Perfume River (12 page)

She takes the parcel from him, saying, “I was afraid also they killed Robert.”

She looks again into his eyes. She studies him closely but with her own eyes steady now.

In the center of his chest he trembles. Standing before her gaze, given that he feared for months that she was dead, he is slow to fully understand the trembling. He takes it simply for passion.

“He did help you?” she asks.

Robert does not understand.

She sees this.

“My father,” she says, lifting the parcel a little.

“He saved my life,” Robert says, wishing he could believe it was as simple as that.

She nods. Her eyes are growing bright from nascent tears.

He aches to lift a hand. To touch her face. But he knows what’s next. It was always to come to this. Surely it was. But they’ve lost so many nights already. And those nights still before him in this country—eighty-seven more, the count on the calendar on the wall beside his bed—now that she is safe, now that she is here, at least some of those nights could be made to feel as if he were never going to leave her. As if she could somehow go with him.

But he already understands there will be no more nights.

“I am glad,” she says. “My father can like you.”

“Could have liked,” he says. The man is dead. The correction is a wistful reflex. She has always asked that he correct her English. She has always wanted to be perfect in her English for him.

“My father could have liked you,” she says.

They wait.

He feels something shift in her.

“You understand,” she says. You must. You should. You will. You can’t.

“That you must go?” he says.

She smiles. She has heard herself leap in her words in a way that he should not have been able to follow. But he has. They have always understood each other. And so her smile quickly fades. And the tears begin to fall.

She does not wipe them away. She does not avert her gaze.

“I understand,” he says. And he feels his own eyes growing warm.

“I cannot see this,” she says. Very gently. He knows she means his tears.

He looks away to the river to hide them. The seemingly incessant clouds of Hue keep the water the color of cheap jade. Today, beneath an empty sky, the Perfume River flows blue.

He says, “You’ll leave Hue?”

“Yes,” she says.

He thinks he is in control of himself now. He looks back to her.

“I love you beaucoup much forever,” she says.

Before they can laugh at her irony—she has used the catchphrase of the bargirls—she touches his hand, a fleeting wisp of a touch, and she turns and walks quickly away.

Watching her go, he understands his earlier trembling. It was not entirely passion. The trembling would also have had him speak to Lien about the man he killed. She was the one person who might have been able to absolve him.

But it’s too late. And as he watches the white flutter of her
ao dai
, the long drape of her black hair as she leaves him, his trembling returns. Now, though, it is indeed passion. The last feeling he will ever have while his eyes are actually upon her is this ache to take her in his arms and hold her as close as he can.

In the following months, his active passion for Lien slowly faded. She was gone forever, irretrievable, this woman he’d loved. Whatever was uniquely left of her within him, he could not, would not consider. Dared not.

That was in another country. A country at war. He worked hard to see Lien as a
Vietnamese
woman. He focused on the
otherness
of Vietnamese women, on the seemingly universal kinesthetics of them—the feeling in his chest and arms and loins for their smallness, for their softness of parts and hardness of will, for the glide of them. And so all of those qualities faded from him once he returned to the States and to the women who had shaped his desire from boyhood. These Americans were the women—in their diversity, in the scale of them—who were imprinted on him. Then, in a coffee shop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he felt his physical desire embed
itself in a long-shared culture, in a shared cast of mind, in another woman’s uniqueness, an American woman. He was ready for Darla.

And now, in this dark room, on the night his father fell and began to hasten toward death, his remembrance of lost passion flows on in him like a river of cerulean blue and enters the sea: Darla, earlier this evening, as she emerges from her study. He stands at her door, as is their way. Whoever of them first notices that it has passed a certain hour will go to the other and wait at the door. And she emerges as she always does, with a faintly startled look as she returns to him from the realm of her mind, and she gives him a soft sigh, as if yes, the workday is through and there you are and I am glad. And he feels, as he sometimes does at this, a swell of tenderness. He felt it when he stood in her office door this evening and he feels it again now, in this moment, in this bed, and Robert wishes to take Darla into his arms and hold her as close as he can.

He turns onto his side.

She is lying with her back to him.

He pauses.

Between Robert and Darla, when did sleep begin to trump desire? It has. And thoroughly enough that even as he desires her now, this is not a question he asks himself. He simply pauses from the fact of it. Perhaps it began after a certain number of years together, after they had come to a certain bone-deep familiarity; perhaps there was a crucial time or two when he turned to her and she was sleeping and, in waking to his touch, she simply patted the beseeching hand and coiled back into
unconsciousness. Or perhaps it was she who first touched him in this way. For neither of them was it understood as a general policy. But something soon shifted. Being of a certain age, perhaps they indeed preferred their sleep and respected this preference in each other. And telling themselves it was only about this or that particular night, they did not realize what else might come of it.

Bob knows where he is. He is inside his head and his head is a deer tick swollen fat and he dare not move or a gnarled and hairy hand—it’s the hand of God, if you want to face facts, and Bob is ready to face facts—the hand of God will reach down and take his head between thumb and forefinger and He will squeeze and Bob’s head will explode with blood. All Bob can think to do is put his own hands on his head and try to hold it together. He draws his arms out from beneath the sheets, and he knows where he is. A thing he must learn over and over today, it seems. He’s in the eight-bed observation unit off the emergency room. He’s been here before for something or other. The place smells of his mother. Her Clorox. Her sponging it on kitchen cabinets, on counters, on the sink in their single-wide. Her hands smelled like this place. Always. Softly, she would grunt and growl and wheeze at the sponging, she would weep at the sponging. He puts his hands on his head, a palm over
each ear, his fingers reaching up, pressing hard until the bed can take him and he sleeps.

Then he wakes, and nearby a voice says, “Brother Bob.”

Bob begins to turn his head in that direction and the pain rushes like a breaker of blood into his right eye, crashing and foaming there.

A hand is upon his head.

This will be it. Finally. The big squeeze.

But the hand simply rests on him, and Bob focuses his eyes to see Pastor Dwayne, who is in the midst of a prayer, the details of which elude Bob. But presumably they are to fix all this.

“In the name of Jesus,” Pastor Dwayne concludes, and he draws his hand away. He smiles.

Bob’s head still hurts.

Pastor Dwayne says, “How are you doing, Brother Bob?”

“Brother Bob’s head hurts like a sonofabitch,” Bob says.

Pastor Dwayne maintains his smile. Even warms it a little. “The Lord spared you from serious harm.”

Bob says, “Have you found out who it was the Lord spared me from?”

“I’m afraid there’s no way to determine that. The man was long gone when we found you. As you well know, we freely offer that space to anyone in need.”

Bob’s body wants him to sit up in umbrage, but the pain in his head checks that impulse instantly.

“Be still now,” the pastor says. “I’m here to help you. The hospital will keep you for only twenty-three hours. That time
is almost up. But I’ve spoken with the social worker. They’d normally find you a halfway house for a few days. I’ve asked if I might take you in at the church, and they’ve agreed, if that’s all right with you.”

Bob pops a little breath in halfhearted assent. You always take the handout in front of you.

“After your head feels better, perhaps we can find you some work,” Pastor Dwayne says. “Our Heavenly Father brought you to us for a purpose.”

Bob would dispute this now if another sea wave of pain weren’t rolling through his head.
Heavenly or not, a father just wants to fuck with you.
Bob knows the pain has helped him out. Don’t push back at the old man if there’s anything more to be had from him.

And so by mid-morning Bob has an inflatable futon and a reading lamp and a New International Holy Bible in a conference room off the church office, converted to a temporary living accommodation so readily that he knows other Hardluckers have preceded him in this place. Bob is wearing flannel and denim, new to him, with the smell of cheap dry cleaning layered over intractable Goodwill funk. He has showered. He used the talcum powder set out for him. He has new underwear. He knows he better not stay.

Pastor Dwayne has blessed him and encouraged him to rest and to read today and to take his pain medicine, and he has promised a nice chat later this afternoon, when he has finished his day’s errands. In the meantime, Sister Loretta, the church secretary in the next room, will help him in any way he needs.

Sister Loretta, buxom and no doubt well talcumed, was standing in the conference room doorway beaming and nodding at him in assent through all of this encouragement, though now that Pastor Dwayne has gone on his way, she has returned to her desk and is presently on the phone talking to a friend. Her voice pitches suddenly lower, though Bob, bending near to the frosted glass panels edging the door, can still hear her speaking kindly of the poor unfortunate in the conference room who the pastor feels responsible for, but it’s okay, the friend should come pick Loretta up at noon, as the poor man is fast asleep. She can take an hour away. Pastor Dwayne won’t mind.

Shortly after noon Loretta is gone and Bob steps from the conference room. A distant corridor rings with hammering. A man in coveralls carrying a ladder passes by on the gravel beyond the office windows and Bob steps back to put the conference door between him and any possible glance.

The footsteps on gravel recede and all is quiet. Even the hammering stops for a few moments, and Bob stays where he is till it resumes.

He crosses the room, passes Loretta’s desk, and he opens the door into the pastor’s office.

Bob is not a thief.

He has not been a thief for decades, and even then it was for only a few years in his late teens. He never used a gun. Never a gun. He was quiet. He was an amateur. He stopped after a couple of whiffs of jail but before he had a permanent record.

He does not enter Pastor Dwayne’s office with the intent to steal anything. He does not have even a flicker of a thought to do so.

Now that he’s standing in the room, the door closed behind him, the bright chill silence of the January morning pressing against the windows, Pastor Dwayne’s massive mahogany desk crouching before him, Bob could not say why he’s come in here. Better simply to put on the sweater and overcoat and watch cap and gloves they’d gathered for him from some donation bin and to walk away right now, while no one is looking.

But this man Dwayne has found an empty La-Z-Boy in Bob’s head and has taken a seat and put his feet up. Though he’s playing it smarmy for the moment. When he stood before the fresh-scrubbed and newly clothed Bob, he explained about his errands and what he expected of Bob for the day’s activities, and then he stopped talking and he took a moment to look at Bob, up and down, and he said, “I see something in you.”

Maybe that’s why Bob is standing in the man’s office now.
Do you know me? Who the hell are you that you know me?
Bob will turn the tables on him. Figure
him
out.
I bet I know you.

The wall beyond the desk, between two windows looking into a tree line, holds a bronze cross up near the ceiling, and beneath are frames and frames.

Bob circles the desk and approaches.

A cluster of color photos. Dwayne and wife. Bob does not look at her face. Dwayne and his sons: young Dwayne and child boys; older Dwayne and teenagers; old Dwayne now and men. Arms around one another’s shoulders.

Bob moves his eyes sharply away from the family photos, all featuring that Jesus-aping loving father, Pastor Dwayne Kilmer. Bob’s gaze lands on another arrangement.

A diploma for a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Bob Jones University.

A photo of Pastor Dwayne shaking hands with the governor of Florida, the two men grasping hands but looking at the camera, the governor a bald man with a lunging, sappy smile like the smiles of the Hardluckers you need to watch out for in the shelters at night.

A typed letter, framed in gold plate. At the top is an eagle sitting on crossed rifles, the NRA logo.
Dear Pastor Kilmer. I am grateful to you for your support in our efforts to protect our Second Amendment rights. What our opponents do not understand is that we have a First Amendment only because we have a Second. Men of God such as yourself …

Bob skips to the signature. He cannot read it. The first name appears to begin with a great, curvy
P
and the rest is a tight march of undifferentiated letters that could be all
u
’s or
m
’s or
n
’s or
l
’s. Then Bob’s eyes slide to the right, to what he realizes is a companion frame, and he thinks he recognizes the square-jawed man speaking behind a lectern. Back to the letter. The logo. And yes. The man’s name is printed in small type beneath it. Not a
P
, in the signature. A fancy
C
. Charlton Heston. Bob’s old man loved this guy. Moses the gunslinger.