Robert Butler - Perfume River

William manages a sharp shake of the head. No.

Finally the coughing stops. His body calms. Tears are streaming down William’s face.

He seems unaware of them.

“Fuck,” he says.

Robert finds his hand still on his father’s shoulder. He gives him a gentle squeeze there and withdraws.

“I wouldn’t even be able do it,” his father says. “Goddamn cast isn’t hard enough.”

Things shift in Robert. But to a complicated place. Not to banter. Not to an encouragement to rest. Not to soothing palaver. His father is indeed a tough guy. That Robert believes. But his father may soon be dead.

Robert sits back in his chair.

William is quiet now. He blinks his eyes. His good hand comes up quickly to his face and wipes at the tears. He sees Robert noticing. “From the pain,” he says.

“You shouldn’t let yourself get worked up over her.”

“That’s our life.”

“She’s probably going to try again to get the priest in here.”

“She thinks I’m going to die,” William says, but almost gently. “She says she won’t know who she is without me.”

“Are you beginning to understand her?”

“Drug addicts are easier.” William turns his face away, toward the window.

Then he turns back.

He holds his gaze steadily on Robert. His eyes seem heavy-lidded, as if he’s struggling to keep them open. But the impression is not weariness. These strike Robert as the heavy eyes of sadness. And he feels himself to be the object of the look.

Robert does not ask what’s behind this. Instead, he says, “Were you still a Catholic in Germany?”

William snorts softly. His eyes relax. “You mean, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’?”

“Something like that.”

“Whoever thought that up was full of shit. Either they were never in a war or were in the priest’s pocket to start with.” William begins carefully to rearrange himself at the shoulders. “Not that I’m an atheist. That’s just another religion.”

He stops arranging. He sucks up the pain.

“Should I get a nurse?” Robert says.

William shakes his head sharply No. He takes a deep breath, and pulling from the shoulder he adjusts his broken arm just a little. He closes his eyes to the pain.

Robert stifles his hands, his voice. He will offer no help. Pops has to be Pops.

When the pain has passed, his father says, “What was it for, my Good War? And what was our national humiliation for?”

He means, by the latter, Robert’s Bad War.

William says, “It only brought us to this fucking world.”

Robert says, softly, “There it is.” The phrase catches him by surprise. He hasn’t used it in decades. It was a meme among the enlisted men in Vietnam. Its meaning slid upon a long continuum from I am content to We’re all fucked. In this case: You said it, brother.

William begins to cough again.

But he stops it. With a sharp intake of breath and a brief flinch of his body and a sneer. A sneer at the cough and at the pain. He takes a moment to let out the breath, fight off a little after-tremor of hacking, and he says, “Who wouldn’t be happy to die tonight? Give me the political wars of the twentieth century any old day. At least your communist or your fascist gave a shit about this present life. The religious wars are going to take us all down. Behead the other guys and blow yourselves up. Sure. If you really read the holy book they believe in — that we all supposedly believe in; the first part of it for all of us is the same book —then what they’re doing makes perfect sense. That book’s full of genocide, on direct order from the Commander in Chief in the Sky. With Moses himself leading the dirty work. Every holy battle gets around to it. Not just by the punks in the ski masks. Even the New Testament believers get around to it. The Catholics and the Pilgrims both had the stake and the torch.”

William falls silent.

Robert has never heard any of this from his father. Was it new? Did it take the breaking of his body for him to come to this? Or did his little band of brothers look up over their coffee and beignets one afternoon and know?

Robert has to work hard now not to put his hand on his father’s hand. The man wouldn’t recognize the gesture, so he dare not. But Pops’s words have fallen upon Robert like a shared thing. Like an understanding between them. Even like a backdoor expression of fatherly pride. Pops went to war. Robert went to war. Both of them came to this.

Robert embraces this understanding. And with it returns the moment at a corner table in the bar on Magazine Street when it was late enough and they both were lubricated enough and the lights in the place were localized enough and dim enough that he and his father seemed all alone in a dark recess, but there was still enough light from somewhere that when his father turned his face slightly, Robert saw the man’s eyes beginning to fill and he thought to reassure him, even though Pops surely understood already, from his own war and from what Robert had just said about his job and duties in Vietnam, but Robert was moved by his father’s worry, and he added, “It’s all right. I’ve got a job inside the wire. I’ll be safe in Vietnam. It’ll be like research. I’ll get home safe.” His father did not speak, did not turn back to him, and the tears that had come to his eyes began to fall. Robert had never seen his father weep. Robert could easily have wept then as well, but he was keenly aware that the pride and appreciation in his father’s tears would be diminished by tears of his own. Robert needed to maintain the composure of a soldier. And he did. He cut the tears off, and he waited for his father to be himself again. Which, slowly, silently, the man became, and they drank some more and then some more, and they did not speak to each other again of war. Not on that evening. Not ever. Not about their personal experience of it.

But now.

As a seventy-year-old Robert finds himself as needy and eager to please this man as an adolescent. So he edges his chair as close to the bed as he can. He leans toward his father. He says, “Whether it’s over politics or over religion, it all comes down to whatever nasty gene humans carry that makes us go to war. But once a war’s on, it takes warfare to stop it. From a distance both sides on a battlefield look alike. That doesn’t mean one of them isn’t justified in being there.”

Though animated by his teenage self, Robert has spoken in the voice of the man he is. And he has heard himself. He thinks: I don’t believe half of that. Not in the way it came out. And his fuller belief hurtles through him, that the very waging of a righteous war, even the very winning of that war, can trigger the dark gene. So the winners go on to fight unrighteous wars. And maybe that’s the real gene that causes all the trouble. The one encoded for righteousness. Politics and religion and just the pure waging and winning of wars all share that.

But it makes no difference. The Robert who edged his chair toward his father didn’t want to make a nuanced point. His intention was deeper and simpler. Two men. Sharing what they did, what they are. That Robert finds his voice now: “Pops, it’s okay. For us both. We had to go to war. You and I did what we could.”

And this turns Pops’s face back to him.

They look at each other.

Robert waits.

William struggles with something. Then he says, “I’ve held this inside for a long time.”

He pauses.

Robert quickens.

And William says, “I lost one son utterly.”

Jimmy.

Robert regrets that it has to be in contrast to his brother, but he longs for what’s next so much that he puts this regret aside. He even draws a good breath now at how Jimmy has made him even more important to his father.