Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  Mr. Dubonnet and a knot of other miners were gathered in an impromptu union meeting by the lamp house. He was handing out pamphlets. “I heard you got your rockets flying,” he said to me.

  “How high are they going?” one of the other miners wanted to know. “You hit the moon yet?”

  “Come and see,” I told him.

  “When are you shooting them off, Sonny?” Mr. Dubonnet asked. “I’d like to come down and watch. Bet a lot of people would.”

  I had a sudden inspiration. “I could put up a notice at the Big Store and the post office.”

  The lift bell rang twice, and the men shuffled aboard. “I’ll be there,” Mr. Dubonnet said as he descended.

  Dad came up on the return lift. Before he saw me, I watched him as he pulled out a red bandanna, now gray, and coughed into it and then spat into a pile of gob next to the bathhouse. He looked up and waved me in behind him as he went into the bathhouse. He hung his helmet on a peg, stripped off his boots and coveralls, and got into the shower and started lathering up with Lava soap. “Why are you here?” he demanded while attacking the black grime embedded in his face.

  “Could I please have some cement?”

  “No,” he answered. A puddle of coal mud swirled about his feet. “What do you want it for?”

  “We need a launchpad. I thought if you had some cement that was maybe extra—”

  “The company doesn’t have extra cement,” Dad muttered through the spray, twisting a washcloth into his ear. “The company doesn’t have extra anything. If we did, we’d go out of business. How many bags do you need?”

  “Maybe four?”

  Dad finished and toweled down. I knew he’d take another shower when he got home to scrub more coal off. The coal dust that collected in the moist skin around his eyes would remain—the miners of Coalwood walked around with their eyes lined like Cleopatra’s. “I tell you what,” he said as he toweled off. “I had a junior engineer make the estimate on a walkway up at fan number three, and I heard there was some cement left over. It’s rained since then so it’s probably ruined, but you can have it if you want it. Save the company the expense of hauling it out.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. The next day, after his garbage run, O’Dell borrowed his dad’s truck and he and Sherman and I went up the tortuous trail to one of the big fans that drove air through the mines. There, beside the locked door to the fan controls, sat four bags of cement. They hadn’t been rained on at all. There was also a pile of sand and gravel, equally intact.

  “Are you sure your dad said we could have this?” Sherman worried. “It’s prime.”

  I shrugged. “He said the rain ruined it.”

  “What rain?” O’Dell demanded. “It hasn’t rained in a month. Your dad’s fooling with you, Sonny. Look, there’s the new walkway. All done. They could’ve hauled the cement and stuff away when they finished.”

  I considered the implication of what O’Dell was saying. Was Dad helping us? Or maybe he’d made a mistake because he was so distracted by the football suspension and opening the new preparation plant over in Caretta. God only knew, but I didn’t have time to figure it out. “Come on,” I said, “let’s load it up before somebody beats us to it.”

  AFTER we dug a hole in the slack and poured a five-by-five-foot slab of concrete for our launchpad, Cape Coalwood was ready for its first rocket. The blockhouse was thirty yards away from the pad, on the creek bank, its dimensions determined by the lumber at hand. Quentin grandly described it as an “irregular polyhedron,” but it was little more than a wooden shed. It had an earthen floor, a doorless entrance in the back, a flat tin roof, and, for a viewing window, a wide rectangular opening covered by a clear, quarter-inch-thick sheet of plastic that O’Dell found, slightly scratched, in the trash behind the Big Store. Mr. Dantzler used these sheets to protect his glass counters. Beside the blockhouse, we erected a flagpole, of two-inch galvanized pipe discovered abandoned alongside a gas wellhead up Mudhole Hollow (Mr. Duncan, the company plumber, told me about it). A BCMA flag, sewn and stitched by O’Dell’s mother, fluttered proudly from it. I loved the flag. It had the initials B-C-M-A arched over an embroidered rocket with an owl (the high-school mascot) riding on it.

  To open Cape Coalwood, I loaded Auk V with our bottle-tested formula of finely ground black powder and postage stamp glue, cured under the water heater for five days. Because I had promised Mr. Dubonnet and the other miners at the tipple I’d let them know when there was going to be a launch, Sherman posted a notice on notebook paper in big block letters on the bulletin boards at the Big Store and post office:

  ROCKET LAUNCH!

  THE BIG CREEK MISSILE AGENCY (BCMA)

  WILL LAUNCH A ROCKET THIS SATURDAY, 10:00 A.M.,

  AT CAPE COALWOOD

  (THE SLACK DUMP TWO MILES SOUTH OF

  FROG LEVEL)

  True to his word, Mr. Dubonnet came to our next launch, parking his Pontiac at a wide spot on the road opposite our blockhouse. There was usually a union meeting on Saturday morning, so I knew he had to hustle to make it to the Cape on time.

  I was pleased when Jake Mosby also showed up, driving his Corvette. Tom Musick, another junior engineer, was with him. After carefully parking his car under a protective tree, Jake sat down beside Mr. Dubonnet on the Pontiac’s fender and raised a bottle of beer in my direction. Tom just waved.

  I was surprised to see another car drive up. It was an Edsel driven by a man named Basil Oglethorpe. Jake, as it turned out, had invited him. He waved me over to introduce us. Basil had the physique of Ichabod Crane. He had on a cream-colored suit, a wide-brimmed floppy hat, a black string tie, a silk vest, and narrow shoes that had weaving in the toes. He also wore a fob watch and a chain. I had never seen anyone so quirkily dressed in my life. My mouth dropped open at the sight of him. Basil ignored my reaction, one that he was probably used to getting in McDowell County, and told me he was going to make me and the other rocket boys famous. “I’m going to be your Lowell Thomas, Sonny my boy,” he told me, “and you my Lawrence of Araby.”

  “Basil’s with the McDowell County Banner,” Jake said, watching my reaction. He was clearly amused. “It’s a grocery-store rag.”

  “We’re growing, however,” Basil sniffed, taking a big flowery silk handkerchief from his vest and pressing it to his nose. “I am the editor-in-chief and features writer.”

  “He sweeps out too,” Jake added. “I thought he might help you boys get some attention. Seems to me you deserve some, as hard as you’ve worked down here at this old dump.”

  I wondered how interesting we would be to a real writer. I couldn’t imagine it. I shrugged and went back to supervise preparations for the launch. Roy Lee lit the fuse to our little Auk and ran for the blockhouse. Before he got there, the fuse reached the powder and the rocket whooshed off the pad, climbed about fifty feet, and then, as if aimed, turned and flew directly at the men lounging on the Pontiac fender. Mr. Dubonnet, Jake, Tom, and Basil threw themselves to the ground while the rocket hissed overhead and then slammed into the road behind, skittering along until it plowed into a muddy ditch. It happened so quickly I didn’t have time to react. “Damn! Never saw men move so fast in my life,” Roy Lee observed.

  We chased after the rocket. Sherman stopped long enough to help Mr. Dubonnet and Tom up. Basil was whooping and laughing and dancing around, stopping to scribble on a notebook pad. “Oh, it’s just like Cape Canaveral,” he exclaimed. “I love it!”

  Jake had gotten up on his own and walked rapidly down the road. I watched as he lit a cigarette with trembling hands and took a pull off a flask. I went to see if he was all right. He waved his cigarette around. “Seeing that rocket come at me was almost like being back in Korea,” he said shakily.

  “I’m real sorry, Jake” was all I could say.

  “It don’t mean a thing,” Jake said. His fingers brought the trembling flask to his mouth.

  When I came back up the road, Mr. Dubonnet and Tom were inspecting the rocke
t with the other boys clustered around him. Basil was in his Edsel, still scribbling furiously. “Boys, next time I come down here, I’m going to make sure my insurance is paid up.” Mr. Dubonnet ho-hoed. He sniffed at the rocket. “Your powder’s putting out a lot of tailings. This is black powder, right?”

  Our own special mixture, I told him. Mr. Dubonnet tapped the rocket casing, and lumps of unburned propellant and ash dropped out. He smeared some in the palm of his hand. “Still wet,” he said. “How long did you let it cure?”

  I told him five days.

  “I’d give it at least two weeks, Sonny.” He rubbed more of the powder residue between his fingertips. “I worked explosives before the company brought in the continuous-mining machines. Powder’s got to be bone-dry.”

  After Mr. Dubonnet, Tom, and Jake left, we boys gathered with Basil beside the blockhouse to discuss the results of the flight. “We’ve got to figure out how to make our rockets fly straight,” Sherman said.

  “And we’ve got to find a better way to set them off,” Roy Lee observed, well aware of what might have happened if the rocket had veered after him on the path back to the blockhouse.

  Quentin said, “I’ll think about it, come up with some proposals.”

  “I hope you come up with something better than that stupid test stand,” O’Dell said.

  “O’Dell, cut it out,” I broke in. “We’re a team here, remember? Quentin, work on it. We’ll get back together after miners’ vacation. All agreed?”

  “Hell, yes,” Roy Lee said. “Did you see the way our rocket flew? So what if it didn’t go straight? We’re doing good here!”

  “Roy Lee’s got it right,” I said. “We’re making progress.” I put out my hand, palm down. “Come on. Put your hand on mine, like the football team does.”

  One by one, Sherman, O’Dell, Roy Lee, and Quentin solemnly placed their hands one on top of the other, all on top of mine. “Rocket boys,” I said. “Rocket boys forever!”

  “Oh, this is so perfect!” Basil chirped, and kept writing. “Rocket boys forever. I love it!”

  THE Coalwood mine, just like all of the mines across McDowell County and the southern part of the state, shut down for the first two weeks of July, so everyone was required to take their vacations at the same time. My father said it was done that way so the economic clout of the mining industry would be clear when all the miners showed up on vacation at the same time. It was for the same reason, he said, that miners were often paid entirely with two-dollar bills, so that local merchants would realize how important the coal companies were to their businesses. Whatever the reason, Coalwood became almost deserted during miners’ vacation. Hungry Mother State Park in nearby Virginia was a popular destination for miners and their families, and also the Smoky Mountains farther south in Tennessee. Another traditional miners’ vacation spot was Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. At Mom’s insistence, that’s where we went. It was the one time of the year she got Dad off to herself and out of the mountains. Days would pass at the beach without Dad saying anything about the coal mine. I noticed that Mom often reached out and just touched his hand when he was talking, and when they sat in the swing on the motel porch at night, sometimes he would even put his arm around her shoulders. They even slept in the same bed. Once when I came back from trying to catch crabs with a fish head on a string, our motel door was locked. I knew my parents were in there because their sandy shoes were on the porch, but no amount of knocking got them to let me in. I guessed they were taking a nap. Mom cried when we loaded up the Buick to come home.

  As soon as Dad drove into the backyard, we could hear the black phone ringing. “Welcome to Coalwood,” Mom muttered to his back as he ran up the porch steps to answer it.

  I’d left three loaded rockets, Auks VI, VII, and VIII, to cure in the basement while we were on vacation and decided to fire all three the Saturday after we came back. Sherman made up some handbills to post at the Big Store and the post office. Since we still had a guidance problem, I spent the next couple of days in the basement, tinkering with fins and how to attach them. O’Dell had delivered a thin aluminum sheet he’d found in the garbage, so I used some tin shears to cut some rough triangles out of it for fins. I punched holes along their inner edge with a nail and then used steel wire to strap the fins to the sides of the casements. After I cranked the wire down with pliers, the fins, though crude, appeared to be at least attached securely. I hoped they might do. On Saturday, Roy Lee came by in his car and I put the rockets in the front seat with us for the ride down to the Cape. He admired the new fin apparatus and said, “I wonder if we’re going to have another crowd today.”

  Before I could stop myself, I said, “I wish Dorothy would come over.”

  He shrugged. “Why don’t you invite her?”

  “I’m afraid she’d bring a boyfriend,” I answered honestly.

  “She’s going out with other guys and you’re still mooning over her?” Roy Lee shook his head. “Sonny, you and I have got to sit down and talk.”

  “I love her,” I said, “and someday she’s going to love me.”

  He sagged behind the wheel, shaking his head. “That ain’t the way it works, boy.”

  At the Big Store, men sitting on the steps waved at us. “Rocket boys!” they hallooed. The football boys had taken to walking around in a gang all summer, as if daring anyone to say anything about their suspension. Buck, brother Jim, and the rest of the giant boys gathered in front of the Club House. They glowered at us as we passed them, but said nothing. We picked up Sherman and kept going. O’Dell was waiting for us, having walked down to the Cape from Frog Level. He had already cleaned out a hornet’s nest in the blockhouse and swept off the launchpad. Mr. Dubonnet didn’t show this time, but Jake and Basil were there. “I’ve been preparing my story on you,” Basil said. “Just you wait and see the power of the press.”

  We let Jake light the fuse. He ran laughing to the blockhouse, his long legs pumping. This time, I had lengthened the fuse so he had time to clamber inside with Basil and the rest of us, all hunkered down in happy anticipation. Mr. Dubonnet had been correct about letting the powder cure longer: The rocket leapt off the pad with a louder-than-ever hiss and then streaked nearly out of sight. I climbed out of the blockhouse and caught sight of the wisp of its contrail as it fell downrange. I joined the others in a stampede of joy. It was our best rocket yet. “How high did it go?” Jake asked breathlessly, as excited as if he were a rocket boy himself.

  “Twice as high as the mountains,” Sherman said authoritatively.

  How high was that? We didn’t know.

  “Maybe a little trigonometry would help you figure it out,” Jake said.

  We didn’t know anything about trigonometry. “I’m a little rusty,” Jake said, scratching his head. “But let me think on it.”

  Auks VII and VIII didn’t need any trigonometry. Auk VII did a horseshoe turn not more than fifty feet up and slammed into the ground. Auk VIII bounced once in front of the blockhouse and then exploded overhead, rattling the tin roof with steel shrapnel. “Oh, this is so exciting,” Basil exclaimed.

  “Every time I get around you boys, it’s like being back in Korea,” Jake said, marveling at the gouges in the blockhouse. “The Army’s going to love you—if you live long enough to join up.”

  The next weekend, Mr. Bykovski met with me and Sherman and O’Dell at the tipple machine shop to teach us the fundamentals of welding and cutting steel so that we could build our own rockets. I wondered if Dad had agreed to it because of his guilt for banishing Mr. Bykovski to the mine. I couldn’t imagine it to be true, but I wondered it all the same. Mr. Bykovski claimed to be happy in his new job. I counted out five U.S. dollars to pay for the steel tubing and bar stock we were to use that day. I left it, according to Mr. Bykovski’s direction, on the workbench with a note on what it was for.

  Dad stood on the stoop of his office when we came out after the training. I went over to thank him. “So I guess you’re an expert at welding
and machining now,” he said.

  “No, sir,” I replied. “It’ll take a lot of practice to be any good at it at all.”

  He looked a little surprised at my response and then nodded. “Not much comes easy in this world, Sonny. If it does, it’s best to be suspicious of it. It’s probably not worth much.”

  “What’s the hardest thing you ever learned, Dad?” I asked abruptly.

  He leaned on the rail of the stoop. “Entropy,” he said finally.

  I didn’t understand the word and he knew it. “Entropy is the tendency of everything to move toward confusion and disorder as time passes,” he explained. “It’s part of the first law of thermodynamics.”

  I must have looked blank. “No matter how perfect the thing,” he continued patiently, “the moment it’s created it begins to be destroyed.”

  “Why was that so hard to learn?”

  He smiled. “Because even though I know it to be true, I don’t want it to be true. I hate that it’s true. I just can’t imagine,” he concluded, heading back inside his office, “what God was thinking.”

  ONE evening that summer, just before school started again, Jake called me on the black phone. Dad took the call, of course, and handed it over, a suspicious look on his face. “Make it fast.”

  “Sonny,” Jake said, “you boys come down and join me on the roof of the Club House tonight. Got a surprise for you.”

  Sherman was the only rocket boy I could round up on short notice. I scampered up the ladder to the Club House roof. Sherman doggedly hopped rung to rung on one foot.

  Jake looked up from the eyepiece of a long cylinder pointing skyward. “A beauty, ain’t it?” he grinned proudly. “My old trusty refractor. Just came in the mail today. This is what I used to do when I was your age, boys. I’d almost forgotten about it until I came down to your range.” It was the first telescope I had ever seen. He handed me a battered book. “Had my mother mail me this too. My old trig book. Learn this stuff and you can calculate how high your rockets fly.”