Читать книгу Rocket Boys - Homer Hickam, Homer H. Hickam - Страница 10

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.