Robert Butler - Perfume River

Robert does love this boy. Loves this smart, tough, quick Jake, who has not gotten enough of his grandfather in his life. Robert lifts his hands to grasp Jake at the shoulders.

Oh no you don’t. Bob slips his Glock from his pocket, takes a breath. Breath control. Trigger control.

Robert cups Jake’s shoulders and he begins to pull him toward him.

Bob’s right hand comes up strong, steady, brings the Glock to bear, tracking the side of Robert’s head.

Jake could take one breath more, could have one more flicker of a thought, he could hesitate for the briefest moment to accept from his grandfather what he has resisted over and over in the past few weeks from his father, but Granddad can do this because he was a soldier, because he went to war, Granddad knows what it means because he’s been there, and so Jake rushes now, he opens his arms to Robert and they hug.

And one flicker, one breath, one moment away from squeezing the trigger, Bob’s right forefinger freezes, and a deep recoil of air rushes into Bob, drops his right arm, pushes him back as if a Viet Cong sniper has been following him through these woods and has squeezed off his own round and shot Bob through the center of his chest. Because this father and this son have embraced.

Bob leans against a tree. Closes his eyes.

Robert and Jake say nothing but hold the embrace for a few more moments. Then they let each other go and they turn and head back through doors, into the hallway.

They pause before entering the visitation room.

“Thanks, Granddad,” Jake says.

Robert reaches out, cuffs his grandson on the shoulder. He fills with a thing too complicated to call regret , though his insistently abstracting mind would be content with that. “What are you going to do for them?” he asks.

“The Marines?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what the test was about. Whatever they want. But you know the first thing they teach in the Corps. Every Marine is a rifleman.”

Robert manages a nod.

Jake says, “Well, time to deploy.” He opens the visitation room door, holds it for his grandfather.

Robert finds himself immovable with the thought that Jake would have made his Grandpa Bill proud.

He flicks his chin to Jake to send him on in. Jake winks and says, “Cover me.” And he disappears.

The door swings closed.

Robert reboots.

He goes in.

Near the door Peggy is quickly closing in on Jake. She reaches him, hugs him, releases him while giving Robert a tilt-headed frown, and she propels her grandson toward the buffet room.

She does not follow but comes to Robert. “Where were you two?”

“Jake wanted to talk.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s okay.”

“I’m sure it’s hard for him,” Peggy says. “Losing his Grandpa Bill. He’s not experienced death before. That’s a blessing, of course. But now he’s got to face it.”

“He’s fine, Mom.”

“Your father loved that boy.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“He was so full of love.”

Robert doesn’t have any words for that.

Peggy’s eyes are filling with tears. But not about Jake. Or the old man. She’s fixed on Robert now. She lifts a hand and touches his cheek.

He accepts it. Waits.

She withdraws the hand, looks over her shoulder.

Several dozen visitors are arranged now in small, softly murmuring groups about the room.

Peggy turns back to her son. “I’m weary of them, Bobby. Can we talk a little?”

“Of course,” he says, hoping she won’t speak to him as Bobby. “There’s a place through here.”

He leads her into the back hallway. For a moment they pause between the two sets of doors. “This is nice,” she says.

Beyond the porte cochere doors, beyond the back driveway, in the darkness of the trees, Bob has settled to the ground at the foot of an oak, his back against the trunk. The Glock is still in his hand, though he is presently unaware of it. His head is full of a high metallic whine. It’s often there. Words can cover it over. Or other sounds. But he has no words to speak, for the moment, and the woods around him are silent. So he listens to the whine. Idly. An oscillating whine. Though its highs and its lows are very near each other, he can distinguish them. He’s smart that way. He begins to count in his head. At each peak. One. Two.

Robert and Peggy step away, toward the end of the hall opposite the kitchen. They stop in the amber bloom of light of a torchiere. They face each other. Peggy initiates a hug, which Robert returns. They hold this for a long moment and then Peggy pulls away, but barely a half step, maintaining the connection of their eyes.

She says, “I keep thinking of when he came home. You and I were living with Mama and Papa, you know. In that creole cottage in the Irish Channel. You were two years old and he was thunderstruck at the sight of you. He picked you up and put you on his shoulders and that’s pretty much where you stayed for a couple of weeks. He’d carry you everywhere from up there. ‘Let him see far,’ is what Bill would say. ‘Let my boy see far.’”

Robert has heard this story often enough that any capacity it once had to move him is long gone. Besides, the old man as a young man was already the man he was and forever would be. A toddler son was easy to sling around. Easy to give a damn about when you could overpower him absolutely.

Peggy says, “He wanted to name you William Junior, you know.”

This is not the first time he’s heard this either.

“He loved you that much,” she says.

What Robert wants is to avoid arguing with his mother on this night. However, he says, “What he wanted was his firstborn son to be just like him.”

She brightens. “You see?”

He has said this to her as if to disprove his father’s love. But he realizes she hears it as a demonstration of that love.

Her bright smile of QED beams on. And the smile suddenly strikes Robert as one of her lies.

Does she know about his father’s deep disappointment in him? The man kept it from his son. Did he keep it from his wife?

Robert and his mother look at each other for a long moment in silence. Her brightness fades a little. He struggles, wanting to let this pass but wanting to know if she knows, wanting to ask but wanting to keep the truth strictly between him and the dead man if she doesn’t.

So he says, “But I wasn’t just like him.”

He expects a spin now, or an evasion or a lie.

She even hesitates.

Then she surprises him. “It was me who talked him out of naming you William,” she says.

The family explanation — Robert can’t remember the exact moment it was offered him but he’s sure it came from her — was that his father realized that his son, to be kept distinct in conversation, would become “Billy” or even “Junior,” and he thought both sounded sissified.

Robert narrows his eyes at her. “You said he talked himself out of it.”

“Did I tell you that?”

“You did.”

“For his sake. He didn’t like admitting my influence.”

“You didn’t like biting your tongue.”

“I bit it as an act of love.” She squares up before him and doesn’t flinch: “It was me. I told him, ‘This boy needs to be his own man.’”

“Did he understand that?”

“Well, who knows. He was a father, after all, with strong ideas. He gave you a love for books. This soldier and dockworker gave his son that.”

Robert does not really expect to learn if the old man revealed his fatherly disgust over Vietnam. He probably didn’t. But she did witness his disappointment in Robert. Listen to her: Your father may not have loved you for what you became but he made you read. That was the substitute from childhood onward. Isn’t that an outcome worthy of actual love? Aren’t you grateful?