The Night of the Comet (32 page)

“I’m a Wild Turkey man myself, but I like Dickel, too,” said Mr. Coot, taking the bottle and looking at it. “Mix that with a little Coke, you got yourself a nice drink. Take that to the kitchen, will you, Pete?” As Peter carried away the bottle, Mr. Coot called after him, “And get the sodas and stuff out, too. See what all our guests want.”

Mr. Coot moved a TV tray out of the way and snatched up a half-eaten bag of potato chips from the sofa, moving with a breathy effort. “We meant to clean up here but didn’t get around to it. You know how that is.”

The Coots’ house was almost identical to ours except that everything was reversed left to right, like in a mirror. There was a kitchen, a small dining room, a living room with a TV against the wall; one bedroom downstairs, two attic bedrooms upstairs—all the same. Also like at our house, the Coots had a Christmas tree in the corner of the front room. Theirs, however, was artificial.

“Let me show you,” Mr. Coot said, and pulled off one of the wire-and-plastic branches and handed it to my father. “We used to have a real tree but you know what those are like. You’ve got to water them, clean up after them, the needles falling off. Fire hazard. This one, you finish, you pack it up, throw it in the garage. No fuss, no muss. It’s clean, that’s why I like it.”

He began to look around. “We’ve got the, ah, the scent.” He hollered to Peter, “Where’s that spray? The tree spray?” Peter shouted something back from the kitchen. “Here it is,” Mr. Coot said, finding the
can on top of the TV. He read the label aloud for us: “ ‘Real pine scent.’ ” He shook the can vigorously and sprayed the tree. “Smell that? It’s just the same. Better, maybe. It lasts ten, twelve hours. You spray it on one time every day, and that’s all.” He set the can back on the TV.

My father had turned to look at a narrow table against the side wall. On top was a kind of shrine to Peter’s older brother, who’d been killed in Vietnam. There were framed pictures, a set of medals, a folded American flag.

“Oh, yeah. That was Tommy. You remember him, don’t you?” Mr. Coot said to my father, coming near. “I don’t guess you’ve been here since then.”

I paused with them in front of the table. The centerpiece was a framed portrait of Tommy in a dark blue uniform and a white hat, standing beside a flag. In front of the picture sat a bowl of dusty red, white, and blue plastic flowers. On either side were two candles in silver holders. On the wall behind it was a framed poem written in old-fashioned script on antique-looking paper; it began,
“Here lies a man once known …”

“I remember he used to ride his bike …,” my father started to say.

“Just four years ago,” Mr. Coot said, suddenly reverent. “He would’ve been twenty-four by now.”

We stared silently at Tommy’s things for a minute. His death seemed to hang over this side of the room like a heavy cloud, the source of the sad, oppressive air that filled the house. Mr. Coot wheezed softly beside me.

“They say you get over it? That’s a goddamn lie. You never get over it.” Mr. Coot sniffed wetly and then let out a string of obscene curses against the government.

Peter came in carrying a large tray of beer and soft drinks, and we all backed away from the shrine, quieter and sadder now. “Set it there,” Mr. Coot said, and Peter put the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch. He waved at us. “Sit, sit.”

Mr. Coot sat painfully in a large blue recliner, lowering first his right hip to the cushions and then allowing the rest of his body to drop. He coughed and gasped. It was the pleurisy, he said. The doctors told him
he had to have his fluids drained, but he’d be damned if he was going to let anyone stick a spigot in him, no thank you.

My father and I sat on the couch, which was covered by a green bed-sheet that kept slipping down. “Just tuck it back up there,” Mr. Coot said. We grabbed handfuls of potato chips while Mr. Coot leaned forward to try to manage the drinks. “Help us out here, Pete.” I took a Shasta cola, and my father and Mr. Coot started with cans of Budweiser.

“Hell no, it’s not too early,” he said. “This is a public holiday. One of seven days a year the station’s closed. Time I get to celebrate.” He proposed a toast: “The lonely hearts club. Four lonely men, all alone on Christmas. Making the best of it.”

He lifted up his hip, pulled the remote control out from under him, and turned on the TV. They had a larger, newer TV than we did, and Mr. Coot described its features to my father while he switched through the channels. He found a program—“
A Christmas Carol
,” he announced—and left the TV tuned to that. Then he abruptly began talking about the challenges of living alone without a woman.

“You’ve got to get you a routine,” he advised. The hardest thing for him, when Patty left, was coping with the responsibility of taking care of the house. “Me and Pete, we divide up the chores. One day he’ll do the cleaning, the next day I’ll do. That right, Pete?”

“I remember when I first moved to Terrebonne,” my father said. Holding his beer can on one knee, he started to tell about how he used to live alone in an apartment downtown during his bachelor days, and how when Lydia came over she was appalled—absolutely appalled—by the condition of that place.…

He trailed off, as though forgetting the point of the story.

Mr. Coot nodded. “The first days are the worst. You’ll get used to it.… How about cooking? Do you cook?”

He talked about the best places for takeout in Terrebonne. Ralph’s Restaurant had a good Monday night buffet, he said. All you can eat. You go in there, fill up one of those cardboard boxes—lima beans, baked ham, macaroni and cheese, vanilla pudding, everything. (“Sounds good,” my father said, nodding.) He talked about spaghetti sauce. Ragú.
That was something they had discovered as of late. (“Chef Boyardee?” my father asked. “That’s another one,” Mr. Coot said.) He said how, himself, he was happy with hamburger. Him and Pete could eat hamburger eight days a week. Little ground chuck. What you did was—here was a tip—you mixed in instant onion soup powder with the ground meat. No, really. You put that in there, mix it in real good, you got a delicious and satisfying meal.…

I looked out the front window to the street, where neighborhood kids were riding their bikes back and forth in the slanting afternoon light, and I wished that I was outside with them.

“That’s the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“What?” my father said.

Mr. Coot pointed at the TV with the remote. “The first ghost. The Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“Oh, right.”

We all turned and stared at the TV for a moment. A cartoon Scrooge was cringing on his knees while a flaming blue ghost rattled his chains and pointed a finger at him.
“Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”
cried Scrooge.

“Another thing is, Green Stamps,” Mr. Coot said, going on. “S&H Green Stamps. People laugh at that, but I tell you, you can get a lot of practical things with those. Toast ovens. Coffeemaker. Our station gives them away, and sometimes people don’t even want them. I take them myself—I can do that legally—and save them.…”

Peter asked if I wanted to see his new gun. I got up to leave with him, relieved to go.

“You boys run along, have fun,” Mr. Coot said, waving a hand. “Us tired old bachelors’ll be down here discussing things of an important nature.”

Climbing the stairs to Peter’s room, I gradually allowed myself to breathe again through my nose. On the couch, my father stared dully at the TV and took another swallow of his beer, as though he’d already succumbed to the sad, suffocating air of the place and could barely move his body.

“CHECK
it out,” Peter said, lifting his new rifle down from the rack.

Except for a long, high window in place of a dormer window, the layout of Peter’s room was exactly like mine. Same size, same low slanted ceiling, even the same furniture—bed, bookcase, desk, chair. His room, though, was dirtier and more cluttered than mine. Clothes and junk covered the brown carpet; cookie and cereal boxes and soda cans lay everywhere. On the nightstand beside his bed sat a bag of cough drops, a jar of Vaseline, and a roll of toilet paper. In an aquarium on his desk, a gerbil ran round and around on a squeaky metal wheel.

“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.