In the Lake of the Woods (24 page)

She remembered swinging out of bed. John was mumbling in his sleep—angry things.

Even then she didn't touch him.

It would not help. Nothing would.

In the dark she put on a fresh silk dress and brushed her hair. She found her purse, went out into the corridor, locked the door behind her, and took the elevator down to the casino. Three
A.M
., but the place was loud and alive. She found a lucky-looking table and squeezed in between a pair of Asian gentlemen. Already she felt better. The light was promising. She ordered coffee and orange juice, bought seven hundred dollars' worth of green chips, smiled at the dealer, asked him for a nice fat blackjack and hit it on the second run.

Verona, she thought. She'd win herself a future.

Flow with the glow.

She took the boat along the edge of the ruler in her head, utterly lost, low on gas, low on odds, looking out on the impossible gray reaches of sky and timber and water. So deal the cards, she thought. Always a chance. No play, no pay.

At six-thirty on the morning of September 22 Claude Rasmussen nudged his eighteen-foot Chris-Craft up against the dock below the yellow cottage on Lake of the Woods. John Wade helped the old man tie up, steadied Pat's arm as she stepped in, then trotted back up to the porch for a styrofoam cooler that Ruth had loaded with soft drinks and sandwiches. He felt a rising freshness inside him. Not quite optimism, but a kind of health, a clarity that had not been there for a very long while.

When he returned to the boat, Claude was bent over a ragged chart book. "What we could use," he was explaining, "is a goddamn divining rod. Pure crapshoot unless somebody's got a piece of razzle-dazzle intuition."

Wade stowed the cooler and took a seat next to Pat. She did not look at him. She studied the lake briefly, then motioned at a string of islands a mile or two offshore.

"There," she said. "Close to home."

Claude nodded. He gave a little shove to the dock, letting the big boat nose out into the waves. "Sit tight," he said. "This mama moves."

For ten minutes he held a course straight east toward the islands, the throttle wide open. It was a raw, foggy morning, like early winter, and in the brittle light Wade could see his own breath snatched away by the wind, little gusts of silver vanishing into deeper silver. The sky was dull and opaque. As they approached the first little island, Claude cut down on the power and turned north along the shoreline. The solitude was startling—rocks and forest and nothing else. They circled the island and then cruised east past a half dozen smaller islands. There was no sign of human presence, not now, not ever, and after an hour Wade felt himself sliding off into reverie. He had nothing to say, no desire to speak. Sitting back, humming under his breath, he scanned the waters for anything that might present itself. A piece of the boat or an oar or a white tennis shoe: Did tennis shoes float? Would the hearts survive?
JOHN
+
KATH
? And what about the human body? What was the float quotient? How long did the gases last?

It was hard to sustain concentration. He tried dividing the lake into quadrants, carefully inspecting each quadrant. He was humming an old army marching tune. The lyric, he realized, had been spinning through his head all morning—
I know a girl, name is Jill!
He couldn't push it away; the tune dipped and curled ...
I know a girl, name is Jill—babe, babe!
... And he remembered sloshing through the monsoons, everything wet and filthy, the war like fluid in his lungs, the whole company laughing and singing and marching through the rain. Other songs, too; other ghosts; odd flashes of this and that—the way Kathy used to chase him around the apartment with a squirt gun—an old man with a hoe—PFC Weatherby starting to smile—Kathy's skin going slick and
moist as they made love in the heat of July, the suction at their bellies, the traffic outside, her eyes softening and losing focus and rolling high in their sockets—the way she sometimes mumbled in her sleep—yes, and other happy times—the time he was Frank Sinatra—how he stripped down and pranced across the bedroom and sang
The record shows I took the blows,
buck naked, high-stepping, wiggling his ass, and how Kathy squealed and laughed and told him to put his flopper away and then lay back on the bed and grabbed her feet like a baby and rocked back and forth and kept laughing and squealing and couldn't stop.

"Senator, you
with
us?"

Wade looked up. The old man was reaching back for a can of soda, squinting at him. They were moving along an island identical to all the other islands.

"Sorry. I was off somewhere."

"Noticed that."

Wade tried to frame some appropriate remark. There was the pressure of oblique scrutiny.

"Green in the gills," Claude said. "For a second there, I thought you was ready to lose breakfast. Say the word, we'll take a breather, find some place to pull in for a while."

"Not a chance," Pat said.

"But if he's—"

Pat made a hard twisting motion. "We just got started, for God's sake. You'd think he'd want to
try.
"

"I do," Wade said, "I'm not—"

"Such crap."

"Pat, cut it out."

"More of the same. Crap, crap." Her gaze skipped across the surface of the lake. The sound of the wind was conspicuous.

"Hey, both of you," Claude said, "let's try for some politeness. Mouths shut, eyes open. That's another real good rule out here."

"But he doesn't even ... Just sits there half asleep."

"Listen, I wasn't—"

"Enough," Claude said. "Too much."

Wade looked out at the water. It occurred to him that he might seize the chance to declare his own innocence. Something indignant. A loud, angry oration. Explain that it was all a mystery and that he loved his wife and wanted her back and that everything else was nothing.

He squeezed his hands together. "Pat, listen," he said, "I'm not sure what you think. Whatever it is, I'm sorry."

"Wonderful."

"That's not an apology."

"No," she said, "I'm sure it's not."

 

Twice they spotted other search boats moving silently in the distance. Later, as they approached Magnuson's Island, a small red pontoon plane banked low overhead, close enough to make out the pilot's beard and straw hat. Mostly, though, things were flat and empty. At Buckete Island they turned west, crossing over to American Point, where for well over an hour they moved along at half speed just off the shoreline.

By late morning the sky had cleared a little. There was still a wind, which kept the chop high, but to the west a spray of sunlight fell across the lake's horizon. Pat took off her jacket and hunched forward. She was wearing a yellow basketball jersey, a size too small, and it was clear that all the weight training had produced results. An imposing creature, Wade thought. Her whole posture. The way she attacked the world. He sat up straight, of the soft double fold at his own belly.

No more booze, he decided. Not a drop.

At noon they ate the sandwiches and then continued north through mostly open water. Wade kept to himself. There was still that sense of being watched—the elaborate way Pat had of turning her head, how her eyes always settled on things in the middle distance. He told himself to ignore it. Nothing he could do. A prime suspect. Not just with Pat—everyone. Art Lux and Vinny Pearson, the newspapers, the party bigwigs, the whole prissy state of Minnesota. He couldn't blame them. He'd tried to pull off a trick that couldn't be done, which was to remake himself, to vanish what was past and replace it with things good and new. He should have known better. Should've lifted it out of the act. Never given the fucking show in the first place. Pitiful, he thought. And no one gave a shit about the pressure of it all. Twenty years' worth. Smiling and making love and eating breakfast and keeping up the patter and pushing away the nightmares and trying to invent a respectable little life for himself. The intent was never evil. Deceit, maybe, but the intent was purely virtuous.

No one knew. Obviously no one cared.

A liar and a cheat.

Which was the risk. You had to live inside your tricks. You had to be Sorcerer. Believe or fail. And for twenty years he had believed.

Now it ends, he thought.

One more fucker with no cards up his sleeve.

 

It was almost twilight when they tied up at the Angle Inlet boatyard. The mood of the place was somber. More than a dozen boats bobbed against the docks, their hulls restless in the approaching dusk. A bonfire was burning on the beach,
and groups of dark-faced men stood around it, smoking and drinking beer. Even from a distance, Wade decided, there was something distinctly mournful in their voices. Now and then a note of laughter rose up, but even the laughter seemed part of a deeper and more permanent gloom. It reminded him of the way men talked in the hours after a firelight. After Weber died, or Reinhart, or PFC Weatherby. That same melancholy. The same musical rise and fall.

Claude stood surveying things for a few seconds. His face looked gaunt in the dimming light. "I'll say this," he muttered, "it ain't no celebration."

"I keep hoping—"

"No shit. We all do."

The old man hitched up his trousers, took Pat's arm, and led her down to the beach. Wade followed a few steps behind. A peculiar frothiness had come into his stomach. Bubble-gut, Kathy used to call it. The tension of the public eye. He could feel heads turning, the air going dead behind him. He moved straight ahead, toward the fire, trying for the correct balance of poise and husbandly concern. Here and there voices rose up in encouragement—dark beards, hooded stares—and as he made his way forward, the whisperings seemed to gust up and push him along.

Ahead, near the fire, Art Lux and Vinny Pearson were shaking hands with Pat. Wade stopped and waited, not sure what to do with himself.

Someone clapped his shoulder. Someone else pushed a can of beer at him. "Tomorrow's tomorrow," Lux was saying, then for a second his voice was lost under the sound of a big double-engined boat approaching the docks. He turned and nodded at Wade. "No luck, I'm afraid. In the morning we'll be out there again. Nobody's got the quits."

The big boat's engines went dead. The running lights flashed off and a thick silence filled up the dark.

Lux took a step forward. His eyes were mild and solicitous in the firelight. "Glad you're up and about, sir. Looking fit."

Vinny Pearson laughed. "Like a fiddle," he said. "Fit to fart. Three
days
it takes."

The sheriff waved a hand. He looked at Wade as if anticipating a joke. "Just tune it out, sir. What we'll do, Miss Hood and I'll go find a place for a chat. Maybe you two boys can figure a way to patch things up."

"No thanks," Wade said.

"Just a thought."

Wade tried to smile but couldn't manage it. "Christ," he said. "What's the point?"

"Sir?"

"Everybody thinks—" He made himself turn away. "I've had it. A bellyful."

"Poor man," Vinny Pearson said.

"Especially from this one."

"Right, and if I was you—"

"The great albino detective."

Vinny lowered his shoulders. His eyes were a smooth, lustrous yellow. "Ain't albino," he said. "Swedish."

"Good for you."

"A fact."

They stood at angles, not quite facing each other. Claude maneuvered between them. "Hey, back off. We don't need this."

Vinny snorted. "Ain't no albino."

"A fetus," Wade said.

"Now that's about all—"

"Our great white albino deputy fetus."

Vinny's fingers twitched. The thought came to Wade's mind that the two of them shared some intuitive understanding about the nature of the human animal. Things that were possible, things that were not.

He felt relaxed and dangerous. That gliding sensation.

"Well, I'll tell you this," Vinny said slowly. "Albino or no albino, I never mass murdered nobody."

"Here's your chance."

"Fuck you."

"Sure. Both of us."

Vinny waited a moment, turned away, then stopped in the shadows beyond the fire. "Truth serum," he snarled. "That's what we need, a nice big
bellyful!
" He cackled and walked off.

Wade was aware of voices behind him. When he looked up, Lux was guiding Pat to a wooden bench across the beach. Claude clamped a hand on Wade's shoulder. "Don't pay it mind. The albino stuff tickled me."

"Right. Tickled."

"Come on, let's park ourselves."

They moved up closer to the fire. Six or seven dusky faces nodded beneath their caps as Claude made the introductions, and then for a long while Wade sat listening to a conversation that seemed to transpire in another language. Impossibly abstract: tides and winds and channel currents. It was hard to achieve focus. Partly it was Vinny, partly the glide. Once or twice he found himself tugged away on the backwash of voices, drifting here and there. Another universe, he thought. Everyday logic had gone inside out; the essential substances that had once constituted his daily being had been transformed into something vaporous and infinitely mutable.
What was real? What wasn't? Kathy, for instance. No firmness. It was difficult to imagine her out there right now, at this instant, looking up at this same starry sky.

He couldn't feel much. He took a slug of beer and tried to brace himself.

"These boys here," Claude was saying, "they're water-smart. Real pros. They'll dig her out for you."

Positive murmurs came from the dark.

Across the beach Lux and Pat were huddled in conversation. Wade watched them for a few seconds, wondering if he should walk over and demand the handcuffs. Blurt out a few secrets. The teakettle and the boathouse. Tell them he wasn't sure. Just once in his life: tell everything. Talk about his father. Explain how his whole life had been managed with mirrors and that he was now totally baffled and totally turned around and had no idea how to work his way out. Which was the truth. He didn't know shit. He didn't know where he was or how he'd gotten there or where to go next.