Jim ducked when I threw my pencil at him and then pulled my door shut. Unbidden, a little bubble of brotherly jealousy gurgled up inside me. Who cared what Jim thought about anything? He didn’t even have to think. Dad would take care of everything for him, see that he got everything he wanted. Jim thought I was some kind of a sister. Well, at least I didn’t go around wearing pink shirts and a peroxide curl in my hair!
My first rocket had caused me to be harassed on the school bus, at school, and now in my own room. There was more to come. The following Saturday, when I went to the Big Store to buy a bottle of pop, I ran afoul of Pooky Suggs.
Pooky Suggs’s history was common knowledge in Coalwood. His father had been crushed by a slate fall about a dozen years back on a section where Dad was the foreman. To stay in Coalwood, Pooky had quit the sixth grade and gone into the mine. To anybody who’d listen, Pooky was forever complaining about having to quit school to go to work, blaming it all on Dad for getting his daddy killed. He didn’t get much sympathy. It had been his daddy’s fault, after all, that he had gone under an unsupported part of the roof to urinate, and anyway, Pooky had already been in the sixth grade for five years when he quit. Nobody in town much thought he’d ever have reached the seventh. Still, for as long as I could remember, I’d heard Pooky’s name around the house, Dad telling Mom about something that Pooky had done that was stupid, or that he’d caught him idling back in the gob again, and Mom telling Dad back he should just fire Pooky and get it done with. For some reason, Dad had never taken her up on it. Maybe he felt a little guilty about Pooky’s father, I don’t know, but he seemed to tolerate Pooky more than he did other complainers and idlers.
I avoided Pooky whenever I could, but hadn’t noticed him among the men gossiping on the Big Store steps. “Well, looky what we got here—Homer’s little rocket boy,” he said nastily. “Heard the damn thang blew up. Did your daddy help you build it?”
The men sitting on the steps turned to look at me. They were all holding paper cups for their chewing-tobacco spit. “You gonna build another one?” asked Tom Tickle, one of the single miners who lived in the Club House.
Tom was friendly. “Yes, sir, I am,” I said.
“Well, attaboy!” the step group chorused.
“Shee-it. All he can do is build a bomb,” Pooky said.
“Well, it was a damn good bomb!” Tom laughed. Pooky stood up and kicked his way through the assembly. If he had hoped to heap scorn on me, it hadn’t worked. He shoved his helmet back on his head and leaned into me, his breath mostly alcohol fumes. “You Hickams think you’re so hot, but you ain’t no better’n me or nobody else in this town.”
“Sonny didn’t say no different, Pooky,” Tom said. “Whyn’t you go sleep it off afore you get into trouble?”
Pooky turned, rocking unsteadily in his hard-toe boots. His face was all angles, with a sharp, pointed nose and a triangular chin covered with stubble. Despite the easy availability of Dr. Hale, the company dentist, his teeth were yellow and cracked. His voice was a whine that sounded like an untuned fiddle. “We need to go on strike, I’m tellin’ ya. That bastard Homer’s gonna work us all to death!”
“I don’t believe work’s ever going to kill you, Pook.” Tom grinned, and the step miners erupted in laughter.
“All y’all can just go to hell!” Pooky muttered. He probably meant it to sound tough, but it came out sort of pitiful. I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. He gave me another dirty look. “Your daddy killed my daddy,” he said. “I ain’t never gonna forget that!”
Tom stood up and tugged Pooky away from me, turning him around and pointing him across the street. “You better get on home, Pook.”
I took the opportunity to slip through the men to go inside the Big Store. I got my bottle of pop, then leaned on the counter and drank it slowly, watching through the glass doors what was going on outside. Pooky and Tom looked like they were dancing, with Pooky trying to come inside the Big Store and Tom turning him back around. To my relief, Tom finally won and Pooky staggered off. Soon afterward, all the men got up, their gossiping done. When the steps were clear, I ran outside and grabbed my bike and pedaled toward home. Near the Coalwood School, I went past a line of miners making their way to the tipple. With big grins on their faces, they all yelled “Rocket boy!” as I flashed by. What had I gotten myself into? I’d told too many people I was going to build another rocket, and now I had to do it. But how? What was the blamed secret that made a rocket fly?
THE final regular season football game ended with Big Creek winning big over Tazewell High School, just across the Virginia border. Jim sent two quarterbacks to the sidelines on stretchers and intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown. With that victory, the team had won all its games. Then the state high-school athletic association did exactly what it said it was going to do and ruled that Coach Gainer’s boys were not eligible to play in the state-championship game. Although it was no surprise, there was still an instant uproar all over the district. The Football Fathers were besieged with demands from fans and the football team to do something. Jim asked Dad every night at supper for a week after the last game what he was going to do. Dad kept saying he was looking into it. Finally, one night at supper he said he was going to go see a lawyer in Welch.
Mom put down her fork and stared at Dad in disbelief. “Homer, I don’t think that’s wise.”
Dad shoveled in a spoonful of beans and corn bread. “Elsie, I know what I’m doing,” he replied nonchalantly. He didn’t look at her.
Mom settled into a deep frown. “No, you don’t. The Charleston muckety-mucks don’t want us to play and they’re not going to let us play. No lawyer’s going to change that. You’re just asking for trouble.”
“Mom, Dad’s got to do something!” Jim begged. “We deserve to play!”
“I know you do, Jimmie,” Mom replied softly. “But sometimes we don’t get our way even when we deserve it. That’s true for everybody, even you. I know that amazes you, but that’s the way it is.”
Jim’s face went dark and he shoved his chair back from the table. “I want to be excused,” he said sullenly.
Dad held up his right hand to his face, as if to shield it from Mom’s riveting gaze. “Jim, it’s okay,” he said reassuringly. “I’m going to take care of it.”
“Homer—” Mom said in her warning tone.
“Elsie—” Dad said back in his don’t-mess-with-me tone.
Jim stood up. “Somebody better do something!” he wailed.
I made my move. The football boys, even my brother, were so easy. “You could move to Charleston and play up there,” I suggested virtuously.
Jim turned on me, his fists tightly balled. “You’re dead, Sonny.”
“Jim, go to your room,” Mom ordered. She waited until Jim stalked off and then gave me a threatening look before turning back to Dad. “Homer, just let it go,” she said.
Dad rolled his head on his neck. I could hear it creak. Ducking his head in the mine all day probably didn’t do it a lot of good. “This is none of your affair, Elsie,” he said.
“Just stop and think, that’s all I’m asking.”
“The Football Fathers—”
“If you put the brains of every one of the Football Fathers in my coffee cup, they wouldn’t fill it up. You’ve got to think for all of them.”
“We’ve made up our minds, Elsie. We’re going to Welch.”
Mom knew the Bible pretty much by heart, and she was quite capable of using it on Dad like a club. “And if the blind leadeth the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,” she told him, making her argument unassailable because it was clearly on the side of the Lord.
After an evident