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

is trying to find or why he should care so hotly.
    “Can you hear me?” the face asks.
    “Why shouldn’t I?” Bob says.
    “Good.” The face narrows its already narrow eyes. “I need to ask you some questions. You understand?”
    “What’s to understand?” Bob says. The man is an idiot.
    “We have to see if your head’s okay.”
    “My head.”
    Bob thinks he has filled those two words with sarcasm.
    To the emergency tech he sounds dazed. “What’s your name?” the EMT asks.
    Bob’s first response is to himself:
My name. All of this about my name suddenly. Not just with this rummy. Too much about my name.
He’s not sure how he got that impression. So the first thing he says aloud is, “Why is it too much?”
    The face cocks sideways.
    Bob is simply trying to figure this out. Not that he expects the face to have an answer to the question.
    And then Bob remembers. The other Bob.
    “Do you understand what I’m asking?” the face says.
    “What are you asking?”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Hello, I’m Bob,” Bob says. “Bob isn’t so popular anymore.”
    “Bob,” the face says.
    “Bob,” Bob says.
    “Bob what?” the face says.
    “Bob what,” Bob says. “Bob fucking what.” A sharp thwack of pain in his head. Not in the forehead. At the back of his head. From his father’s hand.
Tell the man your name
, his father says.
If you’re going to sneak around in the night, little motherfucker, you’re going to get captured and then it’s name, rank,and serial number.
Bob has followed Calvin from their single-wide. It’s the middle of the night, but in a fourteen-by-sixty every sound kicks around in your head even if your bedroom is on the opposite end from theirs. All the words, jumbled and blurred but clear enough tonight about his mother’s fear of his father meeting up with somebody, a buddy, somebody up to no good. Now Bob’s standing in front of a man with a hippie-wild beard, an army field jacket dappled in piss-colored street-light, a First Cav patch—horse’s head and diagonal slash—at the shoulder.
Name.
And another slap at the base of his skull.
Bob
, Bob says. One more slap from his father:
Do it right.
Bob says,
Robert Calvin Weber.
A beat of silence and his father barks,
Rank.
Bob looks at him.
Damn straight
, his father says.
You don’t have one. Lower than a buck private.
And then his father does a thing that he sometimes can do. He abruptly puts his arm around Bob, crushes him close. And he says to the man in the field jacket,
But he’s a crack shot, this one. He’s a goddamn killer in the making, my boy.
    “Do you remember your last name?”
    The face.
    “Weber,” Bob says.
    “All right, Bob Weber. Where are you?”
    The fuck. “Hell,” Bob says.
    And the man gives Bob
that look.
Every man jack of the Hardluckers knows that look. The look when the upstanding asshole—the Upstander—in front of you can’t find or never had or gives up on or runs out of patience for a guy who looks and smells and just plain exists like you. He gives you that tighteningand tiny lifting of the upper lip under just one faintly flaring nostril, that back crawl of a gaze, that little lift of the chin, all of this so slight you could easily feel it wasn’t him at all, it was you, it was you shrinking, a shrinking that’s been going on in smooth, small increments for a long while and you only just now can see it, like staring so hard at a clock’s minute hand that eventually you can watch it move.
That look
says what you’re in fact witnessing is
you
growing
smaller
, and this son of a bitch giving it to you has seen it all along.
    Bob wishes he had the will to lift a hand and make a fist and punch this face. Not the will. He probably has that. The strength.
    The look vanishes now. This man and Bob both know it was there and will always be lurking, but it vanishes, so the two of them can go on.
    The face says, “If you’re messing with me, I need you to stop so we can know how to