Jay Lake: Rocket Science

Who Needs the Yellow Brick Road?

Oz has got nothing on Kansas. At least it’s got nothing on Kansas Jay Lake Style. You don’t need to travel a yellow brick road to get to the Weird Stuff. You’ve just taken the first step on a path to a strange and wonderful — well maybe wonderful isn’t the right word, but strange definitely comes in here — place.

In this Kansas, you won’t find good-natured farmhands dispensing life wisdom. No cute little dogs either. Instead, you’ll find a recently returned WWII vet with a somewhat variable moral compass, a gang of elderly enforcers, the local police, the state police, Army CID, Nazis, Reds, and just wait until you meet Pegasus.

Rocket Science is Jay Lake’s first full length novel and it more than delivers on the vast promise of his short fiction. Nearly all the obsessions that drive Jay’s short fiction are on display in Rocket Science . He loves gadgets, and the gadget at the center of this story is one of his best. Jay’s fascination with United States history is on full display here as well. Jay is fascinated by conspiracy theories (and theorists), secret identities, spies, and gadgets. Did I already mention the gadgets?

I’ve known Jay as a short-story writer since late 2000. Indeed, I published his first two collections, Greetings From Lake Wu and American Sorrows . In 2004, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer on the strength of his short fiction. Here, in Rocket Science , Jay has a chance to engage his vast imagination and follow the trails of “what ifs” that drive his storytelling.

If you’ve read much of Jay’s work, you can probably guess that his background is… well… diverse. His father’s career in the foreign service took Jay and his sister all over the world. He’s lived in Taiwan, Nigeria, and even Texas. He survived high school at a New England prep school (Choate) and college at the University of Texas.

These early experiences inform much of Jay’s work. He writes about people who are not exactly in their natural element. He writes about the weirdness that underlies the ordinary. And yes, there is weirdness everywhere. Even in Kansas. Rocket Science is your ticket to glimpse a little of it. Enjoy.

When my best friend Floyd Bellamy came home from the war in Europe, Augusta, Kansas had a parade for him. The city meant to honor all the returning veterans, but the parade happened just as Floyd got off the troop train at the Santa Fe depot on the east side of town. There he was — healthy, tanned, fit, blond hair and white teeth gleaming in the Kansas summer sun, turned out in his best khakis with a chest full of medals and a jaunty scar on one cheek.

Floyd’s Nazi bayonet instantly won the loyalty of every boy in town, while his casual good looks won the heart of every girl. Mary Ann Dinwiddy had a prior claim that she quickly enforced with a long, slow kiss in front of Mayor Cooper, Bertha Shore from the Augusta Daily Gazette , and various assembled dignitaries on the reviewing stand.

So Floyd stood there in front of the reviewing stand on the bricks of State Street with Mary Ann, prom queen of 1940, hanging on his arm in her best silk stockings and a polka dot dress. He waved at the high school band, smiled at the Masons and the Shriners, saluted the VFW. Half of Butler County was out to watch the parade, and Floyd took center stage in their minds.

Later, we sat in Lehr’s having coffee and cherry pie, on the house for Floyd. The whole restaurant bustled around us, dishes and steam and the smell of fryer grease conspiring to leave a little zone of respect and quiet for the war veteran and his friends. My bad leg bothered me more than usual, the ghost of childhood polio, and I felt crabby from the heat. Floyd and Mary Ann looked as if they had stepped out of a Hollywood poster. He’d picked up a couple of female admirers, who managed to ignore me completely — even Lois, who I’d taken out from time to time over the years.

The way it had always been with Floyd.

He was telling us about the Battle of the Bulge, him trapped in burnt-out tank while half the German army marched by in one direction, then marched back the other two days later. “You should have been there, Vernon. Half the gosh darned Wehrmacht — oh, golly girls, I’m sorry. Pardon my French.” Floyd actually blushed. I remembered him in junior high school, practicing that blush in a mirror. He could wiggle his ears, too. Anything for the girls.

Sometimes I hated my best friend.

“I’m trapped in this tank with these two poor Gusses who got it when our tank took a shell, and—”

“Floyd,” I interrupted. I’d had enough. “You were in the Air Corps. What were you doing inside a tank?”

Floyd gave me one of his patented double-edged looks, the kind that had promised Indian burns or wedgies when we were kids. “I was on detached duty. Intelligence work, you know.” He winked at the girls. “They had a picked crew of us flyboys on the ground looking for secret German aeronautical stuff OSS thought was hidden in Belgium. Hush-hush, can’t discuss.”

Floyd was no pilot, I knew that for sure. He had shipped over as a mechanic, maintaining those big Pratt & Whitney engines on the B-24. But I wasn’t going to bother my best friend with facts again. He had a story to tell, and he was going to tell it come hell or high water.

Floyd cleared his throat. “ As I was saying , I’m trapped in this burnt out tin can with two dead GI’s — God rest their souls.” He paused to bow his head in a brief moment of respect. “There I am peering out through the driver’s periscope, watching the Jerries beat a retreat from our boys, when something really unusual went by.”

“What did you see?” asked Lois, on cue. Floyd was getting her best face for free, the look that I had to pop for a dozen roses and dinner in Wichita to see. I loved Floyd like I loved my brother Ricky, but right then I could have blackened both his eyes for him. Of course, my brother broke my arm once, before the big creep went off and got killed under MacArthur on some jungle trail in the Philippines.

“It was a cargo convoy, pretty small — just three vehicles. But there were SS troopers escorting it, and the troops were letting it by. That was kind of unusual, you see. By that time in the war the Germans were having a rough time of it, so combat units always got top priority. The SS had better things to do than ride herd on supplies.”

“What was on the trucks?” asked Mary Ann.

Floyd winked again. “I can’t rightly tell you. That’s a matter of national security and I’ve been sworn to secrecy. But you can bet I followed those trucks and snooped a look at their cargo that night.”

As a matter of fact, I did have a security clearance, because of my work in the aircraft industry. I knew perfectly well that people involved in security matters never talked about it. All through the latter part of the war, since I graduated from Kansas State, Lois thought I was a parts manager at the Boeing plant in Wichita. I really did that job, part-time, but I had actually been working with a combined team from Boeing and North American on improving ordnance deployment from bomb bays. Still, there wasn’t much point in stopping Floyd when he got going. I could tell from the soft, shiny look in Mary Ann’s eyes that Floyd was going to get whatever he wanted tonight.