Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  We walked out on the gritty surface of the dump. Bulldozers had flattened millions of tons of coal tailings to create a black desert that stretched far down the narrow valley. No tree, not even a blade of grass grew on it. “If you want to fire off your rockets, here’s the place,” Dad said. “Nobody in town can see or hear you. You’ve got the entire valley.”

  I gaped at the huge, flat black space. “How long is it?”

  “About a mile, more or less.”

  I peered down the sun-baked dump and then at the surrounding mountains, my imagination clicking into overdrive. I could see everything as it was going to be: the blockhouse, the launchpad, and our rockets blasting off, roaring up between the steep hills, falling downrange … “Cape Coalwood,” I breathed.

  Dad looked around at the barren slack and then shook his head. “If you want this place, you’re the only one. Let’s go.”

  “Dad, there’s just one thing.”

  “What?”

  I felt reckless. “We need a building—a blockhouse, it’s called—where we can go for protection when our rockets are launched. Could you give us some lumber to build one?”

  Dad took off his gentleman’s fedora and tapped it impatiently on his leg. “Company property is for company business, not for launching rockets.”

  “Scrap lumber will do,” I explained, sensing that this was my moment. “And can we have some tin for the roof?”

  Dad plodded back to the car and then turned and pointed at me. “If I get you this scrap—and even scrap is expensive, young man—if I do this thing, from here on I want the rocket-launching business out of sight and out of mind in Coalwood. Understood?”

  “Yessir. Thank you, sir.”

  Dad perched his fedora back on his head. He looked relieved, but then anxiety played across his face. “Let’s go,” he said urgently. “God only knows what stories your mother is telling the Van Dykes.”

  I looked back over my shoulder at the vast slack dump as I followed my father back to the car. The BCMA finally had a home. Cape Coalwood. I couldn’t wait to tell Quentin.

  8

  CONSTRUCTION OF THE CAPE

  AT THE OTHER cape, the one in Florida, business was booming. The Air Force was launching ballistic missiles every week. Most of them blew up, spectacularly, but a few wobbled downrange. On February 5, 1958, the hapless Vanguard team tried again for orbit and failed, although this time their rocket managed to at least clear the gantry before it blew up. On March 17, they gave it another shot, and this time orbited a 3.24-pound satellite nicknamed Grapefruit. Dr. von Braun launched another thirty-one-pound Explorer into orbit on March 26. It seemed the United States was on the move. Then, in May, the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik III, weighing in at a whopping 2,925 pounds. Some Americans, the same kind I thought would have deserted at Valley Forge or surrendered after Pearl Harbor, said we might just as well give up on space.

  Dr. von Braun wasn’t giving up, not by a long shot. According to a newspaper report, he was building a huge monster rocket called the Saturn. In the spring of 1958, Congress and the Eisenhower Administration set up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in an attempt to put some order into the space program. I read where Dr. von Braun said he might leave the Army and join NASA. If he did, I knew the new agency was my ultimate goal as well.

  As my year in the tenth grade at Big Creek dwindled to days, Mr. Turner held one of his few command performances in the school auditorium. We all expected a lecture on school spirit, how we should think about the football team all summer and be ready to cheer them on come fall. Roy Lee and I sat down together. I felt a punch on my shoulder and looked around and saw Valentine Carmina grinning back at me. Valentine, in the class ahead of me, had a figure that was usually described by boys watching her sashay by as “stacked like a brick privy.” “Hi, Sonny,” she said, her lips parting to show her fine white teeth.

  For some reason, Valentine had always liked me. If the other boys were off doing something else and she saw an empty chair beside me in the auditorium in the morning, she’d sometimes ease into it and just talk about things. She came out of Berwind, which was one of the grittiest and roughest towns in the county. She was the oldest of seven children and, she said, had raised all the other kids because her mother was “worn out.” She’d also had her problems with Mr. Turner. The faction she led in the Sub-Deb girls’ club had been admonished to stop wearing low-cut dresses, smoking in the rest rooms, and sneaking out of class to smooch with boys in the band-instrument storeroom. She had responded by showing up with her dresses hemmed from the bottom and scalloped from the top, threatening, as Mr. Turner lectured her, “to meet somewhere in the middle.” Valentine gave in on the clothes, at least by keeping her Sub-Deb jacket on, however artfully unzipped. She could stop all masculine traffic down the hall, with boys’ knees turning to jelly and necks being wrenched as they jerked around to watch. Sometimes in the hall, she’d sneak up behind me and take my arm and let me walk her to class. It always made me feel proud that she picked me.

  Roy Lee turned almost completely around in his chair. “Oh, Valentine,” he crooned. “My sweet Valentine.”

  “Shut up, Roy Lee,” she grumped, and then turned her radiant smile back on me. “How ya been, honey?”

  I never quite knew what to say to her. “I’m okay, thanks,” I replied mundanely. “How about you?”

  “Feeling fine,” she replied while giving Roy Lee the sly eye. “Only thing’d make it better if you and me went smooching somewhere.”

  I melted into my chair while Roy Lee gleefully poked my ribs. “Forget Dorothy,” he whispered. “Go get yourself some of that!”

  I didn’t get a chance to respond. A hush came over the auditorium as Mr. Turner took the stage. He stood behind a lectern, his eyes darting angrily toward the slightest noise. Very quickly, even the most squirmy of us sat as quiet as stones. Then he spoke of two matters, each sufficient to shake the core of our young lives.

  Big Creek High School, Mr. Turner said in his shrill voice, had been placed on football suspension for the 1958 season. That meant no games would be played. None. The reason for the suspension was this: A group of well-meaning parents—the Football Fathers—had failed in their suit to force the West Virginia high-school athletic commission to let Big Creek play in the 1957 state-championship game. We all sat in dumb shock. He might as well have announced he was going to burn down the school. There was a groan from the knot of football boys. Coach Gainer stood up and hushed them. “Act like men,” he said. “Show them what you’re made of.”

  Mr. Turner had more to say. Big Creek was to be restructured, he said, beginning with the junior class. A more challenging academic curriculum was to be installed, the result of Sputnik and the worry over how badly educated America’s children were compared to Russian kids. Mr. Turner gripped the lectern and looked down on us. “There will be no more easy classes at this school,” he announced.

  We had heard two hard things, Mr. Turner said. “You can do nothing about the football suspension,” he said, looking at the football boys. “Accept it and make the best of it. But the changes in the classroom are another matter.” He gripped the lectern. “After you leave Big Creek, some of you boys will go to work in the coal mines, some will go into the service, some—not enough, in my opinion—will go to college. You girls will be wives, nurses, teachers, secretaries, maybe even someday one of you will be the president of the United States.” There was a murmur of laughter, quickly smothered by dour looks from the other students.

  Mr. Turner swept his gaze over us, his expression proud and certain. “The newspapers and television say the Russian students are the best in the world,” he said. “They tell us how intelligent they are, how advanced, and how all the world may have to bow down to them when they take over. Well, I’m here to tell you Big Creek students have nothing to be ashamed of in front of anybody. You come armed with a wonderful education provided by caring teachers. You come from the best, hardest-wor
king people in the world. You come from the toughest state in the Union. The Russians? I pity them. If they knew you like I know you, they’d be shaking in their boots!”

  Our six hundred faces gazed up at the little man in rapt attention. Until a football boy stifled a groan, the silence was utter. Mr. Turner looked sharply in the football boy’s direction, and Coach Gainer stood up and looked at him too. The football boys leaned their heads in on the groaner as if in group prayer.

  Mr. Turner’s eyes left them, went back to the general assembly. “Now, about these new standards,” he said. “They’re not going to be easy to meet. It’s not only content. From my analysis of the new curriculum, there’s at least twice the amount of material to cover in a school year. That’s going to mean a lot of concentrated classroom work and a lot of homework.

  “You must completely dedicate yourselves to it. To do less will be to let down your country, your state, your parents, your teachers, and, ultimately, yourselves. Remember this: The only good citizen is the well-educated citizen.

  “Consider this poem by William Ernest Henley,” he said, opening a book and adjusting his glasses.

  “Ughhhh,” Roy Lee growled, getting restless. I could sense a stirring in the student body. Mr. Turner had kept our attention until then. But a poem?

  Mr. Turner’s poem turned out to be Invictus. As he read, all of us, even Roy Lee, were absorbed by it. Mr. Turner concluded: “ ‘It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.’ ”

  He clapped the book shut. I almost jumped out of my seat. In the hushed silence, it had been as loud as a rifle shot. “Now the cheerleaders will lead us in the school song,” Mr. Turner ordered.

  The cheerleaders had been sitting together. They crept uncertainly onstage. They were not in their uniforms. “Sing,” Mr. Turner ordered them. “Everybody sing!”

  “On, on, green and white,” the cheerleaders sang weakly, one looking at the other. The audience picked up the words, helping out. Soon, the whole auditorium was roaring. “We are right for the fight tonight! Hold that ball and hit that line, every Big Creek star will shine! We’ll fight, fight, fight for the green and white.…”

  When we were finished, there was applause and hoots of enthusiasm, almost as if we were cheering the team making a goal-line stand. But, with nothing to really cheer about, the noise quickly died and then there was a confused silence. Mr. Turner stepped from behind the lectern and nodded to our teachers, who stood up and began to shoo us out of the auditorium.

  “Well, now, ain’t that some shit,” I heard Valentine say behind me as she made for the aisle. Roy Lee, like me, was too taken aback to say anything at all. The football boys gathered around their exalted coach, begging in vain for some reprieve. I looked for Dorothy and saw her with Emily Sue. Dorothy’s cheeks were wet with tears. I wanted to go to her, but there were too many other kids in the way. By the time I made my way through them out of the auditorium, she had disappeared. As I exchanged books from my locker, Buck came up and smashed his fist against his locker’s metal door. “Dammit!” he bellowed, and students stopped in their tracks, startled by his rage. Mr. Turner appeared instantly. Everyone but me and Buck fled the scene. I couldn’t. He was standing in front of my open locker.

  “Mr. Trant, I hope you didn’t dent your locker,” Mr. Turner said, his voice as cold as ice. “If you did, you will pay for its repair. And did I hear you curse? That I will not tolerate in my school, young man.”

  Buck, huge and thick-browed, loomed over the little principal. “I’ll never get a football scholarship now,” he said, and his lower lip began to tremble and a big tear welled up and dribbled down his fuzzy cheek. “It’s the coal mines for me for the rest of my life. It just ain’t fair!”

  “Isn’t fair, and you’re correct. There was no fairness involved with this decision, only a petty sort of revenge. Even so, there will be no such displays in my school.”

  Buck frowned, his little eyes deeply puzzled. “But what will I do, Mr. Turner?”

  “Do? You will do as we all do each day—our best with what God has given us. Now, if you are quite through with your sniveling, go to class.” He leveled his hard little dark eyes at me. “And what are you looking at, Mr. bomb builder?”

  Not a thing. I reached around Buck, grabbed my books, and took off at a near trot. “No running in the hall!” Mr. Turner called after me just as I turned a corner.

  Afternoon classes were subdued. Dorothy dabbed at her eyes all through biology. When the bell rang, she gathered up her books and made for the door. I followed, but she was met just down the hall by Vernon Holbrook, a senior linebacker. Racked with sobs, she fell into his shoulder. He held her and then touched her cheek, wiping her tears away. Emily Sue walked up beside me and took it all in. “My, oh, my,” she sang.

  I could hardly breathe. “Don’t say anything,” I managed to growl.

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” she said. “It speaks volumes all by itself.”

  “Listen, Emily Sue …” I was about to give her both barrels, but she walked away, heading down the hall toward our next class. When I looked back, Dorothy and Vernon were gone too. In a sea of jostling students, I felt all alone.

  As soon as Jim hit the front door after school, gloom and anger descended on our house. He showed his displeasure by throwing his books on the living-room floor and stomping up and down the steps and slamming doors and yelling at Dad the moment he got home from work for causing the debacle. “That’s enough, Jimmie,” Mom admonished him while Dad stood in stricken silence.

  “You’ve ruined everything!” Jim whined. “I won’t get a college scholarship now!”

  “You’ll go to college,” Dad said evenly. “I’ll pay your way through. Don’t worry about that.”

  “But I wanted to play college football! If I sit out my senior year, no college is going to pay any attention to me! I’ll never forgive you, Dad!”

  “James Venable Hickam, I said that’s enough,” Mom said, her tone of voice turning flat and hard. That was her warning tone. Jim opened his mouth and then clapped it shut, recognizing that Mom was on the edge. He stomped up the steps, making Daisy Mae jump out of his way, and slammed his bedroom door shut. Later, while Dad retreated to the living room and Mom fumed in the kitchen, the football boys from Coalwood gathered in Jim’s room, plotting futile anarchy.

  I had no sympathy for them. I was not even above stirring their pot just a little. I cracked open Jim’s door and suggested, with no little glee, there might be room for them in the band. Jim sprang after me, and I ran back to my room and locked the door behind me. “You’re dead, Sonny,” I heard him say from the hall. A cold chill went up my spine, so solemnly was the statement made and confirmed by the cluster of huge, muscled boys standing outside my door. It was as if somehow every bad thing that had happened to them was now my fault.

  A GLOOM seemed to settle over Coalwood. The fence-line gossipers mostly agreed that my father had acted stupidly. A common thread to the talk was that he’d gotten too big for his britches—again.

  Dad didn’t deliver any lumber and tin to Cape Coalwood, even though he had promised. After giving him a week, I decided to take direct action and went up to the mine carpentry shop to see Mr. McDuff. I entered the immaculate little shop, redolent of freshly sawn pine and oak, and found him working at a shrieking band saw. He shut it down, and I told him what Dad said I could have. He pushed his hand up under his white cloth cap and scratched his head. “News to me, Sonny. But there’s a pile of scrap lumber behind the shop I guess is okay for you to take. You’ll have to go see Ferro for tin. How’s your mom like her new fence?”

  As far as I knew, she liked her resurrected rose-garden fence just fine. It sure wasn’t going anywhere. Mr. McDuff had built it back with posts as thick as telephone poles and crossbeams that could have been used as headers in the mine. The scrap lumber he sent me to look at behind his shop proved to be a sta
ck of beautiful tongue-and-groove pine boards. When I asked, Mr. McDuff also slipped me a big box of nails. I called O’Dell, and a couple of hours later I heard the familiar rumble of the garbage truck pull up to the shop. We loaded the boards and then headed for the big hangarlike machine shops run in neomilitary fashion by Mr. Leon Ferro.

  Rows of lathes, mills, shapers, and drill presses whined, ground, and hissed at us as O’Dell and I stepped inside. Twenty men worked during the day shift producing replacement parts for mine machinery and fabricating a variety of ductwork and support structures. When I asked for Mr. Ferro, the men at the machines waved me back to his office, a windowed cage overlooking the shop. Mr. Ferro leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and listened while I made my request for tin. “Sonny, I had some until this morning,” he replied amiably, “but Junior Cassell came by and got part of it for a doghouse, and Reverend Richard got the rest to patch the roof of his church.” He leaned forward. “Even if I had some, I don’t give anything away out of this shop, even scrap. You want something, I like to trade. What you got?”

  “Nothing,” I admitted.

  He shrugged. “Well, there you go. Come back when you do.”

  I decided to go and see Reverend Richard. We found him behind his church, pondering his little stack of tin. I wondered what he had traded Mr. Ferro for it. The Reverend was dressed in a black suit and a black tie, as if he had just come from a funeral. His shoes were black and white, long and narrow. He was holding a straw Panama hat. “Hi, boys,” he said absently, and then saw it was me. “Sonny boy! I sure miss the newspapers you gave me.”