He had said it too easily. “Let’s hear it, then,” I said, doubtfully.
He raised one of his bony shoulders in a shrug. “What’s in it for me?”
“What do you want?”
“To help you build the next one.”
That was a surprise. “If you know so much, why don’t you build your own?” I demanded.
Quentin built a little church with his hands. “I’ve considered building a rocket for some time, if you must know. Practical reasons, unfortunately, have prevented me from taking action. It takes teamwork to build a rocket, and materials. My observation of you is that you have certain … leadership abilities that I do not.” He locked his eyes on me. They were intense, almost like they were capable of shooting rays. “The other boys will follow you,” he said. “And you, being the Coalwood superintendent’s son, can probably get all the materials you need.”
His ray-gun eyes made me want to look away, but I didn’t. “What’s your angle?” I demanded.
“Ho-ho!” he exclaimed. “The same as you, old chap! If I learn how to build a rocket, I’ll stand a better chance of getting on down at the Cape.”
“First you’ve got to go to college,” I reminded him.
“I’ll go to college,” he said resolutely. “But it won’t hurt to get some good practical rocket-building experience under my belt.” He put out his hand. “How about it? You want to team up?”
It was the best offer I’d gotten since I’d started my rocket-building career, but I was still a little reluctant. I didn’t have much of a reputation at Big Creek, but it was still better than Quentin’s. When I didn’t respond to his hand, he grabbed mine and shook it, big strokes up and down. I hastily pulled my hand away and looked around to see if anybody had noticed. I knew the football boys would accuse me of holding hands with Quentin if any one of them had seen it.
“So what do you know?” I demanded, my face flushed with the potential embarrassment of it all.
“Calm down, old chap,” he said. “All shall become perfectly clear.” He leaned back and took a deep breath and then began to talk just as if he was reading something straight from a book. “The Chinese are reputed to have invented rocketry. Something called ‘Chinese arrows’ are mentioned in Europe and the Middle East as far back as the thirteenth century. The British used rockets later aboard their warships during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. That’s where ‘the rocket’s red glare’ comes from in ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ Then there was the Russian Tsiolkovsky, Goddard the American, and von Braun, of course. Each of them added to the body of rocket knowledge. Tsiolkovsky was a theorist, Goddard applied engineering principles, and—”
I stopped him. “I don’t need to know this stuff. I need to know how a rocket works.”
Quentin cocked his head. “But that’s so elementary. Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
I remembered from one science class or another something about Newton, but I couldn’t put my finger on his laws. “How do you know that?”
“Read it somewhere.”
“Read it where?”
Quentin frowned, disturbed at my attempt to cut through his bull. “A physics book, I suppose,” he said stiffly. “Can’t exactly say which one. I thumb over to Welch every Saturday to the county library. I tend to pick out random shelves and just read every book on it until I’m done.”
I could see it was going to be necessary to be more specific with Quentin. “What kind of fuel does a rocket use?”
“The Chinese used black powder.”
“Black powder?”
He looked at me carefully, as if to determine if I was joking. “Black powder. It contains potassium nitrate—saltpeter, you know—and charcoal and sulfur.”
Saltpeter? Quentin sighed and then explained in some detail the chemical’s properties. It was an oxidizer, which, when combined with other chemicals, produced heat and gas, necessary to make a rocket fly. “It can also kill you down there,” he finished up, pointing at his crotch.
“What do you mean?”
“It fixes men so they can’t … you know.”
“What?”
Quentin flushed. “You know.” He straightened a crooked finger. “That.”
“Really?”
“Well, that’s what I read.”
I thought I’d better get back to rockets. “Where can I buy some of this black powder?”
“You can’t buy it, far as I know,” he said. “You’ve got to mix it up. Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, that’s what we need. Can you get it?”
I wasn’t certain, but I wasn’t going to let him know it. “I’ll get right on it.”
Quentin grinned broadly and suddenly started to rattle on like I was his best friend. He opened up his briefcase and showed me all the books within, most of them on general science, but one of them a novel titled Tropic of Cancer. “You want to know about girls? This is the one,” he said slyly.
“I already know about girls.”
He tapped the book. “No, you don’t.”
When the bell rang and we stood up, I noticed for the first time Quentin’s worn, faded shirt, thin at the elbows, and his patched cotton pants and his scuffed, ankle-high shoes. Quentin wasn’t a Coalwood boy. He came from Bartley. He was one of the kids my mother told me to notice. The mine at Bartley was always having cutoffs and strikes, and in the last few years, many Bartley families had slid into poverty and misery. Quentin’s father was probably out of a job. In 1957 southern West Virginia, you wouldn’t likely starve if you didn’t have any money. There was always bread and commodity cheese you could get from the government. But that was about all there was.
Roy Lee stopped me in the hall. “What were you talking to that moron Quentin about? And did I see you holding his hand?”
I was peeved enough at Roy Lee to not answer, but then I figured it would aggravate him more to tell the truth. “We’re going to build a rocket, him and me.”
A surge of kids passed us, Dorothy Plunk among them. “Hi, Sonny, Roy Lee,” she called angelically. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Roy Lee shook his head and leaned against the lockers. “Gawd almighty. You want to stop all chance of ever having any kind of social life? Dorothy Plunk sees you and Quentin hanging out together, she’s going to lose interest right there.”
I looked after her, trying not to stare at her cute little bottom swinging back and forth down the hall. “Dorothy doesn’t care anything about me, anyway,” I said, sort of breathless.
Roy Lee didn’t try to hide what he was looking at. He watched Dorothy all the way down the hall. “Whew,” he whistled. He pulled his eyes back to me. “You got good taste anyway, Sonny. Why don’t you ask her out? Double date with me next weekend. We’ll go parking at the Caretta fan.”
“She’d just say no.”
Roy Lee shook his head again as if I was the burden of his life. “If you don’t ask her out, I will.”
“You wouldn’t do that!” I bleated.
He wiggled his eyebrows at me, his crooked grin clearly salacious. “Oh, but I would!”
Roy Lee had me in a box. If he asked Dorothy out and she went, I wasn’t sure I could live through it, knowing what Roy Lee was likely to try