Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  As their father begins to snore, the brothers look at each other. It’s been more than a year since they’ve been together. Robert made his decision about the war on his own. The previous summer Jimmy was hitchhiking out west, and he spent Thanksgiving and Christmas somewhere in the Northeast with a girl he’d met on his travels.

  Without a word or a nod, the brothers rise and go out the front door and down the porch steps. Clay Square lies before them, the de facto front yard playground of their shared childhood. Two years apart, they were playmates and then enemies and then friends and then largely indifferent to each other, as they sought their own independent selves, and now neither of them is sure about the other. They are ready to be what they will become on this little walk together, as Robert goes to war and Jimmy enters his senior year at Loyola after months of faux vagabondage during the Summer of Love.

  They pause at the sidewalk and scan the broad, oak-edged sward of the park. The boys have too much history between them there, too much contending and screaming and too many tears and bloodied noses, long passed but with the affect still clinging to the place, and they turn south on Third Street, heading toward the river.

  “So you’ve done this,” Jimmy says.

  “This?”

  “The US Army in Vietnam.”

  Robert looks at Jimmy.

  He is visibly Robert’s brother, with the same jaw, their father’s jaw, but Jimmy is paler in hair and skin, missing their mother’s touches of darkness, which she got from her own mother, who was Italian. In spite of the confrontational quickness of his remark, Jimmy isn’t looking at Robert. He’s keeping his eyes ahead, down the street.

  Robert says, “I did the army. It was up to them where they sent me.”

  “That’s a cop-out,” Jimmy says, though he still doesn’t look Robert’s way and his manner is matter-of-fact. “Did he put you up to it?”

  Robert knows who Jimmy means. Pops. As of this Labor Day weekend in 1967, they have both always called him that. But Jimmy invokes him now as an impersonal pronoun.

  “No,” Robert says at once, taking the words literally to make the answer simple. No, there was no overt conversation, no request or exhortation or plea.

  Jimmy says, “This isn’t his war, you know. Even if he wants to make it that. Ho Chi Minh is not Adolf Hitler. Far from it.”

  “I told you this isn’t about Pops.”

  “It’s an evil war,” Jimmy says.

  Robert says, “Did your girl of the summer put you up to this?”

  Jimmy stops walking abruptly.

  Robert stops too, turns to him. He expects a fight now.

  But even though Robert is a step in front of him, Jimmy keeps his eyes down the street.

  They stand like that for a long moment.

  Robert senses his brother grinding toward a choice. A fight is one option, clearly.

  Now Jimmy looks him in the eyes.

  From years of experience, Robert knows how to read his brother’s face. It surprises him now. Nothing is there that fits the way Jimmy began this conversation. No furrow, no flare, no twitch. Nothing that fits his temper.

  “My feelings are my own,” Jimmy says, and his voice is actually soft. Robert cannot remember the last time he heard this tone in his brother.

  “I believe you,” Robert says. Though he’s not sure he does. But he makes his own voice go soft as well.

  “I bet he’s proud of you,” Jimmy says. He is still managing his tone.

  “I don’t hear any sarcasm in that,” Robert says.

  “There isn’t any.”

  “Is she a flower child?” Robert says. “Teaching you gentleness?” He regrets it at once. No matter that he’s starting to hear Jimmy’s tone as an affectation, a lie. It’s still a better way for them to talk, surely.

  Jimmy doesn’t answer. His cheeks twitch slightly and release, twitch and release. He’s grinding his teeth.

  If a woman is indeed gentling his brother down, the attitude deserves nurturing. So he makes himself a little vulnerable to his brother, offers an admission. “He isn’t showing it.”

  Jimmy stops working his jaw. “I don’t follow,” he says.

  “Pops,” Robert says. “His approval. He was never going to actually show it. We both know that.”

  Jimmy furrows again, briefly, and grunts a nod of sympathetic recognition.

  “My decision was my own,” Robert says.

  Jimmy nods again, in assent, looks away, beyond Robert to the square. They are silent for a few moments. Then Jimmy says, still looking into the distance, “She’s bringing it out in me.”

  Now Robert doesn’t follow.

  Jimmy turns his face to him, sees his puzzlement.

  “Gentleness,” Jimmy says. “She’s only bringing something out in me that’s already there.” He pauses, then adds, “And she’s not a flower child.” This last, however, comes out devoid of gentleness. Not quite angry, but sharply firm. Still, in an earlier time, Jimmy would be in full-flighted umbrage now.

  Robert says, “I didn’t mean to insult her.”

  “It wouldn’t be an insult anyway, if she were,” Jimmy says.

  Robert thinks: If you didn’t take it as an insult, you wouldn’t have hardened up in the denial. But he doesn’t let it out quite that way. He says, “I was just asking. Trying to assess what degree of criminal you both think I am by putting on this uniform.”

  “I thought you were asking to source my gentleness.”

  “Those two things often go together these days. The gentleness and the judgment.”

  “We’re judging a government.”

  “By embracing another,” Robert says. “North Vietnam’s oppressions are even institutionalized. Read a little history. No government, no country in this world has spotless hands.”

  A quick clench comes to Jimmy’s face, furrowing his brow and tightening the margins of his eyes. But he unloosens at once. His forehead stretches tight in willed calm.

  Robert finds this oddly touching. His brother is still working hard to please his girlfriend.

  “I won’t argue Vietnam with you,” Jimmy says. “Personally, I can’t stand the politspeak and jargon and sloganeering. I can’t stand the drug-addled vapidness either. But I’m sorry for the war coming to our family like this. I am.”

  “It will come to you, as well.” Robert says this softly, not as a willed effect but from an ache that he is surprised to feel this keenly. He has even brushed aside his brother’s implicit rebuke. Talk was starting that graduate school deferments were about to vanish. The war could come quite personally to his brother next May.

  Jimmy does not answer. But he does not look away. He and Robert hold their gaze for a long moment. Then, as if they’d spoken of it and agreed, the two of them turn and continue south on Third Street.

  They will not speak again about the war. Not on this day. Not, as it turns out, ever again.

  In his mind now, in his bed, Robert has had enough.

  The room is cold.

  He wants his first cup of coffee.

  He draws back the covers.

  He sits, puts his feet on the floor.

  But he has come this far on Labor Day, 1967, and the rest of it must play through him so he can drink his coffee with the past relegated once more to the past.

  Much of that final scene is a blur. It wasn’t about him, after all. He was simply a witness, standing apart. He’s not even sure where they all are in the house. He can see only Jimmy and Pops. They’re shouting at each other. Likely they’re in the kitchen, because Mom walks out, brushing past Robert. He should follow her. But he doesn’t.

  He stays, though for a long while only in body. He tunes out the words, as Jimmy is drawn by his father into the politspeak he said he despises. High-decibel politspeak that goes on and on.

  Until abruptly the voices cease.

  For a moment the room rings with silence.

  Robert takes notice.

  Jimmy and Pops are standing close, f
acing each other.

  And then Jimmy begins to speak, but softly.

  Robert listens. He misses some of the words, but he gets the gist. It’s about a murderous war. It’s about those who defy their country. Then Jimmy’s voice rises and Robert hears clearly: “Those are the real heroes.”

  And William raises his right hand and slaps his son across the face. Jimmy’s face jerks away from Robert’s view.

  The gesture has been flash-powder fast and William’s hand has vanished. Robert’s mind is lagging way behind. He saw what happened, recognized it. But Jimmy has quickly brought his face back to his father’s, and for a moment Robert doubts his senses, wonders if he saw correctly. For all his bluster and working-class manliness, Pops has almost never used his hands on his sons.

  And it happens again. Robert sees a movement at William’s left shoulder and hears a sharp sound and Jimmy’s face jerks this way, showing itself to Robert. Pops has struck him with his other hand, and he barks a single word: “Cowards.”

  Robert’s body is startled into immobility while his mind revs up to understand. And it comes to him: It’s General George Patton, Pops’s beloved high commander. It’s Patton’s infamous gesture in a field hospital in Sicily in 1943, slapping a shell-shocked soldier across the face as a cowardly malingerer. The press got hold of it and Eisenhower stepped in, reprimanded Patton, took him out of combat command for a crucial year. Pops has spoken more than once about the bum deal this war hero got for a righteous act. Pops absorbed this gesture over the years. His muscles memorized it. And finally what seemed a familiar circumstance reflexed it.

  All this tumbles through Robert’s head as more words are spoken from across the room, as Jimmy then moves away, as he passes Robert, whose body is still inert. Nothing in Robert’s thoughtful understanding of the situation suggests what action his body might take.

  Jimmy is gone from the room. He will continue out of the house. He will not return.

  It’s all over. The end.

  But for Robert in his father’s kitchen, and for Robert in his own bedroom, what ended was simply that Labor Day in 1967. Jimmy would go on to his senior year at Loyola. It would be ten months before he’d go to Canada.

  What Robert does not see at the time and what he does not see now is Jimmy’s face after the second slap. The blow brought Jimmy’s eyes to Robert’s. But at that moment Robert was seeing only what was in his own head: an imagined image of Patton slapping a mind-blasted soldier in a hospital ward; Pops sitting somewhere with a beer, bemoaning Patton’s unfair fall from grace.

  Robert missed Jimmy’s eyes fixed on him, missed what they asked.

  And so he puts the incident away, as he always has: Everything happened very quickly; there was nothing to be done; it was all about these other two men anyway.

  Robert rises from the bed.

  Soon, in the kitchen, ready for the morning in khakis and cardigan, Robert burr-grinds his coffee beans, trying to return fully to this house, to the winter morning, to a day of work ahead in an America of a century ago. To do so he considers this Ethiopian he is grinding as if he were a Starbucks Foundation Endowed Professor of Coffee writing a monograph on these complex beans, washed and sun-dried in a cooperative in the village of Biloya, grown in deep shade more than a mile high in the surrounding mountains by a thousand farmers on less than two acres each, a coffee comprised of a dozen heirloom varieties, Kurume and Wolisho and Dega and more. Roasted last week in Durham, North Carolina, just a little past medium, the beans just beginning to turn dark.

  As he waits for the water to pass through the filter of his Technivorm Moccamaster at exactly two hundred degrees, however, he marvels: All this stuff in my head is prompted by that man in New Leaf. Not even him. My first mistaken impression of him. He has nothing to do with Vietnam.

  “You were restless last night,” Darla says.

  He turns to her.

  She stands in the doorway in black running tights—she still has fine legs, this Dr. Darla Quinlan—and red fleece jacket. She holds her watch cap, her hair pulled back and bunned up, the pull of her hair smoothing the wrinkles in her face enough for them to nearly vanish at this distance. If he were nearer, he would touch the bottom of her chin with his fingertip, lift her face just a little, and even her incipient jowls would vanish.

  “No more than usual, I think,” he says.

  “Perhaps not,” she says.

  “Sorry I disturbed you.”

  “It’s not about me. I wondered if you were all right.”

  “I am.”

  They look at each other in silence, each feeling the wish to have more to say but unable, for the moment, to think what.

  “Tea first?” Robert finally asks.

  “I like to run first,” she says. But she does so without a trace of a dumb-shit-you-should-know-that-after-all-these-years tone. Robert wonders if that means she’s considering putting the running preference aside.

  “Just this morning,” Robert says. “It’s cold out.”

  She hesitates, but says, “That makes it better to take the tea when I return.”

  They fall silent a moment.

  “You’ll be working by then?” she asks.

  “How long will you be?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t sleep well.”

  “Sorry,” Robert says.

  “It wasn’t you. I knew you were restless because I was already awake.”

  “Does it make you run longer or shorter, not sleeping well?”

  “Longer, usually.”

  “Tough girl,” he says.

  “Tough girl,” she says.

  “We’ll see,” he says.

  She angles her head to indicate she doesn’t quite understand.

  “Whether I’m working when you get back,” he says.

  They are silent again, but not moving.

  “I can stay,” she says.

  “You should run,” he says.

  “All right.”

  She puts her cap on. She turns. She turns back. “You could have a second cup. You love the new beans.”

  “The second cup goes to my desk,” he says, though without a trace of a tone—or even a trace of a feeling—that she should know that after all these years.

  Darla goes.

  How is the silence of this kitchen consequently different because she is out running somewhere on the dirt and macadam remnants of a WPA road instead of still sleeping upstairs? Somehow different. Felt several times lately by Robert, like a newly, faintly arthritic knuckle. He cannot say why.

  He takes up the coffeepot, and now, in order to work, he has to try to put Darla out of his mind along with Bob and Jimmy and Lien and Dad and the others who hover around them.

  Perhaps because his work often leads him to consider the smallest semantic details, he hears the shift in his mind from his earlier memory to this present moment: Pops stopped being Pops somewhere along the way. He is Dad now. And to his face, there was rarely an occasion to address him with a name at all. Dad to his mother, when they spoke of the man.

  But this is exactly the hovering of others he needs to resist. Semantics—his mind—snagged him on his father just now, so he thinks it will be a simple matter of the will to return to this kitchen and his coffee and the scholarly day to come. But a woman slips into him. To his surprise, it is not Darla.

  Lien. She came to him last night beneath the oak tree, across all these years, and he left her last night just as he left her when the Tet siege began. Now, she comes to him as she always did, silently, gently. Borne not on a thought but a river.

  The sunlight flares from the water and he turns his face to her, pressed chastely against him in the narrow bow of her uncle’s sampan, the man out of their sight line behind them, beyond the bamboo thatch shelter in the middle of the three-plank boat. He is their chaperone, working the long sculling oar, bearing them on the river past the Citadel, past the coconut palms and the frangipani, toward Ngu Binh Mountain. Robert and Lien me
t only a few weeks ago in her cousin’s tailor shop, where she works. He came again and again as if to consider a tailor-made suit until finally she said, I am happy Robert never choose, and she invited him to float with her upon her river in this season that gives it its name. And indeed the water all around them fills him with a ravishing sweetness possible only on the cusp of rottenness. The blossoms of fruit orchards upriver—litchi and guava, breadfruit and pomegranate—have fallen into the water and decayed in their passage to the South China Sea. The sunlight flares from the water and he turns his face to her and she turns her face to his and they hold each other in this gaze, before they have ever kissed, ever embraced, weeks before they will make love, and the perfume of this river fills them both, and she says to him, Mr. Robert, your eyes are the color of water drop on lotus leaf, and he says, Miss Lien, your name means “lotus,” yes? and she turns away from him, glances over her shoulder toward her uncle, to make sure he cannot see. Then she looks at Robert again with her eyes the color of a black cat turned auburn in sunlight, and she leans to him, and they kiss.

  He has not had this memory—has feared and resisted this memory—for years. He knows how to let go of it. He reinhabits this: Lien offers him the French .32-caliber pistol that belonged to her father, and he takes it and he turns and he heads out her door and down the stairs and into the war. This is a memory he can put aside without needing his willpower.

  He closes his eyes.

  He smells the coffee he has brewed.

  He opens his eyes.

  Once again he takes up the carafe. He pours his Ethiopian in small circles, listening intently to the purl of it, leaning in, flaring his nose to its smell, isolating the notes of peach and blueberry and cocoa. He thinks, reflexively, to carry the cup to the living room, as he often does, to sit in the reading chair that faces the French doors to the veranda. But the oak tree is framed in those doors.