Rude Astronauts (3 page)

Dick was a different story. Although he had long since retired from the Air Force, he was still working for NASA as a civilian consultant at the Johnson Space Center, so he had to fly all the way up from Houston. Roy had to mince around the subject of family while talking on the phone with Dick. Word on the grapevine was that Dick’s home life had gone to hell lately; Grace, his wife of twenty-four years, had just divorced him, and Richard Jr. had been last seen hitchhiking around the country, coasting from one Grateful Dead concert to the next.

Trouble at home had always made Dick irritable, and Roy had half-expected his former teammate to turn down the invitation, but to his surprise Dick eagerly agreed to come up for the weekend. He caught an American flight out of Houston, connected in New York with a commuter flight to New Hampshire, and arrived at the tiny Manchester municipal airport on the morning of July 4. His rented Ford Escort pulled into Roy’s unpaved driveway only fifteen minutes before the arrival of the Happy Howie clan.

There were the usual joyous, yet vaguely uncomfortable, first minutes of greeting each other again. The three men embraced, laughed, pounded each other’s backs, then stood back and mumbled at each other while noticing the changes—receding hairlines, touches of grey, thicker stomachs, new mustache and beard on Dick’s face, old mustache missing from Roy’s, Howie’s slight limp from when he had busted his leg last November on his ice-covered front walk. Meanwhile Irene and Beth, old rivals from their days in the Astronauts’ Wives Club, were carefully sizing each other up after quick hugs of their own: Irene noticing the deep crow’s-feet around Beth’s eyes, Beth deciding that Irene was definitely getting lumpy. Howie’s twins didn’t pay a bit of attention to any of this, of course; Roy’s friendly old collie, Max, came bounding out of the woods to meet them, and soon Jack and Ronnie were chasing the dog down to the lakeshore.

Another summer afternoon, another barbecue. They all changed into their swimsuits and went down to the dock to swim and admire Roy’s second-hand Chris-Craft cabin cruiser which he was gradually restoring. Roy, Dick, and Howie attempted to play softball with Jackson and Veronica, giving up when Howie popped a fly ball into the dense woods behind the house, losing it so thoroughly that even Max couldn’t find it. By this time, Irene had started the charcoal in the grill on the backyard deck while Beth had fixed the salad, so Roy put the steaks on the grill and opened the case of Coors he had tucked in the refrigerator.

They ate on the deck while across the still twilight waters of the lake local teenagers shot off bottle rockets and firecracker strings. When dinner was over, Irene and Beth cleared the table and carried the remains into the kitchen. Max lay down on the deck and gnawed at a T-bone Howie had tossed his way. Jackson found the carved-wood Saturn V model in the living room and tried to take it out into the front yard before Roy stopped him and gently removed the prized model from the child’s grasp; the kids found their toys in the Bronco and ran back down to the dock with the dog.

Wives gossiping in the kitchen—thank God, they had finally learned to get along with each other after all these years—kids torturing the dog, the sun setting behind the distant hills, Roy, Dick, and Howie sat together on the deck, chugging beer. As the photosensor switched on the backyard lights, their talk finally turned to space.

As usual, the grapevine stuff came first, stories about what other ex-astronauts were doing. Glenn was making another re-election run in the Senate; no doubt his constituents in Ohio would let him keep his seat (“But, Christ, you’d think he would have switched parties by now”). Collins was publishing another book (“He knows how to write, but if he wants another bestseller, he’d better do fiction like that Tom Clancy guy”). Armstrong was maintaining a low profile again after his stint on the Rogers Commission (“You gotta admire the guy. He could have opened shopping centers for the rest of his life”), and Bean was solidifying his reputation as a fine artist (“He ain’t no Rembrandt, but his stuff sure is pretty”).

Then there were the old yarns about themselves, retold countless times, always worth hearing again: the time when Dick had been chewed out for doing low-altitude aerobatics over the Cape in his T-38 trainer; when Howie had let a urine sample “slip” out of his hands to splatter all over a flight doctor’s penny loafers; when Roy, flying a Gulfstream over Merritt Island just before the Apollo 14 launch to check the weather conditions, had buzzed a Soviet spy trawler operating just outside the ten-mile coastal limit. There were other stories they all knew—like when Howie had played “Moon River” on a Jew’s-harp while in lunar orbit, just to annoy CapCom—but these weren’t brought up. Stories about being up there meant, eventually, that they would talk about walking on the Moon.

Yet there are subjects which cannot be ignored for long. As night settled on the New England countryside, an alabaster crescent began to rise over the distant shoreline, tinting the lake with silver beams. The three men gradually fell silent and gazed at the Moon, each absorbed with their own thoughts. Through the cabin’s open windows they could hear the unintelligible voices of Irene and Beth from the living room, just under the electronic beep-boop-beep of the kids playing a computer game on Roy’s Macintosh. The collection of dead beer bottles had grown around them and Roy was beginning to wish he had picked up a second case the day before, while the stores had been open, when Dick committed a heresy.

“Don’t you sometimes wish you were back there?” he said.

Happy Howie looked at him with his habitual deadpan expression. “Back where?” he asked. “Oh, you mean Cincinnati … no, no, I never really wanted to go back. Why?”

“I don’t mean your home town. I mean …” Dick tipped his beer bottle toward the Moon. “Don’t you find yourself thinking about that sometimes?”

“Oh, that. Sure. I love beer. Can’t get enough of it.”

Roy chuckled. Dick glared at Howie. “You know what I’m talking about. The Moon. It’s been more than twenty years now. Don’t you … y’know … ever wish you could go back?”

“Jesus, Dick.” Howard sighed. “Y’know, once each term, I get a kid in my office at the university, some sophomore from the campus paper who thinks he’s made the biggest discovery … one of the engineering profs used to be a real, live astronaut, he once walked on the Moon. This kid sits there wide-eyed, just like one of the newshounds who used to hang around the Cape, and he always asks me in this solemn voice …”

Roy picked it up, from long familiarity with the same tired question. “‘Don’t you wish you could go back to the Moooooooooon?’”

All three of them laughed; post-flight press conferences had made them all irreverent about the press. “And I look across my desk at this future Pulitzer winner,” Howard continued, “and I say, ‘Hell no, now ask me another question!’”

“And they always get flustered after that,” snickered Roy, “because that’s usually their best shot.” He shook his head. “I don’t miss talking to reporters, not one bit.”

“Amen, brother,” Howie said.

Dick took a swig from his beer and settled his feet on the deck’s railing. “Well, I’m no news hack, and I want a straight answer from you guys. Do you ever wish you could go back to the Moon?”

Howie balanced his beer on his stomach and stared into the foamed amber glass. “Straight answer, huh?” he said slowly, and paused to think it over. “Yes. No. What day of the week is it? Monday? Okay, the answer’s yes. Tomorrow’s Tuesday, so the answer then is going to be no.”

Dick blew out his cheeks. “What kind of swabbie answer is that?” Howie was a former Navy man. “Are you trying to tell me you never thought about it?”

“Of course, I’ve thought about it,” Howie replied. “Jeez, I wanted to go back the minute the capsule splashed down. Even after going without water for two days and living in the same underwear for a week, I wanted to go back that minute. Going up was the greatest thrill of my life.”

He sloshed the beer around in the bottle, laughed and nodded his head. “When Spiro Agnew said the next goal was going to Mars, I was all set to sign up. Just back from the Moon, and I was ready to volunteer for the Mars shot in 1976. I’d make my name bigger than Neil’s. Gimme more, gimme more.”

“Uh-huh. So what happened?”

Howie coughed, grew sober. “You know what happened. The program went into the friggin’ toilet. Proxmire, Mondale, even damn Nixon … they got their wish. By the time the shuttle got things moving again, I was over the hill.”

“You know what can happen if you think about it too much,” Roy said. “I mean, look at Buzz. He had a lot of problems after he got back and it took him a long while to get over it.”

Howie nodded vigorously, pointing his finger at Roy. “That’s exactly what I mean. It’s kinda depressing, if you let it get to you. Besides … hell, when you’re over the hill, there ain’t no turning back.”

But Dick shook his head. “Bullshit. Young’s gone up in the shuttle, and we were with him back during Gemini. You’re no more over the hill than he is.”

“Yeah, well …” Howie picked up his beer. “Space is a young man’s game, my friend, and I’m not young anymore.”

“No pun intended, of course,” Roy intoned.

“No pun intended, of course,” Howie replied, and the three of them chuckled. “Sure, I think about it sometimes. I look at that picture of myself I have on my wall, standing there on the Moon. I look at it when I’m swamped with term papers from the kids. I think, ‘Man, I’d give my right nut to be there again, right now.’” He shrugged. “Then reality sets in. I’m a college teacher. I fly a desk now. I wouldn’t know what to do with a LEM if my life depended on it again.”

“Hmmm.” Dick was quiet for a moment, then he looked over at Roy. “What about you, Eject?”

Roy grinned from ear to ear. “Been a long time since anyone’s called me that.” He picked up his empty bottle. “Anyone want a refill?”

He started to get up, but as if summoned by marital telepathy, the back door opened and Irene walked out, carrying three cold bottles of beer. The three of them looked at her in surprise, and Roy snapped his fingers as she walked up the steps to the deck. Irene gave each man a bottle, bowed from the waist like a harem girl, then faked a swat at Roy’s head before walking back down to the cabin. Roy waited until the back door shut again. “My girl,” he murmured.

“She’s a good woman,” Dick said. There was an unmistakable twinge of sadness and envy in his voice. Roy felt sorry for him. Grace had been with him since he was a teenager hot-rodding F-101s over Edwards Air Force Base, had stuck with him through the Gemini and Apollo years, done the brave-wife-at-home bit for the TV crews when her husband had piloted a LEM to the airless grey surface of the Moon, given him a son … and then, after all those years, split in the middle of the night with a New Age meditation instructor named Hernando. Hell of a note.

Roy sipped his beer, let the cool liquid slide down his throat. “Howie’s got his story, I’ve got mine,” he said. “When I left the bank, there was a going-away party in the office on my last day. You know the routine … big tinsel banner on the wall saying, ‘So long, Roy,’ the secretaries giving you kisses, the champagne, the gold watch and the speech from the CEO, the whole schtick. Well, then, the guy who’s been promoted to my job … practically a kid, your typical Harvard MBA, a yuppie who had just moved over from Paine Webber … glides over to talk with me.”

“Probably looked like Al,” Howie said.

“Yeah,” Roy said, but without laughing. “But without Shep’s qualities. Smug. Shit-eating grin. He’s got my job, ha ha ha. But, y’know, I give him the time and he says the usual stuff about trying to fit into my shoes and carrying the torch …”

Roy took a breath, put his bottle down on the deck. “Then he tries to get funny with the script. He’s grinning at me, and he suddenly says, ‘So, Eject …’”

Dick took a breath. “How’d he know that name?”

“Probably from the Wolfe book, I dunno …”

“Goddamn Wolfe. Bastard started that Right Stuff shit and we’ll never hear the end of it.” Dick took a hit from his beer. “Nobody has the right to call you Eject unless they were there when it happened.”

Roy had once punched out of an X-15 during a flight when its main engine had failed after it was dropped from a B-52. The plane had been lost and Roy had nearly washed out of NASA; the accident had eventually been overlooked when the Apollo team was selected, but the nickname always stuck. “Never mind. So this guys says, ‘So, Eject, what’s next?’ I started to say something about buying this place here, but he doesn’t copy me. He keeps right on talking and …”

Roy stopped, looked off the deck, over the stone chimney of his cabin, at the Moon. A fingernail shaving in the sky; a place where he had once stood. “Well, he says, ‘So … are you heading for the Moon again? If we can open a branch there, let me know.’”

He picked up his beer, but only let it cool his hands. “One look in his face, and I knew it was all a joke to him. People walking on the Moon was a funny stunt we had pulled a long time ago. A human cannonball trick in the circus. I could see what he thought of me. Moon Man.”

Nobody laughed. Dick and Howard looked at him for awhile, and Roy studied his front lawn. It had rained the day before last, it needed mowing again, the honeysuckle bush next to the driveway had to be trimmed …

Damn, why did it hurt so much?

“Was he old enough to remember?” Howie asked. Roy nodded, and Howie shook his head. “He was probably one of the ones who bitched when the Lucy show was pre-empted for live coverage of our shot.” He sipped his beer. “Am I the only one who doesn’t miss the silly bitch?”

“I wanted to slug him,” Roy said softly. “Not because of me. Because of his attitude about everything we had done.”

The three of them were quiet for a little while, reflecting. Tree frogs and crickets communicated with the night. Suddenly, across the lake, a skyrocket went off. It shot in a sputtering gunpowder arc over the lake, snapping and shrieking over the distant yells of the teenagers on the far shore, then detonated in a red and violet umbrella. They heard the front screen door open and slam closed, saw Ronnie and Jack running out onto the front lawn to watch. After a few minutes another skyrocket went up, but it fizzled out and disappeared over the waters. “Ahhhhhhhhhh,” moaned the kids.