Perfume River (13 page)

Bob looks abruptly away from this wall, turns around.

He starts, as if someone has snuck in behind him.

But it’s the high back of Dwayne’s desk chair.

Bob circles it.

Sits in it.

He puts his arms along the arms of the chair.

He settles himself. As best he can, for his head is quick-thumping in pain.

There’s nothing to do for that. Just push through it.

He begins to open drawers.

Center drawer. Ballpoint pens. Paper clips. Cluttery little crap.

He’s having trouble concentrating, trouble seeing things clearly. But the thumping slows a bit. Bob knows it’s his heart beating in his head. It’s his heart driving the pain.

He opens the top drawer in the desk’s right-hand pedestal. More clutter. Brochures for the church, a bottle of aspirin, a granola bar, a phone-charging cord. In the second drawer are pristine envelopes, stamps, a stapler.

Bob hates this guy. As if he were lying to Bob’s face. This bland daily shit. It’s all lies.

He slams the second drawer and pulls at the bottom one. It won’t yield.

Bob pushes back in his chair and looks at the drawer. It’s the deepest one. Files probably.
Who gives a damn?

But Bob doesn’t like Dwayne keeping his secrets. The drawer has a simple pin tumbler lock. And Bob still has a small skill from his teenage thieving days.

He opens the central drawer and removes two paper clips. He bends one to work as a torque wrench, the other as a rake.

He has to leave the chair. His head and his knees begin to scream at him in pain but he makes himself crouch down. He is determined now.

He draws near to the lock. He inserts the first paper clip, turns it, holds the tension, inserts the second, and he begins to rake the pins inside the lock. His fingers fumble a bit for a moment, but long ago he had a good feel for this, and his muscles quickly remember and he rakes again and once again and the last pin slips into place and the lock yields.

He opens the drawer.

Vertical files, but they’re pushed to the back. Forward, lying at the bottom of the drawer, is a Glock 21 pistol, and a box of .45 auto cartridges.

And Bob thinks:
Dwayne, Dwayne, Dwayne. Pastor Dwayne. Dreaming of ISIS sending a few boys over here to Tallahassee to bust in and rape Loretta and grab you and cut off your head, but you’re ready to defend your First Amendment church with your Second Amendment Glock, you’re ready to protect your flock like a good father should, like a good shepherd, like a Heavenly Father.

Heavenly Father my ass.

Bob’s own voice in his own private head has clambered heavenward to the oldest old man of them all.

Sneering all the way, of course.

And another sea surge of pain swells in him and crashes behind his eyes and tumbles down his face and into his throat and into his chest.

Punishment for the sneer, no doubt.

And he hears a voice.

Not his own.

A loud voice.

A big fucking loud voice.

I’VE BROUGHT YOU HERE FOR A PURPOSE.

Bob’s not crazy. Bob knows he’s hearing this voice in his head. But just because it’s inside his own private head doesn’t mean it’s not a voice. A real voice. Talking to him. Every voice you ever hear when you’re right there in the room with it still has to pass through your head. Even if you close your eyes and make the face and the mouth saying the words vanish, the voice remains, talking away. So where is it
then
? In your head. Your own private head. Just because it’s in your head doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

I BROUGHT YOU HERE.

The voice pauses.

A beating pulse of pain in Bob’s head.

An invitation to litany.

I BROUGHT YOU HERE.

And Bob responds:
To make me okay.

YOU HAVE A PURPOSE.

To be okay.

I BROUGHT YOU HERE.

To you. To you.

YOU HAVE A PURPOSE.

To arm myself.

And Bob takes up the Glock 21 and its box of cartridges. He closes the drawer, and he uses his boyhood skill to reengage
the lock. And he thinks:
Dwayne’ll never know. He won’t even miss his weapon till the Viet Cong bust in and then he’ll know and he’ll go
Oh shit
and they’ll cut off his head.

Earlier this morning, as Pastor Dwayne negotiates Bob’s release into his care, Robert reassures Darla that she needn’t go to the hospital today—his father would surely be embarrassed to be seen in an invalided state—and she goes off on her run. Robert is drinking his coffee at the kitchen island, aware still of the spot on his cheek where Darla kissed him good-bye. A utilitarian kiss, surely, conveying gratitude for a courtesy rendered, but it landed wetly there, as if her lips were parted. Perhaps not so surprising; she is, after all,
ardently
grateful. He can well understand her gratitude. He doesn’t want to go either, for a low-grade dread won’t stop niggling at him over this visit.

He takes the last sip of his coffee and carries his cup to the sink. The dread is not just about his father, but about his mother as well. And thinking of her, he thinks of the index card.

He turns from the sink and realizes where the card is. He puts his hand in his pocket and draws it out. She has written
James.
What was in her head? Is her use of his never-used formal name a rebuke of her other son? An attempt to distance herself, shield herself? But the card was intended for Robert’s eyes. It’s just another dramatic pose. Beneath is a phone number with a 705 area code.

This will be a day rife with choices between one unpleasant option and another. The present decision: call his brother after all these years and risk actually having to deal with him, or incur further implorings from his mother to help reconcile the family. The latter will be tedious in a familiar way. The former is disturbing in being so unfamiliar. But the prospect of a call to Jimmy at least stirs Robert’s morbid curiosity. If the conversation goes badly, so be it. Robert will simply hang up the phone and that will be that till they’re all four of them dead.

Robert takes the phone from its cradle near the foyer and carries it to the living room. He sits in the recessed window seat at the opposite end from the French doors to the veranda.

He dials.

Jimmy grasps the phone at the first ring.

He is sitting at his kitchen table, facing the forest. The phone was already beside him. Linda rose early and was gone when he came downstairs. Her note said that Becca was having a meltdown. Jimmy has been expecting Linda to call and check in, as the two of them were intending first thing this morning to discuss a long-overdue switch from DSL to UPS Canada. The expectation of her call was strong enough that he has not looked at caller ID.

With a voice thick with spousal familiarity he says, “Yes?”

The resultant beat of silence straightens him up in his chair. Somehow he knows it’s Florida again.

Robert was expecting—was hoping—to leave a barebones message on an answering machine and put the burden of all this onto his brother. But the sudden, surprisingly familiar,
surprisingly warm voice ratchets instantly into their shared past. Robert knows the warmth isn’t for him. Not that this disappoints him. His brother was simply expecting someone else. For a moment Robert thinks to hang up.

But instead he says, “Jimmy?”

Jimmy doesn’t recognize his brother’s voice immediately.

Robert understands the next few moments of silence as
It’s you, is it? What the hell are you doing, calling me?
Robert almost hangs up.

But the voice registers now on Jimmy. “Robert?”

“Yes.”

They both fall silent.

The same impulse stirs in Jimmy that prompted him to simply erase yesterday’s message. Touch the button. Keep the dead in their graves. He does not consciously consider this, but the years have worked away some of the softer rock of his brother’s estrangement. It’s still bouldered up in his head. But not like his mother’s. So he says, “Mom put you up to this.”

“Of course.” As soon as he says it, Robert hears the easily inferred subtext:
I would not be speaking to you otherwise.
He did not intend it.

But Jimmy does make the inference. “You did your duty,” he says.

In the thumping finality of Jimmy’s tone, Robert hears his brother’s subtext—
So now that you’ve done it, hang up
—and Robert regrets his part in turning the call so quickly into this. They’re on the phone together after forty-something years. No matter how it came to pass, why not say a few things?
Robert does not hate his brother. He is not angry with his brother. Or even disappointed in him. Over the years Robert has come simply to feel nothing. As if his brother died. Died pretty young—right after college—before the two of them had a chance to mature comfortably into an adult, brotherly friendship. He’s dead, and whatever grieving that entailed is long over with. No one even visits the grave anymore.

But his brother is alive at the other end of the line. So Robert says, “This isn’t about her.” He pauses, not quite knowing how to further soften things.

Jimmy says, “Is he dead, then?”

“No.”

“Is it all overblown?”

“No. Just not dead
yet.
”

“I have no interest in seeing him. Dead or alive.”

“I suspect he feels the same way.” This didn’t come out the way Robert wanted.

Jimmy does not reply. He thinks:
At least he’s saying it straight.

But Robert tries to fix it: “Not that it means a damn thing to anyone, what he feels.” And he thinks:
That sounds sarcastic. Critical.

And Jimmy thinks:
So much for straight.

Robert says, “I admire that in you, not giving that particular damn.”

“What?” Jimmy draws the word out to clearly mean
Bullshit.

Robert considers bailing now.

But he doubles down. “I admire it and I share it.”

“When did that happen?”

“We’re neither of us twenty-two anymore.”

“You figure you actually grew out of trying to please him?”

“The price was too high,” Robert says. He has not put it this way to himself. The banyan and the man in the dark have been too close to him lately. They were big-ticket items on the bill he paid.

The words surprise Jimmy too. This is an admission he could not have expected.

The consequent silence between the brothers persists long enough that Robert finally says, “Are you there?”

“I am,” Jimmy says.

Robert realizes he is standing at the veranda doors. He does not remember rising and crossing the room. He is looking at his live oak but has not seen it till this moment.

Jimmy is standing at the kitchen window. A hundred yards off, the white pines are jammed close, side by side, like a cordoned crowd before a burning building. For many years he understood his brother’s defining act that Labor Day afternoon as a betrayal. He thinks:
Not from his point of view. It was an act of loyalty. Behind his eyes, he was being William Quinlan’s loyal son. His only son. Of course the price was too high.

“I won’t come,” Jimmy says.

“I understand,” Robert says.

“You know it was different for me with him.”

“I know.”

“It was different for me because of how it was for you.”

Robert might have expected this from Jimmy but not so simply or directly. Where they both now are, in mind and heart, is the result of way too much life lived incommunicado. Robert realizes they’re teetering on the brink of forty-six years’ worth of unexpressed blame and justification, anger and regret, jealousy and insecurity.

Jimmy has come to much the same realization.

Neither wants to tumble into all that.

Both, though, in spite of the telephonic silence swelling in their heads, are reluctant simply to hang up.

This time it’s Jimmy who says, “You there?”

“I’m here,” Robert says.

They know a little something about each other, the knowledge having been arrived at in the same way. At some point in the last few years, at some moment late at night, pajamaed and weak-willed, caught up in the technogeist and visited by a soap-operatic curiosity about the past, each began to Google names. For Robert: the lenient commanding officer at MACV in Hue, who had his own girlfriend in a back alley room and who was glad just to get Robert back alive at Tet, and who died in 1998 after two decades as an insurance executive in Omaha; Lien, who was untraceable; a sloe-eyed girl from high school; and Jimmy. For Jimmy: Mark Satin, the director of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme; the first woman Jimmy slept with after he and Linda sensibly established how freely free love would remain in their lives; Heather, whose Facebook picture album was full of pub parties and her child; and Robert.

Jimmy says, “I understand you teach.”

Only for a moment does it surprise Robert that Jimmy knows something about his present life. He realizes, from his own knowledge of Jimmy, that there need be nothing sentimental about this, much less affectionate.

“Yes,” Robert says. “At Florida State University. History.”

“Sounds like where you’d go from Tulane.”

Robert hears, as well:
Not to Vietnam.

Though Jimmy did not intend this.

Robert says, “American history. Usually Southern. Early-twentieth-century particularly.”

“I saw your bio at the school site.”

“And you make leather goods,” Robert says.

“I do.”

“Bags.”

“And other things. But bags are our specialty.”

If Robert knows about this, so does their mother, and Jimmy almost adds:
So does she own one?
But there is no way to ask that and make it simultaneously clear that he doesn’t give a damn.

Robert almost says something about the glowing reviews and press coverage at Jimmy’s website, about the special things Jimmy does to the leather, but Robert can’t immediately shape those words concisely or clearly and maintain the appropriate tone of benignly tepid small talk.