Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  “That’ll please her.”

  “So it will.”

  Robert looks away, into the room, whose numbers seem to have increased since he stepped out. Not that he sees anyone in particular. They are all blurring together now.

  Darla says, “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “Sure.”

  “I never saw my own dad after he died. Did I ever tell you that?”

  He looks at her. “No.”

  “Well. I didn’t. It was a closed casket. I needed to look at him. It’s a good way to get things straight in your head so he won’t hang around in there.”

  Robert tries to take this in. He’s not sure. He stalls by quibbling.

  “Still waiting for the suggestion,” he says.

  “You weren’t with him at the casket for very long,” she says. “Just make sure you did enough tonight.”

  Robert looks off in the direction of the far wall. In the middle of the room, a clump of assisted living visitors with plates of Irish stew blocks his view of the casket beyond. But he’s thinking Darla may be right.

  She says, “It’s not about good guys. I had as much trouble with my dad as you did with yours. More.”

  “Okay,” he says. “You’re right.”

  Robert and Darla would both agree: This is one of the paradigms of the two of them at their intellectual best with each other. A difference. A discussion. Patience over a semantic quibble. One sees the other’s point. And concurs. Sealed with a moment of contented silence.

  That moment ends, but before they part she says, “Does she need me, do you think?”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not right now. I think she needs to be alone.”

  “I’ll go dip some stew.”

  “I think you’re starting to like it.”

  “Please,” she says.

  She begins to turn away.

  Robert puts his hand on her arm. “Hey.”

  She looks back at him.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  She nods.

  He heads off toward the wall with the casket.

  She moves in the other direction, toward the buffet room. But she puts only a few steps of separation between her and the back door of the visitation room before her department chair intercepts her and hugs her as if the dead father were Darla’s own. Darla figures the warmth is mostly about department politics, which means a conversation is imminent. She gives up the hope of hiding immediately behind the stew.

  Robert veers wide around the group of old women in hats and old men in wide ties from Longleaf Village. He keeps his face averted; he’s met a couple of them and this is not a time to chat.

  He’s past them now and he looks toward the casket.

  A man is standing there, his back to Robert.

  Robert does not recognize him.

  Just a man. A lanky man wearing a leather jacket, his hands clasped behind him, his pewter-gray hair thick-curled and shaggy at the collar.

  Robert stops. He’ll wait till the man moves off.

  Robert looks about to see if anyone else is waiting to view the body.

  A few steps off to the left is a pretty, pale-skinned woman, her dark hair spilling from beneath a knit cap. He takes her for an art theory student of Darla’s. Perhaps she has a concealed sketchbook, waiting to capture a dead man.

  Robert thinks to walk away now.

  But he returns his gaze to the man.

  He has not moved.

  Well, yes. His hands, in their clasp, have begun to twist, have grown fretful.

  And now Robert has a thought. This man is not from FSU. Not from assisted living. Not one of Bill’s generation. Wearing leather at a funeral home visitation, he’s not from Peggy’s church. Robert looks at the woman again. Her gaze is fixed on the man. They are here together. And she’s older than he thought at first glance. Robert looks closely at her jaw, looking for his father’s, his own, his brother’s. Looks at her eyes. He’s not recognizing a Quinlan, but he’s never met Linda. This woman’s features could be from Linda’s genes. He follows her eyes back to the casket. The man’s hands cling to each other to quell their restlessness. Robert suspects his own hands were just as restless when he stood there. It’s him.

  Jimmy has not been here for long. He is still breathless, standing in the presence of death. Not realizing, not quite yet, that its immanence in this casket is a major reason why he’s here. All he presently understands is that the face of his dead father is largely an unrecognizable face. Not a man at all. Not even a good caricature. All the features are bloated and blurred and slathered over. Features he last saw forty-six years ago. Features that would have been nearly as unrecognizable last week, when Bill was still walking around, unawares, in death’s anteroom. Jimmy once more asks himself the basic question: What the hell am I doing here? And since the dead body is not providing an answer at the moment, Jimmy works his way along. Closure. Sure. But I’m here because Linda left me. I’m here because I found Heather. Here because I found her only very recently and she’s not yet enough. Blood ties are overrated. But that’s about the inefficacy of blood, not about the need for ties to something. The something was once Linda and Canada. I still have Canada. Oh Canada. Unarmed, universally doctored, killingly polite Canada; grumbling-not-hating Canada; minding-its-own-fucking-business-in-the-community-of-nations Canada. Tolerant, come-find-a-refuge-and-your-own-identity-here Canada. Not enough. I know that. Canada and Heather may eventually be enough. But for some reason I had to come stand here before this man. Only blood connected us. Not part of the real equation. I did dream of him. And my mother. And my brother. But you can dream about an old girlfriend or a high school teacher or a crooked auto mechanic and it doesn’t mean you need to seek them out before they go into the ground. Still I came to this man, his corpse waiting to rot. Because he’s dead; he’s dead so he knows something important, something no one alive knows. Right now. What is it? Is he wedged into the dark matter, pressing his face against mine? Has he run off to be someone else, somewhere else? Or maybe he’s nothing at all. Or just made new. Maybe death is like when they knock you out for a colonoscopy. You’re counting backwards one second and awake the next and they tell you it’s all done and you don’t remember a thing. Maybe you die and you wake and this life you lived is utterly forgotten like that lost hour. Life in the USA and life in Canada. Life on planet Earth. Life is just the camera up your ass that you won’t even remember. So what actually happens after death is fucking academic. If there’s nothing afterward or if it’s something that you’ll totally forget, then it’s all the same. Okay. What the hell am I doing here? I’m here to look at the bag of bones my father has become so maybe I can stop thinking about this thing I can’t stop thinking about. I came to face death.

  Another thought, flowing from these, begins to shape itself. About his brother.

  And someone is standing next to him.

  “Hello, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy turns to his brother. Jimmy’s impulsive few nights of Googling—yielding images of Dr. Robert Quinlan at academic conferences, on a book dust jacket, from the university website—have prepared him only a little for the changes of nearly five decades. The abrupt, palpable presence of Robert’s graying and slackening and weathering, his leap from twenty-three years old to seventy: These twist the knife of mortality in Jimmy’s brain. His own face in the mirror each day is much the same as this one. But even as he’s struggled with the thoughts of death, he could look in the mirror and convince himself, I’m pretty good for my age. I can put off dying. But he got to that understanding of his own face gently, gradually. Jimmy regards this man before him, this man of Jimmy’s blood, this man in the same pretty good shape as he, and sees him as mortally old.

  “Hello, Robert,” he says.

  “I didn’t expect you.”

  “It was last-minute.”

  They need a little break from each other already.

  They have a corpse for that.

&n
bsp; They both look in its direction.

  All the possible small talk coming to Robert’s head sounds potentially touchy or argumentative: So what changed your mind? Mom will be very pleased. Is Linda with you? Who’s the woman? Well, there he is. Was it worth the trip?

  He resists all of these.

  And perhaps for that very reason, perhaps because he refuses to choose one of these superficial, calculated things, what he does say is from quite a different part of him. “If you want to slap him across the face, feel free.”

  They turn and goggle at each other.

  Neither can think of a thing to say.

  They look back to William.

  Robert reboots. “Well, there he is.”

  “There he is.”

  “Was it worth the trip?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” Robert asks this with a little surge of animation, a vague impulse, which he stifles to offer forward his hands. He even finds himself about to say, I’m glad you came, but he doesn’t want to stir up Jimmy’s scorn. He’s lived with a bellyful of scorn these past few days and he wants to keep things calm with his brother.

  Jimmy says, “Answer a question if you can, without looking around.”

  “All right.”

  “Where’s our mother?”

  “She’s taking a few minutes alone. I can get her. She’d be only too glad …”

  “No.” Jimmy says it sharply. He softens his tone but with it justifies his sharpness: “That’s why I didn’t want you to look around.”

  “So there’s something I can do,” Robert says. “Help you slip out unnoticed.”

  The words could be construed as sarcastic. Would have been in the life they lived together before each went away. But Robert has also softened his tone.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Jimmy says. “I may.”

  Still another matter of tone. This fastidious one in Jimmy makes a warmth rise in Robert, from his cheeks and into his temples, replacing sympathy with pissoffedness.

  “Look, Jimmy,” he says, but quietly, calmly. “Why don’t I just slip away and let you do what you need to do. If Mom appears I’ll run interference for you. Distract her so you can get the hell away.”

  Jimmy sucks a breath, pulls back ever so slightly.

  Robert thinks: It was the ‘get the hell away.’ All right. All right. I’m not in the mood. Let’s get it on, brother.

  But Jimmy says, “I’m sorry. I sounded arrogant. I’m here because I want to be here. But it’s complicated.”

  Robert feels animated again. He may need to slip away for his own sake, just to stop the mood swings. He says, “I get it. Not a problem. It’s always been complicated.”

  He looks at William. It wasn’t such a crazy thing to say. About the slap. It was Jimmy’s fretfully clasped hands. He says, “Not long before you appeared, I stood here and I thought about him waking up and daring me to punch him in the face.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “No.”

  “Not even in your head?”

  A beat of silence between them now. And another.

  “No,” Robert says. “Wish I could’ve. But it’s just a corpse.”

  Another silence.

  But brief. For Jimmy, this too is spoken from an impulse. “We should make a pact,” he says. “We’ll fight no fights from the past. If we get angry at each other it needs to be about something right in front of us.”

  “Man, I agree with that,” Robert says. “But the past is all you and I have. If we’re going to speak at all, things may come up. But not to argue them.”

  “Fair enough,” Jimmy says. “And this can’t be a sentimental agreement. It’s not mindless make-nice. You know what I mean?”

  “I do.” Robert offers his hand.

  Jimmy takes the hand.

  They shake.

  The thought of adding their other hands to the ones shaking occurs to both men but only in the abstract, only to be recognized as sentimental and set aside.

  When they let go of their hands, Jimmy says, “I’m going to test our pact right away. I came here because of a dead father. But it’s not just about him. Maybe not about him very much at all anymore.”

  Jimmy hesitates. He hasn’t planned this. Never imagined relating it to his brother. But he’s glad for the chance. He says, “You were precocious when we were kids. And I think you had something dark in you. Can I ask? Did you go off to Vietnam to face death? Did you have to get into the very presence of death to figure it out? Is that what I didn’t recognize about what you did?”

  This is not the question Robert expected. He wants the answer to be Yes. To square himself with Jimmy. To put his motives beyond the criticism of his father, who would never understand such a thing. But the answer isn’t yes. Isn’t even partially yes. He says, “Since we’ve agreed not to argue the past, is it possible for us also to be entirely honest?”

  Jimmy waggles his head a little at this sudden complexity. “Good question. At least we need to try. Otherwise you might as well just go ahead and help me get the hell out of here. But perhaps we can have it both ways, eh?”

  “Perhaps,” Robert says. “So then. No. I didn’t go off to face death. Not at all.”

  And he thinks: Simply that much honesty may not result in an argument, but it will preserve, everlastingly, the estrangement between us. And he knows: I can say the thing that the man lying next to us nearly took to his grave. A thing Robert would just as soon take to his. Do I want a brother? If Robert says no more, he will lose Jimmy forever. If he speaks fully, Jimmy might have a way to understand him, even in light of his own drastic deed of the sixties. Do I want this man for my brother?

  Perhaps.

  Robert says, “You were right long ago. It was all about Pops. About winning his love. You were smart to give up trying. I can see that now. I didn’t go to Vietnam to confront death. I did everything I could to avoid it. Not to see it. Certainly not to inflict it. I voluntarily enlisted so I could choose an army job. A deep-in-a-hole faux research job. And in doing that, I destroyed the thing I wanted most from Pops. I got its opposite. He’d expected me to go off eagerly to the killing, as he had. So he despised me for the rest of his life. Silently. I never knew. Not till he told me himself the afternoon before he died.”

  Robert finds himself relieved not to take that to his own grave. Even if Jimmy doesn’t get it.

  Robert turns his face away, in the only direction possible. To his father. To the death mask of his father. Concerning his brother, Robert thinks, I don’t trust him. But he’s the only person alive who can possibly understand. The only other son of my only father.

  “Bobby.”

  Robert looks back to his brother. Jimmy stopped calling him that before they were teenagers.

  For Jimmy, though what seems to be happening here is new to him, though the army part mitigates his worst assumptions about Robert, his mind could easily swirl on now in its accustomed way. With no mitigations possible once you become part of the war machine. With the established legacy of his father’s blows and Robert’s silence. But the other part of all this surges in him: their shared father, who betrayed them both. And Jimmy thinks: Do I want a brother?

  And he says, “I didn’t know any of that. Never imagined.”

  Then a pause between them.

  Long enough for Robert to turn a corner in his head and find another abyss to leap across. But I did confront death: I inflicted it.

  This he cannot tell his brother.

  Jimmy says, “If I were you—if I were the big brother—I probably would’ve courted the old man the same way. At least you kept the blood off your hands. I hope I would’ve been smart enough to do it the way you did.”

  Robert struggles now with one more irony: As fine as his brother’s reaction is, Robert’s remaining secret about Vietnam would’ve had a better chance for absolution from Pops. If Jimmy were to know, Robert would lose him again.

  “Thanks,” Robert say
s.

  But that is the only show of sentimentality between the two brothers, who both turn now to look at their father’s dead body.

  Together they eye him silently for a few moments.

  “Crappy suit,” Robert says.

  “He needs leather for the grave,” Jimmy says.

  And Bob is standing at the edge of the woods. Calvin is in him. Saying things he hasn’t said before. So Private Weber, you’re in the woods tonight and you see the enemy and you’re quick like you’ve always been, quick to lock and load and aim, ‘cause you’re my boy and you’re good at what I’m good at. Yeah, I said good like me. Good like I used to be. I know all you ever saw was how wrecked I was. They fucking beat us down. Not the enemy. The brass. The government. They did it to all of us. They humped our asses through the jungles of Hell, blew us apart, body and mind, and then they just up and quit. Turned the last page. Gave the whole thing away and turned us into chumps. Dead chumps. Maimed chumps. Batshit-crazy chumps. Sure you saw me already broken like that, even with a rifle in my hand, which is a fucking shame. That wasn’t me. Not like I was in the heat of it, not while I was waging war. You need to believe that of your old man. You’re like the me in Vietnam. But tonight you were quick and ready and then you backed off. Why? A fucking hug. You had your target in your sights and you let him get away because you turned it into this bullshit jungle village scene. A father giving his boy a hug. There’s a lot you don’t know about life. I can’t even begin to tell you. But you walk into the prettiest little village with bananas in the trees and clucking fucking hens in the doorways and you can get your ass blown apart there just like anywhere else. These are tough lessons to learn, boy, things you have to learn for yourself. I can’t say I’m sorry I learned them, even as fucked up as it was. That’s better than being a chump who stays stupid all his life, thinking things are gonna turn out fine. Go on through those doors over there. You’ll see. I’ll come with you. We’ll see together. I can’t give you a hug. Grow up. I seen too much in this world to do a thing like that. But I can slide on inside your head and your heart and your itchy good right hand and ain’t that even better?

  And Bob is crossing the driveway.