“Once in your lifetime, maybe,” Mano countered. She was thirty-three years old, nine years younger than Ruth, had every intention of living the seventy-five years it would take to see the comet again in 2061. When she saw Ruth start to argue, Mano cut her off. “You don't know how the world will change any more than I do. Maybe we'll all live longer than we think.” She said this more to argue than because she believed it. Mano kept up with the news, read her horoscopes. When examined with any honesty, all future indicators were bleak. And then there were the dead fish. Mano made the other half of her living manning the reception desk at the city of Loveland's water treatment facility. Two days before, there had been a massive fish kill in the river, and while it was still officially an unsolved mystery, Mano was pretty sure that Keith, her boss, and Lloyd, his boss, knew something she didn't.
Ruth pursed her lips and looked back up at the sky. Mano felt the roof solid underneath her. The house was well built, sturdy, and the family shifted in and out of its shelter as needed. Their father had passed years ago, and then their mother. After that, Ruth and her four kids had come back to Colorado, moved in with Mano. Teresa, who had become Sister Agnes Mary, who lived now in the church annex downtown, who taught kindergarten at St. Paul's, stopped by when she could for coffee, for a few hands of rummy. Three of Ruth's four kids had grown and flown since then; the last, Chris, sixteen, emerged from the basement only occasionally, for snacks. Mano had moved out too, after her wedding the previous summer.
“I saw Rick in line for confession earlier,” Ruth said, “but I didn't see you. I thought he'd come with you tonight.” Ruth looked away from the sky to stare at Mano. Behind her, Mano saw a new silhouette—a trout curving mid-glide. She wondered what, exactly, Rick had confessed.
Mano had knelt with Rick in front of the altar at St. Paul's Catholic Church, had made a number of promises she had, at that time, fully planned to keep. Rick, also, had seemed sincere. Rick was even more obsessed with Stevie Nicks than she was, and in those early summer months of their marriage he'd loved to watch Mano undress to the early version of “Sorcerer” from his 1974 Buckingham-Nicks demo. Mano would move like the white-winged dove, building intensity with the music, and always, after, Rick lay on his belly, turned his face toward hers, draped his arm across the soft skin of her chest as they both drifted into sleep. But the marriage had flashed hot, cooled quickly. Mano knew she was no longer the only woman lying naked with Rick, smoking cigarettes, listening to “Wild Heart.”
Mano wondered if Ruth knew too, if that's why she was asking. She had a way of knowing things she'd never been told directly.
Rick had backed out of comet-viewing at the last minute. “Your sister makes me nervous,” he'd said. “And besides, I'm close to something in this game. I'm sure of it.”
Rick had spent a month's salary on an Apple IIe computer, become obsessed with a video game called Cranston Manor. From what Mano could tell, it was post-apocalyptic, the player looting a mansion that had been hastily and mysteriously abandoned. Details were scarce, so she invented scenarios—acid rain aerosoling into atmosphere, nuclear winter, or maybe the cyanide gas in the comet's tail was potent enough, as people used to believe, to decimate humanity. The game involved endless wandering through pixilated parlors and drawing rooms and garden labyrinths for items of dubious value the player could collect. The program would tell Rick, in text under the picture, things like: You are in the library. There is some moldy cheese here, and Rick would type, Get cheese. And then later the program would say: You are in the smoking room, and he would type, Drop cheese, just to see what would happen.
Rick had, one time, tried to teach her how to play. Mano collected items as advised: Get dagger. Get crystal. Get bottle full of diamonds. She suspected that she would eventually have to fight the mysterious suit of armor that appeared, ghost-like, in various rooms, but she lost interest before she discovered any possible use for the things she carried. Not the dagger. Not the bottle full of diamonds. Not even the game itself made her feel any closer to Rick, all her familiar loneliness back in the atmosphere, as toxic as anything else.
Back on the roof, Ruth pointed at a spot in the sky. “Is that it? Can you see it?”
“Shhhhh.” Mano gazed through her binoculars. She thought she saw the comet, not like a star, no visible tail, just a hazy spot of sky gone a bit lighter than the rest. That figures. She'd have to believe she'd seen the comet the same way she believed Rick was home alone playing a video game, by just deciding it was true, by not thinking too hard about it.
“Don't shush me, Mano. We're not bird-watching. Talking isn't going to scare the comet away.” Ruth took the binoculars. “Not much to look at, is it?”
Mano tried to focus on the spot where the comet was, though she wasn't sure she could see it with her naked eyes. Mano was surprised at the desperation she felt, how much she'd been hoping to see the comet clearly. She'd been trained to see both shadow and light. She wanted the comet to send some sort of signal. I could at least use some luck, she thought. Get comet, she thought.
THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN she arrived at work, there was a jelly roll and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee on her desk, steam rising from the opening in the plastic lid. A gift. Keith. She could hear him talking on the phone in his adjacent office. Mano's job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river's upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn't notice how filthy things were getting in there.
One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She'd named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too.
When Mano finished her coffee, she wiped the jelly donut out of the corners of her mouth and opened the door to Keith's office, already unbuttoning her shirt. The pastels had led to the other way Mano passed the time at work, which was by fooling around with Keith. Keith disapproved of naming river trout, but he'd insisted on hanging her paintings all over the office. Mano wished she was as enthusiastic about the work as he was. She'd tried to capture their personalities, the essential beauty in their laconic gliding, but all she'd managed were trout—technically perfect, realistic, lifeless. All sight. No vision.
“They're beautiful,” Keith had said, blushing, looking at her, not the pastels, and Mano had been both touched by his awkward proposition and embarrassed by his innocent sincerity.
“Morning,” she said. Keith usually smiled with his mouth closed, self-conscious, she assumed, about the gaps in his teeth. It was endearing when he forgot himself and really let a smile rip, his teeth adorable for all their imperfections. She smiled back as she shook herself out of her blouse.
Keith started to undo his belt. It was only ever the two of them in the office, but the possibility that someone might show up and surprise them in the act made it all the more delicious. “You see the paper today? Someone wrote in saying it was the comet that kil
led all those fish.”
Mano's mind went spastic, gummed up, What kind of theory is that? She'd read that when the comet went through in 1901, people stocked up on “comet pills” from quack doctors. They'd taken them as an antidote to poison and ended up poisoning themselves. She hadn't expected similar nonsense in 1986, but there it was, in the newspaper, more comet conspiracy.
And then Keith was kissing her and she let herself sink into the distraction of him without asking any of the thousand follow-up questions that occurred. She'd come to the job in September a happy newlywed, but by New Year's, she'd started smelling perfume she didn't wear and sex she hadn't had all over Rick. Mano wanted to believe that Keith was her way of moving carefree and easy through the rich banquet of life, same as Rick, sampling its delights at will, but she knew at least part of what she saw in Keith was the chance for petty revenge. And why not? She'd been raised to believe that marriage would mean she'd never have to feel lonely again. When the lonely came back, prickly, cutting, an infestation, it had been easy to accept Keith's invitations. She'd come to crave his attention, his affection, the same way she craved sunbathing—it felt so good she overdid it, every time, and wound up burnt-red with all her regrets.
The business between them lasted ten, fifteen minutes, and when she came back out to the reception desk, every last fish in the tank was dead. Again.
“Why is this happening?” She half yelled this, which summoned Keith, who walked into the reception area with his pants still undone, tucking in his shirt.
Keith peered into the tank, as if getting closer to the algae smeared glass would make it easier to see through. “I gotta call Lloyd.” Lloyd was the big boss, the director of Water and Power. When he'd shown up to the first fish kill, Lloyd had blustered around for a while before he and Keith had talked in hushed tones. It was clear there was something they didn't want her or anyone else, probably, to know.
“You sure?” Mano asked. Lloyd was a real hothead, prone to shouting, quick to assign blame. It was bound to be a trial, getting Lloyd involved.
Keith zipped his pants. “We can't have people drinking this. We have to get off the river and run the reservoir instead. And anytime I switch the intakes I have to tell Lloyd.”
Two Lindsey Buckinghams were floating, their sides exposed so that it was easy to see, from the top of the tank, the way the spot patterns were sparse around their faces, the denser clusters near their tail fins, as though a magnet had pulled the spots from one end of the fish to the other. A couple of Stevies had sunk to the rocks at the bottom of the tank, the pink-blush stripe of their sides muted through the dirty glass. Mano pressed both her hands into her chest to hold her sinking heart steady. Tears wet her eyelashes and she blinked them back. She would do a lot of things at work, but she knew better than to cry.
“Lloyd is going to hand me my ass over this,” Keith said, “and I'm the one who told those guys they had to clean up their act.”
Mano thought to make a joke about his hands and her ass, but it didn't seem like the time. “What guys? Who would do this?”
Keith picked up the phone receiver and started dialing. Mano pressed the button on the saddle to cut the line. “Keith. Tell me.”
Keith looked at the ceiling, as though he'd find the right way to live printed in bold on the asbestos tiles. “Okay, but you have to keep it quiet, all right? It's the construction on the road upstream. Those guys have a reputation for being sloppy with chemicals, and they don't seem too fussed about a few dead fish.”
Mano worked to integrate this new horror into the story. She spread all ten fingers against the glass of the tank and pressed until the pads went pale. The rainbow trout were her favorites, Stevie over Lindsey forever. But the greenback cutthroat had been declared extinct in the 1930s, and who didn't love an underdog? Since they'd found some alive back in the fifties, the Fish and Wildlife Service had been breeding them in fisheries, stocking the rivers, hoping they'd take, once again, to their native habitat. To see them floating there on the top of the giant tank, just under the sign Big T. River, made her more angry than she could remember ever being. How many fish had to die before someone stopped this?
Keith's panic was seeping into the office air. Lloyd was yelling through the receiver like an angry teacher out of a Charlie Brown cartoon.
“Okay,” Keith said. “Yeah.” He covered the bottom end of the receiver with one hand and waved his other hand erratically. She thought he was swatting at a fly until she realized he was beckoning her. Mano pretended she didn't understand, because there was nothing in it for her. She held up one finger as though she would be right back, and fled outside, squinting against the spring sunshine.
Tiny nuthatches crawled sideways, upside down, at all angles in their quest to pull sustenance from the cottonwood bark, their frantic group yammering markedly less adorable than their appearance. The riverbank was lined with dead fish, dozens of them, the water undulating their corpses in tiny rhythmic waves. Twice now. Mass death—trout, human—was too much to bear. Unless the face of one dear and beloved individual stared lifeless from the void, it was easy to keep the surrounding bodies anonymous, to forget they were each of them once alive, maybe beloved. Most humans did not love trout the way Mano did, which made it especially easy for them to look away, deflect blame onto the comet.
A breeze rattled through the cottonwoods, sent gray-yellow leaves left over from autumn scratching across the single-track trail and into the newly green tufts of buffalo grass that signaled springtime. Mano took out her sketchbook, started in with a pencil, dead trout on dead trout on dead trout, just as they appeared from the riverbank, dead trout clogging every stagnant section of river, her heart flooding and clogging and swelling until the pressure was too much. She put the pencil away and closed her eyes. It was painful to look closely enough at the world to draw it. It made her itch. It made her ache.
The mid-river current sent flashes of reflected sun, too bright to bear. Mano tried to read the flashing as code, but she couldn't find any discernible pattern. She found an empty Pepsi bottle someone had dumped along the bank. She knelt down in the damp sand and used a stick to push the fish corpses out into the current. She filled the bottle with river water, watched the bodies of the fish swirl in a lazy downstream eddy. Get evidence.
Mano held the bottle close to her face, watched as particulates swirled, lazy and lovely, through the cloudy mirk. She didn't have any clear intentions just then for the water or the sketch, but she thought she'd take a lesson from Rick's video game. Maybe she wasn't yet sure what she planned to build, but she'd never be sorry she'd collected the materials.
MANO HADN'T SEEN HER husband in over twenty-four hours, but they had a standing date for happy hour. The Town Pump had one pool table and seating for ten. Dark wood paneling held the smell of cigarettes and stale beer. A stained-glass fixture above the single pool table read Budweiser in red, white, and blue, and the rest of the beer list was chalked onto a board behind the bar. It was Friday, near impossible to take a shot without knocking someone with the cue, but she and Rick persisted.
Mano called the 3 ball in the corner pocket but ended up sending the 5 into a side. Rick laughed and said, like he always did, “I guess we'll count the slop.”
She raised her glass to him, shook it so the ice rattled. When she bent over the shot, she made sure her shirt dropped open at the neck, an attempt to keep Rick's eyes focused on only her, but Rick turned toward the bar. “I'll get us another round.” His worn jeans fit him perfectly, his shoulders were broad under his wool sweater. She half loved him still, in spite of everything, which made her hate him even more.
Rick was a near hero in town because he'd raised the alarm, back in 1982, about the big flood in Rocky Mountain National Park. He'd been deep in the park's high country early in the morning; right place, right time. Rick was cagey about the reasons, always claimed the hand of God, and since the question of wh
y he was up there was both central to the story and somehow didn't really matter, everyone let it go. It was Rick, after all, who called in the flood in time to evacuate the downhill campgrounds and the tourist district in Estes Park. If Rick hadn't been there, more than three people would have died. Mano didn't believe for a minute that God had anything to do with it. She was pretty sure Rick had been poaching, or stealing antler sheds, or some shady nonsense, but still the story had elevated Rick. It made him easier to fall in love with, easier to forgive.
He'd been up near tree line, where the wind can strip a spruce of half its foliage, can twist and bend the subalpine firs into flags, when he heard a noise and thought atom bomb, thought The world is ending, thought Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn! He searched for a mushroom cloud, but saw instead rushing mud swallowing boulders, pulling trees out by their roots, different disaster, similar effect. The flood, pulled by gravity, cleared everything in its path, pulled boulders the size of humans, the size of cars, for miles before dumping them in the alluvial fan below—the landscape forever altered. Rick had blocked the road, run for the emergency phone. “I just did what anyone would have done,” Rick said, when he told the story, when people marveled at his decisive action.
“You going over to see that comet again tonight?” Rick asked. He leaned in and nibbled Mano's neck, and she wanted to pull away but didn't. He smelled like Old Spice, like the dusty heat of summer wind, and somehow the faintest whiff of rot, but it was earthy on Rick, pleasant, like the deep heart of a compost pile. As she breathed him in, she searched for the scent of whoever he'd been sleeping with, felt blood rushing to her head. She imagined another woman tracing her fingers along Rick's shoulder blade, thought of the way Rick's eyes turned tender in the moonlight, the love he'd once sworn to her whispered into some other woman's ear.
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