The Night of the Comet (5 page)

“Think of this comet as a messenger. A messenger from our past, who, if we listen carefully, may be able to tell us who we are, where we came from, and how we got here. Listen! What do you hear?”

He cocked his head up and froze. For a moment, everyone, Gabriella included, listened with him. We listened, but all we heard were the sounds of the school rustling around us, the fan humming, the clock ticking, and our own restless teenage bodies shifting and growling and straining beneath our clothes as we waited for the bell to ring.

“YOUR
father’s kind of strange, isn’t he?”

Peter and I sat on the bleachers after lunch, looking out over the football field. My father stood at the edge of the parking lot with one arm braced across his chest, the other propped up to his face. He rubbed his chin as he gazed skyward. Large white clouds hung high and motionless in a blue-gray sky. Now and then he would point to a cloud and shake his finger at it, as though he were arguing with it.

“What’s he doing?” Peter asked.

“Checking the weather.”

“What for?”

“Who knows? He likes to check the weather is all.”

Peter scratched with a stick at the wood between his feet while I scanned the school grounds, searching for Gabriella. The hot, thick air lent a hazy aspect to everything. Boys were lazily throwing a football back and forth along the sideline of the field, still off-limits on account of the new grass. Groups of girls clustered in the shade of the gym. The
black students hung around the temporary buildings at the far end of the field, mostly keeping to themselves. No sign of Gabriella, though.

Peter was talking about his visit to his uncle’s house in Napoleonville last weekend. He and his cousin Trent had gone hunting in the woods behind their farm, where he’d shot a rabbit with his uncle’s twenty-two. He had the skin drying back at the house if I wanted to see it, he said. He was thinking of making a hat with the fur.

“You’re what?”

“Making a hat.”

“A rabbit hat?”

“Why not? It’s a good fur.”

“With ears?”

“No, not with ears. Asshole.”

Peter and I had been friends since third grade, mainly because we were the same age and we lived in the same neighborhood. We’d been Cub Scouts together. He was a runty boy, with crowded teeth, straight hair, and a high, excited voice. He hated school and was always getting into trouble with the teachers. He didn’t care much for our classmates, either, and they repaid him by teasing and shunning him. But four years earlier, I happened to know, his older brother had been killed in Vietnam when he stepped on a land mine, and soon after that his mother had left his father; and knowing all this, I couldn’t help but see him in a more sympathetic light than I might have otherwise. Besides, he was, I was reluctant to admit, my only real friend.

Peter went on to say how his daddy had promised him a twenty-two for Christmas. While a twenty-two was fine for small game like rabbit and squirrel, he’d really prefer something more powerful. He knew plenty of boys our age who already had their own shotguns. His cousin Trent had a Remington twenty-gauge pump rifle—which was an excellent firearm, there was no denying that; the Remington was your industry standard. But personally, his ideal gun, what he really wanted, he said, would be a Winchester thirty-thirty. For deer hunting, that’d be the best. A Winchester thirty-thirty.

“What would be your ideal gun?” he asked me.

I wasn’t listening: I’d caught sight of Gabriella stepping out from
under the covered walkway beside the gym. She was accompanied by a group of the prettiest, most popular girls of our class—the cheerleaders, the homeroom presidents, the girls with boyfriends. They began a slow walk along the edge of the football field. As they strolled, Gabriella smiled and turned her hair over her ear, nodding and answering the girls’ questions as though she were being interviewed for membership in their club.

“Are you listening? You aren’t even listening to me,” Peter said. Then he saw who I was watching. “Do you know her?”

“She just moved into that big new house behind us.”

“Man. She is hot. She is gorgeous. She may be the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. If that girl lived behind me, I’d be swimming across the bayou every night and sneaking into her bedroom.”

“Sure you would.”

“I might.”

“Please.”

Peter was always talking about what he would do with girls, which struck me as laughable, because if anyone had less of a chance with girls than I did, it was Peter. The only thing he knew about girls was what he’d read in
Playboy
. His father owned the Conoco station in town, where he kept a stack of girlie magazines on a shelf in his office. Peter and I would bike there sometimes after school for free Cokes, and when Mr. Coot wasn’t looking, Peter would pull down the magazines to show me. “Oh, man, look at her,” he’d say, rubbing his fingers on the greasy photos. He spoke critically about each girl’s features, which girls he preferred and which he’d most like to have sex with. “This one. I love her. I’d actually marry her. Miss Amber.
Mm-mm
.”

Gabriella and the girls had rounded the far corner and were strolling along the end zone. I saw that if they continued walking around the field, it would bring them directly in front of the stands, and despite my rational expectation of what might happen—which was nothing—I grew excited to see her coming our way. I tugged my shirt from my chest, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and sat up straighter.

Peter said that the least I should do was to try and kiss Gabriella. That would be a reasonable plan for the ninth grade, he said. Freshman
year, kissing and deep French kissing. Then sophomore year, I’d want to be making out with her. By sixteen we should be having oral sex, and by seventeen or eighteen, full frontal sex. Of course, it could go faster than that, but basically, he said, that was the standard progression. Before I finished high school, I should be having full frontal sex with her.

“Full frontal sex. You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“More than you do.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Gabriella and her group were heading our way down the edge of the field. “Here they come,” Peter said, and eagerly rubbed his knees.

I knew I didn’t stand a chance with Gabriella Martello, and I told Peter so. Girls like her didn’t even notice boys like us. We moved in completely different circles. It was like a law of nature, something that should’ve been taught in school but wasn’t. I tried to explain it to him.

“It’s obvious. Look—see? The black kids are over there hanging out with the black kids. The jocks have their territory. Mary Ida and those other sorry girls are standing over there at the water fountain where you know they’ll always be. We’re sitting here on the bleachers, where boys like us always sit. It’s only the first day of school, but we’re already stuck where we’ll all be for the rest of the year. Who said you had to go there? Nobody. But you did. You went automatically. You had no choice. It’s like, I don’t know, in your blood cells or something. That’s what I mean, a law of nature. The universal law governing the motion of bodies at school.”

“The law governing … Where the hell’d you get that?”

They were approaching the bleachers now. Gabriella walked in the middle of the group, her head held high; she’d obviously passed the interview, and with flying colors. You could practically see the other girls already trying to model themselves after her, eyeing her walk and gestures, the way she lifted her shoulders and flopped her head back when she laughed.

As they crossed in front of the bleachers, Gabriella turned and lazily scanned the stands. I felt my heart quicken. When her gaze drifted over me she hesitated, as if she’d caught sight of something that she recognized
but couldn’t quite name. I sat up. I started to wave; my hand got as far as my chest. But then a football tumbled into the girls’ legs, and as quickly as that, I disappeared.

The girls skipped out of the way, squealing and complaining, as Mark Mingis came jogging after the ball. The girls shouted insults at him, but you could tell they all secretly adored this tall handsome boy with the blond hair and blue eyes. Mark stopped to talk to them, tossing his head to shake the hair out of his eyes while he bounced the ball from hand to hand. Gabriella was introduced and they spoke for a minute. Then the girls moved on, huddling together excitedly like birds fluttering over crumbs.

“Look at him,” Peter said. “God, I hate him. Don’t you hate him?”

“Observe. The universal law in action.”

I shaped my two fists into a spyglass and aimed it at Gabriella’s back. By squeezing my fists closed I could cut out everything else from the picture but her and her long dark hair bouncing back and forth across her shoulders in time to her steps. How could anyone look at her and not be astonished? She was lovely … remote … untouchable. A million light-years away.

“Watch and dream, Pete. Watch and dream.”

The bell rang. Peter cursed, and we climbed down the bleachers to go inside.

In the parking lot my father still stood, pointing and waving his hands at the sky like some magician of the weather. High overhead, ponderous dense clouds drifted slowly across a blue-gray sky.

MY
mother liked to read her horoscope while she drank her coffee in the morning. It was the first thing she looked at in the newspaper, even before the headlines. The world could wait; more important was what the stars had in store for her that day. She was an Aries, which, she told us, explained why she sometimes forgot to iron our clothes or ruined our dinner. She was impulsive, impatient, adventurous, passionate—“just like Bette Davis.” Spreading the paper on the table, she would read her entry aloud to us while we ate our breakfast cereal before school.

My father would laugh. First of all, he’d say, leaning back against the counter in his shirt and tie, coffee cup in hand, those predictions were fluff, practically meaningless. And second, the whole premise of astrology had no basis whatsoever in reality. Logically, physically, scientifically, it was impossible that the motion of stars or planets could have any influence on human activity. It was only egotism, plain and simple, for people to believe that they were somehow personally connected to bodies in space. The stars didn’t care when you were born, or how your day would be, or whether or not you would meet a tall, dark stranger. They were here long before us and would be here long after we were gone. They had no interest in our petty little lives.

“But still, sometimes …,” my mother would try to argue, and speak abstractly about the Moon’s gravity and ocean tides and the percentage of water in the human body.

“Nonsense,” he’d answer, and try to set her straight, talking patiently to her like she was a confused but redeemable student. Astrology was nothing but superstition, he explained—entertaining perhaps, but in the end as silly as trying to predict the future by studying goat entrails. Like any rational person, he put his trust in the evidence of his senses. True knowledge could only begin in a clear-eyed observation of the facts. And then, “Hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat. Hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat.” This, as he liked to say, was one of the greatest gifts that modern science had given mankind: a methodological way of reasoning that helped us to understand the world in which we lived. It was this very understanding that lifted human beings out of the Dark Ages and put us in homes with lights and electricity and running water. Cars. Airplanes. Submarines. Computers.
Skylab
! Where would we be without scientific thought? We’d all still be half apes shivering in holes in the ground, trembling and screeching every time the sky thundered.

“ ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves,’ ” he’d say, raising a finger and shaking it to finish his lecture.

In this, I had to agree with my father. I didn’t put any faith in my mother’s horoscopes, either. It seemed unlikely that a planet millions of miles away could determine what happened to us on any given day. People did things for a reason, not because some star in the sky told
them to. To be sure, the reasons behind our actions might be murky and difficult to understand at times, but if we only looked closely enough, all our behaviors became as clear and predictable as math: A + B = C.

And yet … and yet, when this new comet appeared in our lives, there was no denying that it had an effect on people—and most of all on my father. The comet changed him; anyone who knew him could see that. It was gradual, almost imperceptible at first, but as the summer slipped away and the comet crept closer, his transformation became more and more apparent until it was unmistakable.

A person might argue that it wasn’t the comet but my father himself who effected these changes. But didn’t the comet come first, and didn’t the comet lead to the changes? And what was a cause if not that?