October Sky: Chapters 5–9

He could expound on nearly any subject in class until the teacher had to ask him to stop, and if he’d ever made less than a hundred on a test, I wasn’t aware of it.

He wiggled his eyebrows at me, his crooked grin clearly salacious.

“Sonny’s nice,” Emily Sue said succinctly.

She caught me looking once and gave me a demure little smile while I blushed.

If a miner got into enough debt with a company store, the company stopped paying the miner with U.S. dollars and issued his pay in the form of scrip—company money good only in the company store. It was an insidious system.

Junior was a rotund little man with a cherubic face, who was as smart as a whip and liked all over the town.

With Dandy and Poteet watching us furtively from a dark nook beside the coal furnace, we began to work.

Dorothy’s father, a lanky, nearly bald man, stepped in from the kitchen and listlessly shook my hand.

“There’s an old slack dump up behind the mine,” Sherman said.

Mr. Turner looked us over. “Are you two boys plotting something nefarious?”
Quentin was frightened into honesty. Besides that, he understood what nefarious meant.

“It’s not like you to be a pessimist,” Quentin said coldly. “I’m totally dumbfounded by your attitude. Dismayed too.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Astonished, chagrined, and saddened.”

But to me, Emily Sue was what I came to think of as a forever friend, somebody I could tell the truth to without fear of reproach.

Finally, our trial-and-error method resulted in a combination of ingredients that seemed to have the most flash and smoke to it. Quentin had an idea on the propellant.

I was almost out of scrip. I’d soon be cutting into my paltry stash of U.S. dollars.

When Quentin and I threw the black-powder cake in the hot-water heater on the following Saturday, it flashed vigorously. “Prodigious, old man!” he cried, using his latest big word for anything he liked.

I gripped the chain-link fence and edged down the mountain until I stood on the precipice of the ditch.

As long as my washer was well attached, soldering sounded good to me, although I wasn’t exactly certain what soldering was.

“Love the name,” Quentin said. “Maybe the gods will help us, thinking we are suitably respectful of pernicious fate.”

He ran his fingers around the base of the rocket, studied carefully the soldered washer, sniffed speculatively at the cured black-powder mix.

“O’Dell,” Quentin replied, in all sincerity, “I’m worried that your insatiable cupidity will ultimately prove to be something less than a virtue for our club.”

The other boys, I assumed, had gone home to hunker down for the day, hoping without much hope that their parents wouldn’t hear about our errant rocket.

He was working on the big steel-cutting maw of a continuous mining machine. He saw me at the door and waved me inside. “You see, Sonny?” he said, pointing at the maw. “The operator hit rock instead of coal. The teeth have been broken off. I will build new ones.”

Revulsion and shame welled up inside me. I had acted stupidly, but Dad’s reaction was vile and despicable.

“Yo,” Quentin answered, shaken from some distant reverie.

“You know,” he cogitated, his brow furrowing, “there should be a better system.”

He plucked a beggar’s lice—endemic in West Virginia—off his pants leg and inspected the tiny fuzzy seed that hitched rides on anything or anybody who walked through the woods.

“That’s the way I’ll mix it and grind it for our next rocket,” I told him, and he was mollified.

Rather than hammering nails with anger, what if he had instead gone to his son and shown his love with his time, his interest, his generosity? Perhaps the holes in the door are a reflection of the father’s petulance more than his love?

Fathers, I beseech you to seek out your straying sons and rescue them by keeping their dreams alive.

A moment before, he seemed to be lifted high above the congregation, carried aloft by his own rhetoric.

On February 5, 1958, the hapless Vanguard team tried again for orbit and failed, although this time their rocket managed to at least clear the gantry before it blew up.

The faction she led in the Sub-Deb girls’ club had been admonished to stop wearing low-cut dresses, smoking in the rest rooms, and sneaking out of class to smooch with boys in the band-instrument storeroom.

The faction she led in the Sub-Deb girls’ club had been admonished to stop wearing low-cut dresses, smoking in the rest rooms, and sneaking out of class to smooch with boys in the band-instrument storeroom.

There was a murmur of laughter, quickly smothered by dour looks from the other students.

He showed his displeasure by throwing his books on the living-room floor and stomping up and down the steps and slamming doors and yelling at Dad the moment he got home from work for causing the debacle.

I entered the immaculate little shop, redolent of freshly sawn pine and oak, and found him working at a shrieking band saw.

Beside a mountain stream, O’Dell and I worked at a clear place, picking and shoveling rich, black West Virginia loam into the truck.

The next day, after his garbage run, O’Dell borrowed his dad’s truck and he and Sherman and I went up the tortuous trail to one of the big fans that drove air through the mines.

Beside the blockhouse, we erected a flagpole, of two-inch galvanized pipe discovered abandoned alongside a gas wellhead up Mudhole Hollow (Mr. Duncan, the company plumber, told me about it).

My father said it was done that way so the economic clout of the mining industry would be clear when all the miners showed up on vacation at the same time.

The rocket leapt off the pad with a louder-than-ever hiss and then streaked nearly out of sight. I climbed out of the blockhouse and caught sight of the wisp of its contrail as it fell downrange.

“Maybe a little trigonometry would help you figure it out,” Jake said.
We didn’t know anything about trigonometry.

“What’s the hardest thing you ever learned, Dad?” I asked abruptly.
He leaned on the rail of the stoop. “Entropy,” he said finally.
I didn’t understand the word and he knew it. “Entropy is the tendency of everything to move toward confusion and disorder as time passes,” he explained.

“It’s part of the second law of thermodynamics.”
I must have looked blank. “No matter how perfect the thing,” he continued patiently, “the moment it’s created it begins to be destroyed.”

I scampered up the ladder to the Club House roof. Sherman doggedly hopped rung to rung on one foot.