Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  He gently pulls back the covers, eases his way from the bed so as not to disturb her, puts on slippers and robe, and he goes out of the room and along the hallway and down the stairs. He pulls his topcoat from the vestibule closet, enters the wide dark of the living room, and passes through the French doors and onto the rear veranda.

  He stands at its edge. The moonless sky is clear and the stars are bright. His bare ankles are cold but his chest is warm. He once would have snuck a smoke here. He didn’t need Darla to persuade him to abandon cigarettes, even an isolated, open-air smoke or two. His father’s burr-grinder cough did that.

  Now he simply puffs his breath into the starlight.

  His oak stands before him in vast silhouette, its lower horizontal branches thick as most trees, thick as water oaks and pin oaks. On other nights, with or without cigarettes, he felt that his scholarly discipline, his life’s work, his very mind were made manifest in this tree. After all, it stood there through early-twentieth-century America, breathing oxygen into that era’s air. It even likely witnessed the birth and death of the Confederacy, perhaps even Andrew Jackson’s war on the Seminoles, Old Hickory’s ruthlessness thwarted by the tribe’s guerrilla elusiveness.

  But on this night, as Robert folds his arms across his chest and squares himself to the oak, he feels the presence not of the ghosts of history but of Bob. Bob the illusory Vietnam veteran. He evoked Vietnam over Robert’s quinoa at the health food store and then, being illusory in that regard, couldn’t vent the war away. So it has settled back into Robert himself. For this, the veranda, facing the oak tree, is the wrong place to be tonight: a tree sits in the center of Robert’s Vietnam.

  He unfolds his arms, thinks to turn, to retreat to bed. But he does not move. Instead, he wakes and it’s dark and a woman is beside him, naked and small, and she is waking too and the room is still heavy with the incense she has burnt for her dead. Robert has lingered with her, fallen asleep with her in a back street on the south bank of the Perfume River in the city of Hue. It is 3:40 in the morning, January 31, 1968, and they have woken to the sound of the North Vietnamese rockets and mortar rounds coming in from the mountains to the west.

  Robert blinks hard against the memory.

  He will not let certain things in.

  He pats his pockets now, by reflex, as if he will find a cigarette, and he turns his face a little, breaking with his live oak.

  But the woman lingers, still naked, in the dark of the room, lit through the window by a distant flare from across the rooftops.

  And now he is throwing on his clothes. Hue was supposed to be different, traditionally spared by both sides. The targets of the North’s New Year’s offensive were thought surely to have been revealed in the fighting that commenced this time yesterday. Surely it was all coordinated.

  He is dressed and he and the woman are standing beside the bed.

  Her name is Lien. Lotus.

  She hands him something heavy. Metal. He knows the thing. It is a French .32-caliber pistol that belonged to her father.

  Do Robert and the woman speak?

  Of course they do.

  He loves her.

  But he will not remember more of her now.

  And he is down the back stairs into the dead-fish stench of the alley and the AK-47s are popping from across the river. The Viet Cong. Or maybe even the North Vietnamese regulars. Though his job has been to count—men, weapons, from all the field intelligence that comes in—he thinks: We don’t know jack shit about them, for all our counting.

  He goes out into the street, and far down, under the streetlamps along the river, he sees the men moving. The men he counts. He thinks: I am a dead man.

  He turns and runs in the direction of MACV, the US compound, half a dozen blocks away. He rushes past storefronts and the passageways into rear courtyards and past the smells of mildew and dead fish and the smell of wood fires and from all directions now comes the din of weaponry, of small arms and RPDs and the whoosh and suck and blare of rockets, the sky flaring across the river, beyond the Imperial Palace walls—they are hitting Tay Loc, the city airport to the north—and now he sees men before him, as well, a squad of dark-clothed men a block up the river and gunfire is crackling everywhere and now a needle-thin compression of air zips past his head and he lunges into an alley mouth and he is running hard and figures are coming to doorways and he thinks the local communist cadres are emerging, he thinks again that he is dead, and there is only darkness around him and the alley slime underfoot and he pushes hard, and if he is to die he’d rather not see it happening, so he doesn’t look right or left or feel any of the bodies coming out. He just runs and he runs and he is out of the alley and he is in a pocket park and standing before a great, dark form.

  A banyan tree.

  It is old and it is vast. Its aerial roots are thick as young trees and nuzzled together into their own dense forest, propping up a billowing dark sky of leaves, and there is a deep inner curve to the roots, and a turning, and in the direction of the MACV compound there is heavy small-arms fire now and he hears the AK-47s and he hears an answering M60 machine gun and the M16s and he knows what to do.

  He enters the tree.

  He moves into the turning and he puts his back to its roots and he sits and he draws his legs into him and he is in the dark. He can see around the out-curving columns of roots. Bodies appear, nearly as dark as the night, moving quickly past with a metallic rustle of weapons, and he pulls his head back, squeezes into himself. He closes his eyes and smells a dank wet-earth smell and something fainter beneath, an almost-sweetness, and a little sharp thing in the nose, and he thinks of the girl’s incense and the dead she prays for. He knows this tree has killed another to live. These roots around him, holding him in the dark, began long ago by wrapping themselves around another tree, the strangler roots, embracing a living tree until it vanished, until it was dead inside the growing banyan. Rifles flare nearby and he presses back into the killing embrace of the banyan.

  He holds the French pistol in his right hand, flat against his chest. He expects to die here.

  Robert steps from his veranda.

  He is panting heavily.

  He has not let this happen for several years.

  He moves across his lawn now, approaches his tree. He places both hands hard upon its trunk to stop their trembling.

  He leans heavily there, waiting for this to pass.

  But still he thinks: I was not meant to be here. I was not meant to live this life I’ve led. I was meant to die long ago. Long long ago.

  Darla wakes, opens her eyes. Her lids are heavy, a precious, fragile state for her in the deep middle of the night. She is on her back, and above her is only indecipherable dark. She lets her eyes close. The bed has stirred and it continues to stir. Her eyes open again and their heaviness has vanished. She turns her face and watches her husband’s form adjusting, arms and now legs and now arms again. She realizes he is doing this as unobtrusively as he can. He was once much worse, returning from whatever it is that he does. He is trying. She would speak, but she does not want a conversation that would wake her up once and for all. If there is something on his mind and he is choosing not to volunteer it, it can wait till morning. She turns on her side, putting her back to him.

  And she sees him for the first time. It is May 8, 1970, four days after the Ohio National Guard killings at Kent State. He sits alone at a bistro table in a corner of a coffee shop in downtown Baton Rouge. She figures she has him pegged: the stretchy slacks and the button-down, short-sleeved sport shirt could simply be the sartorial momentum of the LSU student dress code, only recently rescinded, but something else about him—perhaps the longer hair on top of his head and the new growth on the sides; perhaps his quiet, two-handed focus on his coffee; perhaps just that surge of intuition about a guy your pheromones tell you you’ll fall for—something—makes her figure they are PX clothes and a military whitewall haircut abandoned at last and a cup of better coffee than he’s had for the
past two or three years. He is an ex-soldier.

  Behind her, on Fourth Street, some of the thousand people who just marched on the state capitol are drifting by, stoked and chatty with righteousness. Enough of them are also crowded into the shop to justify Darla receiving her cup of coffee and then approaching this man with green eyes and disparately dark hair and a jaw as smooth and hard as monument marble.

  He looks up at her, though slowly, as she draws near, as if he were reluctant to shift his attention from the coffee.

  She plays her hunch. “It looks like you’ve wanted that cup of Community for a long time.” She learned quickly, as a New York girl first-year grad student, about the local coffee, ground and roasted on the north side of town.

  “I’ve been away,” he says.

  Darla looks around the crowded room as if checking the available seating. She knows it makes no difference; she’d be doing this anyway. Still, even though she has for several years been quite comfortable with her female empowerment in this new age, she chooses to portray, with the search, a practical reason for the question she is about to ask. She nods at the empty chair across from him. “May I?” she asks.

  “Of course,” he says.

  She puts her coffee cup on the tabletop and sits.

  He stirs now in the bed next to her.

  She stops this memory.

  She is no longer sleepy. She needs to count bricks in an imaginary wall. She needs to take deep breaths and let them out slowly.

  She thinks: What prompted this bit of recherche du temps perdu? Not a small French sponge cake. Not even Community Coffee. Perhaps my Thai quinoa salad, though for its overspiciness rather than its latent nostalgia.

  She can’t even muster an irony-arched half smile for herself. She would like to dismiss the past with this sort of smarty-pants joking. But that is a lifelong impulse she has lately come to see as cowardly. The fact is she clearly remembers falling in love with him. Loving him. Loving him and loving him.

  And now that she is sitting before him in a Baton Rouge coffee shop with only a small tabletop of a French sidewalk café separating the two of them, and now that she is gazing directly into those eyes of his, they remind her of the emerald green of a Monet forest. She thinks to remark on this. Even in those first few moments with him. She also thinks, however, to mask her desire by immediately noting that it was the pigment that drove Monet mad. But instead, she says, “Did you march?”

  He blinks those green eyes slowly, as if trying to understand.

  Given her hunch about what he is or recently was, she hears herself as he might: the question could be a way of asking if he is a soldier. They are being routinely spit upon these days.

  She clarifies. “To the capitol. Over the war.”

  “Ah,” he says in a tone that suggests he was unaware of the event. “No.”

  “Surely you knew,” she says. “We went right past that window. A thousand of us.”

  “I figured it was a Greek Row picnic,” he says.

  For a clock tick or two she believes him. The green eyes show nothing.

  Then they come alive. Widen and spark, and Darla and Robert laugh together.

  His eyes.

  She looks toward him in the dark in the bed.

  She realizes she has not been noticing those eyes for some time. She makes a note in her head to look him carefully in the eyes today.

  And it occurs to her now, for the first time, after all these years: My god. I’d actually expected an observation about the pigment of his eyes driving Monet mad to hide my desire. It would, in fact, have cried out my desire. His eyes were driving me mad.

  Did she ever go on to openly make that observation about their color?

  She tries to remember.

  She cannot.

  She thinks not.

  I never did tell him, she thinks.

  And then: Thank god. He got me into his bed quick enough as it was.

  But she did tell him. It was on their fifth wedding anniversary, spent in bed in their apartment in Baton Rouge, making love in the morning but then spending the rest of the day—wisely, necessarily, they thought—reading for their PhD oral exams. They did so, however, naked together in bed, the heat turned up high, as it was a chilly February day. In the late afternoon, as the light from the window was fading, just after Robert switched on a nightstand lamp, she told him about his eyes, thinking perhaps he and she might touch again for a time on this special day. She told him about their color. Told him that she’d planned to cut him down at once, however, with her line about Monet. Perhaps at the moment of her confession Robert’s head was too full of the academic rhetoric of history. Her head was too, after all. For he simply smiled a little and offered a bland How sweet and he resumed his reading and she resumed her reading and they did not touch again for a few days, and when they did, the incident was forgotten.

  Darla is counting bricks in an imaginary wall, pausing at each hundred to take a brisk, long breath and then letting it out as slowly as she can, trying to ignore the unconscious, restless body in bed beside her, trying simply to sleep.

  Shortly after her third hundred, Robert turns heavily onto his back and sighs. Darla hesitates briefly—just long enough to realize how there is no good reason to hesitate, even briefly, to follow this impulse—and so she seeks his hand at rest between them and lays hers gently upon it. She thought he was probably asleep, and he is, but she keeps her hand on his until, just past her fourth hundred, she falls asleep.

  When Robert wakes, there is a thin etching of gray dawn along the vertical edges of the blackout blinds. Darla’s hand is long gone from his and he has missed the gesture. He is lying on his back and she is to his right, on her side, facing away. He is capable of a gesture similar to hers. He could lay a hand gently on the point of her hip now, as she sleeps, and then take it away again after a time without having to raise any issues or expectations between them. He has done so, with her sleeping, within the past week. But this morning he has woken to find Jimmy in his head and he needs to deal with that first. Gently, very gently, so as not to wake her—for she can be a light sleeper sometimes, an aggrievedly light sleeper—he turns onto his side with his back to her.

  For some years now it has taken Robert a little bit by surprise whenever he thinks of his brother. But the prompts this time are instantly clear: Robert’s venture to the veranda without the purgative focus of a cigarette, particularly on a night of Beethoven’s Seventh; the consequent memory of his flight from the North Vietnamese soldiers in Hue, of his refuge in the banyan tree; his taking refuge, as well, from the army, for an occasional night, in the arms of a Vietnamese woman.

  Robert long ago recognized the irony of all this. In some sense he actually ran and hid before Jimmy did.

  But it wasn’t the same.

  Even now, almost forty-seven years later, he feels compelled to repeat the litany of differences: More than a few Americans at MACV, officers and enlisted men alike, had local women to go to now and then; the communist offensive on five other provincial capitals the previous night had convinced everyone in Hue that the city’s traditional exemption from serious attack, tacitly accepted by both sides, still pertained; Robert’s break from the army was not even AWOL, much less desertion. And Robert had not run from the war. He did not even run from that night’s battle; he sought cover and would later emerge.

  He would later emerge.

  And a price would be paid for not running.

  Robert shuts down this line of thinking.

  He does not want to emerge from the banyan. Not this morning. Not ever again. There is no need. He has long since reconciled himself to those few days in 1968.

  So much time has passed. Generations. For Christ’s sake, he’s had his own children and grandchildren since.

  And the irony about his act being akin to Jimmy’s is superficial. A conceit. Jimmy did run. From the war. From far more.

  Not that Robert blames Jimmy.

  Not for his politics,
certainly.

  Not for decades.

  Robert eases onto his back once again, expecting that thought to send Jimmy on his way, but instead he and Jimmy are sitting in overstuffed chairs angled toward the settee where their father is in a familiar stage of dozing off. Sitting upright, head sinking, he will soon—barely lifting his face and without opening his eyes—pivot slowly into fetal repose on the velour.

  It is Labor Day, 1967. Robert is on home leave with orders to Vietnam. He graduated in June of ‘66 from Tulane and struggled through that summer with what to do. He went off to LSU on a graduate school deferment, but he dropped out as soon as the fall semester was finished and he enlisted.

  Robert is wearing his dress greens. Glad for his father to see him in them. His father was a nineteen-year-old hard-stripe corporal in the infantry under Patton in Germany, about to become a platoon sergeant when the war ended.

  But the conversation has been odd. Minimal. Tangential. Almost sullen, for his father’s part. Pops is a quiet drunk. But sober, he can talk. He has the gift of gab. Even smart gab at times. He isn’t well educated but he’s well read. Their home has always been filled with books, and he even hounded any traces of Third Ward Yat out of his sons’ speech. Still and all, Robert understands: About real feelings his father also is a quiet man. He gets drunk on his feelings and clams up.

  And Robert figures there are other things going on to shut Pops down, figures the old man and Jimmy were probably fighting before Robert arrived and the fight simply has overridden everything. His little brother, fractiously self-assertive and needy as usual, has simply jumped in between him and their father.

  Robert, in his bed, closes his eyes to the oak beam running above him in the ceiling as if it were about to fall and split the bed in two. He is tempted to slide forward a couple of hours, to the abrupt ending of the family’s Labor Day afternoon in New Orleans.

  But he does not.

  He remains in the moment when he and Jimmy are themselves quiet, almost placid-seeming, with each other, as they sit watching their father fade into sleep in the front room of the family’s double shotgun in the Irish Channel. When Pops bought the house—after he was promoted to stevedore foreman at the Seventh Street Wharf—he opened the common wall of the semidetached, here in the living room and in the back, at the kitchen, making a unified home of it. Robert was ten, Jimmy was eight.