The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  “Browning semiautomatic,” he said, bringing the gun to the middle of the room. “Sweet piece, huh?”

  He turned it back and forth under the light. It had a polished wooden stock and a blue-black metal barrel. He pointed out its features for me: the flip-up sight, the loading slot, the safety button, the firing chamber.

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Nah.” He reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a box of bullets, and dropped them on his bed. “Twenty-two longs. That’s fifty rounds there.” I asked if they were dangerous. “Hell, yeah. Those can kill a man.” But really, a twenty-two was best for small game, he said. Rabbit, foxes, squirrel. You’d have a hard time bringing down a deer with a twenty-two.

  He showed me how to sight with it, and we took turns standing on his bed and aiming at distant objects through the window. He said his daddy was going to take him hunting with it as soon as he got the time. They’d go out to Lake Boeuf, maybe. He explained the hunting seasons: deer was fall to winter, duck was winter, turkey was spring, and squirrel and rabbit were basically anytime—nobody really cared about squirrel and rabbit.

  “Have you shot it yet?”

  “Man, I’ve been shooting all day. You haven’t heard me?” He’d been doing target practice down by the water, he said. “We’ll take it out again before it gets dark.”

  He took the gun back from me, protectively. He sat down on the bed and had me time how long it took him to break the gun apart and put it back together.

  “How fast?” he asked when he’d finished.

  “Twenty-one seconds. But that’s just three parts. That’s nothing.”

  “I can do it faster,” he said.

  He tried it a couple more times and then got a rag and oil and began polishing his gun. As he did, he talked about the next gun he wanted—if not a Winchester thirty-thirty, then a shotgun. In fact, a shotgun might even be a better choice because it would make a nice companion piece for his twenty-two. He could buy it himself, he said. His daddy was going to let him start working part-time at the gas station. He figured twenty-five dollars a week, one month, that’s a hundred dollars, six months, that’s six hundred dollars …

  I watched him as he talked and rubbed his gun. He’d been letting his hair grow out so that now it hung limply over his ears almost to his shoulders. Since Thanksgiving he’d been trying to grow a mustache, too, but the brown fuzz above his lip only made him look rattier. He had a cold, and whenever he sniffed the brown fuzz wiggled up and down. As he spoke he looked not at me but at his gun, which he stroked lovingly in his lap. Behind him on his desk I saw something that looked like a dead animal, and then I realized it was the rabbit pelt that Peter was trying to make a hat from. The gerbil ran like a maniac round and around on its squeaking wheel.

  I looked out the window and wondered what Gabriella was doing right now. How could anyone stand to live or speak or move in a world like this, knowing that a girl like her existed? I pictured her skiing down a white mountain slope, a furry hood encircling her face, cutting back and forth in the snow. The air would be clean and cold, and she would be laughing, smiling. I remembered our kiss, and the warm, dark, mysterious hollow of her mouth.…

  “My BB gun and now my twenty-two,” Peter said, replacing his new gun in the rack below his old one. He peered out the window. “What’re you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Look what I got,” he said, and pulled two Playboy magazines out from under his mattress. “I swiped them from my dad. You can see this one. I’ll look at this one.” He tossed one to me and sat down in his desk chair with the other.

  I tried to enjoy the magazine, but I couldn’t, not with Peter there. “Oh, man, look at her. She is hot. Mm-mm,” he said as he turned the pages and stared intently at the pictures. He talked about the various attributes and faults of each girl, and what he would do with each one if she was his girlfriend. After a minute he fell silent. His mouth dropped open, and he began breathing and squirming in his chair so that it made me uncomfortable to be near him.

  I closed my magazine. He looked up. “Are you finished? You want to trade?”

  “Maybe we should go back downstairs.”

  “Wait a minute, you have to see my black light,” he said. “This is cool. You’ve got to see this.”

  He pulled a tube-shaped black light from underneath his bed. He had me plug the cord into an outlet, and he pulled the shade down over the window and turned off the overhead light.

  We shined the black light on our teeth and our clothes, and waved our hands under it, seeing how our skin and fingernails looked like X-ray photos. On the wall opposite his bed was a fluorescent poster of a laughing red devil’s head with horns and yellow teeth. Peter held the light below the poster, and then he held the light under his own face and laughed maniacally. “Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!”

  “Look at this one,” he said. He knelt on his bed and shone the light on another poster tacked to the wall above his bed. It was the image of a woman’s naked body wrapped up in red, orange, and yellow flames. He moved the light back and forth.

  “Look. It looks like it’s moving,” he said quietly.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Wait—you have to lie down on the bed.” He showed me how I should lie down and look up. “Put your head here, your feet there, just like normal. That’s the best position.”

  I lay down on the bed, and in his eagerness to show me, he lay down next to me. He slowly waved the black light back and forth at the poster on the wall above us. He began to speak in a low, excited whisper.

  “See? It’s like it’s moving. Look at that. You can see everything. She’s a naked lady. She’s completely naked.”

  Peter waved the black light, and the image seemed to rise up off the poster. Shadows shifted eerily around the dark room. The light cord slapped with a ticking noise against the side of the bed. Beside me, Peter began to breathe damply. He pressed his leg against mine as he kept up his low whisper.

  “You can imagine it’s Gabriella. That’s her, that’s her naked body. She’s in the room with you. She’s dancing. Look at her dance. She’s right there. You can almost touch her. Her hair, look at her hair. Her body, look at her body. Her legs, her breasts. Here she comes. Come on. Come on, baby. Ooh, yeah. Gabriella. Gabriella, Gabriella …”

  “Cut it out, man.”

  “What?”

  “Stop it! Don’t do that.”

  I scrambled up off the end of the bed and turned on the overhead light. “What’re you doing, man?”

  Peter looked up at me from the bed, his dark eyes piteous and imploring. “Nothing.”

  I was suddenly furious at him, for his damp breathing, and his creepy mm-mm, and for dragging Gabriella into his dirty room. She didn’t belong here; even saying her name aloud here was wrong. She was too good for this. She was too good for any of us.

  “I’m leaving. I’m going downstairs.”

  “Wait!” he cried.

  “No, that’s it, that’s enough. I’m going,” I said, and opened the door.

  “I’ll get my gun,” Peter said, and hurried to follow me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “IT’S those damn cats,” Mr. Coot said, kicking aside the cats that were jumping up onto the back porch. “Pete keeps feeding them.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  The cats meowed and swarmed as we stepped through the stacks of newspapers and broken grill pieces and other junk on the porch and followed Mr. Coot down into their backyard. He carried the opened bottle of Dickel; both he and my father held plastic cups full of whiskey. They’d been drinking quite a lot, apparently. They stumbled out to the middle of the yard. Mr. Coot asked about the comet.

  “I’ve been watching for it. Where is it? I don’t see nothing yet.”

  We all looked up. The sky was gray and violet. The water tower loomed pale and blue above the bare trees off to the right. My father, slurring his words, spoke confusingly about pre- and postperihelion app
aritions, and moon phases, and visual magnitude relative to distance to the Sun.

  “It’s here. It’s here, but we just can’t see it.”

  “I saw it,” Peter said.

  “When?”

  “Last week. Saturday or Sunday night, I forget which.” It was the middle of the night, he’d gotten out of bed, looked out his window, and there it was. It was yellow and white with a long, skinny tail, Peter said.

  “You were dreaming,” I said.

  “Could be, could be,” mused my father.

  “That was a cat you saw,” said Mr. Coot.

  It was a question of light and elevation, my father insisted. Light and elevation. In Hawaii they saw it. In Alaska they saw it. Problem here was that we had too much light and not enough elevation.

  “It’s gonna come around the Sun,” he said. “Then you’ll really get it. Then you won’t be able to miss it. No, sir!”

  Mr. Coot and Peter began walking back and forth, tacking paper targets to trees along the bayou. As they did, my father talked about his plans for a town-wide comet viewing. He’d been discussing it with the mayor. They were going to set up a viewing station at the courthouse, get the city to shut off the lights, get everyone to come out to see it. Like the Fourth of July only better …

  “Put that one up there,” Mr. Coot said to Peter. “Little farther on.”

  “Light up the night like a new moon,” my father said, waving his arm at the sky.

  Mr. Coot stopped and rested his weight on one hip. “Have you ever considered the existence of a higher power in your life? A power greater than yourself?”

  My father looked at him blankly.

  Mr. Coot began talking about his men’s club, the King Solomon Lodge. My father should come for a meeting sometime, he said. They always welcomed any interested party, any man who valued brotherly love, relief, and truth in his life. He showed my father his ring. My father bent in to look at it.

  “What? What?”

  “Freemasonry is what I’m talking about. Look at that. The square and compass.”

  “Hm.”

  “Lots of famous people throughout history. Presidents, astronauts, scientists …” He poured more Dickel into their cups. “They help me find the light in my life. Ever since Patty and Tommy are gone, they’ve been a constant source of love and inspiration to me. Love and enlightenment.”

  “Ready,” said Peter.

  “You think about it, let me know when you’re ready,” Mr. Coot said confidentially to my father. He gestured. “Y’all back up now. Stand back.”

  Peter stepped forward with his rifle. He wore a too-large green army coat with the name Coot on the breast. He made a show of adjusting the parts of the gun, loading the bullets, and checking the chamber. “Clear the line,” he said, and shook the sleeves of the coat away from his hands and raised the gun to his cheek.

  There was a light pop; my father and I jerked. Peter fired several more times at a target on a tree. A neighborhood dog began to bark.

  “Check it out,” he said, and he and I went to inspect the target. He tried to pry a bullet out of the bark of the tree behind the target with his fingernail but he couldn’t.

  As Peter was getting me set up for a turn with the rifle, the Martellos’ house blazed to life across the bayou, the automatic timers turning on the Christmas decorations. Our fathers began talking about them.

  “Look at that. No worries there. Money to burn.”

  “Hell, what do they care?” Mr. Coot said. “They’re dancing and singing all the way to the bank. Oil embargo’s best thing ever happened to them.”

  Mr. Coot spoke about OPEC, and Henry Kissinger, and the worldwide Jewish conspiracy to raise the price of oil to twenty dollars a barrel. He talked about the Louisiana mafia, and how they had their fingers in the pockets of every station owner in the state. They set the price; there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. And now President Nixon calling for gas rationing, wants him to voluntarily—voluntarily—close for business on Saturday and Sundays.

  “The world is unfair,” my father said, suddenly moody.

  “People like you and me—” Mr. Coot said, and poured more whiskey for them. “Gotta stick together.”

  I fired, and the rifle knocked against my cheek, surprising me.

  “You missed completely,” Peter said. “Try again.”

  The sky had lowered to orange at the horizon, bringing out shadows around the trees, so that it was hard to see things clearly. I kept shooting until I hit a target, then I handed the gun to Peter to reload.

  “Give it a whack, Professor,” Mr. Coot said.

  My father stumbled forward to take the gun, but then, remembering, turned and carefully handed his plastic cup of whiskey to Mr. Coot before turning back and taking the rifle from Peter.

  “Rest it there against your shoulder,” Peter said, helping him.

  “I don’t have a permit. Do I need a permit?”

  “Hell, no,” said Mr. Coot. “It’s a free country.”

  “Where is it? What am I looking at? I can’t see anything.”

  Peter positioned him facing the target. “Hold still. Squeeze it easy.”

  The gun went off. “Did I get anything?”

  “You went wide.”

  “About a mile wide. You were in the next parish. You have to hold steady.” Mr. Coot gestured with one of the cups. “Pete, help him.”

  Peter gave him more instruction and helped him line up the sights. My father concentrated. His lips spread back from his teeth and his face took on a wild sneer as he fired off several more rounds. “Yeah!” he shouted, like he was punching somebody with each shot he fired. “Yeah!”

  Mr. Coot started telling dago jokes: Why did birds fly upside down over Italy? Because there was nothing worth shitting on. How many dagos did it take to grease a car? Just one if you hit him right. How could you fit twenty-five dagos in a Trans Am? Make one the boss and the rest would crawl up his ass.…

  My father laughed oddly, a kind of hiccupping sound. His shoulders shuddered; he fired wildly and missed the target again.

  Then Mr. Coot began a complicated dirty joke about a prostitute, a chicken, and a dago. He lost the thread of it, slurred over the middle part, and jumped to the end: “And then Luigi said, ‘My wife-a no whore!’ ”

  “Damn him. God damn him,” my father cried angrily, and wheeled around with the rifle and pointed it at the Martellos’ house. “The next time I see that greasy dago I’m gonna shoot his head off!”

  Mr. Coot caught my father from behind. “Whoa! That’s a loaded weapon you got there. Pete, take the gun.”

  “Okay, Mr. Broussard. Take it easy.”

  Peter got the gun, and in their fumbling, my father fell to the ground.

  “Oh … I’m sorry,” he muttered. “Screw me. Goddamn screw me.”

  “That’s what I feel like sometimes,” Mr. Coot said.

  My father sat up in the dirt, his legs splayed out in front of him, his chin hanging down on his chest. He rubbed his oily hair. He began talking about my mother, his words coming out sloppy.

  “I knew she was flirting with him, I knew that. But she does that with everybody, doesn’t she? I never expected … I mean, how? That’s what I want to know. How’d they do it? Just like that, right under my nose. I didn’t even see it. I didn’t see a goddamn thing!” He hit the dirt with his hand.

  Mr. Coot patted his shoulder. “Okay, okay. Take it easy now.”

  “No. No! I need to know. How’d they do it? Where? When?” he cried. “Were they at his house? His condo? A hotel? Was she drunk? Is that it? Did he lock the door and take off her coat? Was she wearing perfume?”

  “Hush. You stop that. You’re just gonna make yourself crazy.”

  “No! I need to know! How long has this been going on? Were there others before Frank? She’s at home all day. What the hell do I know what she does? Dale Landry. Coach DuPleiss. Who knows? I don’t. I don’t, because I’m a goddamn worm. I’m a goddamn
blind little worm and I can’t see a goddamn thing. I probably deserve it. Oh, who cares? To hell with it. I might as well be dead. You might as well shoot me now, get it over with. See if I care. Where’s that gun?”

  He swung around clumsily and bumped Peter’s rifle with the back of his hand. Peter, startled, stepped away, but my father lunged and grabbed the barrel of the gun with both his hands and yanked it toward himself. For a moment, he and Peter tugged back and forth on the gun, both of them shouting, my father trying to press the mouth of the barrel against his forehead, shouting, “Here! Here! Shoot me here!”

  Mr. Coot knocked the barrel of the gun up in the air with his arm. It went off with a bang, and my father fell over sideways onto the dirt, collapsing into his raincoat.

  “Oh … oh … oh,” he whimpered.

  “Holy shit,” said Mr. Coot.

  “I thought … the safety …,” stammered Peter.

  In the confusion I believed my father had been shot, and I dropped down onto my knees behind him. I tried to get him to sit up. “No, no,” he moaned, clutching his stomach. His glasses had fallen off, and I looked around on the ground until I found them. The left earpiece had snapped off, and I found it, too.

  “Let’s get you inside,” Mr. Coot said. “You’re messed up. You need something to eat. We’ll get you something good to eat. Pete, help him up.”

  “No, no, leave me,” my father moaned, but Peter and I tugged at him until we got him to his feet. I carried his broken glasses, and we helped him across the yard and up the porch steps.

  Inside, Mr. Coot went straight to the kitchen to make hamburgers. He began knocking around in there; he got out the ground beef, a bowl, and the instant onion soup mix.

  But my father kept walking unsteadily through the house. He bumped into the couch and stumbled across the living room. I caught his arm as he fell against the TV. A Christmas Carol was still on, and Scrooge stood shivering in a graveyard as the Ghost of Christmas Future pointed a bony finger at a tombstone. “No, Spirit! Oh no, no!”

  A thought flashed through my mind then that this—a stumbling father, a smelly house, rooms full of sorrow and neglect—this was my future. In a year from now, maybe less, my father and I would be living exactly like Peter and his father. It seemed unavoidable; this was our fate, the only possible ending to a lifetime’s worth of crippled hopes and bad fortune. An artificial tree, a dirty sofa, dusty plastic flowers: this was all we had to look forward to for the rest of our lives.