Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  She switches on the university radio station.

  This same ostinato of orchestral strings presses his face to a window on a TWA 707. The Rocky Mountains crawl beneath him. He is flying to Travis Air Force Base, north of San Francisco. From there he will go to war. And this music is playing in his head through a pneumatic headset. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The first movement has tripped and stomped and danced, making things large, as Beethoven can do, but confidently so, almost lightly so. A little bit of the summer pastoral spilling over from the Sixth Symphony. And now, in the second movement, the largeness of things is rendered into reassuring repetitions. Can Robert believe this of what lies ahead of him, this grave contentment the music would have him feel?

  He is not to be a shooting soldier. He will do order-of-battle work, rather like research, rather like the things he learned to love in his recent four years at Tulane. Wherever they put him, he will be bunkered in at the core of a headquarters compound. It would take an unlikely military cataclysm—or a fluke, a twist of very bad luck, a defiance of an actuarial reality of warfare that is obscured by Cronkite’s nightly report—for him to die.

  He is young enough to feel confident in that reasoning.

  It is September of 1967. Four months before the military cataclysm of the coming Vietnamese New Year, Tet 1968.

  And if he does survive, he believes he will earn a thing he has long yearned to earn, foreshadowed only a few days ago in a bar on Magazine Street. His father shed tears over his tenth farewell Dixie, Robert’s fourth. Silent tears. William Quinlan has always been a quiet drunk. A quiet man, about feelings he could not command, feelings better felt by women. Robert still thinks, as he flies away to music his father could never understand, that he knows what the tears were about.

  In the car, however, this ostinato is solemn and insistent. More than solemn. It aches. He feels nothing like contentment as he races through the corridor of oaks. It is forty-seven years later.

  He glances at Darla.

  Her face is pressed against the window.

  Down a pea gravel drive they emerge from a grove of pine and cedar. They stop before the house they built in 1983 from early-twentieth-century Craftsman plans, with a shed-dormered gable roof, a first floor of brick, and two upper floors of veneered stucco and half-timber. For a decade Darla’s parents withheld every penny of their considerable resources from the struggling young academic couple, disapproving of the politics that brought the two of them together, and then, upon their deaths, they surprised their daughter with a will that split the parental wealth in half between her and a brother as conservative as they. She got the sprawling Queen Anne estate on Cayuga Lake and enough money to keep it up, along with the expressed hope—just short of a mandate—that their “daughter Darla and her family come home.”

  The parents’ death itself surprised her. It was by late-night car crash on the Taconic Parkway, both of them apparently drunk. Darla immediately sold the Queen Anne and she and Robert built this new house, to their shared taste, having lately taken their places at Florida State University. At the time, their son Kevin was eleven. Their daughter Kimberly was five.

  Tonight, with Robert’s Clinton-era S-Class Mercedes sitting next to Darla’s new Prius, they enter the house and put away their coats and go to the kitchen and putter about, she heating water for her herbal tea and he grinding his Ethiopian beans to brew his coffee, and for a long while they say nothing, not uncommon for this early-evening ritual, which occasionally feels, for both of them, comfortable.

  Then, when their cups are full and they are about to go off to their separate places in the house to do some end-of-evening work, Darla touches Robert’s arm, very briefly, though only as if to get his attention, and she says, “What did you two talk about?”

  “Who?” he says, though he knows who she means.

  “The homeless man,” she says.

  “The weather,” he says.

  She nods. “Did he say how he copes?”

  “We didn’t get into that.”

  “I hate to shrug him off,” she says, though in an intonation that mutes the “hate” and stresses the “off.” She therefore does not need to add “but we must.”

  They say no more.

  They are both on sabbatical this spring, and they go to what have been their separate studies ever since the house was finished.

  Robert’s is on the third floor, where the Craftsman plans called for a gentleman’s billiard room. His desk faces the fireplace in the north gable, with its hammered copper hood. Dormers and window seats are to his right hand and his left. His books line the room in recessed shelves.

  Early-twentieth-century American history is his specialty and he is writing a biography of a journalist, publisher, and agitator for pacifist and socialist causes, John Kenneth Turner. Tonight, he is working on a paper for a history conference. “The Prototype of the Twentieth-Century Antiwar Movement in the U.S.: John Kenneth Turner, Woodrow Wilson, and the Mexican Invasion.” A mouthful of a title that he sits for a time now trying to simplify.

  Darla’s study is off the first-floor hallway between the living room and the dining room. Her desk looks west through the casement windows, across the veranda, and out to the massive live oak behind their house. She teaches art theory. By certain scholarly adversaries at other schools, her research is considered to be interdisciplinary to a fault. She is known for her book Public Monuments as Found Art: A Semiotic Revisioning. Tonight she is trying to finish the rough draft of a paper, which, indeed, she will present at a semiotics conference. “Dead Soldiers and Sexual Longing: The Subtexts and Sculptural Tropes of the Daughters of the Confederacy Monuments.” The title seems just right to her.

  They are focused thinkers, Robert and Darla. They would, if pressed to consider the matter, attribute some of their focus to the mutual respect they have for each other’s work. They need give each other not a single thought once they are sitting in these long-familiar rooms.

  But the last sip of Robert’s coffee is cold. And he thinks of Bob.

  He wonders what the man is doing right now. There is some shelter or other in Tallahassee, surely. Bob is there. Perhaps he is thinking, still, of Charleston, thinking of whatever it is he feels responsible for. Or perhaps Robert was right about that sudden stillness in Bob. Perhaps the man is merely hunkered down for the night in this life he’s drifted to, trying to figure out how he got here.

  After the man and his wife passed and vanished and Bob got reacquainted with the food and the coffee before him and after he ate and drank and sat for a while at the table, he has once again forgotten what he knows about what can set him to thinking, forgotten this to his severe detriment since he does not want to deal with the inside of his mind, with the thinking machine revved up, not ever, but especially not at the very same time as having to deal with finding a place to sleep, now that he’s missed the deadlines for the shelters and the missions and the lighthouses and the mercy houses and the promised lands and the heavenly refuges. But tonight he has forgotten what he knows about the situation.

  So as soon as he remembers, he stands and goes out of the New Leaf Market and it’s too late, the situation is upon him: It was light and now it’s dark. It happened while he wasn’t watching. It happened quick.

  It launches him along Apalachee Parkway. And for a long while he just focuses on pushing his body hard to get away. Push and push. That’s all there is. Too much. The ache in his legs and his back starts it all aching in his head again. He doesn’t know how far he’s come, how long he’s been walking. A couple of miles. Maybe more. Then a landmark tells him he’s making progress, even as it stirs up issues. Tillotson Funeral Home passes, its phony columns floodlit like the capitol building, its marquee making some dead body famous for being dead. Some stiff named Henry tonight. Henry something or other, the second name not even worth Bob noticing. This guy doesn’t matter. Some Henry who was breathing and then he wasn’t.

  The dark continues to nag at B
ob. Its suddenness happened early, this being the first week of January. It left a bad chill behind, which is why he’s been walking east as fast as he can. In January he cannot simply vanish into the urban woodlands of Tallahassee, follow a bike trail and then veer off into the woods and find his things in a place only he knows about, through a culvert and along a drain bed and up a bank to a mark on a tree here and a mark on a tree there and a few more marks and a fallen oak and a hollow beneath, a place that was good for him all autumn long and he could go there anytime no matter how his flailing mind was trying to fuck with him, and he could get his stuff and he could find a place to sleep in the woods.

  All of this is rushing in Bob again, filling his head with words, but he never thinks it’s somebody else’s voice.

  “It’s me. It’s just me in here.”

  He says this aloud.

  He’s not crazy. He knows to look around right away to see if anybody heard him and nobody has. Bob’s doing fine, with only cars whisking past, no people, no one to hear. He even has the presence of mind to walk against the traffic in the stretches without sidewalks. He’s not crazy. He can even circle back to his previous thought, the one before the little digression that was worth mouthing.

  “I could always find my way in the woods,” he says. “You were okay with me there. Not that you’d let on. But you didn’t fool me. I knew you were okay with me there.”

  This he addresses to his father. But Bob’s not crazy. Bob doesn’t think the old man is there with him on Apalachee Parkway to hear. The old man is just a memory to him, maybe hiding out in Charleston and yellowing from his liver or maybe spotlighted this very night in front of some funeral home, but he’s nowhere nearby to hear. Nevertheless, because he’s not crazy, Bob shuts his trap and does his talking in his head where you always are, but when I’m strong—and I’m strong tonight, I know I am, in spite of the situation—I can make you behave, in my head I can take us into the woods, just you and me, and I can make it be the summer of ‘71, a certain day in August and I’ve gone and turned twelve and that was when I learned about the thing you didn’t want me to know. That I was okay by you. Though it was only with the Mossberg .22 in the crook of my arm, that I was okay with the Mossberg going quick to my shoulder and I kill some animal or other that you didn’t even see and it makes you drop into a shooting crouch and lay out some covering fire and then you stop and you look me wild in the eyes and inside you’re going Who the fuck are you? and then you focus and you answer your own question in your head, you don’t want me to see it but I do, I listen into your head and you go, You’re Bobby, you’re my son and you can shoot, by God, I been gone away a big chunk of your life to shoot in some big woods—in some fucking jungles in Vietnam—and I come back and by damn you can use a rifle just as good as any of the boys I been with then you look where I shot and you throw a camouflage tarp over the crack that just opened and shut in your head, and you jump up, but you’re not talking, not saying a word, of course not, you’re not looking at me but I know what’s just passed between us, no matter how you try to camouflage it, I know this thing about the two of us.

  “Goddamn you, I know it,” Bob says.

  I know it here in the woods even though I will doubt it when we get back home tonight, you will have your way with my head when you’ve got us in our single-wide and you’re in your La-Z-Boy and you’ve got your bottle, and your silence is just your silence, and I better stay out of arm’s reach while you’re sitting there dealing with whatever it is you came home with a couple of years ago. Your situation.

  Like Bob has a situation. Like now. Like this long, cold walk he’s on tonight, trying the one thing he knows to try, concerning a place to sleep. A church building along the parkway, maybe thirty minutes by foot east of Walmart, an hour and a half from New Leaf, and longer still from the Hardluckers’ center of town, and as he pushes on east, Bob can’t stay in the woods in his head with his father for all that time, in fact his mind has already grabbed him up and galloped into that trailer park along the Kanawha, out past the West Virginia State campus, out where he’s not okay with his father at all, and even if Bob summons up enough energy to at least drive his mind forward to when he’s older, to when he’s near as tall and rangy as his dad and he can easily fend off the old man when he wants to reach out and give his son a slap—it wasn’t about that really, those slaps were all open-handed, always, Bob knew all along there were worse fathers by far—even when Bob skips forward, his mind only roars louder, because his real fear had to do with whatever it was inside his father that only the old man could see, the things he never talked about. Bob was afraid those things were inside himself already, no matter if his father found them in a jungle halfway around the world, because the two of them were the same, father and son, they were stretched tall in body in the same way, they had the same hands and eyes, and they were the same by that shared thing in the woods, when they were okay together. And the okayness only made everything worse because that was never spoken about either, just like the Vietnam jungle stuff. The good things between them and the bad things that could come to men like the two of them were all one in the same unspeakable place. And so Bob tries to just walk. He just strides hard and lets the pain of the pavement pound through his joints and back and temples and gums and he focuses on what’s ahead.

  A pastor out here at Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel leaves the outside door to the groundskeeper’s storage room unlocked on cold nights. They have a food pantry, but this far out of town they do hard-luck families mostly, not the individually lost. Out here, sheltered floor space next to a John Deere is a private little bit of charity by the good pastor that often goes unused, its being attractive only to a Hardlucker without a car. Which makes it a pretty good bet to be available to anyone ready to walk six or seven miles. Especially since the space is needed most when it’s the most daunting to walk, in the cold or the rain.

  Two nights ago it was cold and Bob had the place to himself. It was a hard walk. Tonight it’s cold again, but at the moment, with some things talked over, he feels pretty good. Pretty damn good. He’s got today’s newspaper folded in his pocket, a full copy abandoned on a table, waiting for him as he finished his coffee tonight. There’s a light in the storage room to read by. He’s not afraid to read the news. The meal and the coffee are sitting well in him, so his thoughts turn to the man who gave them to him, the man with the same name as his, the rangy older man with the John Wayne jaw: You said it first, my name, and I thought for a second you somehow already knew I’m Bob and it turns out you’re Bob, and my father is Calvin, my father isn’t Bob, if you were my father I’d be Junior and I don’t know what I’d think about that, I think I wouldn’t like it, not at all, my father is Calvin, Cal, my mother is Marie, and what did you mean, Bob, about my having responsibilities in Charleston? Did you know me there? You another of my old man’s cronies are you? What do you want me to do about it?

  “I never met you before in my life,” Bob says.

  He stops walking.

  He’s not feeling so good now.

  Things are suddenly getting a little out of hand.

  He realizes that.

  This was a good man he met. Bob the stranger.

  He needs to stop his mind.

  He needs to sleep.

  The church isn’t much farther.

  He walks on and the streetlights are gone, they’ve been gone for a while and the dark is even darker but Bob hasn’t noticed till now. Still, it’s all right, he’s reconciled to the dark for this night, and up ahead now is an upspray of light as if rising from the earth, beaconing a message on another marquee, before the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church: GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL

  Somehow this calms Bob for a time. Hardly from the sentiment. But he’s not only not crazy, he’s pretty smart. His mother was smart. Cal was too, in a shrewd sort of way. When Bob’s mind is flailing with deep issues, to hear deep issues turned into banality is a kind of mental speed bump for him. He slows d
own.

  He gives the sign the finger as he goes by, and he finds he can focus now for a time, and he keeps his eyes lowered as he passes the central spire and the fake front columns on the stuccoed facade. He keeps his face down and he moves through the side parking lot and around back and to the separate community building and around to the back of that and to the door and he’s glad now it’s almost over. He will sleep. He can sleep.

  He is at the door and he puts his hand to the knob and he turns it and the knob yields and then the door and he steps into a darkness smelling of cedar mulch and motor oil, and he stops, and he waits a moment for his eyes to adjust and he sees a swift movement of shadow out of the corner of his eye and hears a guttural bark of a voice and he hears nothing more, not even the clang of the shovel against his forehead.

  In bed now, Darla inserts her iPod earbuds, and she and Robert switch off their lamps. Their Kindles have their own light. The tinny spill of Bach from his wife’s ears fades quickly from Robert’s awareness. Soon, however, he is reading the same few sentences over and over. He turns off his book.

  “Good night,” she says, aware of the vanishing of his light in her periphery.

  “Good night,” he says, though they have long ago agreed that the formality of his reply is unnecessary, since her head, at this point, is always full of music and she cannot hear him.

  Nor do they kiss.

  They are so very familiar with each other. And that familiarity has become the presiding expression of their intimacy.

  Robert sleeps.

  And he wakes.

  He has been dreaming, but he does not remember a single image of the dream.

  Not that he tries.

  It is enough that he is awake.

  The room is dark.

  He turns his face toward Darla. He can make out—more kinesthetically than visually—the topography of her. She is lying on her side, facing away.