Read Online Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Robert Olen Butler
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don’t meanto push my way now into your life when I know you’re trying so hard … Not trying. Succeeding, I’m sure, in your new homeland. I don’t mean to … I’m sorry. But your father is in a bad way, physically. The doctor is very very concerned about him. He may not live long. Whatever that might mean to you. At least just for you to know.
This all came out in a blathering rush, and then she fell silent, though she did not hang up. Perhaps she heard herself. Perhaps she knew that all she could do next was ask directly for something he’d long ago made clear he had no intention of giving. Not that his father wished to hear from him, even if he was dying. His mother was no doubt doing this on her own. He could hear her breathing heavily.
The machine will cut her off soon
, he thinks. He waits.
But before this can happen, she says,
Your brother loves you too. We all do.
She pauses again. Then:
Does your phone give you my number? Maybe not.
And she speaks her phone number into the message. Jimmy has no intention of remembering it.
In case you want it
, she says.
And the answering machine clicks into silence.
He hesitates.
Humming in him is an apparatus of thought he assembled years ago. For him at least, blood ties are overrated. It’s only people who have a deeply intractable sense of their own identity—an identity that has been created through parents or siblings or grandparents, through those of their own blood—it’s only people like that who can’t imagine an actual, irrevocablebreak from family. But you drift apart from acquaintances. You even drift apart from previously close friends. Why? Because your interests and tastes, ideas and values, personalities and character—the things that
truly
make up who you are—shift and change and disconnect. Indeed, it’s harder for friends to part: you came together at all only because those things were once compatible. With your kin, that compatibility may never even have existed. The same is true of a country. You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose your land of birth. If you and they have nothing in common, if they have nothing to do with who you are now, if you are always, irrevocably at odds with each other, is it betrayal simply to leave family and country behind?
No.
Fuck no.
Jimmy extends his finger, touches the erase button. With only a quick sniff of hesitation, he pushes it.
Bob is on his back. And he starts to slide, feeling the movement first in the front of his head and then running down his body like nausea. He opens his eyes. He was upright a moment ago. Under a sky. After a talk with Pastor Somebody. After a sleep. But a cold sleep. Very cold. He’s been outside somewhere. Now, though, there’s a low, dark ceiling above. It’s not just him moving. Everything is moving. A face looms suddenly over him.A jowly, red-cheeked face, a bulbous nose. They are moving together, Bob and this man. From the front of Bob’s head: a knot of pain pressing there, pressing outward.
He tries to lift himself up at the chest.
“Hold on, sport,” the face says.
Bob lets go. Falls back. He begins to spin slowly. He closes his eyes against this.
That nose and those cheeks. A rummy.
This is the guy who did it
, Bob says in his head.
The son of a bitch who brained me.
He tries to rise up again, and even though he knows he’s not prepared, he thinks, slowly, carefully, meaning each word:
I will kill you.
A pressure on the center of his chest. He falls back.
“Hold on,” the voice says. “I’m here to help you.”
Help?
“You’re on the way to the hospital.”
The pressing in his forehead. He’s stretched tight there. Thoughts congregating, trying to break through skull bone, trying to leap forth.
Bob opens his eyes, thinking he might catch sight of them.
That’s crazy
, he realizes.
His mind is clear now. He believes the face.
Okay. Okay okay okay. You’re not the guy.
For a moment Bob loses track of exactly what man he
This all came out in a blathering rush, and then she fell silent, though she did not hang up. Perhaps she heard herself. Perhaps she knew that all she could do next was ask directly for something he’d long ago made clear he had no intention of giving. Not that his father wished to hear from him, even if he was dying. His mother was no doubt doing this on her own. He could hear her breathing heavily.
The machine will cut her off soon
, he thinks. He waits.
But before this can happen, she says,
Your brother loves you too. We all do.
She pauses again. Then:
Does your phone give you my number? Maybe not.
And she speaks her phone number into the message. Jimmy has no intention of remembering it.
In case you want it
, she says.
And the answering machine clicks into silence.
He hesitates.
Humming in him is an apparatus of thought he assembled years ago. For him at least, blood ties are overrated. It’s only people who have a deeply intractable sense of their own identity—an identity that has been created through parents or siblings or grandparents, through those of their own blood—it’s only people like that who can’t imagine an actual, irrevocablebreak from family. But you drift apart from acquaintances. You even drift apart from previously close friends. Why? Because your interests and tastes, ideas and values, personalities and character—the things that
truly
make up who you are—shift and change and disconnect. Indeed, it’s harder for friends to part: you came together at all only because those things were once compatible. With your kin, that compatibility may never even have existed. The same is true of a country. You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose your land of birth. If you and they have nothing in common, if they have nothing to do with who you are now, if you are always, irrevocably at odds with each other, is it betrayal simply to leave family and country behind?
No.
Fuck no.
Jimmy extends his finger, touches the erase button. With only a quick sniff of hesitation, he pushes it.
Bob is on his back. And he starts to slide, feeling the movement first in the front of his head and then running down his body like nausea. He opens his eyes. He was upright a moment ago. Under a sky. After a talk with Pastor Somebody. After a sleep. But a cold sleep. Very cold. He’s been outside somewhere. Now, though, there’s a low, dark ceiling above. It’s not just him moving. Everything is moving. A face looms suddenly over him.A jowly, red-cheeked face, a bulbous nose. They are moving together, Bob and this man. From the front of Bob’s head: a knot of pain pressing there, pressing outward.
He tries to lift himself up at the chest.
“Hold on, sport,” the face says.
Bob lets go. Falls back. He begins to spin slowly. He closes his eyes against this.
That nose and those cheeks. A rummy.
This is the guy who did it
, Bob says in his head.
The son of a bitch who brained me.
He tries to rise up again, and even though he knows he’s not prepared, he thinks, slowly, carefully, meaning each word:
I will kill you.
A pressure on the center of his chest. He falls back.
“Hold on,” the voice says. “I’m here to help you.”
Help?
“You’re on the way to the hospital.”
The pressing in his forehead. He’s stretched tight there. Thoughts congregating, trying to break through skull bone, trying to leap forth.
Bob opens his eyes, thinking he might catch sight of them.
That’s crazy
, he realizes.
His mind is clear now. He believes the face.
Okay. Okay okay okay. You’re not the guy.
For a moment Bob loses track of exactly what man he
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