Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online Page B

in assisted living in Thomasville, Georgia.
    He enters the hallway, passing Darla’s study, glancing through the open door to the empty desk across the room, the oak tree beyond, and he stops at the telephone table opposite the vestibule.
    He picks up the phone and dials his mother’s cell.
    “Thank God,” she says. “Where were you?”
    “How is he?”
    “Not good, honey. Not good. The doctor is very concerned.”
    “We’ll talk when I get there,” Robert says. “You’re at Archbold?”
    His mother does not reply. Then her beat of silence turns into a choked-back “Yes” and she begins to cry.
    “It’s all right, Mom. He’s a tough guy. I’ll be there.”
    “Hurry,” she says.
    And Robert does. He pours his coffee into a thermos and dresses and writes a note to Darla. He tapes it to the front door:
My father has broken his hip. I’m in Thomasville. Don’t worry. Work well.
    He turns onto Apalachee Parkway.
    His mind roils with anticipated scenes at the hospital and he cuts each one off, tries to think of things he can manage. Like whether and how to make the connection, in his paper, between John Kenneth Turner’s partisanship in the Mexican civil war and factions of the Vietnam antiwar movement siding with the North and lionizing Ho Chi Minh. Easy things like that. Things not having to do with family.
    In this struggle of mind, Robert seeks distraction, so he turns his eyes to the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church, which he is approaching. Here he routinely finds ironic amusement on a marquee that presumably intends to persuade the fallen to enter therein and learn the absolute truths of the universe, but doing so with messages that veer in tone between fortune cookies and one-liners from a born-again Milton Berle. But this morning his eyes slide past the new message to a Leon County EMS ambulance parked in front of the church, and then to a pair of white-coated men lifting a dark-clothed blur of a third man from a wheelchair into the back of the vehicle, and then past them to a fourth man, tall and nattily topcoated and standing stiffly upright, watching nearby and seeming, given the context, to be the pastor himself, the benighted editor in chief of that marquee.
    And the church has passed and Robert thinks of his father, how he would share his son’s amused disdain for the man in the topcoat, how his disdain, unamused, extended as well to Mama’s priests. Robert wondered if that would be so even now, as his father finds himself on the cusp of some absolute truth of the universe, a truth you could learn for certain only by dying.
    In a room over a clothing and leather goods shop on Baldwin Street in Toronto, Canada, Robert’s brother Jimmy is waking. He lies on his side, at the edge of his bed. The panes of the window before him are groved in fern frost. He owns the building, has owned it for thirty years. The shop is his. These winters are his, finally, more or less. The room is cold but he’s been sleeping with the covers sloughed down to his chest.
    He pulls them up now to cover his arms, his mind filling: windowpanes overgrown with ice; an upstairs room in a two-story brick row house; he and Linda clinging close in a sleeping bag on a futon, the ice lit by the streetlight on McCaul. This was their first winter in Canada, spent only a few blocks from where he now lies thinking. The house was rented by an earlier wave of American resisters and deserters and the women who fled with them. They’d turned it into a commune and a crash pad for other exiles newly arrived. He and Linda had crashed there the previous summer but were permanent by that winter night, the night they celebrated the occasion of theirmeeting, eighteen months earlier. They had done so with a sweet lovemaking—slow and quiet, as there were two other couples asleep in this room—and with a trembling from the cold that never quite stopped, even after they’d spent themselves and lay clinging.
    Jimmy blinks at the daylight