Robert Butler - Perfume River

She comes to him.

She stops just beyond reach. A bad sign.

“I didn’t expect you,” she says.

All he has is small talk. “Things seem slow, eh?” he says.

“Winter Wednesdays. I let Greta go home. She’s working up a cold.”

“Good,” he says. He hears the ambiguity. He quickly adds, “That you let her go.”

She smiles at the correction. Then she softens the smile at the edges and lifts her chin. An inquiry. A prompt.

Such things were part of the Highway 400 narrative.

She is saying but she is not saying.

An insistent part of him wants simply to thank her vaguely and claim that he only dropped in to see how things are and he’s meeting somebody down the street and has to leave.

So he tries to drag himself in the other direction by the improbable strategy of nodding at her chest. He means to indicate the bomber jacket. He says, “You’re modeling today.”

“I sold its mate this morning. The lady took one look and said, ‘I want what you’re wearing.’”

“On a Winter Wednesday to boot.” He knows he sounds lame.

But, generously, she laughs.

Overloaded with prompts, Jimmy is mystified why this should be so difficult for him. He’s never been awkward approaching a woman. And he offers himself an explanation: It’s too important, is why. This is different.

“You look beautiful,” he says.

Heather soughs, as if she’s been holding her breath. She gathers herself and says softly, “Thank you.”

And he finds himself needing to explain. To her. To himself. “You’ve admired how my spirit seems free,” he says.

He has more words but the effort of just these makes him pause.

She fills the pause, again softly: “Yes.”

“Free by ideology,” he says. “Free by protocol. Free by …” He searches for a word now. “… devaluing it,” he says. “ Thus. Thus it’s devalued, the freedom.”

He stops. Tries to clear his head.

“I’m having trouble,” he says. “Putting it into words.”

“Do you have to?” she says.

Another invitation. He won’t ignore it, but he trusts it will stay valid for a few more moments. “I have to,” he says. “I think I understand. I was free because what my wife and I decided we were free to have wasn’t worth all that much.”

He finds that Heather has moved closer to him.

They are in each other’s arms.

And in the room above his shop Jimmy lies on his side, the fern frost on the window jaundiced by street-light, Heather spooned into him, her arm draped around his chest. He closes his eyes, discerns the soft touch of her nipples just beneath his shoulder blades.

He and Heather are quilted over, the room still cold. He’ll have her call someone to look at the furnace.

It seems to have been such a long long while since he had that thought yesterday. The flex of time.

And he thinks of dark matter, dark energy. How astrophysicists now understand that all visible matter — from the galaxies to our bodies to the strands of our DNA — makes up only a tiny percentage of the mass of the universe. How all of the rest of the matter and energy — unobservable, unrecordable, the dark 95 percent — somehow resides in the spaces formerly thought to be empty. How quantum physicists are beginning to theorize the existence of parallel worlds to explain the bizarre mechanics of matter in its smallest particles. How, as well, it’s known that our bodies are made up of atoms, electrons orbiting nuclei, with empty space in between, that our bodies themselves are mostly empty space. And so if dark matter and dark energy exist in the empty space between the stars, why should they not exist inside our very bodies? Are we not ourselves mostly dark matter and dark energy? And what if that’s where those parallel worlds reside?

Linda was wrong. Being with Heather won’t stop me thinking about what’s next. Linda was stupidly wrong: It’s not worry. For millennia we’ve all been thinking there’s a place for us other than the one we’re in, this savage place where we fight each other, consume each other. This place we must escape. From the sun to the moon to the earth, from Heather’s nipples to my shoulder blades, from her atoms to mine. In all the empty space within and between, there is consciousness, there is existence. Impervious to war and betrayal and hardness of heart. It’s the place we all will run to.

“Are you awake?” Heather whispers.

“I am,” Jimmy says.

“What are you thinking?”

Only in his wish to answer her does he realize: “How it was I came to Canada.”

Heather tightens her arm around his chest. “I can’t hold you close enough,” she says.

The next morning Heather and Jimmy rise late, her daughter having spent the night with the grandmother, who is accustomed to sending the girl off to school. They have to rush to get ready to open the shop on time, tussling for first use of the bathroom basin, pausing to laugh at feeling like a couple already. Robert and Darla rise in their usual manner, having gone to sleep in their usual manner, Robert distracted, this time by his intention to speak to his father, and Darla sublimating with Bach. She is to go for her run and drive to the hospital on her own in the late morning. Robert will head up earlier, though after Darla has left the house he lingers for another bean-grinding and brewing and a second slow sipping of Ethiopian coffee, in his reading chair facing his oak. Peggy sleeps late in her one-bedroom assisted-living apartment at Longleaf Village, exhausted by her husband’s pain, sorry the twin bed next to her is empty, dreading when it will not be. Bob is up early from his bunk bed at the Mercy Mild Shelter. He’s happy that North Florida is behaving in the way it often suddenly can, throwing off the cold, warming the morning. He makes his way to the woods near Munson Slough, where he will spend a couple of hours dry-firing his Glock, getting back his trigger control.

And a physical therapist at Archbold Memorial named Tammy, a former softball star at the University of Georgia, uncovers William with encouraging chatter about how tough he looks and how he’s going to muscle through this little episode. She unwraps his compression leggings and she straps a thick cloth belt around him, and she starts to get him up, get him vertical, get him on his feet with her help, just for a little bit, to prime his body to heal, to engage him in staying alive, to get him used to the cost. This is her specialty. She is a champ at this.

William is grumpy but compliant. He might think this is a good time in history to die, given what the world has come to, but he’s too pissed about it to succumb. So he is vertical now. And he feels something begin in the middle of the calf of his right leg. A pulling loose. Like an adhesive bandage that’s been on for too long being stripped off, beginning there in his calf and running now upward, behind his knee, and then curving to the inside of his thigh. It’s a good feeling. A letting go. But the rushing changes, as if the bandage finishes breaking away and something emerges from beneath it, a goddamn night crawler burrowing its way past his broken hip and up his spine, and William thinks, What the hell is that doing inside me? but it moves too fast for a worm way too fast and the blood clot hits his heart and the engine seizes in Papa’s Ford Runabout pickup, which is as old as me, and maybe this is when it finally dies, on this dirt road along Bayou Bernard and Papa has stripped off his shirt and has the hood up and he’s cussing like Mama won’t stand for, and now we’re sitting beside the bayou letting the Ford cool off and Papa cool off, and I’m a little behind him and sneaking peeks as usual at the slash of a scar below his left shoulder blade, and I been warned by Mama since I was toddling not to ask him, since the scar was from the Big War and full of bad memories, but today I do ask and he turns on me and his hands come up but he doesn’t hit me, he just gets quiet and he gets sad and he takes me by the shirt and pushes me over backward, but not hard not to hurt me just to tell me to shut up, and he’s weeping like a baby with me at the train station and I’m in my uniform and there’s another Big War, and as I put my duffel over my shoulder it hits me like a rifle shot in the brain what it is that he’s been carrying around all this time, the fact that his battle scar is in his back, it’s in his goddamn back, he turned his back, and so I turn my back on him, I turn my own goddamn back and I run away from this man and I’m going up the stairs in a house in Mainz, and it’s just mop-up, we haven’t yet found a living soul on this whole block, it’s only us Patton boys tidying up with the Third Army that’s about to cross the Rhine, and I’m checking the second floor, just for procedure’s sake, and I’m at the top of the stairs and there’s a doorway to my left and I step into it and across the room the window is bright behind him and he’s sitting tall there and I can’t see his face, I can’t read his face for the shadow but his Schmeisser is crosswise in his lap and his hands are down but I don’t check where they are I just know they’re down but I don’t check if his shooting hand is near the grip and it’s all fast and my M1 is up and I’m squeezing and squeezing and the Kraut’s chest blows open and he flies back and he’s dead, and then I notice some little thing, no I don’t, not then, I just see it but I don’t really notice it, not then while I’m rushing inside over killing the enemy, rushing sweetly at that moment, sweetly like happens in a war, and it’s only years later, when my sons are about ten, about the age I was myself in the dying Ford, and it’s hot summer in the Ninth Ward and the afternoon thunderstorm has just passed and my boys take off their shoes to run barefoot in the wet grass, it’s then that I really notice the German soldier’s boots, which are sitting there beside him, the two boots straightened up side by side and his socks draped over them, his feet hurt, this guy, his feet hurt and he took off his shoes and socks so whatever is going to happen to him on this day at least his feet won’t hurt him so bad, and I turn away from my sons so there’s no chance they’ll glance back at me and see my eyes filling with tears, and not a week goes by for the rest of my years that I don’t think about that man and I squeeze the trigger and I squeeze and there is no rushing in me, no fucking sweet thing, my own chest cracks open and my heart seizes, and I come up the stairs and I step into the doorway and I see him sitting there and I notice his boots, and I take my hand off the trigger, I don’t squeeze the trigger, and the light behind him gets brighter but the shadow on his face fades away, and we look each other in the eyes, and it’s just two fellas in a sunny room