For Jack and the Eagle
by D.S. Liggett
OF ALL THE TIME that we spent in Alabama, very little was actually spent in Huntsville. It’s easy to forget this, considering the trip is almost exclusively called Huntsville among my family, when we think of the weekend that we spent just outside Decatur.
We drove all through the day, and arrived at a little hotel just after dark. Then began the show of unpacking the car, and repacking the bellman’s cart with our luggage, which we lugged into the elevator. The woman at the front desk was cordial and toothless, and she gave my father our keys without hassle. We thanked her quietly and shuffled up to our room, which was situated one floor up, and bordered on both sides by a dim stairwell, and the steadily chuffing elevator.
The room was not a thing of beauty or convenience; the curtains were shredded from the middle, as though someone had extended an arm straight outward and raked the strips to the floor, and the doors were beset with scratches at their bottom lips. I was to take the fold-out bed, which sprang from the graying blue couch along the room’s furthest-right wall, and my parents were to divide the two beds in the room’s set-away bedroom between themselves, their luggage, and the dog. That night, as I tucked into my fold-out bed, I discovered that the door to the bedroom would not close if the fold-out bed was extended. Keeping silent, I rolled over and offset their unending television with a pillow to the ear.
*
On the first day of our trip, my mother and I went to see the Space & Rocket Center, while my father left our room in Decatur for a Doubletree hotel in Huntsville proper, where he was to play in a dart tournament. This arrangement came as a result of the Huntsville hotel’s No-Dogs policy. Rather than leave our dog at home, we opted for the hotel in Decatur, although I could not yet decide, on that morning, whether the dog would really think our choice was worth it, as she was alone in the room for most of the day.
We took turns planting kisses on her black, clefted head, and took her outside the hotel, to the fields of dead winter-grass bordered by parking lots. I slipped off her lead and gave her a signal which meant, without question, go!, at the sight of which she took off in massive circles around the fields, kicking up fistfuls of strawlike grass and little hunks of dry Earth as she ran.
On that morning, the sky was radiantly blue, and the Tennessee river was full-up nearly to the shore. With the dog packed away in the hotel, and my father gone over to Huntsville for the day, my mother and I were driving out in search of rockets.
Just before we left for Alabama, I’d promised a friend, an English boy called Jack, who loved military history certainly more than I did, to get pictures of all the great rockets, tanks and aircraft for him. Our friendship had always been a strange one; lacking greatly in any real sense of certainty or stability, and so I was more than willing to impress — I could stand good graces.
*
The second-youngest president elected, John F. Kennedy, sometimes called Jack, was a Massachusetts Democrat. Compared to his predecessors, he was a handsome man, with a full head of hair and a presidential smile.
The other day, I stumbled across a picture of him on the campaign trail, standing outside a house in West Virginia and talking with who I take to be a young father and his daughters. Kennedy’s standing on the ground, jacketless, and looking up at the family, who stand relaxed on their patio. The father seems to have his hands in his pockets. The row of identical, small houses seems to stretch on forever, and the sky seems artificially gloomy and dark from the film decay.
Today, I found another picture. It was almost definitely taken minutes later; Kennedy is shaking hands with an older man, likely the first man’s father. The children, now joined by a boy, appear unphased. There’s something strange, looking at the pictures. Knowing that Kennedy won the presidency — and West Virginia itself, by a landslide — part of me wanted to exalt, to take a little joy in seeing such a tidy prelude. But there is another, far more sinister, part of me that cannot so easily examine the picture. I looked at the father, standing in his doorway, face caught by the shadow of the door, white tee-shirt dirty, presumably with coal, and I couldn’t be rid of the face of Lee Harvey Oswald; his dark hair, white shirt, unrepentant stare. I drew a sharp breath and closed the tab.
*
The Space & Rocket Center was ill-maintained, but, in its disrepair, it was charming. I took my mother’s picture under the Space Camp sign, and we made a quick entrance to the center itself; there were no lines. We made our way through the first dim rooms; a small minefield of shuttles, Mars-rock recreations, and displays joyfully announcing the advent of 3D-printed walls, inviting us to admire the black, wavy wall they’d fashioned from concentric plastic rings, after which, we filed into the high-ceilinged halls at the edge of the center.
The hall I remember best was a long one, fitted on all sides with large windows, and sectioned into the shape of a horseshoe by the rocket which lay lengthwise down the middle of the floor. Each wall was covered to eye-level with infographics, booths and children’s activity stations, and we wandered slowly down our aisle, taking in the place. In folding chairs, scattered throughout the hall at wide intervals, was a small gallery of white-haired, gray-suited men clutching clipboards, and fitted with lanyard IDs. I thought for a moment that they must be scientists, but we didn’t stop for long enough to ask. Secretly, I hoped that they weren’t bookending a life of scientific service providing simplified explanations of space travel to the slow procession of mothers and children passing them.
Eventually, when we’d followed the horseshoe back to the mouth of the hall, we took a turn down a cement staircase out to the Rocket Garden. Hearing the name, a small, near-imperceptible part of me had been expecting rows of flowerbeds, giving way to the noses of rockets, poking through the mulch and dirt as though they’d grown miraculously and immaculately from the Earth. Of course, the Rocket Garden was not a garden by any literal means, but a series of cement pathways and platforms, home to hundreds of retired government vehicles, laid bare and docile as animals in a petting-zoo. I cooed their names and peered inside them; leaned forward for better pictures — Little John, Cheyenne.
The rocket I remember best was a truly massive thing; I stood beside it, dwarfed, and looked up at a piece of long pneumatic piping, branded in tall red letters, UNITED STATES, in a hand that was unmistakably human. My mother called to me, for what must’ve been the second time, “Look over here!” I looked back and smiled. She snapped the picture on her phone, and, having had our fill, we left for Decatur.
*
When I think of the American presidents, perhaps more often than I ought to, there is always a defining event of each presidency; something that I can point to and say, “that’s what he did.” — Lincoln won the Civil War, Washington pioneered the position, Taft did/didn’t get stuck in his bathtub, and Kennedy put a man on the moon (So I’ve been told.)
I suppose I always did know that Kennedy himself couldn’t have been around for Apollo 11. Growing up, I was told, above all else about him, that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963. Still, his legacy of spaceflight was almost inescapable.
I spent a week in Florida very recently, almost a year after seeing Huntsville. My parents and I came to stay with my Aunt and Uncle in Sebastian, which is a town so flat that it seems to stretch forever. We spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center, dusted by spitting rain; grumpy and displeased. It seemed to me a sort of amusement park — Each building was a similar series of rooms; we’d wait in a line to get inside, before being led through a series of rooms, all of which played similar videos, covering Kennedy, the Apollo missions, and the invention, testing and success of rockets. Then, we were released into the galleries, — the part I liked best — where displays of all varieties peered back at us through glass cases. I took my mother’s picture next to portraits of Mark and Scott Kelly, and my father pointed out the patches of missing thermal tiles on the displayed rockets.
When I left the Kennedy Space Center, I was struck by a strange thought. Regardless of my longstanding fascination with John F. Kennedy and the minutiae of spaceflight, I had preferred the Huntsville Space & Rocket Center greatly. I wasn’t sure why.
*
The next day, my mother and I went back to Huntsville for the dart tournament. The tournament crowd was one I had been familiar with for most of a decade; a loose and extended network of kindly men and women with a habit of clapping me on the back and saying, “Your daddy’s on a real winning streak over there!”, or “You know, I’ve still got one of your stories in my office.”
Finding a place to sit was easy; my father was loosed on a winning streak, and the trading of seats was unquestionably in favor of his family. I made myself content with a can of coke and a bag of plain Lays — a preference my father has always mocked — and watched.
My mother and I had come to the Doubletree from a long hike on the edge of Huntsville. We had taken the dog, who, itching for adventure beyond our hotel room, had jumped eagerly into the hills. I had, ignorantly, expected that the hike would be flat and easy. Rather, it began to rain bitterly halfway through, and after a certain point, my mother suggested we cut across the remaining loop back to the parking lot. This measure only worsened things, as we climbed successive rows of wet rockface, stepping tenuously side-to-side in search of a clear footpath up, back to the parking lot. We arrived back to the car damp and unsteady on our feet, and so we climbed back into the car and sat in the lot, sipping from clinking metal water-bottles, and waiting for the dog to dry enough to return to the Decatur room, where we dropped her off on the way back to the Doubletree. It was strange, huffing back; we were seasoned hikers, competent and prepared for the hike we’d expected. And yet, somehow, we’d been bested. I didn’t want to think about it.
My hair was still drying as we watched my father in the Doubletree ballroom; he was jolly and light on his feet, and his winning streak did not let up. The evening was drawing to a close, and pointing towards a final match. Most were finishing up their games, and the room’s crowd was thinning at a steady pace. Those who stayed were largely in the same position as my mother and I; watching their friends, family members, spouses, who had not yet been eliminated.
My father was to finish the evening with the tournament’s penultimate event; a match against a friend. Then again, there are very few matches in a regional dart tournament that are not played between friends. The atmosphere was at once tense and slack; those of us still watching had grown hungry and restless, and the sun had gone down outside. The room’s good spirits still remained, but in smaller pockets, and in hushed tones. The movement had slowed, and then stilled near-entirely; there were no more bellowed greetings between friends, or five-man news crews wheeling cameras around to cover the event. Breath was drawn taught and shallow. My father took his place at the board beside his evening’s final opponent. They each shot for the cork, and then began.
*
A dart moves through the air so quickly that it is near-invisible until it reaches a target. It shoots forward, embeds its needlelike tip in the felt of a board, and twangs back and forth upon impact, creaking. When I watched the tournament in Huntsville, I hadn’t seen a rocket launch in person yet, but if I had, I might’ve drawn a parallel. I might’ve thought about the sound that they both make. Almost a year after I saw Huntsville, I stood in my uncle’s backyard in Florida, and watched a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral hours after we left the Kennedy Space Center. I never believed what people told me about feeling a rocket; I was wrong.
It was a few days after Christmas, and the sky had just fallen to full-dark. It was almost cold. I was barefoot, staring up through a sparse canopy at the little patch of sky beside the moon. My uncle pointed out the first signs of the rocket to us, and my mother oohed quietly from beside me. My father looked up silently, and my little cousin tugged at my hand, calling out in chorus with her father. The rocket cut a clear path through the sky and came to rest just beside the moon, framed between two branches of an old, leafless tree at the edge of their yard. It hung there for a moment, before the sound began — my aunt and uncle chuckled quietly, the dogs perked up their heads and cocked them, and the rest of us were silent, smiling despite our slack jaws. The sound buzzed all around us, bordered in by the tall backyard fence, and catching inside my chest. The air was alive and thrumming; I squeezed my cousin’s hand.
For a few moments longer the rocket remained, as the sound dissipated to a quiet hum. It was a little burning circle in the sky, stripping off its boosters and piercing into the darkness. It burned for a few seconds more, and then was gone.
*
My father won the last game. Of the three legs, he won the last two without ever seeming to lose his edge. He was calm and methodical; an unrelenting force. After the second game, he fired the chalker — a younger man entering scores on the iPad hanging beside the boards — with a fatherly pat on the shoulder and a muttered “I’ve got it, you go on and sit down.” The chalker had mistakenly marked his second leg as a loss, and took a seat to my immediate right, grumbling indistinctly, smelling of marijuana. My father’s opponent, a round man with a neat crew-cut, seemed to accept his loss well, and shook my father’s hand with a jolly smile. The game had been won quickly and decisively, and the room’s mood was that of joy and relief. My father made his rounds saying goodbye and patting the backs of his friends, and then we all loaded back into the car, and returned to Decatur.
The next morning, my father played in a final tournament event, while my mother and I sat reading books in the Doubletree lounge with our traveling bags by our feet. The dog slept fitfully in the car, ventilated by the half-opened windows and cool weather, curled up in her traveling crate. My father got done playing in the midafternoon, and we were all glad to pack ourselves into the car once again. I spent most of the drive with my head stuck out the window, swallowed by the falling dark, and blown about happily by the wind wicking down the river. It was a joyful drive; quiet, yet underpinned by a sense of triumph. There was something very strange about riding along, late into the night, on a Sunday evening, but I didn’t mind it. I was happy to be windblown, and to watch the shadows stretch themselves out over the long, pale highway; I was very, very happy.
*
I asked my father, just the other day, about the presidents he grew up under — ten years too young to have seen the Kennedy administration, he told me, “Jimmy Carter was a good man. They say he was just a one-term president, but…” He trailed off and tossed a dart at his practice board, “… No president has done so much after his presidency.”
John F. Kennedy was president for just under three years. In fact, he came in only forty-nine days short of the mark. He served less than a term in office, which continues to surprise me, although I’ve known that since elementary school. He was followed by Lyndon B. Johnson, a man I know very little about, who was followed by Richard Nixon, a man that I know mainly for his scandals and misgivings. Until only days ago, I didn’t know that Nixon had been in office during the Apollo 11 mission. That, technically speaking, he’d put a man on the moon.
Like most people, Kennedy’s goals were not as straightforward as they are represented. By 1963, he was suggesting a joint American-Soviet space mission to the United Nations; the Soviets weren’t nearly as eager. It’s strange to imagine, Ivanov and Sixpack on the moon. To me, the Space Race was an opportunity for blind, exalting Us-vs-Them patriotism; Hell yeah, those are our guys, and they’re kicking the Russians’ asses. I’m from the same country as the men on the moon; they brought all of us up with them, when they brought our flag. It’s strange to think how easily it might have, instead, been a gesture of national unity; friendship, my usual politic.
I think I understand, now, why it is that the Kennedy Space Center seemed so strange to me. I suppose it might have been anyone’s, but it was Kennedy’s. A living mausoleum, a testimony to the great things which came only after his death; a Pharaoh buried in wait of his riches. O, King of America, accept our offerings. O, King, O King Almighty…
*
Jack didn’t care for the pictures nearly as much as I’d hoped. His good graces were delicate. They wore thin before the summer began in earnest. Sometimes, when I look back on the last of our the good times; Huntsville, Easter Sunday, and the rest of our fun, I can’t resist looking back in anger; my current frustrations make me forget the point of remembering. I was happy then; times were good; I had a friend. For a short time, all that mattered was the joy of having a friend, of my father winning the game, of my mother and I making it back to the car, of the dog running free, kicking up clods of dirt and dead winter grass, of the handsome young president, of his black-and-white campaign trail, of his rockets launching, of his man on the moon. I tell myself that I cannot define all that comes before disaster by suffering. I tell myself that to do so would undermine all that there is to be said about living.
For that drive, on the way home from Huntsville, I was surrounded by whipping wind and darkness and music and a churning, frothing river and endless endless endless road. I had a friend, and I had no reason to believe that anything might ever change. There was joy in the infinite; the moving statically; the going nowhere and going quickly. There were thousands of tiny triumphs seeded in the river and mountains and cold night air; I wanted for nothing, and took as much.
*
The ending irony of John F. Kennedy is not lost on me. When he died, the Space Race became not a living man’s passion, but a dead one’s; the moon, the world’s greatest memorial. I live now in an age in which people from 21 separate countries have visited the International Space Station, an age in which a colonized moon is not a possibility, but an inevitability. Rockets launch so frequently that my Aunt and Uncle have become accustomed to watching launches from their backyard, and retired rockets are placed in centers like the Huntsville Space & Rocket Center and the Kennedy Space Center for the public’s viewing pleasure; made docile; domesticated.
In this age, I sometimes wonder about a world in which John F. Kennedy was never assassinated; in which Lee Harvey Oswald stayed in the USSR, and Jack Ruby never went to prison, perhaps in which the first men to walk the moon’s surface were a Soviet-American pair, forced into camaraderie by their proximity and shared goal. Would the moon be any less American, were it shared? Would I still feel as though I’d been brought with, on the backs of the toiling few, and placed upon the moon alongside the American flag? I don’t know. I don’t know whether John F. Kennedy put a man on the moon, or Lyndon B. Johnson, or Richard Nixon. I don’t know whether, had Kennedy survived his presidency, the moon would’ve been nearly as important to the American public. I don’t know whether the Soviets would’ve ever agreed to a joint space flight. No one does. I do know one thing, though. I know that, when John F. Kennedy died, his American people loved him. They still do.
On July 20th, 1969, an anonymous American left a bouquet of flowers on Kennedy’s grave with an attached note, reading ‘Mr. President, The Eagle has landed.’
BIO
D.S. Liggett is a student of creative writing at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, South Carolina, with a vested interest in expressing the joys, hardships and little intimacies of the world through the written word. He plans to continue having great fun reading, writing and seeking publication.
