R is for Rocket (6 page)

    He hummed in his shut mouth, his eyes closed.

    The humming grew louder, louder, higher, higher, wilder, stranger, more exhilarating, trembling in him and leaning him forward and pulling him and the ship in a roaring silence and in a kind of metal screaming, while his fists flew over the controls, and his shut eyes quivered, and the sound grew and grew until it was a fire, a strength, a lifting and a pushing of power that threatened to tear him in half. He gasped. He hummed again and again, and did not stop, for it could not be stopped, it could only go on, his eyes tighter, his heart furious. "Taking off!" he screamed.
The jolting concussion! The thunder!
"The Moon!" he cried, eyes blind, tight. "The meteors!"
The silent rush in volcanic light.
"
Mars.
Oh, Yes! Mars! Mars!"

    He fell back, exhausted and panting. His shaking hands came loose of the controls and his head tilted wildly. He sat for a long time, breathing out and in, his heart slowing.

    Slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes.

    The junkyard was still there.

    He sat motionless. He looked at the heaped piles of metal for a minute, his eyes never leaving them. Then, leaping up, he kicked the levers. "Take off, blast you!"

    The ship was silent.

    "I'll show you!" he cried.

    Out in the night air, stumbling, he started the fierce motor of his terrible wrecking machine and advanced upon the rocket. He maneuvered the massive weights into the moonlit sky. He readied his trembling hands to plunge the weights, to smash, to rip apart this insolently false dream, this silly thing for which he had paid his money, which would not move, which would not do his bidding. "I'll teach you!" he shouted.

    But his hand stayed.

    The silver rocket lay in the light of the moon. And beyond the rocket stood the yellow lights of his home, a block away, burning warmly. He heard the family radio playing some distant music. He sat for half an hour considering the rocket and the house lights, and his eyes narrowed and grew wide. He stepped down from the wrecking machine and began to walk, and as he walked he began to laugh, and when he reached the back door of his house he took a deep breath and called, "Maria, Maria, start packing. We're going to Mars!"

    "Oh!"

    "Ah!"

    "I can't
believe
it!"

    "You will, you will."

    The children balanced in the windy yard, under the glowing rocket, not touching it yet. They started to cry.

    Maria looked at her husband. "What have you done?" she said. "Taken our money for this? It will never fly."

    "It will fly," he said, looking at it.

    "Rocket ships cost millions. Have you millions?"

    "It will fly," he repeated steadily. "Now, go to the house, all of you. I have phone calls to make, work to do. Tomorrow we leave! Tell no one, understand? It is a secret."

    The children edged off from the rocket, stumbling. He saw their small, feverish faces in the house windows, far away.

    Maria had not moved. "You have ruined us," she said. "Our money used for this — this thing. When it should have been spent on equipment."

    "You will see," he said.

    Without a word she turned away.

    "God help me," he whispered, and started to work.

    Through the midnight hours trucks arrived, packages were delivered, and Bodoni, smiling, exhausted his bank account. With blowtorch and metal stripping he assaulted the rocket, added, took away, worked fiery magics and secret insults upon it. He bolted nine ancient automobile motors into the rocket's empty engine room. Then he welded the engine room shut, so none could see his hidden labor.

    At dawn he entered the kitchen. "Maria," he said, "I'm ready for breakfast."

    She would not speak to him.

    At sunset he called to the children. "We're ready! Come on!" The house was silent.

    "I've locked them in the closet," said Maria.

    "What do you mean?" he demanded.

    "You'll be killed in that rocket," she said. "What kind of rocket can you buy for two thousand dollars? A bad one!"

    "Listen to me, Maria."

    "It will blow up. Anyway, you are no pilot."

    "Nevertheless, I can fly
this
ship. I have fixed it."

    "You have gone mad," she said.

    "Where is the key to the closet?"

    "I have it here."

    He put out his hand. "Give it to me."

    She handed it to him. "You will kill them."

    "No, no."

    "Yes, you will. I
feel
it."

    He stood before her. "You won't come along?"

    "I'll stay here," she said.

    "You will understand; you will see then," he said, and smiled. He unlocked the closet. "Come, children. Follow your father."

    "Good-bye, good-bye, Mama!"

    She stayed in the kitchen window, looking out at them, very straight and silent.

    At the door of the rocket the father said, "Children, this is a swift rocket. We will be gone only a short while. You must come back to school, and I to my business." He took each of their hands in turn. "Listen. This rocket is very old and will fly only
one
more journey. It will not fly again. This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide."

    "Yes, Papa."

    "Listen, keep your ears clean. Smell the smells of a rocket.
Feel. Remember.
So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives."

    "Yes, Papa."

    The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The airlock hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. "Ready?" he called.

    "Ready!" all replied.

    "Blast-off!" He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. "We're moving! We're off! Look!"

    "Here comes the Moon!"

    The moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. "There's Earth!" "There's Mars!"

    The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.

    "Good," whispered Bodoni, alone.

    He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

    He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

    No. Bodoni smiled.

    All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.

    Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

    Maria stood in the kitchen window.

    He waved to her and smiled.

    He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

    The sun was rising.

    Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion in the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars come up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

    He awoke.

    Red Mars floated near the rocket.

    "Papa!" The children thrashed to be free.

    Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

    At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

    "We are home," said Bodoni.

    They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, if they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.

    "I have ham and eggs for all of you," said Maria, at the kitchen door.

    "Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!"

    "Yes," she said.

    At bedtime the children gathered before Bodoni. "We want to thank you, Papa."

    "It was nothing."

    "We will remember it for always, Papa. We will never forget."

    Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. "What's this?" he cried.

    "You're the best father in the world," she whispered.

    "Why?"

    "Now I see," she said. "I understand."

    She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. "Is it a very lovely journey?" she asked.

    "Yes," he said.

    "Perhaps," she said, "perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?"

    "Just a little one, perhaps," he said.

    "Thank you," she said. "Good night."

    "Good night," said Fiorello Bodoni.

The electrical fireflies were hovering above Mother's dark hair to light her path. She stood in her bedroom door looking out at me as I passed in the silent hall. "You
will
help me keep him here this time, won't you?" she asked.

    "I guess so," I said.

    "Please." The fireflies cast moving bits of light on her white face. "This time he mustn't go away again."

    "All right," I said, after standing there a moment. "But it won't do any good; it's no use."

    She went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after her like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I heard her say, faintly, "We've got to try, anyway."

    Other fireflies followed me to my room. When the weight of my body cut a circuit in the bed, the fireflies winked out. It was midnight, and my mother and I waited, our rooms separated by darkness, in bed. The bed began to rock me and sing to me. I touched a switch; the singing and rocking stopped. I didn't want to sleep. I didn't want to sleep at all.

    This night was no different from a thousand others in our time. We would wake nights and feel the cool air turn hot, feel the fire in the wind, or see the walls burned a bright color for an instant, and then we knew
his
rocket was over our house — his rocket, and the oak trees swaying from the concussion. And I would lie there, eyes wide, panting, and Mother in her room. Her voice would come to me over the interroom radio:

    "Did you feel it?"

    And I would answer, "That was him, all right."

    That was my father's ship passing over our town, a small town where space rockets never came, and we would lie awake for the next two hours, thinking. "Now Dad's landed in Springfield, now he's on the tarmac, now he is signing the papers, now he's in the helicopter, now he's over the river, now the hills, now he's settling the helicopter in at the little airport at Green Village here. . . ." And the night would be half over when, in our separate cool beds, Mother and I would be listening, listening. "Now he's walking down Bell Street. He always walks . . . never takes a cab . . . now across the park, now turning the corner of Oakhurst and
now
. . ."

    I lifted my head from my pillow. Far down the street, coming closer and closer, smartly, quickly, briskly — footsteps. Now turning in at our house, up the porch steps. And we were both smiling in the cool darkness, Mom and I, when we heard the front door open in recognition, speak a quiet word of welcome, and shut, downstairs. . . .

    Three hours later I turned the brass knob to their room quietly, holding my breath, balancing in a darkness as big as the space between the planets, my hand out to reach the small black case at the foot of my parents' sleeping bed. Taking it, I ran silently to my room, thinking. He won't tell me, he doesn't want me to
know.

    And from the opened case spilled his black uniform, like a black nebula, stars glittering here or there, distantly, in the material. I kneaded the dark stuff in my warm hands; I smelled the planet Mars, an iron smell, and the planet Venus, a green ivy smell, and the planet Mercury, a scent of sulfur and fire; and I could smell the milky moon and the hardness of stars. I pushed the uniform into a centrifuge machine I'd built in my ninth-grade shop that year, set it whirling. Soon a fine powder precipitated into a retort. This I slid under a microscope. And while my parents slept unaware, and while our house was asleep, all the automatic bakers and servers and robot cleaners in an electric slumber, I stared down upon brilliant motes of meteor dust, comet tail, and loam from far Jupiter glistening like worlds themselves which drew me down the tube a billion miles into space, at terrific accelerations.

    At dawn, exhausted with my journey and fearful of discovery, I returned the boxed uniform to their sleeping room.

    Then I slept, only to waken at the sound of the horn of the dry-cleaning car which stopped in the yard below. They took the black uniform box with them. It's good I didn't wait, I thought. For the uniform would be back in an hour, clean of all its destiny and travel.

    I slept again, with the little vial of magical dust in my pajama pocket, over my beating heart.

    When I came downstairs, there was Dad at the breakfast table, biting into his toast. "Sleep good, Doug?" he said, as if he had been here all the time, and hadn't been gone for three months.