Robert Butler - Perfume River

But Jimmy does make the inference. “You did your duty,” he says.

In the thumping finality of Jimmy’s tone, Robert hears his brother’s subtext— So now that you’ve done it, hang up —and Robert regrets his part in turning the call so quickly into this. They’re on the phone together after forty-something years. No matter how it came to pass, why not say a few things? Robert does not hate his brother. He is not angry with his brother. Or even disappointed in him. Over the years Robert has come simply to feel nothing. As if his brother died. Died pretty young — right after college — before the two of them had a chance to mature comfortably into an adult, brotherly friendship. He’s dead, and whatever grieving that entailed is long over with. No one even visits the grave anymore.

But his brother is alive at the other end of the line. So Robert says, “This isn’t about her.” He pauses, not quite knowing how to further soften things.

Jimmy says, “Is he dead, then?”

“No.”

“Is it all overblown?”

“No. Just not dead yet. ”

“I have no interest in seeing him. Dead or alive.”

“I suspect he feels the same way.” This didn’t come out the way Robert wanted.

Jimmy does not reply. He thinks: At least he’s saying it straight.

But Robert tries to fix it: “Not that it means a damn thing to anyone, what he feels.” And he thinks: That sounds sarcastic. Critical.

And Jimmy thinks: So much for straight.

Robert says, “I admire that in you, not giving that particular damn.”

“What?” Jimmy draws the word out to clearly mean Bullshit.

Robert considers bailing now.

But he doubles down. “I admire it and I share it.”

“When did that happen?”

“We’re neither of us twenty-two anymore.”

“You figure you actually grew out of trying to please him?”

“The price was too high,” Robert says. He has not put it this way to himself. The banyan and the man in the dark have been too close to him lately. They were big-ticket items on the bill he paid.

The words surprise Jimmy too. This is an admission he could not have expected.

The consequent silence between the brothers persists long enough that Robert finally says, “Are you there?”

“I am,” Jimmy says.

Robert realizes he is standing at the veranda doors. He does not remember rising and crossing the room. He is looking at his live oak but has not seen it till this moment.

Jimmy is standing at the kitchen window. A hundred yards off, the white pines are jammed close, side by side, like a cordoned crowd before a burning building. For many years he understood his brother’s defining act that Labor Day afternoon as a betrayal. He thinks: Not from his point of view. It was an act of loyalty. Behind his eyes, he was being William Quinlan’s loyal son. His only son. Of course the price was too high.

“I won’t come,” Jimmy says.

“I understand,” Robert says.

“You know it was different for me with him.”

“I know.”

“It was different for me because of how it was for you.”

Robert might have expected this from Jimmy but not so simply or directly. Where they both now are, in mind and heart, is the result of way too much life lived incommunicado. Robert realizes they’re teetering on the brink of forty-six years’ worth of unexpressed blame and justification, anger and regret, jealousy and insecurity.

Jimmy has come to much the same realization.

Neither wants to tumble into all that.

Both, though, in spite of the telephonic silence swelling in their heads, are reluctant simply to hang up.

This time it’s Jimmy who says, “You there?”

“I’m here,” Robert says.

They know a little something about each other, the knowledge having been arrived at in the same way. At some point in the last few years, at some moment late at night, pajamaed and weak-willed, caught up in the technogeist and visited by a soap-operatic curiosity about the past, each began to Google names. For Robert: the lenient commanding officer at MACV in Hue, who had his own girlfriend in a back alley room and who was glad just to get Robert back alive at Tet, and who died in 1998 after two decades as an insurance executive in Omaha; Lien, who was untraceable; a sloe-eyed girl from high school; and Jimmy. For Jimmy: Mark Satin, the director of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme; the first woman Jimmy slept with after he and Linda sensibly established how freely free love would remain in their lives; Heather, whose Facebook picture album was full of pub parties and her child; and Robert.

Jimmy says, “I understand you teach.”

Only for a moment does it surprise Robert that Jimmy knows something about his present life. He realizes, from his own knowledge of Jimmy, that there need be nothing sentimental about this, much less affectionate.

“Yes,” Robert says. “At Florida State University. History.”

“Sounds like where you’d go from Tulane.”

Robert hears, as well: Not to Vietnam.

Though Jimmy did not intend this.

Robert says, “American history. Usually Southern. Early-twentieth-century particularly.”

“I saw your bio at the school site.”

“And you make leather goods,” Robert says.

“I do.”

“Bags.”

“And other things. But bags are our specialty.”

If Robert knows about this, so does their mother, and Jimmy almost adds: So does she own one? But there is no way to ask that and make it simultaneously clear that he doesn’t give a damn.

Robert almost says something about the glowing reviews and press coverage at Jimmy’s website, about the special things Jimmy does to the leather, but Robert can’t immediately shape those words concisely or clearly and maintain the appropriate tone of benignly tepid small talk.

And so they fall silent one last time.

Both men turn from the windows they are facing.

Then Jimmy says, “You understand?”

“That you won’t come to see him.”

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

“Tell her to let go of this.”

“I’ll try.”

Both houses tick with morning silence. The brothers feel the vague impulse to say a little something more before they end the conversation, but neither can possibly imagine what it might be.

“Good-bye then,” Jimmy says.

“Good-bye,” Robert says.

They disconnect.

Each takes the cordless phone away from his ear and looks at it for a moment as if it were a faded Polaroid found in a shoe box.

Jimmy’s four women workers have gone off together for their monthly lunch at Mavis’s house and he is glad now to be able to sit at his worktable and have the barn to himself. Linda has not yet checked in with him. It must be going badly at their friends’ house.

He has taken up his deer tine and his softest square of camel hide and has hunched into the furious burnishing of the edges of half a dozen messenger bags, filling himself with the smell of warming beeswax and edge paint, emptying himself of Robert’s voice and the family he has left behind.

But shortly he hears the middle bay door creak open and closed. He looks across the floor.

It’s Linda, and he thinks: Good. The antidote. Whatever of Robert and Peggy and William he has not been able to burnish away will vanish in five minutes with Linda.

She is flushed from the sun and the cold and sheds her quilted coat as she approaches. Beneath, she is turtlenecked to her chin and is long-legged and slim-hipped in black dress-up jeans.

She stops before him.

She strips off her knit hat and shakes her hair down. “Your women are gone,” she says.

“This is their day for Mavis’s wife to make them venison stew.”