Robert Butler - Perfume River

What are Robert Quinlan and his wife feebly arguing about when the homeless man slips quietly in? Moments later Robert could hardly have said. ObamaCare or quinoa or their granddaughter’s new boyfriend. Something. He and Darla are sitting at a table in the dining area of the New Leaf Co-op. Her back is to the man. Robert is facing him. He notices him instantly, though the man is making eye contact with none of the scattered few of them, the health-conscious members of the co-op, dining by the pound from the hot buffet. It’s a chilly North Florida January twilight, but he’s still clearly overbundled, perhaps from the cold drilling deeper into his bones because of a life lived mostly outside. Or perhaps he simply needs to carry all his clothes around with him.

Robert takes him for a veteran.

The man’s shoulder-length hair is shrapnel gray. His face is deep-creased and umbered by street life. But in spite of the immediately apparent state of his present situation, he stands straight with his shoulders squared.

He sits down at a table beside the partition doorway, which gapes into the crosswise aisle between checkout counters and front entrance. He slumps forward ever so slightly and puts both his clenched fists on the tabletop. He stares at them.

“You should’ve put your curry on it,” Darla says to Robert.

So it’s about quinoa, the argument.

“Instead of rice,” she says.

She has continued her insistent advocacy while his attention has drifted over her shoulder to the vet.

Robert brings his eyes back to her. He tries to remember if he has already cited the recent endorsement of white rice by some health journal or other.

“All those famously healthy Japanese eat rice,” he says.

She huffs.

He looks at his tofu curry on the biodegradable paper plate.

He looks back to the vet, who has opened one fist and is placing a small collection of coins on the table.

“I’m just trying to keep you healthy,” Darla says.

“Which is why I am content to be here at all,” Robert says, though he keeps his eyes on the vet.

The man opens the other fist and begins pushing the coins around. Sorting them. It is done in a small, quiet way. No show about it at all.

“Thanks to their fish,” she says.

Robert returns to Darla.

Her eyes are the cerulean blue of a Monet sky.

“Fish?” he asks. Uncomprehendingly.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s the factor …”

He leans toward her, perhaps a bit too abruptly. She stops her explanation and her blue eyes widen a little.

“I should feed him,” he says, low.

She blinks and gathers herself. “Who?”

He nods in the vet’s direction.

She peeks over her shoulder.

The man is still pushing his coins gently around.

She leans toward Robert, lowering her voice. “I didn’t see him.”

“He just came in,” Robert says.

“Feed him quinoa,” Darla says. She isn’t kidding.

“Please,” he says, rising.

She shrugs.

This isn’t a thing Robert often does. Never with money. He carries the reflex attitude, learned in childhood: You give a guy like this money and it will go for drink, which just perpetuates his problems; there are organizations he can find if he really wants to take care of himself.

Giving food is another matter, he figures, but to give food to somebody you encounter on the street, while rafting the momentum of your daily life — that’s usually an awkward thing to pull off. And so, in those rare cases when it wouldn’t be awkward, you can easily overlook the chance.

But here is a chance he’s noticed. And there’s something about this guy that continues to suggest veteran.

Which is to say a Vietnam veteran.

Something. He is of an age. Of a certain bearing. Of a field radio frequency that you are always tuned to in your head.

Robert is a veteran.

He doesn’t go straight for the vet’s table. He heads toward the doorway, which would bring him immediately alongside him.

He draws near. The man has finished arranging his coins but continues to ponder them. He does not look up. Then Robert is beside him, as if about to pass through the doorway. The vet has to be aware of him now. Still he does not look. He has no game going in order to get something, this man of needs. It has truly been about sorting the coins.

He smells a little musty but not overpoweringly so. He’s taking care of himself pretty well, considering. Or has done so recently, at least.

Robert stops.

The vet’s hair, which was a cowl of gray from across the room, up close has a seam of coal black running from crown to collar.

Robert puts his hand on the man’s shoulder. He bends near him.

The man is turning, lifting his face, and Robert says, “Would you like some food?”

Their eyes meet.

The furrows of the vet’s face at brow and cheek and jaw retain much of their first impression: deeply defined, from hard times and a hard life in the body. But his eyes seem clear, and they crimp now at the outer edges. “Yes,” he says. “Do you have some?”

“I can get you some,” Robert says.

“That would be good,” the man says. “Yes.”

“What do you like? I think there was some chicken.” Though he hasn’t invoked the preternaturally healthful quinoa, he catches himself trying to manage this guy’s nutrition, an impulse which feels uncomfortably familiar. He’s trying to get him healthy.

“It needs to be soft,” the man says. “I don’t have very many teeth.”

“Why don’t you come with me,” Robert says. “You can choose.”

The vet is quick to his feet. “Thank you,” he says. He offers a closed-mouth smile.

Standing with him now, about to walk with him, Robert recognizes something he’s neglected: This act is still blatant charity, condescending in its anonymity. So he offers his hand. And though he almost always calls himself — and always thinks of himself — as Robert , he says, “Bob.”

The vet hesitates.

The name alone seems to have thrown him. Robert clarifies. “I’m Bob.”

The man takes Robert’s hand and smiles again, more broadly this time, but struggling to keep his toothlessness from showing. “I’m Bob,” he says. And then, hastily, as if he’d be mistaken for simply, madly, parroting the name: “ Too .”

The handshake goes on. The vet has a firm grip. He further clarifies. “I’m also Bob.”

“It’s a good name,” Robert says.

“It’s okay.”

“Not as common as it used to be.”

Bob looks at Robert for a moment, letting the handshake slow and stop. Robert senses a shifting of the man’s mind into a conversational gear that hasn’t been used in a while.

“That’s true,” Bob says.

Robert leads him through the doorway and along the partition, past the ten-items-only register, and into the buffet area. He stops at the soup warmers on the endcap, thinking of the man’s tooth problem, but Bob goes on ahead, and before Robert can make a suggestion, Bob says, “They have beans and rice. This is good.”

Robert steps beside him, and together they peer through the sneeze guard at a tub of pintos and a tub of brown rice. Good mess hall food, Robert thinks, though thinking of it that way jars with a reassessment going on in a corner of his mind.

Of no relevance to this present intention, however.

Bob declines any other food, and Robert piles one of the plastic dinner plates high with beans and rice while Bob finds a drink in the cooler. Robert waits for him and takes the bottle of lightly lemoned sparkling water from his hand and says, “Why don’t you go ahead and sit.”