Perfume River (20 page)

As Robert approaches the New Leaf in the early dark he does not immediately recognize the shapeless hulk sitting at a table near the door. Robert’s old man is too much with him, though his overt thoughts have taken refuge in the trivial: how chilled he feels though the air is mild; how fragile his eyes have been this past year or so, with the lights inside the co-op seeming far brighter than they likely are. But as the hulk becomes a man and clarifies its face, Robert’s recognition of him instantly evokes a recollection of Bob’s parting question three days ago:
You know my old man?

Perhaps this should make Robert keep on walking. Perhaps he should avoid Bob this time. But only his mind engages this option. His body veers at once toward the man of hard times, the man a decade too young for Vietnam, the man of responsibilities in Charleston, the man whose father can come
sharply and unbidden to his mind. Robert stops before him and says, “Hello, Bob.”

“Hello, Bob,” the man says.

Bob’s bandaged forehead fully registers now on Robert. “Are you all right?” he asks.

Bob pulls back tight at the chest, as if the question is out of line.

“Your head,” Robert says.

Bob loosens, humphs. “My head. My head got assaulted by a mystery man with a shovel.”

“Damn. How’d it happen?”

“Not worth saying.”

“You got help?”

“With my head. Not with the son of a bitch.”

“You need anything for it?” Robert figures to buy him something for the pain.

“Revenge would be good,” Bob says.

He sounds serious. Robert hesitates, recognizing the need for caution in replying to this, though nothing comes to mind. He’s saved by his cellphone ringing.

“Sorry,” he says to Bob, pulling the phone from his pocket and lofting it in explanation of his apology. He turns, paces a few feet away in the direction of the parking lot.

The cellphone screen says: Kevin Quinlan.

As often happens with grandfathers, William was warmer with his grandson than he’d ever been with his sons. As Robert is well aware. Kevin and the old man were close. Robert should have planned this out. How to say it.

The phone rings again. He answers. “Kevin?”

“Dad. What’s the news?”

How even to begin? Here at the end of this difficult day, it eludes Robert for a moment that Darla already talked to the kids, right after the accident. “Your grandfather fell,” he says.

“Mom said. We’ve been Googling broken hips.”

It’s going on three weeks since Kevin last spoke with Robert, normally a weekly Sunday tradition. His son has been busy with work, no doubt. Which is very good. As a boy more a Lego kid than a book kid, as a man Kevin saved his small architectural firm in the recession by guiding it into associated general contracting. Robert longs simply to ask him about that, about how his work is going, about how busy he must be. Robert knows he can’t. And for what he
must
say, he’s far from having
any
words, much less the right ones.

“Looks serious,” Kevin says.

“Yes.”

“Did the surgery go okay?”

“The surgery itself went fine.” Robert hesitates.

“Itself?”

Restless with his clumsiness, Robert rolls his shoulders, turns around. “He’s dead.”

Robert is now facing Bob but is unaware of him. Bob is quite aware of Robert. This abrupt announcement has rung clearly in the dark. Someone is dead.

Kevin is silent for a moment. And a moment more.

Robert turns around again, faces the parking lot. “I’m sorry. Sorry for your loss. Sorry for just blurting it.”

“No,” Kevin says. “It’s okay. I know this must be hitting you hard. Harder than me. Your Pops.”

Now Robert goes silent.

“What happened?” Kevin asks.

“A blood clot, as I understand it. First time they stood him up, it went straight from his leg to his heart.”

“Jesus.”

More silence. Robert grows restless again, paces the edge of the sidewalk in front of the New Leaf.

Kevin says, “How’s Grandma?”

“Being Grandma.”

“Holding up then.”

“Holding up.”

Robert hears sounds on Kevin’s end of the phone: a door slam; sharp voices, recognizably his grandson and daughter-in-law.

“Excuse me,” Kevin says to Robert, and then, muffled, “Jake. I’m talking. It’s important.”

Jacob lately turned twenty. And yes, as grandfathers can be, Robert is unreservedly warm with him, though in this case he has nothing to make up for, as he has always been warm with his son as well. For most of Jake’s life, however, the warmth has flowed mostly from a distance. For those years, Kevin and his family have lived a long day’s drive away, which in practical terms has meant Sunday phone calls and four visits a year, diminishing in the past decade to two.

Kevin returns to Robert. “Sorry,” he says.

“Jake is home?” After two years at a community college, he’s been away on a construction job.

“Temporarily,” Kevin says in a voice fraught with something it isn’t ready to get into.

In the following beat of silence Robert stops pacing.

He prefers to talk now about his grandson.

But Kevin says, “When’s the visitation?”

Robert’s restlessness returns, propels him in the direction of Bob. “Monday evening. The funeral’s Tuesday.”

“Where?”

“Tallahassee.”

“I’ve got a crucial meeting Monday morning. We may have to come straight to see him.”

“Tillotson Funeral Home on Apalachee,” Robert says.

Bob hears this too.

Robert becomes vaguely aware he’s within earshot. He stops, turns away again as he adds, “Anytime after six. There’ll be food. Your grandmother wants it to feel like a real wake.”

“Granddad won’t like that,” Kevin says, though Robert hears no irony in his voice, only sadness.

“No he won’t.”

“I won’t be telling funny anecdotes about him,” Kevin says.

“He’ll appreciate that.” Robert hears his son puff at this, no doubt ready to weep. He thinks Kevin will want to do that privately; he’ll want to keep the tears from his voice. So
Robert says, “Sorry to be abrupt but I have to go now. I love you. See you Monday.” And he ends the call.

Robert puffs too.

He stares sightlessly into the parking lot for a few moments, puts the phone in his pocket, remembers Bob, and turns back toward the man, half expecting him to be gone.

But Bob is there.

Robert approaches again, stops before him.

Bob raises his face. “Someone’s dead?” he says.

“My father,” Robert says.

Bob feels a rising in his brain like the first rise of gorge, a dizzying bloat, but he forces it down. Far down, without even identifying it.

“Have you eaten?” Robert asks.

“Not for a while. Not tonight.”

“I haven’t either. Shall we?”

Sometimes when Bob’s next meal is certain; sometimes when an Upstander acts natural around him, like this one is acting, with nothing even vaguely resembling
that look
going on in his face; sometimes when Bob has just struggled for a while with the way his life has gone and the poison that recently wanted to rise has been pushed back down; sometimes when any of these things happen but especially when they all happen at more or less the same time, Bob can find himself suddenly thinking straight like he used to and having acceptable words to speak and making a pretty good impression on somebody. This is one of those times.

Bob says, “It’s my turn to pick up the tab. But I’m afraid that’ll make for slim pickings tonight.”

Robert is surprised at Bob’s banter, but Robert’s consequent smile contains no incredulity, no irony, no patronage. For Bob, his banter has carried a risk: Making an unexpected good impression on an Upstander can also provoke a version of
that look.
But the other Bob shows no trace of it, only a smile like he’d give anybody, and Bob is grateful for that.

“I’ve got it covered,” Robert says.

As Bob rises from his chair, something occurs to Robert. When the man is standing, Robert extends his hand. “We never got past ‘Bob.’ I’m Bob Quinlan.”

“I’m Bob Weber.”

They shake on this.

So the two Bobs find their way to a corner table inside the New Leaf, well away from the handful of other diners, and they sit with beans and rice before both of them.

“I’m glad you made me think of this,” Robert says, nodding at his plate, though he chose it out of sympathetic deference to Bob’s teeth. “I used to love beans and rice.”

Bob has never loved it. “When was that?” he asks.

“You’d think it’d be growing up in New Orleans. But my mother was more potatoes than beans. It was in the army. Basic training.”

He’s army.
Bob’s straight thinking suffers a little blip. This man before him has already blurred, now and then, into Calvin.

Robert says, “Of course in basic, you can fall in love with a tepid shower and dry socks and sharing a cigarette, though you don’t even like to smoke.”

Bob is working hard now to keep straight. He’s got a little litany for this from some counselor or other.
This is this; this isn’t that. This is now; this isn’t then. It seems the same but it’s different.

Okay.

He thinks he has a grasp on things and he can move on. But he hears himself lingering. “So you were in the army?”

Robert nods. “Fort Polk, Louisiana.”

Bob looks hard into Robert’s face. This is not his old man. This is another guy. He’s not even an Upstander but an actual stand-up guy. They’re eating food together. They’re talking straight. Bob can ask this thing. “Did you go to war?”

Robert falters, briefly, but long enough for his voice to thicken and sadden and soften from the past twenty-four hours. “I went to Vietnam,” Robert says.

And Bob, who still fears dark hints about unspeakable secrets, instead has just heard a tone in this voice he never expected, hears this other Bob clearly going:
Let’s not make a big thing of it.
And going:
There may be guys who get fierce over this but it sure ain’t me.
And going:
I’m just fucking sad about the whole fucking thing.

Bob is fucking sad too. And Bob feels his mind straighten. He says, “Your father died?”

The man hesitates again. Bob clutches up. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked. And though he expected his own father
to show up a few moments ago over Vietnam, it’s now that Calvin steps into the room and strides this way. He stops just behind Bob’s shoulder, and Bob is afraid this sad man before him will suddenly see Calvin and he’ll go holy shit and he’ll bolt. But instead the man says, “He died this morning.”

Now it’s Bob who goes holy shit. He thinks:
So what are you doing having beans and rice tonight with the likes of me?
But he asks, “How?”

“A blood clot to the heart. He was in the hospital.”

Calvin vanishes.
Fucking poof.
“I don’t trust hospitals,” Bob says.

“That’s probably smart.”

For a time now, they eat their food in silence. Robert feels odd. Finally he has spoken of his service today, though spoken to a stranger, to a man of hard times, to a man who could not have known Vietnam directly. Though Robert has spoken of small things. But small things bind men at war as well, bind them just as certainly as they are bound by spilled blood. The man he has spoken to: Did he serve in another war perhaps? Unlikely. By the look of him, he was of the wrong generation for Afghanistan or for either Iraq, unless he was a lifer. Robert almost asks, but he doesn’t.

The two men go on eating. And Robert goes on wondering about Bob. The way Bob’s father came upon him a few days ago, Robert figures his neglected responsibilities in Charleston might have to do with his old man.

Robert works at his basic-training food for a few bites, trying to put all this aside. But he knows Bob is a man of
suffering, of wrong choices, of lost chances. Also a man with limited options. Robert is keenly aware that no one’s options to redeem a lost chance are more limited than his own. He does not quite think of it this way, he simply follows the impulse, but the effect is the same: To deal with your own problem, meddle with somebody else’s.

Sensing, however, that the meddling needs tact, Robert begins, “So you’re from Charleston?”

“Yes.”

“Been gone a long time?”

“Years.”

“Any folks back there?”

That is a sore point for Bob right now. A sore point anytime. He shrugs.

“Your father still alive?” Robert asks.

Okay. Okay. This other Bob’s own father died just this morning. Bob is still thinking straight enough to see that. But he wants to stay straight and the question is starting to drag him aside. He realizes time is passing. He realizes he’s not saying anything. He touches his forehead, where the sizzle has resumed.

Robert finds himself ready to buy Bob a bus ticket. Send him back to Charleston to find his father. Advise him to use the bus trip to figure out everything he’s got to say to the old man before it’s too late. Even if it’s
Fuck you.

But Bob’s still not talking. He’s flailing in his head for things to think about other than what the other Bob and his dead father would have him think, and the oil drum fire in his
forehead gives him something: Maybe on the next cold night he’ll take a little walk to check out the groundskeeper’s storage room at the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church. Check to see who might have returned to the scene of the crime.

Robert senses the shift in Bob. He senses his mistake. Pressing about a father is wrong. The bus ticket is wrong. But the impulse to fund Bob suggests another plan. A way to actually help. “Have you got a place to sleep tonight, Bob?” he asks.

Bob’s reflexes on matters of food and shelter are strong. This question, in that tone of voice, from a stand-up guy, casts off, for the moment, both Calvin and revenge. “No I don’t, Bob,” he says.

“Can you make good use of a week in a motel?”

The answer to that, for Bob, can be a little complicated. But on balance, yes. “Yes,” he says.

Instantly a practical problem presents itself to Robert. He hesitates, recognizes a likely expert sitting before him, but doesn’t know how to ask. “Do you have a place in mind …” He gets this far and realizes he could have just made that the question. Unfortunately his tone kept the thing open-ended.