Riding Rockets (4 page)

On one drink-making occasion, my little brother found an already opened bottle of 7-Up. He brought the drink to my dad, who tossed back a swallow. “Christ, Mark, how much whiskey did you put in this? It’s really strong.” My brother explained he had used a two-finger measurement, just like always. Only after Dad was down to slurping on the ice did the lightbulb come on. Earlier in the day, when nobody had been around, he had peed in an empty 7-Up bottle and left it on a table. He jerked the highball from his mouth and sniffed it like a dog at a hydrant. “Mark! Where did you find the 7-Up for my drink?”

“There was a bottle of it on the table.”

“Jesus Christ! I’ve been drinking a 7-and-piss.” Moments later, with a fresh drink in his hand, Dad philosophically mused, “I guess if you have to drink urine, it’s best you drink your own.”

There was one item from my dad’s walking life that he adamantly refused to let polio take from him: his beloved toolbox. It came with us on every trip. In spite of past experience, Dad was convinced he would someday save us all from a serious car malfunction with his tools. He got his chance on a blistering day in June 1963. We were on a trip through a remote area of desert in northwest New Mexico. (The term
remote
will always be redundant in describing the venues of Mullane adventures.) The car began to surge. For a moment there would be acceleration, then coast, then acceleration. My dad frantically oscillated his accelerator hand control up and down, hoping to clear the problem. At this point most drivers would probably have exclaimed, “There’s something wrong with the car!” But it was impossible for my aviator father to avoid the lexicon of his prior life. “We’re losing power!” was his cry. It would not have surprised me in the least to have heard, “The goddamn Japs have got us. Feather number two!”

We coasted into the dirt parking area of a small adobe Indian trading post. Faded signs advertised turquoise jewelry, rugs, and other curios. A wooden porch provided the only shade within a hundred miles. A half dozen Indians sitting on chairs and several scruffy dogs lying on the planking had staked their claim to that shade. I recall how fascinated my brothers and I were by the fact the Indians were dressed like cowboys. They wore denim and boots and large western hats. My mom admonished us not to stare but we did nevertheless. The Indians were as still as carvings. Our clattering, sputtering arrival seemed invisible to them. They didn’t move, scratch, wave away a fly, or speak. They just sat on their chairs staring into the shimmering heat in utterly silent, regal repose.

My dad instantly diagnosed the car problem. “Balls! It’s the goddamn fuel pump.” For some strange reason, the testicular epithet
balls
was my dad’s favorite obscenity.

“Hugh, not in front of the children!” was my mother’s favorite response to his swearing. Hers was a cry I heard many, many times in my youth, but it never altered my dad’s vocabulary.

Dad locked his leg braces and rose onto his crutches. In spite of this strange sight, the six Indians remained as still as a Remington bronze. The station wagon, the jabbering kids, the man on crutches appeared no more remarkable to them than a dust devil.

Three of us boys joined my dad at the fender and popped the hood. “I’ll show you kids how to test the fuel pump.” For once we had the right tools and my dad leaned into the engine and began to work. He disconnected the output of the fuel pump. Then he pulled the distributor wire. He explained his actions: “I’ll have Mom turn the key. The car won’t start because I’ve pulled the distributor wire. But the starter will turn the cam shaft, which will cause the fuel pump to operate. If it’s working, we should see gas from this hose.”

He then called for my mom to start the car. I was so proud of my dad. How many other fathers could do roadside maintenance like this in the middle of the desert? And my dad was doing it on crutches and braces.

As pride swelled my soul, gas began to squirt from the output line of the pump and spray across the hot engine. A vapor of fuel immediately enveloped us. With a gratifying grunt my dad proclaimed, “The fuel pump’s okay.” As he was stating the obvious, I noted a blue spark coming from the distributor wire and flashing to the steel of the engine block. It made a
tick, tick, tick
sound. I was just about to comment on this spark when an explosion flashed under the hood. KA-BOOM! The fuel vapor had combined with the surrounding air to form an explosive pocket. The spark from the disconnected distributor wire had provided an ignition source. We had just become all too intimate participants in the first test of a fuel-air weapon. Four decades later, the air force would develop just such a weapon for use against terrorists hiding in caves. The press ballyhooed the device.
Nothing like it has ever been developed,
they crowed. Not exactly. Let history now show my dad was the first to test such a weapon. He did it under the hood of a 1956 Pontiac station wagon at the Teec Nos Pos trading post in northwest New Mexico on June 14, 1963. It worked.

My brothers and I stumbled backward with blasted eardrums and flash-blinded eyes. The smell of burned hair wafted in the breeze. My dad, unable to retreat because of his braces, had fallen straight backward like a cleanly felled tree. He was now a cartoon character with a blackened face and the few remaining hairs on his bald pate burned to cinders. The engine block was on fire. My mom worked furiously to get my youngest brothers and sister and the dogs away from the burning car.

On the trading post porch, the previously lethargic dogs were on their feet barking madly. And the response of the Indians? They roared with laughter. I mean fall-on-the-floor, breath-stealing, tear-welling laughter. Jabbering in their native tongue they pointed at the white man’s folly as if it were a free fireworks show (which it was) and laughed and laughed and laughed.

My dad finally recovered enough to hear the laughter and understand its source. He rolled onto his stomach and made a valiant attempt to crawl to the nearest Indian, no doubt to kill him with his bare hands. John Wayne, leading a silver screen cavalry charge, had never looked as fierce. Thank God, at that moment, Dad couldn’t walk for he certainly would have ended up in prison for manslaughter. Finally, he braced himself on one forearm, shot out an upraised middle finger, and roared, “Shove it up your ass, you bastards!” Even the great cry of “balls” didn’t fit this affront.

Over the barking dogs I again heard my mom’s plaintive cry, “Hugh, not in front of the children.”

Even near-death experiences like this did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for family trips into the great emptiness of New Mexico. It was an emptiness that pulled the sky closer. I could climb
through
the clouds and sit on a mountain peak and look down and imagine I was in a jet skimming over the white. I would lie in a meadow and watch thunderstorms build over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and dream of someday soaring between the canyons of vapor.

But it was the New Mexican night skies that most captured my imagination. I needed only to step into my backyard to be in space. Unlike the light-polluted, haze-shrouded heavens that had domed our previous homes, Albuquerque’s sky was dry and stygian in its blackness. On one occasion, my grandmother visiting from New York City stood with me looking at the night sky and commented, “You won’t be able to see any stars tonight, Mike. It’s cloudy.”

I was baffled by her comment since to my eye the sky was spotlessly clear. “Grandma,” I had said, “there are no clouds. It’s clear.”

“Oh, Mike, sure there are…a long one that goes clear across the sky.” And her hand swept from horizon to horizon. Then I realized she was referring to the Milky Way. The edge view of our galaxy was a fog of stars, a “cloud” to the unpracticed observer.

My dad taught me how to take time exposures of the night sky. I would set one of his cameras in the desert and open its aperture and let the turn of the Earth trace the starlight onto film. Later, with the developed photos in hand, I would marvel at the circles of varying brightness and color the stars had inscribed about Polaris. Occasionally I would catch the streak of a shooting star, a recording that would excite me as much as if I had found buried treasure.

Above Albuquerque the stars and planets blazed with a clarity I had never seen before. They seemed so
accessible.
With the help of a small Sears telescope and my imagination I traveled this sky on a nightly basis. I would stare at the crescent of Venus and the red circle of Mars and count the brightest moons of Jupiter. The thrill of those observations was no less than what Galileo must certainly have experienced. When a wire-thin sketch of moon was part of the fresco, I would train my telescope on it and imagine I was walking its deeply shadowed craters and mountains. When meteor showers were predicted I would drag a sleeping bag into the desert and lie awake to watch their flashes of fire and pray that one would miraculously land nearby.

But another night sight was soon to thrill me even more.

Chapter 4

Sputnik

On the morning of October 4, 1957, I entered my dad’s bedroom to say good-bye before departing for school. As usual he was drinking coffee, smoking his pipe, and reading the paper. This morning, however, he was purple with rage. “The goddamn Reds have put some type of moon around the earth. Balls! What the hell is Eisenhower doing? What if there’s an H-bomb on the damn thing?”

I picked up the paper and read about the orbiting Sputnik and how the Russians were saying it was just the beginning of their space program. They were working to put men into space. There were interviews with American scientists who predicted our nation would do the same. A smaller sidebar explained that Sputnik would be visible as a moving dot of light over Albuquerque just after sunset.

That evening I stood with the rest of the city population in the cold October twilight to watch the new Russian moon twinkle overhead. My dad watched from his wheelchair, cursing Eisenhower for being asleep at the switch. I was struck dumb by the spectacle. The paper had said the object would be moving at 17,000 miles per hour, 150 miles in the sky. I was mesmerized by the thought of traveling at such speeds and altitudes. The newspaper had said men would someday do it. The science fiction movies of my youth had long depicted manned spaceships flying to distant planets. Now Sputnik proved that was really going to happen. There would be spaceships! I couldn’t imagine a more exciting adventure and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to fly in space.

Within weeks I was launching my own rockets in the New Mexico desert. These were not the cardboard and balsa-wood rockets seen in today’s hobby stores. Those didn’t exist in my youth. My rockets were multistage steel-tubed devices, five feet in length with welded steel fins, and filled with wicked home-brewed propellants. Basically, my rockets were pipe bombs. How I survived this period of my life, I have no idea. I was a preteen boy mixing rocket fuel in glass jars and tamping it into steel tubes. You couldn’t get closer to mayhem and death than that.

I searched for any source of steel tubing. An early find was the extension piece of my mom’s vacuum cleaner. Its stainless-steel gleam and lightweight construction had
rocket
written all over it. “It’s perfect, Mom!” I cried. Without hesitation she handed it over. She and my dad were oblivious to the dangers of my experiments. In response to the new celestial Red menace, school-sponsored rocket clubs were organized to get kids interested in science and engineering and the formula for rocket fuel was passed out like raffle tickets. If the school was involved, then it must be safe, was my parents’ erroneous thinking.

Not only did my mom give up her vacuum extension (and henceforth had to vacuum like a scoliosis victim), she also let me use her iron to heat plastic to form parachutes for my capsule payloads of ants and lizards. That work destroyed her iron. She let me use her oven to bake recipes of foul-smelling, fertilizer-based rocket fuel. My dad’s extensive tools were at my disposal, as was his time. He would drive me to machine shops to have nozzles turned on lathes, and to chemical supply companies to purchase rocket fuel ingredients. He would drive me and my bombs into the desert. There he would rise onto his braces and crutches and hold a Super-8 movie camera on the action. I would set up the rocket and lay wire to the car battery. Dad would offer an irreverent prayer that the rocket would land on Khrushchev’s head, then he would recite a short countdown. At zero I would touch the wires to the battery and hope for the best. Sometimes that best was a perfect streak of smoke leading a thousand feet into the azure blue. A white puff would mark the firing of the parachute extraction rocket and we would be treated to the glorious sight of my Maxwell House coffee can capsule descending on a parachute of dry-cleaning plastic and kite string.

More frequently, however, my launches closely mirrored NASA’s. At the count of zero an explosion would rend the air and a sulfurous cloud would be all that remained of my creation. My dad, ever the optimist, would opine that the rocket had gone into orbit or possibly hit the moon. We would remain silent and listen for any sound of a whine or thud of an impact, but there would be none. That was proof enough for my father that the rocket was on its way to the Kremlin.

During one launch my dad was nearly a casualty. He was whooping and hollering at what appeared to be a perfect ascent until the missile arced into a dive straight for us. “Jesus Christ, Mike! It’s coming right at us!” He was ten feet from the car and did his best to sprint for its cover. With the clatter of steel braces and aluminum crutches he sounded like a machine gone wild. I was powerless to help and abandoned him like a dropped Popsicle. I dove under the car and turned to look up, certain I was going to witness my dad getting shish-kebabed by a five-foot smoking skewer. I made one final, not so helpful cry, “Watch out, Dad!”

“Balls!” he roared. As a whistling sound gained in decibels, Dad suddenly stopped and jerked himself into a ramrod-straight pose, holding his crutches as close to his body as possible, trying to minimize his target footprint. His face was scrunched up, eyes squeezed to slits, teeth bared. There was a brief whooshing sound followed by a loud
whoomph.
The rocket embedded itself in the sandy soil no more than ten feet away. A thin curl of smoke corkscrewed from its nozzle.