Homer Hickam - Rocket Boys

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?”