Robert Butler - Perfume River

Bob’s head snaps back at the sign.

Quinlan’s dead. He only just shook my hand. That was quick. Done. Bang. It doesn’t make sense. So Bob tries to do in his head what he can do with his eyes. He squeezes at these thoughts like they’re the blur of words in a newspaper. He squeezes till they clarify, just a little, just enough to make them out. The Quinlan who shook his hand was Bob. Not William. He’s Bob. A Vietnam vet. In that, too much like the old man. But this one is Bob like me.

And now Bob remembers the rest. The father of the other Bob has died. A blood clot in a hospital. Tillotson Funeral Home. Bob looks again at the sign. Tillotson. And this Quinlan: Husband. Father. Veteran. Another veteran. This makes Bob stir a little. Too many veterans. But the other Bob is okay. They ate together at New Leaf, the two of them. But he put me in a hotel with my father. Did the old man arrange it? Did he get his Vietnam buddy to put me in a room with him?

No.

This is Bob the son of William, who is dead.

Bob looks toward the distant house. Shining.

Dead in this place shining in the dark.

Respects.

Bob can’t just walk up to the front door.

He understands that.

Nearby. Twenty yards away. The woods. Bob knows his way through woods. These run up toward the shining house and then past and around back, surrounding the place. Bob heads off. Laurel oak and water oak and sweet gum, dark and dense, and Bob enters them, moving swiftly, silently.

Hushed, Robert and his son’s family enter the visitation room. Robert is before them. Kevin steps up now beside him, scans the room, sees the casket at the far wall, keeps on looking around. Robert figures he knows why. When Kevin’s gaze arrives at the buffet room, Robert says, “I suspect they’re in there,” meaning Peggy and Darla. When Kevin looks at him, Robert nods back to the partition doorway. “Serving your grandmother’s food.”

Kevin turns to his family and says, softly, “This is a good time to pay our respects.”

Grace steps beside him, takes his arm. Molly has put her cellphone away and takes her mother’s arm. Jake is standing a little apart, and when the others move off toward the casket, he stays put.

“Granddad,” he says in a near-whisper, “can we have a little talk? I need some advice.”

“Of course,” Robert says, reciprocating the whisper. He nods toward his grandson’s retreating family. “Perhaps a little later.”

Jake understands. “Thanks.” He follows the others.

Robert moves off toward the buffet room thinking how Jake has gotten to age twenty without the two of them ever really sitting down to talk about life in the way a grandfather and grandson often can do. Will this be a night full of ironies? Full of people assuming Robert’s unadulterated sorrow, for instance; full of the tender, approving warmth — as one might receive from a loving father — that those assumptions will earn him. And likely this irony as well: The old man has reminded Jacob that families can dissolve, so if you ever want a heart-to-heart connection with your grandfather, you better get it while you can. Not that any of this was William Quinlan’s benign intention. He just happened to die.

Robert steps into the partitioned room with his mother’s food unfurled on platters and in pots and stainless warmers and with herself stationed behind the row of tables ladling Irish stew and brightly complaining that Tallahassee is muttonless. “But the lamb is good,” she says, tapping the serving spoon in the air over the filled plate of Darla’s colleague. Peggy turns her face at Robert’s arrival.

“Kevin and Grace and the kids are here,” he says.

And Bob pushes on through the trees. Why does he feel a rushing in him, why is he beating up his legs and lungs and elbows and shoulders trying to get through a thicket of oak in this big fucking rush? As if something is pursuing him here in the woods. No. He’s doing the pursuing. That shifting of the dark up ahead, shaping and shifting and vanishing and shaping again You can shoot, by God Bobby, you can shoot and Bob pulls the Glock from inside his coat, snug in palm and crotch of thumb and forefinger, his fingertip lying easy on the trigger, perfectly fitting its curve, perfectly placed for Bobby to be okay by God, a hell of a shot. The old man was worthless in the woods. He was worthless. Maybe he was worthless in the jungles of Vietnam as well, maybe that’s what pissed him off so bad at Bob, Bob being okay when the old man wasn’t. Maybe Calvin Henry Weber, sergeant — or whatever his rank really was — serial number whatever-the-fuck, was scared of his okay boy Bob. When Bob has a Mossberg or when Bob has a Glock, Calvin Henry Weber is scared. And Bob moves on, dodging the trees, aware, though, that he’s not just chasing, aware that he has a destination, aware of a building being sliced into fragments by the trunks of the oaks, a building passing by and passing by and finally vanishing, replaced by the stretch of a sodium-vapor-lit drive, covered along the back edge of the building by a hanging porch. And Bob changes his bearing, which has been north. He now turns east, and the building is passing again through the trees to his right. He has circled behind it and now there is a wide doorway in its rear facade, bright lights inside.

Bob stops.

Things clarify for him.

He has come to pay his respects to a dead man. A father of a Bob. The other Bob. Bob the Vietnam buddy of the father he’s been following through the woods.

Keep it straight.

Bob tucks his Glock back inside his inner coat pocket.

But the door is opening.

And while Bob has been making his way through the woods to this place behind a particularly large-trunked laurel oak: Peggy and Robert emerge from the buffet and cross the room to wait for Kevin and his wife and his son and his daughter to finish their shoulder-to-shoulder encounter with the corpse of William Quinlan, which they soon do. Kevin and Grace draw their children closer in an embrace and they turn to find Peggy and Robert. They all huddle in condolence. Beyond them the visitation room is beginning to gather visitors, arriving from a flow of cars into the parking lot, including, mostly recently, a minivan from Longleaf Village. The minivan prompts Jimmy and Heather to look at each other and nod and emerge from their car, though unhurriedly, as they want all these recent arrivals to have a chance to populate the room. Jimmy flexes at his qualms as if they were morning-stiff muscles.

Inside, Peggy abruptly declares to Kevin and his family, “You’re straight from the airport. You must be famished. I’ve got just the thing.” She steps between Kevin and Grace and arranges herself shoulder to shoulder with them, hooking their arms and conveying them toward the buffet room.

“Come on, kids,” she says over her shoulder.

Molly says, “I’m famished,” and follows.

Jake glances to Robert, who nods at his grandson and waits for the diners to make some progress toward the partition door. Then Robert says, “Let’s go.” He leads Jake across the visitation room, looking first toward the exit into the foyer. But people are coming in, some of whom he knows, and he looks away to the back wall and the doors there. No one has gathered near them. “This way,” he says.

Jake follows.

They say nothing to each other as they cross the room and enter the back hallway. It’s lit brightly with torchiere floor lamps. Double doors directly before them lead outside.

“Inside or out?” Robert says.

“Out,” Jake says.

“Good man,” Robert says.

Bob has already stopped in the trees across from the back doors of the funeral home. Things have already become clear to him. He has already tucked his Glock away inside his coat.