Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  And William Quinlan is dead.

  When the phone rings in the foyer, Robert is still sitting in his reading chair, his coffee mug empty for a while now. He’s not actively dreading his father. He’s not wavering in his intention to tell him. He’s just inert. Intending to overcome that. The dread driven deep. The wavering converted to dozy distraction: wondering if this lot of coffee beans is depleted yet at the roaster; watching the flash of cardinals beyond the veranda; thinking the room too warm and suspecting the weather has changed overnight. It takes a second ring of the phone to make him rise, and still there is no urgency in him, no sense of dread. Just the phone ringing.

  Doctor Tyler himself. Very sorry. A saddle embolism is not uncommon in spite of doing everything possible. Death certificate signed. In the hospital mortuary awaiting instructions. Have you done this before? Do you have a funeral home?

  “No,” Robert is finally saying, “I’ll have to see about one.”

  “Not a problem. Call here and tell us when you decide. The home will take care of everything from this point on.”

  “All right,” Robert says.

  “I’m very sorry,” Doctor Tyler says.

  “Yes,” Robert says. “Thank you.”

  “He didn’t suffer.”

  “That’s good.”

  And the conversation is over.

  Robert puts the phone down.

  He finds himself inert again.

  He does not miss his father.

  But something got misplaced.

  He looks around him. “Darla?” he calls.

  No answer. Again, louder: “Darla?”

  Nothing. She’s not back. She sometimes gets inspired and runs a long time. He understands that. She has to go up to the hospital afterward and she wants to run thoroughly first.

  No.

  She won’t have to go to the hospital.

  There’s a beeping. Distant. But nearby.

  He looks. It’s the cordless phone. He’s forgotten to push the off button. He picks up the phone. He pushes the button. He puts it down.

  He drifts back into the living room, looks at the French doors, moves to them, opens them, steps into a morning that feels almost warm.

  He looks to the live oak standing massively before and above him. He walks to it, turns his back to it, and sits heavily down in the crotch of two roots. He presses against his tree even as his limbs feel their tone fading. They waver, and he wills his legs to stretch flat and he lets his arms fall to his sides.

  The oak’s trunk is rough, touching him hard in the back in long, uprunning ridges. He is glad for its hardness against him and he is glad to smell the sudden Florida warmth in the air. He is glad he is in his own country now and did not die. But he aches. He aches for the dead. For one man he did not know at all. For one man he knows too well.

  He sits like this until he hears Darla calling for him from inside the house.

  “Out here.” He does not move.

  She appears in the open French door, sweating in her running clothes, a towel around her neck. “What is it?” she says.

  “He’s dead,” Robert says.

  She steps to the edge of the veranda, but pauses.

  She doesn’t want to force him to stand by coming too near the tree. He seems propped there as if after a beating in a ring. “Are you okay?”

  He rouses himself, flails a little with his arms, drags at his legs.

  She presents a palm. “You don’t have to …”

  “I’m fine,” he says, making it to his feet.

  She steps closer, ready to hold him but not initiating it, regretting her sweat.

  He’s not ready for the ritual of this. He holds still, looks down to the space between them.

  The phone rings, a small sound from the foyer but it lifts Robert’s eyes to hers.

  He knows who it is, and from his look, she knows.

  Darla says, “Would you like me to talk with her?”

  He considers this.

  The phone rings again.

  “Thanks,” he says. “But I better.”

  He moves past her.

  She remains.

  Not just in the small of her back, the touch of his hand; not just in her chest, the press of his; but in her conscious memory now, his arms come around her in the darkness of their bedroom with both her parents laid out in a hospital morgue a thousand miles away, and he pulls her close. She should have done that for him just now, instantly, as he did it for her, not pausing in the doorway or on the veranda. But he surprised her, the tableau of him and the tree. She did not expect him to be stricken by the death of such a difficult man, a man who would no longer be able to disappoint him. She’d needed a few moments to get over her surprise. Then the phone intervened.

  Darla needs to be close to him now.

  She turns, steps through the French doors, crosses the living room toward his voice in the foyer: “Of course, Mom … Of course … Try to be calm till I’m with you … Say a prayer. Say a rosary.”

  Darla hears these last few words trying to stick in his throat. She stops before she becomes visible in the living room doorway.

  “Soon,” he says. “Yes.”

  He listens. He says, “Of course. Very safe.”

  Moments after this she hears the phone clack into its cradle. She steps into the foyer and he turns to her. She comes to him and puts her arms around him.

  He draws her close, but only briefly, and he gently pulls away. “I have to go up there now.”

  “I’ll follow as soon as I can,” she says.

  An hour later Robert is sitting on his mother’s sofa, his arm around her, her head on his shoulder as she weeps. Across the room the leg rest of his father’s overstuffed brown velvet recliner remains raised from the last time he sat there, barely more than forty-eight hours ago. Whenever Peggy’s tears swell into sobs, Robert murmurs I know, I know until they ebb. She has not reminisced or eulogized or criticized but has simply wept, which makes her grief seem to him unadulterated and keeps his arm around her, gentles his grip on her shoulder, makes him long for his mother to show this part of her more often. He wonders if Darla’s arrival, the expansion of the audience, will put her back onstage.

  He tightens his hold on her as if to prevent that.

  As he does, Robert grows conscious again of the leg rest on the recliner. Whenever the old man figured he was returning soon, he kept it raised and worked his way out of the chair at an angle. He’d hobble then. He never spoke of them, but surely those knees hurt him. Most likely arthritis. They hurt him to push against the leg rest to lower it, though they probably hurt him as much climbing from the chair so awkwardly. But he’d gotten it into his head that this was the best way to do it, so by damn he’d do it this way forever. The last time he sat here he struggled to extend one leg off the chair and to drag his butt on the cushion till he could get the other leg over and then to drag some more to put both his feet flat on the floor and then he braced himself and he rose. He’d done this thousands of times and he thought he’d be right back. He was wrong. He’d be dead before he could do it again.

  Robert finds his eyes filling with tears.

  He does not feel as if they’re for the man himself exactly. Maybe some. Maybe for the father Robert wished he’d been. But these tears seem mostly about knowing this small, commonplace thing. How his father got out of a chair. True to his character. Stubbornly. Hurting himself trying not to hurt himself. Someone Robert comprehends in this small but telling way has vanished from the world: That’s what these incipient tears are about. And he raises his free arm, drags his wrist across his eyes, refuses to shed them.

  He feels his mother’s face turn upward toward his.

  She will get this all wrong.

  That pisses him off.

  He abruptly drops his arm. He does not look at her. He says nothing.

  He feels her face turn downward again.

  Good.

  Peggy Quinlan gently disengages her son’s arm
from around her, raises the handkerchief she’s been fisting, and dabs at her eyes, wipes her nose.

  She tucks the handkerchief into a pocket of her sweater.

  Robert is still not looking at her. Not looking at the chair either. His eyes have drifted to a Currier and Ives print of a sleigh in the foreground of a snowy countryside, its pair of horses in a synchronized trot, the sleigh holding a mother and father and two children. This print has hung on his parents’ living room walls through his whole lifetime. Robert long ago stopped even seeing it. He sees it now. And he remembers that as a child he took the two children, bundled similarly, to be brothers. They are not. One is a girl.

  “He loved you,” she says.

  Damn.

  Robert regards her. He wishes he could offer the reflex reassurance that has been so easy for the past half hour. Just one I know and she might refrain from making the case for William’s love. In the absence of any overt avowals from the man, Robert made his own faulty case for that over the years. Those tears in the bar, for instance. And none of it carries weight anymore. Not after yesterday. He tells himself: After yesterday I can’t lie about this even to say those two words.

  But he considers the alternative.

  She is brimming with bullshit reassurances.

  “I know,” he says.

  And he thinks: Fuck me. I’m your son. So there’s the lie we can agree to between us, so we can just go on.

  She lays her head on his shoulder again.

  She does not resume crying. Robert feels her working up to more words, though this intervening silence makes him hopeful they won’t be intended proofs of his father’s love for him.

  But before she speaks there’s a knock at the door.

  She rises and moves off.

  Robert flexes the ache out of his mother-hugging arm, rolls the kink out of his shoulder. As his mother and his wife linger just inside the door to embrace and murmur, Robert rises from the sofa and steps to his father’s recliner. He looks for a moment at the man’s indent in the backrest and seat cushion. Then he lifts his foot and pushes the leg rest down till it snaps into place.

  He cannot imagine how they will all get through the next several hours. But Darla squeezes Robert at the elbow and sits with Peggy on the sofa for a time, and soon enough things grow as much practical as mournful, seeing as William waits in the basement of Archbold. He needs a funeral home to carry him away and this leads to Peggy’s entreaty that they bury him in Tallahassee so that when she joins him they will both be nearer to Robert and Darla. This leads them to a choice of a funeral home and a cemetery and then to details of a wake and a service and then to a locating of Peggy’s desk copy of the will and of papers for insurance and Social Security and, in the process, the finding of a box of family photographs and the consequent reminiscences and criticisms cast as endearments and Peggy weeps some more and grows weary from weeping. Darla tucks her in for a late-afternoon nap while Robert wanders into the living room, weary himself. He stares at his father’s recliner and sees no reason why he shouldn’t sit there and put his feet up, but he finds no capacity to do so. And then Darla is beside him.

  “Why don’t you go on home,” she says softly.

  She puts her head against his shoulder. The same spot that has been occupied for a long while already on this day.

  She says, “I suspect this is harder on you than you realize.”

  He puts his arm around her, squeezes her gently, and lets go.

  “I’ll work on her papers,” she says.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  “We need to make some calls.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall I do them?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Let’s divide up the close ones,” she says.

  Robert nods.

  Darla suggests she call their daughter and Robert their son.

  He speaks what suddenly strikes him: “We’re getting to this late.”

  “We needed some arrangements first so they could make plans.” Again she speaks softly.

  She’s being patient with him.

  Robert takes Darla in his arms, kisses her on the top of the head.

  She turns her head, lays it on his chest, and exhales deeply.

  She says, “In his own way, I’m sure he loved you.”

  He makes himself wait for a few moments before ending the embrace so she won’t suspect anything is suddenly amiss. He thinks of something to say: “I really appreciate what you’re doing here.” And he goes out of the apartment and fumbles with the key in the door lock of his Mercedes.

  On the Florida-Georgia Parkway he places a call to his son in Atlanta. Kevin’s voice sounds cheery on the answering machine. Robert simply asks him to call back. He hangs up. He turns his headlights on in the thickening twilight. He decides to stop at the New Leaf Co-op for a quick dinner.

  Bob sits at an outside table in front of the New Leaf, watching the sky darken. He won’t let it sneak up on him this time, the dark. If it wants to come he will wait for it and he will own it. He is strong enough. Till a woman’s voice. Rushing by Bob, a woman talking rapidly on a cellphone, a fluttering jabber beating outward like something you’re planning to shoot, flushed from a plum thicket. Then she stops at the curb, invisible to him behind a support column on the arcade over the front of the co-op. She talks, she laughs, unseen. Laughs. Sapping him. Through a thin wall a woman’s talk, a woman’s laughter. Bob is fifteen. He is naked. Against this sound, from the past and from the present, he crosses his two arms before him at the wrists, pounds his chest once and again, hard, but the woman yammers on into her cellphone and Bob knows he can’t just get up and step out beside her on the curb to deal with her, he has to let her be and take care of it in his own head, and so he sings, he grabs a few words from the first song that comes to him and he sings them over and over—There’s something happening here—at first only inside his head but then they find their way into his mouth and into the chill of the dark, looping over and over There’s something happening here and the voice of the woman at the curb before the New Leaf abruptly moves off and fades away. The words slide back into Bob’s head. He listens outward while they play, and he realizes they can stop and he stops them.

  All around, the darkness has taken over but he didn’t let it catch him off guard. He should go inside now. He has some coins. But he finds he cannot move. Somebody has turned the flame up inside the knot on his forehead. The pain has his full conscious attention, but inside him, coming upon him while he’s distracted, like the night overtaking the day, he is still fifteen but he’s not yet naked, it’s earlier in the evening and he’s staring at the flicker of the TV screen in the living room, and beyond the kitchen, at the far end of the single-wide, from behind the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, their two voices are grappling fiercely and then they stop and all that’s left is his mother weeping and now his father emerges and slams the door and Bob steels himself, waits for it all to turn against him. But his father stops in the kitchen, and beyond the thin wall his mother weeps on and Bob wants to go to her and try to help her stop, but his father is between him and the bedroom and so he stays where he is, keeping his eyes on the TV screen, seeing nothing. The refrigerator door opens and closes. A bottle cap hisses off and falls. And another.

  And now Calvin looms over Bob. Bob keeps his eyes where they are. He braces himself. But the man simply stands there. Waiting. Bob looks up. Here, his father says. He’s holding two Blue Labels and he extends one of them to him. His father’s in that middle ground he sometimes can get into when he’s buzzing with beer and not hard stuff. His mother’s weeping has faded. Bob takes the beer, and as quick as that, he knows this is what he wants. His father sitting down in his chair nearby and the two of them drinking a beer together. It’s happened a couple of times before, and this is what Bob wants.

  And when their beers are done, his father rises and says, It’s time for you, boy. Bob does not ask what that means. They go out of the
ir trailer and the night has come on. It’s July, a few days after the Fourth, which Calvin celebrated in places unknown. Then they’re in his pickup running south on 119, and after a long while he actually talks. It’s still Independence Day for you, boy. You’re with me and I can draw the day on out. Fourth of July is my Christmas and Thanksgiving and fucking Arbor Day all in one, ‘cause of what I went through for this country. We still got some fireworks to shoot off, you and me. I went through shit for this country and you know what it was all for? Five days. Five fucking days by the seaside. The US Army can blow your mind. They put you in a jungle to kill and be killed and then by God they pluck you right out of there for five days and nights and they put you in a pretty little city right there in-country, right on the South China Sea, and it’s like Jesus himself went down into Hell with His winnowing fork and nicked you out of there and put you in Heaven where you belong and you’re walking down a street and it’s not paved with gold, it’s better than that, it’s paved with pussy, in bars and in massage parlors, and this pussy isn’t mama-san pussy, it’s the real pretty ones, even though the day before, if you see girls like this in a village you’re clearing, you can’t trust to turn your back on them much less drop your pants. The day before, you might have to blow their pretty asses away. But now you go right on in for a massage and more, and you just fuck your brains out, you fuck your fears out, you fuck your goddamn blood-and-gore memories out, and you’re doing it with the enemy—that’s the thing—you’re doing it with the prettiest little Co Cong in the whole shithole country.