Читать книгу Rocket Boys - Homer Hickam, Homer H. Hickam - Страница 9

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.