Rocket Boys. Homer Hickam
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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