Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  “Good reason as any,” Daddy said. He looked at me then watched the fireflies too. “Like I said, old wars is mainly lies.”

  The thunder thanked me. I turned up my collar. Big rains and more were coming.

  SOME STAGES ON THE ROAD TOWARD OUR FAILURE TO REACH THE MOON

  The trip to the moon did not happen. It failed because of a hat. As with most things the failure arrived in stages, the end-point of many details. Of course it was not the fault of the hat.

  Stage One: DeAngelo was born.

  Stage Two: DeAngelo’s dad died. Korea.

  Stage Three: DeAngelo found the dead cat three weeks after school started. Fifth grade. Luck was all. As usual he was dodging Keegan and Niewig after Release Time at Saint Sophie’s. As usual they got him. This time he came to earth by the peony bushes along the rectory wall, his face in the dirt, arm wrung behind. Niewig twisted, Keegan giggled.

  Two feet from DeAngelo’s nose, lying in the tangle of stems and peony petals, recently dead—within a day, DeAngelo figured—was Father O’Doule’s cat. Its grinning head was angled stiffly; it screamed a silent yowl inches from DeAngelo’s face. Its paws stiff, tail going bare, muddy skin showed beneath the fur.

  Pain from his twisted arm shot from his shoulder to the back of his head. He shoved pain and Keegan’s giggles to the background. When he did, what had happened to the cat became apparent: the thing expired, probably snoozing on O’Doule’s windowsill, directly above. Struck by sickness, nastiness, age, or poison, God had come to it and it had fallen three stone stories into the peonies that ringed the building. The cat was dead on landing, DeAngelo was sure, but getting it from alive on the sill to dead in the bush, that was the thing. He ran the stages in his head: the jerk of croaking death, that first. Then, propelled from the sill, already stiffening (bouncing off an imagined parapet which DeAngelo knew that falling bodies always struck in slow-motion), the cat body tumbled slowly, fell between stems, hit the ground, adjusted to place. The peonies rebounded, swayed, then were still with all evidence of death, fall and cat, gone. Then, forever begins.

  Meanwhile, Niewig and Keegan knelt on DeAngelo’s back. They twisted and giggled until he grunted into the dirt, yes, yes he was queer, one big queer! He said it, said it again, whatever.

  Whatever DeAngelo was at that moment though, Father O’Doule’s cat lay there, rotting. It would continue in that course. In Encyclopedia Britannica time-lapse he imagined: cat shriveling, collapsing, white grubs blooming, wriggling in quick time, devouring until.

  And DeAngelo knew where it was happening. Better: no one else did, certainly not Reinhart.

  Stage Four: DeAngelo showed Reinhart the drawings he’d made over a week of watching the animal disintegrate. Reinhart shrugged.

  “Wait’ll you see,” DeAngelo told him.

  The day he took him there, two things happened: the cat disappeared and Sputnik went up.

  That quick, DeAngelo stopped caring about cats or drawings made on-scene, improved by flashlight at night and kept in his box of secrets beneath the bed. A cat? Who cared? Not DeAngelo.

  Stage Five: DeAngelo made a poem. The poem was:

  Twinkle, twinkle little Sputnik

  How I wonder why you Wink-nik

  You dirty little Russian nudnik,

  How the heck’ll I get my sleep

  When all night long you beep, beep, beep?

  DeAngelo read it aloud. “I like the ‘heck’ll I get my sleep’ part,” he said. “‘heck’ll I…’ That’s good.”

  Reinhart snorted. “That’s dumb,” he said.

  “Dumb because you didn’t make it.”

  “Dumb because ‘Wink-nik?’ Dumb because you mean ‘hell’ and you say ‘heck’…”

  “‘Heck’ll I!’ All right! ‘How the HELL can I get my sleep’ then.”

  “Dumb because the lines have too many syl-ables. And there are too many lines! And A-A-A-B-B? Come on!” Reinhart sang his complaints, as though talking to a child. “And you can’t hear Sputnik, not without equipment. It beeps on the radio and gotta be tuned just right. And you have the right kind of radio.”

  “I heard,” DeAngelo said. “And Sputnik makes me not sleep.”

  Everyone had heard it and seen it. Television. The picture was from Russia. And Channel 10 carried it. Worse, they played the beeps, the awful beeps, Russian beeps from a Commie moon that circled overhead, every hour and a half. John Facenda voiced doom: “This,” he said, “is the sound…”

  First silence, then a hiss. From space, a rhythmic beat approached within the hiss, something, a ship calling in distant night. It neared, then faded, then was gone.

  Facenda went on: “That is the sound from outer space tonight. It is courtesy of the Union. Of Soviet. Socialist’s. Republics.” Channel 10 had a scratchy animation of a round nothing in space, “the size of a basketball.” Facenda spoke of it as though the game of basketball should be ashamed.

  The speed, DeAngelo thought. “Wow,” he said.

  Reinhart shrugged. “Eighteen thousand miles an hour.”

  “It’s crazy,” DeAngelo whispered.

  “Any faster, it escapes. Twenty-five thousand and whisssh!” Reinhart’s hand shot past DeAngelo’s ear. “For good’n gone!”

  “Nuts.” DeAngelo was mad. “Why didn’t we do it?”

  “We will. For IGY. Vanguard’s going in what, a couple weeks. Criminies, DeAngelo, it’s not the end of the—”

  “But we didn’t. We didn’t do it. Forever, we didn’t.”

  “So we will. And better. And your poem still stinks. And you can’t hear Sputnik in bed. You can’t hear beeps. It beeps radio.”

  DeAngelo had heard. He couldn’t sleep. And “heck’ll I” was better than hell! The hell with it, he thought finally. It was stupid, the poem. Now on anyway he was a science guy, not an English guy.

  Stage Six: Vanguard collapsed. A slender pencil, the rocket quivered on its tail, smoke rolled, it rose, what? Two feet. Collapsed on itself and blew. DeAngelo and Reinhart decided if the country couldn’t, they would. They’d go to the moon. They would. Not now, not tomorrow (they were kids!). But they would go, and go soon. They were scientists. Would be. In stages over the next… Well, over the years, however many, they would gather materiel (Reinhart’s brother, a mechanic in the Air Force, sent letters home using words like that). Materiel was out there. Military surplus. Good stuff. They saw it at STAUFFER’S ARMY-NAVY on Railroad Street: parachutes, bayonets, helmets. The government must have too much other stuff: missiles, probably. Old ones, anyway. V-2s from Germany after the war, shipped to New Mexico, tested, stored and now were useless around Nikes, Jupiters, and Redstones. They’d get one, fit it out to carry a different payload—them—then…

  As Pop-pop saw it, the problem was not that they didn’t have money enough for a war surplus shovel much less a German rocket ship, it was not a question of them building a missile to go to the moon when the whole American government couldn’t even…

  “Wouldn’t!” DeAngelo groused.

  …put a basketball in orbit. The problem wasn’t even that they were kids for crineoutloud, “The problem is nobody’s going to the moon is the problem. Now you get one of your rockets up too far there, and it’s falling right back.”

  “Russians’ didn’t.”

  The old man lip-farted. “Sputnik, not out. Not in whatchacall Out-of-Space. Sputnik’s just…” he pointed to the ceiling, “UP. Going ’round around the world up there. You can’t go into out of space.” He leaned closer. “What’s your rocket going to push against? Answer me that.”

  There was an answer. DeAngelo knew there was but the old man made a point. He did not bring Pop-pop’s point to Reinhart during design meetings in the back of Klein’s Pharmacy. Even when first ice silvered the trees, Klein’s Pharmacy kept its Kool Konditioned smell from summer. Their heads together at the marble-top table back by surgical supplies and bedpans, the scent of creams and ice and rubber tubes, varnished wood and flypaper filled DeAng
elo. “Going to the moon smells like…” he sniffed deeply, “cough syrup and rubber tube.”

  “Huh?” said Reinhart.

  On paper, one surplus V-2 had become three, one atop the other in stages. Each stage latched to the one below, each chopped and tucked, the assembly tapered to a point a hundred feet above the desert.

  In plan the journey was beginning to look… Well? Possible.

  The Nazi rockets were now atom fueled. At least the first stage was atomic, the one that had to lift the whole load off the desert earth. Only made sense, DeAngelo argued. Atoms were more powerful than chemicals. Of course they were. Bah-OOOM! Everyone had seen the movies.

  Reinhart squinted. “More than gunpowder. If you’re blowing something up.”

  “More than red fuming nitric acid!”

  “And hydrazine,” Reinhart added.

  Atoms were certainly safer than the powdered zinc and sulfur compound they’d actually made and tested. DeAngelo tingled at the memory. Powdered zinc. Sulfur. There it was in Reinhart’s chemistry set. They mixed them, packed the compound into one of the empty .30-06 cartridges DeAngelo’s dad had left with his hunting stuff. When he’d held his dad’s Zippo under the shell, it spit hot stuff all over him and whip-cracked across the yard and alley. If anyone had seen it, that would have been it. If it had made it to Hebhart’s house it would have smashed the kitchen window. If that, it would have buried itself in Hebhart’s grandma or baby brother, always in the kitchen. DeAngelo knew, he just knew as he watched the thing streak and fizz. If… If it hadn’t thwacked the wet sheets Hebhart’s mom had hung on the line, if it hadn’t dropped, hissing, onto the rump of Hebhart’s mutt, it would have been… It didn’t. The mutt woofed dully and looked sadly at the world. So much of the world was “if,” DeAngelo realized. Thank God. Still, DeAngelo and Reinhart ran their separate ways.

  And Reinhart agreed, atoms were probably best. Still, he squinted at the sketch, at the now triumphantly radiating atomic pile in what had been the hydrogen peroxide tank.

  Stage Seven: They practiced for flight. Mahler had a new refrigerator. The carton was dragged to DeAngelo’s basement. They painted gauges, buttons and switches on the inside walls. DeAngelo drew more buttons and dials on a pair of shoebox consoles they carried on their laps. The bulb hanging at the far end of the basement shone through the porthole.

  “That’s where we’re going,” he told Reinhart.

  Reinhart squinted.

  For the test flights, DeAngelo began to wear his dad’s garrison cap. The silver captain’s bars seemed right for a trip to the moon. In the dark crew compartment, light from the bulb touched the bars. Reflections swept Reinhart’s face, flashed across the instruments, touched the red FIRE button as they counted from 50 to Zero.

  They made the trip a half-dozen times.

  “Rods!” Reinhart yelled one day. DeAngelo had reached 28.

  “Counting! Cripes! 26, 25…”

  “Cripes yourself, you need rods.”

  “What? 22, 21…”

  “Thorium rods.” Reinhart pointed to the red button on the shoebox.

  DeAngelo’s captain’s bars flashed in Reinhart’s eyes. “19, 18…”

  “Thorium controls the chain reaction. Don’t you know about thorium?” Reinhart sang his stupidity song.

  “I know! 13…”

  “They have to pull out… withdraw.” Reinhart’s hand fluttered over dozens of imaginary rods sliding—or not—from the atomic pile below.

  “One, zero.” DeAngelo didn’t push the red button. Nothing happened.

  Later at Klein’s, DeAngelo drew ropes and channels. The ropes and channels climbed in elaborate ways from the atomic pile through all the stages. They met the top where he, DeAngelo, lay strapped in the cabin waiting to pull a darn lever.

  Cripes, he thought, pull out a rod. He imagined nuclear fire funneled in a rage through the rocket hole in their tail: thunder, flame, the thrill of a lifetime and a long space voyage, a forever adventure, begun with the pull of a rod.

  Reinhart squinted.

  DeAngelo made more pictures: their rocket and its gantry, the rocket in space (Pushing against the what? What!) and descending on a piston of fire to the cratered moon, his rocket parked among the moon’s sawtooth mountains. Pictures of them: climbing the gantry, waving good-bye, strapped down surrounded by gauges, switches. DeAngelo made pictures of Earth spreading below them as small as the bulb at the far end of the basement, pictures of the moon and of him steering them down the fire as the moon rushed toward them. He didn’t show these to Reinhart.

  Reinhart bailed out, screaming, the afternoon a large black water bug crawled up his leg. Five minutes to touchdown, and Reinhart tore the hatch off the ship and ran swiping at his crotch. He danced, screaming, beneath the moon, still brushing.

  DeAngelo went into space alone. Half the crew meant twice the air, fuel and sandwich. Alone between basement and moon, DeAngelo survived (or did not survive) meteor storms and engine failure. He’d lost (and sometimes re-found) his way between worlds, or, pushing the limit of his ship, ended on Mars or dodged asteroids all the way out to Jupiter, sometimes on to Saturn. Once, he’d set foot on the sun (The sun! He tore those pages from his log, almost hearing Reinhart’s singsong smirk). He made pictures of the possibilities (remote, but potential) of attack by monsters, by meteor beasts that caught him, passing in space. He wrote and drew descriptions of the dinosaurs that lived in the jungles of cloud-sheathed Venus. He met wise star folk who did not want Mankind in space because we could not be trusted among peaceful beings. He made pictures of alien ships that were hidden behind the moon, waiting the moment, which might be any moment, to spring.

  Crazy Lenz came along a few times. With Lenz, the journeys lasted rarely more than a minute before meteors hulled them and they tumbled across the basement or before Lenz hushed with, “You hear? Listen! Y’hear that?” At every landing, it was them against Martians, Russians, Germans, Chinese Commies, whatever might lurk down the alley or lay hidden in the gangways between houses on Perkiomen.

  With Lenz they always carried guns and always had a ball.

  Even so, when DeAngelo drew two explorers standing, finally standing, on the moon, the Earth in the always-black black sky above, the tiny ship far away and behind, the second suit was always Reinhart’s. DeAngelo and Reinhart, the flag between them. After all that had come before, whatever it had been, whatever would come between them in the years that were to follow, they were there and alive, DeAngelo and Reinhart, on the moon, first on the moon. Famous forever.

  Reinhart shuffled the pictures. “You’re nuts.”

  “What about them?” DeAngelo said.

  Reinhart got it then giggled.

  Still, that was the last time he showed Reinhart any but technical drawings.

  Christmas. For no reason he could fathom there was a Junior Engineer’s drafting set under the tree—drawing board, T-square, pair of compasses, dividers, French curves, architect’s scale, kneaded eraser, mechanical pencil, real drafting paper, book of projects. DeAngelo looked from Mother to Pop-pop, to visiting aunts and sleeping uncles and back.

  “Still got nothing to push on. But you can make better pictures,” Pop-pop said.

  He made different pictures. He spent hours drafting the ship’s hull, making both sides just-so.

  Reinhart nodded, no squint.

  DeAngelo threw it away. The lousy drawings were better, the dozens where one edge bellied more than the other or where a bulbous extrusion lumped crazy from the nose. The more the differences, the better it felt.

  “The heck’s that?” Reinhart said. He was squeakier each time they got to work.

  “Looks better,” DeAngelo said. “See?” He traced a softly curving ship’s underbelly in the air. “Then…” He traced a humpback topside above Reinhart’s head. “Cool, huh?”

  “Yeah?” The question hung. “And by the way,” Reinhart poked the detail drawing of the ship’s atomic pile, “you have any idea wh
at a reactor weighs?”

  DeAngelo shrugged.

  “Well, it’s mostly concrete and lead!”

  “So?”

  “Well, no atomic pile, no atomic pow-er.” Singing. “Anyway, what’re you figuring’s the reaction mass?”

  DeAngelo shuffled drawings. “Mass, mass. Reaction mass?” he said as he paged.

  “What’s the ‘pile’ supposed to heat up? What blows out the ass to make us go? Newton’s law, you know? Action? Reaction? It’s what makes us go. What’s our action, DeAngelo?”

  That was almost it. Not quite.

  Stage Eight: Finally, it was about who would lead. DeAngelo was DeAngelo’s choice. To Reinhart, there was no question. “What’s pi?” he asked.

  “Three point I don’t give a crap.”

  “Three point one four one five nine two...” He strung the number to a dozen places. “What’s orbital velocity?”

  DeAngelo couldn’t say.

  “Escape velocity? What’s the escape asymptote? Where’s the optimum launch place?”

  “New Mexico!”

  “Equa-tor! Dummy.”

  Reinhart capped the questions. He pointed at the tiny final stage. “Okay? That gets us to the moon. What gets us home? You forget that? You and Lenz ever make it back? Or were you too busy shooting mon-sters?”

  DeAngelo had not worked it out; he had not forgotten. There were reasons. Secrets. Nothing to do with Lenz or being too busy. DeAngelo didn’t say. He stared at Reinhart. Who knew pi, asymptotes and orbits; Reinhart was a book of knowing. He picked at problems but never drew solutions.

  “Your buddy carries a trunk full of not and never has a pocket full of why,” Pop-pop said.

  Reinhart never burned with the joy of not knowing, never seemed to feel lovely terror. He never saw monsters in shadows because he knew there were no monsters. Water bugs from basement drains? They were. He wasn’t sure, but DeAngelo was pretty sure, Reinhart had not said prayers to be first, the first to set foot upon the moon, to be that first forever.