Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  Dad pushed me ahead. “Go take a shower,” he said gruffly. He looked around at the men still ducking their heads, but watching all the same. “This is none of your business!”

  The rock-dust crew moved off only a couple of feet so they could keep listening. I walked to the bathhouse, but stopped at the door. Even though I was so mortified I wanted to disappear, I wanted to hear too. Mr. Dubonnet, wearing his miner’s helmet with his street clothes, stepped outside and saw what was happening. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, chuckling. I didn’t know what he thought was so blamed funny.

  “What the devil’s wrong with you, Elsie?” Dad hissed, reaching to take her arm.

  She pulled back. “This mine’s killed you, but it’s not going to kill my boys!”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “Black spot—about the size of a dime,” Mom said, poking her index finger at his chest. “Here, on the right side!” She poked him again—hard.

  Dad huffed a near laugh, reached down for a handful of coal dust, and tossed it in the air. He took a deep breath of it. “I thrive on this stuff. It’s like mother’s milk to me!”

  Mom watched the dust settle around him. Some of it blew in her face, sticking to her makeup, but she didn’t flinch. She named and marched inside the bathhouse where I had retreated, sending naked miners scrambling for towels. She grabbed me by my arm. “You can wash at home,” she growled. As we came out, Mr. Dubonnet tipped his helmet to her, but all he got in return was a dirty look. The rock-dust crew scattered before her. Only Dad stood his ground, his helmet in his hand. He watched us pass without comment. All the way down the path from the tipple, I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head.

  12

  THE MACHINISTS

  Auks XIV-XV

  WHEN I NEXT ventured down to my lab, I discovered Mom had taken back her kitchen hardware. All she had left me was a ruined rocket-candy pot. I had a lot of experience dealing with my mother when she got mad at me. The best approach was to throw myself immediately on her mercy. I sought her out, finding her in the kitchen. “Mom, I’m really sorry,” I said, my head bowed. I watched her out of the tops of my eyes to see what impact my declaration had made.

  She gave me a short, hard look and then stirred the pot of beans she had on the stove. “First off, you lied to me, and on a Sunday to boot,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said, allowing a little groan of regret to steal into my voice.

  “Far as I can tell, you weren’t thinking at all,” she snapped, now furiously sorting.

  “I’m sorry.”

  With all her heavy-duty stirring, her beans were starting to look like pudding. She stopped and threw me an apron. “You’re not going to mope around the kitchen without being put to work. See those kidneys on the counter? Cook them up for the cats.”

  Grateful to be doing something in her presence, I tied on the apron, put the slimy kidneys in the sink, washed them, and prepared a pot for boiling. “Keep stirring these beans too,” Mom said. “Don’t let them stick to the bottom of the pot. I’m going into the living room and put my feet up and watch television like the Rockefellers.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said miserably. But I wasn’t miserable at all. I was happy. Mom had set the terms for my forgiveness and they were pretty easy. I cooked the kidneys, my nose wrinkling at their stink, and stirred the beans, although they hardly needed it. Daisy Mae rubbed up against my leg, and outside I heard Lucifer beg for entrance. The two cats, gurgling and purring, pounced on the organ meat when I set it down for them. It smelled like hot urine, but at least the cats and my mother were pleased. I went down in the basement and opened up a can of dog food for Dandy and Poteet, petting and patronizing them to make up for the attention I had given the cat enemy upstairs. Then I went outside and scattered seeds for the birds on the picnic table and threw some old lettuce and carrots out for the rabbits. I went out on the enclosed side porch to see how Chipper was doing and fed him too. He was racing along, his truncated tail held high, in the wheel Mr. McDuff had built for him. Chipper’s tail was cut short because he had caught it in the wheel and chopped about a quarter of it off. Mom had tried to tape the severed portion back on with some of Dad’s green mine tape, but it wouldn’t take. Chipper loved his wheel. As Mom said, he might not be getting anywhere, but at least he was getting there fast.

  As I scurried past her, making a little extra noise so she’d know how hard I was working, she looked up from the television. “I washed your rocket things and put them in a paper sack in the cupboard,” she said.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Mom hid a smile. “You’ve scraped and kowtowed enough, Sonny,” she said. “Don’t overdo it. And Sonny?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Her expression was dead serious. “You ever go down in the mine again, I’ll get your Ground-Daddy’s old pistol out of my cedar chest and shoot you dead on the spot.”

  It was news to me she had a pistol in her cedar chest, but I didn’t doubt it. And if it was Ground-Daddy’s, I guessed it would be so big she would need both hands to hold it up and it would have a bullet the size of a hickory nut.

  According to what Roy Lee heard from his mother, the fence-line telegraph had already gleefully dissected Mom and Dad’s fracas at the man-hoist. Everybody was just waiting for the next chapter in the Hickam family soap opera. Embarrassed, Jim had once more lowered himself to speak to me, but only to suggest that it might be a good idea if I more or less disappeared forever. We were trudging home after getting off the school bus.

  Jim was so easy. I stuck my verbal stiletto in him in just the right spot and twisted it. “I’ve been wondering,” I said, appraising him with mock concern. “Do you think you’re getting fat because you’re not playing football or because you basically swallow the refrigerator every night?” Jim sputtered and threatened, but restrained himself from battering me on the street. It would have meant even more embarrassment.

  Although I didn’t care about Jim and had time-tested ways to handle Mom, Dad was trickier. I had disappointed him before, but it had never been in such a personal way. I kept trying to think what I should say to him, but couldn’t figure out what it might be. He gave me no opportunity, in any case. For the next several weeks, he retreated to the mine, coming home after I was in bed and up and gone before I woke up, I worried about Dad, but I didn’t dwell on him. Rocket-building had begun to teach me a different way to think. There were always so many things to do and to remember in rocket design and construction that I had been forced to get organized in my mind. I had learned all the steps I needed to put one of the Auks together into different categories. Then I had put all of them in the order they had to be done and of their importance. It was sort of like putting stuff into different drawers in my mind and then remembering which drawers I needed to open and when. When I told Quentin about it, he called it a “sequential approach” to problems and admired it. “It is what I have always believed to be true,” he said. “Our work with rockets will change us in ways we would not have predicted. You, for instance, have actually learned an orderly way to think. When I first met you, I would not have believed that was possible.”

  I took Quentin’s comment as a compliment. I couldn’t do anything about Dad, not now, so I left his drawer closed until I could. But there was one thing—what my father had said about Mr. Bykovski on the cage—that kept bothering me no matter what else I was trying to think about. It was the drawer that stayed open. I would need help to close it.

  IKE and Mary Bykovski didn’t have a telephone, so I walked to their house after school. Mrs. Bykovski opened the door and frowned when she saw it was me. She was a slender woman with a pale, thin face and sunken cheeks. Her brown hair was short and straight, uneven around the edges as if maybe she had cut it herself and hadn’t tried too hard to make it come out right. Mom said Mrs. Bykovski always looked a little “peaked.” “The Mister’s still napping,” she said.
“Working at the face wears him out.”

  I blurted out an apology for causing his job change. “It’s all right, I guess, Sonny,” she said in a kindlier tone. “The paycheck’s bigger, anyway.”

  She invited me in and I sat alone on the couch in their living room while she went upstairs. The house smelled of corn bread and beans, the Coalwood staple. I saw a pair of reading glasses on a table beside the couch and also a book. Closer inspection revealed that it was a novel titled The Fountainhead. I didn’t know it. Opposite the couch was a television set in a dark, heavy console. On top of it was a framed photograph of Esther, the Bykovski’s daughter. She was in a wheelchair, her head lolling on her shoulder. Mrs. Bykovski stood on one side of her and Mr. Bykovski on the other. None of them was smiling.

  After a while, Mr. Bykovski came down the stairs into the living room, yawning and stretching his suspenders over his shoulders. “Hello, young man,” he smiled as his Mrs. set down a saucer and a cup of steaming tea on a little table beside his easy chair. When she asked me if I wanted something, I said, “No, ma’am,” and she disappeared into the kitchen. He noticed I was looking at the photograph on the television and said, “Maybe the day will come when we can bring Esther home and she can go back to school with you.”

  “I hope so, sir,” I told him. Actually, Esther had been a disruption during the first and second grade, and I had been shamefully glad when she left. Usually, she sat silently at her desk, staring blankly at the teacher or with her head down on her arms. But at other times, she would gyrate and make grunting sounds and spasmodically sweep her books and pens to the floor. Our teachers would wait patiently until she was through and then direct one of us boys to pick up her things and place them back on her desk. While the rest of us were worrying over getting our printing to match exactly the example shown on the blackboard, Esther got praise for any kind of mark that resembled the letters. Toward the end of the second-grade school year, she had gone into some kind of a seizure and thrown up all over the boy in front of her and then fallen out of her chair and started to choke. Mr. Likens, the principal, came rushing in and pulled her tongue out and then put a fold of notebook paper between her teeth. While the rest of us kids cowered against the wall, Doc arrived and had Esther carted out. She didn’t come back after that. Somehow, it got to the Bykovskis that I had been the one she threw up on, and my mother said Mrs. Bykovski stopped her at the Big Store and said how sorry she was. But I wasn’t the one.

  “What is on your mind, Sonny?” Mr. Bykovski asked, pulling my thoughts of Esther away.

  I took a deep breath and told him about going down in the mine and then what Dad had said about Wernher von Braun and Mr. Bykovski being a Jewish person. “Dad said I should ask you about Dr. von Braun working for the … Germans and all.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word Nazis. I sensed it would be the same as if I cursed in front of him.

  Mr. Bykovski put his cup down carefully in the saucer, the sound a minute clinking noise in an otherwise silent room. “This is a hard thing,” he said slowly, as if he were having difficulty getting his mind turned to my question. He drummed his thick fingers on the armrest. “Your Dr. von Braun,” he said, still speaking slowly and carefully, “helped monsters, and for that he should be blamed.” He set his mouth in a hard line. “There are concepts of forgiveness and redemption.…” He knitted his brow and shook his head. “For this, we need the rabbi, but he is in Bluefield and we are here.” He sipped his tea and thought some more. “Sonny, please listen and remember you are hearing from a profoundly ignorant man.”

  Ike Bykovski spoke then of the way a man can change and how it is possible to forgive if not perhaps to forget. “This is not your sin, Sonny,” he said. “It is Dr. von Braun’s. If you’re asking my permission to admire him for what he has become, you don’t need it.”

  Mrs. Bykovski spoke from the kitchen. “Maybe there’s a certain father who’s jealous of a certain rocket man.”

  “Mary!” Mr. Bykovski admonished.

  “You think my dad is jealous of Wernher von Braun?” I asked the empty kitchen doorway.

  “I am sure Mrs. Bykovski is just suggesting the possibility of it,” Mr. Bykovski said. He frowned at the kitchen and then came back to me. “And how are your rockets doing these days?” he asked, clearly wanting to change the subject.

  I was ready to change it myself. “We got one up to nearly eight hundred feet. Next time, we’ll bust a thousand, I know it!”

  “That is very good! And your machine-shop work? Have you been practicing?”

  “A little. But I think we need some more lessons.” I explained that Quentin and I believed we had a solution to the erosion in our nozzles, but it would require machine work beyond our capabilities.

  “I will speak to Leon Ferro,” he said. “He could turn out such work in short order.”

  “Would you really talk to him? I wouldn’t want to get you in any more trouble.”

  Mr. Bykovski shrugged my concern away. “Leon will want to trade. Will you be prepared?”

  “Better than I was the last time,” I said, remembering when O’Dell and I had gone looking for roof tin.

  “While you’re trading, we could use a new commode,” the voice said from the kitchen.

  “Mary!”

  “Well, we could.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, ma’am,” I called out while Mr. Bykovski chuckled.

  THE next week, Quentin caught the school bus to Coalwood and we went to the big machine shop. Mr. Ferro waved us into his office. “Yeah, Ike told me you were coming,” he said, rearing back and putting his boots up on his desk. “Let’s hear what you’re after.”

  What we were after, I said, was some kind of steel for our nozzles that could withstand heat, pressure, and oxidation. “The steel we’ve been using burns up.”

  “Sounds like it also needs to be thicker,” Mr. Ferro said. He had taken a pencil and, for no apparent reason, was balancing it on his upper lip. He rocked his head, working to keep the pencil from slipping off.

  “Yessir,” I said, mesmerized by his trick. “We think at least an inch thick. We need a hole drilled through its center too.”

  “SAE 1020 bar stock ought to do you fine,” Mr. Ferro said, taking the pencil and tapping it against his temple before sticking it behind his ear. He looked up at the ceiling. “It has a high melting point and good tensile strength too. Expensive stuff though. Take some time to drill and shape. C’mon.”

  Quentin and I followed him through the shop, his machinists busy at their drill presses and milling machines and lathes. When we caught their eye, they stopped long enough to grin and wave at us. “Rocket boys,” they mouthed to one another over the drone of their machines. Mr. Ferro stopped at a workbench and picked up a tap and threading tool. “I’d recommend inserting machine screws around the diameter of your thing to hold it in place. What did you call it?”

  “A nozzle.”

  “We need a mechanism for sealing off the upper aperture too,” Quentin said.

  Mr. Ferro looked at me. “We need a top plug,” I translated.

  He nodded and took the pencil from behind his ear and pulled out a sheet of paper from the bench. Some of his men wandered over, peering over our shoulders. They were all grinning. “we gonna get into rocket-building, boss?”

  Mr. Ferro handed me the pencil. “Draw me what you need.”

  I drew parallel lines to represent the casement and then showed the plug at the top and the nozzle at the bottom with a hole—about a third of the diameter—drilled through it. Mr. Ferro perused my effort. “Sonny, if you want work done in this shop, you’re going to have to give me an engineering drawing. I’ll need not only this side view, but also a top view and a detail on the plug and the nozzle. Think you can do that if I give you an example to follow?”

  “Yessir, I can,” I said. Except for winning Dorothy, which still remained my unsolvable puzzle, I figured I could do pretty much anything I wanted to do if only I worked at
it hard enough.

  We went back to his office. Mr. Ferro sat down behind his desk while Quentin and I stood. He eyed me. “Sonny, you know where I live?”

  He knew I did. He lived in the group of joined brick houses below the Dantzler house known as the Apartments. I had delivered the morning paper to him for years, once managing to fling a folded Bluefield Daily Telegraph right through a tier of milk bottles on his front porch.

  “Every time it rains, it turns into a mudhole behind my place,” he said, leaning back and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Could sure use some gravel back there.”

  Machining and materials for gravel. Gravel, like all things in Coalwood, could be supplied by my father. After I completed my engineering drawing of the nozzle, there was nothing to do but to go up to the mine. Dad looked up from his desk when I entered his office. “I heard you’ve been talking to Ike Bykovski,” he said. “And now you’re visiting Leon Ferro. You get around, don’t you?”

  I was always astonished how he knew everything I did at almost the moment I did it. “Dad,” I said, “I really need your help.”

  “You want gravel.” He shook his head. “Leon Ferro’s been after me about that for weeks. It’s not going to happen. Get it out of your head.”

  “What can I do to make it happen?”

  “Nothing. What’s that you got?”

  I showed him my drawing of the nozzle, the casement, and the top plug. He studied it. “That’s not bad work,” he allowed. “But you need to show the thickness of the tube.” He showed me how to place the arrows and where to put the dimension mark.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  “Get out of here. I’ve got work to do.”

  I rolled up the drawing. “The gravel?”

  He stared at me. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “Mom says it’s the Lavender in me.”

  Dad’s left eyebrow shot up. “By God, I’d say it’s the Hickam!”