Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  Mom knew Jesse was Mr. Jackson’s old hound dog. “Why on earth for, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Well, I heard those old Cape Canaveral boys were shootin’ monkeys off into outer space. I thought maybe your boy got around to old huntin’ dawgs.”

  Mom suppressed her laughter. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Jackson. Jesse will wander in. I don’t think the boys have him.”

  Old Jesse did indeed meander back home soon afterward, but Mr. Jackson still always gave me an odd look whenever he saw me go by on my bike.

  O’Dell and Roy Lee, looking for a way to improve Cape communications, targeted the mule barn. Mr. Carter had built it in the early 1930’s for the old mules who had become too broken down to work in the mine. He refused to sell the beasts to the rendering factories, maintaining that they deserved something of a retirement for their years of loyalty. After years underground, they were too sensitive to light to be put out to pasture. The old wooden structure had been empty of mules since Mr. Carter had sold the company to the steel mill. As soon as the men from Ohio arrived, the mules were loaded up and sent away to become dog food. Mom and many of the women, I was told, lined the streets crying as the trucks holding the tired old animals went by. When we kids played around the mule barn, we peeked through its dirty, screened windows to look at the ghostly stalls and the ancient harnesses. On a table in the center of one end of the barn were also a number of ancient mine telephones. O’Dell, believing these telephones to be scrap, decided the BCMA should have them. Rather than simply ask the company for them, he instead hatched a plan that he thought would be more fun.

  O’Dell and Roy Lee arrived at the mule barn on a Friday, near midnight. The next morning, while I was watching cartoons on television, the home phone rang. It was Tag Farmer, the town constable. “I think you better hightail it on down to Mr. Van Dyke’s office, Sonny,” he said. “You got problems.”

  When Tag told me what had happened, I felt like choking O’Dell. This stunt, I knew, had every chance of getting us kicked off company property again. I grabbed my bike and raced down Main Street.

  Mr. Van Dyke raised his eyebrows when I ran in and screeched to a halt in front of his desk. Roy Lee and O’Dell looked up from their chairs by the wall. They looked miserable and dirty. “Well, Sonny,” Mr. Van Dyke said, “I understand that your rocket club is in need of telephone equipment.” His expression was stony, and he made a little church with his fingers. “So you decided to steal it from the company, eh? Oh, you boys think you’re so sly, but we know what is going on in this town, far better than you may think. Isn’t that right, Tag?”

  Tag Farmer, leaning against an old wooden filing cabinet in the corner, nodded. Tag was in his official company khaki uniform, a company badge in the shape of a star on his jacket. He was a young man, still in his twenties. After graduating from Big Creek, the story I got was he had spent his entire time in Korea on top of the same mountain, waiting for the Chinese to come up and kill him. It must not have been an important mountain, because they never bothered. When his tour was up, Tag came home to go into the mine. He’d made it to the bottom of the shaft, but couldn’t get off the cage. Because he was a combat veteran, Captain Laird found him another job. Tag had proved to be a good constable. There wasn’t much crime to deal with, but he was always on call to come help housewives move furniture, and anybody who needed a ride could depend on Tag to supply taxi service.

  “Breaking and entering with the intent to commit theft. What do you call that, Tag? In legal terms?”

  Tag shrugged. “Reckon it be a felony, Mr. Van Dyke.” Roy Lee and O’Dell hung their heads. My knees nearly buckled.

  Mr. Van Dyke leaned back in his chair, the springs creaking discordantly. “A felony, my! Does that mean jail, Tag?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir.”

  Instead of a future with the von Braun team, it looked as if my future was going to be behind bars. I considered throwing myself on my knees and begging for mercy. O’Dell gulped so loud I heard him. Roy Lee kept a stoic silence. Tag shifted his weight from foot to foot and then said, “Mr. Van Dyke, could we talk about this? I mean, maybe this don’t need to go over to the court in Welch.”

  Mr. Van Dyke shrugged. “Well, if you insist, Tag, although it seems to me we’d be hard-pressed to go against the law.”

  Tag indicated the door. “Why don’t you boys go outside and have a seat? I’ll come get you in a minute. Go on, now.”

  We filed out and sat in the office outside. The typewriter on the desk was covered and the desk was uncluttered. Mr. Van Dyke was without a secretary again. The latest one, come down from Ohio, had spent the better part of a month in Jake’s room before she got the ax. As a result, Jake had been ordered never to go out with a company secretary again, and Mr. Van Dyke’s wife had let Coalwood know that the next time one was hired, she’d do the picking. “Wait’ll Jake Mosby sees the spinster I choose,” Mrs. Van Dyke told the fence. “And wait’ll Mr. Van Dyke gets a load of her too,” the fence had answered back, deliciously.

  Roy Lee sat silently, glaring at O’Dell while the boy whispered furiously in my ear about what had happened. Around midnight they had arrived at the mule barn, finding a rusty padlock on the back door, knocked loose with a whack from a hammer out of Roy Lee’s car. They pushed ahead cautiously, O’Dell holding the flashlight and flashing it around the empty stalls. He said it smelled like the air was a hundred years old in there. Then the rotten old floor collapsed, and the boys plummeted into the basement. Bats chattered and spun around the rafters, sailing through a cracked window into the cold night outside, and then it was quiet again. Trapped, they spent the night in old mule dung until Tag found them.

  Roy Lee finally spoke. “I hate you,” he said to O’Dell. He looked at me. “I hate you too.” Then he lapsed into silence again.

  Tag came and got us, and we went back inside and stood, our heads lowered, while Mr. Van Dyke pondered us. “How much do you think that old telephone equipment’s worth?” he said finally.

  We had no idea, we mumbled.

  His hand moved to a big black metal calculator. He tapped some keys and pulled the lever on it and then inspected the resulting paper strip. “All right. Here’s what I’m going to do, boys. If you want telephone equipment, you can have the lot for twenty-five dollars plus two dollars for the busted padlock plus another ten dollars for failure to notify the company of your plan to enter the barn. We’re going to make this a business deal, gentlemen, so that your dubious records won’t be further besmirched. Tag has taken up for you, although God knows why, said you boys aren’t usually the ones who soap up his car or hit the sides of the doors in your cars as you drive by old people walking on the street. In short, he has asked me to display mercy toward you, even though my instinct is to take advantage of the moment and see not another rocket fired off in this town. So, is it to be business or criminal proceedings?”

  “What about our parents?” I asked cautiously.

  Mr. Van Dyke’s eyes widened in theatrical astonishment. “I’d never recount the contents of a business deal to another party!”

  And so the BCMA went into business with Mr. Van Dyke. We had a year to pay off the thirty-seven dollars, and though I had no idea how we would get the money, at least we were still building rockets. “I know how to get money, a lot of it,” O’Dell said afterward, outside on the street. His face fairly glowed. “Cast iron.” He laid his finger beside his nose, a sign of stealth, or perhaps deceit. “Next summer. Cast iron.”

  “Count me out,” Roy Lee said.

  OF all my subjects in the eleventh grade, chemistry was my favorite, because Miss Riley was our teacher. She was strict with us, not ever allowing anybody to get her off the topic even once, but she still had an impish humor that she often used to keep us alert, along with such an obvious love for her subject that we all paid attention. Our advanced curriculum put us into the periodic table during the first week. By the second, we were working at balancing chemical equations. If we didn
’t understand something, we were expected to say so and then she’d go back and patiently cover the ground again. If we didn’t ask a question, she assumed we understood the material and kept going. I had at least an hour of chemistry homework to do every night. That was on top of the three hours from the other subjects.

  Even though Big Creek gave Miss Riley little in the way of lab equipment to demonstrate what was in our new chemistry book, she was inventive. One day, she led us outside to the football field. The field had deteriorated during our fall of suspension. Its grass was ragged and brown, and the chalked yard lines had faded to a pale yellow. Even the stands and press box seemed to be sagging. Miss Riley poured on the ground a small amount of white powder from each of two little paper bags she had carried with her and then mixed them with a wooden spoon. I was standing beside Dorothy. To my surprise, she moved closer and took my arm and pressed her breasts against me for a few seconds before walking around to a different place to get a better look at Miss Riley. I looked up to find Roy Lee frowning at me. I sheepishly grinned.

  “This is a mixture of potassium chlorate and sugar,” Miss Riley said. “What we’re going to see now is a demonstration of rapid oxidation. Quentin, tell us the difference between slow and rapid oxidation.”

  Of course, Quentin knew our homework cold. “When oxygen combines with an element over an extended period of time, the result is slow oxidation, rust being a good example of it,” he said confidently. “But when oxygen combines with something rapidly, energy is released in the form of light and heat.”

  “Thank you, Quentin. This mixture of potassium chlorate and sugar will demonstrate rapid oxidation.” Miss Riley struck a match and dropped it onto the little pyramid of powder. Instantly, a hot greenish flame erupted with a loud hiss. The BCMA looked at one another. We didn’t have to say what we were all thinking. Rocket fuel.

  After class, I went up to Miss Riley’s desk and pointed at the little sack of potassium chlorate. “Can I have what was left over?” I asked. I told her about the BCMA, just in case she hadn’t heard about it. “We’ve built a range—Cape Coalwood—and we’re starting to get some altitude. But we need a better fuel.”

  “Have you thought any more about entering the science fair? I’m still in charge of the committee.”

  “I don’t think we’re ready,” I said honestly. “We’re still trying to figure things out. It would help if we had a book.”

  “A book.” She cocked her head, thinking. “No. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a book on how to build a rocket. I’ll look around though.”

  “Would you? That would be great. In the meantime …” I pointed at the sack.

  She shook her head. “Sorry, it’s all I’ve got. Anyway, potassium chlorate is unstable under heat and pressure. It’s too dangerous for rocket fuel. What do your parents think about the BCMA?”

  “My mother said just don’t blow myself up.”

  She laughed and then seemed to ponder me as if I were some sort of puzzle. “Why do you build rockets?”

  She was easy to talk to, almost like a friend. “I guess I just want to be a part of it—going into space,” I told her. “Every time they launch something down at Cape Canaveral, it’s like … I just want to help out somehow. But I can’t. If I build my own rockets—” I stopped, not certain I was making sense.

  She helped out. “If you build your own, you’re part of it. I can see that. For me, it’s the same with poetry. Sometimes I have to write some of my own—it’s poor, I know that—but it allows me to make a connection with the poets I admire. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” I told her. No teacher had ever confided in me about anything to do with her personal life the way Miss Riley had just done, almost as if I were her equal.

  She kept smiling at me, and I felt at that moment like I was the most important person to her in the world. “Let me give you some advice,” she said. “Don’t blow yourself up. I think I want to keep you in my class. Okay?”

  “Okay! I mean, yes, ma’am.”

  Quentin was waiting for me in the hall. “What did she say?” he asked.

  “She won’t let us have the potassium chlorate. She said it was too dangerous.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s okay. Potassium nitrate has much the same property and exactly the same number of oxygen atoms as potassium chlorate. Mix saltpeter and sugar and we should get the same reaction we just saw.”

  Quentin put down his briefcase and hauled out his chemistry text. He found the equation. “Potassium nitrate. KNO3 The same as potassium chlorate except it has a potassium atom instead of a chlorine one.” He put a piece of paper against a locker and scribbled down the formula. “I think if we mix it with sugar and add heat we’ll get three parts oxygen and two parts carbon dioxide along with some other byproducts. In other words, lots of good expanding gases. It should be an excellent propellant.”

  Quentin looked to be right. “I’ll test it tonight,” I promised.

  Back home, I headed for the basement after a brief raid on Mom’s kitchen cupboard. I took a tablespoon of sugar and the same of saltpeter, stirred them in a coffee cup with a wooden spoon, opened the door to our coal-fired hot-water heater, and tossed it in. I was gratified by the eruption of hot flame, just like Miss Riley’s experiment, except mine was pink rather than green. The sound and intensity and time of the burn seemed to exceed the best of my black-powder combinations. I whipped up some more mixtures, experimenting with the percentages.

  Mom was outside leaning on the fence, gossiping with Mrs. Sharitz, when suddenly our chimney erupted with smoke and sparks like a small volcano. Both came running down the basement steps just as I threw in another cup of mixture. I clanged the heater door shut and gave them my best innocent grin. “Hi, Mom, Mrs. Sharitz.”

  “See, Elsie? I told you Sonny was home from school,” Mrs. Sharitz said.

  “It would be nice to find that out without smoke signals,” Mom growled.

  I showed both of them what I was doing, how I mixed the propellant, how I stood back when I threw a little of it in the heater. I demonstrated, and Mrs. Shartiz whooped excitedly at the flash of pink sparks. “How pretty!”

  Mom was dubious. “Okay, Sonny, let’s go over this one more time. Don’t blow yourself up. Got it?”

  I put on my most honest face. “Yes, ma’am. I got it.”

  That night, I started to load a casement with a sugar-and-potassium-nitrate mix. It was too granular to attempt to put a spindle hole down the middle, so I poured it in and tapped on the casement to settle the grain as best I could. Dad caught me at it as he came in from work. “What now, little man?”

  “New propellant, sir.”

  “If it went off, how high would this house come off its foundation?”

  “Only a foot or two,” I said.

  “Attaboy,” he said, and then kept going. Startled, I turned and watched him go up the steps. Attaboy?

  The following Saturday the BCMA gathered and went down to the Cape for a test. This launch wasn’t advertised, because we had no idea how our new propellant of saltpeter and sugar would work. Auk IX took off with a satisfying hiss, but it quickly died and fell with a plop not more than a hundred feet from the pad. We recovered it and carried it back to the blockhouse to consider it. When I tapped it, a little debris fell out. Most of the propellant had burned. Sherman sniffed at it. “It smells like candy,” he said.

  “Rocket candy!” O’Dell chimed, and so coined our new term for the propellant.

  “It seems to produce an ample exhaust, but it burns too rapidly,” Quentin said. “A loose mix in the casement may not be adequate. What we need to do is somehow pack more of it inside.”

  “I can try wetting it with the postage-stamp glue in the next batch,” I proposed.

  “Sugar’s awfully soluble,” Quentin said, biting his thin lip. “It may retain the moisture for a very long time. You may try it, Sonny, but the proof will be here on the range, of course.”

&nb
sp; “Of course,” I said back, pleased that our discussion sounded so scientific and professional.

  “You guys don’t have the foggiest idea what the hell you’re talking about, do you?” Roy Lee asked.

  Despite his statements to the contrary after the mule-barn incident, Roy Lee was still with us. Quentin scowled at him, but I laughed at Roy Lee’s insight. He was right.

  We launched again the following weekend. I had wet the potassium-nitrate-and-sugar mix and packed it inside a standard casement. A new member of the BCMA joined us. His name was Billy, a boy in our class who lived up Snakeroot Hollow. Other boys occasionally expressed an interest in joining us, but Billy was the first one who took it upon himself to persist in asking. I was glad to have him. Billy was a good runner, which, considering the range we hoped to attain, I thought we might need to help us find our rockets. He was also smart, smarter than me if his grades were any evidence. Billy’s dad had been cut off in 1957, but had stuck around by claiming an old shack above where the colored people lived in Snakeroot. After his attendance at a BCMA meeting at our house, Mom took one look at what Billy had to wear and stopped him at the door. She drew him aside and then took him to my closet and threw open the door. Billy staggered to Roy Lee’s car, weighted down with pants and shirts.

  Auk X sat on the pad and fizzled, producing some white smoke and just enough thrust to rock it gently on its fins. We inspected it afterward, a dark, thick liquid like caramel oozing from it. “I cured it all week and it was still wet,” I told the others.

  Quentin shook his head. “I warned you. Sugar’s too soluble.”

  Auk XI, which had rocket candy inside that I had not moistened, leapt off the pad with a satisfying hiss, but then exploded, steel fragments whistling overhead while we hit the dirt inside the blockhouse. We crept outside and stood around the pad. “My speculation is the propellant collapsed,” Quentin said.