CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Mommy was sad. At the ripe old age of six years, Mikey did not comprehend the complexity of the full range of adult emotions, but he knew that Mommy was sad.
She had been sad a lot this year, ever since baby Doug had started growing in her tummy. Mikey looked at his littlest brother, sitting under the Christmas tree and banging on his new Fisher Price xylophone, and wondered if it was Dougie's fault. Probably not, because Mommy always seemed happiest when she was playing with the baby or baking cookies or doing fun Mommy things like that. She was mostly sad when Daddy was away working in Washington, or when she and Daddy had fights. Mikey didn't think that Mommy and Daddy had used to fight so much, but maybe they were getting sick of each other the way he was getting sick of playing with Lewis from next door. That made sense.
What didn't make sense was why Mommy was sad now. It was Christmas Morning, and Santa had brought lots and lots of wonderful presents for everybody. The house was decorated with bows and garlands and all kinds of ornaments. There was lots and lots of snow, and later Daddy was going to take Mike and Geoff to the big hill so they could go tobogganing while Dougie had his nap and Mommy made the turkey. Then they'd come home and watch the astronauts land on the moon!
All Mikey's friends were going to watch it. They'd been waiting for months and months for it. Even in school, the teachers talked about it, because it was so important! Everybody knew that it was going to be the best moon landing ever, ever! Mikey knew all there was to know about the mission and the astronauts. Daddy called him an eggs-pert.
There was Lieutenant Jim Taggert, who would drive the lunar lander and park it on the moon. Jim was from a Dakota too, but from North Dakota. He was an Air Force pilot, which meant that he wasn't scared of anything. The man who drove the rocket was Clem Jacobs, and he had a son who was an Eagle Scout. Someday, Daddy said, Mikey would be an Eagle Scout. Then Mikey had asked if when he was an Eagle Scout would Dad be an astronaut? That had made Daddy frown so that the lines showed at the sides of his mouth, and he had told Mikey to go and pick up his toys.
Then there was Commander Al Claveechee. He was the best of all! Everybody knew that he was the bravest, smartest, strongest, best astronaut in the whole world! He had saved the mission on the very first day when one of the engines went funny, and he was going to make sure that the rest of it was a stunning success. That was what the man from NASA had said on the TV: a stunning success.
All of the boys in the first grade had photographs of the astronauts cut out of newspapers and magazines and pasted to the backs of their bedroom doors. Mikey had wanted them, too, but Daddy had said he couldn't have any pictures of Commander Al. That wasn't fair, Mikey thought. He was the best, best one. So even when Daddy had brought him fancy color prints of Jim and Clem in their space suits he had refused to put them up. Without Commander Al it just wasn't right.
Mikey was an eggs-pert on Commander Al, too, though—even if Dad wouldn't let him paste his picture on the bedroom door. He had found out lots and lots from reading Daddy's grown-up magazines. He wasn't supposed to read them, but when Daddy was done with them he just put them in boxes in the basement, and it was easy to sneak them upstairs to read by the light of his Mickey Mouse flashlight when he was supposed to be sleeping. Usually he didn't bother, because Daddy's magazines were boring, but now almost every one had a story about Commander Al or Apollo 20. Mikey knew that his hero had grown up in New York City, which was the biggest and best city in the world—after all, Spider-man lived there!—and that he had joined the Navy to be a pilot. When he told the kids at school that, they laughed at him, because they said the Navy was just boats. But Mikey knew better, and the very next week there had been a story on the news about Commander Al when he was an Ensign flying Navy planes in Florida. The kids at school hadn't laughed after that.
There were lots of big words in the magazines, and Mikey didn't understand everything, but he loved the pictures of brave, strong Commander Al in his uniform and his space suit and the funny white clothes that he wore when he had Thanksgiving dinner with the President. There was a little word that he didn't understand, too. The magazines almost always called Commander Al a POW at least once in each article. Mikey didn't know what a pow was, but whatever it was Commander Al was obviously an important one to have it spelled all in big letters like that. Mikey liked that word. It made him think of Batman and Robin. Maybe Commander Al was a superhero, too. Mikey wondered what his secret identity was.
"POW!" Mikey exclaimed, imagining Commander Al in his white spacesuit, hitting the bad guys and saving the world. "Pow! Pow! POW!"
"Mikey, not so loud," Mommy said. She was sitting on the sofa with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She still looked sad.
Suddenly Mikey was scared that Mommy was sick. He remembered last night. She had been happy, laughing and singing all day, until they watched the broadcast from the shuttle. Daddy hadn't wanted to watch it, but Mikey and Geoff had begged, and Mommy had said sharply; "I'm watching it, Dirk, and you can't stop me!" Then Daddy knew he was being a bad boy and he had stopped saying no. Usually Mommy called him Daddy. Dirk was his In Trouble name, the way that Michael was Mikey's.
The broadcast had been really great. First the astronauts had said hello, and then they had read from the Bible. Mikey knew almost all the words they read. He was Presbyterian, like Daddy and Geoff and Dougie and Granmie and Grandpa. Mommy wasn't Presbyterian, she was Cathy-lick, which Grandpa said meant that she didn't know her Bible so good. But Mikey did, and so did the astronauts! Commander Al was the best reader, of course, except that at one part he had trouble sounding out a word and the other astronauts had helped him. Then the astronauts had said hi to their families, and Commander Al had said that all the boys and girls in America were his kids. That made Mikey proud. He was glad that he was Commander Al's kid. Then the most exciting thing of all happened, and the picture fizzled and disappeared! Mikey had thought it was the Moon Men attacking the rocket, but then a man from the TV station had explained that the astronauts were behind the moon now, and that they couldn't make TV when they were behind the moon.
Mommy had started crying then, and she didn't stop even when Mikey explained that the Moon Men weren't attacking the rocket and that the astronauts weren't going to be taken prisoner and locked up in a Moon Dungeon. In fact, that had made Mommy cry more, and Daddy had started to look really mad, even though it was Christmas Eve.
Now she was sitting on the sofa looking very sad. Mikey got up, abandoning his new Tinker-Toys, and walked over to hug her.
"Are you sick, Mommy?" he asked. "Have you got a temperature?"
Mommy hugged him very tightly. "No, baby. No. Mommy hasn't got a temperature."
"Good!" Mikey said. "Because Commander Al is landing on the moon today, and you don't want to miss it because you have to go to the doctor for some medicine!"
Mommy smiled a very small smile. "Commander Al?" she asked.
Mikey nodded vehemently. "Commander Al Claveechee!" he enthused. "He's the best astronaut in the whole world!"
Mommy frowned a little. It wasn't a mad frown, it was a thinking frown. She pulled Mikey up onto her lap. "His name is Calavicci," she said. "Not Claveechee. Calavicci. Try and say that, Mike."
"Calliveechee," Mikey tried.
"Good boy. Try again. Calavicci," Mommy coached.
Mikey concentrated really hard. "Cal-ah-vee-chee," he said.
"Good!" Mommy said. "One more time!"
Mikey looked at her anxiously. He wasn't sure if he could say it again. It was an awfully funny name.
"Don't worry about it, sport. You call him whatever you want," Daddy said, coming into the room. "And I thought I said you and I were the space buddies, and you should leave Mommy alone about it."
"Why shouldn't he talk to me about space if he wants to?" Mommy asked crossly.
"No reason," Daddy said. "Except I tell him all about the rockets while you're busy giving him Italian lessons."
"I think it's important that he know how to pronounce it!" Mommy snapped.
Daddy looked very angry. Mikey was scared. He didn't like it when Mommy and Daddy fought.
"Well, I say he can call that star jock whatever he wants!" Daddy growled. "Mikey, you go and play with Geoff and no more talking to Mommy about space. She doesn't like it."
"Who says I don't like it?" demanded Mommy.
"Well, you were bawling pretty good last night!"
"Damn it, Dirk—" Mommy stopped abruptly, her hand flying to her mouth. She had never sworn in front of Mikey before. "I'm sorry, baby," she said humbly. "Mommy shouldn't talk like that."
Daddy's anger wasn't the same anymore. Now his face looked like Doctor Octopus, not the Green Goblin. "Liz, forget him. He's not worth thinking about. He's forgotten you: just look at that bimbo he married. More chest than brains. What kind of a guy would hitch up with a dame like that—and then cheat on her?"
"You shut up!" Mommy cried, angry again. "You shut up and leave him alone! You're not half the man he is!"
She was crying again. She stood up, setting Mikey down on the sofa. Daddy tried to hug her.
"Liz…" he said. "Lizzy, come on…"
"No! Just you shut up about him!" she cried. Mikey saw that she was crying, even though she looked mad now, not sad at all. "And stay out of my kitchen: I'm going to make your stupid turkey!"
Then she stormed out of the room.
Daddy stood for a minute, watching the door she had disappeared through. Then he clapped Mikey on the shoulder.
"Hey, sport!" he said, grinning broadly. "Whaddaya say we hit the slopes early today!"
With a crow of excitement, Mikey ran to find his snowpants.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWM"Ready?" Jim asked, his voice crackling over the speakers in Al's helmet.
"Never been so ready," Al replied. He activated the vox up to the capsule. "Enterprise, this is Excelsior. Preparing for EVA."
"Acknowledge Excelsior. You have a good stroll, fellas!" Jacobs replied.
Al closed his eyes and opened the hatch.
The ladder landed with a jolt he could feel through his boots. Carefully, his slight frame made unwieldy by the bulk of the suit, he descended. Jim had a camera trained on him as he stepped from the lowest rung onto the firm surface below. He faltered, his knees quivering.
"Al? You okay?" Jim asked.
"Fine… fine…" Al gasped. He couldn't believe it. He just… he couldn't believe it.
He was standing on the moon. Albert Calavicci, the gutter nothing, throwaway from the slums of New York, orphan and reprobate, juvenile delinquent, runaway, petty thief, lockpick and troublemaker, miserable craven wretch and coward and turncoat, drinker of jungle rainwater, eater of befouled rice, whipping boy of North Vietnam, inhabitant of cages and pits and tiny, stinking cells, he, Albert Calavicci, was standing on the moon!
"Good. You think you could move a little to the side so I can join this little expedition?" Jim asked good-naturedly.
Somehow Al managed to move his legs. When he pushed off from the ground, however, he started to float, rising in a gentle arc far higher than he would have stepped on earth. He landed gently four and a half feet from where he had started. Still, he stared at the diamond-studded sky above him and the broad, white landscape before him, unable to focus on anything but the utter wonder of the moment.
His cheeks were wet, and he realized that tears of awe and gratitude were pouring from his eyes. He was here. He had done it. How had he done it? It didn't matter. He was here, on the outer frontier of man's horizons, free as he had never been free before!
He took another step, forcefully this time. He sailed through the one-sixth-G environment. A laugh of pure joy welled up in his throat. "We did it, Jimbo!" he crooned. "We did it!"
"We did it, buddy!" Jim cried in return. "Al, we did it!"
"Fellas?" Clem's voice prompted. "Houston wants to remind you that you gentlemen are due on the air in five minutes."
That snapped Al out of his blissful catatonia. He turned back to help Jim set up the bulky color camera on a tripod next to the LEM. When it was done, Al positioned himself in front of the lens. Then the lieutenant flashed him the a-okay.
"Merry Christmas!" Al cried, knowing that his words were filtering into homes around the world that was hovering in the sky above him. He pointed towards the orb, and Jim adjusted the position of the camera accordingly. "I can see you folks, though those of you in America won't be able to see me for a few hours yet. We're standing here on a plain just north of the Carpenter Crater, and let me tell you, Earth, are you looking good tonight! I'd be proud to step out with a lady like you any night!"
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMTheir first ten minutes on the surface were occupied by the broadcast, and then they were able to get down to the task of collecting samples, taking off across the rocky landscape in the rover. There were lists of what to look for and the limits to what they would be able to bring back. They drilled for core samples and collected vials of dust. Jim was on the lookout for handsome rocks for his son and Clem's kids. They snapped pictures of each other, some serious and some ridiculous, and tried some clumsy gymnastics and some incredible trick jumps. It was unbelievable what you could do in fractional gravity…
At last they returned to the Excelsior, and loaded her up for the return journey. Then Jim dug out a little tote bag, and they descended again. Al checked the feed on the camera, which Clem subsequently confirmed with Houston. It was time for one last publicity stunt, and this time it was Calavicci's brainchild.
Thrilled by the proposal, Hillerich and Bradsby had provided two custom-made mitts, adapted to fit over the bulky gloves of the spacesuits. Al donned his with some effort, and Jim did the same. Then they spread out from one another, far enough that they weren't going to overshoot their gentle tosses but near enough that they were both still visible to the camera, and started up a game of catch.
Before the eyes of the world, Albert Calavicci the one time Navy all-star became the first man to pitch a baseball on the moon.