Perfume River (3 page)

Two nights ago it was cold and Bob had the place to himself. It was a hard walk. Tonight it’s cold again, but at the moment, with some things talked over, he feels pretty good. Pretty damn good. He’s got today’s newspaper folded in his pocket, a full copy abandoned on a table, waiting for him as he finished his coffee tonight. There’s a light in the storage room to read by. He’s not afraid to read the news. The meal and the coffee are sitting well in him, so his thoughts turn to the man who gave them to him, the man with the same name as his, the rangy older man with the John Wayne jaw:
You said it first, my name, and I thought for a second you somehow already knew I’m Bob and it turns out
you’re
Bob, and my father is Calvin, my father isn’t Bob, if you were my father I’d be Junior and I don’t know what I’d think about that, I think I wouldn’t like it, not at all, my father is Calvin, Cal, my mother is Marie, and what did you mean, Bob, about my having responsibilities in Charleston? Did you know me there? You another of my old man’s cronies are you? What do you want me to do about it?

“I never met you before in my life,” Bob says.

He stops walking.

He’s not feeling so good now.

Things are suddenly getting a little out of hand.

He realizes that.

This was a good man he met. Bob the stranger.

He needs to stop his mind.

He needs to sleep.

The church isn’t much farther.

He walks on and the streetlights are gone, they’ve been gone for a while and the dark is even darker but Bob hasn’t noticed till now. Still, it’s all right, he’s reconciled to the dark for this night, and up ahead now is an upspray of light as if rising from the earth, beaconing a message on another marquee, before the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church: GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL

Somehow this calms Bob for a time. Hardly from the sentiment. But he’s not only not crazy, he’s pretty smart. His mother was smart. Cal was too, in a shrewd sort of way. When Bob’s mind is flailing with deep issues, to hear deep issues turned into banality is a kind of mental speed bump for him. He slows down.

He gives the sign the finger as he goes by, and he finds he can focus now for a time, and he keeps his eyes lowered as he passes the central spire and the fake front columns on the stuccoed facade. He keeps his face down and he moves through the side parking lot and around back and to the separate community building and around to the back of that and to the door and he’s glad now it’s almost over. He will sleep. He can sleep.

He is at the door and he puts his hand to the knob and he turns it and the knob yields and then the door and he steps into a darkness smelling of cedar mulch and motor oil, and he stops, and he waits a moment for his eyes to adjust and he sees a swift movement of shadow out of the corner of his eye and hears a guttural bark of a voice and he hears nothing more, not even the clang of the shovel against his forehead.

In bed now, Darla inserts her iPod earbuds, and she and Robert switch off their lamps. Their Kindles have their own light. The tinny spill of Bach from his wife’s ears fades quickly from Robert’s awareness. Soon, however, he is reading the same few sentences over and over. He turns off his book.

“Good night,” she says, aware of the vanishing of his light in her periphery.

“Good night,” he says, though they have long ago agreed that the formality of his reply is unnecessary, since her head, at this point, is always full of music and she cannot hear him.

Nor do they kiss.

They are so very familiar with each other. And that familiarity has become the presiding expression of their intimacy.

Robert sleeps.

And he wakes.

He has been dreaming, but he does not remember a single image of the dream.

Not that he tries.

It is enough that he is awake.

The room is dark.

He turns his face toward Darla. He can make out—more kinesthetically than visually—the topography of her. She is lying on her side, facing away.

He gently pulls back the covers, eases his way from the bed so as not to disturb her, puts on slippers and robe, and he goes out of the room and along the hallway and down the stairs. He pulls his topcoat from the vestibule closet, enters the wide dark of the living room, and passes through the French doors and onto the rear veranda.

He stands at its edge. The moonless sky is clear and the stars are bright. His bare ankles are cold but his chest is warm. He once would have snuck a smoke here. He didn’t need Darla to persuade him to abandon cigarettes, even an isolated, open-air smoke or two. His father’s burr-grinder cough did that.

Now he simply puffs his breath into the starlight.

His oak stands before him in vast silhouette, its lower horizontal branches thick as most trees, thick as water oaks and pin oaks. On other nights, with or without cigarettes, he felt that his scholarly discipline, his life’s work, his very mind were made manifest in this tree. After all, it stood there through early-twentieth-century America, breathing oxygen into that era’s air. It even likely witnessed the birth and death of the Confederacy, perhaps even Andrew Jackson’s war on the Seminoles, Old Hickory’s ruthlessness thwarted by the tribe’s guerrilla elusiveness.

But on this night, as Robert folds his arms across his chest and squares himself to the oak, he feels the presence not of the ghosts of history but of Bob. Bob the illusory Vietnam veteran. He evoked Vietnam over Robert’s quinoa at the health food store and then, being illusory in that regard, couldn’t vent the war away. So it has settled back into Robert himself. For this, the veranda, facing the oak tree, is the wrong place to be tonight: a tree sits in the center of Robert’s Vietnam.

He unfolds his arms, thinks to turn, to retreat to bed. But he does not move. Instead, he wakes and it’s dark and a woman is beside him, naked and small, and she is waking too and the room is still heavy with the incense she has burnt for her dead. Robert has lingered with her, fallen asleep with her in a back street on the south bank of the Perfume River in the city of Hue. It is 3:40 in the morning, January 31, 1968, and they have woken to the sound of the North Vietnamese rockets and mortar rounds coming in from the mountains to the west.

Robert blinks hard against the memory.

He will not let certain things in.

He pats his pockets now, by reflex, as if he will find a cigarette, and he turns his face a little, breaking with his live oak.

But the woman lingers, still naked, in the dark of the room, lit through the window by a distant flare from across the rooftops.

And now he is throwing on his clothes. Hue was supposed to be different, traditionally spared by both sides. The targets of the North’s New Year’s offensive were thought surely to
have been revealed in the fighting that commenced this time yesterday. Surely it was all coordinated.

He is dressed and he and the woman are standing beside the bed.

Her name is Lien. Lotus.

She hands him something heavy. Metal. He knows the thing. It is a French .32-caliber pistol that belonged to her father.

Do Robert and the woman speak?

Of course they do.

He loves her.

But he will not remember more of her now.

And he is down the back stairs into the dead-fish stench of the alley and the AK-47s are popping from across the river. The Viet Cong. Or maybe even the North Vietnamese regulars. Though his job has been to count—men, weapons, from all the field intelligence that comes in—he thinks:
We don’t know jack shit about them, for all our counting.

He goes out into the street, and far down, under the streetlamps along the river, he sees the men moving. The men he counts. He thinks:
I am a dead man.

He turns and runs in the direction of MACV, the US compound, half a dozen blocks away. He rushes past storefronts and the passageways into rear courtyards and past the smells of mildew and dead fish and the smell of wood fires and from all directions now comes the din of weaponry, of small arms and RPDs and the whoosh and suck and blare of rockets, the sky flaring across the river, beyond the Imperial Palace walls—they
are hitting Tay Loc, the city airport to the north—and now he sees men before him, as well, a squad of dark-clothed men a block up the river and gunfire is crackling everywhere and now a needle-thin compression of air zips past his head and he lunges into an alley mouth and he is running hard and figures are coming to doorways and he thinks the local communist cadres are emerging, he thinks again that he is dead, and there is only darkness around him and the alley slime underfoot and he pushes hard, and if he is to die he’d rather not see it happening, so he doesn’t look right or left or feel any of the bodies coming out. He just runs and he runs and he is out of the alley and he is in a pocket park and standing before a great, dark form.

A banyan tree.

It is old and it is vast. Its aerial roots are thick as young trees and nuzzled together into their own dense forest, propping up a billowing dark sky of leaves, and there is a deep inner curve to the roots, and a turning, and in the direction of the MACV compound there is heavy small-arms fire now and he hears the AK-47s and he hears an answering M60 machine gun and the M16s and he knows what to do.

He enters the tree.

He moves into the turning and he puts his back to its roots and he sits and he draws his legs into him and he is in the dark. He can see around the out-curving columns of roots. Bodies appear, nearly as dark as the night, moving quickly past with a metallic rustle of weapons, and he pulls his head back, squeezes into himself. He closes his eyes and smells a dank wet-earth smell and something fainter beneath, an almost-sweetness, and a
little sharp thing in the nose, and he thinks of the girl’s incense and the dead she prays for. He knows this tree has killed another to live. These roots around him, holding him in the dark, began long ago by wrapping themselves around another tree, the strangler roots, embracing a living tree until it vanished, until it was dead inside the growing banyan. Rifles flare nearby and he presses back into the killing embrace of the banyan.

He holds the French pistol in his right hand, flat against his chest. He expects to die here.

Robert steps from his veranda.

He is panting heavily.

He has not let this happen for several years.

He moves across his lawn now, approaches his tree. He places both hands hard upon its trunk to stop their trembling.

He leans heavily there, waiting for this to pass.

But still he thinks:
I was not meant to be here. I was not meant to live this life I’ve led. I was meant to die long ago. Long long ago.

Darla wakes, opens her eyes. Her lids are heavy, a precious, fragile state for her in the deep middle of the night. She is on her back, and above her is only indecipherable dark. She lets her eyes close. The bed has stirred and it continues to stir. Her eyes open again and their heaviness has vanished. She turns her face and watches her husband’s form adjusting, arms and now legs and now arms again. She realizes he is doing this as
unobtrusively as he can. He was once much worse, returning from whatever it is that he does. He is trying. She would speak, but she does not want a conversation that would wake her up once and for all. If there is something on his mind and he is choosing not to volunteer it, it can wait till morning. She turns on her side, putting her back to him.

And she sees him for the first time. It is May 8, 1970, four days after the Ohio National Guard killings at Kent State. He sits alone at a bistro table in a corner of a coffee shop in downtown Baton Rouge. She figures she has him pegged: the stretchy slacks and the button-down, short-sleeved sport shirt could simply be the sartorial momentum of the LSU student dress code, only recently rescinded, but something else about him—perhaps the longer hair on top of his head and the new growth on the sides; perhaps his quiet, two-handed focus on his coffee; perhaps just that surge of intuition about a guy your pheromones tell you you’ll fall for—something—makes her figure they are PX clothes and a military whitewall haircut abandoned at last and a cup of better coffee than he’s had for the past two or three years. He is an ex-soldier.

Behind her, on Fourth Street, some of the thousand people who just marched on the state capitol are drifting by, stoked and chatty with righteousness. Enough of them are also crowded into the shop to justify Darla receiving her cup of coffee and then approaching this man with green eyes and disparately dark hair and a jaw as smooth and hard as monument marble.

He looks up at her, though slowly, as she draws near, as if he were reluctant to shift his attention from the coffee.

She plays her hunch. “It looks like you’ve wanted that cup of Community for a long time.” She learned quickly, as a New York girl first-year grad student, about the local coffee, ground and roasted on the north side of town.

“I’ve been away,” he says.

Darla looks around the crowded room as if checking the available seating. She knows it makes no difference; she’d be doing this anyway. Still, even though she has for several years been quite comfortable with her female empowerment in this new age, she chooses to portray, with the search, a practical reason for the question she is about to ask. She nods at the empty chair across from him. “May I?” she asks.

“Of course,” he says.

She puts her coffee cup on the tabletop and sits.

He stirs now in the bed next to her.

She stops this memory.

She is no longer sleepy. She needs to count bricks in an imaginary wall. She needs to take deep breaths and let them out slowly.

She thinks:
What prompted this bit of
recherche du temps perdu
? Not a small French sponge cake. Not even Community Coffee. Perhaps my Thai quinoa salad, though for its overspiciness rather than its latent nostalgia.

She can’t even muster an irony-arched half smile for herself. She would like to dismiss the past with this sort of smarty-pants joking. But that is a lifelong impulse she has lately come to see as cowardly. The fact is she clearly remembers falling in love with him. Loving him. Loving him and loving him.