Free Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler Page A

waking obsession. It is this he fights off as he drives to his hospitalized father: Robert is huddled in the deep dark of the banyan tree. Outside are the sounds of pitched battles, none of them immediately nearby, the heaviest across the river. He wraps his left arm around his drawn-up legs, hugs them closer, and they press the pistol in his right hand more tightly against him, the fit of the weapon in his palm and the weight of it upon his chest making him feel oddly calm. Though his mind knows how foolish this is. The enemy is rushing through the city, filling it as if the Perfume River has risen and breached its banks. The tree and the pistol will soon fail him. If he is to live, he needs to think this out. Surely the North’s night offensive is focused on the key military positions in the city: the airport; the South’s division headquarters in the old Citadel across the river; and the place where Robert belongs, the MACV compound. If those places fall, particularly MACV, Robert is dead anyway. If they survive the night, Robert is dead if he cannot make his way back. Finding his way back will be vastly more difficult in daylight. He cannot stay where he is.He must use the cover of night to at least find another hiding place, nearer MACV.
    All of this is preamble. Usually when the event coils through Robert’s head like concertina razor wire, the decision to emerge has already been made. The next few essential moments travel on their own. He closes his eyes. He turns his head, cocks it, trying to focus his hearing in the direction of MACV: AK-47s, M16s, grenades launched and exploding. Robert pushes those sounds away into the background. He listens nearby. Nothing. The rush of dark-clad bodies just beyond the tree seems to have ended. He takes a deep breath. He lets go of his legs, stretches them out, takes another breath. He rises. He clicks the pistol’s safety lever forward. He holds the weapon before him, ready to fire. He steps from the tree. Though his eyes are dilated to the dark, nothing is clear on this overcast night, not pocket-park sward or trees or alleyway beyond or huddled city shapes all around, everything is smeared together in the tarry night. He must find his way through. He pauses. And from somewhere behind him and to his right a white flare rises, rushing to its apogee, far enough away that its light simply dapples through the trees and so Robert can see but he cannot see, and there is movement to his left and he looks and a shape is there, half a dozen paces away and it is a man clad in shadow and instantly Robert’s hand is moving and he is squeezing at the trigger and the pistol pops and jumps a little in his hand and it levels and pops again and again and the shape flies back into the dark and Robert hears the shape—the man—hears the man thump onto the ground, and Robert turns and runs.
    And why should this man whose face he never saw, who surely was a Viet Cong, who surely, moments later, would have done the same to him if Robert had not shot first, why should this man thrash still inside Robert?
You are a killer
, Robert whispers again to himself from somewhere deep in the dark, somewhere invisible in the trees. But so many men have had to reconcile so much more, so many killings, so much blood that they have spilled in some far place where there was no alternative except to let their own blood be spilled, brought into this situation by their country, in the name of and for the protection of all that they and their families, now and for generations before, have held dear. And later on this day in Hue and on the next day and on the next, first in the streets and then safe among his own in the MACV compound, Robert will shoot and shoot and it is not entirely clear if he has killed again but he probably has. But this one, this one dark figure will not simply die, will not allow himself to be buried in the psyche the way most of all the millions who have died in wars have been buried inside