Free The Coalwood Way by Homer Hickam Page A

rocket in Coalwood again. Under pressure, he later relaxed his sentence, but we were banished a mile below Frog Level to the slack dump we called Cape Coalwood. There, Dad expected us to stay out of sight and out of mind of Coalwood citizenry. In no time, however, we managed to send a missile on a ballistic arc from the Cape all the way to a field not more than one hundred feet from the houses on Middletown Row, a distance of three miles. A steel company official sent down to oversee the selling of Coalwood’s houses and utilities had observed the near miss and ordered our blockhouse torn down and launchpad bulldozed. Dad had taken up for us on that one and we’d kept our range. I guess the way he saw it was that if anybody was going to kick the Rocket Boys out of Coalwood, he was going to do it, not some steel company slicker. We’d also been falsely accused by the West Virginia State Police of starting a forest fire over in Davy. Miss Riley had saved us on that one, pointing out on a map that our rockets couldn’t quite reach out that far—not yet, anyway. In the last few months, we’d stayed pretty much out of trouble, although nearly every weekend, our rockets shook the ground from one of our spectacular successes or our devastating but always colorful pyrotechnic failures.
    The basement was a good echo chamber, and I could hear nearly everything that happened on the floor above. I heard Mom cross the kitchen floor to the back porch. I supposed one of the women of the Women’s Club had arrived. Then the basement door opened again. “Somebody here to see you,” she said, and then I heard footsteps down the basement steps and then a pause at the last one. I knew whoever it was was carefully stepping over Lucifer. “Lucifer, I swan,” Mom said by way of a complaint as she got past him.
    I turned to see who was with her. Much to my surprise, it was Mrs. Dantzler and Ginger. The furnace pipes ran along the ceiling and they had to duck them to get to us. Mrs. Dantzler was especially careful of her hairdo. “Hello, Sherman,” she said, giving him a quick smile that she lost when her eyes came to rest on me. “So, Sonny, this is what took the place of your piano lessons.” Her large blue eyes flitted across the cluttered shelves. “Elsie, how you keep your house on the ground is beyond me. And the smell of it!”
    “I know, Eleanor Marie,” Mom sighed. “We do the best we can with what we’ve got to work with.”
    “Sonny, take off those gloves and raise your hands,” Mrs. Dantzler commanded. “There, you see, Elsie? Long fingers, wide palms. Those are the hands of a pianist. If only Sonny had kept at his lessons . . . It’s a shame is what it is.”
    I glanced at Mom and was rewarded with a twinkle in her eye. “Now, boys,” she said, “the ladies and I have some last-minute Veterans Day float issues to discuss today. All I ask is you keep it quiet down here. Got it?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Sherman and I chorused.
    Sherman said, “I hear our float’s going to be the best one yet.”
    “That’s true, dear,” Mom agreed.
    Ginger looked around her mother’s shoulder with a bright smile. She had grown up to be a pretty sprite of a girl, and she still had those curly brown locks and deep amber eyes. She had on a plaid skirt and a white blouse that was buttoned up to her neck, but Sherman and I were both aware that she was a budding, comely teenager. We exchanged smiles when she asked, “Can I stay and watch?”
    “Sure!” Sherman said eagerly.
    Ginger looked at me. “Is it all right with you, too, Sonny?” she asked.
    “Just be careful,” I said, playing the big rocket scientist role to the hilt. “And watch what you touch.”
    “I won’t touch a thing,” she said softly.
    The way she spoke, so meek and mild, made me look twice at her. Then, while I was looking, I had the sudden opinion that Ginger Zanice Virginia Dantzler was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. It just came out of nowhere