Free Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler

help you. Tell me where you are.”
    Bob is weary. His head hurts. “Seems like an ambulance,” he says.
    “Okay. Where did we find you?”
    Where.
    The pastor crouched before him, a dense mane of shovel-blade gray hair crowning his head. Bob was sitting upright, probably this man’s doing. He was beneath a tree. The church community building squatted across the yard.
I’m Pastor Dwayne Kilmer
, the man said, putting a blanket around Bob’s shoulders.
Call me Pastor Dwayne.
Bob’s ears rang loudly and a small angry animal was trying to claw its way out of his forehead,but things were coming back to him already.
Who did this?
Bob said, raising his hand to his head.
I don’t know
, Pastor Dwayne said and started to add,
In the
… But Bob interrupted, waving his hand: I was in
there.
He could not remember the name for it, though the door was in plain sight.
It was empty
, Pastor Dwayne said without even turning to look in the direction of Bob’s gesture. He knew more than he was saying.
It’s a sin to lie
, Bob said. Pastor Dwayne rocked backward in his crouch.
Now Brother Bob
, he began.
Do you know me?
Bob said, sharply.
How do you know my name?
Pastor Dwayne said,
You told me a few moments ago.
This stopped Bob. He couldn’t remember. Then he thought of a question he needed to ask.
Who did this to me?
The pastor patted him on the shoulder.
I don’t know who did it, Brother Bob. That’s the truth.
    “Can you say where it was that we picked you up?”
    Bob blinks hard at this question. For a moment he hears it coming from Pastor Dwayne. But it’s the face.
    The face is waiting.
    Bob figures the face probably has some power over him for now. For ill or for good. Bob’s hungry. His bones ache from the chill. He probably needs this guy to help. Bob should answer.
    “Bloodied by the Lamb Hospital,” he says.
    Instantly he knows he somehow bungled it. Wrong sort of place. “Gospital,” he says.
    Not right.
“Gospel
,
”
Bob says. “The Bloody Lamb Full of Gospel.”
    Clarity. Clarity.
    The face has
that look
again.
    “That’s close enough, isn’t it?” Bob says. “I’m not crazy and I’m not stupid.”
    The face fixes itself and says, “Okay. Just rest.” It drifts away from Bob’s view.
    Bob closes his eyes. He feels the motion all around him. He is being carried along fast now. No bumps. A straight line to somewhere. And he feels his father’s arm go around his shoulders, like it can sometimes do. As always, that gesture only makes Bob ache. Ache and ache. And he thinks of standing in the night in front of their single-wide, lit by street-light, standing side by side with his father, the man’s arm around him, and there’s a tree growing nearby, a jungle tree that sprung up there in the trailer park and nobody gets wise to it till it’s too late, and in that tree is a Viet Cong, a sniper, a helluva shot of a sniper, and the VC squeezes his trigger and sends out a single round that crashes into one side of Bob’s head and out the other and then into his father’s head, and he and his old man die together, right there and then, standing there just like that next to each other.
    And as that phantom sniper’s bullet spins through Bob’s brain, Robert passes the concertina fence at the federal prison on Capital Circle, half a mile north of the parkway, the fence a thing his mind has always known to ignore, in its evocation of a military perimeter. But it’s not ignorable with the issues ofthis past night and this morning. His eyes know to hold on the road ahead, know to prevent even a glance to the side, but the periphery is always there for the seeing, and he is quite aware now of the four rows of razor wire spiraling along beside him, and with them Vietnam spins near, and a deep-driven voice inside Robert whispers:
You are a killer.
    He does not acknowledge it. Does not let this event play itself over, as it has done a thousand times in these five decades, in dreams, in near-sleep, in full