Rocket Boys Read online

  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 perfection? She was to be worshiped, not handled. Happy in my daydream, I cut and wrote, wrote and cut. I was inspired. I was doing the work for Dorothy, my partner on this worm—and maybe more. Over the remains of a giant formaldehyde-soaked worm, I made up my mind to win her.

  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.

  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.