In the Lake of the Woods (28 page)

Maybe twice that night John Wade woke up sweating. The first time, near midnight, he would've turned and coiled up against Kathy, brain-sick, a little feverish, his thoughts wired to the nighttime hum of lake and woods.

Later he kicked back the sheets and whispered, "Kill Jesus."

Quietly then, he swung out of bed and moved down the hallway to the kitchen and ran water into an old iron teakettle and put it on the stove to boil. As he waited—naked, maybe, watching the ceiling—he would've felt the full crush of defeat, the horror and humiliation, the end of everything he'd ever wanted for himself. It was more than a lost election. It was disgrace. The secret was out and he was pinwheeling freestyle through the void. No pity in the world. All arithmetic—a clean, tidy sweep. St. Paul had been lost early. Duluth was lost four to one. The unions were lost, and the German Catholics, and the rank-and-file nobodies. A winner, he thought, until he became a loser. That quick.

The teakettle made a brisk whistling sound, but he could not bring himself to move.

Ambush politics. He could see it happening exactly as it happened. Front-page photographs of dead human beings in awkward poses. Names and dates. Eyewitness testimony. He could still see Kathy's face turning toward him on the morning when it all came undone. Now she knew. She would always know. The horror was partly Thuan Yen, partly secrecy itself, the silence and betrayal. Her expression was empty. Not shocked, just dark and vacant, twenty years of love dissolving into the certainty that nothing at all was certain.

"Kill Jesus," he said.

He felt the electricity in his blood.

Maybe then, when the water was at full boil, he pushed himself up and went to the stove.

Maybe he used a towel to pick up the iron teakettle.

Stupidly, he was smiling, but the smile was meaningless. He would not remember it. He would remember only the steam and the heat and the electricity in his fists and forearms. He carried the teakettle out to the living room and switched on a lamp and poured the boiling water over a big flowering geranium near the fireplace. "Jesus, Jesus," he was saying. There was a tropical stink. "Well now," he said, and nodded pleasantly.

He heard himself chuckle.

"Oh, my," he said.

He moved to the far end of the living room and boiled a small young spider plant. It wasn't rage. It was necessity. He emptied the teakettle on a dwarf cactus and a philodendron and a caladium and several others. Then he returned to the kitchen. He refilled the teakettle, watched the water come to a boil, smiled and squared his shoulders and moved down the hallway to their bedroom. A prickly heat pressed against his face; the teakettle made hissing sounds in the night. He felt himself glide away. Some time went by, which he would not
remember,
then later he found himself crouched at the side of the bed. He was rocking on his heels, watching Kathy sleep. Amazing, he thought. Because he loved her. Because he couldn't stop the teakettle from tipping itself forward. Kathy's face shifted on the pillow. Her eyelids snapped open. She looked up at him, puzzled, almost smiling, as if some magnificent new question were forming. Puffs of steam rose from the sockets of her eyes. The veins at her throat stiffened. She jerked sideways. There were noises in the night—screechings—his own name, perhaps—but then the steam was in her throat. She coiled and uncoiled and coiled up again. Unreal, John decided. A dank odor filled the room, % fleshy scalding smell, and Kathy's knuckles were doing a strange trick on the headboard—a quick rapping, then clenching up, then rapping again like a transmission in code. Bits of fat bubbled at her cheeks. He would remember thinking how impossible it was. He would remember the heat, the voltage in his arms and wrists. Why? he thought, but he didn't know. All he knew was fury. The blankets were wet. Her teeth were clicking. She twisted pushing with her elbows, sliding off toward the foot of the bed. A purply stain spilled out across her neck and shoulders. Her face seemed to fold up. Why? he kept thinking, except there were no answers and never would be. Maybe sunlight. Maybe the absence of sunlight. Maybe electricity. Maybe a vanishing act. Maybe a pair of snakes swallowing each other along a trail in Pinkville. Maybe his father. Maybe secrecy. Maybe humiliation and loss. Maybe madness. Maybe evil. He was aware of voices in the dark_women and children, slaughterhouse sounds_but the voices were not part of what he would remember. He would remember darkness. The skin at her forehead blistered up peeling off in long ragged strips. Her lips were purplish blue.
She jerked once and shuddered and curled up and hugged herself and lay still. She looked cold. There was a faint trembling at her fingers.

Maybe he kissed her.

Maybe he wrapped her in a sheet.

Maybe some black time went by before he carried her down the slope to the dock, gliding, full of love, laying her down and then moving to the boathouse and opening up the double doors.

"Kath, my Kath," he would've whispered.

He would've dragged the boat out into shallow water, letting it fishtail there while he went back for the engine. The fog had lifted. There was a moon and many stars. For a few seconds he was aware of certain sounds in the dark, the nighttime murmur of lake and woods, his own breathing as he locked in the engine and waded back to the boathouse for the oars and gas can and life vest. He was Sorcerer now. He was inside the mirrors. He would've used the oars to pull over to the dock, tying up there, feeling the waves beneath him and lifting her up and thinking Kath, my Kath, placing her in the boat and then returning to the cottage for her sneakers and jeans and white cotton sweater. Maybe he whispered magic words. Maybe he felt something beyond the glide. Remorse, perhaps, or grief. But there were no certainties now, no facts, and like a sleepwalker he would've made his way back to the boat and started the engine and turned out into the big silent lake. He did not go far. Maybe two hundred yards. In the dark, the boat shifting beneath him, he caused her sneakers to vanish in deep water. Then her jeans and sweater. He weighted her with polished gray rocks from the slope below the cottage. "Kath, Kath," he must've said, and maybe other things, and then dispatched her to the bottom. Later, he
would've eased himself into the lake. He would've tipped the boat and held it firm against the waves and let it fill and sink away from him.

Maybe he joined her for a while. Maybe he didn't. At one point he felt an underwater rush in his ears. At another point he found himself alone on the dock, cold and naked, watching the stars.

And then later still he woke up in bed. A soft pinkish light played against the curtains. For a few seconds he studied the effects of dawn, the pale ripplings and gleamings. He reached out for Kathy, who wasn't there, then hugged his pillow and returned to the bottoms.

Three miles out, in open lake, Wade turned straight north. Dawn came up thin and cold.

By seven in the morning he was well beyond Buckete Island, moving at fifteen knots, nothing ahead but the wilds. On occasion he found himself scanning the lake, throttling down as he passed bleak islands of rock and pine. Hopeless, he realized. Kathy was not to be found. It was finished, obviously, and he had to take consolation in the fine line between biology and spirit.

Around mid-morning he crossed over into Canadian waters and continued north through a chain of thickly wooded islands. The Chris-Craft bounced along nicely: an expensive wheel-steered vessel, trim and fast. At moderate speeds, Wade estimated, the topped-off tanks gave him a two-hundred-mile cruising range. The emergency gas cans might tack on another fifty. Which was sufficient. Emergencies belonged to an earlier period. Now it was down to essentials. He leaned back, calm and relaxed, letting his thoughts mix with the overall flow of things, the sweeps of timber, the waves and water. Not so bad. Not at all. The day had turned mostly sunny,
not warm but comfortable, and to the west little puffs of cloud animated a pleasant autumn sky. Twice he spotted deserted fishing cabins along the shoreline, but after an hour the forests thickened and the country went shaggy and unbroken. He used his new plastic compass to hold a bearing due north.

Very simple, really.

Lost was his forte. A lifelong pursuit.

It was close to noon when he moved into a series of channels that twisted capriciously through the wilderness. He swung to the northeast, where the woods looked deepest and most inviting, the channels splitting off and multiplying and then multiplying again. At one juncture he found himself thinking aloud. Nothing sensible. A little jingle in his head:
East is east and lost is lost ...
He told himself to shut up. Don't lose it, he thought—not that, not yet—but soon he was singing against the throb of the engine:
You're much too good to be truuue
... Later, other songs came to mind, which he voiced to the afternoon, and for a considerable expanse of time he had the sensation of being adrift on a sea of glass, reflections everywhere, backward and forward. At times he found himself speaking to Kathy as if she were in an adjoining room, some secret hidey-hole just behind the mirrors. He told her everything he could tell about what had happened at Thuan Yen. The pastel sunlight. The machine-gun wind that seemed to pick him up and blow him from spot to spot. "Oh, Kath," he said quietly, "sweet lost Kathleen." The only explicable thing, he decided, was how thoroughly inexplicable it all was. Secrets in general, depravity in particular. He did not consider himself an evil man. For as long as he could remember he had aspired to a condition of virtue—for himself, for the world—yet at some point he'd caught a terrible infection that
was beyond purging or antidote. He didn't know the name for it. Simple befuddlement, maybe. Moral disunity. A lost soul. Even now, as he looked out across the glassy lake, Wade felt an estrangement from the actuality of the world, its basic nowness, and in the end all he could conjure up was an image of illusion itself, pure reflection, a head full of mirrors. He laughed and thought aloud,
Won't you trust in me pleeease,
then paused to appraise the woods and water. Very natural. White-caps and plant life. Here was a region that bore resemblance to the contours of his own little repository of a soul, the tangle, the overall disarray, qualities icy and wild. Yes, and all the angles at play. This angle, that angle. Was he a monster?
Well?
he wondered, but it was inconclusive. A while later he yelled, "Hey, Kath!"

Not a monster, he thought. Certainly not. He was Sorcerer.

"Kath!" he yelled.

Some vacant time passed, an hour or more, and when he refocused, Wade saw that the sun had dropped off well to the west. Four-thirty, he guessed. There were clouds now, bloated and purply black, the sky pressing down hard. He smelled winter. Not snow, but the principle of snow—the physics. For a few moments he felt something approaching terror. If the object were survival, which it was not, he would now turn tail and put the throttle on flat-out flee and make a run for whatever was left of his life.

Instead, he chuckled.

"Dear me," he said, and turned in toward a low island a quarter mile to the east.

It was snowing by the time he'd made camp for the night. Nothing elaborate. A pair of pines. A blanket and a fire. He ate a sandwich, not tasting much, then pulled out the
note Claude had left him and read it through by firelight. A grand old gentleman. Allegiant in an epoch of shifting loyalties.

"Whether you're nuts or not, I don't know," Claude had scrawled, "but I can honestly say that I don't blame you for nothing. Understand me? Not for
nothing.
The choices funnel down and you go where the funnel goes. No matter what, you were in for a lynching. People make assumptions and pretty soon the assumptions turn into fact and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Anyhow, I've got this theory. I figure what happened was real-real simple. Your wife got herself lost. The end. Period. Nothing else. That's all anybody knows and the rest is bullshit. Am I right?"

Wade smiled.

He looked up at the sky, almost nodding, but there was no point in it. Points were hard to come by. He fortified himself with vodka and finished reading.

"A couple of practical things. You got a radio on board. It's set to the right frequency, just switch the fucker on and talk. I stuck the chart book under the rear seat—Canada's that hunk of dry land up at the top of most pages. Recommend it highly. I'm not saying you should change your mind, even if you know what your mind is, but at least there's plenty of space up there to evaporate. It's worth some thought. Luck to you. Love."

Wade read the letter through again, then lay back and watched the snow slanting across the yellow firelight. The old man was mostly right. Kathy was gone, everything else was guesswork. Probably an accident. Or lost out here. Something simple. For sure—almost for sure. Except it didn't matter much. He was responsible for the misery in their lives, the betrayals and deceit, the manipulations of truth that had sub
stituted for simple love. He was Sorcerer. He was guilty of that, and always would be.

 

Just after midnight Wade woke to a heavy rain. He was drenched and cold. For the rest of the night he huddled under the pair of leaky pines, sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out at the dark. Here, Wade realized, he had come up against a few firm truths. The wet. The cold. His quixotic little war with the universe seemed pitiful indeed.

"Well, Kath?" he said.

Later he said, "
Well?
"

His tone was intimate, open to conversation, but nothing returned to him.

 

At first light he continued north. The rain had become fog, which was presently replaced by scattered flurries and a hard westerly wind. By nine o'clock the flurries were dense snow. The wind was light, the temperature not far above freezing. Visibility, he reminded himself, was not a problem. All morning he cruised at random through a maze of wide channels, zigzagging, no objective except to lose himself and stay lost. The snow helped. Once, in the early afternoon, he found himself surrounded by several sparkling white islands. The view was stark and beautiful. A Christmas card, he thought. Happy holidays. Despite everything, his mood was curiously festive, his morale high, and it occurred to him that happiness itself was subject to the laws of relativity. He took out his bottle and sang "I'll Be Home for Christmas," then other carols, and as he continued north the appropriate images began to take shape before him—wreaths and eggnog and stuffed stockings and big bowls of oyster stew. "Hey, Kath," he said. He waited, then yelled "Kath!"