Rocket Boys. Homer Hickam
than he thinks. I believe you can build a rocket. He doesn’t. I want you to show him I’m right and he’s wrong. Is that too much to ask?”
Before I could reply, she sighed deeply once more, glanced over at her fence (the fire had burned itself out), and then stomped past me and went inside. I eased my foot out from under Dandy’s head so he wouldn’t be disturbed and came off the steps and stood alone in the deep blackness of the backyard, the old mountains looming over me. I tried to think, to catch up with all she had said. Dandy got up and sidled over to me and licked my hand. He was a good old dog. Poteet had stopped chasing bats and was asleep under the apple tree.
When I went inside, Dad was still on the black phone. He said nearly everything over the company phone in exclamations. “Get Number Four back on line, and I mean now!” Number Four was undoubtedly one of the huge ventilators on the surface that forced air through the mine. Whoever was on the other end apparently wasn’t giving him the response he wanted. “I’m leaving the house right now, and it better be going by the time I get there!” He slammed the receiver down. I watched him throw open the hall closet and snatch his jacket and hat. He rushed past me without a glance, just as if I didn’t exist, and went out the back door. I heard the gate unlatch and close, and he was gone into the night.
I went up the stairs and found Mom waiting for me in the hall. She wasn’t through with me yet. “Has anything I’ve said tonight made any sense to you at all?”
I guess I looked blank. “Well …” I began.
“Oh, God, Sonny,” she groaned in exasperation. She touched me on the nose with her finger. “I-am-counting-on-you,” she said, tapping my nose with each word. “Show him you can do something! Build a rocket!” Then she looked at me in a significant way and went inside her bedroom.
It was past midnight when Dad returned. I had just dozed off after a round of thinking about all that Mom had said. I heard him creep up the stairs and then I started thinking all over again. I carefully lifted Daisy Mae, my little calico cat, out of the crook of my arm and placed her at the foot of the bed and got up and opened my window. The tipple loomed before me like a giant black spider. According to Mom, Dad thought all I was good for was working there as a clerk. A gasp of steam erupted from an air vent beside the tipple, and I followed the cloud skyward, watched the water droplets disperse. A big golden moon hovered overhead, and the vapor formed a misty circle around it. Sparkling stars flowed down the narrow river of sky the mountains allowed. I looked at the tiny pricks of light so far away. I didn’t know one star from the other, didn’t know much of anything about the reality of space. I knew less than nothing about rockets too. I suddenly felt as stupid as Dad apparently thought I was. Mom had said for me to build a rocket, show him what I could do. I had already been thinking about learning enough to go to work for Wernher von Braun. Her Elsie Hickam Scholarship, if approved by Dad, would fit right in with that.
Then I remembered what Mom had said about Coalwood dying. That was the hardest thing to understand of all the things she had told me. All around me, Coalwood was always busily playing its industrial symphony of rumbling coal cars, spouting locomotives, the tromping of the miners going to and from the mine. How could that ever end?
The black phone interrupted my thoughts. Dad had probably just let his head touch his pillow when it rang. I heard his muffled voice as he answered it and then a string of what I was certain were curses. Within seconds, his door banged open and I heard him thumping down the stairs almost as if someone was chasing him. At the bottom of the stairs, he started to cough, a racking, deep, wet hack. He’d lately been complaining a lot about his allergies, even though in the fall you’d think there wouldn’t be much pollen in the air. I’d often awoke to hear him coughing at night, but I’d never heard it so bad before. I watched him out of my bedroom window a few minutes later as he walked quickly toward the mine, his head down and a bandanna to his face. He stopped once and bent nearly double, a great spasm rocking him. Those allergies were really getting to him, I thought. He straightened and hurried on. As he neared the track, a long line of loaded coal cars trundled out of his way as if in recognition of his approach. As soon as he hopped the rails and disappeared up the path, the cars moved back to block my view. Mom’s bedroom was beside mine, and I heard her pull her window shade down. She’d been watching him too.
FOR THE NEXT week, the destruction of Mom’s rose-garden fence by my rocket dominated conversation in Coalwood. Mr. McDuff came down from the mine to restore the fence and reported it had been reduced to splinters. “Maybe Elsie better get my Mister to build her next fence out of steel,” Mrs. McDuff said to a friend at the Big Store. Soon ladies in their backyards were repeating that remark, fence by fence, from one end of the valley to the other. On the way to the tipple or in the man-trips, on the main line, in the gob (the mix of rock and coal dust that lay in the old part of the mine), and even at the face, the miners were talking about the great blast.
“You little sisters are idiot morons,” Buck Trant, the big, ugly fullback, announced from the back bench of the morning school bus. He laughed at himself, thinking his observation brilliant. The other players joined in. “Little idiot moron sisters!”
Buck added, after a moment of concentration, “You sisters couldn’t blow your noses without your mamas!”
Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell bowed their heads in impotent rage. Not me. Buck Trant was too easy. Not only was he a dimwit, he was vulnerable. “At least we know where our mamas are,” I shot back. Buck’s mother had run off with a vacuum-cleaner salesman a few years before. Just as soon as I’d said my mean thing, I regretted it, but it was too late. Outraged, Buck jumped to his feet, but when Jack stomped on the brakes, he went tumbling. We were halfway up Coalwood Mountain. Without a word, Jack pulled the bus off the road, turned in his seat, and pointed at me. “Out!” he ordered. He looked at Buck. “You too, Buck!”
“Me?” Buck whined. “What did I do? Sonny started it. He’s always starting stuff, you know that.”
Jack didn’t take guff off anybody on his school bus, even big overgrown football players. “Don’t make me have to kick you out the door, son,” he growled.
Buck looked for support from the other football boys, but they all had their heads down. He walked meekly down the aisle and got out, standing forlornly in the dirt. I followed him and we stood beside each other while Jack slammed the door shut. Before the bus rounded the curve, Buck was after me. I threw down my books, ducked his bear hug, and scampered up the mountainside and disappeared into the woods. “I’m going to murder you, you little four-eyed freak,” he yelled after me.
“You and what army?” I challenged him from deep within a thicket of rhododendron. Buck huffed around along the road, but didn’t come after me, probably because he was wearing blue suede shoes and didn’t want to get them dirty. After a while, a car came along and Buck stuck his thumb out and climbed in. I came down and did the same, hitching to Big Creek, just making it in time for the first class. I avoided Buck all day, which was not easy since his locker was beside mine. Roy Lee and the other boys caught me at lunch. “We aren’t going to build another rocket,” Roy Lee said.
“Fine,” I replied. I was already mad at him and the others for not backing me up on the bus. “I’ll build one by myself!” I said it with such certainty, it surprised even me. Whether I liked it or not, I was committed to do it.
“Have at it,” Roy Lee muttered, and he and O’Dell and Sherman walked away. I knew I’d really messed up. I needed their help. I had to build a rocket and I didn’t have a clue where to start.
THAT night, while I was puzzling over my algebra, Jim stuck his head in my room. “I just want you to know how really great it is to have a brother who’s a complete moron.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I replied lamely.
“Everybody’s