Ignatius MacFarland (3 page)

Mr. Andriasco looked around at my classmates, who all chuckled. I’m sure not one of them found what he said to be the least bit funny but since they wanted to stay out of trouble, they all acted like he was the wittiest guy in the world. Even stupid Frank Gutenkunitz was smiling at him as if Mr. Andriasco were his favorite teacher in all of teacherdom. This is the same Frank Gutenkunitz, mind you, who called Mr. Andriasco “Mole Man” behind his back, because Mr. Andriasco had no chin and a pointy nose and looked like a mole.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Andriasco,” I said, hoping he would just give me back my notebook and return to the chalkboard. That was my goal.

Yeah, right, don’t hold your breath.

“I’m sorry, too, Mr. MacFarland,” he said as he continued to study the drawings in my notebook. “I’m sorry that you’ve decided not to listen to my factually accurate lesson about evolution in favor of misguidedly dreaming about things that have no basis in scientific fact.”

And then, to my horror, he held out my notebook for the whole class to see, as if he were reading a story from a picture book and showing everyone the drawings. They all leaned forward so that they could get a good long look at my most private doodlings, and then they all burst out laughing. I felt like I was going to throw up.

“All right, quiet down,” Mr. Andriasco said to the class with a smile that showed he was really pleased with himself. “Mr. MacFarland, I would appreciate it if the only higher form of intelligence you have contact with when you’re in my classroom is me.” And with that, Mr. Andriasco handed me back my notebook and gave me a look that said I’d be in big trouble if he caught me drawing again. Then he walked back up to the chalkboard.

I looked over and saw Frank Gutenkunitz staring at me. He mouthed the words
MacFartland, you are such a loser
and shook his head to himself, laughing at how stupid he thought I was.

Can I have just
one
good day at school? I thought. Is that asking so much?

Mr. Andriasco picked up his piece of chalk and turned to us. “And for the record, boys and girls, there is no scientific evidence that UFOs even exist. If Mr. MacFarland is waiting around for his alien friends to come and visit him, I’d say he’s got a better chance of meeting them by building his own spaceship and flying off to find them himself.” He then chuckled at what he thought was a joke and went back to his lecture.

I, however, couldn’t concentrate once again. Because I suddenly had something else on my mind. Something really big.

Mr. Andriasco had given me an idea.

4

PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE

The minute we were at our regular cafeteria table, I told my friends Gary and Ivan about my plan.

“All right, you guys,” I said, leaning in and talking quietly so that nobody at any nearby tables could hear me. “We’re meeting at the barn right after school. We’re gonna do something big. Gary, did your brother make his Tennessee fireworks run this month?”

“Uh-huh,” said Gary, his mouth full of the really terrible pizza our cafeteria made every Friday afternoon. Everybody always got excited the days our school served pizza, but then everybody always remembered the minute they bit into it that it wasn’t good. It always tasted sort of like a big stale saltine cracker with dried-out ketchup and melted-down wax lips on top.

“Bring over as many fireworks as you can,” I told him. “Especially bottle rockets.”

“But Rick’ll kill me if I take his stuff,” said Gary as he tried to wash down the hideous pizza with a big drink of chocolate milk that had an expiration date I believe was from the previous decade. Gary’s way-older brother, Ricky, was always driving down to Tennessee to buy fireworks because they weren’t legal where we lived. The police had even arrested him once for doing it but he just wouldn’t stop. I think he was a bit of a pyromaniac. (That’s a person who’s obsessed with fire, in case you didn’t know.)

“This is really important, Gary. Just tell him that the police came and confiscated everything again.”

“That’s a lie,” said Ivan as he chewed on the giant meatloaf sandwich his mom always sent him to school with. I’d known Ivan ever since we were in kindergarten and I’d never seen him eat anything other than a meat-loaf sandwich at lunch. Gary used to say that when Ivan went to the bathroom, the only thing that came out was a meat-loaf sandwich, which his mom then fished out of the toilet bowl and put back in his lunchbox for the next day. There was only one time Ivan’s mom didn’t give him a meat-loaf sandwich and that was the day he talked her into packing him a giant Slim Jim and a Twinkie and nothing else. But then Mrs. Jenkins, the cafeteria guard, came by our table and saw Ivan’s lunch and ended up calling his mom and accusing her of being a bad parent.

Anyway, Ivan was pretty religious, so stuff like lying really upset him. He always said that God was just looking for an excuse to punish people. “Are you asking Gary to lie
and
steal at the same time? ’Cause that’ll pretty much guarantee that Gary’s going to H-E-double toothpicks after he dies.”

“Yes, I’m asking Gary to lie and steal, but it’s to help
me
out,” I said, signaling Ivan to keep his loud voice down. “This is really,
really
important.”

Gary and Ivan looked at me, confused. I leaned in even closer to them and whispered really quietly.

“I’m going to build a rocket.”

“YOU’RE GOING TO BUILD A
ROCKET?”
Ivan bellowed, loud enough so that people at all the tables around us looked over.

“Shut up!” I whispered, then looked at the people who were staring at us and made a face that was supposed to show them I thought Ivan was crazy and that he had no idea what he was talking about. Then I looked back at him and Gary.

“Tell the whole school, why don’t you, loudmouth?” I said to Ivan, who just shrugged and took another bite of his sandwich. When he did, the entire piece of meat loaf slid out the back of the bread slices and dropped onto the table with a splatty-sounding
thud.
I leaned in farther and whispered even quieter this time. “I’m going to build a rocket and fly it into outer space.”

They both stared at me.

“What do fireworks have to do with building a rocket engine?” asked Gary.

“What do you think bottle rockets
are?
They’re little
rockets,
” I said, trying to convince Gary how ignorant he was at that moment. “If we tape a ton of them together, they’ll be one
big
rocket. Then all we have to do is stick them on the bottom of the spaceship we’re going to build, light them, and I’ll go into outer space.”

“Uh, Iggy,” said Gary. “No offense, but I think you’d better do some more research about rockets.”

As much as I hated to admit it, Gary was right.

I
was
an idiot.

It was just that I was so desperate to get to the aliens that I didn’t really think things through. I do that a lot. I get excited about something and then I want it right away. My dad always says that’s a sign of immaturity but you oughta hear
him
if the waitress at a restaurant doesn’t bring his food within five minutes. Then he acts like he hasn’t eaten in days and gets all sarcastic with the waitress, saying things like, “What are you doing? Growing the food before you serve it?” and “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were in the middle of a famine.” Patience is a virtue, my grandma always told my dad when he’d do this, and so I knew that when it came to me and rockets, it was time to get a little more virtuous.

I spent the next week going to the library and looking all over the Internet to learn about rocket engines. I found information from NASA, from rocketry clubs, from college science department Web sites, and from some really old books from the library. My dad always made fun of our local library and said it was more like a book museum, since all the books in it were super old and out of date. But I liked the old books. There was something about them that made me feel good. Maybe it’s because they looked like lots of people had read and enjoyed them. For all I knew, inventors and movie stars and famous scientists and presidents could have thumbed through the exact same pages that I was looking through. I thought that was kind of exciting.

Anyway, here’s a super fast overview of what I discovered about rockets, since if I tell you all the scientific information I read about, you’ll probably fall into a deep sleep from which you will not awaken for centuries.

Okay. Here goes:

There are two kinds of rocket engines. There are liquid propellant engines, and there are solid propellant engines. And liquid propellant engines use liquid fuel and solid propellant engines use solid fuel.

Duh, right?

Now, a solid propellant engine is what I was thinking of when I wanted to use all those fireworks. It’s basically a long tube filled with something that’s solid and flammable, like the gunpowder that’s in a bottle rocket, and there’s a hole on one end of the tube. When you light the fuel, it starts to burn really fast, which forces huge flames to shoot out the bottom of the tube, which then push the rocket up off the ground and keep pushing it until it breaks through Earth’s atmosphere and away from the gravitational pull of our planet.

Did that make sense?

Well, trust me, it’s accurate.

Anyway, when I read about the solid propellant engines, I realized that my plan of taping a bunch of little fireworks together wouldn’t work. But I did figure out that if I took all the gunpowder from inside the fireworks and emptied it into one
big
tube and had the tube sticking out the bottom of the spaceship, then I might actually have a shot at getting into outer space when I lit the thing. I just needed to build a spaceship to put the engine on.

And so that’s what Gary, Ivan, and I did.

The only problem was we had no idea what we were doing.

5

THREE GARBAGE CANS

Okay, before I tell you all of the stuff I did next, please realize I now know that what I was trying to do was
really
stupid. But at the time it seemed
really
smart. That’s the problem with stupid things. They never seem stupid
before
you do them.

Like this rocket I came up with.

I got the idea for it when Ivan and I found these old metal garbage cans under a pile of junk inside his garage. Ivan’s garage was majorly disgusting and looked like a fleet of garbage trucks had dumped their entire loads inside of it instead of going to the landfill. Ivan was always saying that his dad was going to clean it out but every weekend we’d see Ivan’s dad lying in a lawn chair in his backyard drinking beer and reading magazines that my dad said I wasn’t allowed to look at. But the fact that Ivan’s dad was such a slob was a good thing for us at that moment, because nobody else in town had metal garbage cans and we couldn’t have made a rocket out of plastic ones, which is what all garbage cans are now.

So we grabbed the garbage cans and this huge metal funnel Ivan’s dad used to pour oil into his pickup truck’s engine and a bunch of other things like nails and tape and hammers and wire and old license plates and wood planks and paint cans and we took it all over to this old abandoned barn in the middle of what we called the dead field.

The dead field was called the dead field because it was, well, dead. That’s why there was an old abandoned barn there. Because some poor farmer about a hundred years ago tried to start a farm in the middle of the dead field and then he couldn’t get anything to grow. Ever. For his entire life.

Mr. Andriasco told us once that there was some weird blend of mineral deposits in the dirt of the dead field that kept any plants from ever being able to grow there. I always felt sorry for that old farmer a hundred years ago who had pulled a total Ignatius MacFarland by convincing himself he could make a dusty field that had nothing growing in it into something good. I bet there was some other farmer in town who was a jerk like Frank Gutenkunitz who made as much fun of the dead field farmer as Frank made of me all the time. And so I guess I figured that if I could build my rocket in the dead field, maybe somehow I’d be helping that old farmer by turning his farm into a place where something good was finally going to happen.