In the Lake of the Woods (20 page)

He sniffed his hand again, then shook his head. The dank odor revived facts he did not wish to revive.

There was the fact of an iron teakettle. Kill Jesus, that also was a fact. Defeat was a fact. Rage was a fact. And there were the facts of steam and a dead geranium. Other things were less firm. It was almost a fact, but not quite, that he had moved down the hallway to their bedroom that night, where for a period of time he had watched Kathy sleep, admiring the tan at her neck and shoulders, her fleshy lips, the way her
thumb lay curled along the side of her nose. At one point, he remembered, her eyelids had snapped open.

He stood still for a moment. The wind seemed to lift up the boathouse roof, holding it briefly, then letting it slap down hard. Even in the weak light Wade could make out a number of grooves and scratchings where the boat had been dragged out to the beach. He tried to imagine Kathy handling it alone, and the Evinrude too, but he couldn't come up with a convincing flow of images. Not impossible, but not likely either, which left room for speculation.

The thing about facts, he decided, was that they came in sizes. You had to try them on for proper fit. A case in point: his own responsibility. Right now he couldn't help feeling the burn of guilt. All that empty time. The convenience of a faulty memory.

He stepped outside, closed the doors, switched off the flashlight and walked back up the slope to the cottage.

Pat sat waiting for him on the porch.

"Out for a stroll?" she said.

The man was like one of them famous onions. Keep peeling back the layers, there's always more. But I liked him. Her, too. In some ways they was a lot alike, more than you'd figure. Two peas in a pod, Claude used to say, but I always claimed onions.

—Ruth Rasmussen

 

There was plenty he wasn't saying. Plenty. One of these days I'd like to go out and do some more digging around that old cottage, or dredge the lake. I bet bones would come up.

—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

 

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
⁶⁸

—Edith Wharton (
The Touchstone
)

 

He was constantly doing weird things, like he'd trail her around campus like one of those private eyes or something, except he was a klutz and Kathy always knew about it. She used to call him Inspector Clouseau—that fumble-bumble detective in
The Pink Panther.
Not to his face of course I can't sec how she tolerated it but she did Head over heels you could say
⁶⁹

—Deborah Lindquist (Classmate of Kathleen Wade, University of Minnesota)

 

Johnny had slick hands. With magicians that's a compliment. Ten, eleven years old, he could work freestyle, no apparatus, just those beautiful little hands of his. And he knew how to keep his mouth shut.

—Sandra Karra (Karra's Studio of Magic)

 

You will never explain your tricks [to an audience], for no matter how clever the means, the explanation disappoints the desire to believe in something beyond natural causes, and admiration for cleverness is a poor substitute for the delight of wonderment.
⁷⁰

—Robert Parrish (
The Magician's Handbook
)

 

Forget the dentist! Too damn personal. She was my
sister—
why can't you just leave her alone? It's like you're obsessed.
⁷¹

—Patricia S. Hood

 

GLOSSARY

Effect:
The professional term for a magician's illusion.
Stripper deck:
A deck of cards whose sides or ends have been planed on a taper so that if a card is reversed, it can be located by feeling the protruding edges.
Vanish
(noun): A technical term for an effect in which an object or person is made to disappear.
Transposition:
A magic trick in which two or more objects or persons mysteriously change places.
Causal transportation:
A technical term for an effect in which the causal agent is itself made to vanish; i.e., the magician performs a vanish on himself.
Double consummation:
A way of fooling the audience by making it believe a trick is over before it really is.
⁷²

 

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know ... and another life running its course in secret.
⁷³
—Anton Chekhov ("The Lady with the Dog")

 

Q: How many people did you gather up?
A: Between thirty and fifty. Men, women, and children.
Q: What kind of children?
A: They was just children.
Q: Where did you get these people?
A: Some of them was in hootches and some was in rice paddies when we gathered them up.
Q: Why did you gather them up?
A: We suspected them of being Viet Cong. And as far as I'm concerned, they're still Viet Cong.
⁷⁴

—Paul Meadlo (Court-Martial Testimony)

I didn't shoot nobody. I shot some cows.

—Richard Thinbill

 

Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in one as in the other.
⁷⁵

—Miguel de Cervantes

 

I found his father in the garage. I knew. I really did. Even before I went in.

—Eleanor K. Wade

 

[Houdini's father] took the young Houdini to a stage performance by a traveling magician named Dr. Lynn. Dr. Lynn's magic act featured an illusion called "Palegenisia." In this illusion, he pretended to administer chloroform to a man, and then, after tying him in place inside a cabinet, Dr. Lynn proceeded to dismember the man with a huge butcher knife, cutting off legs and arms, and finally (discreetly covered with a black cloth) the man's head. The pieces were then thrown into the cabinet and the curtain was pulled. Moments later, the victim appeared from the cabinet restored to one living piece, and seemingly none the worse for the ordeal. Many years later Houdini purchased this illusion ... It is significant that, at an early age, Houdini had been fascinated by this particular illusion literally embodying the theme of death and resurrection, for this was a motif that reoccurred in all of Houdini's performances throughout his career.
⁷⁶

—Doug Henning (
Houdini: His Legend and His Magic
)

 

I told you how secretive he was—you never knew what he was thinking—and it just got worse after his father hanged himself.

—Eleanor K. Wade

 

[Woodrow] Wilson's own recollections of his youth furnish ample indication of his early fears that he was stupid, ugly, worthless, and unlovable ... It is perhaps to this core feeling of inadequacy, of a fundamental worthlessness which must ever be disproved, that the unappeasable quality of his need for affection, power, and achievement, and the compulsive quality of his striving for perfection, may be traced. For one of the ways in which human beings troubled with low estimates of themselves seek to obliterate their inner pain is through high achievement and the acquisition of power.
⁷⁷

—Alexander and Juliette George (
Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House
)

 

We'd just started gym class. I had the kids shooting baskets and after five or ten minutes the school principal came in and called me over and gave me the news. Then she walked away—a pure coward. I wasn't much better. I told John to hit the showers, his mom was waiting. A kid that age, it breaks your heart.
⁷⁸

—Lawrence Ehlers (Phys-Ed Teacher)

 

Another cousin, Jessie Bones, recalled a typical instance of Dr. Wilson's "teasing." The family was assembled at a wedding breakfast. Tommy [Woodrow] arrived at the table late. His father apologized on behalf of his son and explained that Tommy had been so greatly excited at the discovery of another hair in his mustache that morning that it had taken him longer to wash and dress. "I remember very distinctly the painful flush that came over the boy's face," Mrs. Brower said.
⁷⁹

—Alexander and Juliette George (
Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House
)

 

His father was never physically abusive. When he wasn't on the bottle, Paul could be very attentive to the boy, extremely caring. John loved him like crazy. Everybody did. My husband had this wonderful magnetic quality—this glow—he'd just point those incredible blue eyes at you and you'd feel like you. were under a big hot sun or something ... Except then he'd go back to the booze and it was like the sun burned itself out. He was a sad person underneath I wish I knew what he was so sad about I keep wondering.

—Eleanor K. Wade

 

When he was a college student, [Lyndon Johnson's] fellow students ... believed not only that he lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, "the biggest liar on campus"—but also that some psychological element
impelled
him to lie.
⁸⁰

—Robert A. Caro (
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
)

 

He was ambitious, no doubt about it, but that's not a black mark in my book. No ambition, no politics—it's that simple. But John also had ideals. A good progressive Democrat. Very dedicated. Help the needy, et cetera, ad weirdum. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, I guess he wanted to make up for what happened during the war. The way I see it, he came back pretty shattered, pretty fucked up, then he got married to Kathy and they had this really great love thing going. Never saw two people so feelie-grabbie. So he gets his life back together. Doesn't say anything about the Vietnam shit—not to his wife or me or anybody. And then after a while he
can't
say anything. Sort of trapped, you know? That's my theory. I don't think it started out as an intentional lie, he just kept mum about it—who the hell wouldn't?—and pretty soon he probably talked himself into believing it never happened at all. The guy was a magic man. He could fool people. Sure as fuck fooled me ... Keeping that stuff locked up inside, it must've driven him crazy sometimes ... Anyhow, I think the lies were sort of built into this whole repair-your-life thing of his—the ambitions, the big Washington dreams—and I guess it basically boils down to a case of colossal self-deception. State office, that's one thing. But this was a run for the United States Senate. The shit
had
to come out: a principle of politics. And so we get pulverized and he's right back to square one. Shattered again. That blank dead-man look I told you about.

—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

 

I didn't know what to do. At his dad's funeral. The way he was yelling—he wouldn't stop. It was embarrassing.

—Eleanor K. Wade

 

Kill Jesus!
⁸¹

—John Wade

 

I took down a single-barreled gun which belonged to my father, and which had often been promised me when I grew up. Then, armed with the gun, I went upstairs. On the first floor landing I met my mother. She was coming out of the death-chamber ... she was in tears. "Where are you going?" she asked ... "I'm going to the sky!" I answered. "What? You're going to the sky?" "Yes, don't stop me." "And what are you going to do in the sky, my poor child?" "I'm going to kill God, who killed Father."
⁸²

—Alexandre Dumas (
My Memoirs
)

 

John never accepted it. I'd hear him in his room at night, he'd be having these make-believe conversations with his father. Just like me, he wanted explanations—he wanted to know
why—
but I guess we both finally had to come up with our own pathetic answers.

—Eleanor K. Wade

 

Indeed, many young children express anger because they believe the death of a parent is deliberate abandonment ... [T]here are negative consequences for those who carry unresolved childhood grief into adulthood.
⁸³

—Richard R. Ellis ("Young Children: Disenfranchised Grievers")

 

Shame ... can be understood as a wound in the self. It is frequently instilled at a delicate age, as a result of the internalization of a contemptuous voice, usually parental. Rebukes, warnings, teasing, ridicule, ostracism, and other forms of neglect or abuse can play a part.
⁸⁴

—Robert Karen ("Shame")

 

I came to a hootch and a lady jumped out. I shot and wounded her, and she jumped in again and then came out with a baby and some others ... There was a man, a woman, and two girls ... [A] guy from the Second Platoon came up and grabbed my rifle and said, "Kill them all!" He shot them.
⁸⁵