R is for Rocket (5 page)

    The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.

    The Fog Horn blew.

    "Let's see what happens," said McDunn.

    He switched the Fog Horn off.

    The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of the light.

    The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.

    "McDunn!" I cried. "Switch on the horn!"

    McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fishskin glittering in webs between the fingerlike projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a caldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.

    McDunn seized my arm. "Downstairs!"

    The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. "Quick!"

    We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down toward We ducked under the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I, holding tight, while our world exploded.

    Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and be wash of the sea on the raw stones.

    That and the other sound.

    "Listen," said McDunn quietly. "Listen."

    We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone's thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night, must've thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All's well. We've rounded the cape.

    And so it went for the rest of that night.

    The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came out to dig us from our stoned-under cellar.

    "It fell apart, is all," said Mr. McDunn gravely. "We had a few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled." He pinched my arm.

    There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore.

    The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As for McDunn, he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own specifications, out of steel-reinforced concrete.  "Just in case," he said.

    The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening late and parked my car and looked across the gray waters and listened to the new horn sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out there, by itself.

    The monster?

    It never came back.

    "It's gone away," said McDunn. "It's gone back to the Deeps. It's learned you can't love anything too much in this world. It's gone into the deepest Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. Waiting and waiting."

    I sat in my car, listening. I couldn't see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.

    I sat there wishing there was something I could say.

Many nights Fiorello Bodoni would awaken to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky. He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets.

    Now, this very night, he stood half naked in the darkness, watching the fire fountains murmuring in the air. The rockets on their long wild way to Mars and Saturn and Venus!

    "Well, well, Bodoni."

    Bodoni started.

    On a milk crate, by the silent river, sat an old man who also watched the rockets through the midnight hush.

    "Oh, it's you, Bramante!"

    "Do you come out every night, Bodoni?"

    "Only for the air."

    "So? I prefer the rockets myself," said old Bramante. "I was a boy when they started. Eighty years ago, and I've never been on one yet."

    "I will ride up in one someday," said Bodoni.

    "Fool!" cried Bramante. "You'll never go. This is a rich man's world." He shook his gray head, remembering. "When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters:
the world of the future!
Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The Future becomes Now! Do
we
fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us."

    "Perhaps my
sons — "
said Bodoni.

    "No, nor
their
sons!" the old man shouted. "It's the rich who have dreams and rockets!"

    Bodoni hesitated. "Old man, I've saved three thousand dollars. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery. But every night for a month now I've been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I've made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!" His eyes were shining and dark.

    "Idiot," snapped Bramante. "How will you choose? Who will go? If you go, your wife will hate you, for you will be just a bit nearer God, in space. When you tell your amazing trip to her, over the years, won't bitterness gnaw at her?"

    "No, no!"

    "Yes! And your children? Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here? What a senseless task you will set your boys. They will think of the rocket all their lives. They will lie awake. They will be sick with wanting it. Just as you are sick now. They will want to die if they cannot go. Don't set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junkyard, not up to the stars."

    "But
—
"

    "Suppose your wife went? How would you feel, knowing she had
seen
and you had not? She would become holy. You would think of throwing her in the river. No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces."

    The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.

    "Good night," said Bodoni. "Sleep well," said the other.

    When the toast jumped from its silver box, Bodoni almost screamed. The night had been sleepless. Among his nervous children, beside his mountainous wife, Bodoni had twisted and stared at nothing. Bramante was right. Better to invest the money. Why save it when only one of the family could ride the rocket, while the others remained to melt in frustration?

    "Fiorello, eat your toast," said his wife, Maria.

    "My throat is shriveled," said Bodoni.

    The children rushed in, the three boys fighting over a toy rocket, the two girls carrying dolls which duplicated the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and Neptune, green mannequins with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers.

    "I saw the Venus rocket!" cried Paolo.

    "It took off,
whoosh!
" hissed Antonello.

    "Children!" shouted Bodoni, hands to his ears.

    They stared at him. He seldom shouted.

    Bodoni arose. "Listen, all of you," he said. "I have enough money to take one of us on the Mars rocket."

    Everyone yelled.

    "You understand?" he asked. "Only
one
of us. Who?"

    "Me, me, me!" cried the children.

    "You," said Maria.

    "You," said Bodoni to her.

    They all fell silent.

    The children reconsidered. "Let Lorenzo go — he's oldest."

    "Let Miriamne go — she's a girl!"

    "Think what you would see," said Bodoni's wife to him. But her eyes were strange. Her voice shook. "The meteors, like fish. The universe. The Moon. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning. You have a way with words."

    "Nonsense. So have you," he objected.

    Everyone trembled.

    "Here," said Bodoni unhappily. From a broom he broke straws of various lengths. "The short straw wins." He held out his tight fist. "Choose."

    Solemnly each took his turn.

    "Long straw."

    "Long straw."

    Another.

    "Long straw."

    The children finished. The room was quiet.

    Two straws remained. Bodoni felt his heart ache in him. "Now," he whispered. "Maria."

    She drew.

    "The short straw," she said.

    "Ah," sighed Lorenzo, half happy, half sad. "Mama goes to Mars."

    Bodoni tried to smile. "Congratulations. I will buy your ticket today."

    "Wait, Fiorello — "

    "You can leave next week," he murmured.

    She saw the sad eyes of her children upon her, with the smiles beneath their straight, large noses. She returned the straw slowly to her husband. "I cannot go to Mars."

    "But why not?"

    "I will be busy with another child."

    "What!"

    She would not look at him. "It wouldn't do for me to travel in my condition."

    He took her elbow. "Is this the truth?"

    "Draw again. Start over."

    "Why didn't you tell me before?" he said incredulously.

    "I didn't remember."

    "Maria, Maria," he whispered, patting her face. He turned to the children. "Draw again."

    Paolo immediately drew the short straw.

    "I go to Mars!" He danced wildly. "Thank you, Father!"

    The other children edged away. "That's swell, Paolo."

    Paolo stopped smiling to examine his parents and his brothers and sisters. "I
can
go, can't I?" he asked uncertainly.

    "Yes."

    "And you'll
like
me when I come back?"

    "Of course."

    Paolo studied the precious broomstraw on his trembling hand and shook his head. He threw it away. "I forgot. School starts. I can't go. Draw again."

    But no one would draw. A full sadness lay on them.

    "None of us will go," said Lorenzo.

    "That's best," said Maria.

    "Bramante was right," said Bodoni.

    With his breakfast curdled within him, Fiorello Bodoni worked in his junkyard, ripping metal, melting it, pouring out usable ingots. His equipment flaked apart; competition had kept him on the insane edge of poverty for twenty years.

    It was a very bad morning.

    In the afternoon a man entered the junkyard and called up to Bodoni on his wrecking machine. "Hey, Bodoni, I got some metal for you!"

    "What is it, Mr. Mathews?" asked Bodoni, listlessly.

    "A rocket ship. What's wrong? Don't you want it?"

    "Yes, yes!" He seized the man's arm, and stopped, bewildered.

    "Of course," said Mathews, "it's only a mockup.
You
know. When they plan a rocket they build a full-scale model first, of aluminum. You might make a small profit boiling her down. Let you have her for two thousand — "

    Bondoni dropped his hand. "I haven't the money."

    "Sorry. Thought I'd help you. Last time we talked you said how everyone outbid you on junk. Thought I'd slip this to you on the q.t. Well — "

    "I need new equipment. I saved money for that."

    "I understand."

    "If I bought your rocket, I wouldn't even be able to melt it down. My aluminum furnace broke down last week — "

    "Sure."

    "I couldn't possibly use the rocket if I bought it from you."

    "I know."

    Bodoni blinked and shut his eyes. He opened them and looked at Mr. Mathews. "But I am a great fool. I will take my money from the bank and give it to you."

    "But if you can't melt the rocket down — "

    "Deliver it," said Bodoni.

    "All right, if you say so. Tonight?"

    "Tonight," said Bodoni, "would be fine. Yes, I would like to have a rocket ship tonight."

    There was a moon. The rocket was white and big in the junkyard. It held the whiteness of the moon and the blueness of the stars. Bodoni looked at it and loved all of it. He wanted to pet it and lie against it, pressing it with his cheek, telling it all the secret wants of his heart.

    He stared up at it. "You are all mine," he said. "Even if you never move or spit fire, and just sit there and rust for fifty years, you are mine."

    The rocket smelled of time and distance. It was like walking into a clock. It was finished with Swiss delicacy. One might wear it on one's watch fob. "I might even sleep here tonight," Bodoni whispered excitedly.

    He sat in the pilot's seat.

    He touched a lever.