In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O’Brien

Скачать книгу

against the counter.

      “It’s not my fault.”

      Wade shrugged. “Sorry.”

      “So stop it,” she said. “Just goddamn stop.”

      Kathy spun around on her stool, got up, went over to the magazine rack, and stood with her back to him. Dusk was settling in fast. A cold lake breeze slapped up against the Mini-Mart’s screen door, startling the plump young waitress, causing a spill as she refilled their cups.

      It was 5:24.

      After a time Kathy sat down again and studied the frosted mirror behind the counter, the ads for Pabst and Hamm’s and Bromo-Seltzer. She avoided eye contact, sliding down inside herself, and for an instant, watching her in the mirror, John Wade was assaulted by the ferocity of his own love. A beautiful woman. Her face was tired, with the lax darkening that accompanies age, but still he found much to admire. The green eyes and brown summer skin and slim legs and shapely little fingers. Other things, too—subtle things. The way her hand fit precisely into his. How the sun had turned her hair almost white at the temples. Back in college, he remembered, she used to lie in bed and grasp her own feet like a baby and tell funny stories and giggle and roll around and be happy. All these things and a million more.

      Presently, Wade sighed and slipped a dollar bill under his saucer.

      “Kath, I am sorry,” he said. “I mean it.”

      “Fine, you’re sorry.”

      “All right?”

      “Sorry, sorry. Never ends.” Kathy waited for the young waitress to scoop up their cups. “Stop blaming me. We lost. That’s the truth—we lost.”

      “It was more than that.”

      “John, we can’t keep doing this.”

      Wade looked at the revolving clock. “Mr. Monster.”

      

      They had a light supper, played backgammon for dimes, sat listening to records in the living room. Around eight o’clock they went out for a short walk. There was a moon and some stars, and the night was windy and cool. The fog had not yet rolled in off the lake. In the coming days John Wade would remember how he reached out to take her hand, the easy lacing of their fingers. But he would also remember how Kathy pulled away after a few steps. She folded her arms across her chest and walked up to the yellow cottage and went inside without waiting for him.

      They did not take their blankets to the porch that night. They did not make love. For the rest of the evening they concentrated on backgammon, pushing dimes back and forth across the kitchen table.

      At one point he looked up at her and said, “Kath, that stuff in the newspapers—”

      Kathy passed him the dice.

      “Your move,” she said.

      As near as he could remember, they went to bed around eleven. Kathy snapped off the lamp. She turned onto her side and said, “Dream time,” almost cheerfully, as if it did not matter at all that she was now going away.

       5

       Hypothesis

      The purest mystery, of course, but maybe she had a secret lover. Marriages come unraveled. Pressures accumulate. There was precedent in their lives.

      In the kitchen that morning, when her eyes traveled away, maybe Kathy Wade was imagining a hotel room in Minneapolis, or in Seattle or Milwaukee, a large clean room with air-conditioning and fresh flowers and no politics and no defeat. Maybe she saw someone waiting for her. Or someone driving north toward Lake of the Woods, moving fast, coming to her rescue. An honest, quiet man. A man without guile or hidden history. Maybe she had grown tired of tricks and trapdoors, a husband she had never known, and later that night, when she said “Dream time,” maybe it was this she meant—an escape dream, a dream she would now enter.

      Among the missing, as among the dead, there is only the flux of possibility.

      Maybe a heaven, maybe not.

      Maybe she couldn’t bear to tell him. Maybe she staged it. Not likely, but not implausible either. The motives were plentiful—fed up, afraid, exhausted by unhappiness. Maybe she woke early the next morning and slipped out of bed and got dressed and moved out to the porch and quietly closed the door behind her and walked up the narrow dirt road to where a car was waiting.

       6

       Evidence

      We called him Sorcerer. It was a nickname.

       —Richard Thinbill

       Exhibit Seven: Photograph of John Wade, age 12

      Smiling

      Husky, not fat

      Holding a magician’s wand over four white mice

      

      He used to practice down in the basement, just stand in front of that old mirror of his and do tricks for hours and hours. His father didn’t think it was healthy. Always alone, always shut up by himself. A very secretive boy, I think I mentioned that.

       —Eleanor K. Wade

       Exhibit Eight: John Wade’s Box of Tricks, Partial List

      Miser’s Dream

      Horn of Plenty

      Spirit of the Dark

      The Egg Bag

      Guillotine of Death

      Silks

      Pulls

      Wands

      Wires

      Duplicates (6) of father’s necktie

      

      My sister seemed almost scared of him sometimes. I remember this one time when Kathy … Look, I don’t think it’s something we should talk about.

       —Patricia S. Hood

      What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.

       —Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

       —Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery)