In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O’Brien

Скачать книгу

—Eleanor K. Wade

       Exhibit Four: Polling Data

       July 3, 1986

      Wade—58%

      Durkee—31%

      Undecided—11%

      

       August 17, 1986

      Wade—21%

      Durkee—61%

      Landslide isn’t the word. You saw the numbers? Three to one, four to one—a career-ender. Poor guy couldn’t get elected assistant fucking dogcatcher on a Sioux reservation … Must’ve asked a trillion times if there was anything that could hurt us, scum or anything. Man never said one single word. Zero. Which isn’t how you run a campaign … Did I betray him? Fuck no. Other way around. Worked like a bastard to get his sorry ass elected.

       —Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

       Exhibit Five: Photographs (2) of boathouse (exterior), Lake of the Woods

       Exhibit Six: Photographs (3) of “Wade cottage” (exterior), Lake of the Woods

      I’ll bet she’s on a Greyhound bus somewhere. Married to that creep, that’s where I’d be. She liked buses.

       —Bethany Kee (Associate Admissions Director, University of Minnesota)

       —Patricia S. Hood (Sister of Kathleen Wade)

       —Ruth Rasmussen

       —Myra Shaw (Waitress)

       —Arthur J. Lux (Sheriff, Lake of the Woods County)

       —Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

      That’s preposterous. They loved each other. John wouldn’t hurt a fly.

       —Eleanor K. Wade

      Fucking flies!

       —Richard Thinbill

       3

       The Nature of Loss

      When he was fourteen, John Wade lost his father. He was in the junior high gymnasium, shooting baskets, and after a time the teacher put his arm around John’s shoulder and said, “Take a shower now. Your mom’s here.”

      What John felt that night, and for many nights afterward, was the desire to kill.

      At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn’t. He wanted to take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying. But he was helpless. He didn’t know where to start.

      In the weeks that followed, because he was young and full of grief, he tried to pretend that his father was not truly dead. He would talk to him in his imagination, carrying on whole conversations about baseball and school and girls. Late at night, in bed, he’d cradle his pillow and pretend it was his father, feeling the closeness. “Don’t be dead,” he’d say, and his father would wink and say, “Well, hey, keep talking,” and then for a long while they’d discuss the right way to hit a baseball, a good level swing, keeping your head steady and squaring up your shoulders and letting the bat do the job. It was pretending, but the pretending helped. And so when things got especially bad, John would sometimes invent elaborate stories about how he could’ve saved his father. He imagined all the things he could’ve done. He imagined putting his lips against his father’s mouth and blowing hard and making the heart come alive again; he imagined yelling in his father’s ear, begging him to please stop dying. Once or twice it almost worked. “Okay,” his father would say, “I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” but he never did.

      In his heart, despite the daydreams, John could not fool himself. He knew the truth. At school, when the teachers told him how sorry they were that he had lost his father, he understood that lost was just another way of saying dead. But still the idea kept turning in his mind. He’d picture his father stumbling down a dark alley, lost, not dead at all. And then the pretending would start again. John would go back in his memory over all the places his father might be—under

Скачать книгу