Robert Butler - Perfume River

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 door, 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.