Homer Hickam - Rocket Boys

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 upside 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 highschool 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 mantrip 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.