Perfume River (25 page)

Robert assumes that asking for this was the purpose of tonight’s private talk. He expects Jake to take them back inside.

But he doesn’t. Jake is working up to something else. He looks away, toward the trees, where Bob is watching closely.

He’s spotted me.
But Bob doesn’t react abruptly, as much as his hand wants to duck inside his coat. Just in case it’s okay. Just in case the darkness that Bob is standing in is sufficient, he simply moves backward, deeper into the shadows, but without
seeming to move, in minute measures, steadily, his hand ready to leap if necessary. The boy’s head turns back to Cal’s buddy.

Jake says to Robert, “There’s one other thing. Maybe we can talk now just a bit? They’re okay inside without us for a couple more minutes, aren’t they?”

Robert hears a different sort of rush in Jake’s voice, an urgency, a pressing private need. “Whatever you need, Jake.”

“I just need to say it. I’m joining the Marines.”

Robert steels himself instantly to show no reaction. Though he’s staggered.

Jake rolls on. “Dad is freaked. But I’ve made up my mind. He sees me as a child. Always will, probably. At least till I’m forty or something. I’m smart, Granddad. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, you know? The war you fought—we can talk about all that another time—but that one was fucked up. Sorry for the language. That’s a thing too with Pop. But Jesus. It’s just a fucking word. In the Vietnam War we got mixed up with another country that was trying to decide for itself who they were, and they had no intention to make anybody else think the same way. Much less kill you if you disagreed. You know? They weren’t about to send the Viet Cong over here to hijack an American Airlines jet and fly it into a New York skyscraper. Hell, how did the dreaded communist Vietnam end up? They’re filling clothes racks at Walmart and Target. But this war now is different. The jihadists of the world are cutting off the heads of anyone who disagrees with them. Not just Christians. Even other Muslims. Over what?
Over a fourteen-century-old beef about who should carry on Muhammad’s work, a cousin or a caliph. And they’re coming for us. They say so. They mean it. If they had the technology and a modern country and the governing chops of Adolf Hitler, they’d out-Hitler Hitler. This is a real cause to fight for. If we don’t become the new Greatest Generation, then the jihadists will turn us into the Beheaded Generation.”

Bob has stopped retreating into the dark. The boy’s voice has risen and it’s angry and though it takes too much from Bob to make out the words at this distance, too much squeezing in his head, he knows the boy is telling off his father, standing up to him, and Bob is breathing hard, his right hand is itchy but he keeps it at his side for the moment. Still he owes it to the boy, so he strains to hear, and there’s
Viet Cong
and there’s
jihad
and there’s
Hitler
and there’s
beheaded
and Bob can’t draw his next breath because there’s just too much in his chest to get past.

Jake has stopped talking. He’s panting a little.

Robert wants badly to have words now. His life, his work, is about words. None come to mind. Jake
is
smart. Robert has listened to him carefully. He’s heard him. He understands how Jake can see the world in this way, how he can see this cause as just. But how to reason a young man out of going to war? As reasonable as Jake’s words sound, his decision itself isn’t about reason. But now that the babble in Robert’s head has quieted, the only words he commands can’t begin to address Jake’s rush, his passion.

It may be too late anyway.

Robert says, “Have you already joined?”

“I’ve taken the aptitude test. And I’ve passed the medical. I make it official next week.”

“What do you need from me?”

“If you can talk to Dad, help him through this. He’s really upset. He won’t get off it.”

Kevin is smart too. He’s surely said it all. Robert despairs of finding a way to dissuade Jake.

“Your dad isn’t making any sense to you?”

Jake shrugs. “It’s not really about sense. He loves me.”

“I love you too, Jake.”

“But you made the same choice when you were my age. For a worse cause.”

Another irony for this night. That was also about a father’s love. A worse cause indeed. And Robert suddenly has relevant words: “Are you sure you’re not doing this because he
does
love you? Because you need to be your own man, separate from him?”

Jake turns his face away to the trees. To think this over.

Bob straightens sharply. Something’s happened across the way. Since he resumed his breathing, Bob has held himself very still, in body and mind, trying to understand what was before him and what he should do about it. But either the words faded or his mind has. And now the boy has looked away again. As if he’s been slapped across the face. Things can change quickly. Bob puts his hand inside his coat. Holds the Glock but keeps it inside there for the moment.

Jake turns his face back to Robert. He says, “I’m sure. Living with what I believe, how I feel, I couldn’t bear to watch the future unfold if I don’t do what I can.”

Robert does love this boy. Loves this smart, tough, quick Jake, who has not gotten enough of his grandfather in his life. Robert lifts his hands to grasp Jake at the shoulders.

Oh no you don’t.
Bob slips his Glock from his pocket, takes a breath.
Breath control. Trigger control.

Robert cups Jake’s shoulders and he begins to pull him toward him.

Bob’s right hand comes up strong, steady, brings the Glock to bear, tracking the side of Robert’s head.

Jake could take one breath more, could have one more flicker of a thought, he could hesitate for the briefest moment to accept from his grandfather what he has resisted over and over in the past few weeks from his father, but Granddad can do this because he was a soldier, because he went to war, Granddad knows what it means because he’s been there, and so Jake rushes now, he opens his arms to Robert and they hug.

And one flicker, one breath, one moment away from squeezing the trigger, Bob’s right forefinger freezes, and a deep recoil of air rushes into Bob, drops his right arm, pushes him back as if a Viet Cong sniper has been following him through these woods and has squeezed off his own round and shot Bob through the center of his chest. Because this father and this son have embraced.

Bob leans against a tree. Closes his eyes.

Robert and Jake say nothing but hold the embrace for a few more moments. Then they let each other go and they turn and head back through doors, into the hallway.

They pause before entering the visitation room.

“Thanks, Granddad,” Jake says.

Robert reaches out, cuffs his grandson on the shoulder. He fills with a thing too complicated to call
regret
, though his insistently abstracting mind would be content with that. “What are you going to do for them?” he asks.

“The Marines?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what the test was about. Whatever they want. But you know the first thing they teach in the Corps. Every Marine is a rifleman.”

Robert manages a nod.

Jake says, “Well, time to deploy.” He opens the visitation room door, holds it for his grandfather.

Robert finds himself immovable with the thought that Jake would have made his Grandpa Bill proud.

He flicks his chin to Jake to send him on in. Jake winks and says, “Cover me.” And he disappears.

The door swings closed.

Robert reboots.

He goes in.

Near the door Peggy is quickly closing in on Jake. She reaches him, hugs him, releases him while giving Robert a tilt-headed frown, and she propels her grandson toward the buffet room.

She does not follow but comes to Robert. “Where were you two?”

“Jake wanted to talk.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s okay.”

“I’m sure it’s hard for him,” Peggy says. “Losing his Grandpa Bill. He’s not experienced death before. That’s a blessing, of course. But now he’s got to face it.”

“He’s fine, Mom.”

“Your father loved that boy.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“He was so
full
of love.”

Robert doesn’t have any words for that.

Peggy’s eyes are filling with tears. But not about Jake. Or the old man. She’s fixed on Robert now. She lifts a hand and touches his cheek.

He accepts it. Waits.

She withdraws the hand, looks over her shoulder.

Several dozen visitors are arranged now in small, softly murmuring groups about the room.

Peggy turns back to her son. “I’m weary of them, Bobby. Can we talk a little?”

“Of course,” he says, hoping she won’t speak to him as
Bobby.
“There’s a place through here.”

He leads her into the back hallway. For a moment they pause between the two sets of doors. “This is nice,” she says.

Beyond the porte cochere doors, beyond the back driveway, in the darkness of the trees, Bob has settled to the ground at the foot of an oak, his back against the trunk. The Glock is still in his hand, though he is presently unaware of it. His head is full of a high metallic whine. It’s often there. Words can cover it over. Or other sounds. But he has no words to speak,
for the moment, and the woods around him are silent. So he listens to the whine. Idly. An oscillating whine. Though its highs and its lows are very near each other, he can distinguish them. He’s smart that way. He begins to count in his head. At each peak. One. Two.

Robert and Peggy step away, toward the end of the hall opposite the kitchen. They stop in the amber bloom of light of a torchiere. They face each other. Peggy initiates a hug, which Robert returns. They hold this for a long moment and then Peggy pulls away, but barely a half step, maintaining the connection of their eyes.

She says, “I keep thinking of when he came home. You and I were living with Mama and Papa, you know. In that creole cottage in the Irish Channel. You were two years old and he was thunderstruck at the sight of you. He picked you up and put you on his shoulders and that’s pretty much where you stayed for a couple of weeks. He’d carry you everywhere from up there. ‘Let him see far,’ is what Bill would say. ‘Let my boy see far.’”

Robert has heard this story often enough that any capacity it once had to move him is long gone. Besides, the old man as a young man was already the man he was and forever would be. A toddler son was easy to sling around. Easy to give a damn about when you could overpower him absolutely.

Peggy says, “He wanted to name you William Junior, you know.”

This is not the first time he’s heard this either.

“He loved you that much,” she says.

What Robert wants is to avoid arguing with his mother on this night. However, he says, “What he wanted was his firstborn son to be just like him.”

She brightens. “You see?”

He has said this to her as if to disprove his father’s love. But he realizes she hears it as a demonstration of that love.

Her bright smile of QED beams on. And the smile suddenly strikes Robert as one of her lies.

Does she know about his father’s deep disappointment in him? The man kept it from his son. Did he keep it from his wife?

Robert and his mother look at each other for a long moment in silence. Her brightness fades a little. He struggles, wanting to let this pass but wanting to know if she knows, wanting to ask but wanting to keep the truth strictly between him and the dead man if she doesn’t.

So he says, “But I wasn’t just like him.”

He expects a spin now, or an evasion or a lie.

She even hesitates.

Then she surprises him. “It was me who talked him out of naming you William,” she says.

The family explanation—Robert can’t remember the exact moment it was offered him but he’s sure it came from her—was that his father realized that his son, to be kept distinct in conversation, would become “Billy” or even “Junior,” and he thought both sounded sissified.

Robert narrows his eyes at her. “You said he talked himself out of it.”

“Did I tell you that?”

“You did.”

“For his sake. He didn’t like admitting my influence.”

“You didn’t like biting your tongue.”

“I bit it as an act of love.” She squares up before him and doesn’t flinch: “It was me. I told him, ‘This boy needs to be his own man.’”

“Did he understand that?”

“Well, who knows. He was a father, after all, with strong ideas. He gave you a love for books. This soldier and dockworker gave his son that.”

Robert does not really expect to learn if the old man revealed his fatherly disgust over Vietnam. He probably didn’t. But she did witness his disappointment in Robert. Listen to her: Your father may not have loved you for what you became but he made you read. That was the substitute from childhood onward. Isn’t that an outcome worthy of actual love? Aren’t you grateful?

He says, “He gave me the love of books expecting me to come to the same conclusions from them that he did.”

Her face puckers in puzzlement. “You seemed to.”

She’s right.

“I often bit my tongue,” Robert says.

She smiles at him, half smiles. “An act of love.”

Well, the act never won his.
He catches himself before this comes out of his mouth. She’s tried the same tactic all her life long.

Her eyes are fixed on Robert’s but restlessly so.

“He loved all of us,” she says.

And he understands. If she can convince Robert of William’s love for him, then she might believe that the man loved her as well.

Because she doesn’t believe it.

Of course she doesn’t.

And it abruptly occurs to him: He hasn’t told her what he knows about the old man’s secret trysts.

Her priests would nail me for a sin of omission. A big one. Sure it was for his privacy. It was his place to tell her. It was between them. It had been going on for years when I found out. She would have stopped him. She would have nagged him back home if she knew it was something that didn’t threaten her so profoundly she preferred the lie. But still. He wasn’t worth keeping it from her. He was never worth it. Mea culpa.