Perfume River (18 page)

And he finds himself needing to explain. To her. To himself. “You’ve admired how my spirit seems free,” he says.

He has more words but the effort of just these makes him pause.

She fills the pause, again softly: “Yes.”

“Free by ideology,” he says. “Free by protocol. Free by …” He searches for a word now. “… devaluing it,” he says. “
Thus.
Thus it’s devalued, the freedom.”

He stops. Tries to clear his head.

“I’m having trouble,” he says. “Putting it into words.”

“Do you have to?” she says.

Another invitation. He won’t ignore it, but he trusts it will stay valid for a few more moments. “I have to,” he says. “I think I understand. I was free because what my wife and I decided we were free to have wasn’t worth all that much.”

He finds that Heather has moved closer to him.

They are in each other’s arms.

And in the room above his shop Jimmy lies on his side, the fern frost on the window jaundiced by street-light, Heather spooned into him, her arm draped around his chest. He closes his eyes, discerns the soft touch of her nipples just beneath his shoulder blades.

He and Heather are quilted over, the room still cold. He’ll have her call someone to look at the furnace.

It seems to have been such a long long while since he had that thought yesterday. The flex of time.

And he thinks of dark matter, dark energy. How astrophysicists now understand that all visible matter—from the galaxies to our bodies to the strands of our DNA—makes up only a tiny percentage of the mass of the universe. How all of the rest of the matter and energy—unobservable, unrecordable, the dark 95 percent—somehow resides in the spaces formerly thought to be empty. How quantum physicists are beginning to theorize the existence of parallel worlds to explain the bizarre mechanics of matter in its smallest particles. How, as well, it’s known that our bodies are made up of atoms, electrons orbiting nuclei, with empty space in between, that our bodies themselves are mostly empty space. And so if dark matter and dark energy exist in the empty space between the stars, why should they not exist inside our very bodies? Are we not ourselves mostly dark matter and dark energy? And what if that’s where those parallel worlds reside?

Linda was wrong. Being with Heather won’t stop me thinking about what’s next. Linda was stupidly wrong: It’s not worry. For millennia we’ve all been thinking there’s a place for us other than the one we’re in, this savage place where we fight each other, consume each other. This place we must escape. From the sun to the moon to the earth, from Heather’s nipples to my shoulder blades, from her atoms to mine. In all the empty space within and between, there is consciousness, there is
existence. Impervious to war and betrayal and hardness of heart. It’s the place we all will run to.

“Are you awake?” Heather whispers.

“I am,” Jimmy says.

“What are you thinking?”

Only in his wish to answer her does he realize: “How it was I came to Canada.”

Heather tightens her arm around his chest. “I can’t hold you close enough,” she says.

The next morning Heather and Jimmy rise late, her daughter having spent the night with the grandmother, who is accustomed to sending the girl off to school. They have to rush to get ready to open the shop on time, tussling for first use of the bathroom basin, pausing to laugh at feeling like a couple already. Robert and Darla rise in their usual manner, having gone to sleep in their usual manner, Robert distracted, this time by his intention to speak to his father, and Darla sublimating with Bach. She is to go for her run and drive to the hospital on her own in the late morning. Robert will head up earlier, though after Darla has left the house he lingers for another bean-grinding and brewing and a second slow sipping of Ethiopian coffee, in his reading chair facing his oak. Peggy sleeps late in her one-bedroom assisted-living apartment at Longleaf Village, exhausted by her husband’s
pain, sorry the twin bed next to her is empty, dreading when it will not be. Bob is up early from his bunk bed at the Mercy Mild Shelter. He’s happy that North Florida is behaving in the way it often suddenly can, throwing off the cold, warming the morning. He makes his way to the woods near Munson Slough, where he will spend a couple of hours dry-firing his Glock, getting back his trigger control.

And a physical therapist at Archbold Memorial named Tammy, a former softball star at the University of Georgia, uncovers William with encouraging chatter about how tough he looks and how he’s going to muscle through this little episode. She unwraps his compression leggings and she straps a thick cloth belt around him, and she starts to get him up, get him vertical, get him on his feet with her help, just for a little bit, to prime his body to heal, to engage him in staying alive, to get him used to the cost. This is her specialty. She is a champ at this.

William is grumpy but compliant. He might think this is a good time in history to die, given what the world has come to, but he’s too pissed about it to succumb. So he is vertical now. And he feels something begin in the middle of the calf of his right leg. A pulling loose. Like an adhesive bandage that’s been on for too long being stripped off, beginning there in his calf and running now upward, behind his knee, and then curving to the inside of his thigh. It’s a good feeling. A letting go. But the rushing changes, as if the bandage finishes breaking away and something emerges from beneath it, a goddamn night crawler burrowing its way past his broken hip and up his spine, and William thinks,
What the hell is that
doing inside me?
but it moves too fast for a worm way too fast and the blood clot hits his heart and the engine seizes
in Papa’s Ford Runabout pickup, which is as old as me, and maybe this is when it finally dies, on this dirt road along Bayou Bernard and Papa has stripped off his shirt and has the hood up and he’s cussing like Mama won’t stand for, and now we’re sitting beside the bayou letting the Ford cool off and Papa cool off, and I’m a little behind him and sneaking peeks as usual at the slash of a scar below his left shoulder blade, and I been warned by Mama since I was toddling not to ask him, since the scar was from the Big War and full of bad memories, but today I do ask and he turns on me and his hands come up but he doesn’t hit me, he just gets quiet and he gets sad and he takes me by the shirt and pushes me over backward, but not hard not to hurt me just to tell me to shut up, and he’s weeping like a baby with me at the train station and I’m in my uniform and there’s another Big War, and as I put my duffel over my shoulder it hits me like a rifle shot in the brain what it is that he’s been carrying around all this time, the fact that his battle scar is in his back, it’s in his goddamn back, he turned his back, and so I turn my back on him, I turn my own goddamn back and I run away from this man and I’m going up the stairs in a house in Mainz, and it’s just mop-up, we haven’t yet found a living soul on this whole block, it’s only us Patton boys tidying up with the Third Army that’s about to cross the Rhine, and I’m checking the second floor, just for procedure’s sake, and I’m at the top of the stairs and there’s a doorway to my left and I step into it and across the room the window is bright behind him and he’s sitting tall there and I can’t see his face, I can’t read his face for the shadow but his Schmeisser is crosswise in his lap and his hands are
down but I don’t check where they are I just know they’re down but I don’t check if his shooting hand is near the grip and it’s all fast and my M1 is up and I’m squeezing and squeezing and the Kraut’s chest blows open and he flies back and he’s dead, and then I notice some little thing, no I don’t, not then, I just see it but I don’t really notice it, not then while I’m rushing inside over killing the enemy, rushing sweetly at that moment, sweetly like happens in a war, and it’s only years later, when my sons are about ten, about the age I was myself in the dying Ford, and it’s hot summer in the Ninth Ward and the afternoon thunderstorm has just passed and my boys take off their shoes to run barefoot in the wet grass, it’s then that I really notice the German soldier’s boots, which are sitting there beside him, the two boots straightened up side by side and his socks draped over them, his feet hurt, this guy, his feet hurt and he took off his shoes and socks so whatever is going to happen to him on this day at least his feet won’t hurt him so bad, and I turn away from my sons so there’s no chance they’ll glance back at me and see my eyes filling with tears, and not a week goes by for the rest of my years that I don’t think about that man and I squeeze the trigger and I squeeze and there is no rushing in me, no fucking sweet thing, my own chest cracks open and my heart seizes, and I come up the stairs and I step into the doorway and I see him sitting there and I notice his boots, and I take my hand off the trigger, I don’t squeeze the trigger, and the light behind him gets brighter but the shadow on his face fades away, and we look each other in the eyes, and it’s just two fellas in a sunny room

And William Quinlan is dead.

When the phone rings in the foyer, Robert is still sitting in his reading chair, his coffee mug empty for a while now. He’s not actively dreading his father. He’s not wavering in his intention to tell him. He’s just inert. Intending to overcome that. The dread driven deep. The wavering converted to dozy distraction: wondering if this lot of coffee beans is depleted yet at the roaster; watching the flash of cardinals beyond the veranda; thinking the room too warm and suspecting the weather has changed overnight. It takes a second ring of the phone to make him rise, and still there is no urgency in him, no sense of dread. Just the phone ringing.

Doctor Tyler himself. Very sorry. A saddle embolism is not uncommon in spite of doing everything possible. Death certificate signed. In the hospital mortuary awaiting instructions. Have you done this before? Do you have a funeral home?

“No,” Robert is finally saying, “I’ll have to see about one.”

“Not a problem. Call here and tell us when you decide. The home will take care of everything from this point on.”

“All right,” Robert says.

“I’m very sorry,” Doctor Tyler says.

“Yes,” Robert says. “Thank you.”

“He didn’t suffer.”

“That’s good.”

And the conversation is over.

Robert puts the phone down.

He finds himself inert again.

He does not miss his father.

But something got misplaced.

He looks around him. “Darla?” he calls.

No answer. Again, louder: “Darla?”

Nothing. She’s not back. She sometimes gets inspired and runs a long time. He understands that. She has to go up to the hospital afterward and she wants to run thoroughly first.

No.

She won’t have to go to the hospital.

There’s a beeping. Distant. But nearby.

He looks. It’s the cordless phone. He’s forgotten to push the off button. He picks up the phone. He pushes the button. He puts it down.

He drifts back into the living room, looks at the French doors, moves to them, opens them, steps into a morning that feels almost warm.

He looks to the live oak standing massively before and above him. He walks to it, turns his back to it, and sits heavily down in the crotch of two roots. He presses against his tree even as his limbs feel their tone fading. They waver, and he wills his legs to stretch flat and he lets his arms fall to his sides.

The oak’s trunk is rough, touching him hard in the back in long, uprunning ridges. He is glad for its hardness against him and he is glad to smell the sudden Florida warmth in the air. He is glad he is in his own country now and did not die. But he aches. He aches for the dead. For one man he did not know at all. For one man he knows too well.

He sits like this until he hears Darla calling for him from inside the house.

“Out here.” He does not move.

She appears in the open French door, sweating in her running clothes, a towel around her neck. “What is it?” she says.

“He’s dead,” Robert says.

She steps to the edge of the veranda, but pauses.

She doesn’t want to force him to stand by coming too near the tree. He seems propped there as if after a beating in a ring. “Are you okay?”

He rouses himself, flails a little with his arms, drags at his legs.

She presents a palm. “You don’t have to …”

“I’m fine,” he says, making it to his feet.

She steps closer, ready to hold him but not initiating it, regretting her sweat.

He’s not ready for the ritual of this. He holds still, looks down to the space between them.

The phone rings, a small sound from the foyer but it lifts Robert’s eyes to hers.

He knows who it is, and from his look, she knows.

Darla says, “Would you like me to talk with her?”

He considers this.

The phone rings again.

“Thanks,” he says. “But I better.”

He moves past her.

She remains.

Not just in the small of her back, the touch of his hand; not just in her chest, the press of his; but in her conscious memory now, his arms come around her in the darkness of their bedroom with both her parents laid out in a hospital morgue a
thousand miles away, and he pulls her close. She should have done that for him just now, instantly, as he did it for her, not pausing in the doorway or on the veranda. But he surprised her, the tableau of him and the tree. She did not expect him to be stricken by the death of such a difficult man, a man who would no longer be able to disappoint him. She’d needed a few moments to get over her surprise. Then the phone intervened.

Darla needs to be close to him now.

She turns, steps through the French doors, crosses the living room toward his voice in the foyer: “Of course, Mom … Of course … Try to be calm till I’m with you … Say a prayer. Say a rosary.”

Darla hears these last few words trying to stick in his throat. She stops before she becomes visible in the living room doorway.

“Soon,” he says. “Yes.”

He listens. He says, “Of course. Very safe.”

Moments after this she hears the phone clack into its cradle. She steps into the foyer and he turns to her. She comes to him and puts her arms around him.