Perfume River (8 page)

“Can you say where it was that we picked you up?”

Bob blinks hard at this question. For a moment he hears it coming from Pastor Dwayne. But it’s the face.

The face is waiting.

Bob figures the face probably has some power over him for now. For ill or for good. Bob’s hungry. His bones ache from the chill. He probably needs this guy to help. Bob should answer.

“Bloodied by the Lamb Hospital,” he says.

Instantly he knows he somehow bungled it. Wrong sort of place. “Gospital,” he says.

Not right.
“Gospel
,
”
Bob says. “The Bloody Lamb Full of Gospel.”

Clarity. Clarity.

The face has
that look
again.

“That’s close enough, isn’t it?” Bob says. “I’m not crazy and I’m not stupid.”

The face fixes itself and says, “Okay. Just rest.” It drifts away from Bob’s view.

Bob closes his eyes. He feels the motion all around him. He is being carried along fast now. No bumps. A straight line to somewhere. And he feels his father’s arm go around his shoulders, like it can sometimes do. As always, that gesture only makes Bob ache. Ache and ache. And he thinks of standing in the night in front of their single-wide, lit by street-light, standing side by side with his father, the man’s arm around him, and there’s a tree growing nearby, a jungle tree that sprung up there in the trailer park and nobody gets wise to it till it’s too late, and in that tree is a Viet Cong, a sniper, a helluva shot of a sniper, and the VC squeezes his trigger and sends out a single round that crashes into one side of Bob’s head and out the other and then into his father’s head, and he and his old man die together, right there and then, standing there just like that next to each other.

And as that phantom sniper’s bullet spins through Bob’s brain, Robert passes the concertina fence at the federal prison on Capital Circle, half a mile north of the parkway, the fence a thing his mind has always known to ignore, in its evocation of a military perimeter. But it’s not ignorable with the issues of
this past night and this morning. His eyes know to hold on the road ahead, know to prevent even a glance to the side, but the periphery is always there for the seeing, and he is quite aware now of the four rows of razor wire spiraling along beside him, and with them Vietnam spins near, and a deep-driven voice inside Robert whispers:
You are a killer.

He does not acknowledge it. Does not let this event play itself over, as it has done a thousand times in these five decades, in dreams, in near-sleep, in full waking obsession. It is this he fights off as he drives to his hospitalized father: Robert is huddled in the deep dark of the banyan tree. Outside are the sounds of pitched battles, none of them immediately nearby, the heaviest across the river. He wraps his left arm around his drawn-up legs, hugs them closer, and they press the pistol in his right hand more tightly against him, the fit of the weapon in his palm and the weight of it upon his chest making him feel oddly calm. Though his mind knows how foolish this is. The enemy is rushing through the city, filling it as if the Perfume River has risen and breached its banks. The tree and the pistol will soon fail him. If he is to live, he needs to think this out. Surely the North’s night offensive is focused on the key military positions in the city: the airport; the South’s division headquarters in the old Citadel across the river; and the place where Robert belongs, the MACV compound. If those places fall, particularly MACV, Robert is dead anyway. If they survive the night, Robert is dead if he cannot make his way back. Finding his way back will be vastly more difficult in daylight. He cannot stay where he is.
He must use the cover of night to at least find another hiding place, nearer MACV.

All of this is preamble. Usually when the event coils through Robert’s head like concertina razor wire, the decision to emerge has already been made. The next few essential moments travel on their own. He closes his eyes. He turns his head, cocks it, trying to focus his hearing in the direction of MACV: AK-47s, M16s, grenades launched and exploding. Robert pushes those sounds away into the background. He listens nearby. Nothing. The rush of dark-clad bodies just beyond the tree seems to have ended. He takes a deep breath. He lets go of his legs, stretches them out, takes another breath. He rises. He clicks the pistol’s safety lever forward. He holds the weapon before him, ready to fire. He steps from the tree. Though his eyes are dilated to the dark, nothing is clear on this overcast night, not pocket-park sward or trees or alleyway beyond or huddled city shapes all around, everything is smeared together in the tarry night. He must find his way through. He pauses. And from somewhere behind him and to his right a white flare rises, rushing to its apogee, far enough away that its light simply dapples through the trees and so Robert can see but he cannot see, and there is movement to his left and he looks and a shape is there, half a dozen paces away and it is a man clad in shadow and instantly Robert’s hand is moving and he is squeezing at the trigger and the pistol pops and jumps a little in his hand and it levels and pops again and again and the shape flies back into the dark and Robert hears the shape—the man—hears the man thump onto the ground, and Robert turns and runs.

And why should this man whose face he never saw, who surely was a Viet Cong, who surely, moments later, would have done the same to him if Robert had not shot first, why should this man thrash still inside Robert?
You are a killer
, Robert whispers again to himself from somewhere deep in the dark, somewhere invisible in the trees. But so many men have had to reconcile so much more, so many killings, so much blood that they have spilled in some far place where there was no alternative except to let their own blood be spilled, brought into this situation by their country, in the name of and for the protection of all that they and their families, now and for generations before, have held dear. And later on this day in Hue and on the next day and on the next, first in the streets and then safe among his own in the MACV compound, Robert will shoot and shoot and it is not entirely clear if he has killed again but he probably has. But this one, this one dark figure will not simply die, will not allow himself to be buried in the psyche the way most of all the millions who have died in wars have been buried inside most of all the millions of their killers. Why? Because Robert did not go to Vietnam to do this. Because he had a graduate school deferment and he let it go and so the army gave him a choice: to enter into officers’ training and risk a combat assignment or enter as an enlisted man and select his own army occupation. So he chose not to kill. He went to Vietnam to slide away to the side, to land and work and fly home as one of the eight out of ten who goes to war and never kills, who never experiences any actual battle, who never fires a weapon. Who goes to war to cook or repair or fuel or type or drive or warehouse or launder or telegraph; or
goes to study and analyze, like doing the research he loves; who goes to war and sleeps and eats and drinks and writes letters and listens to music and falls safely in love in another country with an exotic girl and writes a resume and plans a future life and goes home; who goes to war to please your dad, to receive your dad’s approval, to make your dad proud, to win your dad’s love.

You didn’t have to kill to do that.

Robert has never told his father about the banyan tree. About the man he shot in the dark.

You are a killer.

Still. Still. So many men had it figured out that way, thinking they would be one of the eight in ten who never engaged in actual combat, but ended up having the fight come to them, having an army—not just men, not just a solitary man but an army—having an enemy army come at them and their pals, and then everyone did this thing together, so many men ended up killing, ended up killing other men, ended up turning into killers, many times over. But somehow so many of those men—surely so many; just look at all the veterans who apparently are leading routine lives, more or less happy lives, lives full of all those values we putatively fought for—so many were able to figure out how their killings were outliers, were acts apart from who they really are, so many somehow figured out how to live the rest of their lives as men who are not, in fact, killers, are anything but killers.

But when Robert emerged from his tree, this was not an enemy army before him. This was one man. A solitary man. A few paces away in the dark. A man who simply was there.
A man who simply moved. A man who could have been anyone. Maybe a frightened boy. The Viet Cong recruited boys. Maybe he was solitary because he was running away, ready in that moment to make some sort of separate peace, one man to another. Worse: maybe not a Viet Cong at all. Maybe no enemy at all. Maybe a man who minutes ago had been hiding in his home in the alleyway. Or hiding in another tree.

Robert had not seen a weapon.

Though that proved nothing. It was too dark. And the North’s soldiers who had only recently passed through would certainly have killed Robert. What the hell was that man doing there? The great likelihood was that he was a soldier like all the rest, and for Robert to have hesitated would have been for Robert to die. Nearly a decade ago, Robert’s own Florida passed the first stand-your-ground law: If you find yourself in a situation where you reasonably fear that someone is about to kill you or seriously injure you—no matter where you are—you have no obligation to retreat. You can kill. You can kill and you are innocent. You are innocent.

Robert and Darla have spoken several times about how they despise this law.

Robert has not spoken with Darla about how he has quietly invoked this law over and over to try to make that voice inside him fall silent.

He has never told Darla about the killing.

Five miles of urban-sprawl businesses have passed like white noise and now Robert crosses over the interstate. The faint quaver of the overpass, the rush of traffic beneath him,
snap him back to the car, to his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

“It was a fucking war,” he says aloud. And to himself:
What’s wrong with you? What kind of man are you? It was the Tet Offensive. I killed a Viet Cong who would have killed me.

He loosens his grip.

He takes a deep breath.

He considers the gravity of his father’s situation. Eighty-nine years old. A broken hip. A bad heart. A smoker’s lungs. And this thought surges in Robert:
At least I didn’t let him down. I went. Especially with Jimmy doing what he did. If Dad dies now, at least there is that.

Robert doesn’t quite go so far as to say to himself,
He was proud of me.
Though he lets himself assume it. William Quinlan never went so far as to say that. Not in those words. But the things he might have said, the things Robert wanted him to say, by the very nature of those things—intense, tender, vulnerable feelings unbecoming to a man of the era and of the sort that his father was—those very things kept him quiet.

And as the incident in the dark in Hue recedes in Robert, he notes that neither has his father ever spoken of the killing he himself did. He did kill. Unquestionably so. He was an infantryman. Indeed, William has rarely spoken of the war at all to his family, other than to say he was there, other than to speak generally of its grandness and its righteousness.

Robert stops at a red light.

Rarely to his family. But not never. His father puts an arm around him. And an arm around Jimmy. Robert is nine years
old, his brother seven. Pops is sitting in a chair on the porch of the house on Clay Square and the two brothers are standing. He pulls them to him, then lets them go, but it is clear they are to stay where he’s put them, at whisper distance. He says to them, low,
Boys, it’s time.
He smells of bourbon. It’s late on a spring afternoon. The shadow of their house has crossed the street and entered the park.
You know I was in the war. You should know what I went through for you. Can you imagine how scary it was? I want you to think of this, boys. I was with the Third Army under a great American general named Patton, and we were sweeping toward Berlin. We were in the outskirts of a city called Bingen. The Nazi troops were falling back. The enemy, you understand. So there was a house we thought they’d been using as a headquarters. A small house but with an upper floor. I went up. No one was there. Nothing of interest, and so I was ready to come back down the stairs.

Their father stops now. Takes a deep breath. Puts his arms around them again, draws them closer, and he says,
Now pay careful attention.

He lets them go, but delicately, so that they remain even nearer to him.

So I am still in the upper room and I head for the stairway and I start down. Not particularly hurrying. Down a few steps, a few steps more. Then I’m on the bottom floor. And I’ve been thinking maybe I should look around down here as well. But I don’t. For some reason I think to hell with it and I go to the front door and I step out.

He stops one more time and says,
Now, boys, I want you to start counting seconds. You know: One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Like that. You know?

They nod.

And while you count I want you to imagine me moving across a little porch of this house and down into the yard and then taking a few more steps. But not many, not big. I’m going slow
,
‘cause everything was okay inside. Are you ready?

They are.

And they begin to count.

After
Three Mississippi
he says,
I’m stepping off the porch.

Four Mississippi.

I’m barely in the yard
, he says.

Five Mississippi.

I took a step.

Six Mississippi. Seven Mississippi.

Two more steps.

Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi.

BOOM!
Pops barks the word and claps his hands together and the two brothers jump and cry out.

Pops waits a moment. Lets them calm down. Then he says,
An artillery round hit the house and the whole place and everything in it was blown to smithereens. I was that close to being dead.