Rocket Science Read Free

manufacturing know-how that had gone into that magnificent beast belonging to the previous century. This was the age of flight, and my heart always wanted to soar.
    Odus Milliken the railway agent, a cadaverous veteran of the Spanish-American War who seemed likely to live forever, had told us that this route would be getting the new diesels soon, so we’d better say goodbye to the steam trains. As much as I admired the old machines, I could live without the noise.
    Odus and Bertie the switchman had conspired to drop two flat cars off onto the depot’s freight siding. One was loaded with an enormous crate, the other had something bulky secured under a tarp. Floyd and some of the old guys from the Otasko Club strained with the swing-arm block and tackle on my Dad’s stakebed truck to shift the massive crate from the first flat car. With my bad leg and all I stayed out of the way. The crate was almost too big for the truck — easily large enough to contain a small omnibus. I couldn’t imagine what something so massive and heavy could actually be. Had he shipped home artillery? I wouldn’t put it past Floyd.
    Odus stood with me, shaking his head and laughing in his creaky old-man voice. “Those boys are idiots,” he said. “They ought to trot over to the lumberyard and borrow a forklift. It’s gonna take them all day to get that crate off. Plus he’s got that other load, too.”
    I hadn’t realized that both flat cars were for Floyd. Where had he gotten the money for the freight charges? “What else does he have?”
    “Come on,” Odus said. “Let’s have look.”
    Odus and I walked around the flat cars, staying out of the way of Floyd’s work party. Odus untied the lashing that held one corner of the tarp to the second flat car. We lifted the canvas and saw a massive rubber tire. I peered up. “It’s a truck.”
    “Really?” asked Odus. “I never would have guessed.”
    I eyed the four-foot drop off from the flat car to the rails below. “How are we going to get this onto the ground?”
    “Well, if they’d listed this correctly on the manifest, I would have had it off already,” said Odus sharply. “I’ve got a ramp we can drop at the end of the car. You just drive it off. Why don’t you pull the tarp off it while I go set it up?” He trotted away.
    I tugged and pulled to get the tarp off the truck. The tarp was huge, heavy and damp, and nearly smothered me when it finally slid off. That was when I discovered it wasn’t a truck. It was a halftrack. Definitely German — field gray with the big black cross on the doors. Floyd had shipped himself a German army vehicle complete with bumper numbers and swastika. But it was the weirdest halftrack I’d ever seen — nothing like those newsreels of troops riding in an armored box over muddy, cratered landscapes.
    The front looked just like any truck built in the last fifteen years — I didn’t recognize the make, of course, but it had to be German. The tracks in back looked a whole lot like an old Caterpillar 60 with extra wheels in the middle to extend the tread length. But the body on top was planed and angled like it was meant to fly away. There wasn’t a vertical surface anywhere on the back of the halftrack. I cocked my head, studied the thing. It really did look streamlined, or perhaps as if it had been meant to deflect explosion.
    “Oh, Floyd, what have you done?” I whispered to the halftrack.

    It started raining as soon as we left the depot and headed out of town, and it poured all the way back to the farm. I kept praying that the creaky old Mack would make it without sputtering to a halt. I didn’t look forward to dragging the truck and Floyd’s monstrous crate down muddy dirt roads with Mr. Bellamy’s ancient Farm-All. Lucky for me the spirits that moved the old truck smiled, and it kept turning over in spite of the dampness.
    Somehow we got the vehicles all the way to Floyd’s place without attracting attention from the Butler County