Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  The handouts bite Bob on the ass. That and the Murat being closed for refurbishing into a Budgetel. The other Vietnam vet had to put him in The Sojourner, near the bus station, a sizable step down from the Murat, it being the only other place that would take him. Which might’ve been okay, for the sake of warmth and a sure bed, except for the handouts. Only yesterday Bob acquired new blood-of-the-lamb clothes from skin outward and a full-gospel shower and even a coating of goddamn talcum powder, so after he walks into this room and hangs up his Goodwill coat and sweater on the clothes rack and places his Glock on the nightstand and stacks the pillows for his head and takes off his shoes and lies down beside the pistol and looks up at the ceiling, Bob discovers that the shower and the clothes and the talcum have separated him from his own stink sufficiently so he can smell the stink of the motel—the musty smell of roaches and air conditioner mold in the air, and a couple decades of cigarette smoke and spilled food and spilled spunk and women smells in the carpet and drapes and bedspreads—and all this puts him in another motel room and he’s sixteen years old and he’s traveling with his father because his mother has had enough, which she’s had a couple of times already, and she’s gone off to Wheeling to see her sister for an indefinite period and Calvin has decided he and Private Weber need to get out of town, need to go hunting up in the mountains, and on the way they find this cheap motel room, but it’s got one beat-up luxury, a television, and Calvin makes the mistake of turning it on. A big mistake, because it’s April 30, 1975. The picture flickers and flips into focus just in time for Harry Reasoner to say, The Viet Cong flag is flying over the Presidential Palace in Saigon today just a few hours after the South Vietnamese government announced its unconditional surrender. And Calvin jumps up from where he’s sitting on the foot of the bed and he says, just once, real low: Motherfuck. After that he’s just pacing and glancing at the screen and not making a sound, which backs Bob up against the headboard and tucks him tight and scares the shit out of him more than if his old man was raging full-voiced, because once more it’s all about the things he’s not saying, the things he knows that men have to face down, and Bob understands that it’s got to do with killing and being killed and your buddies being killed, of course, but it’s not that simple and maybe what makes it complicated can’t be said, has to stay a secret, so it’s forever a black hole you carry in the center of you, swallowing everything, not just the killing and the being killed but the living on, swallowing your whole fucking life as well, it’s about voices and laughter through a wall when you damn well know there’s nothing to laugh about and there are no words to say, and so the old man is pacing back and forth saying nothing while on the TV Americans in civvies and Vietnamese with their women and children are crowding into buses and then running to helicopters and then a door gunner on a chopper is looking down on the roofs of Saigon and then it’s roofs along a beach and then it’s the sea and a voice on the TV is saying, The helicopter passed over small fleets of boats leaving the coastal city of Vung Tau and Calvin stops pacing abruptly at this and whirls to the screen and then he backs away from it and now he’s across the room and he’s got his Winchester 70 and he squares around to the TV and it’s nighttime on the screen and a tall man in a suit and sunglasses with his hair flying shakes hands with admirals in ball caps and the voice is saying it’s Ambassador Graham Martin stepping from a Marine helicopter onto the deck of the command ship Blue Ridge and he’s closing the final chapter on America in Vietnam and Calvin works the bolt on his Winchester, chambering a round, and the voice from the TV says, When this correspondent asked what his feelings were, Martin would only say that he was hungry, and Calvin whips the rifle up on his shoulder and Bob turns his face away and the room explodes. And how long does he go on after that, the old man? A little over two years. Quieter than ever, even when drunk. So quiet that Bob’s mother, who’s come back, seems almost happy. So quiet that Bob feels it’s okay to slip out one night and hit the road and end up in Texas for day labor and landscaping and restaurant work, okay to be a West Virginia wetback. And one night the old man himself slips out. He heads into the pines behind the trailer park and chambers a round in his Winchester and sticks the muzzle in his mouth and blows off the back of his head and all his secrets with it.

  Framed tastefully in brick and Portland pilasters, Tillotson Funeral Home’s floodlit marquee beacons into the evening dark:

  William Quinlan

  Husband, Father, Veteran

  Visitation 6 to 9 PM

  Two hundred feet away, up the landscaped parking lot, Tillotson’s wide, double-winged, hip-roofed Georgian house is similarly lit. In the front foyer a grandfather clock begins to strike six.

  As it does: In the visitation extension behind the main house, Peggy is alone at last. She stands before the buffet table, the caterers for casseroles and cold cuts just departed through the rear porte cochere, and her church-lady friends busy cleaning up out of sight in the Tillotson kitchen. They have chatteringly helped her with the Irish stew and the Irish potato soup, which steam now in their own special row of food warmers. Peggy thanks Mary the Holy Mother of God for this moment of quiet. Robert and Darla turn in at the marquee. Darla thinks of those very women—Peggy and her friends from church—and that very row of food warmers, with Peggy putting on her birth-name-is-Pegeen persona to make Irish food; and she thinks how much Peggy wanted her to be part of that project, the two of them bonding in the Quinlan family’s reconfiguration, with the church ladies as witness; and Darla thinks how she should probably feel guilty at having declined Peggy’s invitation but how, in fact, she does not. Not in the least. Robert focuses his thoughts on the Georgian house itself, built in 1922 by Horace Naylor in the Great Florida Land Boom, lost by Horace Naylor in 1926 in the Great Florida Land Bust, restored for the benefit of the dead and their kin by Howard Tillotson in 1934, and repeatedly expanded and modernized by two generations of Tillotsons to follow. Robert is, of course, a historian. And he happens to live in the middle of a city that sits in the middle of many of his interests. But even as he sees the personal excesses of the house’s speculator builder in the half dozen two-story Corinthian front columns, Robert recognizes that his mind is simply trying to avoid his father’s face as it waits for him in an open casket inside. A mile away, heading east on Apalachee Parkway, Jimmy is driving a rented Impala to the funeral home from a room in the downtown DoubleTree. Heather is beside him. Just before stepping out of their hotel room, Jimmy stopped Heather and suggested they simply close the door, have an ironic night of sex and HBO, and then go back to Canada; and Heather reminded Jimmy of the conclusion they’d struggled to together in Toronto, that he’s seeking closure not renewal and if things go badly they can escape at any time. Jimmy knows that conclusion was grossly oversimplified, but he can’t begin to say what the full truth is, except that even though it brought him here, it is now urging him to turn around and go home. They have been silent in the car. Heather lays her hand on Jimmy’s thigh. He puts his hand on top of hers. And they pass Bob, a dark and bundled figure striding along the sidewalk, also heading east, silhouetted against the neon of a liquor store. Sometime in the deep predawn dark of this morning Tallahassee turned cold, and it’s been cold all day long, and it is cold tonight, and Bob has a score to settle. So he pushes his aching knees and he accepts the radiating pain from knee to back to mouth, his remaining teeth throbbing with each step. He accepts this pain on the way to the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church, accepts it because he wants to be waiting in the groundskeeper’s storage room when the nameless faceless coward returns. Bob has something more effective than a garden tool for him. Bob touches just below and to the side of his heart, touches his coat where, inside, his Glock waits.

  Robert and Darla step between the center columns, past Cracker Barrel rockers deployed along the portico right and left, through the front doors, and into the hushed, condoling greeting of two black-suited Tillotsons tanned like winter corpses. One of them breaks off and leads Rob
ert and Darla across the welcome foyer, past a spiral staircase, through a doorway, and into the visitation room foyer. Here they cross a dense Oriental rug toward an open double-wide doorway as William Quinlan floats brightly, unsettlingly out of the dark at Jimmy, who averts his eyes. He steadies himself in the empty lane ahead of him and then glances up the long, dim expanse of parking lot to the funeral home. There seem to be very few cars. He does not pull in but accelerates past.

  “We’re too early,” he says. “I don’t want to be the center of attention.”

  “That’ll be hard to avoid,” Heather says.

  “Not in a crowd.”

  “So we’ll take a little drive,” she says.

  They rush on along the parkway as the accompanying Tillotson discreetly falls away and Robert and Darla step through the doors of the visitation room. They stop. Robert scans the place. It’s large and could be made larger. To the right, an accordion wall creates a doorway into a somewhat smaller, separated space, where trays of cold cuts and sides wait on a table whose other end, out of sight from Robert’s angle of vision, holds the Irish food before the tranquil-at-last gaze of Pegeen Quinlan. Informal settings of chairs and divans are arrayed all about, most of them facing to the left, where Robert has so far declined to look, though Darla’s head is already turned that way. The chairs and divans are empty but for two elderly women in hats on a chesterfield in the center of the floor. But it’s barely six o’clock. Kevin and his family are still on the way from the airport. Robert’s daughter Kimberly is arguing a case before the Connecticut supreme court in the morning. Peggy is nowhere visible, probably overseeing the food. That’s it for the immediate family, who are the only ones, by the protocol, you’d really expect to be here at the opening bell.

  Robert needs to get this out of the way before all the others begin to arrive. He turns toward the left-hand wall, where Corinthian half columns flank the casket and ceiling spotlights shine softly down on its contents in what the Tillotsons no doubt have in mind as the gaze from Heaven. The contents at six o’clock, however, are presently blocked from view by the backs of two old men in dark suits. Not Quinlans. Not likely to be Tillotsons. Still. So be it. Get it over with.

  Robert touches Darla on the arm. “Give me a minute,” he says.

  “Of course,” she says.

  He moves off in the direction of the casket, and as he approaches, the two men begin to turn. He realizes who they must be. These veteran faces are different in detail from the beignet boys, but they are the same in wizened ethos. These are Bill’s coffee buddies from the Thomasville chapter of the Greatest Generation.

  “You must be his son,” one of them says.

  Robert takes the man’s offered hand and says, “Yes, Robert,” thinking, He didn’t say “One of his sons.” Of course not. Jimmy never existed.

  But it surprises him that his father acknowledged his existence to these men, given the recent revelation.

  He has missed hearing the name of the first veteran and finds himself shaking the hand of the second as the man finishes the last couple of syllables of his. “… field.”

  The first vet says, “Harley and me served on the Western Front the same time your dad did.”

  “We all had coffee and Dunkin’ Donuts pretty near every week,” Harley says.

  “In Thomasville?”

  “Yep. He loved his Glazed and his Original Joe.”

  “He was very proud of you,” the first man says.

  This flips Robert’s face sharply back to him.

  Confident he understands the look in Robert’s eyes, the man says: “Not that he said much about your experience. He respected your silence.”

  And the second vet says, “But the little he did say … Well, we all understand the tough job and the short life span of infantry lieutenants in Vietnam.” He gives Robert a knowing nod and offers his hand for another shake. “Thank you for your service.”

  Robert does not take the hand. If the refusal hurts the man’s feelings, it’s his donut buddy’s lying fucking fault. That wasn’t the service I rendered. I was a cowardly specialist fourth class hiding in a bunker counting beans.

  But the man thinks he understands Robert’s hesitation. He straightens up, withdraws the offered shake, and turns it into a salute, holding a strack pose. “Sergeant Harlan Summerfield offers his gratitude, sir.”

  Shit. Shit. Robert can’t keep up the rebuff. It’s not this man’s fault. But neither can he explain. So Robert returns the goddamn salute, forced to buy into the lie of his humiliated father, whose body Robert is suddenly, acutely aware of. It’s presently reduced to a chest-to-crotch view by the frame of intervening vets, laid out in his one wearable but outdated suit, a dark gray pinstripe with padded shoulders and wide lapels, his hands crossed over his bowels.

  The two men pick up on the shift of Robert’s attention.

  “We’ll leave you with him now,” the first one says.

  “Just wanted to pay our respects,” the second one says.

  Robert is clenching in the chest as if he were about to step out of a banyan tree in the dark.

  “Good to meet you,” one or the other of them says.

  And the two men step aside and vanish.

  Robert moves forward into an aura of dry cleaner perc and mortuary pancake, and he stands alone now in front of his dead father.

  Beneath the veneer of a Tillotson tan, William Quinlan’s dumb Sunday-doze face is fixed for eternity, the face that always seemed to Robert, in its own parsimonious way, to allow that nothing was terribly wrong between the two of them. The face that said, without actually saying it: Even though I don’t offer any details, you’re sufficiently okay by me that I can simply sleep in your presence in this apparently unperturbed way.

  The old man sleeps that way now. Couched in that lie. But even if he were suddenly to wake, brought back for just a few climactic moments, and if he were to look Robert in the eyes and say to him, I know what you really want to do, so okay, go ahead, punch me in the face if you got the balls, take your best shot, Robert would not be able to lift an arm or make a fist, would not even be able to lift a lip into a sneer. All he has is a handful of words: Go back to sleep, Pops. Robert feels weary. Deeply weary. Simply weary. He feels seventy fucking years old. Go back to sleep.

  A hand on his shoulder and he starts.

  He’s done with the casket anyway.

  He turns.

  It’s his mother.

  She opens her arms.

  He is as little inclined to accept this gesture as he was Sergeant Summerfield’s salute. But he is even less capable of brushing it aside. He puts his arms around her, telling himself, This embrace isn’t about my feelings for him. It’s about her. It’s just for her. That’s her dead husband in the casket and she loved him, in her own way. In her own way she loved him very much, so I can hold her and kiss her now on the cheek. Which he does, and he says, “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  “I know,” she says.

  She kisses his cheek in return. Then she brings her mouth very near his ear and whispers, “Who are those people?”

  Robert whispers in return, “A couple of his World War Two buddies.”

  “Really,” she says, with a thump of a tone, meaning How come he never mentioned them to me?

  She lets Robert gently disengage the embrace.

  “They’re casual coffee buddies,” he says.

  Darla has drawn near.

  Robert sees her over Peggy’s shoulder, turns his face to her.

  Darla, however, is focused on her mother-in-law. The back of Peggy’s head; her ashen hair rolled plain and tight; her arms falling from the embrace of her son into a slump of her narrow shoulders; her usual wiry vigorousness transformed abruptly into a bony dwindling, like a twentysomething cat. And she thinks of all the recent mother-daughter words. All the grief words. And the riddance words. And the Irish food prep. These things suddenly signify for Darla. Signify in a way that can, in a century-old monument, elici
t her compassion for women long dead. So why not here, for this flesh-and-blood woman?

  “Peggy,” she says, the consideration of using Mom having flashed into her and out again in a nanosecond. Maybe another time.

  Peggy turns to her, brightens, throws open her arms, embraces her, pats her.

  “I’m so glad you’re with me tonight,” Peggy says.

  “I am too,” Darla says.

  “Can you help me greet people now and then? Not to monopolize you. Robert needs you too.”

  “Of course,” Darla says.

  Peggy lets go of Darla, pulls back a bit, looks her in the eyes. “Thank you,” she says. She lets that register, and then she says, “Would you like a few moments with Bill now?”

  Peggy Peggy Peggy. How do I say No to that? You have a talent. Darla says, “Of course.”

  Peggy nods, steps away, revealing Robert still stuck standing where he was, looking at his wife with one side of his mouth and the corresponding curve of his cheek clenched in irony. “I’ll give you a few moments,” he says, and he too moves away.

  Darla wants to rap him in the arm with a knuckle as he passes. She wants simply to follow him.

  But she steps forward.

  Her father-in-law’s face is a crude likeness, molded in hand-puppet rubber. But it’s him. No doubt. The distortion is simply death. It’s the stuff he’s pumped full of instead of blood. It’s all the makeup. And yet: I envy Robert. This thought surprises her. She does envy him. Her own father went face forward through his windshield and into an overpass pier. Darla and her brother, far away from the bodies, made the decision by telephone. It was logical. Don’t wait for us. Close the caskets. Seal them up. We don’t need to see our parents in that state. I don’t need to see the wrecked face of my wrecked father. But she did. And she didn’t know it until now, as she looks at the face of this boring, emotionally obtuse, river-dock-macho, son-bullying, simplistically jingoistic man lying here dead. As altered as the man’s face is, this moment with William Quinlan still feels like a kind of existential intimacy, and much to her surprise and a little to her horror, she ardently wishes she’d had a chance for these concluding moments of closeness with her own father. As bullying and politically knuckleheaded as he could be. As passionate over sausages and conservatism but reticent over her. So why does she long for that lost opportunity, to see his final mask of reticence? Her mind replies: Perhaps because it would say to you: This is the ultimate him and so it was always him. A him apart from you. A him he would have arrived at whether he felt tenderly about you or not. Whether you ever existed or not. You did not create the chill in him. You did not earn it. If he could give no more in life, it was only because he was destined to die. That dark wind was already upon his face. If you’d had these final moments with him, perhaps you could have understood all that for yourself. More than understood. You could have actually felt it.