Sensing, however, that the meddling needs tact, Robert begins, “So you’re from Charleston?”
“Yes.”
“Been gone a long time?”
“Years.”
“Any folks back there?”
That is a sore point for Bob right now. A sore point anytime. He shrugs.
“Your father still alive?” Robert asks.
Okay. Okay. This other Bob’s own father died just this morning. Bob is still thinking straight enough to see that. But he wants to stay straight and the question is starting to drag him aside. He realizes time is passing. He realizes he’s not saying anything. He touches his forehead, where the sizzle has resumed.
Robert finds himself ready to buy Bob a bus ticket. Send him back to Charleston to find his father. Advise him to use the bus trip to figure out everything he’s got to say to the old man before it’s too late. Even if it’s Fuck you.
But Bob’s still not talking. He’s flailing in his head for things to think about other than what the other Bob and his dead father would have him think, and the oil drum fire in his forehead gives him something: Maybe on the next cold night he’ll take a little walk to check out the groundskeeper’s storage room at the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church. Check to see who might have returned to the scene of the crime.
Robert senses the shift in Bob. He senses his mistake. Pressing about a father is wrong. The bus ticket is wrong. But the impulse to fund Bob suggests another plan. A way to actually help. “Have you got a place to sleep tonight, Bob?” he asks.
Bob’s reflexes on matters of food and shelter are strong. This question, in that tone of voice, from a stand-up guy, casts off, for the moment, both Calvin and revenge. “No I don’t, Bob,” he says.
“Can you make good use of a week in a motel?”
The answer to that, for Bob, can be a little complicated. But on balance, yes. “Yes,” he says.
Instantly a practical problem presents itself to Robert. He hesitates, recognizes a likely expert sitting before him, but doesn’t know how to ask. “Do you have a place in mind …” He gets this far and realizes he could have just made that the question. Unfortunately his tone kept the thing open-ended.
Bob understands. He finishes, declaratively: “… that will take a guy like me.” Before the other Bob can feel awkward for asking, Bob goes on, “Sure. You know the Prince Murat Motel?”
Through this day, from his awakening to the revelation of his father’s death to the hours with his mother to this unexpected dinner, Robert, unawares, has been winding tight inside. Now it all seems to snap loose and he nearly gasps with relief as his safely scholarly mind seizes on something familiar. “I do,” he says, leaning toward Bob. “It’s my favorite business establishment in Tallahassee. Prince Achille Murat was a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte and the son of the King of Naples. He was exiled with his family to Vienna after Napoleon’s final defeat, and then he emigrated to Florida. By the age of twenty-four he was the mayor of Tallahassee. He was a Jacksonian Democrat, though he never really made much of a political career outside the area. He became a bosom pal of the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Tallahassee in 1826 a ‘grotesque place,’ by the way. But Murat eventually was known mostly for his eccentricities.”
The first of these that comes to Robert’s mind is Murat’s reputation for washing his feet only after he wore out his shoes. Robert leaves this unspoken. He’s beginning to hear himself.
Bob has no idea what Robert is talking about. Bob has even begun to wonder if Robert has troubles like his own.
After a moment of silence between them, Robert says, as if to explain his little lecture, “I do know the Murat.”
Still silence.
“I teach history.”
“They’ll let me in there,” Bob says.
“Then it’s the Murat,” Robert says, and he says no more. What seemed to loosen in him is again wrung taut.
After Robert leaves his wife and mother on the day his father died, as the January late afternoon wanes into darkness and Darla works in the next room sorting through papers and arranging the wake, Peggy finds herself unable to sleep. She turns her face to the ribbon of parking lot light edging her window blind. She closes her eyes. And she is standing very still, trying not to sweat, not to swoon from all the cheap perfume — like hers — on all the bodies of all the girls as they wait — like her — along the platform of the inbound track, wait for the troop train, wait for the long wait to be over. Their men will return to them on this day. Bill will return. The rest of Peggy’s life will begin. She is wearing her daisy-print sundress. Her arms are bare, and her hair falls to her shoulders in long curls and mounts high above her forehead in a pompadour. Little Bobby is elsewhere. He is up and running already, at thirteen months, always running, and talking as well, babbling an hour at a time to a framed photo of his father, he and the image sitting together in the center of the living room floor, the glass perpetually smudged with Bobby’s fingerprints. He was conceived on Peggy and Bill’s wedding night, which was also their last night together. Bill has never seen his son. But he won’t see him on this night either. The boy is at Mama’s and Papa’s, where the four of them have lived these two years. And Uncle Joe is happy to go on a bender for a few days with his buddies at the Industrial Canal so Peggy and Bill can have some time alone in Joe’s shotgun on Constance Street. So they can make love for the second time.
Peggy opens her eyes. She has turned and is facing her husband’s empty bed, barely visible in the dim room, as if this is the memory and the train platform is her life in the moment.
She closes her eyes again. Briefly she watches the splash of phosphenes there, the color of street-light. Then there is only bright New Orleans sunlight beyond the shade of the railroad shed. And now cries at the far end of the platform. Someone sees the train. The bodies around her begin to move, to surge. She holds still. He will find her. She has always known he will return and he will find her.
And she says to her nineteen-year-old self: Oh, baby, don’t get your hopes up. He’s been off fighting a holy war against the legions of evil, an evil so pitiless that it would have one day crossed the ocean and come to our own front porch. He has seen things and done things that required a bravery beyond your imagining. You have been faithful to him. You have trusted in the noble cause he fought for and you must make him feel how proud you are. You must try to hold him close. But don’t be surprised at the things you both have sacrificed. This night will be one of them. And the next. And the next. Try not to be disappointed in him.
Later this same evening, Jimmy turns off Harrison Trail and into his Twelve Mile Bay property. He has returned to pack his bags. He will stay in Toronto till the future is arranged with Linda. Heather is beside him. She becomes abruptly quiet as they enter the half-mile approach to the house. In the city, when he told her he needed to come up here for his things and it was best to do it right away, she did not speak of the reason but she insisted on coming along. She stirs now, leans toward the lights they push before them.
“She won’t be here,” Jimmy says, offering a hand.
He has read her correctly. She grasps his, holds on tight.
They emerge from the pines. The house is lit by the moon. There are no lights within. No car in the driveway. Heather lets go of his hand.
Barely through the front door, she brings the two of them to a stop.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Why?”
“Cold feet.”
“No need …”
“I know the place is yours too,” she says. “But it feels like her.”