The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  “They’re leaving,” Peter called to his father in the kitchen. “They’re leaving!”

  Mr. Coot waddled out of the kitchen, a mess of red ground beef in his hands. “Where’re you going? I’m making dinner for us.”

  But my father was already out the door. “I think we’re leaving now,” I said, and hurried out to help him before he fell down the steps.

  Mr. Coot came to the door. “Y’all don’t want to stay? Come on back. It’s Christmas. I got the chuck.” He held up the meat in one hand. Peter came up behind him to look out.

  “Some other time. Thank you, good night,” I said.

  “It’s Christmas!” Mr. Coot hollered sadly.

  I tried to take my father’s arm but he shrugged off my hand. At the end of the Coots’ driveway he stopped, looked up at the sky, and shook his fist at the stars. Then he lurched left, aiming himself out of the neighborhood.

  He walked quickly, leaning forward over his feet and letting momentum carry his body so that with every step he seemed to be just catching himself before he pitched over flat on his face. He stumbled like this to the end of the block, his raincoat flapping behind him, and turned right on Franklin Street toward town. Off the side of the road stood the water tower, the red warning light on top blinking on and off. I stopped at the edge of the pavement as he swerved in across the grass to the tower.

  He stopped and rested a hand against the nearest support, catching his breath. The thing loomed above him, four round legs reaching up to the dark belly of the tank. On the leg he leaned against, a metal ladder ended a few feet above his head. He clumsily tried to hop up and grab the bottom rung a couple of times.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” I called. “You can’t go up there.”

  He muttered something about light and elevation, if only he had the proper light and elevation.

  “There’s nothing up there!” I said.

  I looked around, hoping there might be someone nearby to help, but there wasn’t. It was just me with my father staggering around under the water tower. He seemed to be disintegrating, crumbling to pieces before my eyes, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  THE reception was poor. Through the fuzzy blue and white snow, I could make out the figures of two men floating around inside a cabin, moving as though in slow motion. Radioed voices sputtered on and off as the astronauts spoke back and forth with Mission Control. An off-screen announcer described what was happening:

  “You can see them checking their equipment.… Gibson and Carr, suiting up as they prepare to leave Skylab for another space walk … their second of this mission …”

  The program shifted to the inside of a bright blue and yellow TV studio, where a NASA scientist in a white shirt and black tie held up a toy-sized model of Skylab. Pointing to various parts of it with a pencil, he explained how the astronauts would attempt to attach a new camera to a telescope mount on the outside of the spacecraft during their space walk.

  I sat on the couch, hugging a blanket around me. Outside the day was chilly and damp; inside, chilly and damp. In the three days since our sad Christmas with the Coots, my father had gone from bad to worse. He barely stirred from his room now. When he did come out, he spent most of the day sitting on the couch, distractedly watching TV, not even bothering to open a journal or magazine. I could hear him through his bedroom door now, snoring through his nose.

  So this really was it, I thought. Two sad, lonely men shuffling around in blankets in an underheated house. My sister could say what she wanted about our situation being perfectly typical for families of our age and generation, but clearly, this should never have happened to us. Something had gone very wrong in the universal scheme of things. I still half expected to see my father come bounding out of his bedroom, dressed and ready for the day, and announce that there had just been a slight mix-up, an unexpected kerfuffle in the cosmic order, but all that was straightened out now and we could go back to our regular, uneventful lives.

  On the TV, two white shapes floated and bumped around inside a tiny cabin, like a couple of divers trapped inside a sinking ship.

  I thought about what Megan had told me regarding our mother and Frank Martello. If what she reported was true, and if there really was the possibility of a future relationship between our mother and Frank, then what did that mean for us, their children? Maybe, I thought, there could be some good news here, too. I tried to envision different configurations of our families, the Broussards and the Martellos. If my mother married Frank, she might move into the house with him across the bayou. Maybe I would move in with them. Gabriella and I would be stepbrother and stepsister then. We would sit together at breakfast in the morning. We would ride together to school; maybe my mother—Mrs. Martello now—would drive us in Barbara’s own sky-blue Town Car. After school, we’d sit together for dinner, and then Gabriella and I would watch TV while doing our homework. At bedtime, Gabriella would go up to her room, and I to mine next door.…

  That scenario was so fantastic, so appealing, that I was afraid to even think about it for very long, for fear that by wishing too earnestly for it, I might also somehow wish away the likelihood of it happening. Even entertaining the possibility of it for more than a few minutes made my stomach twist in worry and anticipation.

  I remembered then that I hadn’t eaten any breakfast yet. I was just getting up to fix something for myself when I heard a mention of the comet on TV.

  “… track and gather information on Comet Kohoutek. Although we haven’t been able to see it much here from Earth, the astronauts are in line to get a clear view of the comet as it comes around the top of the Sun.…”

  On the TV, murky white shapes drifted slowly past a confusing backdrop of panels and equipment. There was a head, an arm, a leg.

  “Gibson and Carr. There you see them exiting the air hatch now.…”

  I ran to my father’s room and knocked on his door. When there was no answer, I went in. He was sprawled crookedly across the bed, half covered by the sheets. I shook his shoulder.

  “It’s the comet. They’re talking about the comet.”

  “Huh?”

  “Get up. I think they’re going to look for it.” I shook him again. “Come on. Hurry up.”

  He pulled himself up. I found his broken glasses on the nightstand and handed them to him. He staggered into the living room and stopped in front of the TV, adjusting his pajamas around himself.

  An astronaut was clinging to the outside of the spacecraft, his feet floating free as he crawled with his hands along industrial-looking pipes and rails. Far below, the edge of the Earth was just emerging from shadow.

  “They’re going to attach a camera to the telescope mount,” I explained.

  My father, his hands shaking a little, quickly tried to adjust the controls on the old Zenith to bring in the picture better. He fiddled with the antenna, a complicated add-on device with a nest of metal hoops, and then we both backed up and sat on the couch to watch.

  Voices crackled. Nothing much seemed to be happening. But then through the static, their voices sounding tinny and distant, we heard the astronauts begin to talk to Mission Control about Kohoutek.

  “Have you got visual yet? You should be able to see it … just above the horizon.…”

  Beep.

  “Hey, look! It’s right out there.”

  Beep.

  “Do you see it?”

  Beep.

  “Oh, man. Oh, man, I tell you, it’s one of the most beautiful creations … beautiful creations I’ve ever seen. It’s so graceful. I’ll try to aim the camera around.…”

  “There it is. There it is,” my father whispered. His hands, resting on his knees, began to tremble.

  “Can you see it now?”

  Beep.

  “Roger. We see it sharp and clear.”

  Beep.

  “It’s yellow and orange, just like a flame. Man, will you look at that? It’s just … it’s just spe
ctacular. Unbelievable.”

  I looked at the side of my father’s face and was surprised to see that he was crying. I had never seen my father cry before. Thick tears ran down alongside his nose. He snatched off his glasses and rubbed his face roughly with one hand.

  I swallowed and stared down at the stain on the rug. He sniffed. We didn’t speak for a long moment. When I looked back up at the TV again, an astronaut was drifting away into space. A white tube trailed after him, and his body was bent in a peculiar manner, as though he were tumbling. Far below him was the curved rim of the Earth, blue oceans and white clouds. Behind him, against the black backdrop of space, just visible above his right shoulder, was the bright yellow smear of the comet.

  “Beautiful. So beautiful!” my father croaked.

  He pressed both his hands over his face and began to rock slowly back and forth on the couch. An odd noise escaped him.

  “Dad?” I said.

  “Fine … fine,” he said, and made another strangled noise.

  The astronaut continued to move in slow motion, floating peacefully above the Earth, looking as though he might happily fall forever.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  KOHOUTEK hadn’t failed us after all. It had returned, just as my father had promised, rising spectacularly over the rim of the Sun.

  With that postperihelion sighting from Skylab, his spirits were revived. He threw off his bathrobe, shaved, and dressed, and that same afternoon he sat down at the dining room table and went back to work. His recovery was so sudden, so unexpected, in fact, that I didn’t entirely trust it to be genuine.

  He rechecked his almanacs; he looked again at the bulletins from NASA, the National Weather Service, the AAS. He might’ve been off by a week or two in his predictions for a Christmastime apparition, he explained, but he’d just been overeager, that was all. Historically speaking, it was a fact that most comets became brighter after they circled the Sun. There was no reason to believe that Kohoutek wouldn’t behave the same. Over the next week, he told me, it should continue to draw energy from the Sun, so that by the sixth of January, the night he had set for our town-wide viewing, its coma would be swollen to maximum size, its tail fully extended. For the rest of the month we’d continue to see it blazing above the southwestern horizon, hanging like a giant flaming sword in the sky.

  Never mind all the naysayers in the media; never mind that my father had been promising virtually the same thing for the last six months. Hadn’t we seen it with our own eyes right there on TV, as magnificent as the astronomers had said it’d be? There was no longer any doubt in his mind, he said, none at all. Kohoutek was still coming, we could be sure of that. And we should be ready for him when he arrived—to greet him, as my father said, with all the pomp and ceremony due to a visitor of this importance.

  The breakup of his marriage, the flight of his wife and daughter, our disastrous Christmas with the Coots: all that was shoved behind him. It might never have happened. My father lived only for the comet now, and in the days leading up to the new year, he turned his attention back to it with a feverish, single-minded intensity—as though believing that the very strength of his devotion might help fan the flames of the comet brighter. If he only loved the comet enough, it couldn’t help but love him back.

  For the night of the viewing, he had Kohoutek in Capricorn, becoming visible half an hour after sunset. The Moon wouldn’t be up yet, and the tail would be in a horizontal position relative to the Earth, allowing for maximum visibility.

  But there were so many local atmospheric variables, and these were what concerned him: cloud cover, temperature, humidity, wind speed, air pollution, skyglow—all these could affect viewing. So many contingencies, so much to consider, so much to try to understand. He filled pages and pages with charts and notes peppered with arcane-looking symbols and equations:

  Given resonance light A2Σ – X2 Π for the radical H, at 0.6 AU, production rate of QOH = 4 xsx 1028 moleculesec –1sr –1 …

  Sometimes he mumbled aloud to himself: “Come on. We got you. We got you now. Where do you think you’re going? Huh?”

  He became especially excited when, a few days after their space walk, the Skylab astronauts spotted an antitail on the comet, a long yellow spike extending from the head of the coma, like the golden horn of a unicorn.

  “You see?” my father said. “You don’t get those often with comets, no sir. Kohoutek’s getting dressed up. He’s going to put on a real show for us.”

  Afternoons, he stuffed his papers in his briefcase and rode his bike downtown to organize the viewing. The mayor had given his okay, and announcements had appeared in the paper, but logistical details still had to be coordinated between the different municipal services—the fire department, the police, the public utilities, the chamber of commerce. My father was overseeing everything. They were going to block off the streets around the square. Everybody would come out, they’d bring their kids and grandkids … balloons, ice cream … couples standing arm in arm … children with their faces lifted to the sky. And then, at precisely six o’clock, the air-raid siren would sound, the streetlights would be extinguished. The town would go dark, and—Ahhh!

  Something we would remember for the rest of our lives. Something we could tell our children and grandchildren about. We were there, we could say. We were there when Kohoutek came.

  The week before the event, he printed up fliers and began distributing them to shops and businesses. He biked all over town, out to the black grocery stores on the north side, to the fishing and tackle shops along the canals to the south. Late in the day, when people were getting off work, he stood at the edge of the square and handed out sheets to passersby. I sat on my bike around the corner from the drugstore and watched him. In his black raincoat and taped-together glasses, he looked like one of those comet crazies we’d seen on TV. But people stopped and took his fliers; they nodded and asked questions. Almost everyone knew my father from the school or from his column and his talks around town, and they didn’t seem to find it especially odd that he should be standing on the street corner handing out fliers. If anything, many seemed eager to hear more about the comet; he was our local astronomy expert, after all, and if he said it was still coming, then it must be coming.

  And we can see it when? This Sunday? The whole town? Sure. Will do. Sounds interesting. Thanks.

  In the evenings, I set the table for takeout dinners from Ralph’s Restaurant. We had fried chicken and coleslaw, baked ham and lima beans. Between bites of food, he updated me on the progress of the comet and told me what all he’d accomplished that day. “I think we’ll have a good crowd for it. Folks are getting excited,” he said. Community cooperation was vital if we hoped to achieve a full blackout, and so far things looked promising. He’d been in touch with the various civic organizations, the Cub Scouts, the Lions Club, the Rotary Club, to be sure they knew about the night of the comet. He’d sent announcements to the TV and radio stations, too. “I think I’ll bike out to the churches next and make sure they have some fliers. They can talk it up with their congregations, encourage people to come.”

  Growing expansive, he said that this kind of positive public response just went to show how much one man could accomplish with enough well-focused effort. He talked about the possibility of writing up a report about his experience and presenting it at the next American Astronomical Society conference. Lots of members would probably be interested in hearing how he’d been able to generate enthusiasm for astronomy in Terrebonne: his cross-curricular projects, his newspaper articles, his visits to clubs and schools. Town-wide viewing events. Heck, if he could do it, anybody could. “Shoot for the Stars: Stimulating Support for the Sciences at the Local Level”—something like that. He’d have to think about it some more; that could be his next project, as soon as he finished with Kohoutek.

  And then—but this was still down the line, just a notion he had—he’d been thinking of speaking with Dr. Brewer about returning to graduate school at LSU. Ther
e wasn’t any reason that he couldn’t start up there again during the summers.

  “I mean, sure, I’m forty years old and I’ve been out of college for a while, but that’s not necessarily a strike against me. I’ve kept up with developments in the field, more or less, and now that I’ve made something of a name for myself, I don’t see why they wouldn’t admit me—

  “Hey! Think about that.” He stopped and looked up across the table at me; his broken glasses wobbled on his nose. “Maybe by the time you finish high school and start at LSU, I’ll be teaching undergraduates by then. Wouldn’t that be neat? Alan and Alan Junior, together at college. Running across the quad to our classes. You could take my Introduction to Astronomy course.…”

  After dinner, after I’d cleared the table, he’d pull out his books and papers and go back to work. When I went up to bed he’d still be sitting there beneath the weak bulb of the overhead lamp, the darkness of the room hanging around his shoulders like a cloak. I’d wake in the middle of the night to hear him stirring downstairs. The back door would carefully open and close, and his footsteps would creak across the wooden porch and down to the yard. I didn’t need to look out my window to see what he was doing; I knew what he was doing. In the morning when I came downstairs, he’d be as I left him the night before, sitting at the table, shirtsleeves rolled up, pen in hand, dried mud on his shoes. He might’ve never gone to bed at all. He’d look up and blink, as though surprised to see someone else in the house.

  Maybe, I thought, his comet would still shine as brightly as he said it would. Maybe it would light up the sky day and night like a blazing fireball. Just because it hadn’t happened yet didn’t mean that it still couldn’t. What did I know, after all? This was the first comet I’d ever seen, so I hardly knew what to expect.