Robert Butler - Perfume River

For some years now it has taken Robert a little bit by surprise whenever he thinks of his brother. But the prompts this time are instantly clear: Robert’s venture to the veranda without the purgative focus of a cigarette, particularly on a night of Beethoven’s Seventh; the consequent memory of his flight from the North Vietnamese soldiers in Hue, of his refuge in the banyan tree; his taking refuge, as well, from the army, for an occasional night, in the arms of a Vietnamese woman.

Robert long ago recognized the irony of all this. In some sense he actually ran and hid before Jimmy did.

But it wasn’t the same.

Even now, almost forty-seven years later, he feels compelled to repeat the litany of differences: More than a few Americans at MACV, officers and enlisted men alike, had local women to go to now and then; the communist offensive on five other provincial capitals the previous night had convinced everyone in Hue that the city’s traditional exemption from serious attack, tacitly accepted by both sides, still pertained; Robert’s break from the army was not even AWOL, much less desertion. And Robert had not run from the war. He did not even run from that night’s battle; he sought cover and would later emerge.

He would later emerge.

And a price would be paid for not running.

Robert shuts down this line of thinking.

He does not want to emerge from the banyan. Not this morning. Not ever again. There is no need. He has long since reconciled himself to those few days in 1968.

So much time has passed. Generations. For Christ’s sake, he’s had his own children and grandchildren since.

And the irony about his act being akin to Jimmy’s is superficial. A conceit. Jimmy did run. From the war. From far more.

Not that Robert blames Jimmy.

Not for his politics, certainly.

Not for decades.

Robert eases onto his back once again, expecting that thought to send Jimmy on his way, but instead he and Jimmy are sitting in overstuffed chairs angled toward the settee where their father is in a familiar stage of dozing off. Sitting upright, head sinking, he will soon — barely lifting his face and without opening his eyes — pivot slowly into fetal repose on the velour.

It is Labor Day, 1967. Robert is on home leave with orders to Vietnam. He graduated in June of ‘66 from Tulane and struggled through that summer with what to do. He went off to LSU on a graduate school deferment, but he dropped out as soon as the fall semester was finished and he enlisted.

Robert is wearing his dress greens. Glad for his father to see him in them. His father was a nineteen-year-old hard-stripe corporal in the infantry under Patton in Germany, about to become a platoon sergeant when the war ended.

But the conversation has been odd. Minimal. Tangential. Almost sullen, for his father’s part. Pops is a quiet drunk. But sober, he can talk. He has the gift of gab. Even smart gab at times. He isn’t well educated but he’s well read. Their home has always been filled with books, and he even hounded any traces of Third Ward Yat out of his sons’ speech. Still and all, Robert understands: About real feelings his father also is a quiet man. He gets drunk on his feelings and clams up.

And Robert figures there are other things going on to shut Pops down, figures the old man and Jimmy were probably fighting before Robert arrived and the fight simply has overridden everything. His little brother, fractiously self-assertive and needy as usual, has simply jumped in between him and their father.

Robert, in his bed, closes his eyes to the oak beam running above him in the ceiling as if it were about to fall and split the bed in two. He is tempted to slide forward a couple of hours, to the abrupt ending of the family’s Labor Day afternoon in New Orleans.

But he does not.

He remains in the moment when he and Jimmy are themselves quiet, almost placid-seeming, with each other, as they sit watching their father fade into sleep in the front room of the family’s double shotgun in the Irish Channel. When Pops bought the house — after he was promoted to stevedore foreman at the Seventh Street Wharf — he opened the common wall of the semidetached, here in the living room and in the back, at the kitchen, making a unified home of it. Robert was ten, Jimmy was eight.

As their father begins to snore, the brothers look at each other. It’s been more than a year since they’ve been together. Robert made his decision about the war on his own. The previous summer Jimmy was hitchhiking out west, and he spent Thanksgiving and Christmas somewhere in the Northeast with a girl he’d met on his travels.

Without a word or a nod, the brothers rise and go out the front door and down the porch steps. Clay Square lies before them, the de facto front yard playground of their shared childhood. Two years apart, they were playmates and then enemies and then friends and then largely indifferent to each other, as they sought their own independent selves, and now neither of them is sure about the other. They are ready to be what they will become on this little walk together, as Robert goes to war and Jimmy enters his senior year at Loyola after months of faux vagabondage during the Summer of Love.

They pause at the sidewalk and scan the broad, oak-edged sward of the park. The boys have too much history between them there, too much contending and screaming and too many tears and bloodied noses, long passed but with the affect still clinging to the place, and they turn south on Third Street, heading toward the river.

“So you’ve done this,” Jimmy says.

“This?”

“The US Army in Vietnam.”

Robert looks at Jimmy.

He is visibly Robert’s brother, with the same jaw, their father’s jaw, but Jimmy is paler in hair and skin, missing their mother’s touches of darkness, which she got from her own mother, who was Italian. In spite of the confrontational quickness of his remark, Jimmy isn’t looking at Robert. He’s keeping his eyes ahead, down the street.

Robert says, “I did the army. It was up to them where they sent me.”

“That’s a cop-out,” Jimmy says, though he still doesn’t look Robert’s way and his manner is matter-of-fact. “Did he put you up to it?”

Robert knows who Jimmy means. Pops. As of this Labor Day weekend in 1967, they have both always called him that. But Jimmy invokes him now as an impersonal pronoun.

“No,” Robert says at once, taking the words literally to make the answer simple. No, there was no overt conversation, no request or exhortation or plea.

Jimmy says, “This isn’t his war, you know. Even if he wants to make it that. Ho Chi Minh is not Adolf Hitler. Far from it.”

“I told you this isn’t about Pops.”

“It’s an evil war,” Jimmy says.

Robert says, “Did your girl of the summer put you up to this?”

Jimmy stops walking abruptly.

Robert stops too, turns to him. He expects a fight now.

But even though Robert is a step in front of him, Jimmy keeps his eyes down the street.

They stand like that for a long moment.

Robert senses his brother grinding toward a choice. A fight is one option, clearly.

Now Jimmy looks him in the eyes.

From years of experience, Robert knows how to read his brother’s face. It surprises him now. Nothing is there that fits the way Jimmy began this conversation. No furrow, no flare, no twitch. Nothing that fits his temper.

“My feelings are my own,” Jimmy says, and his voice is actually soft. Robert cannot remember the last time he heard this tone in his brother.

“I believe you,” Robert says. Though he’s not sure he does. But he makes his own voice go soft as well.

“I bet he’s proud of you,” Jimmy says. He is still managing his tone.