Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  She ignored my tone. “Your job, Sonny, is to build your rockets.”

  “Why?”

  “If for no other reason, because it honors you and this school.”

  I wanted to run from her, tear out of her classroom and keep going, and never look back. “What if I don’t like doing my job?” I argued weakly.

  She gave me a look that went down to my marrow. “Then, and especially then,” she said, “you give it everything you’ve got.”

  SHERMAN called me. “Sonny, I think you’d better go up to the Little Store bus stop.”

  “How come?”

  He told me. Then he told me what I should do. If Sherman said it, brave and good Sherman, I knew it was so. I burst for the door.

  Mrs. Bykovski stood alone across the road from the Little Store with two cheap suitcases by her side. Mr. Van Dyke had given her a whole month in her house, but she had decided to leave after the standard two weeks. Sherman said she was going upstate to live with relatives near the hospital that housed her daughter. “I came to say how sorry I am,” I told her. When she just looked at me and didn’t say anything, I stood as straight and tall as I could and said, “It was my fault Mr. Bykovski was at the face.”

  I was startled when she smiled. “Ike could’ve gone back to the machine shop anytime he wanted. He said your dad got mad sometimes, but in the end he was always fair. The thing was, he didn’t want to—I didn’t want him to either. We got used to the money.”

  “But it was me—”

  “Ike loved you, Sonny,” she said. “You know that?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but—”

  “Shut up,” she said evenly. “Just shut up.” She sighed and looked up and down the street. “This was a nice place. Clean and peaceful. Wish we could’ve stayed.”

  My heart felt like somebody had put it in a vise.

  The bus was coming up the road. “But things happen,” she said.

  I picked up her suitcases, helped the driver put them aboard. “Just don’t forget Ike,” she said at the door.

  “I won’t,” I swore, and stood away from the bus.

  She went to a seat and slid open the window and smiled down at me. “There’s one thing you can do,” she said. “Something I know Ike’d really like.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Keep firing off those rockets!” She closed the window and gave me a sad little smile and the bus pulled out. I looked up the road until it disappeared around the curve at the base of the mountain.

  There was a breeze coming down the hollow. The dogwoods low on the mountain waved as if asking me to look at their glory. They were like white bouquets God had stuck in the stands of ancient oaks and hickories, glistening green in their own new growth. I heard something and looked up and down the road for its source. It wasn’t just a single sound. It was Coalwood moving, talking, humming its eternal symphony of life, work, duty, and job. I stood alone on the side of the road and listened to my town play its industrial song.

  AUK XXI was fired three weeks after the accident, about the time my father, ignoring Doc’s orders, got up and went back to work, his right eye blind and glassy, a bloody rent full of stitches still on his forehead. Mom watched him go and then went back to her table and sat in front of her beach picture and pretended not to notice when the company men came inside and hooked the black phones back in. There wasn’t anything for me to say to either one of them. We all had our jobs to do.

  Mom fixed supper every day, but left it on the stove, retreating to her bedroom. Jim and I spooned out what we wanted and we took it to our respective rooms. Dad rarely came home from the mine, and when he did, he ate the cold leavings. I fully expected the rest of my life in Coalwood to go on exactly like this. Jim had his football scholarship and was leaving in July. I had one more year and then—whatever it took, I would go too. I did not plan on taking a dime from my parents for college or anything else. Jake had always said the Army or Air Force would like to have me. Joining up seemed a good idea. There was always the GI Bill. I’d get my college and get on down to Cape Canaveral in my own good time.

  The seamless steel tubing I told Mr. Caton to order was delivered. He said Dad signed the request without comment. Quentin and I still weren’t quite ready to work the equations for a De Laval nozzle in my book, but I got the machinists working, instead, on a new nozzle with deeper countersink cuts, hoping we might acquire at least some of the attributes of the converging–diverging design.

  “Watch this rocket fly,” I predicted to the boys at a morning BCMA meeting in the auditorium. “This one’s really going to go!” I had apologized to them all for shunning them after the accident, and they had all acted as if nothing had ever happened. That was the West Virginia way, and they were better at it than I was.

  From the moment I pressed the firing button the following weekend, I knew it was our best rocket yet. A hot, conical flame spurted from Auk XXI’s base as it accelerated off the pad. It darted for the blue sky, a long white contrail flowing out behind it. A couple of other Big Creek boys, Dean Crabtree and Ronnie Sizemore, had joined us for the day to help out around the range. Mr. Dubonnet, our machinists, and thirty other Coalwoodians cheered. Basil danced around his Edsel. The Auk hurtled downrange, exactly as planned. I savored the thunk it made when it hit the slack. It was perfect. “Four thousand, one hundred feet,” Quentin reported from his downrange post.

  “We picked up a thousand feet,” Roy Lee said. “We’ll be at a mile next time.”

  “We will,” I said, “but this is the last time we fly with rocket candy.” I had already talked over what I was about to say with Quentin. “Next time we fly will be with a new propellant: zinc dust and sulfur. We’re going for maximum altitude.”

  Sherman frowned. “What do we know about zinc dust and sulfur?”

  “Not much, but we’ll learn.”

  “But rocket candy’s doing great!” Billy protested.

  “Yeah,” O’Dell weighed in. “I don’t think we ought to change.”

  “Zinc dust and sulfur,” I told them. “That’s next. If you don’t like it, quit.”

  “Who elected you king?” Sherman demanded.

  “I’m in charge,” I replied like the tough man I was trying to be, “and that’s the way it is.”

  Roy Lee hung back while the other boys stalked off. “For God’s sake, Sonny, take it easy.”

  “Don’t start with me, Roy Lee,” I told him. “Quentin and I are going to design a sophisticated nozzle, and we need an advanced propellant to go along with it.”

  “Okay. Then why didn’t you explain that to the others?”

  “Because I don’t have time to explain everything I do.”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I—we are going to win the county science fair next year. And to do that, we’re going to have to be twice as good as any of the Welch High students. There’s a lot to be done—and learned—before then.”

  “Why do you want to win the science fair?”

  “Do I have to defend everything I do? Don’t I already do everything in this club anyway?”

  Roy Lee looked grim. “No, you don’t. But even if you did, I think you shouldn’t talk to the boys that way.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think,” I said, biting off each word.

  Roy Lee unleashed a surprise punch to my chest. I went sprawling onto the hard slack. I rubbed my chest—it hurt—while he stood over me, his fists at the ready. “You moron,” he hissed. “We’ve worked our tails off on your rockets. So you think you can just come down here and treat us like we’re nothing? If that’s what you think, come on, get up. I’ll knock you down again!”

  I sat up on the slack, still holding my chest. “I just want to use zinc dust and sulfur,” I said shakily.

  “Jesus, what an idiot you are,” Roy Lee said, shaking his head. “Use whatever the hell you want.” He reached out his hand to help me up. I took it and he drew me to my feet, “I’m sorry I hit you.”
r />   “I’m not,” I said, and I wasn’t.

  20

  O’DELL’S TREASURE

  MY DADS EYE had not healed properly. He had kept it, but it was unfocused and watery. The doctor in Welch said it would likely remain that way for the rest of his life. Dad held one hand over his bad eye to read his newspapers and magazines and to watch television. He and Mom had made a kind of peace as far as I could tell. They acted as if nothing had happened, although they rarely spoke. Dad and I had little to say to one another. Mom spoke to me kindly, asking how schoolwork was going, but nothing of consequence. Jim might as well have been a ghost in the house as far as I was concerned. It was rare when the family had supper together, and when we did, there was only the lonely clinking of our forks and knives on our plates. There was at least Daisy Mae, ever my gentle confidante.

  Mom stayed in her room in the morning and let me get up on my own. Without her prodding, Jim had no trouble waking up in time to spend his hour in the bathroom, but I missed the bus a couple of times, had to hitch a ride over, was late, and got called into Mr. Turner’s office. If it happened one more time, he promised, I was in more trouble than I could possibly imagine. It happened again in mid-May, despite the alarm clock I borrowed from O’Dell. I found myself standing across the filling station with my thumb out toward War. Jake pulled up in his Corvette. “Where to?” he asked, swinging open the door. It was good to see him. He’d been in Ohio since the accident. I didn’t know why.

  “Big Creek! I’m late!” I clambered inside.

  A gleam came to Jake’s eyes. “Well, all right!” he cried, and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. We shot past the mine and up Coalwood Mountain. He was drinking and handed over the bottle. “You drink, don’tcha?”

  “Not before school,” I replied, a true statement as far as it went.

  He put the bottle to his lips and made three successive curves at once without looking. I saw Geneva Eggers in front of her house, wearing canvas trousers and a plaid shirt and sitting on a fence post. I slid down in my seat when Jake slowed the Corvette to a crawl and rolled down his window. “Hidy, Miss Eggers,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat and sliding into the southern West Virginia vernacular. “How you feelin’ this fine mornin’?”

  “Why, I’m feelin’ jus’ fine, Jake,” she said. She peered inside the car. “Who you got there? Oh!” She smiled prettily when she recognized me. “How you feelin’, Sonny? Did you miss the bus again?”

  I slid ever deeper in the seat. “Yes’m,” I mumbled.

  “Well, y’all take it easy,” she said as we idled on by.

  “Oh, that’s a fine woman!” he said over the shriek of tires. “She sure seems to like you, old son. How do you know her?”

  I shrugged. “Once, when it was snowing. She let me warm up by her stove.”

  Jake laughed a great open-mouth laugh as only he could.

  When we got to Big Creek, I thanked Jake and made a run for chemistry class. When I got there, I realized I had left my books in his car. Miss Riley was sitting at her desk, placidly noting our arrivals, when Jake strolled in with them. She glanced at him a second or two longer than I thought was necessary and then went back to her attendance roster. I waved and he brought my books over. “Who’s your teacher?” was all he wanted to know.

  I introduced them and they shook hands. “So I believe you are an engineer, Mr. Mosby?” Miss Riley asked in a dulcet voice I had never heard her use before.

  “I have a degree, Freida, but some would question if I am an engineer,” he replied oh so smoothly. “The rocket boys tell me you’re their favorite teacher, and I must say I’m impressed by their taste.”

  She blushed and looked down at her papers. “Well, do call again, Mr. Mosby.”

  “Jake,” he answered, all but flipping his eyebrows up and down in anticipation. “You can count on that, Freida.”

  He bent over me on the way out. “Forget the school bus, kid. You’ve got a chauffeur anytime you want it!”

  I’m not certain when it dawned on me that Jake and Miss Riley were going out, but one day she called me to her desk after class and wanted to know more information about “Mr. Mosby,” who his friends were, what people thought of him, and so forth. I lied, of course, and told her how respected and beloved he was in Coalwood. I figured I owed Jake at least a good recommendation. It was a character-building exercise, since, to my surprise, I was jealous.

  As the school year wound down, the junior class and I walked the halls with a sense of impending ownership. We suspected that the good times were finally about to roll. The BCMA met in my room just before school let out. We had several issues to discuss. We needed money, I said, to buy zinc dust. We also still had a debt to Mr. Van Dyke for the telephone equipment.

  O’Dell looked around to make certain no one was listening. Other than us boys, only Chipper and Daisy Mae were in the room, and both of them were asleep. Satisfied, he bade us to lean in closer. “There’s scrap iron out there, boys,” he whispered. “It’s like gold. All we have to do is dig it up.”

  He explained. With the track pulled out of Coalwood, the N&W Railroad Company had abandoned the spur line in the wilderness of Big Branch, about five miles west of Cape Coalwood. Underneath the track were cast-iron drainage pipes. “Here’s what we do,” O’Dell said. “We dig up those pipes, bust ’em into pieces, and sell the lot to a scrap yard. We’ll make a ton of money and it’s all legal!”

  “Why don’t we just take the rails?” Roy Lee wanted to know in a burst of logic and suspicion. “They’re easier to get at.”

  “If we took the rails, the scrap yard might be suspicious and tell the railroad company,” O’Dell answered.

  “What difference would that make?” Sherman wanted to know. “If it’s legal to get the pipes, isn’t it legal to get the rails?”

  Sherman and Roy Lee’s doubts did not fit O’Dell’s universe. “No,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  It took a month to get our expedition prepared, so we were approaching the end of June by the time Red drove me, Sherman, O’Dell, and Roy Lee in the back of the garbage truck to the abandoned track. Quentin and Billy were visiting out-of-state relatives for the summer. O’Dell’s father left us with a pile of assorted supplies, including a canvas tent, sleeping bags, a camp stove, four grocery bags filled with canned food (mostly beef stew), a few crates of bottled sodas, some loaves of white bread, a couple of big cartons of Moon Pies, several boxes of matches, a wheelbarrow, two shovels, two sledgehammers, and a pick. The tools and the wheelbarrow were borrowed from several different families. We’d pooled our meager resources to buy the food. We set up camp in a small clearing and then went looking for our first pipe. We found it a hundred yards past a timber trestle bridge. We looked over the bank to where the pipe protruded. “Good God,” Roy Lee moaned. “It’s under ten feet of dirt!”

  “What did you expect?” O’Dell demanded. “You think the railroad company was going to lay drainage pipes on top the ground?” He took a shovel and pushed it into the track bed. It penetrated barely a half inch. “It is kind of hard,” he admitted.

  I picked up the other shovel, and a copperhead snake crawled out from underneath it. I jumped about a foot straight up in the air and came down running. “Stand back,” O’Dell said. “I’ll take care of this.”

  He took a big swing at the snake with his shovel, missed the terrified reptile by at least six inches, lost his footing, and fell over the embankment. I ran to the edge and looked for him, but all I saw was a muddy stain in the river far below. I called out to him, but there was no response. Both Roy Lee and Sherman sat down on the track, holding their stomachs from laughing. “What if he broke his neck?” I worried.

  “Take more than a hundred-foot fall to hurt that boy,” Roy Lee said in all seriousness.

  When O’Dell finally climbed back to the track bed, wet but unhurt, we began to dig. We dug all that day and the next and the next. It rained every day, and we found ourselve
s working up to our necks in sticky brown mud. At camp, everything became covered with mold. Our food started to rot.

  I didn’t care. After each day’s labor, we’d wash in the river and sit around our campfire and listen to the sounds of the dense forest—the wind rustling through the trees, the munching of deer feeding on crab apples, the crackle of raccoons in the underbrush, the owls hooting their mournful cry. After months of tension and worry, I felt grateful to be detached from Coalwood and all its problems. I hadn’t realized how lonely and miserable I’d become until I went down into the wilds of Big Branch. There, with nobody around but Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell, I could be just another boy again. I put Coalwood and even my parents out of my mind and took in all the sounds and sights and smells of God’s nature everywhere about me. For the first time in months, I was genuinely happy.

  When it got dark and a river of stars flowed overhead, we spread out our sleeping bags and laid down on them and talked. After we exhausted the topic of females, we considered the future. We agreed we were all going to make it into space. The United States would need men like us to be explorers and adventurers. It would be an adventure like the one we were having at Big Branch. If we lay there long enough, we were blessed with a satellite—American or Russian, we were never sure—streaking across the sky. It still made my heart beat a little faster to see one.

  After five days of digging, we were finally rewarded with the sound of a pick hitting cast iron. When we finished uncovering the pipe, we looked like the mud men of Borneo worshiping a fallen idol. Sherman picked up a sledgehammer and fell to smacking the damn thing. I took the next turn at the hammer, smacking the pipe over and over until a crack appeared. O’Dell finally succeeded in knocking a chunk loose. We all jumped into the hole and admired the triangular iron fragment. It had taken nearly a week of hard labor to extract that tiny little piece. Undaunted, we got stronger every day and refined our technique. Red ferried in more food, and two weeks later, we had piled up a treasure trove of cast iron almost as high as our tent.