“Or in your case a pencil,” O’Dell jeered at Roy Lee.
“You oughta know,” Roy Lee replied, his eyebrows dancing. O’Dell blushed. Trading insults with Roy Lee was never a good idea, even for a bright kid like O’Dell.
“Where’s our rocket range going to be?” Sherman asked me.
“We’ll have to think on that,” I said.
“There’s an old slack dump up behind the mine,” Sherman said. “That might do.”
Slack was the tailings of the mine, coal with too much rock in it. Wherever it was dumped, nothing grew. I thought Sherman had a good idea. “We’ll try it,” I agreed.
“So what do we do now?” O’Dell asked.
“We build a rocket.”
“How?”
“Got to work on that,” I admitted.
After we finished our meeting, not deciding anything else except what time we were going to meet the following weekend, the boys went home. I stopped Roy Lee at the door. “Don’t ask your brother about Dad’s spot,” I said.
Roy Lee nodded. “You don’t want to know how bad it is?”
“No, I don’t.” That about summed it up. I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
AT lunch during the following days, Quentin and I worked on how to build a rocket, sketching out crude drawings and theorizing. We were proceeding mostly by instinct. Despite a search from top to bottom at the McDowell County Library, Quentin still couldn’t find any books to help us. While we worked, both of us ate out of my lunch bag. He told me he usually skipped lunch because eating too much was unhealthy. I noticed, however, that his health regimen didn’t keep him from eating more than half of my food. When I mentioned this to Mom, she started putting in an extra sandwich because, she said, “You’re a growing boy.” I wasn’t fooled. She might as well have written QUENTIN on it in big capital letters.
One day, on our way to class after lunch, Quentin and I were walking past the Big Creek football trophy case, just outside the principal’s office, when he stopped and put his hand on the glass. “Maybe one day we’ll have a trophy in here, Sonny, for our rockets.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Absolutely not. Every spring, science students present their projects for judging at the county science fair. If you win there, you go to the state and then to the nationals. Big Creek’s never won anything, but I bet we could with our rockets.”
Quentin and I saw their reflections in the case when they came up behind us—Buck and some of the other football boys, looking huge in their green and white letter jackets. “What the hell you two morons doing in front of our trophies?” Buck demanded. He squinted past us. “Oh, no! Is that your filthy handprint on our trophy case?”
“Let’s murder these sisters,” a tackle snarled. A growl of agreement rose from the assembled giants.
We turned to face them. “I assure you chaps—” Quentin started to explain.
“I assure you chaps!” Buck mocked Quentin. “You really are a little sister, ain’t you?” He bulled his face in close to us, his chin prickly with whiskers. There was a brown chewing-tobacco stain in the lower left corner of his mouth. I could smell its sweetness on his breath. “I assure you I’m gonna kick your chapped tails. You especially, Sonny. I still owe you, big time.”
Jim came by, his latest girl on his arm. He eased her on down the hall and came over to see what was going on. He saw it was me and said, “Leave them alone, Buck.”
Jim could take him apart and Buck knew it. “I wasn’t going to hurt your little four-eyed sister moron brother,” Buck said, lying through his teeth. “But this little sister,” he said, nodding at Quentin, “I’m going to kick his tail.”
“You can kick both their tails for all I care, but do it somewhere else,” Jim said, dispelling any thought I might have had that he cared anything about me. He nodded toward the principal’s office. “I just don’t want the team to get into any trouble.”
Mr. Turner strutted out of his office at that moment. A young woman was with him. I recognized her as Miss Riley, a Concord College senior assigned to Big Creek as a student science teacher. If what I heard was correct, she would be teaching us chemistry next year. Mr. Turner was a banty-rooster kind of man who kept the entire school under his thumb. He took one look at the assembly in front of the trophy case and said, “If this hall isn’t cleared of boys with letter jackets in two seconds, I know who won’t be playing football anymore.”
Jim and Buck and the football players disappeared, almost as if they got sucked up into the ceiling, leaving Quentin and me standing exposed. Mr. Turner looked us over. “Are you two boys plotting something nefarious?”
Quentin was frightened into honesty. Besides that, he understood what nefarious meant. “I was just telling Sonny,” he said, “I think someday there will be a trophy in here for the Big Creek Missle Agency.”
Mr. Turner frowned deeply. “And what, pray tell, is the Big Creek Missile Agency?”
“Our rocket club,” I said when Quentin hesitated.
He looked at me closely. “Mr. Hickam, isn’t it? Jim’s brother? Did I not hear that you blew up your mother’s rose-garden fence? That sounds much more like a bomb than a rocket. Gentlemen, let me make this perfectly clear to you. I will not tolerate a bomb club in my school. And as for trophies, Mr. Hickam, your brother and the football team don’t need your help.”
“But I think these boys have a wonderful idea, Mr. Turner,” Miss Riley said. She smiled at me. She had an impish, freckled face. “I graduated from this high school,” she said, “and all I ever heard was football, football, football. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if science was another way to get in this trophy case?”
“That’s just what I was saying, Miss Riley!” Quentin blurted.
“I am disciplining these boys at present, Miss Riley,” Mr. Turner said, shooting Quentin a warning look. The bell rang and students started to stream into classrooms up and down the hall. “Well?” Mr. Turner demanded of us. “Don’t you have classes?”
“I’m in charge of helping students prepare for the county science fair,” Miss Riley said to us over the noise of the throng. “If you boys are interested, come and talk to me.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Quentin chirped.
I felt like strangling Quentin. All we had done was blow up a fence and stink up Coalwood with our failures. It was embarrassing. “We can’t be in any science fair,” I muttered.
Miss Riley studied me. It felt as if she could see right through me. “Why not, Sonny?”
“We just can’t,” I repeated stubbornly. I didn’t want to explain. I just wanted to get off the subject.
“Go away, boys,” Mr. Turner waved. “Quickly, now.”
I was grateful for the excuse to get away and ran for it. With his big briefcase practically dragging on the floor, Quentin couldn’t get anywhere too fast, but he caught me while I waited for the other students to file inside the door to history class. “Listen, Sonny,” he gasped, catching his breath, “we win the science fair with our rockets, it’s got to help us get on down to the Cape.”
Besides the fact we didn’t know how to build a rocket, I told him my main objection. “Quentin, we’d just embarrass ourselves. We’d be up against Welch High School students.” This was self-explanatory, I thought. Welch students came from families with fathers who were doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and bankers, and their high school was the newest, best-equipped