Homer Hickam - Rocket Boys

I ran in the direction that Tex pointed, but it soon became apparent that Dr. von Braun was gone. Disappointed, I returned to find that I had missed another visit, this one from the judges to leave a certificate of my prize and a beautiful gold and silver medal. Tex pounded my back with the joy of it. He’d come in second, but as far as I was concerned, we’d both won. I went to make my second long-distance call ever.

ISTEPPED off the bus in Bluefield to a sea of familiar faces accompanied by applause and cheers, brandishing the surprise medal I had garnered. The first thing I heard was, “The strike’s settled!” from Mr. Caton. Before I could ask what had happened or how my hardware got made in time, Roy Lee pulled me aside. “Sonny, Miss Riley’s in the hospital.”

Mom came over. Dad waited at the Buick. Mr. Dubonnet and Mr. Caton were loading my stuff in its trunk. “Go on with the boys,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything later.”

QUENTIN, Roy Lee, Sherman, O’Dell, Billy, and I crept down the quiet, polished halls of Stevens Clinic in Welch. We found Jake sitting beside Miss Riley’s bed. She was propped up, looking very pale, and there was a tube leading into her arm. “Hi, boys,” she whispered to us. “Sonny. Back from the fair. How did you do?”

I showed her the medal. “You did it,” she said. “I always knew you would.” She found a little smile for each of us. “I’m so proud to be your teacher.”

“Miss Riley—” I realized suddenly that I loved her, that I had never known and never would know anyone as good as she.

“Can I hold the medal?” she asked.

“It’s yours,” I managed to choke out. “We wouldn’t have won it without you.” I pinned it to her pillow.

She turned her pretty face to look at it. “I just got you the book—”

“You did so much more than that!” I tried without success to swallow the thickness in my throat. I was raging inside. Why had God made her sick? Where was the grace of the Lord that Reverend Lanier and Little Richard talked about? Was this an example of it, knocking down a young woman who wanted only to teach?

When she closed her eyes and seemed to drift away, I looked at Jake. He shook his head and led us outside. “She’s just gone to sleep. They keep her pretty well doped up.”

“Is she going to die?” I asked, nearly inaudibly. I had trouble saying the words.

He didn’t answer me directly. “She’ll be back teaching after the doctors build her up a bit. Your medal will give her a good boost, I know.”

Jake walked us outside to Roy Lee’s car. He split me off from the others. “Don’t let this spoil what you did,” he said. “You should be proud.”

I shook my head. “Jake, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Jake jammed his hands in his pockets, sighed, and looked up at the mountains. “I’m not a religious man, Sonny. You want parables and proverbs, go to church. But I believe there’s a plan for each of us—you, me, Freida too. It doesn’t help to get mad about it or want to whip up on God about it. It’s just the way it is. You’ve got to accept it.”

“Is that you, Jake?” I asked him scornfully. “You accept things the way they are? Is that why you drink?”

He faced me. “I drink sometimes so I don’t have to think,” he said. “Other times just because it feels good. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know—feeling good. You ought to give it a try sometime, maybe give beating up on yourself a rest.”

I sagged inwardly. “You know, I’d give my right arm to be like you, to take pleasure from life.”

“I know you love living, Sonny. It shows right through you.” He looked around. “These old mountains can weigh anybody down. When you get away from them… well, there’s a whole other world out there. You’ll see.”

I thought about what he was saying, about what lay ahead of me. I didn’t mean to say it. I thought it and it just popped out. “I’m scared of the future, Jake.”

Jake turned toward me, but hesitated. He’d been in West Virginia long enough for our terrible stolidity to rub off on him. Then, with a laugh, he threw his arm over my shoulders and hugged me close. “Old son, we’re all scared of that.”

Gratefully, I leaned against him and thought of Saturday nights long ago when once my father carried me up the stairs.

IT TOOK ME a while, but I finally managed to piece together what happened in Coalwood after my nozzles got stolen. The boys gave me their version, Mr. Caton told me about his part, and then I heard the rest from my mother. In less than an hour, the fence-line telegraph had alerted the whole town that I was in trouble. Mr. Caton headed for the machine shop, but a line of union men, including Mr. Dubonnet, stopped him. Although Dad said the best thing to do was nothing, Mom made him drive her to the machine shop. Then he saw Mr. Dubonnet and got out of the Buick and went nose to nose with him. Roy Lee said it was as if the two of them were finally where they wanted to be, with nothing to keep them apart.

Mom was ready to let them fight it out, she said, but Mr. Caton pushed in between and said, “Now, look here, you won’t find a better union man than me and I know we don’t have no contract, but we’ve got to help that boy. He’s not up there just for himself. He’s up there for Coalwood.”

That was when Mr. Bundini showed up in his jeep and told everybody to break it up. O’Dell said Mr. Bundini had a big smile and went over and tapped Mr. Dubonnet on the shoulder and said, “How about we talk a little, John?”

“Oh, your dad was mad,” Mom said, frowning at the memory. “Martin Bundini just left him standing there and went off with his arm over John’s shoulder. He was so mad he started to cough, and that made him even madder.”

Roy Lee, who heard most of the inside union talk from his brother, said Mr. Dubonnet told Mr. Bundini there wasn’t all that much to talk about, that the men would be back to work as soon as a unionmanagement panel was set up that would approve the list of men who were to be cut off.

“That’s not all he wanted,” Sherman shrugged, telling me the side he heard from his father, which was the management side. “He also wanted all the men who had been cut off last time to be hired back because it had been done wrong.”

“Well, that’s all John said he wanted,” Mom told me in her version. “But John’s smart. He wanted something else, something personal out of your dad. Your dad’s smart too. He knew it.”

“Mr. Bundini was in his glory,” Sherman laughed. “He was being the great peacemaker. But he wasn’t telling the union everything he knew either.”

“Let’s see if I understand you correctly, John,” Mom imitated Mr. Bundini’s Yankee accent. “The company still says the number of miners who will be cut off. Then this panel agrees who those men will be, based on seniority and union rules. Is that it? And hiring back the men too?”

Roy Lee rolled his eyes. “Your dad finally stopped coughing and grabbed Mr. Bundini and argued with him. ‘Don’t do it, Martin!’ he said right out loud. Mr. Dubonnet was laughing the whole time. He’d already won and he knew it.”

I hated that it was my rockets that had made Dad give in to the union. “Don’t you worry about that, Sonny,” Mom said. “This time he needed to give in.”

“Mr. Bundini took your dad aside and they started whispering back and forth,” Roy Lee said. “Your dad was shaking his head back and forth just as hard and fast as Mr. Bundini was nodding his up and down.”