Читать книгу In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O’Brien - Страница 16

They were at a fancy party one evening, a political affair, and after a couple of drinks John Wade took Kathy’s arm and said, “Follow me.” He led her out to the car and drove her home and carried her into the kitchen and made love to her there against the refrigerator. Afterward, they drove back to the party. John delivered a funny little speech. He ended with a couple of magic tricks, and people laughed and clapped hard, and when he walked off the platform, Kathy took his arm and said, “Follow me.”

“Where?” John said.

“Outside. There’s a garden.”

“It’s December. It’s Minnesota.”

Kathy shrugged. They had been married six years, almost seven. The passion was still there.

It was in the nature of love that John Wade went to the war. Not to hurt or be hurt, not to be a good citizen or a hero or a moral man. Only for love. Only to be loved. He imagined his father, who was dead, saying to him, “Well, you did it, you hung in there, and I’m so proud, just so incredibly goddamn proud.” He imagined his mother ironing his uniform, putting it under clear plastic and hanging it in a closet, maybe to look at now and then, maybe to touch. At times, too, John imagined loving himself. And never risking the loss of love. And winning forever the love of some secret invisible audience—the people he might meet someday, the people he had already met. Sometimes he did bad things just to be loved, and sometimes he hated himself for needing love so badly.

In college John and Kathy used to go dancing at The Bottle Top over on Hennepin Avenue. They’d hold each other tight, even to the fast songs, and they’d dance until they couldn’t dance anymore, and then they’d sit in one of the dark booths and play a game called Dare You. The rules were haphazard. “I dare you,” Kathy might say, “to take off my panty hose,” and John would contemplate the mechanics, the angles and resistances, and then he’d nod and slide a hand under the table. It was a way of learning about each other, a way of exploring the possibilities between them.

One night he dared her to steal a bottle of Scotch from behind the bar. “No sweat at all,” Kathy said, “it’s way too easy,” and she straightened her skirt and got up and said a few words to the bartender, who went into a back room, then she strolled behind the bar and stood studying the selections for what seemed a very long while. Finally she made a so-what motion with her shoulders. She tucked a bottle under her jacket and returned to the booth and smiled at John and dared him to order two glasses.

He was crazy with love. He pulled off one of her white tennis shoes. With a ballpoint pen he wrote on the instep: JOHN + KATH. He drew a heart around these words, tied the shoe to her foot.

Kathy laughed at his corniness.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

First, though, there was Vietnam, where John Wade killed people, and where he composed long letters full of observations about the nature of their love. He did not tell her about the killing. He told her how lonely he was and how he wanted more than anything to sleep with his hand on the bone of her hip. He said he was lost without her. He said she was his compass. He said she was his sun and stars. He compared their love to a pair of snakes he’d seen along a trail near Pinkville, each snake eating the other’s tail, a bizarre circle of appetites that brought the heads closer and closer until one of the men in Charlie Company used a machete to end it. “That’s how our love feels,” John wrote, “like we’re swallowing each other up, except in a good way, a perfect Number One Yum-Yum way, and I can’t wait to get home and see what would’ve happened if those two dumbass snakes finally ate each other’s heads. Think about it. The mathematics get weird.” In other letters he wrote about the great beauty of the country, the paddies and mountains and jungles. He told her about villages that vanished right before his eyes. He told her about his new nickname. “The guys call me Sorcerer,” he wrote, “and I sort of like it. Gives me this zingy charged-up feeling, this special power or something, like I’m really in control of things. Anyhow, it’s not so bad over here, at least for now. And I love you, Kath. Just like those weirdo snakes—one plus one equals zero!”

When he was young, nine or ten, John Wade would lie in bed with his magic catalogs, drawing up lists of the tricks he wanted—floating glass balls, colorful fekes and tubes, exploding balloons with flowers inside. He’d write down the prices in a little notebook, crossing out items he couldn’t afford, and then on Saturday mornings he’d get up early and take the bus across town to Karra’s Studio of Magic in St. Paul, all alone, a forty-minute ride.

Outside the store, on the sidewalk, he’d spend some time working up his nerve.

It wasn’t easy. The place scared him. Casually, or trying to be casual, he’d gaze into the windows and stroll away a few times and then finally suck in a deep breath and think to himself: Go—Now, he’d think—Go!—and then he’d step inside, fast, scampering past the glass display cases, letting his head fill up with all the glittering equipment he knew by heart from his catalogs: Miser’s Dream and Horn of Plenty and Chinese Rings and Spirit of the Dark. There were professional pulls and sponge balls and servantes—a whole shelf full of magician’s silks—but in a way he didn’t see anything at all.

A young orange-haired woman behind the counter would flick her eyebrows at him.

“You!” she’d cry.

The woman made his skin crawl. Her cigarette voice, partly. And her flaming carrot-colored hair.

“You!” she’d say, or she’d laugh and yell, “Hocus-pocus!” but by that point John would already be out the door. The whole blurry trip terrified him. Especially the Carrot Lady. The bright orange hair. The way she laughed and flicked her eyebrows and cried, “You!”—loud—as if she knew things.

The ride home was always dreary.

When he walked into the kitchen, his father would glance up and say, “Little Merlin,” and his mother would frown and put a sandwich on the table and then busy herself at the stove. The whole atmosphere would tense up. His father would stare out the window for a time, then grunt and say, “So what’s new in magic land? Big tricks up your sleeve?” and John would say, “Sure, sort of. Not really.”

His father’s hazy blue eyes would drift back to the window, distracted and expectant, as if he were waiting for some rare object to materialize there. Sometimes he’d shake his head. Other times he’d chuckle or snap his fingers.

“Those Gophers,” he’d say. “Basketball fever, right? You and me, pal, we’ll catch a game tomorrow.” He’d grin across the table. “Right?”

“Maybe,” John would say.

“Just maybe?”

“I got things to do.”

Slowly then, his father’s eyes would travel back to the window, still searching for whatever might be out there. The kitchen would seem very quiet.

“Well, sure, anything you want,” his father would say. “Maybe’s fine, kiddo. Maybe’s good enough for me.”

Something was wrong. The sunlight or the morning air. All around him there was machine-gun fire, a machine-gun wind, and the wind seemed to pick him up and blow him from place to place. He found a young woman laid open without a chest or lungs. He found dead cattle. There were fires, too. The trees and hootches and clouds were burning. Sorcerer didn’t know where to shoot. He didn’t know what to shoot. So he shot the burning trees and burning hootches. He shot the hedges. He shot the smoke, which shot back, then he took refuge behind a pile of stones. If a thing moved, he shot it. If a thing did not move, he shot it. There was no enemy to shoot, nothing he could see, so he shot without aim and without any desire except to make the terrible morning go away.

When it ended, he found himself in the slime at the bottom of an irrigation ditch.

PFC Weatherby looked down on him.

“Hey, Sorcerer,” Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him.

John Wade was elected to the Minnesota State Senate on November 9, 1976. He and Kathy splurged on an expensive hotel suite in St. Paul, where they celebrated with a dozen or so friends. When the party ended, well after midnight, they ordered steaks and champagne from room service. “Mr. Senator Husband,” Kathy kept saying, but John told her it wasn’t necessary, she could call him Honorable Sir, and then he picked up a champagne bottle and used it as a microphone, peeling off his pants, gliding across the room and singing Regrets, I’ve had a few, and Kathy squealed and flopped back on the bed and grabbed her ankles and rolled around and laughed and yelled, “Honorable Senator Sir!” so John stripped off his shirt and made oily Sinatra moves and sang The record shows I took the blows, and Kathy’s green eyes were wet and happy and full of the light that was only Kathy’s light and could be no one else’s.

One evening Charlie Company wandered into a quiet fishing village along the South China Sea. They set up a perimeter on the white sand, went swimming, dug in deep for the night. Around dawn they were hit with mortar fire. The rounds splashed into the ocean behind them—a bad scare, nobody was hurt—but when it was over, Sorcerer led a patrol into the village. It took almost an hour to round everyone up, maybe a hundred women and kids and old men. There was much chattering, much consternation as the villagers were ushered down to the beach for a magic show. With the South China Sea at his back, Sorcerer performed card tricks and rope tricks. He pulled a lighted cigar from his ear. He transformed a pear into an orange. He displayed an ordinary military radio and whispered a few words and made their village disappear. There was a trick to it, which involved artillery and white phosphorus, but the overall effect was spectacular.

A fine, sunny morning. Everyone sat on the beach and oohed and ahhed at the vanishing village.

“Fuckin’ Houdini,” one of the guys said.

As a boy John Wade spent hours practicing his moves in front of the old stand-up mirror down in the basement. He watched his mother’s silk scarves change color, copper pennies becoming white mice. In the mirror, where miracles happened, John was no longer a lonely little kid. He had sovereignty over the world. Quick and graceful, his hands did things ordinary hands could not do—palm a cigarette lighter, cut a deck of cards with a turn of the thumb. Everything was possible, even happiness.

In the mirror, where John Wade mostly lived, he could read his father’s mind. Simple affection, for instance. “Love you, cowboy,” his father would think.

Or his father would think, “Hey, report cards aren’t everything.”

The mirror made this possible, and so John would sometimes carry it to school with him, or to baseball games, or to bed at night. Which was another trick: how he secretly kept the old stand-up mirror in his head. Pretending, of course—he understood that—but he felt calm and safe with the big mirror behind his eyes, where he could slide away behind the glass, where he could turn bad things into good things and just be happy.

The mirror made things better.

The mirror made his father smile all the time. The mirror made the vodka bottles vanish from their hiding place in the garage, and it helped with the hard, angry silences at the dinner table. “How’s school these days?” his father would ask, in the mirror, which would permit John to ramble on about some of his problems, little things, school stuff, and in the mirror his father would say, “No problem, that’s life, that’s par for the course. Besides, you’re my best pal.” After dinner John would watch his father slip out to the garage. That was the worst part. The secret drinking that wasn’t secret. But in the mirror, John would be there with him, and together they’d stand in the dim light, rakes and hoses and garage smells all around them, and his father would explain exactly what was happening and why it was happening. “One quickie,” his father would say, “then we’ll smash these goddamn bottles forever.”

“To smithereens,” John would say, and his father would say, “Right. Smithereens.”

In all kinds of ways his father was a terrific man, even without the mirror. He was smart and funny. People enjoyed his company—John, too—and the neighborhood kids were always stopping by to toss around a football or listen to his father’s stories and opinions and jokes. At school one day, when John was in sixth grade, the teacher made everyone stand up and give five-minute speeches about any topic under the sun, and a kid named Tommy Winn talked about John’s father, what a neat guy he was, always friendly and full of pep and willing to spend time just shooting the breeze. At the end of the speech Tommy Winn gave John a sad, accusing look that lasted way too long. “All I wish,” Tommy said, “I wish he was my father.”

Except Tommy Winn didn’t know some things.

How in fourth grade, when John got a little chubby, his father used to call him Jiggling John. It was supposed to be funny. It was supposed to make John stop eating.

At the dinner table, if things weren’t silent, his father would wiggle his tongue and say, “Holy Christ, look at the kid stuff it in, old Jiggling John,” then he’d glance over at John’s mother, who would say, “Stop it, he’s husky, he’s not fat at all,” and John’s father would laugh and say, “Husky my ass.”

Sometimes it would end there.

Other times his father would jerk a thumb at the basement door. “That pansy magic crap. What’s wrong with baseball, some regular exercise?” He’d shake his head. “Blubby little pansy.”

In the late evenings, just before bedtime, John and Kathy often went out for walks around the neighborhood, holding hands and looking at the houses and talking about which one they would someday have as their own. Kathy had fallen in love with an old blue Victorian across from Edgewood Park. The place had white shutters and a white picket fence, a porch that wrapped around three sides, a yard full of ferns and flower beds and azalea bushes. She’d sometimes pause on the sidewalk, gazing up at the house, her lips moving as if to memorize all its details, and on those occasions John would feel an almost erotic awareness of his own good fortune, a fluttery rush in the valves of his heart. He wished he could make things happen faster. He wished there were some trick that might cause a blue Victorian to appear in their lives.

After a time Kathy would sigh and give him a long sober stare. “Dare you to rob a bank,” she’d say, which was only a way of saying that houses could wait, that love was enough, that nothing else really mattered.

They would smile at this knowledge and walk around the park a couple of times before heading back to the apartment.

Sorcerer thought he could get away with murder. He believed it. After he’d shot PFC Weatherby—which was an accident, the purest reflex—he tricked himself into believing it hadn’t happened the way it happened. He pretended he wasn’t responsible; he pretended he couldn’t have done it and therefore hadn’t; he pretended it didn’t matter much; he pretended that if the secret stayed inside him, with all the other secrets, he could fool the world and himself too.

He was convincing. He had tears in his eyes, because it came from his heart. He loved PFC Weatherby like a brother.

“Fucking VC,” he said when the chopper took Weatherby away. “Fucking animals.”

In 1982, at the age of thirty-seven, John Wade was elected lieutenant governor. He and Kathy had problems, of course, but they believed in happiness, and in their power to make happiness happen, and he was proud to stand with his hand on a Bible and look into Kathy’s eyes and take the public oath even as he took his own private oath. He would devote more time to her. He would investigate the market in blue Victorians. He would change some things.

At the inaugural ball that evening, after the toasts and speeches, John led her out to the dance floor and looked directly at her as if for the first time. She wore a short black dress and glass earrings. Her eyes were only her eyes. “Oh, Kath,” he said, which was all he could think of to say, nothing else, just “Oh, Kath.”

One day near Christmas, when John was eleven, his father drove him down to Karra’s Studio of Magic to pick out his present.

“Anything you want,” his father said. “No sweat. Break the bank.”

The store hadn’t changed at all. The same display cases, the same carrot-haired woman behind the cash register. Right away, when they walked in, she cried, “You!” and did the flicking thing with her eyebrows. She was dressed entirely in black except for a pair of copper bracelets and an amber necklace and two sparkling green stars pasted to her cheeks.

“The little magician,” she said, and John’s father laughed and said, “Little Merlin,” and then for a long time the two of them stood talking like old friends.

John finally made a noise in his throat.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ll miss Christmas.” He pointed at one of the display cases. “Right there.”

“What?” said his father.

“That one. That’s it.”

His father leaned down to look.

“There,” John said. “Guillotine of Death.”

It was a substantial piece of equipment. Fifteen or sixteen pounds, almost two feet high. He’d seen it a hundred times in his catalogs—he knew the secret, in fact, which was simple—but he still felt a rubbery bounce in his stomach as the Carrot Lady lifted the piece of apparatus to the counter. It was shiny black with red enamel trim and a gleaming chrome blade.

The Carrot Lady nodded, almost tenderly. “My favorite,” she said. “My favorite, too.”

She turned and went into a storeroom and returned with a large cucumber. The sucker move, John knew—prove that the blade was sharp and real. She inserted the cucumber into the guillotine’s wooden collar, clamped down a lock, stepped back, pulled up the chrome blade and let it fall. The cucumber lay on the counter in two neat halves.

“Good enough,” said the Carrot Lady. She squinted up at John’s father. “What we need now is an arm.”

“Sorry?”

“Your arm,” she said.

His father chuckled. “No way on earth.”

“Off with the jacket.”

His father tried to smile—a tall, solid-looking man, curly black hair and blue eyes and an athlete’s sloping shoulders. It took him a long while to peel off his jacket.

“Guillotine of Death,” he muttered. “Very unusual.”

“Slip your wrist in there. No sudden movements.”

“Christ,” he said.

“That’s the spirit,” she said.

The Carrot Lady’s eyes were merry as she hoisted up the blade. She held it there for a few seconds, then motioned for John to step behind the counter.

“You know this trick?” she said.

His father’s eyes swept sideways. “Hell no, he doesn’t know it.”

“I do,” John said. “It’s easy.”

“Bullshit, the kid doesn’t have the slightest –”

“Simple,” John said.

His father frowned, curled up his fingers, frowned again. His forearm looked huge and meaty in the guillotine collar.

“Listen, what about instructions?” he said. “These things come with instructions, right? Seriously. Written-down instructions?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” John said, “she told you to relax.”

He grasped the blade handle.

Power: that was the thing about magic.

The Carrot Lady folded her arms. The green stars on her cheeks seemed to twinkle with desire.

“Go on,” she said. “Let him have it.”

There were times when John Wade wanted to open up Kathy’s belly and crawl inside and stay there forever. He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press his gums against the firm red muscle of her heart. He wanted to suture their lives together.

It was terror, mostly. He was afraid of losing her. He had his secrets, she had hers.

So now and then he’d play spy tricks. On Saturday mornings he’d follow her over to the dry cleaners on Okabena Avenue, then to the drugstore and post office. Afterward, he’d tail her across the street to the supermarket, watching from a distance as she pushed a cart up and down the aisles, then he’d hustle back to the apartment and wait for her to walk in. “What’s for lunch?” he’d ask, and Kathy would give him a quick look and say, “You tell me.”