The Night of the Comet (33 page)

“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.

“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 apparitions, 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.

“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.