Robert Butler - Perfume River

Center drawer. Ballpoint pens. Paper clips. Cluttery little crap.

He’s having trouble concentrating, trouble seeing things clearly. But the thumping slows a bit. Bob knows it’s his heart beating in his head. It’s his heart driving the pain.

He opens the top drawer in the desk’s right-hand pedestal. More clutter. Brochures for the church, a bottle of aspirin, a granola bar, a phone-charging cord. In the second drawer are pristine envelopes, stamps, a stapler.

Bob hates this guy. As if he were lying to Bob’s face. This bland daily shit. It’s all lies.

He slams the second drawer and pulls at the bottom one. It won’t yield.

Bob pushes back in his chair and looks at the drawer. It’s the deepest one. Files probably. Who gives a damn?

But Bob doesn’t like Dwayne keeping his secrets. The drawer has a simple pin tumbler lock. And Bob still has a small skill from his teenage thieving days.

He opens the central drawer and removes two paper clips. He bends one to work as a torque wrench, the other as a rake.

He has to leave the chair. His head and his knees begin to scream at him in pain but he makes himself crouch down. He is determined now.

He draws near to the lock. He inserts the first paper clip, turns it, holds the tension, inserts the second, and he begins to rake the pins inside the lock. His fingers fumble a bit for a moment, but long ago he had a good feel for this, and his muscles quickly remember and he rakes again and once again and the last pin slips into place and the lock yields.

He opens the drawer.

Vertical files, but they’re pushed to the back. Forward, lying at the bottom of the drawer, is a Glock 21 pistol, and a box of.45 auto cartridges.

And Bob thinks: Dwayne, Dwayne, Dwayne. Pastor Dwayne. Dreaming of ISIS sending a few boys over here to Tallahassee to bust in and rape Loretta and grab you and cut off your head, but you’re ready to defend your First Amendment church with your Second Amendment Glock, you’re ready to protect your flock like a good father should, like a good shepherd, like a Heavenly Father.

Heavenly Father my ass.

Bob’s own voice in his own private head has clambered heavenward to the oldest old man of them all.

Sneering all the way, of course.

And another sea surge of pain swells in him and crashes behind his eyes and tumbles down his face and into his throat and into his chest.

Punishment for the sneer, no doubt.

And he hears a voice.

Not his own.

A loud voice.

A big fucking loud voice.

I’VE BROUGHT YOU HERE FOR A PURPOSE.

Bob’s not crazy. Bob knows he’s hearing this voice in his head. But just because it’s inside his own private head doesn’t mean it’s not a voice. A real voice. Talking to him. Every voice you ever hear when you’re right there in the room with it still has to pass through your head. Even if you close your eyes and make the face and the mouth saying the words vanish, the voice remains, talking away. So where is it then ? In your head. Your own private head. Just because it’s in your head doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

I BROUGHT YOU HERE.

The voice pauses.

A beating pulse of pain in Bob’s head.

An invitation to litany.

I BROUGHT YOU HERE.

And Bob responds: To make me okay.

YOU HAVE A PURPOSE.

To be okay.

I BROUGHT YOU HERE.

To you. To you.

YOU HAVE A PURPOSE.

To arm myself.

And Bob takes up the Glock 21 and its box of cartridges. He closes the drawer, and he uses his boyhood skill to reengage the lock. And he thinks: Dwayne’ll never know. He won’t even miss his weapon till the Viet Cong bust in and then he’ll know and he’ll go Oh shit and they’ll cut off his head.

Earlier this morning, as Pastor Dwayne negotiates Bob’s release into his care, Robert reassures Darla that she needn’t go to the hospital today — his father would surely be embarrassed to be seen in an invalided state — and she goes off on her run. Robert is drinking his coffee at the kitchen island, aware still of the spot on his cheek where Darla kissed him good-bye. A utilitarian kiss, surely, conveying gratitude for a courtesy rendered, but it landed wetly there, as if her lips were parted. Perhaps not so surprising; she is, after all, ardently grateful. He can well understand her gratitude. He doesn’t want to go either, for a low-grade dread won’t stop niggling at him over this visit.

He takes the last sip of his coffee and carries his cup to the sink. The dread is not just about his father, but about his mother as well. And thinking of her, he thinks of the index card.

He turns from the sink and realizes where the card is. He puts his hand in his pocket and draws it out. She has written James. What was in her head? Is her use of his never-used formal name a rebuke of her other son? An attempt to distance herself, shield herself? But the card was intended for Robert’s eyes. It’s just another dramatic pose. Beneath is a phone number with a 705 area code.

This will be a day rife with choices between one unpleasant option and another. The present decision: call his brother after all these years and risk actually having to deal with him, or incur further implorings from his mother to help reconcile the family. The latter will be tedious in a familiar way. The former is disturbing in being so unfamiliar. But the prospect of a call to Jimmy at least stirs Robert’s morbid curiosity. If the conversation goes badly, so be it. Robert will simply hang up the phone and that will be that till they’re all four of them dead.

Robert takes the phone from its cradle near the foyer and carries it to the living room. He sits in the recessed window seat at the opposite end from the French doors to the veranda.

He dials.

Jimmy grasps the phone at the first ring.

He is sitting at his kitchen table, facing the forest. The phone was already beside him. Linda rose early and was gone when he came downstairs. Her note said that Becca was having a meltdown. Jimmy has been expecting Linda to call and check in, as the two of them were intending first thing this morning to discuss a long-overdue switch from DSL to UPS Canada. The expectation of her call was strong enough that he has not looked at caller ID.

With a voice thick with spousal familiarity he says, “Yes?”

The resultant beat of silence straightens him up in his chair. Somehow he knows it’s Florida again.

Robert was expecting — was hoping — to leave a barebones message on an answering machine and put the burden of all this onto his brother. But the sudden, surprisingly familiar, surprisingly warm voice ratchets instantly into their shared past. Robert knows the warmth isn’t for him. Not that this disappoints him. His brother was simply expecting someone else. For a moment Robert thinks to hang up.

But instead he says, “Jimmy?”

Jimmy doesn’t recognize his brother’s voice immediately.

Robert understands the next few moments of silence as It’s you, is it? What the hell are you doing, calling me? Robert almost hangs up.

But the voice registers now on Jimmy. “Robert?”

“Yes.”

They both fall silent.

The same impulse stirs in Jimmy that prompted him to simply erase yesterday’s message. Touch the button. Keep the dead in their graves. He does not consciously consider this, but the years have worked away some of the softer rock of his brother’s estrangement. It’s still bouldered up in his head. But not like his mother’s. So he says, “Mom put you up to this.”

“Of course.” As soon as he says it, Robert hears the easily inferred subtext: I would not be speaking to you otherwise. He did not intend it.