The Rocket

Alec Long missed his mother. On the summer between the fifth and sixth grade of school, Alec had traveled from his grandparent's home in Maryland to visit her for the first time since she had moved away.

Alec's parents had divorced when he was still a baby and after the split, his mother Gina had moved Out West to live with an older man named Carol. Apparently his mom had married Carol years ago, but that marriage had been short-lived and the only thing Gina had to show for it was the rather old and battered Mercedes sedan that Alec was currently sitting in.

The car itself was parked on a desolate stretch of private dirt road somewhere on the sprawling Wyoming ranch of Mr. Simm, a cattleman who owned the bar where Alec's mom served drinks. Mr. Simm's bar was called the Jolly Roger and sported a faux 'pirate' theme. There was a fake pirate ship in the parking lot which Alec thought was funny because the nearest ocean seemed to be at least ten million miles away from the tedious desert landscape surrounding Evanston, the little oilfield town where his mother had settled after her second divorce.

That is stupid, he had laughed to himself, there aren't any pirate ships in the desert.

Alec didn't like boats.

Most of Alec's young life had been spent with his father's parents, as his father Jeff had taken a job as a steward on a cruise ship two days before Alec's premature birth and was, as his grandfather was fond of saying, lost at sea, although he wasn't truly lost like a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck; Jeff just didn't come home very often and when he did , he tended to show up drunk and stay that way until he left. Which was usually sooner than later.

Last Christmas Jeff had given his son a small bag of brightly-colored toy plastic dinosaurs and claimed that he had brought them special all the way from China, see, it says so right on the bag. Alec knew better but he had been so glad to see his father that he didn't mention seeing those same dinosaurs last week, pegged to the wall at the local 7-11, right next to the store's comic-book rack.

Those same dinosaurs were keeping Alec company as he waited for his mother to return. She had followed Mr. Simm's pickup truck as it drove over the half-graveled road, the Mercedes lurching crazily as it bounced on the uneven surface, headlights casting frenzied searchlight beams into the plume of dust left in Mr. Simm's wake. Mr. Simm is always in a hurry, Gina had told her son, but this car can't go that fast on this road.

After a few miles of turbulent driving, they saw the headlights of Mr. Simm' s Ford. He had turned around a few hundred feet ahead of them and stopped. His headlights flashed twice and then went dark. Gina stopped her car, turned off the engine and opened her door.

Wait here, honey. I need to talk to Mr. Simm for a little bit. I brought your comic-books with us- they are in the backseat, so sit tight until I get back, OK?

Alec wanted to tell her that it wasn't OK. He wanted to tell her that he was scared, that it was dark outside and he couldn't see anything and that if she left now he knew that she would never come back for him. He wanted to tell her that he knew dinosaurs didn't really come special from China just for him. He wanted to scream.

OK, Mom, he said.

Alec clambered into the back and rummaged around in the small red cooler Gina always traveled with, pushing aside the ghastly yellow cans of Coors beer until he finally came up with a chilly can of Coke. He opened it and carefully placed the curled metal tab in the car's ashtray. One of his schoolteachers had told Alec that baby squirrels often strangled on metal pull-tabs that careless people threw out of their car windows. Alec didn't want any part of that.

He had already read the comics at least a dozen times but there wasn't much else to do, so he flicked on the dim overhead lamp and started reading The Amazing Spider-Man again. It was the issue where Peter Parker discovers that the evil Green Goblin is actually his best friend's father. In it, the Green Goblin accidentally gets killed while fighting Spider-Man and now everyone-including Peter's best friend Harry, the New York police and Peter's sickly Aunt May- blames Spider-Man. Peter has to listen to his friends and family talk about how rotten Spider-Man is, when the whole time Peter is Spider-Man. Alec sometimes felt as if his own family secretly hated him. When he thought about his parents, he always wanted to cry, although he also wanted to be strong, even if it was the secret kind of strength like what Peter Parker had, the kind of strength that no one else could ever know about. So most of the time he didn't cry, even when he felt like it.

The comic story made Alec sad so he turned to his favorite part of the book, which was an advertisement for Estes model rockets. One of Alec's classmates owned a model rocket and had taken Alec out on a launch not long ago and ever since then, Alec had been asking his grandparents for a rocket of his own. He wanted a Saturn model, it was excitingly complicated-looking, with multiple engines that would ignite in stages, just like real thing. In his imagination, he painted the rocket in red and blue patches with black webs , just like Spider-Man's costume, and named it AF-15, after the first-ever Spidey book, Amazing Fantasy #15.

Maybe you can get one for Christmas, Granpa had said. But not sooner, we don't have money for trifles. Ask your mother when you get Out West. Maybe she has triflin' money.

After Alec arrived in Wyoming, Gina asked him if there was anything special he wanted. He showed her his tattered mail-order rocket catalog with the Saturn model circled in red magic marker. Gina whistled.

That is a lot of money. How about ice cream? Do you like ice cream?

He was ashamed of it, but he started to cry when Gina asked him if he liked ice cream. He really wanted that rocket and he hadn't seen his mom in forever and she couldn't even give him the rocket he had been dreaming of for so long. And suddenly Gina was crying too and Alec didn't know why , only that the grown-ups he knew seemed to cry a lot more than he did , and he was just a kid. She hugged him and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry in a whisper he could barely hear.

I am like Spidey, I am sad and everybody I love hates the real me, but I am strong and I don't cry. But he did cry.

Later, Gina told him that she had talked to Mr. Simm and that he was going to help her buy the rocket for him, the best rocket in the whole catalog, with extra engines, parachutes and decals and a deluxe electronic ignition kit that used a large battery to light the missile, not the cheap and unreliable fuses like Alec's friend had used.

Alec didn't know why Mr. Simm wanted them to drive all the way out to nowhere to talk about rockets, but the grownups in Alec's life were always going off to talk to each other in secret places, usually right before they dumped him off with a relative or family friend for a while. Alec didn't want to live with Mr. Simm, rocket or no rocket. He waited in the car, wondering where he might be tomorrow.

For a while, Alec's dinosaurs had an imaginary argument over which toy would be the first one to ride the rocket into space. That lasted for a few minutes and then he looked again at the rocket advertisement while he finished his Coke. Time passed until he had to step out of the car to pee.

After he was done he stared through the moonless night toward the low shadowy bulk of Mr. Simm's Ford. Without thinking, he crouched and started creeping slowly towards it, walking just off to the side of the road. As he neared it, he could hear faint strains of country-music coming from the cab He couldn't see inside from where he stood, so he snuck closer and stood on his tip-toes, peering diagonally across the truck bed and through the rear cabin window. He remained there for a few minutes.

When he got back to the Mercedes, his mouth was parched dry and he felt like he might choke on the spongy mass of his own tongue. He reached into the cooler for another Coke, but there weren't any, just a half-dozen Coors lazing in the dirty, icy water. Alec had tasted beer before, of course, and found it disgusting, but there was nothing else, so he popped the top of the nearest can. Out of habit, he placed the ring in the ashtray, then he steeled himself and took a small sip, then another, larger one.

It tasted very good to him.

.

One Chapter

It was a terrible plan, I thought to myself as I thunked ketchup out of the glass bottle and onto my mother's old wig. This ketchup wouldn't fool anyone and the only people who might actually stop would be the police, and what would I do with a stolen police car anyway? They probably had some secret cop trick to keep their cars from getting stolen and I'd just get caught again. That wouldn't suit me anymore than it would suit the court, which would be of the adult variety the next time I saw one, me having just turned eighteen a few weeks ago.

I was pretty sure I had some more trips to court in my future, but right now I had bigger problems, mainly getting out of town before one of Dobbie's thugs found me. About the only way I could afford to travel would be the bus and Dobbie knew that; someone would be watching the bus station, so that was out. Hitchhiking always makes me feel vulnerable and I hate feeling vulnerable, so I decided that stealing a car for my getaway would be a lot safer and easier than relying on the roadside kindness of strangers.

Like most of my plans, it didn't start off being terrible, it just wound up that way. I mean, stealing a car is a pretty sensible thing to do if you don't have one and you need one, but a lot of how sensible it is depends on how you steal it. Mostly it's easier if you steal a car that doesn't have anyone else in it, but I wanted a car that was already on the highway and that is where the canvas rucksack came in. In it , I had the wig, a bottle of ketchup, a couple packs of matches, a large Mason jar full of kerosene and about twenty pounds of bloody pork bones that I stole from the renderer's barrel in the alley behind the butcher's shop. The mannequin wouldn't fit in the bag, so I had to un-peg the legs and arms from the fake plastic torso and put them in a cardboard box that wasn't so much heavy as it was awkward and difficult to walk through the woods with. So you can see how my plan was heading towards terrible by this point.

Usually I did OK without a plan. Like how I got the mannequin.

I was killing time, feeling old and lost after my birthday, walking around town for the first time in years when I stumbled across one of those new 'shopping malls' , which is like a fenceless prison compound with a cluster of large single-story flat-topped buildings that are surrounded by parking lots and divided into lots of cells, only they aren't really cells, they are stores and shops, with a big two-story Montgomery Ward department store looming over them all like a lopsided guard tower, except instead of guards it was full of girls my age who were there voluntarily.

I imagined those loser girls in their matching frocks, getting paid a fifty cents an hour to sell lipstick and skin balms to saggy old ladies who couldn't look young again even if they had a time machine. It made me want to shoplift but I wasn't wearing shoplifting clothes, just jeans and light blue t-shirt. I had no large pockets and no purse.

I hate purses. If you ever see me with a purse, it's probably full of stolen clothes or stolen drugs. Or both. And I probably stole the purse too, which, if you think about it, is a hell of a lot better than buying one because the ones you buy don't come with all the neat stuff that the stolen ones have inside- one time I found a loaded .22 in a bag I snatched from an old lady in downtown Cincinnati. I guess she thought the gun would make her safer from people like me. But I hate guns so I traded it for mescaline. I hate mescaline too, but I didn't know that then.

So I walked around behind the Montgomery Wards store where a large loading dock faced a patch of woods. There weren't any people on the dock, but I saw a green-painted metal door standing open on the far end of the platform , so I hopped up and peeked in. There was a large stockroom area on one side and on the other side a small hallway led to what looked like a set of offices. I heard voices coming from the office area but saw no one. Right inside the door was a folding metal chair which some counter-girl had dropped her blue sales smock across the back of. I took the garment and put it on. The red plastic name tag pinned to the front said 'Norma' in white stenciled letters, which I thought was funny since my name is Jean and people always told me I looked like Marilyn Monroe, which is nice thing if a woman tells you but not always so nice when a boy does. Mostly, boys say that to me because they want to make me sticky. And I hate that, so I wear my hair plain and never touch makeup except when I'm stealing it or trying to look like someone that isn't me.

I was tying the little string on the back of the ugly blue apron when two men in white shirts and thin black ties came out of one of the offices and walked right past me without seeming to notice I was there. After they passed, one of them- a flabby, pear-shaped man who was sweating just from walking- turned around and looked at me.

"Break time is only five minutes, sweetheart. We don't pay you to stand around. Now get your pretty little behind out there and finish clearing section five. We need the old dolls off the floor. And no more wearing dungarees to work", he finished.

Old dolls? I was curious so I followed the rude fat man through the stockroom doors as he gestured towards a cluster of stripped-down female mannequins in the nearby corner. Old dolls.

They weren't nearly as heavy as a real person, so I picked one up and carried it back into the stockroom, out through the open door, across the loading dock and into the woods behind the store, where I hid it until it got dark outside and we came to pick it up in Dobbie's car. That was back when Dobbie and I were still friends, like maybe two weeks ago. So that's how I got the store dummy.

The ketchup was an unnaturally bright red against the blond wig and the whole mess didn't look very convincing on the mannequin. Fake blood on fake hair on fake body. I guessed maybe that it would work for my purposes, although I chickened out when it came to dumping the red sauce on my own blonde hair, which I had tried to grow long but was now hacked off , messily and unevenly just above my shoulders. I had done it myself earlier that morning and I'd been in a hurry at the time so it looked pretty bad, even compared to what we got at Watertown Home for Girls.

I wish I'd thought to bring the scissors with me. I wasn't really in the mood for cutting myself but what I was planning on doing was pretty crazy and cutting someone else would make things even more exciting. A lot better than this ketchup could ever hope to be, that's for sure.

When I was in the Watertown Home I had to spend some of my afternoons talking to adults who asked a lot of questions, most of which weren't really about what I had done and why I was there. Except they were about that, it was just that the questions were in disguise, sorta.

Like, sometimes the questions would really be pictures instead of questions and at first it seemed like all the answers I gave were the wrong ones. I don't think it was fair, it isn't my fault that they kept showing me ink-blobs that looked like my parents burning and screaming in a pool of bloody fire. I don't know where they found those pictures but it kinda shows that even though I was the inmate, the so-called doctors were really the sick ones. After what I'd done and been through, you'd think they'd show me pictures of flowers and butterflies, not horrible blobs like the ones they had put on the table in front of me. No wonder I have nightmares.

I don't really remember deciding to do it, or even doing it really, but one day the docs came to my ward and they asked me how long I planned on staying quiet. It seemed like a familiar question, I think maybe they asked me the same thing every day but I wasn't really paying attention so I'm not sure.

"Long enough", I answered. I don't know why I said that, but they seemed pleased and told me it was a breakthrough because I hadn't spoken for six months. I hadn't? That surprised me.

Like I said, I don't really recall being quiet for so long but after my breakthrough I decided to tell the doctors that their pictures looked like butterflies and flowers and they called that a breakthrough too.

Before long, one of them confided to me that I'd been recommended for EST- which is like being electrocuted to make you stop being crazy- but since I was having so many breakthroughs, they'd decided to postpone that indefinitely. There were a lot of people on the outside, she told me, who thought EST was a bad idea and that it messed up people's brains and if I was lucky, it would be banned before my turn came and the postponement wouldn't matter anyway. The way she said it made me feel like she was one of those people on the outside, and that I should be relieved that she thought EST was a bad idea. It turned out that she was right and by the time I turned 18, the docs had pretty much stopped using it, although the table they used was still there, waiting threateningly in the scary basement room that no one I knew could ever quite remember being in, no matter how many times they were taken there.