Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  “Then we should build …”

  Quentin’s face took on a characteristic smugness. “Perfectly calculated De Laval nozzles. We do that, Sonny, my boy”—he reared back in the kitchen chair and waved his baloney sandwich—“and we’re going to fly rockets not thousands of feet but miles into the sky.” He took a giant bite of his sandwich and chomped on it thoughtfully, lettuce hanging out a corner of his mouth.

  “If we learn how to work these equations,” I said.

  Quentin nodded. “Yes. That will be the trick.”

  I WOKE to all earthquake in the night, my heart slamming against my chest. Dogs were barking up and down the valley, a battery of yips and yelps and howls. The telephone rang in Dad’s room, and then I heard his feet hit the floor. He raced downstairs and I heard the hollow thumping of the basement steps as he went down them. I looked outside and saw him heading up the path to the mine, struggling into his coat as he ran. He stopped once, coughed, and then kept going.

  The mine was lit up, big spotlights playing around the grounds. A gathering murmur, people in their yards talking across the fences, coalesced outside. Mom went downstairs, pulling her housecoat around her. Jim and I, putting coats on over our pajamas, followed her out into the yard. Mrs. Sharitz shared the news over the fence. A bump in the mine, a big one. That meant a pillar—or more than one—had exploded. I remembered what Dad had told me that Sunday in the mine, the energy that was concentrated in pillars by the tons of rocks resting on them. But he had also told me that they were carefully engineered to hold the weight, and something had to be done wrong to make them explode. I pulled my mother to the side and told her what I knew. She looked at me sourly. “Your father will take care of it,” she said.

  “But something’s not right,” I said. “This shouldn’t happen.”

  She huffed, exasperated at having to talk about it. “Sonny, I’ve been around coal mines all my life. What’s supposed to happen and what does happen in them are two different things. You think Poppy was supposed to get his legs cut off?”

  “But Dad said if the calculations are done correctly—”

  “Don’t you think Wernher von Braun does his calculations right too?” she demanded. “I still see his rockets blow up.”

  Mom wrapped her housecoat tighter around herself and walked away from me. After a while, the dogs stopped their howling, subsiding to a series of whimpers, and everybody went back inside. The next morning and most of the day Dad still didn’t come home, but we knew, because the fence spread the word, that no one was hurt and that there was only one exploding pillar, in the gob far from the face. Dad had plunged inside the mine with the rescue team—they proudly called themselves the Smoke Eaters—and drove straight to the site of the pulverized pillar just in case there was anybody hurt. I found that out when Mom complained to him about it. I was in my lab and could hear them in the kitchen. “It’s not your job, Homer,” she said from the stepladder in front of her painting.

  “I trained those men, Elsie.”

  “Then let them do what you trained them to do. You should stay back like Mr. Van Dyke.”

  “You just don’t understand,” Dad replied.

  “Homer,” she sighed, “the one thing in this old world I do understand is you.”

  THE next Saturday, the day clear and cold with light winds, we set Auk XVI on the pad, sliding it down the launch rod. A small group of people waited expectantly on the road. Basil sat on the hood of his Edsel. I was also surprised to see some Sub-Debs, in their distinctive leather jackets, standing apart. I went over to them when I saw Valentine Carmina, drop-dead gorgeous in a tight black skirt and a white V-necked sweater.

  “I just had to see your rocket, Sonny,” she said mischievously, taking me by my arm and walking me away from the other girls. They were smoking and giving some boys who were yelling at them the finger. “I can’t take ’em anywhere,” she sighed, looking at her company.

  “I’m glad you came, Valentine,” I said, feeling suddenly very warm. Her breasts had pretty much swallowed my arm.

  She released me and turned to study me. “Sonny, I got something to say and I’m going to say it. I know you’re crazy about that Dorothy Plunk, but she don’t seem to give a flip about you. Boy as cute as you shouldn’t have to put up with that.” She smiled and winked. “You should have a girl who ’preciates you. Now, I ain’t sayin’ who that girl oughta be, but you need to take a look around.”

  Roy Lee walked up to us while I was trying to figure out what to say. My tongue seemed to be tied in knots. “I hate to break this up—believe me, I do,” he said, “but we’ve got a rocket to launch.” He led me off, his hand firmly on my arm. “Now, there’s a woman,” he said.

  I worked to clear my head. Then I wondered if Roy Lee had been talking to Valentine. Before I could make an accusation, I heard Quentin whoop. He was downrange with one of the old mine telephones O’Dell and Roy Lee had acquired from the mule barn and for which, I remembered, we still owed Mr. Van Dyke. We were testing them for the first time. Sherman and O’Dell had run phone wires all morning, hooking them up to old truck batteries donated by Emily Sue’s father from his scrap yard. When I entered the blockhouse, the speaker to the phone squawked, startling me. “Blockhouse,” Sherman said into the phone and then listened. “It works, it works!” he yelled.

  We each took our turn at the phone, talking to Quentin. “You ready?” I asked, all excitement.

  “Ready!”

  “Stand by.” I looked around the group. Roy Lee went outside and ran the BCMA flag up the pole. When he came back, I started to count, with Sherman on the phone to Quentin keeping up with me. “Ten—nine—eight—seven …”

  At zero, I touched the bare tips of the ignition wires to the battery. There was a spark as the wires touched, and then Auk XVI suddenly jumped off the pad and flew straight up the rod into the sky, a white plume of rocket-candy fire and smoke sizzling behind. It had a fine contrail, allowing us to track it all the way. When Auk XVI was just a pinpoint in the sky, it arced over smoothly and dropped downrange. I heard a satisfactory thunk when it hit the slack.

  We fired three more rockets that day, two two-footers and one three-footer, counting up to Auk XIX. All performed flawlessly, flying nice elliptical trajectories downrange to impact on the slack. Billy aimed his theodolite from a spot beside the blockhouse, and Quentin did the same with his downrange. Two observation points made the trig more accurate, and Quentin calculated that the two-footers reached an altitude of around three thousand feet, the three-footer around two thousand feet, an observation that confirmed our suspicions on rocket performance and their size. When going for altitude, bigger wasn’t always better. Basil stood beside us while we talked, taking notes.

  I heard the toot of a horn and saw the Sub-Debs leaving. Somebody was waving something pink out of the back window of their car. They were panties. “I wonder why it is that females wear such creations,” Quentin mused while the rest of us boys stared, open-mouthed. “They seem too slippery for good posture in the seated position.”

  “Shut up, Quentin,” Roy Lee said.

  “I have also wondered why they wear stockings as separate items. If they were combined with the, ahem, panties, it would be more efficient.”

  “Shut up, Quentin,” we all said as one. Basil laughed, but wrote it all down.

  When we returned from Cape Coalwood for a BCMA meeting, brother Jim contemplated us sourly from the sofa, where he was watching television. “Will you sisters hold it down?” he griped as we chattered about our rockets.

  Quentin had a copy of the McDowell County Banner containing Basil’s latest story about us. Jim snatched the paper from him, looked it over, and then threw it on the floor. “Why would anybody want to write something on you jerks anyway? So you shoot off rockets, so what?”

  “People show jealousy in a lot of ways,” Quentin snapped. “In your case, Jim old chap, it’s overt.”

  Jim turned to look at me. “You better have you
r jerk friend take that back or I’ll slug him.”

  Quentin shoved his fists in the air and made little mixing moves. “Come on, big boy. Anytime!”

  “I could smash you with one hand tied behind my back,” my brother said.

  Quentin barked out a laugh. “And I could outsmart you with one brain tied behind mine!”

  Jim reddened and came off the sofa. He pushed me out of the way, and he might have gotten to Quentin if Roy Lee hadn’t stepped in front. Roy Lee was no match for my brother, but he gave me time to get up and wedge in beside him. Together we might do Jim a little damage, if only accidental. “Sister morons,” he muttered, and went back to the sofa.

  “Let’s get out of here while we still can,” I whispered to Roy Lee, and he, Sherman, O’Dell, Billy, and I shepherded Quentin, still sputtering, upstairs to my room. Chipper ran in past us and leapt up on the window curtain and hung there. I passed the rocket book around, inviting all the boys to inspect the pages of equations. “To get all that we need to know from this book,” I said, “we’re going to have to learn calculus.”

  “And differential equations,” Quentin added.

  “Are you two crazy?” Roy Lee demanded. “We can hardly do the homework they give us now.”

  “Nevertheless,” Quentin said, “it must be done.”

  “I want to learn calculus,” Sherman said simply, and then O’Dell and Billy said they did too.

  Roy Lee sighed, “Here we are, a bunch of gawddamned West Virginia hillbillies wanting to be Albert Einsteins.”

  “Wernher von Brauns,” I corrected him.

  “Same thing,” he said, but the way he said it I knew he was with us.

  15

  THE STATE TROOPERS

  MR. HARTSFIELD PUSHED my book back across his desk. “You disturb my lunch with this nonsense? How can you expect to learn calculus when you didn’t understand algebra?” That was meant for me. The other boys had made A’s in algebra.

  Quentin interceded. “Sir, we’ve been studying trigonometry already on our own.” He produced Jake’s book. “We needed it to find out how high our rockets flew. But it’s unlikely we could teach ourselves calculus. We need your help for that.”

  Mr. Hartsfield looked sympathetically at Quentin. “Perhaps you could absorb the material,” said, but then he hung his old gray head. “But, no, I see no purpose in it.”

  “We need it to learn how to build better rockets, Mr. Hartsfield,” I said. “It’s for our futures, don’t you see?”

  Mr. Hartsfield softened for an instant, his watery eyes glistening, but then he snapped back to his usual dourness. “I’ve heard of your group, Mr. Hickam. Mr. Turner has spoken of it, and not in positive terms.”

  “What if we got Mr. Turner’s permission for you to teach us?” I asked.

  A smile almost played across Mr. Hartsfield’s face. “I shall do what Mr. Turner tells me to do, of course. But surely you must know there is no hope for this class, no hope at all.”

  “Why not?” Billy demanded.

  “Because,” Mr. Hartsfield sighed, looking down and shaking his head, “this is Big Creek High School. Maybe if this was Welch High, the county superintendent would approve such a class, but not here. We’re a football and a coal miner’s school, and that’s all we’ve ever been.”

  We were outraged. “That’s not fair!”

  Mr. Hartsfield looked up sharply. “Who ever told you boys life was fair?” he demanded.

  “WELL, the pipe-bomb boy,” Mr. Turner said from his desk. “And Miss Riley too? I hope you’re not here to tell me you’ve blown up chemistry class.”

  Miss Riley told him our purpose and showed him my rocket book. “The boys are very serious about this, Mr. Turner,” she ended.

  “I presume Mr. Hartsfield has agreed?” he asked.

  “If you approve it, he’ll teach us,” I said.

  “Artfully put, Mr. Hickam,” Mr. Turner observed, an eyebrow cocked. “Miss Riley, do you really believe this to be a good idea?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He tapped a finger on his polished desktop. “I see you have much to learn about school administration, I could not allow this course even if I wanted to. The county superintendent would first have to approve it, and I can assure you he won’t. ‘R. L., you are putting on airs!’ he’d say.” He waved at us with the back of his hand. “That’s all. You’re excused.”

  Miss Riley taught our class without her usual ebullience, the corners of her mouth turned down. My mom would have said that she “had her Irish up,” and since she was Irish, I could sense that she was a little dangerous. On the way to English lit., I saw her emerging from the teachers’ lounge, Mr. Hartsfield in tow. He was staring at the floor and shaking his head from side to side. She caught my eye and gave me a wink.

  The next day, Quentin and I were called from typing class, told to report to Mr. Turner’s office. Mrs. Turner, the principal’s wife and also his secretary, was clearly flustered and leapt from her chair when we arrived. She ushered us inside. Turning from the principal’s office window were two uniformed men, the patches on their arms identifying them as West Virginia State Police. “That’s them,” Mr. Turner said, and I knew we were in trouble deep.

  The state troopers were huge and daunting in their gray uniforms. One of them advanced on us, holding a scorched metal tube with fins attached to it. “Recognize this, boys?” He held it out to us and we stared at it.

  “It’s yours, isn’t it?” Mr. Turner accused.

  Quentin recovered first. “May I inspect this device?” The trooper handed it to him, and he turned the tube over in his hands. “Interesting, is it not?” he asked me. “Note carefully how the fins are attached. See? They’re spring-loaded. Ingenious design!”

  “What is it?” I asked, finally finding my voice.

  “Oh, come, boys,” Mr. Turner said. “You must tell the truth. I think you know very well what this is. It is one of your so-called rockets.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “It isn’t. But these fins …” I took the thing from Quentin. I wasn’t certain what I was looking at, but whatever it was, I wanted to compare the area of the fins with the area of the tubing. I suspected there was knowledge there to be gained. “Can we have this?”

  The trooper snatched the tube back, his face clouded with anger. “No, you can’t have this! It’s evidence. Your rocket started a forest fire. It burned the top off Davy Mountain and almost got to the houses on Highway 52.”

  I remembered reading something about the fire in the Welch Daily News. There had been some speculation that it was caused by arson. “We didn’t do it!” I yelped.

  “I read in that grocery-store newspaper all about you boys,” the other trooper said, ignoring my denial. He had a big square face and eyes looking for the lie. “You’re the only kids in this county who are shooting off rockets, so it has to be you.” He took out handcuffs. “Now, come along. We need to take you over to Welch to the courthouse. You are officially under arrest, both of you.”

  “There’s a couple more boys involved,” Mr. Turner said. “I’ll have them called too.”

  Miss Riley suddenly appeared. “Why are you scaring these boys?” she demanded, inserting herself between me and the trooper holding the handcuffs.

  “They tried to burn half the county down,” he said.

  “With this rocket,” the other trooper added.

  “Where was this fire?” she asked in a doubting tone of voice.

  “Davy Mountain. Between Coalwood and Welch by the way a crow flies. Or a rocket.”

  Mrs. Turner entered the office, holding a map of the county. She looked at her husband. He knew (and she knew he knew) that she had called Miss Riley to our rescue. “Maybe this might help?” she said to his scowl, and then retreated. The one sure thing was there was going to be trouble in the Turner household later.

  “Come over here and show us where your rocket range is,” Miss Riley said to me. She spread the map on Mr. Turner’s desk, his neat
stacks of documents tumbling into heaps. He stood up, aghast at Miss Riley’s forwardness, brushing imaginary debris from his vest.

  I leaned over the desk, my trembling finger finding Coalwood and then moving down the valley toward the river at Big Branch. “Here,” I said, finding the low place that was Cape Coalwood.

  The troopers looked, and then one of them slapped Davy Mountain with his big paw. “You see, only an inch away!”

  “An inch is ten miles on this map,” Miss Riley said sardonically.

  Quentin had been looking at the tube. “Of course!” he piped. “I should have known it the moment I saw these fins. They’re spring-loaded because they have to snap out when this device leaves its storage tube.”

  Everyone in the principal’s office turned to see what he was talking about.

  “It’s an aeronautical flare. I thought it looked familiar. I was reading a book on the civil air patrol just a month or so ago.” Quentin perused the map. “Look here. There’s the Welch Airport, just beside Davy Mountain. This must be a flare dropped from an airplane!”

  The troopers looked at the tube, and then took it away from Quentin and looked at it some more, snapping the fins closed and back open again. Then they looked at one another and then at the map. Then they looked at us and then we all turned and looked at Mr. Turner, who seemed to shrink before us. Steadying himself, he carefully turned the map around and studied it through his half-glasses. He straightened up. “I think you’d better leave,” he said quietly to the troopers. “Miss Riley. Would you please stay? And you two …” It felt as if his eyes were piercing me. “I believe you are supposed to be in typing class.”

  A week later, Mr. Turner called Quentin and me back to his office. This time, no troopers waited for us. Mr. Hartsfield looked up from a chair along the wall. “Big Creek will offer a class in calculus. The first class will begin in two weeks. It will be limited to six students. The superintendent said five, but I insisted on six so all the boys in your pipe-bomb club could be in it. A sign-up paper will begin circulating immediately.” He stood up. “All right, you can go. You have gotten what you wanted. But heaven help you if you waste Mr. Hartsfield’s time!”