and then climb up a gully until we reached Pine Knob’s bald top. Somebody had clear-cut the top of the mountain more than a decade ago, and the forest still hadn’t recovered. There was just a sea of ugly stumps and barren, eroded dirt.

  After Quentin got through complaining how much his feet hurt and how tired he was, we set up and began our tests, blowing the bottles to smithereens, one by one, while we hid behind the stumps. Sherman took notes. Quentin kept grumbling about our unscientific approach. In truth, the tests were subjective at best, one exploding bottle difficult to compare to another. I had ground the powder especially fine for the last bottle we detonated, however, and when it went off, it blew a crater a foot deep. Even Quentin was impressed. “That’s the way I’ll mix it and grind it for our next rocket,” I told him, and he was mollified. We had accomplished something nearly scientific, after all. The finer the powder, the bigger the explosion.

  Despite the fact we were off company property, we would later hear that some people in Coalwood were still unhappy over what we were doing. It seemed like every time we blew a bottle, some people thought the mine had blown up. They’d come out on their porches in a panic, but then somebody else would say, no, it’s just those damn rocket boys! Then everybody would go back inside until we blew another bottle, and the same thing would happen all over again. When I returned, Mom said Dad had gotten phone calls about the noise, including one from Mr. Van Dyke. Surprisingly, Dad didn’t say anything to me about it. I was off company property, so perhaps he felt I had followed his orders, at least to an extent that satisfied him. But I still had a problem. Pine Knob was okay to blow up bottles, but it was impractical for a rocket range. The BCMA needed, more than anything else, a place of its own nearby where we could launch our rockets without anybody complaining. But where could we find such a place? As it would turn out, that particular decision was about to be taken out of my hands.

  AT the Coalwood Women’s Club meeting on Thursday evening, the Great Six teachers met with Mom and Mrs. Van Dyke and gave them their unsolicited advice on the whole matter of us outlaw rocket boys. Mom woke me up the next morning. It was still dark outside. “Come on. We’re going to talk to your father.”

  Bleary-eyed and confused, I followed her to the kitchen. Dad almost dropped his coffee mug when we appeared. It was a rare thing for Mom to be up that early, and he had never seen me before sunrise, ever. “Damn, Elsie, don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  “Sonny and I need to talk to you, Homer,” Mom said.

  Dad eyed me and sagged in his chair. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I want you to figure out how he can launch his rockets without everybody getting upset about it.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because there’s some people in this town who think he and the other boys are trying to do a good thing.”

  Although I didn’t have a clue, Dad, of course, already knew who Mom was talking about; don’t ask me how. “Those damn old biddy schoolteachers think all they have to do is snap their fingers and they get
their way about everything in this town.” He gulped down the dregs of his coffee. “Sorry. This comes from higher than me anyway. Van Dyke says no more rockets too.”

  “You’ll come to regret this, Homer,” Mom said icily. She wrapped her housecoat around her and stalked out of the kitchen.

  I was left alone, standing at attention before Dad, who finally acknowledged my presence. “Do you see all the trouble you’ve caused?” he demanded.

  I was confused about exactly what trouble he had in mind. After all, I hadn’t fired any rockets since his last order to stop. I did, however, have his complete attention, a rare occurrence. I took advantage of it. “Dad, is Coalwood going to be torn down?”

  He looked at me as if I were out of my mind. “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard the easy coal’s almost gone and the company’s going to pull out.”

  He turned his head as if to face the mine, but saw Mom’s beach picture instead. He puzzled over it a moment, as if it were the first time he’d ever seen it, and then turned back to me. “There’s more than fifty years of good coal left in that mine.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Dubonnet said.”

  Dad gripped the edge of the table as if he were going to get up and come across the kitchen after me. He subsided. “Dubonnet’s a union rabble-rouser. I don’t want you talking to him anymore. I’m a company man, and that makes you a company boy, understand?”

  I understood more than he knew. After all, I was the one who had been beaten up by the older boys when the union went out on strike. He didn’t know that. I was irritated enough to tell him, but then the black phone rang. He rushed past me into the foyer, snatched up the receiver, and yelled in it before whoever was on the other end had time to say a word. “I’m coming, damn you!”

  ON Sunday, Mom and Jim and I got up as usual and dressed to go to church. Dad also came down the steps, decked out in a suit and tie. Mom could not have been more astonished if he had appeared naked. It turned out Mr. Van Dyke had asked him to attend a “brunch” at the Club House after church services. “Well, la-te-da,” Mom sang. “A buh-runch. Aren’t we fancy?”

  Dad frowned at her. “Elsie, I told him we’d both be there.”

  Mom pushed me ahead, straightening my tie with one hand around my neck. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and I could almost hear Dad’s teeth grind.

  Mom and Dad sat in the back of the church between the Van Dykes and Doc and Mrs. Lassiter. Jim sat with the football boys, all of them still grumpy about being left out of the state-championship game. Actually, Dad had mollified my brother, if only a little. Jim now had exclusive use of the Buick every Saturday night. He didn’t even have to wash it first if he didn’t want to. I wasn’t jealous of his privilege. I had only just turned fifteen and didn’t have a driver’s license yet, and, anyway, Jim had girls to take out. I didn’t, and at the rate I was going, it didn’t look like I ever would.

  I found Sherman and O’Dell and we sat up front. When the choir got up to sing, Mrs. Dantzler stepped out for a solo. She stood straight and tall in her maroon robe, and when the sun came through the clear glass windows, her hair glowed like molten silver. When she finished, her voice seemed to still be ringing up in the rafters. The Reverend Lanier stood up and made his way to the pulpit. I thought something about him didn’t look right. He looked a little harried. His robe seemed to be ill-fitting, and his hair needed combing. “Today,” he began in a strangely nervous voice, “I will speak on the general topic of fathers and sons.”

  We live, he said to the hushed congregation, in a day and age when fathers often do not receive the respect they should from their sons. At this remark, my antennae went up. The company paid the good Reverend’s salary and was not above suggesting the topic of his sermons, mostly having to do with rendering to Caesar what was Caesar’s. What sons might not be respecting their fathers? Who else but us outlaw rocket boys?

  Reverend Lanier told us a little story. There was once a son who did bad things, and every time he did one of them, his grieving father drove a nail in a door. When finally the son came to his senses, his father forgave him and removed each of the nails.

  “But though the nails were gone,” Reverend Lanier said sadly, “the holes were still there, representing the pain still abiding in the father’s heart.”

  Involuntarily, I slid down in the pew when Reverend Lanier looked directly at me. He had worked a little magic, making me feel guilty for something I didn’t really feel guilty about. Preachers seemed to be good at that. He talked a little more about the poor, abused door and what it meant and then ticked off an appropriate proverb. Just in case I still doubted who he meant it for, he locked his gaze on me once again. A foolish son is the calamity of his father. Cease, my son, to hear the instruction that causeth to err from the words of knowledge.

  I slid even farther down in my seat. I could just imagine my father smiling smugly at my mother. I thought I knew the real reason my dad was at church services. The preacher was delivering a company sermon!

  But the Reverend wasn’t finished. He took a deep, nervous breath. This time he didn’t look at me but over my head, toward the back pews. “I was taught the story of the door in Bible college, and it’s always stuck with me. I’ve used it more than once to counsel young men who’ve gotten a little too rambunctious. But the events of late right here in Coalwood have gotten me to thinking: What of the father who drove those nails in the door? Rather than hammering nails with anger, what if he had instead gone to his son and shown his love with his time, his interest, his generosity? Perhaps the holes in the door are a reflection of the father’s petulance more than his love.”

  After clearing his throat and tugging at his collar, the Reverend continued. “We’ve had some trouble in Coalwood lately,” he said, his voice nearly cracking. “Father–son trouble. Of course, the son must respect his father. But I am also reminded of Proverbs twenty-three, verse twenty-four. He that begetteth a wise child shall have joy of him. To have a child who longs to learn is the sweetest gift of all.”

  Although usually there was only silence in the congregation, I heard a few hearty “amens” from the choir box, and then, to my joy, I realized who had influenced at least the second part of this particular sermon. It wasn’t the company. It was the old biddies who filled most of the choir box. The Great Six. Reverend Lanier wasn’t preaching to the choir, he was preaching for it.

  The Reverend was on a roll. “Sons, obey your fathers. But fathers, help your sons to dream. If they are confused, counsel them. If they stray, search them out and bring them home. Our Lord said: If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them strays, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains to go out in search of the stray one? And if he manages to find it, I assure you that he is happier over that one than the ninety-nine that did not stray. Fathers, I beseech you to seek out your straying sons and rescue them by keeping their dreams alive. These boys, and we all know I’m talking about our very own rocket boys, are dreaming great dreams. They should be helped, not stifled.”

  “Amen,” the Great Six rumbled as one.

  Sherman and O’Dell and I looked at one another and grinned. I heard furious whispering among the football boys. But behind us, where our parents sat, there was nothing but stone-cold silence. Reverend Lanier looked intently there and then wiped the sweat off his forehead with the blousy sleeve of his robe. A moment before, he seemed to be lifted high above the congregation, carried aloft by his own rhetoric. Now, perhaps by the reaction he was receiving from certain individuals behind me, he was back on earth. “Of course, this is just a poor preacher’s opinion,” he said in a shaky voice. His eyes darted. “Ummm, the choir will sing now.”

  Reverend Lanier sat down, hiding behind the pulpit, but the choir stood up and sang “Faith of Our Fathers” with a special enthusiasm. Afterward, the Reverend was supposed to get up and give the blessing, but he stayed seated. After a moment of hesitation, Mr. Dantzler, who had been elected the compan
y-church deacon for the year, rose and asked for everybody to wait until the choir filed outside. I turned around and saw Dad and Mr. Van Dyke looking sour. Mom and Mrs. Van Dyke had angelic smiles on their faces. As the Great Six filed by, they gave us rocket boys stern looks. I knew what that meant. They’d gone out on a limb for us. We’d better do good.

  Jim and most of the other football boys went off down the street, but Buck caught Sherman and O’Dell and me out on the church steps. “The Reverend and everybody else ought to be worrying about the football team, not you sister morons.”

  “Izzat so?” O’Dell made as if to take off his jacket. “Come on, big boy, I’ll show you who’s a sister.”

  Mom came out of the church at that moment and saw what was afoot. “Hello, Buchanan,” she said to Buck.

  “Hullo, Mrs. Hickam,” he said, straightening his tie and his posture all at once. “How are you today?”

  “Fine, Buchanan. And you?”

  “Jus’ fine,” the big boy said. He looked at us threateningly and then trudged after the other football boys, who were gathering on the Big Store steps.

  O’Dell and Sherman both took off in the opposite direction, leaving me with Mom. She said, “Why don’t you wait here a minute, Sonny? I think your dad would like to talk to you.” Then she walked with Mrs. Van Dyke toward the Club House. I looked over at the parking area and saw Dad and Mr. Van Dyke surrounded by Coalwood teachers. When they broke free, the two men huddled and then Dad sought me out and tossed me the keys to the Buick. “Let’s let you practice,” he said, looking and sounding thoroughly disgusted.

  “Really?” I was delighted at the prospect. Usually, I had to beg him for days to get in a practice session.

  He slumped into the passenger seat. “Go toward Frog Level.”

  The drive was quiet, with me carefully steering while Dad said little except to grumble when I accidentally hit a pothole. When we reached the Frog Level camp, he nodded toward the dirt road, which led down through the wilderness area that was called Big Branch. I took it and was even more careful on the rutted clay lest the big Buick lose its oil pan. Two miles farther down the road, he told me to stop at an abandoned slack dump. “Let’s take a look,” he said.