Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  You didn’t have to kill to do that.

  Robert has never told his father about the banyan tree. About the man he shot in the dark.

  You are a killer.

  Still. Still. So many men had it figured out that way, thinking they would be one of the eight in ten who never engaged in actual combat, but ended up having the fight come to them, having an army—not just men, not just a solitary man but an army—having an enemy army come at them and their pals, and then everyone did this thing together, so many men ended up killing, ended up killing other men, ended up turning into killers, many times over. But somehow so many of those men—surely so many; just look at all the veterans who apparently are leading routine lives, more or less happy lives, lives full of all those values we putatively fought for—so many were able to figure out how their killings were outliers, were acts apart from who they really are, so many somehow figured out how to live the rest of their lives as men who are not, in fact, killers, are anything but killers.

  But when Robert emerged from his tree, this was not an enemy army before him. This was one man. A solitary man. A few paces away in the dark. A man who simply was there. A man who simply moved. A man who could have been anyone. Maybe a frightened boy. The Viet Cong recruited boys. Maybe he was solitary because he was running away, ready in that moment to make some sort of separate peace, one man to another. Worse: maybe not a Viet Cong at all. Maybe no enemy at all. Maybe a man who minutes ago had been hiding in his home in the alleyway. Or hiding in another tree.

  Robert had not seen a weapon.

  Though that proved nothing. It was too dark. And the North’s soldiers who had only recently passed through would certainly have killed Robert. What the hell was that man doing there? The great likelihood was that he was a soldier like all the rest, and for Robert to have hesitated would have been for Robert to die. Nearly a decade ago, Robert’s own Florida passed the first stand-your-ground law: If you find yourself in a situation where you reasonably fear that someone is about to kill you or seriously injure you—no matter where you are—you have no obligation to retreat. You can kill. You can kill and you are innocent. You are innocent.

  Robert and Darla have spoken several times about how they despise this law.

  Robert has not spoken with Darla about how he has quietly invoked this law over and over to try to make that voice inside him fall silent.

  He has never told Darla about the killing.

  Five miles of urban-sprawl businesses have passed like white noise and now Robert crosses over the interstate. The faint quaver of the overpass, the rush of traffic beneath him, snap him back to the car, to his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

  “It was a fucking war,” he says aloud. And to himself: What’s wrong with you? What kind of man are you? It was the Tet Offensive. I killed a Viet Cong who would have killed me.

  He loosens his grip.

  He takes a deep breath.

  He considers the gravity of his father’s situation. Eighty-nine years old. A broken hip. A bad heart. A smoker’s lungs. And this thought surges in Robert: At least I didn’t let him down. I went. Especially with Jimmy doing what he did. If Dad dies now, at least there is that.

  Robert doesn’t quite go so far as to say to himself, He was proud of me. Though he lets himself assume it. William Quinlan never went so far as to say that. Not in those words. But the things he might have said, the things Robert wanted him to say, by the very nature of those things—intense, tender, vulnerable feelings unbecoming to a man of the era and of the sort that his father was—those very things kept him quiet.

  And as the incident in the dark in Hue recedes in Robert, he notes that neither has his father ever spoken of the killing he himself did. He did kill. Unquestionably so. He was an infantryman. Indeed, William has rarely spoken of the war at all to his family, other than to say he was there, other than to speak generally of its grandness and its righteousness.

  Robert stops at a red light.

  Rarely to his family. But not never. His father puts an arm around him. And an arm around Jimmy. Robert is nine years old, his brother seven. Pops is sitting in a chair on the porch of the house on Clay Square and the two brothers are standing. He pulls them to him, then lets them go, but it is clear they are to stay where he’s put them, at whisper distance. He says to them, low, Boys, it’s time. He smells of bourbon. It’s late on a spring afternoon. The shadow of their house has crossed the street and entered the park. You know I was in the war. You should know what I went through for you. Can you imagine how scary it was? I want you to think of this, boys. I was with the Third Army under a great American general named Patton, and we were sweeping toward Berlin. We were in the outskirts of a city called Bingen. The Nazi troops were falling back. The enemy, you understand. So there was a house we thought they’d been using as a headquarters. A small house but with an upper floor. I went up. No one was there. Nothing of interest, and so I was ready to come back down the stairs.

  Their father stops now. Takes a deep breath. Puts his arms around them again, draws them closer, and he says, Now pay careful attention.

  He lets them go, but delicately, so that they remain even nearer to him.

  So I am still in the upper room and I head for the stairway and I start down. Not particularly hurrying. Down a few steps, a few steps more. Then I’m on the bottom floor. And I’ve been thinking maybe I should look around down here as well. But I don’t. For some reason I think to hell with it and I go to the front door and I step out.

  He stops one more time and says, Now, boys, I want you to start counting seconds. You know: One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Like that. You know?

  They nod.

  And while you count I want you to imagine me moving across a little porch of this house and down into the yard and then taking a few more steps. But not many, not big. I’m going slow, ‘cause everything was okay inside. Are you ready?

  They are.

  And they begin to count.

  After Three Mississippi he says, I’m stepping off the porch.

  Four Mississippi.

  I’m barely in the yard, he says.

  Five Mississippi.

  I took a step.

  Six Mississippi. Seven Mississippi.

  Two more steps.

  Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi.

  BOOM! Pops barks the word and claps his hands together and the two brothers jump and cry out.

  Pops waits a moment. Lets them calm down. Then he says, An artillery round hit the house and the whole place and everything in it was blown to smithereens. I was that close to being dead.

  He pauses so he’s sure they get it. They get it. They’re still quaking.

  As it was, the blast threw me about twenty feet and I ended up bruised and scuffed and my head was spinning for an hour. I was alive. Barely. It was that close, boys. You know what else that means. You two were that close to never being born. Never even existing. Think of that.

  Jimmy is weeping. Robert is still shaky in the legs but he’s making sure he stands up straight before his father. Jimmy begins to tremble and the weeping turns to sobs. Pops is looking off down the street, toward the river. Robert puts his arm around his brother.

  A horn honks.

  And again.

  On Thomasville Road, north of I-10, at the traffic signal before Walmart, the light has turned green.

  Robert shakes off the past.

  He thinks: All of that is done with. He will die now.

  On the cusp between the tumbledown houses of Thomasville’s poor and the bespoke dwellings of Thomasville’s moneyed, along an avenue of attendant health care enterprises—for pain, for feet, for teeth and hearts and vascular systems, for flu shots and for lab work—Archbold looms large in a six-storied complex of cream stucco walls and red-tiled roofs. Robert parks in the landscaped lot before the hospital’s main entrance. As he steps from the car, his cellphone rings. He reads the screen. Home. Darla is back from running. He closes the car d
oor, leans against it, and answers.

  “You got my note,” he says.

  “I’m so sorry,” Darla says. “How is he?”

  “I just arrived. I’m still in the parking lot.”

  Darla is standing, sweating, in the foyer, just returned. It occurred to her to shower first. But she carries a memory, not so much in her mind as in her body. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom in their first house in Tallahassee, a rental near Lake Ella, and there was only darkness before her. She’d just spoken to her brother Frank on the phone downstairs. Dead. His voice. Both of them. And she’d said Oh. She stood in the doorway and she realized that this single word might not have been the right one. Perhaps she’d said more. But she could not remember any further words with her brother, nor any details of her passage from the phone downstairs to this doorway. She thought: We need an extension up here. She stood there waiting for something, but she could not imagine what. And then he emerged from the darkness. Robert. She blinked hard at him. She thought: I haven’t been seeing him very clearly lately. And Robert knew to say nothing, he knew instead to step very close. He smelled of Ivory soap and flannel and coffee on his breath. He should brush better. And his arms came around her, one at her waist, his hand coming to rest in the small of her back; the other under her arm and angling across her shoulder blades, that hand landing on her shoulder, cupping her there, and his hand on her back rose and moved farther around her and he drew her against him, and as soon as he did, she could remember what had happened, and she fell into him, fell a long way into him. Their first death. The first close death that comes to a man and a woman who are sharing a life. The first death brings all the future deaths with it. Brings all the deaths in all the world. And he held her close.

  She does not remember this consciously now, as an event. Her body remembers, in the muscles, on the skin, simply as something it owes. Darla knows what the broken hip in Thomasville likely will mean for Robert, who has gone deep into his life without a close death of his own, and so she has not showered before making this call. She says, “Shall I come?”

  “Thank you,” he says. “But no. Not yet. He’s probably … I don’t know. It’s going to be all about Mom. It’ll be about her. You don’t need to come. Please just do what you need to do today.”

  She says, “Perhaps I need to be there. Not for her. For you.”

  “Weren’t you doing something? A field trip?”

  “Did I say?”

  “Last week. Something.”

  She thinks. Then, “Ah. Monticello.”

  “You want to meditate there, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go. Be a Southern belle.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Whatever you need.”

  She doesn’t answer for a moment. From the prompting of her body, she tries to think if she should ignore what he’s saying. If she should go to him anyway. But her body also feels a sharp-scrabbling chill. He keeps the thermostat too low overnight. Always. She should turn it up before she runs, but she never seems to remember. She doesn’t want to go to Thomasville. “All right,” she says.

  “I’ll see you later,” he says.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  They fall silent. But they do not immediately hang up. They aren’t good at ending phone calls. They both hate phones, in fact. They can’t read each other’s body or face, which is crucial to them, to inflect their silences.

  “Really?” she says.

  Just enough silence has ticked by between them that it takes a moment for Robert to place the really into its proper context.

  While he tries to, she interprets the few beats of his silence to mean he’s not really sure.

  “I’ll come,” she says.

  “No,” he says, figuring it out. “I’m really sure. Thank you.”

  And he hangs up.

  I do that too, she says to herself about the abruptness of his ringing off. She won’t worry anymore about him for now.

  She touches the off button on the phone and places it in its cradle.

  Robert finds his mother sitting on an upholstered couch beneath the skylight halfway down the entrance corridor. Peggy Quinlan rises at his approach and comes to him and they hug in the way they’ve hugged for decades, leaning to each other at the waist, cheek to cheek, patting each other behind the shoulders, as if always consoling each other. The patting is firmer this morning.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” she says. “They’re preparing him for surgery. The doctor is coming down to talk to us.”

  They let go of each other. She takes his hand and leads him to the couch. “I need to sit,” she says.

  They do.

  Robert turns mostly sideways to face her.

  “Are you okay?” Robert says.

  “A little shaky. I didn’t eat.”

  “Ma,” he says. “You have to eat.”

  “After the doctor.”

  “How’s Pops doing?”

  She smiles faintly at Robert.

  He sees it. “What?”

  “‘Pops,’” she says. “It’s just good to hear you call him that again.”

  He was unaware. He’s not sure it’s good. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s pissed,” she says. Then she quickly adds, “I put it that way because it’s how he says it.”

  Robert wags his head at her. “You can say ‘pissed’ for yourself.” And he regrets niggling. Why make a point of this now? But he knows the answer. The artifice of her. This is not the time for her to be working on her image.

  As she often does, Peggy quickly co-opts Robert’s irritation with her by claiming it for her own, criticizing herself. “Of course,” she says. “What a silly time to hear the whisper of the priest. Piss piss piss. There. I’m pissed too.”

  Though part of him recognizes her self-deprecation, antically adorned, as just another strategy of image-making, Robert gives her credit for it. “Good girl,” he says.

  “But he’s more than pissed,” she says. “He’s scared, darling.”

  “He’s a tough guy.”

  “You don’t see him like I do. He’s not so tough.”

  This is hardly the first time she’s claimed this. Robert has always doubted that it’s so. He has understood her assertions about the inner life of William Quinlan simply as her taking the opportunity to project herself onto the blank screen of her husband.

  “He’s faced death before,” Robert says.

  “It’s not about the dying,” she says. “It’s about leaving other things unresolved.”

  “Jimmy.”

  “That,” she says. “And more.”

  Robert nods at this. But he does not even try to think what those other things would be. They could be legion.

  Peggy waits.

  Robert stays silent.

  She says, “I called Jimmy.”

  “What?”

  “I called him.”

  “How?”

  “Your grandson.”

  She waits again, and Robert can only do likewise in response. He refuses to drag the story out of her. She is prone to this sort of drama.

  She says, “I asked Jake if there was a website. He found one. It’s like the white pages for Canada.”

  “Didn’t you already try to find his phone number?”

  “Years ago. But this time, there he was. Not in Toronto anymore. A town called MacTier. It was his voice. I recognized his voice on the answering machine.”

  “So you didn’t talk to him directly?”

  “No.”

  “When did you call him?”

  “This morning, though I’ve had the number for a little while. I knew how losing Jimmy continued to hurt your father. Even if he wasn’t talking about it.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I don’t expect him to call me back. At the end I was too much on your father’s side. How could I not be? But it wasn’t so bad between the two of you, was it?”
r />   “Bad enough.”

  “Still.” Peggy picks up her purse from beside her and opens it and draws out an index card. She offers it to Robert.

  He lets it hang there between them.

  “Please,” she says. “His number. He may listen to you.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good thing, even if Dad wants it.”

  “For me then.” The throb in her voice sounds genuine.

  Still Robert doesn’t take the card.

  A figure appears in Robert’s periphery.

  “Mrs. Quinlan.” A baritone, but not as warm as you’d expect from the pitch. A scalpel-edged voice. Robert turns to it. A man in blue scrubs, young-seeming somehow but with his managed scruff turning gray and with wrinkling at brow and eyes.

  Robert and Peggy rise.