Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  We were on our tenth pipe when I clambered into its deep hole to take my turn at breaking it up. After hammering out a pile of jagged iron fragments, I slipped while crawling out and threw back my left hand to catch myself. My hand plunged into the pile of iron, and I could feel a sharp edge slice into my wrist.

  It didn’t hurt that bad. Roy Lee started laughing, not because my fall was particularly funny, but because he was so exhausted he had turned giddy. I pulled my hand out of the cast-iron fragments and looked with wonder at my wrist, painted a bright red, and then I saw a spurt of blood. I laughed as another geyser of blood went flying. O’Dell saw it and laughed too, and so did Sherman. “Look,” I giggled, crawling out of the hole, “I’m bleeding to death.”

  Roy Lee sat down, his face flushed from laughing. “You are,” he chortled. “You really are!”

  “Let me see that!” O’Dell said, sobering up. He held up my wrist. There was an inch-wide slit across it. I could see the O of the severed artery. Suddenly, I felt dizzy and sat down and stared dumbly at the scarlet geyser until I started to giggle again, and then we all giggled inanely at each other. “We got to stop the bleeding,” O’Dell finally managed. He took off his T-shirt and pressed it against the cut, then tore a strip from it and made a tourniquet. He wrapped it six inches above the cut, using a stick to wrench it tight. “We got to get Doc,” he said.

  I was no longer laughing. As hot as that summer day was, I felt cold. I sank down on a rail and hung my head, my brain spinning. “I’ll wait here while you get him,” I said, my eyes suddenly heavy. “Maybe I’ll just take a little nap.”

  “If we walk out, it’ll take us most of the day,” O’Dell said, checking the height of the sun, “and it’ll be dark. By the time we make it back …” He looked at me. “Sonny, wake up! You’ve got to walk out with us.”

  I slid off the track and wallowed in the dirt, feeling the sun on my face. “Oh, I don’t think so.…”

  Sherman and Roy Lee started to laugh again, but O’Dell stopped them. “We got to get him to Doc, you guys. This is serious!” He cranked the tourniquet tighter. “We got to or he’s going to die.”

  “Die?” I perked up. “Who’s gonna die?”

  “You are, you moron!” O’Dell said, and grabbed me under my armpits and tried to pull me to my feet. The other boys, sobered now, helped me up. I leaned on Sherman and we started to walk up the track.

  It took us six hours to walk out. When we got to Frog Level, it was nearly dark. I lay down in the middle of the road while O’Dell went after his father. I saw a satellite and then another, streams of them dashing across the heavens, red and pink and white and blue and green, and then the bowl of sky began to turn, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. Sherman and Roy Lee took turns waking me up, but by the time O’Dell came back, I had passed out. Red picked me up and loaded me into the back of the garbage truck. At Doc’s house, his wife appraised me at the front door, holding her nose at the smell, and announced that Doc wasn’t there but was probably at his office. That’s where we found him. He also held his nose (the back of the garbage truck had added a final eau de pig slop to the mildew and slime from our camp) and led me back to his examining room. He sat me on the table, unwrapped the tourniquet and the soggy dressing, observed with interest the waning spurt of the little blood left inside me, and hauled out his suture kit. “You want me to deaden your wrist?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” I said groggily.

  He shrugged. “Your dad got all his stitches in his forehead without any painkiller whatsoever.”

  I rose to his challenge. “Then I don’t need it either.”

  Doc plunged the needle in. It hurt and I howled. “Deaden it. Deaden it!”

  “Naw, too late now,” Doc said. He happily sewed while sweat popped out in huge drops on my forehead. I swayed, nearly passing out every time he plunged the needle in. “Very good, Sonny,” he said after a lifetime. “All finished. Hop up.”

  I hopped up and fainted. I woke on the cot, with Mom looking down at me. She had her nose covered with a handkerchief. “Sonny, dear God but you had me worried.”

  “Hi, Mom.” I smiled weakly.

  Doc’s face appeared. “The other boys walked him out. Their tourniquet pretty well saved him.” He lifted my arm, checked the bandage around my wrist. “You’re going to have a nice scar, young man, to remind you of this particular adventure.”

  “Can he go home, Doc?” Mom asked.

  “I hope so,” he said. “The fumigators are due any minute.”

  Mom walked me out, the other boys jumping to their feet in the waiting room. They clustered around the car as I sagged onto the bench seat. “Go get the scrap iron,” I gasped at them.

  Mom made me take a shower in the basement before letting me upstairs. I lay down on my bed and heard Dad come in from the mine. Then my door swung open. He and Mom entered. “You okay, little man?”

  It was wonderful to hear Dad’s voice. “I’m fine,” I said. I looked up at my parents. It made me so happy to see them together, it took everything I could muster not to cry. “I’m sorry. Like always.”

  Dad said, “You have nothing to be—” but I fell into a deep sleep before he finished. It was a sleep packed with dreams of swirling colors, as if I were in the midst of a gigantic kaleidoscopic whirlpool. Once I came to and was surprised to see Jim in the bedroom with me, sitting at my desk watching me with something like concern on his face. Was I dreaming?

  The next day, while I still slept, the other boys went back to Big Branch and loaded the pile of scrap iron on the garbage truck, forgetting the tools and the wheelbarrow, and carried it to Welch and the Chester Matney Scrap Yard. Mr. Matney weighed it carefully—more than four hundred pounds!—and then counted out the twenty-two dollars and fifty cents he figured he owed us. We had expected at least a dollar a pound. No, Mr. Matney said, prices were down. After subtracting out the cost of the food and ignoring the cost of the ruined sleeping bags and the lost tools, we made a grand total of four dollars. That was before Doc sent me a personal bill for five dollars for “sutures and labor.”

  Jake came to our rescue. If we promised to wash and wax his Corvette for approximately the rest of time, he’d cover our debts. We took him up on it, paid off Mr. Van Dyke and Doc, plus the people whose tools we’d lost.

  We also bought ten pounds of zinc dust.

  21

  ZINCOSHINE

  Auks XXII, A, B, C, and D

  NOW WAS THE time for greater strides. With Quentin and Billy back in the fall, we gathered at Cape Coalwood to test the first of our zinc–sulfur rockets. Our machinists were there, along with Reverend Richard and at least a hundred other Coalwood citizens. The Reverend beckoned me over and took off his hat. “Been prayin’ for you, boy,” he said. “Knew you needed it.”

  He told me then that he had had a dream. He had seen men on the moon, and I was one of them. When he woke, he had opened his Bible and his eyes had fallen on the testament of Peter. “Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness,” he quoted.

  “I hope that’s so, sir,” I told him, and he looked pleased.

  We loaded the rocket on the pad by holding it upside down, tapping the casement with a hammer to get the gray powder to settle as we poured it in. When I pushed the ignition button, Auk XXII detonated on the launchpad, sending shards of steel deep into the slack and a boil of greenish-white smoke into the air. Had we already passed the critical dimension for our new propellant? I couldn’t believe it. There was something else wrong.

  The crowd wandered over to help us study the fragments like tea leaves. “Guess the Lord didn’t want this one to fly,” Reverend Richard said while I turned a piece of jagged steel over and over in my hands, looking for some clue as to what had happened.

  When our audience drove away, we had a BCMA meeting. Our conclusion was we didn’t know what we were doing with the new propellant. No fingers were pointed
. It was just the way it was.

  I went home that night, unhappy and confused. Mom gave me a look as I crossed the kitchen. I knew she had something to say. “What?” I asked her.

  “The company’s selling the houses,” she said.

  IN the fall of 1959, the television and newspapers were filled with stories about American rockets roaring successfully into the sky. A-OK! We have lift-off! All systems go! The language of our rocket engineers became part of our everyday speech.

  On September 9, 1959, I read that NASA had launched a mock-up of a Mercury manned capsule aboard a Big Joe rocket. It was a suborbital lob shot, and though the spacecraft was empty, the newspapers said it was the opening round of America’s program to put men into space. I was thrilled. I started to think about spacecraft big enough for whole families to be launched—to the moon, Mars, perhaps the stars themselves. As Reverend Richard had said, to look for new heavens and a new earth. I often felt a new earth for me would be an excellent plan.

  Most people in Coalwood were preoccupied with other matters more down to this earth. Not only had the steel company decided to sell the houses, the sewage and water systems and the churches were on the block as well. Would the mine itself be next? Mr. Van Dyke and Dad went to the union hall and sat around the table to inform the union leaders about the sell-off. I listened from the dining room while Dad in the kitchen gave Mom the blow by blow of that meeting. “Dubonnet was all over me, asking how the men were going to pay for their houses and everything else,” Dad said.

  “Well, how are they?” Mom wondered.

  “The company’s going to loan them the money, almost no interest rate, twenty years to pay.”

  “That’s still going to be money out of their pocket,” Mom pointed out, “and then when they’ve bought the house in twenty years, who’s going to buy it from them when they want to retire and move? Did you ever stop to think the reason the company wants to sell everything is because they don’t think the mine has a future either? That’s what the people are saying.”

  He used his good eye to look at her suspiciously. “Who’ve you been talking to?”

  “It’s common knowledge.”

  “Common knowledge is wrong,” he growled. “The company’s selling the houses because they hired some fool efficiency expert who told them it’s cheaper to sell them than keep them up. Captain Laird knew that thirty years ago. It wasn’t efficiency he was after. He said if the miners lived in company houses, they’d feel like they were part of the company, be more loyal to it. Anyway, Van Dyke’s going to drive up to Ohio and tell them this isn’t such a good idea. We’d like to keep things in Coalwood just as they are. I think he’ll be back with good news.”

  “Oh, Homer,” Mom said in despair.

  A week later, Mom told me that Mr. Van Dyke had been fired. Mom guessed it was because he had lodged his complaint about the property sale but she wasn’t certain. In any case, a new general superintendent was being sent to Coalwood to make sure the sale of the houses and the churches and the utilities stayed on track. Dad retreated again to the mine. The union hall rattled with outrage. I rode by on my bike going to the machine shop and heard the chant: “Strike, strike, strike!”

  THE zinc–sulfur powder mix was too loose, I decided, probably because it had air pockets in it. That’s why our last rocket had exploded. It was the same experience we’d had with black powder and then again with potassium nitrate and sugar. Before, a binding agent had solved the problem with black powder, and melting had produced our reliable rocket candy. Melting zinc and sulfur was not a good plan, I didn’t think—it would surely detonate before the melting began—so I used dextrose and water to see if that would work as a binder. The resulting mix just spewed feebly in the hot-water heater. I wasn’t sure why. “The water probably caused the zinc to oxidize,” Quentin said.

  “How about we mix in gasoline?” O’Dell proposed.

  “Too dangerous,” Quentin said. “And I’m not so certain gasoline wouldn’t react with the zinc in any case.”

  We argued various liquids. Naphthalene? The mine had a lot of the solvent derived from coal tar, but it was too volatile. Diesel? Not volatile enough. Semisolids such as paraffin? Too messy. Billy proposed alcohol, and Quentin’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Alcohol is stable and it’ll evaporate quickly. Perfect!”

  We looked at scrounge-master O’Dell, and he grinned. There was only one place to go in Coalwood when you wanted to buy one hundred percent pure two-hundred-proof alcohol.

  “ARE you sure Tag’s not going to catch us?” I nervously asked again from the backseat of Roy Lee’s car as we bounced up the rutted dirt road to Snakeroot. Roy Lee, O’Dell, and I were on a quest that had seemed like a good idea when I’d first heard it. Now I was having some doubts.

  “Tag couldn’t catch a cold,” Roy Lee said, gripping the steering wheel and turning it back and forth to dodge the pot holes.

  “He caught you and O’Dell in the mule barn.”

  Roy Lee shrugged. “That was different. This is a time-honored tradition. Every boy in town goes to John Eye’s, sooner or later.”

  Because it was a Friday night, Roy Lee had to search for a parking place. A line of cars had already collected up and down the ditch line in front of John Eye Blevins’s moonshine palace. I nervously handled the four dollars we had scraped together. Four dollars would buy us a gallon of John Eye’s finest. We waited covertly in the shadows until there was a gap in the traffic and then clumped up the old wooden steps, worn smooth by years of traffic. A little girl with her hair tied up in braids swung on a porch swing and watched us with wide round eyes. “Y’all be too young to buy ’shine,” she pronounced.

  “Who are you, the moonshine police?” Roy Lee asked.

  “Nuh uh.” She shook her head. “I’m just smarter’n you.”

  A huge bulk suddenly filled the door. “Whatchall boys want?” The voice seemed to rise from a deep well. I held up the money. “Get on in here!”

  The little living room had a broken-down couch and some easy chairs with the stuffing hanging out. A big old radio filled a dark corner, and on top of it was a cheap suitcase phonograph. Music I’d never heard before was playing, some sort of jazz. Hanging beads marked the door to the kitchen beyond, where three Negro men sat around the kitchen table. They were playing cards and ignoring the business in the living room. John Eye looked at us with his brow furrowed, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something, and then he put out his huge paw, palm up. I counted out our dollars and he nodded and limped through the beads. I knew John Eye’s legend—how the timber had given way in his section and how he held up the roof with his broad back until the other miners got out. When the roof finally caved, a piece of slate had cut off his foot at the ankle. That was the reason the company—meaning my dad—allowed him to make a living from his still on the ridge behind his house.

  John Eye came out with four fruit jars of clear liquid. Roy Lee expertly held one of them up to the light. “There’s no water in here, is there?”

  “I don’t cut my whiskey!” John Eye rumbled. “It’s pure ‘n bonyfidy. Wanta sip?”

  Roy Lee brightened. “Yeah!”

  “I don’t think we should,” I said quickly. “It isn’t for drinking anyway. It’s for scientific purposes.” I flinched. I hadn’t meant to confess that.

  John Eye held on to the other quart jars. “Whatchall mean? Y’all ain’t gonna drink my stuff? This is the best corn likker in the county! It’d be sacker-lijus not to drink it!”

  “Aw, he’s just kidding, John Eye,” Roy Lee said, and pulled me off to a corner. “All these guys got razors on ’em,” he whispered. “We got to be nice to them or they’ll cut our throats. And we got to make sure this stuff is pure, don’t we?”

  “Well …”

  “You’ve never had a drink, have you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Roy Lee cocked an eyebrow at me. “Man, you think Wernher von Braun don’t drink down at Cape Canaveral?
I bet that’s about all those rocket men do in between shooting off missiles. That and chasing women.”

  I couldn’t resist his logic. I nodded agreement. “A-OK, John Eye!” Roy Lee told him.

  Our host beamed and disappeared back into the kitchen, and I heard a cabinet squeak open and the tinkling sound of glasses being set up. The men at the table looked up from their cards and laughed. John Eye brought in a tray with three filled shot glasses on it. He held it out to us and we each daintily took the ’shine. Roy Lee held his glass up for a toast. “To Wernher von Braun!” He downed the drink, smacked his lips, rolled his eyes, and croaked, “Damn, that’s good!”

  O’Dell followed suit and wiped his mouth, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Good!” he shouted, but it came out a strained whisper.

  Everyone looked at me. It was for Wernher von Braun, after all. I tossed back the drink, not even letting the liquid roll across my tongue. It went straight back to my gullet and caught on fire. I nearly doubled over as I felt it burn all the way to my stomach. I tried to breathe, but nothing worked. Roy Lee pounded on my back. “How about that, old son? Is that rocket fuel or what?”

  “All … systems … go!” I finally wheezed.

  “Wanta ’nother?” John Eye grinned, gold teeth flashing.

  We boys looked at each other and then held out our glasses. “To Werrer va Brah!” we bellowed, while O’Dell and I sat down hard. Now I knew why all the chairs were busted in John Eye’s living room.

  Sometime later, we were singing “Blueberry Hill” as Roy Lee guided us uncertainly down the dirt road from Snakeroot. Tag pulled us over the moment we bumped up on the asphalt of the road that led down past the church. He fanned the sweet ’shine vapors away when Roy Lee rolled down the window. “Why, hidy, Roy Lee. O’Dell. Sonny. Whatchall boys doin’?”

  An hour and a half later, I stood in front of my mother in the kitchen. I was wobbly on my feet and had a sickly grin plastered on my face. “You’re drunk?” she asked in disbelief.