Perfume River (24 page)

Jimmy shrugs in a slow-motion, exaggerated, high-shouldered way.

Heather smiles. She’s known him long enough to understand the gesture as pouty assent. She finds it endearing, which makes her suspect she’s falling in love.

He says, “We’re still too early.”

“So let’s sit here and make out for a while,” she says.

Jimmy barks a laugh at this.

But he turns a little in her direction and regrets the ubiquity of center consoles in modern cars. “We’d have to climb into the backseat to do it right,” he says.

“So?”

“On the way out,” he says. “After getting him into the casket.”

Heather laughs and leans across the console to him. She initiates a kiss, which they draw out for a time and end with as much of an embrace—of shoulders and chests—as they can manage. Jimmy’s attention drifts up to the funeral home. But it’s far enough away that he does not even register the figure silhouetted in the open front doorway.

Robert has only moments ago slipped his cellphone into his pocket, having absentmindedly carried it in his hand from the visitation room to this place in the doorway. The text message that brought him here was sent by his grandson.
Almost there.
The message pleased Robert, and surprised him a little. If they’re almost here, there’s no reason for Jake to text, except that he’s eager to see his granddad.

Far down at the parkway, lights have just turned into the parking lot, but they immediately pull into a spot and go dark. Clearly not Kevin. Nor is it Kevin at the opening and shutting of doors much closer. Figures from school are emerging there.

“Are you okay?” This is Darla’s voice from just over his shoulder.

He glances at her. “Yes. Thanks. I got a text from Jake. They’re almost here.”

Darla steps up beside him.

Four FSU colleagues, three of Robert’s, one of Darla’s, are heading this way.

She feels Robert fidget a little. “I’ll handle them, if you like,” she says.

“Thanks. Yes.”

And after the commiserations, she does, taking them away to the food and alcohol that make this a wake and not a funeral.

More lights turn in now from the parkway and keep approaching until they angle into the nearest parking spot. Robert goes out into the chill and down the front steps to meet Kevin, who is striding forward, looking young in the dim light, not forty-two, looking like a college boy. He embraces Robert. Grace follows and puts her arms around both of them. A tender woman. Good for Kevin. Robert withdraws one arm from his son to include his daughter-in-law in his embrace.

The death of his father is grieved more simply by these two, who did not know the man, who knew an alternate man. Robert looks beyond this wordless huddle. Molly is on her cellphone; she’s eighteen, after all. Jake is standing nearby watching Robert closely. Their eyes meet and the boy nods to his grandfather.

How has this boy gotten so big? This man. Twenty now. He’s taller than Robert. Maybe not when Robert was twenty, not before his septuagenarian shrinkage. But tall. A man. And Robert wonders how this is now a surprise. As the hug goes wordlessly on, Robert tries to think of the last time he saw his grandson. A year. Maybe two. Jake’s been elsewhere during the
family’s last couple of visits. Growth spurts have their limits. The last time, Jake surely was some significant fraction of this man who stands before Robert. But it was long enough ago that the near-man has been composted into this present surprise.

Grace begins the exchange of condolences. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she says.

The three end the embrace and exchange ardent words as they all gather and turn and move off toward the front door.

Bob cannot distinguish the words but this faint flurry of sound floats down the parking lot to him. He has just stopped abruptly at the foot of the Tillotson driveway. The lights of the marquee have drawn his eyes up from their focus on the sidewalk and have stopped him, and now these distant voices come at him like a past incident that troubles you in the middle of the night but you can’t quite remember what it was. And the lights. This sign. William Quinlan. Quinlan. Bob thrashes in his head to understand. Just recently a Quinlan. A handshake. I’m Quinlan. The Vietnam vet.
Vietnam. America’s last chapter. Bang. Done.

Bob’s head snaps back at the sign.

Quinlan’s dead.
He only just shook my hand. That was quick. Done. Bang. It doesn’t make sense.
So Bob tries to do in his head what he can do with his eyes. He squeezes at these thoughts like they’re the blur of words in a newspaper. He squeezes till they clarify, just a little, just enough to make them out. The Quinlan who shook his hand was Bob. Not William. He’s Bob. A Vietnam vet. In that, too much like the old man.
But this one is Bob like me.

And now Bob remembers the rest. The father of the other Bob has died. A blood clot in a hospital. Tillotson Funeral Home. Bob looks again at the sign. Tillotson. And this Quinlan:
Husband. Father. Veteran.
Another veteran. This makes Bob stir a little. Too many veterans. But the other Bob is okay. They ate together at New Leaf, the two of them.
But he put me in a hotel with my father. Did the old man arrange it? Did he get his Vietnam buddy to put me in a room with him?

No.

This is Bob the son of William, who is dead.

Bob looks toward the distant house. Shining.

Dead in this place shining in the dark.

Respects.

Bob can’t just walk up to the front door.

He understands that.

Nearby. Twenty yards away. The woods. Bob knows his way through woods. These run up toward the shining house and then past and around back, surrounding the place. Bob heads off. Laurel oak and water oak and sweet gum, dark and dense, and Bob enters them, moving swiftly, silently.

Hushed, Robert and his son’s family enter the visitation room. Robert is before them. Kevin steps up now beside him, scans the room, sees the casket at the far wall, keeps on looking around. Robert figures he knows why. When Kevin’s gaze arrives at the buffet room, Robert says, “I suspect they’re in there,” meaning Peggy and Darla. When Kevin looks at him, Robert nods back to the partition doorway. “Serving your grandmother’s food.”

Kevin turns to his family and says, softly, “This is a good time to pay our respects.”

Grace steps beside him, takes his arm. Molly has put her cellphone away and takes her mother’s arm. Jake is standing a little apart, and when the others move off toward the casket, he stays put.

“Granddad,” he says in a near-whisper, “can we have a little talk? I need some advice.”

“Of course,” Robert says, reciprocating the whisper. He nods toward his grandson’s retreating family. “Perhaps a little later.”

Jake understands. “Thanks.” He follows the others.

Robert moves off toward the buffet room thinking how Jake has gotten to age twenty without the two of them ever really sitting down to talk about life in the way a grandfather and grandson often can do. Will this be a night full of ironies? Full of people assuming Robert’s unadulterated sorrow, for instance; full of the tender, approving warmth—as one might receive from a loving father—that those assumptions will earn him. And likely this irony as well: The old man has reminded Jacob that families can dissolve, so if you ever want a heart-to-heart connection with your grandfather, you better get it while you can. Not that any of this was William Quinlan’s benign intention. He just happened to die.

Robert steps into the partitioned room with his mother’s food unfurled on platters and in pots and stainless warmers and with herself stationed behind the row of tables ladling Irish stew and brightly complaining that Tallahassee is muttonless.
“But the lamb is good,” she says, tapping the serving spoon in the air over the filled plate of Darla’s colleague. Peggy turns her face at Robert’s arrival.

“Kevin and Grace and the kids are here,” he says.

And Bob pushes on through the trees. Why does he feel a rushing in him, why is he beating up his legs and lungs and elbows and shoulders trying to get through a thicket of oak in this big fucking rush? As if something is pursuing him here in the woods. No. He’s doing the pursuing. That shifting of the dark up ahead, shaping and shifting and vanishing and shaping again
You can shoot, by God Bobby, you can shoot
and Bob pulls the Glock from inside his coat, snug in palm and crotch of thumb and forefinger, his fingertip lying easy on the trigger, perfectly fitting its curve, perfectly placed for Bobby to be okay by God, a hell of a shot. The old man was worthless in the woods. He was worthless. Maybe he was worthless in the jungles of Vietnam as well, maybe that’s what pissed him off so bad at Bob, Bob being okay when the old man wasn’t. Maybe Calvin Henry Weber, sergeant—or whatever his rank really was—serial number whatever-the-fuck, was scared of his okay boy Bob. When Bob has a Mossberg or when Bob has a Glock, Calvin Henry Weber is scared. And Bob moves on, dodging the trees, aware, though, that he’s not just chasing, aware that he has a destination, aware of a building being sliced into fragments by the trunks of the oaks, a building passing by and passing by and finally vanishing, replaced by the stretch of a sodium-vapor-lit drive, covered along the back edge of the
building by a hanging porch. And Bob changes his bearing, which has been north. He now turns east, and the building is passing again through the trees to his right. He has circled behind it and now there is a wide doorway in its rear facade, bright lights inside.

Bob stops.

Things clarify for him.

He has come to pay his respects to a dead man. A father of a Bob. The other Bob. Bob the Vietnam buddy of the father he’s been following through the woods.

Keep it straight.

Bob tucks his Glock back inside his inner coat pocket.

But the door is opening.

And while Bob has been making his way through the woods to this place behind a particularly large-trunked laurel oak: Peggy and Robert emerge from the buffet and cross the room to wait for Kevin and his wife and his son and his daughter to finish their shoulder-to-shoulder encounter with the corpse of William Quinlan, which they soon do. Kevin and Grace draw their children closer in an embrace and they turn to find Peggy and Robert. They all huddle in condolence. Beyond them the visitation room is beginning to gather visitors, arriving from a flow of cars into the parking lot, including, mostly recently, a minivan from Longleaf Village. The minivan prompts Jimmy and Heather to look at each other and nod and emerge from their car, though unhurriedly, as they want all these recent arrivals to have a
chance to populate the room. Jimmy flexes at his qualms as if they were morning-stiff muscles.

Inside, Peggy abruptly declares to Kevin and his family, “You’re straight from the airport. You must be famished. I’ve got just the thing.” She steps between Kevin and Grace and arranges herself shoulder to shoulder with them, hooking their arms and conveying them toward the buffet room.

“Come on, kids,” she says over her shoulder.

Molly says, “I’m famished,” and follows.

Jake glances to Robert, who nods at his grandson and waits for the diners to make some progress toward the partition door. Then Robert says, “Let’s go.” He leads Jake across the visitation room, looking first toward the exit into the foyer. But people are coming in, some of whom he knows, and he looks away to the back wall and the doors there. No one has gathered near them. “This way,” he says.

Jake follows.

They say nothing to each other as they cross the room and enter the back hallway. It’s lit brightly with torchiere floor lamps. Double doors directly before them lead outside.

“Inside or out?” Robert says.

“Out,” Jake says.

“Good man,” Robert says.

Bob has already stopped in the trees across from the back doors of the funeral home. Things have already become clear to him. He has already tucked his Glock away inside his coat.

The door is opening, and he hangs back, fades into the darkness like the ghost of his father that he’s been chasing
through these woods. No doubt also like his father’s ghost, he keeps a careful watch.

Robert and Jake step into the chill air, stop beneath the porte cochere roof, turn to each other, and Jake says at once, “I’ve been intending for a while to do this the next time I saw you.” He extends his hand.

Robert accepts Jake’s hand and they shake. His grandson’s grasp is firm, ardently so but not strained.

Jake says, “Thank you for your service.”

The puzzlement that Robert felt but did not show when Jake offered his hand must be flickering now in his face because Jake quickly adds, “For our country. In Vietnam.”

Their hands are still clasped and Jake renews the shake with this.

Robert nods, trying to block out the voice of the corpse just inside the doors, trying to quash the same impulse he’d felt with the old man’s donut buddies. He manages: “That’s good of you to say.”

The handshake ends.

Jake says, “We’ve never talked about any of that.”

“I tend not to.”

“I respect that,” Jake says. “But if it’s not an absolute thing. ‘Tend,’ right? I mean, I’ve never asked. But I’d like to. I’m older now. I’d like to sit down and talk about war with you. I mean, you’re my grandfather and you’ve been through that and it’s crazy I shouldn’t find out what you know.”

His grandson’s intention, especially now, should rattle Robert. But upon this rush of words, Jake the boy frisks into
him, Jake from the few years he lived close by, the three-year-old out with his granddad for a walk but the boy never walking anywhere, always taking off and running ahead.

Not that Robert ever wants to discuss Vietnam, but for now he says, “Maybe not tonight.”

“No no,” Jake says. “I understand. We’ll make another time.”

“Of course.”

“Soon.”

“Sure.”

The two of them are standing here growing a little chilly now up the sleeves and down the collar and beneath the tie because of Jake and his interest in their talking together. So when his grandson pauses, Robert simply waits, glad he’s put off Vietnam. For some years the two households have had ongoing good intentions to get together more often and soon, but it never seems to happen. Robert regrets that but hopes the phenomenon will at least save him from ever having this particular grandfather-and-grandson conversation.