Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 1998

Published in paperback as October Sky in 1999

This edition published in 2015

Copyright © Homer H. Hickam 2005

Homer H. Hickam asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

‘It’s All in the Game’ by Charles Gates Dawes and Carl Sigman. Lyrics reprinted courtesy of Major Songs (ASCAP) c/o the Songwriters’ Guild of America © 1951, and Warner Bros Publications, Inc. Rights for the British Reversionary Territories controlled by Memory Lane Music Limited, London. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing’ by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain. © 1955 Twentieth Century Music Corporation. © Renewed and Assigned to EMI Miller Catalog, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of Warner Bros Publications, Inc.

Front cover photograph © Andrew Rich/Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008166083

Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008172275

Version: 2015-11-06

Dedication

To Mom and Dad And the people of Coalwood

Epigraph

All one can really leave one’s children is what’s inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.

—Dr. Wernher von Braun

All I’ve done is give you a book. You have to have the courage to learn what’s inside it.

—Miss Freida Joy Riley

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE ROCKET BOYS of the Big Creek Missile Agency and their lives and times were real, but it should be mentioned that I have used a certain author’s license in telling their story. While I have used the actual names for each of the boys and my parents and most of the people in this book, I have used pseudonyms for others and also sometimes combined two or more people into one when I felt it necessary for clarification and simplification. I have also taken certain liberties in the telling of the story, particularly having to do with the precise sequence of events and who may have said what to whom. Nevertheless, my intention in allowing this narrative to stray from strict nonfiction was always to illuminate more brightly the truth.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

1. Coalwood

2. Sputnik

3. Mom

4. The Football Fathers

5. Quentin

6. Mr. Bykovski

7. Cape Coalwood

8. Construction of the Cape

9. Jake Mosby

10. Miss Riley

11. Rocket Candy

12. The Machinists

13. The Rocket Book

14. The Pillar Explosion

15. The State Troopers

16. A Natural Arrogance

17. Valentine

18. The Bump

19. Picking Up and Going On

20. O’Dell’s Treasure

21. Zincoshine

22. We Do the Math

23. Science Fairs

24. A Suit for Indianapolis

25. The National Science Fair

26. All Systems Go

Epilogue

Carrying Albert Home

About the Author

Also by Homer Hickam

About the Publisher

1
COALWOOD

UNTIL I BEGAN to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives. I didn’t know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn’t know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine.

Coalwood, West Virginia, where I grew up, was built for the purpose of extracting the millions of tons of rich, bituminous coal that lay beneath it. In 1957, when I was fourteen years old and first began to build my rockets, there were nearly two thousand people living in Coalwood. My father, Homer Hickam, was the mine superintendent, and our house was situated just a few hundred yards from the mine’s entrance, a vertical shaft eight hundred feet deep. From the window of my bedroom, I could see the black steel tower that sat over the shaft and the comings and goings of the men who worked at the mine.

Another shaft, with railroad tracks leading up to it, was used to bring out the coal. The structure for lifting, sorting, and dumping the coal was called the tipple. Every weekday, and even on Saturday when times were good, I could watch the black coal cars rolling beneath the tipple to receive their massive loads and then smoke-spouting locomotives straining to pull them away. All through the day, the heavy thump of the locomotives’ steam pistons thundered down our narrow valleys, the town shaking to the crescendo of grinding steel as the great trains accelerated. Clouds of coal dust rose from the open cars, invading everything, seeping through windows and creeping under doors. Throughout my childhood, when I raised my blanket in the morning, I saw a black, sparkling powder float off it. My socks were always black with coal dirt when I took my shoes off at night.

Our house, like every house in Coalwood, was company-owned. The company charged a small monthly rent, automatically deducted from the miners’ pay. Some of the houses were tiny and single-storied, with only one or two bedrooms. Others were big two-story duplexes, built as boardinghouses for bachelor miners in the booming 1920’s and later sectioned off as individual-family dwellings during the Depression. Every five years, all the houses in Coalwood were painted a company white, which the blowing coal soon tinged gray. Usually in the spring, each family took it upon themselves to scrub the exterior of their house with hoses and brushes.

Each house in Coalwood had a fenced-off square of yard. My mother, having a larger yard than most to work with, planted a rose garden. She hauled in dirt from the mountains by the sackful, slung over her shoulder, and fertilized, watered, and manicured each bush with exceeding care. During the spring and summer, she was rewarded with bushes filled with great blood-red blossoms as well as dainty pink and yellow buds, spatters of brave color against the dense green of the heavy forests that surrounded us and the gloom of the black and gray mine just up the road.

Our house was on a corner where the state highway turned east toward the mine. A company-paved road went the other way to the center of town. Main Street, as it was called, ran down a valley so narrow in places that a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one side of it to the other. Every day for the three years before I went to high school, I got on my bicycle in the morning with a big white canvas bag strapped over my shoulder and delivered the Bluefield Daily Telegraph down this valley, pedaling past the Coalwood School and the rows of houses that were set along a little creek and up on the sides of the facing mountains. A mile down Main was a large hollow in the mountains, formed where two creeks intersected. Here were the company offices and also the company church, a company hotel called the Club House, the post office building, which also housed the company doctor and the company dentist, and the main company store (which everybody called the Big Store). On an overlooking hill was the turreted mansion occupied by the company general superintendent, a man sent down by our owners in Ohio to keep an eye on their assets. Main Street continued westward between two mountains, leading to clusters of miners’ houses we called Middletown and Frog Level. Two forks led up mountain hollows to the “colored” camps of Mudhole and Snakeroot. There the pavement ended, and rutted dirt roads began.

At the entrance to Mudhole was a tiny wooden church presided over by the Reverend “Little” Richard. He was dubbed “Little” because of his resemblance to the soul singer. Nobody up Mudhole Hollow subscribed to the paper, but whenever I had an extra one, I always left it at the little church, and over the years, the Reverend Richard and I became friends. I loved it when he had a moment to come out on the church porch and tell me a quick Bible story while I listened, astride my bike, fascinated by his sonorous voice. I especially admired his description of Daniel in the lions’ den. When he acted out with bug-eyed astonishment the moment Daniel’s captors looked down and saw their prisoner lounging around in the pit with his arm around the head of a big lion, I laughed appreciatively. “That Daniel, he knew the Lord,” the Reverend summed up with a chuckle while I continued to giggle, “and it made him brave. How about you, Sonny? Do you know the Lord?”

I had to admit I wasn’t certain about that, but the Reverend said it was all right. “God looks after fools and drunks,” he said with a big grin that showed off his gold front tooth, “and I guess he’ll look after you too, Sonny Hickam.” Many a time in the days to come, when I was in trouble, I would think of Reverend Richard and his belief in God’s sense of humor and His fondness for ne’er-do-wells. It didn’t make me as brave as old Daniel, but it always gave me at least a little hope the Lord would let me scrape by.

The company church, the one most of the white people in town went to, was set down on a little grassy knob. In the late 1950’s, it came to be presided over by a company employee, Reverend Josiah Lanier, who also happened to be a Methodist. The denomination of the preacher the company hired automatically became ours too. Before we became Methodists, I remember being a Baptist and, once for a year, some kind of Pentecostal. The Pentecostal preacher scared the women, hurling fire and brimstone and warnings of death from his pulpit. When his contract expired, we got Reverend Lanier.

I was proud to live in Coalwood. According to the West Virginia history books, no one had ever lived in the valleys and hills of McDowell County before we came to dig out the coal. Up until the early nineteenth century, Cherokee tribes occasionally hunted in the area, but found the terrain otherwise too rugged and uninviting. Once, when I was eight years old, I found a stone arrowhead embedded in the stump of an ancient oak tree up on the mountain behind my house. My mother said a deer must have been lucky some long ago day. I was so inspired by my find that I invented an Indian tribe, the Coalhicans, and convinced the boys I played with—Roy Lee, O’Dell, Tony, and Sherman—that it had really existed. They joined me in streaking our faces with berry juice and sticking chicken feathers in our hair. For days afterward, our little tribe of savages formed raiding parties and conducted massacres throughout Coalwood. We surrounded the Club House and, with birch-branch bows and invisible arrows, picked off the single miners who lived there as they came in from work. To indulge us, some of them even fell down and writhed convincingly on the Club House’s vast, manicured lawn. When we set up an ambush at the tipple gate, the miners going on shift got into the spirit of things, whooping and returning our imaginary fire. My father observed this from his office by the tipple and came out to restore order. Although the Coalhicans escaped into the hills, their chief was reminded at the supper table that night that the mine was for work, not play.

When we ambushed some older boys—my brother, Jim, among them—who were playing cowboys up in the mountains, a great mock battle ensued until Tony, up in a tree for a better line of sight, stepped on a rotted branch and fell and broke his arm. I organized the construction of a litter out of branches, and we bore the great warrior home. The company doctor, “Doc” Lassiter, drove to Tony’s house in his ancient Packard and came inside. When he caught sight of us still in our feathers and war paint, Doc said he was the “heap big medicine man.” Doc set Tony’s arm and put it in a cast. I remember still what I wrote on it: Tony—next time pick a better tree. Tony’s Italian immigrant father was killed in the mine that same year. He and his mother left and we never heard from them again. This did not seem unusual to me: A Coalwood family required a father, one who worked for the company. The company and Coalwood were one and the same.

I learned most of what I knew about Coalwood history and my parents’ early years at the kitchen table after the supper dishes were cleared. That was when Mom had herself a cup of coffee and Dad a glass of milk, and if they weren’t arguing about one thing or the other, they would talk about the town and the people in it, what was going on at the mine, what had been said at the last Women’s Club meeting, and, sometimes, little stories about how things used to be. Brother Jim usually got bored and asked to be excused, but I always stayed, fascinated by their tales.

Mr. George L. Carter, the founder of Coalwood, came in on the back of a mule in 1887, finding nothing but wilderness and, after he dug a little, one of the richest seams of bituminous coal in the world. Seeking his fortune, Mr. Carter bought the land from its absentee owners and began construction of a mine. He also built houses, school buildings, churches, a company store, a bakery, and an icehouse. He hired a doctor and a dentist and provided their services to his miners and their families for free. As the years passed and his coal company prospered, Mr. Carter had concrete sidewalks poured, the streets paved, and the town fenced to keep cows from roaming the streets. Mr. Carter wanted his miners to have a decent place to live. But in return, he asked for a decent day’s work. Coalwood was, after all, a place for work above all else: hard, bruising, filthy, and sometimes deadly work.

When Mr. Carter’s son came home from World War I, he brought with him his army commander, a Stanford University graduate of great engineering and social brilliance named William Laird, who everyone in town called, with the greatest respect and deference, the Captain. The Captain, a big expansive man who stood nearly six and a half feet tall, saw Coalwood as a laboratory for his ideas, a place where the company could bring peace, prosperity, and tranquillity to its citizens. From the moment Mr. Carter hired him and placed him in charge of operations, the Captain began to implement the latest in mining technology. Shafts were sunk for ventilation, and as soon as it was practical, the mules used to haul out the coal from the mine were replaced by electric motors. Later, the Captain stopped all the hand digging and brought in giant machines, called continuous miners, to tear the coal from its seams. The Captain expanded Mr. Carter’s building program, providing every Coalwood miner a house with indoor plumbing, a Warm Morning stove in the living room, and a coal box the company kept full. For the town’s water supply, he tapped into a pristine ancient lake that lay a thousand feet below. He built parks on both ends of the town and funded the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Brownies, Cub Scouts, and the Women’s Club. He stocked the Coalwood school library and built a school playground and a football field. Because the mountains interfered with reception, in 1954 he erected an antenna on a high ridge and provided one of the first cable television systems in the United States as a free service.

Although it wasn’t perfect, and there was always tension between the miners and the company, mostly about pay, Coalwood was, for a time, spared much of the violence, poverty, and pain of the other towns in southern West Virginia. I remember sitting on the stairs in the dark listening to my father’s father—my Poppy—talk to Dad in our living room about “bloody Mingo,” a county just up the road from us. Poppy had worked there for a time until a war broke out between union miners and company “detectives.” Dozens of people were killed and hundreds were wounded in pitched battles with machine guns, pistols, and rifles. To get away from the violence, Poppy moved his family first to Harlan County, Kentucky, and then, when battles erupted there, to McDowell County, where he went to work in the Gary mine. It was an improvement, but Gary was still a place of strikes and lockouts and the occasional bloody head.

In 1934, when he was twenty-two years old, my father applied for work as a common miner with Mr. Carter’s company. He came because he had heard that a man could make a good life for himself in Coalwood. Almost immediately, the Captain saw something in the skinny, hungry lad from Gary—some spark of raw intelligence, perhaps—and took him as a protégé. After a couple of years, the Captain raised Dad to section foreman, taught him how to lead men and operate and ventilate a mine, and instilled in him a vision of the town.

After Dad became a foreman, he convinced his father to quit the Gary mine and move to Coalwood, where there was no union and a man could work. He also wrote Elsie Lavender, a Gary High School classmate who had moved on her own to Florida, to come back to West Virginia and marry him. She refused. Whenever the story was told, Mom took over at this point and said the letter she next received was from the Captain, who told her how much Dad loved her and needed her, and would she please stop being so stubborn down there in the palm trees and come to Coalwood and marry the boy? She agreed to come to Coalwood to visit, and one night at the movies in Welch, when Dad asked her to marry him again, she said if he had a Brown Mule chewing tobacco wrapper in his pocket, she’d do it. He had one and she said yes. It was a decision that I believed she often regretted, but still would not have changed.

Poppy worked in the Coalwood mine until 1943, when a runaway mine car cut off both his legs at the hip. He spent the rest of his life in a chair. My mother said that after the accident, Poppy was in continuous pain. To take his mind off it, he read nearly every book in the County Library in Welch. Mom said when she and Dad visited him, Poppy would be hurting so much he could hardly talk, and Dad would agonize over it for days afterward. Finally, a doctor prescribed paregoric, and as long as he had a continuous supply, Poppy found some peace. Dad saw that Poppy had all the paregoric he wanted. Mom said after the paregoric, Poppy never read another book.

Because he was so dedicated to the Captain and the company, I saw little of my father while I was growing up. He was always at the mine, or sleeping prior to going to the mine, or resting after getting back. In 1950, when he was thirty-eight years old, he developed cancer of the colon. At the time, he was working double shifts, leading a section deep inside the mine charged with cutting through a massive rock header. Behind the dense sandstone of the header, the Captain believed, was a vast, undiscovered coal seam. Nothing was more important to my father than to get through the header and prove the Captain right. After months of ignoring the bloody symptoms of his cancer, Dad finally passed out in the mine. His men had to carry him out. It was the Captain, not my mother, who rode with him in the ambulance to the hospital in Welch. There the doctors gave him little chance for survival. While Mom waited in the Stevens Clinic waiting room, the Captain was allowed to watch the operation. After a long piece of his intestine was removed, Dad confounded everybody by going back to work in a month. Another month later, drenched in rock dust and sweat, his section punched through the header into the softest, blackest, purest coal anyone had ever seen. There was no celebration. Dad came home, showered and scrubbed himself clean, and went to bed for two days. Then he got up and went back to work again.

There were at least a few times the family was all together. When I was little, Saturday nights were reserved for us to journey over to the county seat of Welch, seven miles and a mountain away from Coalwood. Welch was a bustling little commercial town set down by the Tug Fork River, its tilted streets filled with throngs of miners and their families come to shop. Women went from store to store with children in their arms or hanging from their hands, while their men, often still in mine coveralls and helmets, lagged behind to talk about mining and high-school football with their fellows. While Mom and Dad visited the stores, Jim and I were deposited at the Pocahontas Theater to watch cowboy movies and adventure serials with hundreds of other miners’ kids. Jim would never talk to any of the others, but I always did, finding out where the boy or girl who sat next to me was from. It always seemed exciting to me when I met somebody from exotic places like Keystone or Iaeger, mining towns on the other side of the county. By the time I had visited and then watched a serial and a double feature and then been retrieved by my parents to walk around Welch to finish up Mom’s shopping, I was exhausted. I almost always fell sound asleep on the ride home in the backseat of the car. When we got back to Coalwood, Dad would lift me over his shoulder and carry me to bed. Sometimes even when I wasn’t asleep I pretended to be, just to know his touch.

Shift changes in Coalwood were daily major events. Before each shift began, the miners going to work came out of their houses and headed toward the tipple. The miners coming off-shift, black with coal dirt and sweat, formed another line going in the opposite direction. Every Monday through Friday, the lines formed and met at intersections until hundreds of miners filled our streets. In their coveralls and helmets, they reminded me of newsreels I’d seen of soldiers slogging off to the front.

Like everybody else in Coalwood, I lived according to the rhythms set by the shifts. I was awakened in the morning by the tromp of feet and the clunking of lunch buckets outside as the day shift went to work, I ate supper after Dad saw the evening shift down the shaft, and I went to sleep to the ringing of a hammer on steel and the dry hiss of an arc welder at the little tipple machine shop during the hoot-owl shift. Sometimes, when we boys were still in grade school and tired of playing in the mountains, or dodgeball by the old garages, or straight base in the tiny clearing behind my house, we would pretend to be miners ourselves and join the men in their trek to the tipple. We stood apart in a knot and watched them strap on their lamps and gather their tools, and then a bell would ring, a warning to get in the cage. After they were swallowed by the earth, everything became eerily quiet. It was an unsettling moment, and we boys were always glad to get back to our games, yelling and brawling a little louder than necessary to shatter the spell cast on us by the tipple.

Coalwood was surrounded by forests and mountains dotted with caves and cliffs and gas wells and fire towers and abandoned mines just waiting to be discovered and rediscovered by me and the boys and girls I grew up with. Although our mothers forbade it, we also played around the railroad tracks. Every so often, somebody would come up with the idea of putting a penny on the track and getting it run over by the coal cars to make a big flat medal. We’d all do it then until we had used up our meager supply. Stifling our laughter, we’d hand the crushed coppers across the counter at the company store for candy. The clerk, having seen this many times over the years, usually accepted our tender without comment. They probably had a stack of flat pennies somewhere in the company-store offices, collected over the decades.

For a satisfying noise, nothing beat going up on the Coalwood School bridge and throwing pop bottles into the empty coal cars rolling in to the tipple. When the coal cars were full and stopped beneath the bridge, some of the braver boys would even leap into them, plunging waist-deep into the loose coal. I tried it once and barely escaped when the train suddenly pulled out, bound for Ohio. I wallowed through the coal and climbed down the outside ladder of the car and jumped for it, skinning my hands, knees, and elbows on the packed coal around the track. My mother took no pity on me and scrubbed the coal dirt off me with a stiff brush and Lava soap. My skin felt raw for a week.

When I wasn’t outside playing, I spent hours happily reading. I loved to read, probably the result of the unique education I received from the Coalwood School teachers known as the “Great Six,” a corruption of the phrase “grades one through six.” For years, these same six teachers had seen through their classrooms generations of Coalwood students. Although Mr. Likens, the Coalwood School principal, controlled the junior high school with a firm hand, the Great Six held sway in the grades below. It seemed to be very important to these teachers that I read. By the second grade, I was intimately familiar with and capable of discussing in some detail Tom Sawyer and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Huckleberry Finn they saved for me until the third grade, tantalizingly holding it back as if it contained the very secrets of life. When I was finally allowed to read it, I very well knew this was no simple tale of rafting down a river but the everlasting story of America itself, with all our glory and shame.

Bookcases filled with complete sets of Tom Swift, The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew were in the grade-school hallway and available to any student for the asking. I devoured them, savoring the adventures they brought to me. When I was in the fourth grade, I started going upstairs to the junior high school library to check out the Black Stallion series. There, I also discovered Jules Verne. I fell in love with his books, filled as they were with not only great adventures but scientists and engineers who considered the acquisition of knowledge to be the greatest pursuit of mankind. When I finished all the Verne books in the library, I became the first in line for any book that arrived written by modern science-fiction writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, Clarke, and Bradbury. I liked them all unless they branched out into fantasy. I didn’t care to read about heroes who could read minds or walk through walls or do magic. The heroes I liked had courage and knew more real stuff than those who opposed them. When the Great Six inspected my library record and found it top-heavy with adventure and science fiction, they prescribed appropriate doses of Steinbeck, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It seemed as if all through grade school, I was reading two books, one for me and one for my teachers.

For all the knowledge and pleasure they gave me, the books I read in childhood did not allow me to see myself past Coalwood. Almost all the grown-up Coalwood boys I knew had either joined the military services or gone to work in the mine. I had no idea what the future held in store for me. The only thing I knew for sure was my mother did not see me going into the mine. One time after Dad tossed her his check, I heard her tell him, “Whatever you make, Homer, it isn’t enough.”

He replied, “It keeps a roof over your head.”

She looked at the check and then folded it and put it in her apron pocket. “If you’d stop working in that hole,” she said, “I’d live under a tree.”

After Mr. Carter sold out, the company was renamed Olga Coal Company. Mom always called it “Miss Olga.” If anybody asked her where Dad was, she’d say, “With Miss Olga.” She made it sound as if it was his mistress.

Mom’s family did not share her aversion to coal mining. All of her four brothers—Robert, Ken, Charlie, and Joe—were miners, and her sister, Mary, was the wife of a miner. Despite their father’s hideous accident, my father’s two brothers were also miners; Clarence worked in the Caretta mine across the mountain from Coalwood, and Emmett in mines around the county. Dad’s sister, Bennie, married a Coalwood miner and they lived down across the creek, near the big machine shops. But the fact that all of her family, and my father’s family, were miners did not impress my mother. She had her own opinion, formed perhaps by her independent nature or by her ability to see things as they really were, not as others, including herself, would wish them to be.

In the morning before she began her ritual battle against the dust, my mother could nearly always be found with a cup of coffee at the kitchen table in front of an unfinished mural of a seashore. She had been working on the painting ever since Dad took over the mine and we moved into the Captain’s house. By the fall of 1957, she had painted in the sand and shells and much of the sky and a couple of seagulls. There was an indication of a palm tree going up too. It was as if she was painting herself another reality. From her seat at the table, she could reflect on her roses and bird feeders through the picture window the company carpenters had installed for her. Per her specifications, it was angled so not a hint of the mine could be seen.

I knew, even as a child, that my mother was different from just about everybody in Coalwood. When I was around three years old, we were visiting Poppy in his little house up Warriormine Hollow, and he took me on his lap. That scared me, because he didn’t have a lap, just an empty wrinkled blanket where his legs should have been. I struggled in his thick arms while Mom hovered nervously nearby. “He’s just like Homer,” I remember toothless Poppy lisping to Mom while I squirmed. He called to my dad on the other side of the room. “Homer, he’s just like you!”

Mom anxiously took me from Poppy and I clutched hard to her shoulder, my heart beating wildly from an unidentified terror. She carried me out onto the front porch, stroking my hair and hushing me. “No, you’re not,” she crooned just loud enough so only she and I could hear. “No, you’re not.”

Dad slapped open the screen door and came out on the porch as if to argue with her. Mom turned away from him and I saw his eyes, usually a bright hard blue, soften into liquid blots. I snuggled my face into her neck while Mom continued to rock and hold me, still singing her quietly insistent song: No, you’re not. No, you’re not. All through my growing-up years, she kept singing it, one way or the other. It was only when I was in high school and began to build my rockets that I finally understood why.

2
SPUTNIK

I WAS ELEVEN years old when the Captain retired and my father took his position. The Captain’s house, a big, barnlike wood-frame structure, and the closest house in Coalwood to the tipple, became our house. I liked the move because for the first time I didn’t have to share a room with Jim, who never made any pretense of liking me or wanting me around. From my earliest memory, it was clear my brother blamed me for the tension that always seemed to exist between our parents. There may have been a kernel of truth to his charge. The story I heard from Mom was that Dad wanted a daughter, and when I came along he was so clearly disappointed, and said so in such certain terms, she retaliated by naming me after him: Homer Hadley Hickam, Junior. Whether that incident caused all their other arguments that followed, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that their discontent had left me with a heavy name. Fortunately, Mom started calling me “Sunny” right away because, she said, I was a happy child. So did everybody else, although my first-grade teacher changed the spelling to the more masculine “Sonny.”

Mr. McDuff, the mine carpenter, built me a desk and some bookshelves for my new room, and I stocked them with science-fiction books and model airplanes. I could happily spend hours alone in my room.

In the fall of 1957, after nine years of classes in the Coalwood School, I went across the mountains to Big Creek, the district high school, for the tenth through the twelfth grade. Except for having to get up to catch the school bus at six-thirty in the morning, I liked high school right off. There were kids there from all the little towns in the district, and I started making lots of new friends, although my core group remained my buddies from Coalwood: Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell.

I guess it’s fair to say there were two distinct phases to my life in West Virginia: everything that happened before October 5, 1957 and everything that happened afterward. My mother woke me early that morning, a Saturday, and said I had better get downstairs and listen to the radio. “What is it?” I mumbled from beneath the warm covers. High in the mountains, Coalwood could be a damp, cold place even in the early fall, and I would have been happy to stay there for another couple of hours, at least.

“Come listen,” she said with some urgency in her voice. I peeked at her from beneath the covers. One look at her worried frown and I knew I’d better do what she said, and fast.

I threw on my clothes and went downstairs to the kitchen, where hot chocolate and buttered toast waited for me on the counter. There was only one radio station we could pick up in the morning, WELC in Welch. Usually, the only thing WELC played that early was one record dedication after the other for us high-school kids. Jim, a year ahead of me and a football star, usually got several dedications every day from admiring girls. But instead of rock and roll, what I heard on the radio was a steady beep-beep-beep sound. Then the announcer said the tone was coming from something called Sputnik. It was Russian and it was in space. Mom looked from the radio to me. “What is this thing, Sonny?”

I knew exactly what it was. All the science-fiction books and Dad’s magazines I’d read over the years put me in good stead to answer. “It’s a space satellite,” I explained. “We were supposed to launch one this year too. I can’t believe the Russians beat us to it!”

She looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “What does it do?”

“It orbits around the world. Like the moon, only closer. It’s got science stuff in it, measures things like how cold or hot it is in space. That’s what ours was supposed to do, anyway.”

“Will it fly over America?”

I wasn’t certain about that. “I guess,” I said.

Mom shook her head. “If it does, it’s going to upset your dad, no end.”

I knew that was the truth. As rock-ribbed a Republican as ever was allowed to take a breath in West Virginia, my father detested the Russian Communists, although, it should be said, not quite as much as certain American politicians. For Dad, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Antichrist, Harry Truman the vice-Antichrist, and UMWA chief John L. Lewis was Lucifer himself. I’d heard Dad list all their deficiencies as human beings whenever my Uncle Ken—Mom’s brother—came to visit. Uncle Ken was a big Democrat, like his father. Uncle Ken said his daddy would’ve voted for our dog Dandy before he’d have voted for a Republican. Dad said he’d do the same before casting a ballot for a Democrat. Dandy was a pretty popular politician at our house.

All day Saturday, the radio announcements continued about the Russian Sputnik. It seemed like each time there was news, the announcer was more excited and worried about it. There was some talk as to whether there were cameras on board, looking down at the United States, and I heard one newscaster wonder out loud if maybe an atomic bomb might be aboard. Dad was working at the mine all day, so I didn’t get to hear his opinion on what was happening. I was already in bed by the time he got home, and on Sunday, he was up and gone to the mine before the sun was up. According to Mom, there was some kind of problem with one of the continuous miners. Some big rock had fallen on it. At church, Reverend Lanier had nothing to say about the Russians or Sputnik during his sermon. Talk on the church steps afterward was mostly about the football team and its undefeated season. It was taking awhile for Sputnik to sink in, at least in Coalwood.

By Monday morning, almost every word on the radio was about Sputnik. Johnny Villani kept playing the beeping sound over and over. He talked directly to students “across McDowell County” about how we’d better study harder to “catch up with the Russians.” It seemed as if he thought if he played us his usual rock and roll, we might get even farther behind the Russian kids. While I listened to the beeping, I had this mental image of Russian high-school kids lifting the Sputnik and putting it in place on top of a big, sleek rocket. I envied them and wondered how it was they were so smart. “I figure you’ve got about five minutes or you’re going to miss your bus,” Mom pointed out, breaking my thinking spell.

I gulped down my hot chocolate and dashed up the steps past Jim coming down. Not surprisingly, Jim had every golden hair on his head in place, the peroxide curl in front just so, the result of an hour of careful primping in front of the medicine-chest mirror in the only bathroom in the house. He was wearing his green and white football letter jacket and also a new button-down pink and black shirt (collar turned up), pegged chino pants with a buckle in the back, polished penny loafers, and pink socks. Jim was the best-dressed boy in school. One time when Mom got Jim’s bills from the men’s stores in Welch, she said my brother must have been dropped off by mistake by vacationing Rockefellers. In contrast, I was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, the same pair of cotton pants I’d worn to school all the previous week, and scuffed leather shoes, the ones I’d worn the day before playing around the creek behind the house. Jim and I said nothing as we passed on the stairs. There was nothing to say. I would tell people some years later that I was raised an only child and so was my brother.

This is not to say Jim and I didn’t have a history. From the first day I could remember being alive, he and I had brawled. Although I was smaller, I was sneakier, and we had battled so many times over the years that I knew all his moves, knew that as long as I kept inside the swing of his fists, he wasn’t going to kill me. By the fall of 1957, Jim and I were about two months into a period of uneasy truce. Our last fight had scared us both into it. It began when Jim found my bike lying on top of his in the backyard. My bike’s kickstand had collapsed (I probably hadn’t levered it all the way down) and my bike had fallen on top of his, taking them both down. Furious, he carried my bike to the creek and threw it in. Mom was over in Welch shopping and Dad was at the mine. Jim stomped up to my room where I was lounging on my bed reading a book, slammed open the door, and told me what he had done and why. “If anything of yours ever touches anything of mine again,” he bellowed, “I’ll beat the ever-loving hell out of you!”

“How about right now, fat boy?” I cried, launching myself at him. We fell into the hall, me on the inside punching him in the stomach and him yowling and swinging at the air until we rolled down the stairs and crashed into the foyer, where I managed a lucky hit to his ear with my elbow. Howling, he picked me up and hurled me into the dining room, but I got right up and hit him with one of Mom’s prized cherry-wood chairs, breaking off one of its legs. He chased me into the kitchen, whereupon I picked up a metal pot off the stove and bounced it off his noggin. Then I made for the back porch, but he tackled me and we fell through the screen door, ripping it off its hinges. We wrestled in the grass until he got up and then leapt back on top of me. That’s when I felt my ribs creak. My chest hurt so bad I started to cry, but I didn’t say anything mainly because I couldn’t breathe. His leg was in my face, so I bit him as hard as I could to make him get off me. He screamed and jumped up while I rolled over onto my back and gasped for air. My ribs felt like they were caved in. Blood flowed from my nose. A knot on Jim’s head was rising, and there was going to be a nice, purple welt on his leg. We had managed some real damage to each other and knew we’d gone too far at last.

When Mom came home, she found our bikes parked neatly beside each other in the backyard and Jim and I sitting innocently together in the living room. Jim had his hand on his head, idly cradling it while he read the sports page of the Welch Daily News. I was sitting nearby, watching television, trying not to scream from the pain each time I breathed. My ribs ached for a month. The dining-room chair was back in its place, well-glued. Jim and I watched it for days to keep anyone from sitting on it until it dried. The dogs got the blame for the screen door. Either Mom never noticed it or chose not to mention the dent in her pot.

Jim was already at the bus stop while I was still rushing around getting ready. I was in and out of the bathroom in two minutes flat, pausing only to brush my teeth and run a wet hand through my hair. I had my mother’s hair—black, thick, and curly. She had started turning gray in her thirties, so I knew that was likely to happen to me too. It didn’t look like I’d gotten anything from Dad’s family tree. Mom said I was a Lavender like her through and through. Dad never argued with her about it, so I guessed it was so. That was fine with me. The Hickams always seemed a nervous bunch to me. Dad and his brother Clarence and sister Bennie never seemed able to quite settle down, always jumping up to walk real fast to wherever they were going, and talking fast too. The Lavenders were a more relaxed bunch, although Mom’s father, my “Ground-Daddy,” was shot in the arm crawling into some lady’s bedroom while her husband was supposed to be working the hoot-owl shift over in Gary. My mom said her mama helped her daddy put his coat on while his winged arm healed. Mom also said Ground-Daddy would have gone naked out in the snow before she would’ve helped him.

On the first school day after Sputnik, I threw on one of Jim’s hand-me-down cotton jackets, grabbed my books off the banister, and snatched the brown-bag lunch Mom held out for me at the front door. I had to run for it. The big yellow bus was already at the stop in front of the Todds’ house, and Jack Martin, the driver, waited for no one. He watched sourly, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, as I scrambled aboard an inch ahead of the closing doors. “Any later and you’d be walking, Sonny boy,” he said. I knew he wasn’t kidding. Jack ran his bus in dictatorial fashion. The slightest breach in decorum would find the perpetrator kicked off on the side of the road, no matter where we were. I found a two-inch sliver of a seat on a bench and squeezed in beside Linda DeHaven and Margie Jones, girls who had been in my class since the first grade. They shifted minutely and fell back asleep. Jack changed gears and we were off. My friend and fellow former Coalhican O’Dell was snoozing up front, just behind Jack. O’Dell was small and excitable. His hair was the pale, nearly translucent color of spun silk. In the seat behind him, Sherman, a compact, muscular kid with a wide, intelligent face, was also sleeping. Sherman’s left leg was shriveled and weak, the result of polio. During all our years growing up together, he never complained about his affliction and I never gave it any mind. He either kept up with the rest of us or he didn’t.

Roy Lee, thin and long-legged, got on the bus at the next stop, easing down the aisle until he squeezed in behind me. For as long as I could remember, Roy Lee and I had been friends. He’d show up at my house or I’d go up to his and we’d be off to the mountains, playing cowboys or spacemen or pirates or whatever we could think up. Roy Lee was unique among us. He had his own car, the result of an insurance settlement after his father had died in the mine. His mother, wanting to keep Roy Lee in Coalwood, had campaigned to keep her company house. Surprisingly, she and Roy Lee had been allowed to stay. Maybe it was because Roy Lee’s brother still worked in the mine. Roy Lee was a good-looking kid, and he knew it. His hair was coal black, and he kept it swept back and greased and teased into what we called a D.A. (duck’s ass). He looked a bit like a very young Elvis. Roy Lee thought he was pretty much girl bait, and I guess he was, seeing as how he had a date nearly every weekend. Owning a car probably helped too.

I was grateful to have Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell as friends. When I entered the first grade, I found myself in a community of boys from all over the town, and it became apparent that, as my father’s son, I was marked by his position. Around the kitchen tables at night, union fathers often identified Homer Hickam as the enemy, and the boys from those families sometimes went out looking for revenge. Jim was always big for his age and known for his terrible temper. I was a much easier target, caught at recess behind the school or loitering around the Big Store. Though I came home bloody, I never told my mother who attacked me, and my father never knew of it at all. Coalwood boys didn’t carry tales on one another. I did the best I could for a small, nearsighted kid and each year got to be a little tougher nut to crack. I even managed to bloody a few noses myself. For some reason, Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell never seemed to mind who my dad was. As far as they were concerned, we were all just Coalwood kids together.

The road out of town led past the coal mine, and Jack blew the bus horn at the tipple. Those of us still awake waved at the men at the man-hoist, and then we kept going for about a mile until we stopped for the few students that came out of the hollow at Six (named after the sixth ventilation shaft sunk for the mine; there were some houses built up around it). They were the last students to pick up. Then we started up the first of the mountains. Between Coalwood and Big Creek High School were eight miles of twisting, potholed roads. Unless it was snowing, it took Jack about forty-five minutes to cover the distance.

The road up Coalwood Mountain turned through one steeply inclined switchback after another. Wedged three to a seat, most of us dozed, leaning against one another at each turn. At the top of the mountain, the road dropped precipitously and swung back and forth until it bottomed out into a long, narrow valley. Here was the longest stretch of straight road in the district, nearly a mile of asphalt. About midway down it, behind a barbed-wire fence, was one of the big fans that ventilated the mine. On Saturday nights, this straight stretch—nicknamed Little Daytona—was a racetrack for those few teenagers with wheels, and the fan a favorite place to park and make out. Since I had neither a driver’s license or a girlfriend, I knew both those things only by hearsay. Roy Lee was my most likely source. He had told me he took his dates to park there after going to the Dugout. The Dugout was in the basement of the Owl’s Nest restaurant across from the high school, and there were dances there every Saturday night. I’d never been to the Dugout, but from what I’d heard it was a lot of fun. One of the Big Creek janitors, Ed Johnson, was the disc jockey, and Roy Lee said he had one of the best record collections this side of American Bandstand.

After a sharp turn at the end of Little Daytona, we entered the town of Caretta. Caretta was owned by the same company that owned Coalwood. Its tunnels had broken through to our mine the previous year. There had been a massive slab of sandstone between the two mines, and my father had fought through it like he was in a war. Once opened, the combined mines caused so many ventilation problems Dad had to take over both of them. According to what I heard Mom tell Uncle Joe during a visit, a lot of people in Caretta had said some real nasty things about that, calling Dad “uppity.” There seemed to be so many people that just couldn’t forgive Dad for not having a college degree like the Captain. That seemed strange to me since they didn’t have a degree either. Mom told Uncle Joe that, as far as she was concerned, those Caretta people weren’t “much punkin’ and funny turned too.” Mom sometimes seemed to lapse into a different dialect when one of her brothers was around. I remember Uncle Joe nodding his head in solemn agreement.

After we passed through Caretta, we reached a fork in the road at a little place called Premier, where there was an old run-down whitewashed brick building called the Spaghetti House. I’d never been in there, but Roy Lee had. He said there were whores in there, old skaggy ones that would give you the clap. I didn’t know what the clap was, but it didn’t sound like I wanted it. Roy Lee said he’d only been in there one time to get change for a dollar and they had given him four rubbers instead. He still had all four. I knew because he’d shown them to me. He carried one of them in his billfold. It looked pretty old to me.

War Mountain was not as steep as the mountain out of Coalwood, but its roads were narrower and there were two curves that nearly doubled back on themselves. Jack slowed down to a crawl at each of these, blowing the bus horn and then easing us around. Those of us pinned to the outer side of the bus looked straight down at a river far below with no sign of the road or even the shoulder, while those on the other side watched giant, jagged boulders swing by inches away. After we got past them, it was a straight shot down the mountain to the town of War.

War had seen better days. Its main street consisted of some tired old stores, a bank, a couple of gas stations, and a crumbling hotel. During the 1920’s, according to the history the War kids recounted from their parents, War was a wild, bawdy place of dance halls and gambling houses. Maybe that was why whenever a lady wore too much perfume my mother would say she smelled “like Sunday morning in War.”

Big Creek High School sat on the outskirts of War beside the river that gave the district its name. It was a grimy three-story brick building with a carefully tended football field in front. On the other side of the football field was a train track. Our classes were often interrupted by the rumble of coal cars and the moans of steam locomotives going past. Sometimes it seemed as if they would never stop, train after endless train bound for the world that lay beyond us.

After getting to Big Creek, we usually had an hour to wait before classes, and Roy Lee, Sherman, O’Dell, and I spent the time together in the auditorium, trading homework and watching the girls parade up and down the aisle. That morning, I wanted to sit down with them and talk about algebra. I hadn’t figured out the assigned problems to my satisfaction. But nobody else wanted to talk about algebra, not with Sputnik to chew over. “The Russians aren’t smart enough to build a rocket,” Roy Lee said. “They must’ve stole it from us.” I didn’t agree with him and said so. The Russians had built atomic and hydrogen bombs, and they had jet bombers that could reach the United States. So why couldn’t they build something like Sputnik too?

“I wonder what it’s like to be a Russian?” Sherman asked, aware that none of us had the slightest notion. Sherman was always wondering what it was like to live somewhere else other than West Virginia. I never gave it that much thought at all. I figured one place was like another, except, according to the television, if you lived in New York or Chicago or any big city, you had to be plenty tough.

Roy Lee said, “My daddy said the Russians ate their own babies in the war and it was a good thing the Germans attacked them. He said we should have joined the Germans and kicked their tails. Then we wouldn’t be having so much trouble with them now.”

O’Dell had been eyeing a senior cheerleader standing in the aisle. “I wonder if I crawled over there and kissed her feet if she’d pet me on the head?” he mused.

“Her boyfriend might,” Sherman said as a huge football player stalked up and took her hand. Football players more or less had their pick of the girls at Big Creek.

I said, desperately, “Did anybody get the algebra?”

The other three just looked at me. “Did you get the English?” Roy Lee finally asked.

I had—a bunch of diagramed sentences. We traded, talking over the work as we busily copied. It wasn’t exactly cheating, and it was the only way I was going to get any points at all in algebra class. Mr. Hartsfield, Big Creek’s math teacher, never gave partial credit in a test. The work was either right or wrong. It seemed the more frustrated I got, the wronger I tended to be, in algebra or anything else.

Sputnik came up as a topic again later in the day during Mr. Mams’s biology class. At the time, I was contemplating a long pickled worm stretched out in a square steel pan. To my everlasting delight, I had somehow managed to get Dorothy Plunk as my partner for the worm dissection. It was my opinion that Dorothy Plunk, a native of War, was the most beautiful girl in our class or, for that matter, at Big Creek High. She had a long shimmering ponytail and eyes the electric blue of my father’s 1957 Buick. She also had a budding figure that made me feel as if I was going to explode. I had shyly managed to say hello to her in the hall a few times, but hadn’t figured out any way to hold a real conversation with her. I couldn’t even figure out what to say to her over the dead worm we were supposed to cut up together. The crackle of the intercom system intervened before I could come up with anything. The voice we heard was that of our school principal, Mr. R. L. Turner:

“As I’m sure you know by now,” Mr. Turner said in his deliberate manner, “the Russians have launched a satellite into space. There have been many calls for the United States to do something in response. The Big Creek Student Council today has responded to, and I quote, the ‘threat of Sputnik’ by passing a resolution—I have it in my hand now—that dedicates the remainder of the school year to academic excellence. I approve the council’s resolution. That is all.”

Dorothy and I had been staring at the intercom. When we looked down, we were facing each other and our eyes locked. My heart did a little flip-flop. “Are you scared?” she asked me.

“Of the Russians?” I gulped, trying to breathe. The truth was, at that moment Dorothy scared me a lot more than a billion Russians, and I didn’t know why.

She gave me a soft little smile, and my heart wobbled off its axis. I could smell her perfume even over the formaldehyde. “No, silly. Cutting open our worm.”

Our worm! If it was our worm, couldn’t it also be our hearts, our hands, our lips? “Not me!” I assured her and raised my scalpel, waiting for Mr. Mams to give us the go-ahead. When he did, I made a long cut down the length of the specimen. Dorothy took one look, grabbed her mouth, and lurched out the door, her ponytail flying. “What’d you do, Sonny?” Roy Lee chortled from the desk behind me. “Ask her for a date?”

I had never asked any girl out, much less the exalted Dorothy Plunk. I turned to Roy Lee and whispered, “Do you think she’d go out with me?”

Roy Lee wiggled his eyebrows, a leer on his face. “I got a car, and it’s got a backseat. I’m your driver anytime you want.”

Emily Sue Buckberry, who was Dorothy’s best friend, stared at me, doubt written all over her round face. “She’s got a boyfriend, Sonny,” she said pointedly. “A couple of them. One’s in college.”

Roy Lee countered, “Aw, they’re no competition. You don’t know Sonny when he gets going. He’s all action in the backseat.”

My face flushed at Roy Lee’s bragging. I’d never actually been with a girl in a backseat or anywhere else. The best I’d ever done was a kiss on a girl’s front porch after a dance, and that was only with Teresa Anello in junior high school, just once. I turned back to the worm and made another cut and began to pin back the worm’s flesh, taking meticulous notes. I thought to myself, Roy Lee just doesn’t understand. Dorothy Plunk was no mere girl. Could he not see, as I, that Dorothy Plunk was God’s perfection? She was to be worshiped, not handled. Happy in my daydream, I cut and wrote, wrote and cut. I was inspired. I was doing the work for Dorothy, my partner on this worm—and maybe more. Over the remains of a giant formaldehyde-soaked worm, I made up my mind to win her.

Roy Lee sneaked around my table and stared at my blissful expression. “Gawdalmighty,” he complained. “You’re in love.”

Emily Sue came up on the other side. “I think you’re right,” she said. “This is serious.”

“Heartbreak coming?” Roy Lee asked, as if from one professional in the love business to another.

“Undoubtedly,” Emily Sue replied. “Sonny? What day is it, Sonny? Hello?”

I ignored them. A single name was the only lyric to the song in my brain. Over and over again it played: Dorothy Plunk, Dorothy Plunk.

THE Big Store steps was a favorite place for off-shift miners to lounge about, chew tobacco, and gossip. When a topic—especially one that happened outside Coalwood and also didn’t involve mining or football—reached the steps, you knew it was important. Sputnik made it by midweek after its launch. I was going inside the store to buy a bottle of pop when I heard one of the miners on the steps say, “We ought to just shoot that damn Sputnikker down.” There was a pause while the men all thoughtfully spat tobacco juice into their paper cups, and then one of them said, “Well, I’ll tell you who we oughta shoot. Makes me madder’n fire”—he pronounced the word as if it rhymed with tar—“them damn people up in Charleston who’s tryin’ to cheat Big Creek out of the state champs. I’d like to warp them up side the head.” This got even a louder affirmation from the assembly, followed by some truly hearty spitting. Only coal mining was more important in Coalwood than high-school football. Sputnik, and anything else, was going to always come in a distant third.

What made the miner “madder’n fire” was that Big Creek was on its way to an undefeated season, but according to the West Virginia High School Football Association, it was ineligible for the state championship because it played too many Virginia schools. On the man trip cars into the mine, at the company stores, and even in church, this was a topic of endless discussion and debate. Big Creek kept winning, and the people in charge of high-school football up in Charleston kept saying it didn’t matter—there was no way we were going to be state champs. It didn’t take much of a genius to see there was some kind of trouble ahead. As it turned out, it was my dad who ended up causing the trouble.

BROTHER Jim was a fury on the football field. He played tackle on offense and linebacker on defense, and opposing quarterbacks ran from him like scared rabbits. He could hit like a locomotive and was a devastating blocker. At the time, a player as good as Jim was accorded nearly the same celebrity status across Big Creek district as Johnny Unitas and Bart Starr in the outside world. My father, utterly thrilled by Jim’s gridiron prowess, was elected as president of the Big Creek Football Fathers’ Association. I was watching television in the living room one night when Mom suggested to Dad, after he had spent some minutes on the mine phone (which we called the black phone) boasting about Jim to one of his foremen, that it might be a good thing if he bragged on me every once in a while. Even though he knew I was in the same room, Dad thought for a moment and then wondered aloud, quite honestly, “What about?”

I’m sure I didn’t know either. I had no proclivity for football whatsoever. For one thing, I was terribly nearsighted. When I was in the third grade, Doc Lassiter came up to the school with an eye chart, and all of the children in my class were put in a line to read it. Our mothers, alerted by the school, were also there. I had most of the letters memorized by the time it was my turn, but Doc fooled me by putting up another chart. All I could see was a grayish blur. Doc gently told me to walk ahead until I could see the top letter. I walked forward until my nose nearly touched the wall. “E!” I announced proudly while Mom sobbed and the other mothers comforted her.

I tried out for the team at Coalwood Junior High for three straight years, but there was no way I was ever going to be anything more than a tackle dummy. “Sonny’s small,” Coach Tom Morgan told my Uncle Clarence at practice one day, “but he makes up for it by being slow.” Everybody on the sidelines got a good laugh over that one. Quitting, however, never entered my mind. My mother would have dragged me right back to practice. It was one of her rules: If you start something, you’ve got to finish it.

When I went to Big Creek, Coach Merrill Gainer, the winningest coach in southern West Virginia history, took one look at me lost inside the practice gear and ordered me off his football field. I joined Big Creek’s marching band as a drummer. Mom said she liked my uniform. Dad had no comment. Jim was mortified enough to complain about it at the supper table. While simultaneously chewing two huge spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, he explained the general lack of masculinity of boys who played in the band: “Boys don’t play onna team gotta be chicken. Boys play inna band gotta be real chicken!” Jim worked for a little while more on the potatoes, swallowed, and then noted, “My brother’s a sister.”

“Well, my brother’s an idiot,” I responded reasonably and, to my way of thinking, objectively.

“If you two boys can’t say anything nice at the table,” Mom said with an utter lack of passion, “I’d just as soon you said nothing at all.”

Jim’s words had stung, but I shut up. I couldn’t understand what all the interest in football was, anyway, and especially why the football boys were considered heroes. They were out on a field with a referee who made sure everybody followed all the rules, and the players wore pads on their shoulders and hips and thighs and knees, and helmets on their heads. What was heroic about lining up and following the rules and wearing a bunch of stuff that was going to keep you from getting hurt? I just never could understand it.

Dad remained silent at the table, but I noticed he and Jim exchanged a look of what I took to be agreement about the shame of me being in the band. I looked over at Mom for support, but she was looking through the window behind me. I supposed there were birds at her feeder. I thought to myself, I like the uniform and I like playing the snare drum. And Dorothy Plunk’s in the band too. That last thought made me give Jim a smug look that confused him no end.

ALL that fall, the Welch Daily News and the Bluefield Daily Telegraph were filled with stories of our American scientists and engineers at Cape Canaveral in Florida, desperately working to catch up with the Russians. It was as if the science fiction I had read all my life were coming true. Gradually, I became fascinated by the whole thing. I read every article I could find about the men at the Cape and kept myself pinned to the television set for the latest on what they were doing. I began to hear about one particular rocket scientist named Dr. Wernher von Braun. His very name was exotic and exciting. I saw on television where Dr. von Braun had given an interview and he said, in a crisp German accent, that if he got the go-ahead he could put a satellite into orbit within thirty days. The newspapers said he’d have to wait, that the program called Vanguard would get the first chance. Vanguard was the United States’s International Geophysical Year satellite program, and von Braun, since he worked for the Army, was somehow too tainted by that association to make the first American try for orbit. At night before I went to sleep, I thought about what Dr. von Braun might be doing at that very moment down at the Cape. I could just imagine him high on a gantry, lying on his back like Michelangelo, working with a wrench on the fuel lines of one of his rockets. I started to think about what an adventure it would be to work for him, helping him to build rockets and launching them into space. For all I knew, a man with that much conviction might even form an expedition into space, like Lewis and Clark. Either way, I wanted to be with him. I knew to do that I’d have to prepare myself in some way, get some skills of some kind or special knowledge about something. I was kind of vague on what it would be, but I could at least see I would need to be like the heroes in my books—brave and knowing more than the next man. I was starting to see myself past Coalwood. Wernher von Braun. Dorothy Plunk. My song now had two names in it.

When the papers printed that Sputnik was going to fly over southern West Virginia, I decided I had to see it for myself. I told my mother, and pretty soon the word spread, fence to fence, that I was going to look at Sputnik and anybody else who wanted to could join me in my backyard the evening it was scheduled to appear.

It didn’t take much in Coalwood to create a gathering. On the appointed night, Mom joined me in the backyard, and then other women arrived and a few small children. Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell were there too. The ladies clustered around Mom and she held court. Since Dad was who he was, she could always be counted on to know the latest on what the company was planning and which foreman was up and which was down. Watching her, I couldn’t help but be proud at how pretty she was. Later in life, looking back on those days, I realized she was more than pretty. Mom was beautiful. When she smiled it was like a hundred-watt bulb just got switched on. Her curly hair fell past her shoulders, she had big, hazel-green eyes, and her voice, when she wasn’t using it to keep me and Jim straight, was soft and velvety. I don’t think there was a miner in town who could get past the front gate when she was out in the yard in her shorts and halter tending her flowers. They’d stand there, tipping their helmets, grinning with their chewing tobacco–stained teeth. “Hidy, Elsie, them flares sure are lookin’ good, that’s for sure,” they’d say. But I don’t think they were looking at the flowers.

It got darker and the stars winked on, one by one. I sat on the back steps, turning every few seconds to check the clock on the kitchen wall. I was afraid maybe Sputnik wouldn’t show up and even if it did, we’d miss it. The mountains that surrounded us allowed only a narrow sliver of sky to view. I had no idea how fast Sputnik would be, whether it would zip along or dawdle. I figured we’d have to be lucky to see it.

Dad came outside, looking for Mom. Something about seeing her out there in the backyard with the other women looking up at the stars vexed him. “Elsie? What in blue blazes are you looking at?”

“Sputnik, Homer.”

“Over West Virginia?” His tone was incredulous.

“That’s what Sonny read in the paper.”

“President Eisenhower would never allow such a thing,” he said emphatically.

“We’ll see,” Mom intoned, her favorite phrase.

“I’m going—”

“To the mine,” my parents finished in a chorus.

Dad started to say something, but Mom raised her eyebrows at him and he seemed to think better of it. My father was a powerfully built man, standing just under six feet tall, but my mother could easily take his measure. He plopped on his hat and trudged off toward the tipple. He never looked up at the sky, not once.

Roy Lee sat down beside me. Before long, he was offering me unwanted advice on how to gain my beloved, Dorothy Plunk. “What you do, Sonny,” he explained, putting his arm around my shoulders, “is take her to the movies. Something like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Then you kind of put your arm on the back of her chair like this, and then when things get scary and she’s not paying attention to anything but the movie, you let your hand slide down over her shoulder until …” He pinched one of my nipples and I jumped. He laughed, holding his stomach and doubling over. I didn’t think it was so funny.

Jim wandered outside and contemplated Roy Lee and me. He was eating a Moon Pie. “Idiots,” he concluded. “Tenth-grade morons.” Jim always had such a way with words. He squashed the entire pie in his mouth and chewed it contentedly. One of the neighbor girls down the street saw him and came over and stood as close to him as she dared. He smirked and rubbed his hand along the small of her back while she shivered in nervous delight. Roy Lee stared in abject admiration. “I don’t care if they break every bone in my body, I got to go out for football next year.”

“Look, look!” O’Dell suddenly cried, jumping up and down and pointing skyward. “Sputnik!”

Roy Lee sprang to his feet and yelled, “I see it too!” and then Sherman whooped and pointed. I stumbled off the steps and squinted in the general direction everybody was looking. All I could see were millions of stars. “There,” Mom said, taking my head and sighting my nose at a point in the sky.

Then I saw the bright little ball, moving majestically across the narrow star field between the ridgelines. I stared at it with no less rapt attention than if it had been God Himself in a golden chariot riding overhead. It soared with what seemed to me inexorable and dangerous purpose, as if there were no power in the universe that could stop it. All my life, everything important that had ever happened had always happened somewhere else. But Sputnik was right there in front of my eyes in my backyard in Coalwood, McDowell County, West Virginia, U.S.A. I couldn’t believe it. I felt that if I stretched out enough, I could touch it. Then, in less than a minute, it was gone.

“Pretty thing,” Mom said, summing up the general reaction of the backyard crowd. She and the other ladies went back to talking. It was a good hour before everybody else wandered off, but I remained behind, my face turned upward. I kept closing my mouth and it kept falling open again. I had never seen anything so marvelous in my life. I was still in the backyard when Dad came home. He opened the gate and saw me. “Aren’t you out late?”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to break the spell Sputnik had cast over me.

Dad looked up at the sky with me. “Are you still looking for Sputnik?”

“Saw it,” I said finally. I was still so overwhelmed I didn’t even tag on a “sir.”

Dad looked up with me for a little longer, but when I didn’t elaborate he shook his head and went down into the basement. I soon heard the shower running and the sound of him scrubbing with brushes and Lava soap. He’d already showered at the mine, most likely, but Mom wouldn’t let him in the house if he had a molecule of coal anywhere on him.

That night, in my room, I kept thinking about Sputnik until I couldn’t think about it anymore and fell asleep, waking in the night to hear the men miners scuffling their boots and talking low as they went up the path to the tipple. I climbed up on my knees and looked through the window at their dark shapes walking alongside the road. The hoot-owl miners were the safety and rock-dust crew, assigned the task to spray heavy rock powder into the air to hold down the explosive coal dust. They also inspected the inside track, the support timbers, and the roof bolts. It was their job to make certain the mine was safe for the two coal-digging shifts. The way they looked in the moonlight, slogging in the dust, I could imagine them to be spacemen on the moon. The tipple, lit up by beacons, could have been a station there. I let my imagination wander, seeing the first explorers on the moon as they worked their way back to their station after a day of walking among craters and plains. I guessed it would be Wernher von Braun up there, leading his select crew. The men crossed the tracks and I saw the glint of their lunch buckets in the tipple light, and I came slowly back to reality. They weren’t explorers on the moon, just Coalwood miners going to work. And I wasn’t on von Braun’s team. I was a boy in Coalwood, West Virginia. All of a sudden, that wasn’t good enough.

ON November 3, the Russians struck again, launching Sputnik II. This one had a dog in it—Laika was her name—and by her picture in the paper, she looked a little like Poteet. I went out into the yard and called Poteet over and picked her up. She wasn’t a big dog, but she felt pretty heavy. Mom saw me and came outside. “What are you doing to that dog?”

“I just wondered how big a rocket it would take to put her into orbit.”

“If she don’t stop peeing on my rosebushes, she’s going into orbit, won’t need any rocket,” Mom said.

Poteet whined and ducked her head in my armpit. She might not have known every word, but she knew very well what Mom was saying. As soon as Mom went back inside, I put Poteet down and she went over and sat by one of the rosebushes. I didn’t watch to see what she did after that.

My dad got two magazines in the mail every week, Newsweek and Life. When they came, he read them from cover to cover and then I got them next. In a November issue of Life, I found, to my great interest, drawings of the internal mechanisms of a variety of different kinds of rockets. I studied them carefully, and then I remembered reading how Wernher von Braun had built rockets when he was a youngster. An inspiration came to me. At the supper table that night, I put down my fork and announced that I was going to build a rocket. Dad, musing into his glass of corn bread and milk, said nothing. He was probably working through some ventilation problem, and I doubt if he even heard me. Jim snickered. He probably thought it was a sister thing to do. Mom stared at me for a long while and then said, “Well, don’t blow yourself up.”

I gathered Roy Lee, O’Dell, and Sherman in my room. My mom’s pet squirrel, Chipper, was hanging upside down on the curtains, watching us. Chipper had the run of the house and loved to join a gathering. “We’re going to build a rocket,” I said as the little rodent launched himself at my shoulder. He landed and snuggled up against my ear. I petted him absently.

The other boys looked at one another and shrugged. “Where will we launch it?” was all that Roy Lee wanted to know. Chipper wiggled his nose in Roy Lee’s direction and then hopped off my shoulder to the bed and then to the floor. The sneak attack was Chipper’s favorite game.

“The fence by the rosebushes,” I said. My house was narrowly fitted between two mountains and a creek, but there was a small clearing behind Mom’s rose garden.

“We’ll need a countdown,” Sherman stated flatly.

“Well of course we have to have a countdown,” O’Dell argued, even though no one was arguing with him. “But what will we make our rocket out of? I can get stuff if you tell me what we need.” O’Dell’s father—Red—was the town garbageman. On weekends, O’Dell and his brothers helped out on the truck and saw just about every kind of stuff there was in Coalwood, one time or another.

Sherman was always a practical boy with an orderly mind. “Do we know how to build a rocket?” he wondered.

I showed them the Life magazine. “All you have to do is put fuel in a tube and a hole at the bottom of it.”

“What kind of fuel?”

I had already given the matter some thought. “I’ve got twelve cherry bombs left over from the Fourth of July,” I said. “I’ve been saving them for New Year’s. We’ll use the powder out of them.”

Satisfied, Sherman nodded. “Okay, that ought to do it. We’ll start the countdown at ten.”

“How high will it fly?” O’Dell wondered.

“High,” I guessed.

We all sat around in a little circle and looked at one another. I didn’t have to spell it out. It was an important moment and we knew it. We boys in Coalwood were joining the space race. “All right, let’s do it,” Roy Lee said just as Chipper landed on his D.A. Roy Lee leapt to his feet and flailed ineffectually at his attacker. Chipper giggled and then jumped for the curtain.

“Chipper! Bad squirrel!” I yelled, but he just closed his beady eyes and vibrated in undisguised delight.

Roy Lee rolled up the Life magazine, but before he could raise his arm, Chipper was gone in a flash, halfway down the stairs toward the safety of Mom in the kitchen. “I can’t wait for squirrel season,” Roy Lee muttered.

I appointed myself chief rocket designer. O’Dell provided me with a small discarded plastic flashlight to use as the body of the rocket. I emptied its batteries and then punched a hole in its base with a nail. I cracked open my cherry bombs and poured the powder from them into the flashlight and then wrapped it all up in electrical tape. I took one of the cherry-bomb fuses left over and stuck it in the hole and then glued the entire apparatus inside the fuselage of a dewinged plastic model airplane—I recall it was an F-100 Super Sabre. Since Sherman couldn’t run very fast—and also because it was his idea—he was placed in charge of the countdown, a position that allowed him to stand back. Roy Lee was to bring the matches. O’Dell was to strike the match and hand it to me. I would light the fuse and make a run for it. Everybody had something to do.

When night came, we balanced our rocket, looking wicked and sleek, on top of my mother’s rose-garden fence. The fence was a source of some pride and satisfaction to her. It had taken six months of her reminding Dad before he finally sent Mr. McDuff down from the mine to build it. The night was cold and clear—all the better, we thought, for us to track our rocket as it streaked across the dark, starry sky. We waited until some coal cars rumbled past, and then I lit the fuse and ran back to the grass at the edge of the rosebushes. O’Dell smacked his hand over his mouth to smother his excited giggle.

Sparkles of fire dribbled out of the fuse. Sherman was counting backward from ten. We waited expectantly, and then Sherman reached zero and yelled, “Blast off!” just as the cherry-bomb powder detonated.

There was an eyewitness, a miner waiting for a ride at the gas station across the street. For the edification of the fence gossipers, he would later describe what he had seen. There was, he reported, a huge flash in the Hickam’s yard and a sound like God Himself had clapped His hands. Then an arc of fire lifted up and up into the darkness, turning and cartwheeling and spewing bright sparks. The way the man told it, our rocket was a beautiful and glorious sight, and I guess he was right, as far as it went. The only problem was, it wasn’t our rocket that streaked into that dark, cold, clear, and starry night.

It was my mother’s rose-garden fence.

3
MOM

WOODEN SPLINTERS WHISTLED past my ears. Big chunks of the fence arced into the sky. Burning debris fell with a clatter. A thunderous echo rumbled back from the surrounding hollows. Dogs up and down the valley barked and house lights came on, one by one. People came out and huddled on their front porches. Later, I would hear that a lot of them were wondering if the mine had blown up or maybe the Russians had attacked. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything except a big orange circle that seemed to be hovering in front of my eyes. When I regained some sensibility and my vision started to come back, the circle diminished and I started to look around. All the other boys were sitting in the grass, holding their ears. With relief, I noted that it didn’t look as if any of them had suffered any serious damage. Roy Lee’s D.A. needed work though, and O’Dell’s eyes were as wide as the barn owls that nested on the tipple. Sherman’s glasses were nearly sideways on his face. The dogs had retreated to the farthest corner of the yard. They were crawling on their bellies back toward us when Mom came out on the back porch and peered into the darkness. “Sonny?” she called. Then I think she saw the burning fence. “Oh, my good Lord!”

Dad, holding his newspaper, came out beside her. “What happened, Elsie?”

At my father’s appearance, the other boys suddenly jumped up and ran off. I guess he had such a fierce reputation at the mine they didn’t want any part of his wrath. I fleetingly caught a glimpse of Roy Lee leaping over the still-standing part of the fence, clearing it by a good yard. The others went through the gap we’d just blown out. I could see them clearly because the standing part of the fence was on fire. I thought to myself, I ought to follow them, maybe take up residence in the woods for a year or two. But I was caught. Running would just put off the inevitable. I answered Mom with a croak, my mouth not working quite right yet. She replied, “Sonny Hickam. You get over here!” Rubbing my ears in an attempt to stop them from ringing, I lurched over to the back porch and waited expectantly for one of my parents to come down off it and kill me.

“Elsie, do you have any idea what’s going on here?” Dad asked.

Mom, bless her, had figured it all out. “Sonny asked us if he could build a rocket, Homer,” she replied, as if she were amazed he had not perceived the perfectly obvious.

Dad puzzled over her statement. “Sonny built a rocket? He doesn’t even know how to put the sprocket chain back on his bike when it slips off.”

“We’ll see,” Mom sniffed. “Sonny, what happened to the other boys?”

I had learned that sometimes when I was in trouble with Mom, the best thing to do was to adopt the complete-idiot strategy. “Other boys?” I asked, most sincerely. Even under the greatest duress, my capability to dissemble was scarcely diminished. Once, when I had used Mom’s best and only wheelbarrow as a kind of summertime sled to go careening down a gully on Substation Mountain, and then misplaced the legs I had removed and the screws that bolted them on, and then dented the barrow almost beyond recognition on a boulder that popped up in my way, and flattened the tire of the wheel, what I’d said then when I came home with the remnants of the thing was that I’d spotted some great flower dirt up in the mountains and would’ve brought Mom some home with me “if this blame ol’ ‘wheelbare’ hadn’t fallen apart!” Mom wasn’t fooled, but she got to laughing too hard to swat me at full power. Whatever it took, sometimes, is what I did.

“Elsie, I don’t care about any other boys,” Dad told her. “Just take care of this one before he embarrasses me all over Coalwood.”

Mom laughed—a short, bitter bark. “Oh, my, yes. Heaven forbid you be embarrassed! Why, the next thing you know, the men would stop shoveling coal for you!”

He stared at her. “They don’t shovel. They haven’t shoveled in twenty years. They use machines.”

“Isn’t that interesting!”

I recognized that Mom and Dad were about to go off onto one of their standard quarrels and eased back into the darkness of the yard and stood with the dogs. Dandy nuzzled my hand and Poteet leaned against my legs. I could feel her trembling, or maybe it was me. Dad gave Mom one of his standard speeches about how the mine provided for her and us boys, and she said back her usual piece about how the mine was just a big, dirty death trap. When Dad went back inside, shaking his head, Mrs. Sharitz next door called softly to Mom and she went over and leaned on the fence. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could guess. I could see Mrs. Todd waiting patiently at the next fence beyond. Mrs. Sharitz would cross her yard with the news from Mom and pass it on to Mrs. Todd and so on down the fence line. I knew within an hour all of Coalwood would know about my semi-sort of rocket and how I’d roped the other boys into more of my foolishness, and everybody in town would have a good laugh at my expense. When Mom signed off with Mrs. Sharitz, she walked over and stood beside me. She looked at the smoldering ruin of her fence and sighed deeply. I braced myself. Now that we were alone, she was free to deliver her scorn with both barrels. “Didn’t I tell you not to blow yourself up?” she asked in a surprisingly soft voice.

Just then, I heard the black phone ring and saw Dad through the living-room window as he ran to answer it. I hoped it wasn’t anybody complaining about the noise. Mom looked at the window and then up the road to the tipple. I knew the best thing I could do was to stay quiet while she was chewing things over in her mind. After a while, she pointed at the back porch and said, “Go sit on the steps. We need to talk, you and me.”

“I know what I did was wrong, Mom,” I said in a bid to preempt whatever she had in mind.

“Homer Hadley Hickam, Junior. It wasn’t wrong. It was stupid. I said go sit!”

I did as I was told with the enthusiasm of a prisoner going to his own beheading. Dandy crawled up beside me, whimpered briefly, and laid his head on my feet. Poteet was off chasing bats. I watched her launch herself into the air, do a double twist, and come down running, a big grin on her black muzzle.

I thought to myself, I’m really in for it this time. Mom was a master at delivering creative punishment. Once, after Sunday school, and in my usual rush to get outside and play, I wore my church shoes in the creek to hunt crawl-dads with Roy Lee. When Mom cast an eye on my soggy Buster Browns, she said, “I swear, Sonny, if your head gets any emptier, it’s going to float off your head like a balloon.” For punishment, she dictated that the next week I had to go to church in my stocking feet. It didn’t take long before everybody in town got wind of what I was going to have to do. I didn’t disappoint, walking down the church aisle in my socks while everybody nudged their neighbor and snickered. The thing was, though, I had picked out the socks, and my big toe poked through a hole in one of them. Mom was mortified. Even the preacher couldn’t keep a straight face.

Mom stood before me and crossed her arms and stuck her chin out. Dad said she looked just like a Lavender when she did that, and it usually always meant trouble. “Sonny, do you think you could build a real rocket?”

She so startled me by her question that I forgot my usual coyness. “No, ma’am,” I said, straight up. “I don’t know how.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know you don’t know how. I’m asking you if you put your mind to it, could you do it?”

I searched for her trap to make me do something I didn’t want to do. I was sure it was there. It was just a matter of finding it. I thought I’d better say something. “Well, I guess I could—”

Mom stopped me. She knew I was just going to ramble. “Sonny,” she sighed, “you’re a sweet kid. I love you. But, doggone it, you’ve just been drifting along like you were on a cloud your whole life, making up games and leading Roy Lee and Sherman and O’Dell off on all your wild schemes. I’m thinking maybe it’s past time you straightened up a bit.”

When a Coalwood mother told her son maybe he needed to “straighten up a bit,” it was usually in a direction he didn’t necessarily want to go. I started to squirm. She was about to make it ten times worse. “I was worrying about you the other night to your dad,” she said. “I was just kind of wondering out loud what you were going to do with yourself when you grew up. He said for me not to worry, he’d find you a job on the outside up at the mine. You know what that means, Sonny? You’d be some kind of clerk working for your dad, sitting at a typewriter pecking out forms, or writing in a ledger about how many tons got loaded in a day. That’s the best your dad thinks you can do.”

A question just seemed to jump out of my mouth. It surprised even me. I guess I’d been wondering about it for a long time and didn’t know it. “Why doesn’t Dad like me?” I asked her.

Mom looked as if I had slapped her in the face. She was quiet for a moment, obviously chewing over my question. “It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” she said at length. “It’s just with the mine and all, he’s never had much time to think about you one way or the other.”

If that was supposed to make me feel any better, it didn’t work. I knew Dad thought about Jim all the time, was always telling people what a great football player my brother was, and how he was going to tear up the world in football when he went to college.

Mom sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders. I twitched at her unfamiliar touch. It had been a long time since she’d hugged me. We just didn’t do much of that kind of thing in our family. “You’ve got to get out of Coalwood, Sonny,” Mom said. “Jimmie will go. Football will get him out. I’d like to see him a doctor, or a dentist, something like that. But football will get him out of Coalwood, and then he can go and be anything he wants to be.”

She clutched my shoulder, pulling me hard against her side. For a little bit, I would’ve put my head on her shoulder, but I sensed that would be going too far. “It’s not going to be so easy for you,” she said. “You and me, we’ve got to figure out some way to make your dad change his mind about you, see his way clear to send you to college. I’ve been saving money right along and probably have enough for you to go, but your dad would have a hissy right now if I said that’s what I was going to do, say it’s a waste of good money. He’s got it in his head you’re going to stay around here, have some little job at his mine.”

“I’d like to go to college, sure—” I began.

“Well, you’d better!” she snapped, cutting me off. She dropped her arm off my shoulder. I felt suddenly chilled without it. “Coalwood’s going to die,” she announced, “deader than a hammer.”

“Ma’am?” She had lost me with that one.

She stood up. I saw that her eyes were glistening. By her nature, she wasn’t a crier. In an instant, she brought herself back under complete control. “You can’t count on the mine being here when you graduate from high school, Sonny. You can’t even count on this town being here. Pay attention, will you? Look at the kids at Big Creek from Berwind, Bartley, Cucumber … Their fathers are out of work, and those towns are just falling down around them. It’s the economy and it’s the easy coal playing out and it’s … I don’t know what all it is, but I’ve got sense enough to know it’s just a matter of time before the same thing happens here in Coalwood too. You need to do everything you can to get out of here, starting right now.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at her. She sighed. “To get out of here, you’ve got to show your dad you’re smarter 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.

4
THE FOOTBALL FATHERS

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 laughing at the family because of you.”

“Just go away,” I growled. “I’m busy.”

“Doing what?” he chided. “Trying to decide what dress to wear?”

Jim ducked when I threw my pencil at him and then pulled my door shut. Unbidden, a little bubble of brotherly jealousy gurgled up inside me. Who cared what Jim thought about anything? He didn’t even have to think. Dad would take care of everything for him, see that he got everything he wanted. Jim thought I was some kind of a sister. Well, at least I didn’t go around wearing pink shirts and a peroxide curl in my hair!

My first rocket had caused me to be harassed on the school bus, at school, and now in my own room. There was more to come. The following Saturday, when I went to the Big Store to buy a bottle of pop, I ran afoul of Pooky Suggs.

Pooky Suggs’s history was common knowledge in Coalwood. His father had been crushed by a slate fall about a dozen years back on a section where Dad was the foreman. To stay in Coalwood, Pooky had quit the sixth grade and gone into the mine. To anybody who’d listen, Pooky was forever complaining about having to quit school to go to work, blaming it all on Dad for getting his daddy killed. He didn’t get much sympathy. It had been his daddy’s fault, after all, that he had gone under an unsupported part of the roof to urinate, and anyway, Pooky had already been in the sixth grade for five years when he quit. Nobody in town much thought he’d ever have reached the seventh. Still, for as long as I could remember, I’d heard Pooky’s name around the house, Dad telling Mom about something that Pooky had done that was stupid, or that he’d caught him idling back in the gob again, and Mom telling Dad back he should just fire Pooky and get it done with. For some reason, Dad had never taken her up on it. Maybe he felt a little guilty about Pooky’s father, I don’t know, but he seemed to tolerate Pooky more than he did other complainers and idlers.

I avoided Pooky whenever I could, but hadn’t noticed him among the men gossiping on the Big Store steps. “Well, looky what we got here—Homer’s little rocket boy,” he said nastily. “Heard the damn thang blew up. Did your daddy help you build it?”

The men sitting on the steps turned to look at me. They were all holding paper cups for their chewing-tobacco spit. “You gonna build another one?” asked Tom Tickle, one of the single miners who lived in the Club House.

Tom was friendly. “Yes, sir, I am,” I said.

“Well, attaboy!” the step group chorused.

“Shee-it. All he can do is build a bomb,” Pooky said.

“Well, it was a damn good bomb!” Tom laughed. Pooky stood up and kicked his way through the assembly. If he had hoped to heap scorn on me, it hadn’t worked. He shoved his helmet back on his head and leaned into me, his breath mostly alcohol fumes. “You Hickams think you’re so hot, but you ain’t no better’n me or nobody else in this town.”

“Sonny didn’t say no different, Pooky,” Tom said. “Whyn’t you go sleep it off afore you get into trouble?”

Pooky turned, rocking unsteadily in his hard-toe boots. His face was all angles, with a sharp, pointed nose and a triangular chin covered with stubble. Despite the easy availability of Dr. Hale, the company dentist, his teeth were yellow and cracked. His voice was a whine that sounded like an untuned fiddle. “We need to go on strike, I’m tellin’ ya. That bastard Homer’s gonna work us all to death!”

“I don’t believe work’s ever going to kill you, Pook.” Tom grinned, and the step miners erupted in laughter.

“All y’all can just go to hell!” Pooky muttered. He probably meant it to sound tough, but it came out sort of pitiful. I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. He gave me another dirty look. “Your daddy killed my daddy,” he said. “I ain’t never gonna forget that!”

Tom stood up and tugged Pooky away from me, turning him around and pointing him across the street. “You better get on home, Pook.”

I took the opportunity to slip through the men to go inside the Big Store. I got my bottle of pop, then leaned on the counter and drank it slowly, watching through the glass doors what was going on outside. Pooky and Tom looked like they were dancing, with Pooky trying to come inside the Big Store and Tom turning him back around. To my relief, Tom finally won and Pooky staggered off. Soon afterward, all the men got up, their gossiping done. When the steps were clear, I ran outside and grabbed my bike and pedaled toward home. Near the Coalwood School, I went past a line of miners making their way to the tipple. With big grins on their faces, they all yelled “Rocket boy!” as I flashed by. What had I gotten myself into? I’d told too many people I was going to build another rocket, and now I had to do it. But how? What was the blamed secret that made a rocket fly?

THE final regular season football game ended with Big Creek winning big over Tazewell High School, just across the Virginia border. Jim sent two quarterbacks to the sidelines on stretchers and intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown. With that victory, the team had won all its games. Then the state high-school athletic association did exactly what it said it was going to do and ruled that Coach Gainer’s boys were not eligible to play in the state-championship game. Although it was no surprise, there was still an instant uproar all over the district. The Football Fathers were besieged with demands from fans and the football team to do something. Jim asked Dad every night at supper for a week after the last game what he was going to do. Dad kept saying he was looking into it. Finally, one night at supper he said he was going to go see a lawyer in Welch.

Mom put down her fork and stared at Dad in disbelief. “Homer, I don’t think that’s wise.”

Dad shoveled in a spoonful of beans and corn bread. “Elsie, I know what I’m doing,” he replied nonchalantly. He didn’t look at her.

Mom settled into a deep frown. “No, you don’t. The Charleston muckety-mucks don’t want us to play and they’re not going to let us play. No lawyer’s going to change that. You’re just asking for trouble.”

“Mom, Dad’s got to do something!” Jim begged. “We deserve to play!”

“I know you do, Jimmie,” Mom replied softly. “But sometimes we don’t get our way even when we deserve it. That’s true for everybody, even you. I know that amazes you, but that’s the way it is.”

Jim’s face went dark and he shoved his chair back from the table. “I want to be excused,” he said sullenly.

Dad held up his right hand to his face, as if to shield it from Mom’s riveting gaze. “Jim, it’s okay,” he said reassuringly. “I’m going to take care of it.”

“Homer—” Mom said in her warning tone.

“Elsie—” Dad said back in his don’t-mess-with-me tone.

Jim stood up. “Somebody better do something!” he wailed.

I made my move. The football boys, even my brother, were so easy. “You could move to Charleston and play up there,” I suggested virtuously.

Jim turned on me, his fists tightly balled. “You’re dead, Sonny.”

“Jim, go to your room,” Mom ordered. She waited until Jim stalked off and then gave me a threatening look before turning back to Dad. “Homer, just let it go,” she said.

Dad rolled his head on his neck. I could hear it creak. Ducking his head in the mine all day probably didn’t do it a lot of good. “This is none of your affair, Elsie,” he said.

“Just stop and think, that’s all I’m asking.”

“The Football Fathers—”

“If you put the brains of every one of the Football Fathers in my coffee cup, they wouldn’t fill it up. You’ve got to think for all of them.”

“We’ve made up our minds, Elsie. We’re going to Welch.”

Mom knew the Bible pretty much by heart, and she was quite capable of using it on Dad like a club. “And if the blind leadeth the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,” she told him, making her argument unassailable because it was clearly on the side of the Lord.

After an evident moment of confusion, Dad replied, “Thank you for your vote of confidence, Reverend Lavender.” Then the black phone rang, ever the convenient way to end discussion in our house. Dad yelled at whomever was on the other end and then headed out the door, throwing on his coat and hat as he went. I had no doubt he was grateful for the interruption. He didn’t come home until past midnight. Sometimes when he did that, I wondered if he wasn’t just sitting around his office, checking his watch, until Mom went to bed.

A week later, as Mom had feared, the Football Fathers had themselves a proud little suit. The championship game was only a week away, so it was necessary to press the court to act fast. Three days after it was filed, a state judge in Bluefield took one look at the case and threw it out of court on a technicality. There was no precedent, he wrote, for a private organization to sue a state entity in his court. The championship game was held as scheduled in Charleston, and the season was officially over. Jim was so mad he locked himself in his room all day, except to come downstairs to eat and watch television and talk to some girls on the home telephone. I kept out of his way, retreating to a chair in the living room to read Dad’s latest Newsweek.

“I’m glad it’s over,” Mom said, watching Jim stomp morosely up and down the steps.

“We’re going to appeal,” Dad said from his easy chair. He was reading the paper. “We’re going to go over that judge’s head.”

“But the game’s been played!”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Dad replied.

Mom went into the living room and stood over him. “What principle? It’s high-school football!”

Dad turned the page, as if he had just finished an article. I noticed, from my position, that he had turned to the comic page, which he never read. When Mom kept looking at him, he finally said, his eyes still firmly planted on the funnies, “This is man’s work, Elsie.”

“Maybe so, Homer,” Mom replied, “but this woman is telling you it’s going to lead to disaster.”

“We’ll see,” he said, stealing her phrase.

WINTER came to West Virginia late that year. It was a splendid fall; the leaves kept their bright burnt color well into November, and the sky turned a pale but pretty blue, like a robin’s egg. Just before Thanksgiving, the first of the cold fronts from Canada finally reached us, and the trees abruptly dropped their leaves and turned black and skeletal. Winter storm clouds scudded in, got snagged on our hills, and stayed. Everything just seemed to turn black, brown, and gray after that.

Coalwood had its routine for the beginning of winter, just as it did for every season. Mrs. Eleanor Marie Dantzler, the wife of Mr. Devotee Dantzler, the company-store manager, started to plan her winter piano recital, an annual social event. Company coal trucks made the rounds of the houses, stocking the coal boxes. The Coalwood Women’s Club built a float for the Veteran’s Day parade in Welch. In 1957, Jim and the other football boys wore Marine uniforms and pretended to be raising the flag on Iwo Jima. A lot of veterans were seen sobbing on the Welch streets as it went by. Just behind the Coalwood float, the Big Creek band marched, with me proudly playing the snare drum, one of five drummers in a line. Standing with Mom on the curb, Dad clapped and cheered the Coalwood float as it went past. His eyes were on Jim the whole time. Before I got there, he turned to talk to somebody behind him and didn’t see me as I paraded past. “Attaboy, Sonny,” I heard Mom call above the rat-a-tat-tat of my drum.

THE union leader in Coalwood was a man named Mr. John Dubonnet, a classmate of my parents at Gary High School. During World War II, many Coalwood miners, including my father, were exempted from service because of the need for coal in the war effort. Mr. Dubonnet could have probably also stayed in West Virginia, but instead joined the Army. While he was landing on Normandy, my dad was opening up a new part of the mine, an incredibly rich vein of “high” coal, so-called because it was so thick a man could stand straight up in the tunnel left after its removal. By war’s end, the Coalwood mine was a lucrative little operation, envied across the county. That was when the UMWA finally turned its attention to Mr. Carter’s mine. The labor peace that Coalwood had enjoyed for more than fifty years came to an abrupt end. When Mr. Carter resisted the union’s attempts to organize, the union ordered a strike. In retaliation, Mr. Carter instituted a lockout, closing the mine to everybody. There was some pushing and brawling around the tipple and rumors of gunfire up the hollows. To calm things down, President Truman sent in the United States Navy to reopen the mine. After six months of military occupation in Coalwood, Mr. Carter was forced to sign a contract with the union and, soon afterward, sold Coalwood in disgust. The Captain, and my father, stayed behind.

In the decade that followed, an edgy peace between labor and management settled on our town, broken only by intermittent strikes, usually quickly settled. The Coalwood operation became even richer. When the Captain retired, my father, at the Captain’s insistence, took over his position of mine superintendent. Since he was only a high-school graduate, many people in Coalwood—and in the union and the steel company that owned us too—thought my father was not qualified. Dad set out to prove them wrong by the sheer volume of his work and application of every particle of his energy and intelligence. He also continued to carry the Captain’s vision of the town long after nearly everyone else had forgotten it.

By 1957, most of the old union leaders had followed the Captain into retirement, and a new crop was eager to show their worth to the rank and file. Mr. Dubonnet was one of them, quickly rising to lead the Coalwood UMWA local. Although nobody noticed it until it was too late, having Mr. Dubonnet and my dad on opposite sides was a prescription for conflict.

As Mom had predicted, one day in early winter Dad stood outside the tipple and called out the names of men to be cut off. A national recession was under way, steel orders were reduced, and Coalwood was producing more coal than the steel company needed. Twenty-five men were cut off from the company. The phrase was apt. Not only were the men separated from their work, they were cut off from their homes, credit at the company stores, and identification as a Coalwood citizen. The miners cut off were required to leave their houses within two weeks. A few of them surreptitiously moved up past Snakeroot and built shacks along the fringe of the woods, hoping someday to be rehired. My father was later ordered by the steel company to bulldoze them out, but he never did. The church put together baskets of food at Thanksgiving and Christmas for these families. For the first time I could remember, I heard little children were showing up in Coalwood classrooms needing clothing and food.

After the cutoff, the union local, not certain what else to do about it, threatened to strike. Mr. Dubonnet showed up on our doorstep one evening and Mom answered his knock. “Why, John, come in!” she exclaimed, evidently pleased to see him. I was sprawled on the rug in the living room, reading The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt. He had written a lot about the rocket his heroes were voyaging in, but nothing on how it worked. That was a disappointment.

“Elsie,” Mr. Dubonnet greeted her grimly, taking off his black helmet. He stayed on the porch. “Is Homer home?”

Dad was in the kitchen, probably getting an apple. After his cancer was cut out of him, the doctor had prescribed as many apples as he could stand, and he ate a lot of them. Dad came to the front door. “You want to talk to me, Dubonnet, come see me at my office.” He said it in as mean a tone of voice as I ever heard him use.

“What’s gotten into you, Homer?” Mom gasped. “Please come in, John!”

The union man stood his ground. “It’s okay, Elsie. Homer, could you step outside? We need to talk before I go down to the union hall for the meeting.”

Dad frowned, but went out and closed the storm door behind him. I couldn’t hear what was being said between him and Mr. Dubonnet, but I got up and came into the foyer so I could watch. Mom gave me a disapproving look and I retreated back to the living room, carefully positioning myself to where I could still see what was going on. I remembered that Mom, Dad, and Mr. Dubonnet had all come out of Gary. I also recalled that Mr. Dubonnet had been the valedictorian of their class and a star football player. It had never exactly been said, but I think Mr. Dubonnet had even taken my mom out a few times way back then. After a while, Dad opened the storm door to come back inside. “The company’s given you a good job, a house, and a decent life, Dubonnet,” he was saying, “and all you want to do is tear it down.”

“The cutoff was not done properly according to our contract,” Mr. Dubonnet said reasonably. “You know that, Homer.”

Dad put his hand on the doorknob. “The company did what it had to do.”

“How they turned you into such a company man I’ll never figure,” Mr. Dubonnet said. This time his voice was hard and bitter.

“Better than to throw in with a bunch of John L. Lewis commies!” Dad shot back.

Mr. Dubonnet shook his head. “The trouble with you, Homer, is that you don’t know who your real friends are. When the company gets into trouble, it’ll throw you out like a dead mouse.”

Dad stepped back onto the porch. “And the trouble with you, Dubonnet, is you can’t get over I got the Captain’s job.” Dad was about to say more when he started to cough and grabbed his chest.

“That’s it, Homer,” Mr. Dubonnet chided him, “cough your lungs out. You might be the mine superintendent, but you’ve got the common miner’s disease.”

“Stop it, both of you!” Mom spat.

“Stay out of this, Elsie,” Dad gasped and took a big, strangled breath.

“Look at him,” Mr. Dubonnet said to my mother. “You think the company cares anything about his lungs or anybody else’s? Hell, no! This is what the great Captain did for us with his continuous miners.”

Dad shook his head and searched for air. “You lay off the Captain,” he gasped. “He was a great man. I’ve got allergies, that’s all. Look at my daddy. Look at yours too. They worked in the mine all their life, and they never had any problems with their lungs.”

“Our daddies dug coal out with picks, Homer,” Mr. Dubonnet said, back to being calm again. “The continuous miners grind the coal up, fill the air with dust. After we get this cutoff settled, it’s the next thing I want to talk to you about. We need some way to protect the men from the dust.”

“I’ll thank you to get off my porch,” Dad choked.

“John, maybe it would be best,” Mom said softly, putting her hand on Dad’s arm. He shrugged it off.

Mr. Dubonnet put his helmet back on. “Elsie, you’re a fine woman. I always thought you deserved better.” He turned and went out the gate and walked across the street toward the gas station.

Dad lurched back inside and slumped into his easy chair. “Damned union John L. Lewis sonuvabitch,” he muttered. “Still thinks he’s the great football player. Well, I could’ve played, but I had to work, picking coal at the tipple after school.”

“I know that, Homer,” Mom said, watching him from the foyer. Her gentle tone surprised me.

Dad’s hands were trembling as he reached for his paper. “You’re a good woman, Elsie,” he said.

“I know that too, Homer,” she replied softly.

“You could’ve had your pick.”

“I did.” She looked at me, probably just noticing I was in the living room. “Go to your room,” she barked. “Study!”

I nodded and went up the stairs, two steps at a time. Outside, a line of cars rumbled into the gas station, and I looked out the window to see what was going on. Mr. Dubonnet got into one of the cars and then they all headed down Main Street. I guessed they were headed to the union hall.

JUST before Thanksgiving, Doc Lassiter ordered Dad to get an X ray. When he refused, Doc went to Mr. Van Dyke, the only man in town who could tell Dad what to do. Mr. Van Dyke was the mine’s general superintendent, a courtly man with silver hair who had been sent by the steel company to keep watch on its holdings. Dad, a company man through and through, had no choice but to comply with Mr. Van Dyke’s orders. He went over to Stevens Clinic in Welch. When he came home, I was upstairs in my room, reading. “A spot,” I heard him tell Mom. “About the size of a dime.”

“Oh, Homer, for God’s sake,” I heard her say in a small and worried voice I hadn’t ever heard her use before. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m not going to do anything,” he replied blandly. “Why’re you looking at me like that? Don’t worry about it. I’m only telling you because you’ll find out anyway. The only way to keep a secret in this town would be if I tore down every backyard fence in it.”

Dad went into the living room and sat down and snapped open the Welch Daily News. Mom looked up and saw me. She scowled, crossed her arms, and went back to her kitchen. She was soon rattling pots and pans. I went back to my room and stared at nothing, feeling a little panicky. I’d been around Coalwood long enough to know miners with spots on their lungs were supposed to quit the mine. It was not unusual to see them sitting on the Big Store or post office steps during the day, quietly hacking up black spit. For some reason, if it was their lungs that made them quit, they were allowed to stay in Coalwood as long as they could afford the rent for their houses. But I never imagined the common disease of the mine could affect my dad. He seemed far too tough for that. He had a spot on his lungs the size of a dime. I’d have to ask somebody about how bad that was. Maybe Roy Lee. His older brother worked up around the face where the coal dust was the thickest. Yes, I would ask Roy Lee. He would know.

IN December 1957, the United States made its first attempt to put a satellite into orbit with its Vanguard. I saw the result on television. Vanguard managed three tentative feet off the pad, lost thrust, and then blew up. According to the papers, the whole country was shocked and disappointed. I was too. I read some newspaper editorials and listened to television commentary that wondered if perhaps western civilization itself might soon be at an end with the technologically superior Russians taking over. I might have worried even more about Vanguard’s failure if I hadn’t had rocket problems of my own. Vanguard, after all, had managed to fly a yard higher than I had. There were a lot of smart people working on that project, and I guessed they’d figure things out, sooner or later. I, on the other hand, was all alone. That’s why I decided, like it or not, I had to talk to Quentin.

5
QUENTIN

QUENTIN WAS THE class joke. He used a lot of big words often delivered in a pseudo-English accent, and he carried around an old, cracked-leather briefcase, stuffed to overflowing with books and who-knew-what-else. While the rest of us played dodgeball or did calisthenics in phys. ed., he always had some excuse not to participate—a sprained ankle or a headache or some such—and sat in the bleachers and read one of his books. While all the other students traded gossip and nonsense in the auditorium in the morning and at lunch, Quentin always sat alone. He had no friends as far as I could tell. Although everybody, including me, made fun of him, I was pretty certain he was some sort of a genius. He could expound on nearly any subject in class until the teacher had to ask him to stop, and if he’d ever made less than a hundred on a test, I wasn’t aware of it.

I figured if there was anybody who might know how to build a rocket, it was Quentin. The next morning before classes, I sat down beside him in the auditorium. Startled, he pulled his book down from his face. “I don’t let anybody copy my homework,” he said suspiciously.

“I don’t want to copy your homework,” I replied, although I would have taken his algebra if he had offered. “Do you know anything about rockets?”

A little smile crossed his face. Quentin wasn’t a bad-looking kid for a genius. He had a narrow face, a sharp nose, crisp blue eyes, and jet-black hair that looked as if it had been plastered down with about a quart of Wildroot Cream Oil. “I wondered how long it would take for you to come to me with that question. I heard about your rocket, old boy. Blew up, did it? What made you think you could build a rocket? You can’t even do algebra.”

“I’m getting better,” I muttered. It was amazing to me that everybody, even Quentin, knew my business.

“One of my little sisters can already do algebra,” he advised me. “I taught her. It’s really quite simple.”

In less than a minute, he’d already pretty much irritated me. “So what do you know about rockets?” I asked him. “Anything?”

“I know everything,” he replied.

He had said it too easily. “Let’s hear it, then,” I said, doubtfully.

He raised one of his bony shoulders in a shrug. “What’s in it for me?”

“What do you want?”

“To help you build the next one.”

That was a surprise. “If you know so much, why don’t you build your own?” I demanded.

Quentin built a little church with his hands. “I’ve considered building a rocket for some time, if you must know. Practical reasons, unfortunately, have prevented me from taking action. It takes teamwork to build a rocket, and materials. My observation of you is that you have certain … leadership abilities that I do not.” He locked his eyes on me. They were intense, almost like they were capable of shooting rays. “The other boys will follow you,” he said. “And you, being the Coalwood superintendent’s son, can probably get all the materials you need.”

His ray-gun eyes made me want to look away, but I didn’t. “What’s your angle?” I demanded.

“Ho-ho!” he exclaimed. “The same as you, old chap! If I learn how to build a rocket, I’ll stand a better chance of getting on down at the Cape.”

“First you’ve got to go to college,” I reminded him.

“I’ll go to college,” he said resolutely. “But it won’t hurt to get some good practical rocket-building experience under my belt.” He put out his hand. “How about it? You want to team up?”

It was the best offer I’d gotten since I’d started my rocket-building career, but I was still a little reluctant. I didn’t have much of a reputation at Big Creek, but it was still better than Quentin’s. When I didn’t respond to his hand, he grabbed mine and shook it, big strokes up and down. I hastily pulled my hand away and looked around to see if anybody had noticed. I knew the football boys would accuse me of holding hands with Quentin if any one of them had seen it.

“So what do you know?” I demanded, my face flushed with the potential embarrassment of it all.

“Calm down, old chap,” he said. “All shall become perfectly clear.” He leaned back and took a deep breath and then began to talk just as if he was reading something straight from a book. “The Chinese are reputed to have invented rocketry. Something called ‘Chinese arrows’ are mentioned in Europe and the Middle East as far back as the thirteenth century. The British used rockets later aboard their warships during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. That’s where ‘the rocket’s red glare’ comes from in ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ Then there was the Russian Tsiolkovsky, Goddard the American, and von Braun, of course. Each of them added to the body of rocket knowledge. Tsiolkovsky was a theorist, Goddard applied engineering principles, and—”

I stopped him. “I don’t need to know this stuff. I need to know how a rocket works.”

Quentin cocked his head. “But that’s so elementary. Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

I remembered from one science class or another something about Newton, but I couldn’t put my finger on his laws. “How do you know that?”

“Read it somewhere.”

“Read it where?”

Quentin frowned, disturbed at my attempt to cut through his bull. “A physics book, I suppose,” he said stiffly. “Can’t exactly say which one. I thumb over to Welch every Saturday to the county library. I tend to pick out random shelves and just read every book on it until I’m done.”

I could see it was going to be necessary to be more specific with Quentin. “What kind of fuel does a rocket use?”

“The Chinese used black powder.”

“Black powder?”

He looked at me carefully, as if to determine if I was joking. “Black powder. It contains potassium nitrate—saltpeter, you know—and charcoal and sulfur.”

Saltpeter? Quentin sighed and then explained in some detail the chemical’s properties. It was an oxidizer, which, when combined with other chemicals, produced heat and gas, necessary to make a rocket fly. “It can also kill you down there,” he finished up, pointing at his crotch.

“What do you mean?”

“It fixes men so they can’t … you know.”

“What?”

Quentin flushed. “You know.” He straightened a crooked finger. “That.”

“Really?”

“Well, that’s what I read.”

I thought I’d better get back to rockets. “Where can I buy some of this black powder?”

“You can’t buy it, far as I know,” he said. “You’ve got to mix it up. Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, that’s what we need. Can you get it?”

I wasn’t certain, but I wasn’t going to let him know it. “I’ll get right on it.”

Quentin grinned broadly and suddenly started to rattle on like I was his best friend. He opened up his briefcase and showed me all the books within, most of them on general science, but one of them a novel titled Tropic of Cancer. “You want to know about girls? This is the one,” he said slyly.

“I already know about girls.”

He tapped the book. “No, you don’t.”

When the bell rang and we stood up, I noticed for the first time Quentin’s worn, faded shirt, thin at the elbows, and his patched cotton pants and his scuffed, ankle-high shoes. Quentin wasn’t a Coalwood boy. He came from Bartley. He was one of the kids my mother told me to notice. The mine at Bartley was always having cutoffs and strikes, and in the last few years, many Bartley families had slid into poverty and misery. Quentin’s father was probably out of a job. In 1957 southern West Virginia, you wouldn’t likely starve if you didn’t have any money. There was always bread and commodity cheese you could get from the government. But that was about all there was.

Roy Lee stopped me in the hall. “What were you talking to that moron Quentin about? And did I see you holding his hand?”

I was peeved enough at Roy Lee to not answer, but then I figured it would aggravate him more to tell the truth. “We’re going to build a rocket, him and me.”

A surge of kids passed us, Dorothy Plunk among them. “Hi, Sonny, Roy Lee,” she called angelically. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Roy Lee shook his head and leaned against the lockers. “Gawd almighty. You want to stop all chance of ever having any kind of social life? Dorothy Plunk sees you and Quentin hanging out together, she’s going to lose interest right there.”

I looked after her, trying not to stare at her cute little bottom swinging back and forth down the hall. “Dorothy doesn’t care anything about me, anyway,” I said, sort of breathless.

Roy Lee didn’t try to hide what he was looking at. He watched Dorothy all the way down the hall. “Whew,” he whistled. He pulled his eyes back to me. “You got good taste anyway, Sonny. Why don’t you ask her out? Double date with me next weekend. We’ll go parking at the Caretta fan.”

“She’d just say no.”

Roy Lee shook his head again as if I was the burden of his life. “If you don’t ask her out, I will.”

“You wouldn’t do that!” I bleated.

He wiggled his eyebrows at me, his crooked grin clearly salacious. “Oh, but I would!”

Roy Lee had me in a box. If he asked Dorothy out and she went, I wasn’t sure I could live through it, knowing what Roy Lee was likely to try with her. And what if she did it—or if Roy Lee claimed she did? My life would be pretty much ruined forever. I had no choice. I chased after Dorothy, catching her with Emily Sue at the entrance to biology class. “I’m sorry I got sick over the worm,” Dorothy said, first thing.

“Dorothy,” I said, my heart pounding in my ears, “would you like to go to the dance with me Saturday night? With Roy Lee? I mean, in his car? I mean—”

Her big blues blinked. “But I already have plans!”

The blood drained from my face. “Oh …”

“But if you’d come over to my house on Sunday afternoon,” she purred, “I’d love to study biology with you.”

To her house! “I’ll be there!” I swore. “What should I bring? I mean—”

“Just yourself, silly.” She looked me over, studying me, and I kind of thought she liked what she was seeing. “We’ll have so much fun,” she concluded.

Emily Sue had been observing all this. “Be a little careful with this one, Dorothy,” she said.

“Whatever do you mean?” Dorothy asked her friend.

They talked to each other as if I weren’t even there. “Sonny’s nice,” Emily Sue said succinctly.

“Well, so am I!” Dorothy said back. She went on into the classroom.

Roy Lee had been loitering nearby, listening. He came up and stood beside Emily Sue. “What do you think?” he said.

They were talking as if I weren’t there too. “Dangerous,” Emily Sue told him. “But probably not fatal.”

During class, I couldn’t help but sneak looks at Dorothy at her desk while she worked on a drawing of frog intestines. She had the adorable habit of letting the pink tip of her tongue protrude from her full, delectable lips while she concentrated. She was wearing a white pinafore blouse with a blue ribbon around its collar, which made her look so very innocent, yet the way she filled the blouse out troubled me with indecent thoughts. She caught me looking once and gave me a demure little smile while I blushed. I couldn’t figure out how so much perfection could wind up in one person. Then a little misery inserted itself. If Dorothy had plans for Saturday night, I didn’t imagine it was to bake cookies with her mother.

THERE was a company-store system in most of the towns in southern West Virginia. They usually featured easy credit and inflated prices. If a miner got into enough debt with a company store, the company stopped paying the miner with U.S. dollars and issued his pay in the form of scrip—company money good only in the company store. It was an insidious system. A popular song across the country in the late 1950’s was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” where he sang about a miner owing his soul to the company store. That was just about the truth for a lot of West Virginia miners.

As part of his social agenda, the Captain abolished the worst aspects of the company-store system in Coalwood. He brought in a college-educated manager—Mr. Devotee Dantzler, a Mississippi gentleman—to make certain prices were kept fair and no miner was gouged. The Captain dictated that credit could be given, when necessary, but the books were to be watched closely. No miner was allowed to get himself too far into debt. Scrip in Coalwood was issued sparingly. Smaller stores were built around the town for the convenience of the population. Under Mr. Dantzler, the Big Store became a source of town cohesiveness and a social gathering spot.

The Big Store contained a little bit of everything: hard-toe boots, leather utility belts, helmets, coveralls, and the cylindrical lunch buckets the miners favored; clothes for the whole family, groceries, and umbrellas; refrigerators, baby carriages, radios, and television sets with free installation onto the company cable system; pianos, guitars, record players, and a record department too. It had a drugstore where you could get Doc’s prescriptions and a wide variety of patent medicines, and a soda fountain where you could get pop and candy and a milk shake so thick a spoon would stand straight up in it. It had auto parts and lumber; shovels, picks, rakes, and seeds for the little gardens the miners scraped into the sides of the mountains. It even had a limited choice of coffins, hidden away in a back room. It was technically illegal to bury anyone on company property, but the colored people had a cemetery somewhere up Snakeroot Hollow. My father, and the company, looked the other way on it.

The Big Store had just about everything anybody in Coalwood needed, but would it have rocket fuel? With my cigar box of dollars and scrip left from my defunct newspaper delivery business, I went to Junior, the clerk at the drugstore counter, to find out. Junior was a rotund little man with a cherubic face, who was as smart as a whip and liked all over the town. When Junior worked on the store truck that delivered heavy things (like refrigerators) in the afternoon, he was welcome to come right into anybody’s house, even though he was a Negro. Most of the ladies loved him, even petted on him a little. He rarely got away from them after a delivery without some tea or coffee and cake. I saw him once in Mom’s kitchen, admiring her mural. Mom was beaming. It was rumored that Junior had once attended college, which put him ahead of even my father. Junior heard my order and cocked his head doubtfully. “Saltpeter?” he demanded in his raspy voice. “Your folks sent you after that?”

“It’s for me,” I said forthrightly. “Science project. I need sulfur and charcoal too.”

Junior adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles and seemed to make a mental calculation. Then he went into the back and brought out a can each of sulfur and saltpeter and a ten-pound bag of cooking charcoal. “Listen, rocket boy,” he said. “This stuff can blow you to kingdom come. I think you know what I’m saying.”

I mumbled, “Yessir,” and paid with scrip. I loaded my treasures on my bike and rode home. As I passed a line of miners walking to work, Mr. Dubonnet hailed me down. “I hear you’re going to build another rocket,” he said.

“Yessir. I’m thinking about going down to Cape Canaveral and joining up with Wernher von Braun.”

He seemed to brighten at the news. “That’s a good thing. You’re too smart to stay here.”

The line of coal cars beside us suddenly began slamming against each other, just before being pushed to the tipple. It was as loud as a hundred car wrecks happening all at once, but no one, including me, even bothered to look in its direction. We heard that sound every day. “Mr. Dubonnet, you’re smart too,” I said in an attempt to figure out why everybody lately seemed to want me out of town. “After the war, why did you come back to West Virginia if it’s so bad?”

He laughed. He had a deep, rich, ho-ho-ho kind of laugh that was wonderful to hear. “You got me there, Sonny.” He began to walk and I pushed my bicycle beside him. “I guess these old mountains, the mines, the people get in your blood,” he said. “When I got back from overseas I couldn’t wait to get home to McDowell County. It’s where I belong.”

There was the thing. He’d hit right on what I’d been wondering about since Mom’s backyard lecture. “How do you know I don’t belong here too?” I wondered.

He stopped and raised his eyebrows as if I had said the most amazing thing. I guess my ignorance was a continuing surprise to everyone in Coalwood. “Well, you do, of course,” he answered. “Anybody raised here belongs here. You can’t belong anywhere else.”

The empty coal cars shrieked as the locomotive, perhaps a mile down the track, began to push them toward the waiting tipple. I shouted to be heard. “Then I don’t understand why I’m supposed to leave!”

He stopped again, the other miners passing us by at a hard slog, the shift-change hour approaching. “Don’t you understand?” he yelled. “In just a few years, all this will be gone, almost like it never existed.” The coal cars began to roll and the noise lowered to a deep rumble. Mr. Dubonnet lowered his voice with them. “Even the union can’t put the coal back in the ground.”

I knew I probably shouldn’t ask him anything about my father, considering the row I’d observed between them, but I couldn’t resist. “Does my dad know this?”

Mr. Dubonnet grimaced. “He knows. But he acts like he don’t.”

“How come?”

“Now, that’s something you should ask him,” Mr. Dubonnet said, his face turning as hard as concrete. “Good luck with your rockets, Sonny.” He joined the line of men and quickly disappeared, one black helmet in a river of black, bobbing helmets, all going up the path to the tipple. I looked back down the valley at all the houses. Women were out on their front porches with their mops and buckets, waging their never-ending battle against the coal dust. The coal cars kept trundling past until a big black steam locomotive, puffing huge gouts of white smoke, finally appeared. It churned past, its engineer giving me a wave. I waved back distractedly. With all this activity, I just couldn’t imagine it ever ending. Maybe Dad and I had a similar blind spot.

Beside the washing machine in the basement was a wide counter and a deep steel sink. I had decided it would be my rocket laboratory. As soon as I set my chemicals on the counter, the upstairs door opened. “Sonny?” Mom called, and I yes-ma’amed her. “Remember what I said. Don’t blow yourself up.”

News in Coalwood traveled a lot faster than a boy on a bike.

QUENTIN hitchhiked over on Saturday and I introduced him to my mother. He made a short bow at the waist to her, an Errol Flynn kind of move I’m sure he had seen in the movies. Mom was impressed by it, however, her hand going to her mouth almost like a bashful girl’s. She rarely baked cookies, but I soon smelled their aroma drifting down from the kitchen. When she thumped down the basement steps with them and two glasses of milk, the plate she handed Quentin was piled twice as high as mine. “These are marvelous, undoubtedly the most delicious cookies I have ever tasted in the entire history of my life,” Quentin told her after a nibble. Mom looked tickled. She wondered what else she could do for us.

“Nothing, Mom,” I answered. I just wanted her to leave so we could get to work.

She seemed to want to loiter. “If you need anything, just call me.”

“We will, Mom. See you later, Mom.”

After my mother had gone back to the kitchen, Quentin worked on his cookies for a while while I waited impatiently. Finally, he took a final swig of milk, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and picked up the bag of saltpeter. He looked inside it. “Looks pure,” he said. I wondered how he would know.

With Dandy and Poteet watching us furtively from a dark nook beside the coal furnace, we began to work. First, we mixed up several small batches of what we hoped was black powder and, as a test, opened the grate and threw a spoonful of each into the coal-fired hot-water heater beside the washing machine. The ingredients hissed feebly, but it was impressive enough for the dogs to beg to be let out. I opened the basement door and they bolted outside. “What do you think?” I asked. Quentin shrugged. Neither of us knew how rocket fuel was supposed to burn.

We decided to test two of our best mixtures inside devices we hoped resembled rockets. There was some one-inch-wide aluminum tubing under the back porch that Dad had brought home from the mine to make a stand for Mom’s bird feeders. I appropriated it with a clear conscience since it looked as if he were never going to get around to it. I hacksawed off two one-foot lengths. Quentin called the lengths our “casements.” We hammered in a short length of broom handle at one open end and then poured in our powder mixes, crimping the other end with pliers to form a constriction the Life magazine diagram called the rocket “nozzle.” The result was obviously crude, but it was for testing purposes only. We attached triangular cardboard fins with model-airplane glue. We knew the fins would probably burn off, but they would at least give our rockets something to sit on. “We need to see how the powder acts under pressure,” Quentin said. “Whatever the result, we’ll have a basis for modification.”

I was becoming used to Quentin’s way of putting things. What he was saying was that we had to start somewhere, either succeed or fail, and then build what we knew as we went along. It seemed to me, considering all the rockets that I read about blowing up down at Cape Canaveral, that was the way Wernher von Braun and the other rocket scientists did their work too. Without Quentin, I might have been too embarrassed to fail in front of God and everybody. With him, no matter what happened, I felt “scientific.” Failure, after all, just added to our body of knowledge. That was Quentin’s phrase too. Body of knowledge. I liked the idea that we were building one.

After the fins dried, I decided we would test our creations behind my house, over by the creek. I didn’t think there was anything over there anybody would care about if we blew it up. To my surprise, Roy Lee appeared, claiming he just happened to be in the neighborhood. I think he’d actually been hanging around waiting for me and Quentin to come out.

The first rocket emitted a boil of nasty, stinking, yellowish smoke and then fell over, the glue on its fins melted. “Wonderful,” Roy Lee muttered, holding his nose. Quentin silently wrote the result down on a scrap of notebook paper. Body of knowledge.

The second rocket blew up. A good-size chunk of shrapnel twanged off the abandoned car we were hiding behind. A cloud of oily smoke covered us. Dad came out on the back porch and yelled, “Sonny! Get over here right now!” Obediently, we followed the smoke, reaching him as it did. He wrinkled his nose. “Didn’t I tell you not to do this again?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer. Mom came out “Homer, telephone.” She gave us boys a little smile while she waved the smoke away from her.

Dad went after the call and then came back out on the porch. He ignored Quentin and Roy Lee, his eyes on me. “As soon as I put the phone down, it rings again. People are complaining about the stink and smoke. I want this stopped. Do you understand me?”

Mom quickly amended his meaning. “Not behind the house, dear. You need to find a better place.”

Dad turned on her. “Elsie, they’ve got to stop trying to burn Coalwood down!”

She kept her smile on us boys. “Okay. I’ll make them promise. You won’t burn this wonderful, beautiful city down, will you, boys?”

“No, ma’am!” we chorused.

“You see?”

Dad stared at her and then shook his head and went inside. She followed him, leaving us boys to contemplate what had been, after all, our scorched, stinking failures. Quentin finished his notes. “First sample was too weak, the second too strong,” he said. “Now we know where we are. This is good, very good.”

Across the creek, some younger children gathered—dirty, snot-nosed urchins all. “Hey, rocket boys! Why don’t your rockets fly?” they chorused.

Roy Lee picked up a rock and they scattered, giggling.

I HITCHHIKED to War on Sunday afternoon. Dorothy’s house was across the railroad tracks on the mountain that overlooked the town. Her mother welcomed me with a delighted grin, as if she never wanted to see anybody more in her life. I could see a little of Dorothy in her face, but, unlike her daughter, she was a big, robust woman. Although Dorothy’s hair was a sandy color, her mother’s hair was the color of an orange. Dorothy’s father, a lanky, nearly bald man, stepped in from the kitchen and listlessly shook my hand. The owner of a gas station in War, I could tell he was used to Mrs. Plunk doing most of the talking. Both parents disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me and. Dorothy in the living room with our biology books. As it turned out, we didn’t study much. She wanted to know all about my rockets. “I’m so proud just to know somebody who does something so interesting!”

Emboldened, I told her I was going to try to learn as much as I could and go down to Cape Canaveral and join up with Wernher von Braun. “Oh, Sonny,” she said, “I know you’re going to be an important person someday. When you get to Florida, will you write me and tell me all about it?”

I struggled to find the nerve to tell her I didn’t want to write her, that I wanted her to be there by my side. But before I could find my voice, she said, “I want to be a teacher and a mom, the best one there ever was. I so love children—”

“So do I!” I exclaimed, although it was news to me. If Dorothy wanted it, I did too.

We continued talking, about friends and our parents. I told her about my mother—all the little funny things she did, about Chipper, her squirrel she kept in the house, and her mural on our kitchen wall. When I described Dad, all I could say was that he was in charge of the mine and worked a lot at it and, yes, he had caused the suit to be filed on behalf of the Big Creek team. “What’s it like to be Jim’s brother?” Dorothy asked, even though I hadn’t mentioned him.

I really had never given that particular subject much thought. “Okay, I guess” was the best I could do.

“He’s such a good football player!”

I shrugged. “Uh huh …”

“I think you’re much more interesting,” she said.

That brightened me up. It seemed like the right moment to ask her out on a date. “Dorothy, you know Roy Lee has a car, and I was just thinking that maybe you and me—”

“Do you know what, Sonny?” she interrupted. “I’ve never been outside of West Virginia. Isn’t that sad? How about you?”

Her question caused my own to die on my lips. I told her I had been several times to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Mom loved it there. And Dad had driven the family to Canada when I was in the third grade, all the way to Quebec.

She seemed thrilled. “Tell me about Quebec.”

I remembered how clean everything was. The French language had also made an impression. “It sounded real pretty to hear it,” I told her.

“Someday I’ll go there and hear it too,” Dorothy said solemnly.

I was halfway home before I realized Dorothy had diverted me from asking her out. I resolved to do it the next morning. I scanned the auditorium and found her with a group of her girlfriends huddling around a trio of senior football players. Dorothy was wearing a tight pink sweater and a black poodle skirt and was on her knees in the chair in front of them, her hands covering her mouth as she laughed at something one of the boys had said. I edged in beside her and stood awkwardly while she bantered back and forth with him. “Saturday night then?” he asked, and she nodded eagerly.

“Oh, hi, Sonny!” she said brightly and then slipped past me, to join her future date on a stroll up the aisle. I just stood there, my heart sinking to my toes.

6
MR. BYKOVSKI
Auks I–IV

ON JANUARY 31, 1958, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), led by Dr. von Braun, was ready to launch the Explorer-1 satellite aboard a Jupiter-C rocket. It was to be a night launch, so I stayed up to watch television, hoping for good news. Around 11:00 P.M., a bulletin interrupted the Tonight Show with an announcement that the launch had been a success. Film of the launch was promised momentarily. I started a vigil, lying on the rug in front of the television set, staring at the set, which displayed nothing but a sign stating STAND BY. Mom, Dad, and Jim had long since gone to bed. Daisy Mae joined me on the rug, curling up behind me in the bend of my knees. The bitter cold outside had also chased our old torn Lucifer in, and he was curled up in Dad’s easy chair. It was good to have them as company. I reached back and patted Daisy Mae’s head. “Good old girl,” I told her. “Good old cat.” She rewarded me with a purr and a lick on my hand.

Daisy Mae was a pretty cat, a fluffy calico, and was special to me. Four years earlier, when she had wandered in from the mountains, I hid her for a day, secretly feeding her in the basement. When Mom discovered her, she said I’d have to find the kitten another home, pointing out we already had two dogs, a squirrel, and a cat, and that was enough animals. After I pouted about it for a day, Mom gave in. “If you want this kitten,” she said, “you’ll have to take care of her.” I readily agreed, easy enough to do (the agreeing part). Daisy Mae had kittens right off, a pretty litter quickly snapped up by the neighbors. By then, Mom had completely adopted her into the family and, as I knew she would, took care of her as she did all the other animals, feeding her and spending hours picking fleas out of her coat. Mom thought Daisy Mae was such a pretty but delicate cat that she decided we’d have her fixed. To my knowledge, no other cat or dog in Coalwood had ever been neutered before. Mom drove Dad’s Buick with me holding Daisy Mae on my lap all the way to the veterinarian over in Bluefield, forty miles and six mountains away. It was the first time any of our animals had ever seen a vet. After she healed, Daisy Mae became even more loving, waiting for me to come home from school and sleeping on my bed at night. I often talked to her before I went to sleep, especially when I was frightened, or worried. She was just a comfort when everybody else in the family seemed at odds. Of course, I never told anyone else I talked to my cat, certainly not any of the other boys. I’d have never lived it down.

Around midnight (it was a Friday and not a school night), I was surprised by a knock on the front door, and in came Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell to join me. They bedded down on the couch and the floor. We talked some, mostly about girls, but then O’Dell and Sherman kind of drifted off. I’d been meaning to ask Roy Lee about the spot on Dad’s lung, so I took the opportunity. He tucked himself in the corner of the couch and gave me a worried look. “I’ll ask Billy,” he said. Billy was his brother.

“Don’t tell him why. Dad doesn’t want anybody to know.”

Roy Lee gave me a funny look. “Sonny, I already knew. I guess everybody in Coalwood knows.”

I put my head down on the rug and pretty soon I went to sleep. I woke during the night, finding the picture on the television turned to snow. I kept waking up and falling back to sleep. At dawn, I was awake when the picture flickered back on and an announcer said to stand by. I woke the others up and then, without preamble, film of the launch was run. Dr. von Braun’s rocket lifted off the pad in a caldron of fire and smoke and went right up into the night sky without a moment of hesitation. We whooped and cheered at the sight of it. O’Dell got up and did a little jig and then fell back on the couch and put his feet up in the air and made like he was riding a bicycle. I wasn’t so demonstrative, but I felt proud and patriotic. Dad came downstairs, let Lucifer and Daisy Mae out, and found us boys clustered around the set. He looked us over. “Did it work?”

It was the first time I remember him ever expressing any interest in space. “Yessir!” we roared.

He stared at the television, where Dr. von Braun’s rocket kept taking off again and again. “I don’t know what to make of it,” he said. I’d never heard him say anything like that before.

“We’re going into space, Dad,” I said, by way of an explanation.

“Little man,” he replied, “in your case, I think sometimes you’re already there.” I took that as a compliment and beamed. He looked back at me with his eyebrows raised.

Mom appeared in her housecoat. She smiled drowsily at me and the other boys. “Did it work?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“I think that’s wonderful. Don’t you, Homer?”

Dad had gone to the kitchen. “Wonderful,” he said, his voice afar.

Mom looked us over. “You boys want some breakfast? How about some waffles?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Later that same day, I gathered Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell in my room. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said.

Roy Lee fell back on the bed and groaned. “Every time you say that, we always end up in trouble.”

I laid out my plan. I was forming a rocket club to be called the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA), named in imitation of von Braun’s ABMA. Quentin and I were going to be in it. We were going to learn all there was about rockets and start building them. This was to be a serious thing, not playing. If the others wanted to join us, they were welcome. I figured Roy Lee would get up and walk out rather than belong to anything with Quentin in it, but instead he sat up on the bed and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Sonny, I like it. It sounds like fun. Count me in.” I think he was inspired by the success of the Explorer. Sherman and O’Dell readily agreed too.

“The Big Creek Missile Agency is hereby formed,” I said. “I’m the president. O’Dell, I’d like for you to be the treasurer and in charge of supplies. Roy Lee, because you’ve got a car, we’ll need for you to handle transportation. Sherman, if you’d take care of publicity and setting up our rocket range, I’d appreciate it. Quentin is going to be our scientist. Any questions?”

Roy Lee said, “Any girls in this club, or do you have to have a rocket in your pocket?”

“Or in your case a pencil,” O’Dell jeered at Roy Lee.

“You oughta know,” Roy Lee replied, his eyebrows dancing. O’Dell blushed. Trading insults with Roy Lee was never a good idea, even for a bright kid like O’Dell.

“Where’s our rocket range going to be?” Sherman asked me.

“We’ll have to think on that,” I said.

“There’s an old slack dump up behind the mine,” Sherman said. “That might do.”

Slack was the tailings of the mine, coal with too much rock in it. Wherever it was dumped, nothing grew. I thought Sherman had a good idea. “We’ll try it,” I agreed.

“So what do we do now?” O’Dell asked.

“We build a rocket.”

“How?”

“Got to work on that,” I admitted.

After we finished our meeting, not deciding anything else except what time we were going to meet the following weekend, the boys went home. I stopped Roy Lee at the door. “Don’t ask your brother about Dad’s spot,” I said.

Roy Lee nodded. “You don’t want to know how bad it is?”

“No, I don’t.” That about summed it up. I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

AT lunch during the following days, Quentin and I worked on how to build a rocket, sketching out crude drawings and theorizing. We were proceeding mostly by instinct. Despite a search from top to bottom at the McDowell County Library, Quentin still couldn’t find any books to help us. While we worked, both of us ate out of my lunch bag. He told me he usually skipped lunch because eating too much was unhealthy. I noticed, however, that his health regimen didn’t keep him from eating more than half of my food. When I mentioned this to Mom, she started putting in an extra sandwich because, she said, “You’re a growing boy.” I wasn’t fooled. She might as well have written QUENTIN on it in big capital letters.

One day, on our way to class after lunch, Quentin and I were walking past the Big Creek football trophy case, just outside the principal’s office, when he stopped and put his hand on the glass. “Maybe one day we’ll have a trophy in here, Sonny, for our rockets.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Absolutely not. Every spring, science students present their projects for judging at the county science fair. If you win there, you go to the state and then to the nationals. Big Creek’s never won anything, but I bet we could with our rockets.”

Quentin and I saw their reflections in the case when they came up behind us—Buck and some of the other football boys, looking huge in their green and white letter jackets. “What the hell you two morons doing in front of our trophies?” Buck demanded. He squinted past us. “Oh, no! Is that your filthy handprint on our trophy case?”

“Let’s murder these sisters,” a tackle snarled. A growl of agreement rose from the assembled giants.

We turned to face them. “I assure you chaps—” Quentin started to explain.

“I assure you chaps!” Buck mocked Quentin. “You really are a little sister, ain’t you?” He bulled his face in close to us, his chin prickly with whiskers. There was a brown chewing-tobacco stain in the lower left corner of his mouth. I could smell its sweetness on his breath. “I assure you I’m gonna kick your chapped tails. You especially, Sonny. I still owe you, big time.”

Jim came by, his latest girl on his arm. He eased her on down the hall and came over to see what was going on. He saw it was me and said, “Leave them alone, Buck.”

Jim could take him apart and Buck knew it. “I wasn’t going to hurt your little four-eyed sister moron brother,” Buck said, lying through his teeth. “But this little sister,” he said, nodding at Quentin, “I’m going to kick his tail.”

“You can kick both their tails for all I care, but do it somewhere else,” Jim said, dispelling any thought I might have had that he cared anything about me. He nodded toward the principal’s office. “I just don’t want the team to get into any trouble.”

Mr. Turner strutted out of his office at that moment. A young woman was with him. I recognized her as Miss Riley, a Concord College senior assigned to Big Creek as a student science teacher. If what I heard was correct, she would be teaching us chemistry next year. Mr. Turner was a banty-rooster kind of man who kept the entire school under his thumb. He took one look at the assembly in front of the trophy case and said, “If this hall isn’t cleared of boys with letter jackets in two seconds, I know who won’t be playing football anymore.”

Jim and Buck and the football players disappeared, almost as if they got sucked up into the ceiling, leaving Quentin and me standing exposed. Mr. Turner looked us over. “Are you two boys plotting something nefarious?”

Quentin was frightened into honesty. Besides that, he understood what nefarious meant. “I was just telling Sonny,” he said, “I think someday there will be a trophy in here for the Big Creek Missle Agency.”

Mr. Turner frowned deeply. “And what, pray tell, is the Big Creek Missile Agency?”

“Our rocket club,” I said when Quentin hesitated.

He looked at me closely. “Mr. Hickam, isn’t it? Jim’s brother? Did I not hear that you blew up your mother’s rose-garden fence? That sounds much more like a bomb than a rocket. Gentlemen, let me make this perfectly clear to you. I will not tolerate a bomb club in my school. And as for trophies, Mr. Hickam, your brother and the football team don’t need your help.”

“But I think these boys have a wonderful idea, Mr. Turner,” Miss Riley said. She smiled at me. She had an impish, freckled face. “I graduated from this high school,” she said, “and all I ever heard was football, football, football. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if science was another way to get in this trophy case?”

“That’s just what I was saying, Miss Riley!” Quentin blurted.

“I am disciplining these boys at present, Miss Riley,” Mr. Turner said, shooting Quentin a warning look. The bell rang and students started to stream into classrooms up and down the hall. “Well?” Mr. Turner demanded of us. “Don’t you have classes?”

“I’m in charge of helping students prepare for the county science fair,” Miss Riley said to us over the noise of the throng. “If you boys are interested, come and talk to me.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Quentin chirped.

I felt like strangling Quentin. All we had done was blow up a fence and stink up Coalwood with our failures. It was embarrassing. “We can’t be in any science fair,” I muttered.

Miss Riley studied me. It felt as if she could see right through me. “Why not, Sonny?”

“We just can’t,” I repeated stubbornly. I didn’t want to explain. I just wanted to get off the subject.

“Go away, boys,” Mr. Turner waved. “Quickly, now.”

I was grateful for the excuse to get away and ran for it. With his big briefcase practically dragging on the floor, Quentin couldn’t get anywhere too fast, but he caught me while I waited for the other students to file inside the door to history class. “Listen, Sonny,” he gasped, catching his breath, “we win the science fair with our rockets, it’s got to help us get on down to the Cape.”

Besides the fact we didn’t know how to build a rocket, I told him my main objection. “Quentin, we’d just embarrass ourselves. We’d be up against Welch High School students.” This was self-explanatory, I thought. Welch students came from families with fathers who were doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and bankers, and their high school was the newest, best-equipped school in the county. The Welch Daily News had stories all the time about Welch students going off to college and winning honors. Although we routinely knocked the tar out of them in football, there was no way any Big Creek student was going to beat Welch students head to head in a science fair. “You want it in the paper and everywhere else how we got stomped? How would that look to Dr. von Braun? If you have an ounce of common sense, you’ll drop this idea,” I told him, perfectly aware that he lacked that ounce.

“It’s not like you to be a pessimist,” Quentin said coldly. “I’m totally dumbfounded by your attitude. Dismayed too.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Astonished, chagrined, and saddened.”

I wasn’t going to let him bait me with his vocabulary. I just shook my head and left him standing in the doorway. I didn’t want to hear any more about it.

NEARLY every Sunday afternoon that year, I thumbed rides to War to visit Dorothy for study sessions. She seemed to enjoy my company, and it wasn’t her fault, after all, that I was in love with her. One Sunday, she stopped studying and looked across the coffee table at me. “Oh, Sonny, I’m so glad we’re such good friends!” she gushed.

“Me too, Dorothy,” I answered, lying. Never had friend been such an awful word.

Emily Sue caught me staring unhappily at Dorothy in the auditorium one morning. Dorothy was holding hands with her latest, a senior basketball player, and I had my lip out about it. Emily Sue sat down in front of me and put her arm up on the seat, looking over it at me. Because she was plump, was a brilliant scholar, and had big, round glasses that gave her face an owllike appearance, it might have been expected that Emily Sue wasn’t popular with the boys, but she was. For one thing, she was one of the best dancers in school. But to me, Emily Sue was what I came to think of as a forever friend, somebody I could tell the truth to without fear of reproach. I just instinctively knew that about her. She also seemed to possess a wisdom far beyond our years. “So what are you going to do about her?” she asked me, nodding toward Dorothy.

“Nothing I can do,” I shrugged, working hard to be nonchalant.

Emily Sue inspected me. “She likes you, Sonny, but to her you’re just her special little friend. That’s probably not ever going to change.”

Her words were like knives plunged into my heart. I abandoned all pretense. “But why?” I whined. “What’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Emily Sue said. “You’re one of the nicest, friendliest kids in this school. Everybody likes you, Sonny. You know why? You like yourself. Look at your brother. He dresses great, he’s a football star, he’s a wonderful dancer—God knows, I love to dance with him—and there’s a lot of girls after him all the time. He’s a big man on campus, but he doesn’t really have any friends. That’s why I think he goes out with so many girls. He’s trying to find someone who will like him for who he is, not because he’s a big football star. Dorothy’s the same way. She’s happy you’re her little friend but she’s going to keep looking somewhere else for love.”

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