Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  The night was clear and the stars were spread out like diamonds on a vast blanket of black velvet. “Come on, be my guest.” Jake grinned. “I got Jupiter cornered.”

  Sherman went first, pressing his eye against the eyepiece. “I can see the bands!” he cried.

  I took off my glasses and Jake showed me how to rotate the focus knob. Jupiter was a shimmering yellow circle with brown horizontal streaks. It felt as if I could reach out and touch it, and I wanted to.

  Jake pointed up at a stream of stars snaking across the sky between the mountains. “That’s the Milky Way, our galaxy. We’re looking at its edge.” I heard him unscrew a bottle and take a drink. He whistled out a long breath. “That’s the constellation Lyra the Lyre, and there’s Sagittarius the Archer. But look there, beside Lyra.” He fumbled with the eyepiece. “Tell me what you see.”

  Sherman looked and then I did. A glowing doughnut. I could just barely make it out. “A star with a hole in it?”

  Jake laughed. “Close. It’s the Ring Nebula. The ring is the ejected shell of a star’s outer mass.”

  Long past midnight, Jake kept showing Sherman and me different planets and stars, until finally he sat down and leaned up against a brick chimney and went to sleep. While Sherman kept looking through the telescope, I wandered to the edge of the roof and looked out over my little town. The church, bathed in starlight, glowed against the black silhouette of the mountain behind it, and on the hill above the post office I could make out the spires of Mr. Van Dyke’s mansion. The trees rustled in the cooling air coming off the mountains, and in the distance I could hear the hoot of a lone owl and by the creek that ran alongside the machine shops the rhythmic eepingof frogs. I went back to the telescope and tried to use it to look at Coalwood, but discovered I couldn’t focus it close enough. I thought how ironic it was that Jake’s telescope could see stars a million light-years away, but not the town it was in. Maybe I was that way myself. I had a clear vision of my future in space, but the life I led in Coalwood sometimes seemed to blur.

  Sherman gasped so loud it made me look up in time to see the streak of a big blue meteor, yellow sparks flying from its head, coming out of the north, It flew silently across the sky and then fell behind a mountain. I wanted to say something to capture the glory of its passing, but I had no words that were adequate. Sherman and I looked at one another. “Wow” was all we could say. Jake kept snoring.

  10

  MISS RILEY

  Auks IX-XI

  I have seen the future and it works! Two weeks ago, this reporter watched as the boys of the Big Creek Missile Agency launched their magnificent creations at their new Cape Coalwood range. As their silvery missiles leapt from the concrete pad and soared away into the sky, my mouth dropped open, so enthralled was I at the glorious sight of their rockets scrambling toward space.… They also have their failures. I got to hunker in their bunker and dodge shrapnel with these brave lads. But they are not the kind of boys who give up! This reporter is telling one and all who read these words: If you have any hope of understanding what the grand and glorious future holds for all who dare seize it, you must come to see the rocket boys of Coalwood.

  —The McDowell County Banner, August 1958

  THE FIRST DAY back to school in 1958 also began the first day of the football suspension. Instead of swaggering heroically through the halls in their green and white letter jackets, Jim and the football boys trudged to class sullen and trigger-sensitive to insult. Usually, at the beginning of the academic year, the team would be nearing their first game and the school would be focused on them. All they had to do was crook their fingers and the girls would come running, eager to be known as the girlfriend of a member of the exalted Big Creek team. This year, it seemed they looked more lumpy than muscled, more bullet-headed than bright, and oddly tainted. They were still quite capable of wiping the floor up with me, so I kept my distance and recommended that the other rocket boys not tease them either. “But it’s so tempting,” Quentin snickered as we walked down the hall. “Look at them. Like lost sheep.”

  We were soon to learn that more had changed at Big Creek than the lack of football. Our teachers sat us down, shut us up, and began to talk rapidly at the blackboard, outlining the courses and what would be expected of us in the new Sputnik-inspired curriculum. Astonishing homework assignments filled our notebooks. Books began to stack up. Mimeographed handouts flew down the aisles. Clutching books and papers, we slogged from class to class, our arms wrapped around the material. The same thing was happening in high schools in every state. Sputnik was launched in the fall of 1957. In the fall of 1958, it felt to the high-school students of the United States as if the country was launching us in reply.

  “Hi y’all,” a pretty tenth-grade girl said to Quentin and me in the hall between classes. “Will you be at the Dugout this Saturday? Hope so. I love to dance.” She skipped past a cluster of football boys without so much as a glance. They looked at Quentin and me with murder in their eyes.

  “Wow,” Quentin said. “That’s never happened before.”

  “We’ve never been written up in a newspaper before either,” I reminded him.

  As we passed the trophy case, I saw Valentine. She was standing alone, her books held to her chest. She was wearing a plaid skirt and a tight black sweater, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail, an ebony, shimmering waterfall. She looked sort of doleful. “Hi, Sonny,” she said, her eyes lighting up at the sight of me. “You wanna go to the band room and neck?”

  I was sure Valentine was only kidding. After all, she was in the class ahead of me and nearly two years older. I came over to her. “Sure, Valentine,” I joked. “Any day, any time.”

  She seemed to search my eyes. “You want to walk a girl to class?”

  “You bet.”

  Valentine leaned into me while we walked down the hall. “Read about you in the newspaper,” she said. “I am so proud of you. Um, would it be okay if I and some of the other girls came over to see you launch your rockets?”

  Valentine forever had the capacity to surprise me. “I’d be proud to have you,” I told her, and it was the truth.

  A knot of sullen football boys trudged past us, giving us dirty looks. One of them, Bobby Joe Shaw, bumped Valentine so hard she almost dropped her books. She grabbed his arm and spun him around. “Watch where you’re going, snot for brains!”

  Like Valentine, Bobby Joe was a senior. I remembered seeing the two of them holding hands in the auditorium the previous year. He had played second-string quarterback during the 1957 season, but he threw a mean pass and had a great running game too. His year to shine was supposed to be 1958. Now it was gone forever. “Robbin’ the cradle, ain’t you, Valentine?” he said.

  “Don’t give me any of your shit, Bobby Joe,” Valentine snarled, nearly standing on the boy’s toes. He backed off, glanced at me with a look that could kill, and then stalked down the hall. She came back. “Bobby Joe or any of those bad boys ever give you any … junk, Sonny, you come get me. I’ll take care of ’em.” At her classroom, she gave me a coy smile. “Whenever you’re ready to make out, just call me. I’ll be there.” She gave me a wink and went inside.

  Quentin came up beside me and helped me watch Valentine to her desk. “That is the most prodigious girl in this school!” he pronounced. Except for my Dorothy, I had to agree. My heart was thumping in my chest like I’d just run a mile. Coach Gainer had warned us boys in health class about the hormones that surged through our bodies when we got in high school. “It’ll pass,” the great man had advised. “Enjoy the sensations while you can, but don’t act on them. If you realize they’re not your brain talking, but just teen-age-boy crazy hormones, you’ll be fine”

  At the end of the day, Dorothy hailed me outside as I headed to the bus. She was a vision in a white starched blouse and navy blue skirt. “Coming over Sunday?” she asked. “I need help on plane geometry.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  She looked away, a little smil
e playing. “I missed you all summer,” she said in a soft voice.

  “R-really?” I stammered.

  “Um hmm,” she nodded, her big blues fastened on me. “I read about you too. All these cute little tenth-grade girls have got their caps set for you, I’ll bet. I’m just as jealous as I can be!”

  I grinned like a complete moron at her. “Don’t be! I—I mean … Dorothy, I missed you too!”

  “There’s so much for us to talk about. I just can’t wait!”

  Roy Lee came after me at a trot. He stopped and eyed Dorothy with obvious distaste. He just never tried to understand her perfection. “Sonny, Jack’s ready to go. He said you’ve got about five seconds or he’s going to leave you here with Miss Priss.”

  Reluctantly, I followed Roy Lee. “I was hoping you’d be over her by now, Son,” he said.

  “Never,” I replied.

  I waved at Dorothy from the bus. She waved back and then threw me a little kiss. I felt like I was floating the whole trip back to Coalwood. Jack had to remind me to get off at my bus stop.

  I HAD survived algebra in the tenth grade, barely managing a B after a flurry of good test scores at the end of the school year. But in the eleventh grade, I got good scores in plane geometry from the start. For one thing, I was certain its body of knowledge concerning plane curves, angles, and polygons would help me design my rockets. I suspected there were dimensional relationships involved in rocket design, such as a proper ratio between the area of the guidancecontrolling fins to the area of the casement. But how could I figure out such things? Mr. Hartsfield waved away my questions about how to calculate and compare flat areas (the fins) and curved surfaces (the casement) to first immerse us in Euclidean geometry and all of its axioms and postulates and proofs. “Sir, you are asking questions that are more in the nature of analytical geometry and calculus,” he said, mining away from the blackboard to eye me over his half-glasses. “As I recall, you had trouble understanding algebra. And if you didn’t understand algebra, Mr. Hickam, you’re lost, lost for all time!”

  During a lecture on triangles, I had the sudden insight that there was a relationship between the three sides and the angles they formed. I asked about that and Mr. Hartsfield looked me over, but not entirely disapprovingly. “That, Mr. Hickam, is trigonometry. In due course, we will get to wherever it is your usually less supple mind is trying to take us.”

  My usually less supple mind was trying to figure out how high our rockets were flying. I delved into Jake’s book. Quentin, delighted to have it, did the same. Sitting together in the Big Creek auditorium at lunch, we taught ourselves trigonometry. I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn’t hard when I had a reason to want to know it. With trig under our belt, all we would need to do was build some instruments to measure angles and we would be able to calculate how high our rockets flew. “I’ll get right on it,” Quentin promised.

  “OH, Sonny, you’re so smart,” Dorothy sighed on the couch in her living room when I told her how I was learning trigonometry. She leaned over and hugged me. “That’s for helping poor me on this old plane geometry.”

  It was the perfect opportunity for a patented Roy Lee kind of move. I started to slide my hand around her shoulders, but she jumped up. “Oh, my cookies are going to burn! Be right back.” When she returned with a plate of chocolate chip cookies, she sat in the chair across from me and doled them out. “I’m so glad we’re friends,” she said for about the millionth time. I didn’t let it wear me down. I was making progress with her, one little step at a time.

  All through the fall, I thumbed over to War every Sunday afternoon so Dorothy and I could work on plane geometry. We worked well together. As we covered each postulate and theorem, it soon became clear that Dorothy actually understood their derivations better than I did. She was a good teacher, patiently explaining to me how each proof built on the other. She had a wonderful memory for details and never seemed to forget anything once she had committed it to memory. But I was a lot better than she was at mental visualizations. I had to draw a picture for Dorothy just to get her to understand that two lines were parallel if they were both perpendicular to a third line.

  Mr. Hartsfield did his best to give us a tool to do our work. “Ladies and gentlemen, you must learn deductive reasoning!” He caught Roy Lee ogling the girl next to him and threw a perfect chalk strike to the boy’s head. “Now, sir, let me put a general statement to you,” he said to Roy Lee. “All human beings have brains, that’s my major premise. Do you not agree?”

  Roy Lee rubbed his head, chalk dust sticking to his lacquered D.A. “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Hartsfield stood and balanced on his toes. “And all teenage boys are human beings. That is my minor premise, controversial though it may be. And if my major and minor premises are so, sir, what is your conclusion?”

  Roy Lee wrinkled his brow. “That all teenage boys have brains?” he finally allowed.

  “Why, yes, my boy!” Mr. Hartsfield shouted and bounced a foot off the floor. “So what, pray tell, is your excuse?”

  Deductive reasoning was all well and good, but I loved to just let my mind go and soar the endless reaches of space, where lines crossed to create points with no dimensions at all and parallel lines intersected in infinity. I started to think a lot about infinity, and what it was like there, and how all the postulates and theorems and principles were true across all the universe. I lay in my bed at night, Daisy Mae’s head on my feet, and looked up into the darkness and allowed my mind to go wherever it wanted to go. Sometimes when I did that I actually felt like I was flying, soaring into the night sky over Coalwood and through the dark valleys and mountain hollows that marched away in the moonlight. One night, when I was having one of these visions, I had the startling revelation that plane geometry was, in fact, a message from God. My mind closed down and I came immediately back to my bed, my room coalescing around me, my desk and chair, my little chest of drawers, the books and model airplanes suddenly so terribly real. Daisy Mae stirred and I knew I was safe in my room, where I felt the safest of anywhere, but I was still trembling with fear. I lay there, unsleeping, waiting for the idea to leave me, but it wouldn’t. All the next day and the next, it kept batting around in my head. I decided I had better see Reverend Lanier about it.

  Reverend Lanier greeted me warily in his study. He had successfully survived his little sermon that had resulted in Cape Coalwood, but it had apparently been a close call. He told me that Mr. Van Dyke himself had suggested that perhaps the Reverend might care to review Proverbs 17:19. Reverend Lanier had and concluded that, while Mr. Van Dyke’s theology was flawed, his message was clear. Reverend Lanier would take great care with his future messages from the pulpit.

  Unfazed, I presented my revelation that in the principles and theorems and axioms of plane geometry—these truths that stayed true across the universe—God had sent us a message. The Reverend wasn’t buying it. “You’re talking about arithmetic, Sonny,” he said, and tapped the Bible. “All of God’s words are here, in the Good Book.”

  I tried to talk about it some more with him, but he just kept tapping the Bible. My next stop was the Reverend Richard. Little and I walked down the narrow aisle of his tiny church toward the altar while I explained. He seemed to bow under the weight of what I was saying. “Gawdalmighty,” he breathed. “Can’t be nothin” but God’s plan.” He grabbed a Bible from behind his pulpit and plumped down on one of the crude wooden pews. I sat beside him while he opened the book and closed it and then opened it again. “The Word is the Word, Sonny,” he said, running his finger along a random passage. “But the Number is God’s too. Got to be.” He scratched his chin, his eyes lifted to the plain wooden cross nailed to the wall by the choir box. “I can’t cipher it.” He looked at me. “Do you think you can?”

  I shrugged. “Not me. I just want to know how to build a rocket.”

  “Oh, if that’s all you want, pray on it and God will provide,” he said. “I’ll help you
if you promise me somethin’. When you build your rocket and it goes off way high in the air, people may say let’s give Sonny glory for it. Don’t you take none of it.” He nodded toward the cross. “All the glory in the world belongs right there.”

  I looked at the cross and then bowed my head, suddenly afraid that God might punish me for poking around in His business. “Yessir,” I gulped.

  “Don’t be puttin’ on any airs, now, gettin’ prideful and all.”

  “No, sir,” I said in a small voice, as small as I felt.

  Little laughed, a kind of slow heh-heh-heh. “Boy, don’t you be frettin’. God is love, don’t you know that? He ain’t never gonna hurt you. He’s got plans for you, all you boys.”

  I nodded dumbly. “Then go on witch’a,” he said. “I got some prayin’ to do. Boy in Coalwood findin’ the Word of God in his plane geometry book. Yes, sir. I got a lot of prayin’ to do about that.”

  ONE morning, Dad plunked bread slices in the old toaster that sat on the counter and pushed the mechanism down and then went to the stove to pour coffee. When he came back, the handle on the toaster was still down, but nothing was happening. He discovered the heating element was gone, mainly because I had taken it to see if my plans for an electrical-ignition system would work.

  Those same plans led O’Dell to borrow the heavy-duty battery from his dad’s garbage truck. Roy Lee drove him and the battery to my house for the test. It worked, the toaster wire getting sufficiently hot to ignite black powder, but then we got distracted by American Bandstand and then Roy Lee and O’Dell drove off, leaving the battery and wire in the garage. For my dad, that meant no toast. For O’Dell’s dad, the next day, that meant his garbage truck wouldn’t start. There was unhappiness in both houses, and the gossip fence gleefully sang with it. It didn’t take long before every missing thing in town was blamed on “those rocket boys.” One day, Mom got a call from Mr. Jackson, who lived up in the New Camp part of town and fancied himself a hunter. “Elsie, would you ask Sonny if he’s seen Jesse?”