Robert Butler - Perfume River

He tries to lift himself up at the chest.

“Hold on, sport,” the face says.

Bob lets go. Falls back. He begins to spin slowly. He closes his eyes against this.

That nose and those cheeks. A rummy. This is the guy who did it , Bob says in his head. The son of a bitch who brained me. He tries to rise up again, and even though he knows he’s not prepared, he thinks, slowly, carefully, meaning each word: I will kill you.

A pressure on the center of his chest. He falls back.

“Hold on,” the voice says. “I’m here to help you.”

Help?

“You’re on the way to the hospital.”

The pressing in his forehead. He’s stretched tight there. Thoughts congregating, trying to break through skull bone, trying to leap forth.

Bob opens his eyes, thinking he might catch sight of them.

That’s crazy , he realizes.

His mind is clear now. He believes the face.

Okay. Okay okay okay. You’re not the guy.

For a moment Bob loses track of exactly what man he is trying to find or why he should care so hotly.

“Can you hear me?” the face asks.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Bob says.

“Good.” The face narrows its already narrow eyes. “I need to ask you some questions. You understand?”

“What’s to understand?” Bob says. The man is an idiot.

“We have to see if your head’s okay.”

“My head.”

Bob thinks he has filled those two words with sarcasm.

To the emergency tech he sounds dazed. “What’s your name?” the EMT asks.

Bob’s first response is to himself: My name. All of this about my name suddenly. Not just with this rummy. Too much about my name. He’s not sure how he got that impression. So the first thing he says aloud is, “Why is it too much?”

The face cocks sideways.

Bob is simply trying to figure this out. Not that he expects the face to have an answer to the question.

And then Bob remembers. The other Bob.

“Do you understand what I’m asking?” the face says.

“What are you asking?”

“What’s your name?”

“Hello, I’m Bob,” Bob says. “Bob isn’t so popular anymore.”

“Bob,” the face says.

“Bob,” Bob says.

“Bob what?” the face says.

“Bob what,” Bob says. “Bob fucking what.” A sharp thwack of pain in his head. Not in the forehead. At the back of his head. From his father’s hand. Tell the man your name , his father says. If you’re going to sneak around in the night, little motherfucker, you’re going to get captured and then it’s name, rank, and serial number. Bob has followed Calvin from their single-wide. It’s the middle of the night, but in a fourteen-by-sixty every sound kicks around in your head even if your bedroom is on the opposite end from theirs. All the words, jumbled and blurred but clear enough tonight about his mother’s fear of his father meeting up with somebody, a buddy, somebody up to no good. Now Bob’s standing in front of a man with a hippie-wild beard, an army field jacket dappled in piss-colored street-light, a First Cav patch — horse’s head and diagonal slash — at the shoulder. Name. And another slap at the base of his skull. Bob , Bob says. One more slap from his father: Do it right. Bob says, Robert Calvin Weber. A beat of silence and his father barks, Rank. Bob looks at him. Damn straight , his father says. You don’t have one. Lower than a buck private. And then his father does a thing that he sometimes can do. He abruptly puts his arm around Bob, crushes him close. And he says to the man in the field jacket, But he’s a crack shot, this one. He’s a goddamn killer in the making, my boy.

“Do you remember your last name?”

The face.

“Weber,” Bob says.

“All right, Bob Weber. Where are you?”

The fuck. “Hell,” Bob says.

And the man gives Bob that look. Every man jack of the Hardluckers knows that look. The look when the upstanding asshole — the Upstander — in front of you can’t find or never had or gives up on or runs out of patience for a guy who looks and smells and just plain exists like you. He gives you that tightening and tiny lifting of the upper lip under just one faintly flaring nostril, that back crawl of a gaze, that little lift of the chin, all of this so slight you could easily feel it wasn’t him at all, it was you, it was you shrinking, a shrinking that’s been going on in smooth, small increments for a long while and you only just now can see it, like staring so hard at a clock’s minute hand that eventually you can watch it move. That look says what you’re in fact witnessing is you growing smaller , and this son of a bitch giving it to you has seen it all along.

Bob wishes he had the will to lift a hand and make a fist and punch this face. Not the will. He probably has that. The strength.

The look vanishes now. This man and Bob both know it was there and will always be lurking, but it vanishes, so the two of them can go on.

The face says, “If you’re messing with me, I need you to stop so we can know how to help you. Tell me where you are.”

Bob is weary. His head hurts. “Seems like an ambulance,” he says.

“Okay. Where did we find you?”

Where.

The pastor crouched before him, a dense mane of shovel-blade gray hair crowning his head. Bob was sitting upright, probably this man’s doing. He was beneath a tree. The church community building squatted across the yard. I’m Pastor Dwayne Kilmer , the man said, putting a blanket around Bob’s shoulders. Call me Pastor Dwayne. Bob’s ears rang loudly and a small angry animal was trying to claw its way out of his forehead, but things were coming back to him already. Who did this? Bob said, raising his hand to his head. I don’t know , Pastor Dwayne said and started to add, In the … But Bob interrupted, waving his hand: I was in there. He could not remember the name for it, though the door was in plain sight. It was empty , Pastor Dwayne said without even turning to look in the direction of Bob’s gesture. He knew more than he was saying. It’s a sin to lie , Bob said. Pastor Dwayne rocked backward in his crouch. Now Brother Bob , he began. Do you know me? Bob said, sharply. How do you know my name? Pastor Dwayne said, You told me a few moments ago. This stopped Bob. He couldn’t remember. Then he thought of a question he needed to ask. Who did this to me? The pastor patted him on the shoulder. I don’t know who did it, Brother Bob. That’s the truth.

“Can you say where it was that we picked you up?”

Bob blinks hard at this question. For a moment he hears it coming from Pastor Dwayne. But it’s the face.

The face is waiting.

Bob figures the face probably has some power over him for now. For ill or for good. Bob’s hungry. His bones ache from the chill. He probably needs this guy to help. Bob should answer.

“Bloodied by the Lamb Hospital,” he says.

Instantly he knows he somehow bungled it. Wrong sort of place. “Gospital,” he says.

Not right. “Gospel,” Bob says. “The Bloody Lamb Full of Gospel.”

Clarity. Clarity.

The face has that look again.

“That’s close enough, isn’t it?” Bob says. “I’m not crazy and I’m not stupid.”

The face fixes itself and says, “Okay. Just rest.” It drifts away from Bob’s view.

Bob closes his eyes. He feels the motion all around him. He is being carried along fast now. No bumps. A straight line to somewhere. And he feels his father’s arm go around his shoulders, like it can sometimes do. As always, that gesture only makes Bob ache. Ache and ache. And he thinks of standing in the night in front of their single-wide, lit by street-light, standing side by side with his father, the man’s arm around him, and there’s a tree growing nearby, a jungle tree that sprung up there in the trailer park and nobody gets wise to it till it’s too late, and in that tree is a Viet Cong, a sniper, a helluva shot of a sniper, and the VC squeezes his trigger and sends out a single round that crashes into one side of Bob’s head and out the other and then into his father’s head, and he and his old man die together, right there and then, standing there just like that next to each other.