Читать книгу In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O’Brien - Страница 9

When he was fourteen, John Wade lost his father. He was in the junior high gymnasium, shooting baskets, and after a time the teacher put his arm around John’s shoulder and said, “Take a shower now. Your mom’s here.”

What John felt that night, and for many nights afterward, was the desire to kill.

At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn’t. He wanted to take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying. But he was helpless. He didn’t know where to start.

In the weeks that followed, because he was young and full of grief, he tried to pretend that his father was not truly dead. He would talk to him in his imagination, carrying on whole conversations about baseball and school and girls. Late at night, in bed, he’d cradle his pillow and pretend it was his father, feeling the closeness. “Don’t be dead,” he’d say, and his father would wink and say, “Well, hey, keep talking,” and then for a long while they’d discuss the right way to hit a baseball, a good level swing, keeping your head steady and squaring up your shoulders and letting the bat do the job. It was pretending, but the pretending helped. And so when things got especially bad, John would sometimes invent elaborate stories about how he could’ve saved his father. He imagined all the things he could’ve done. He imagined putting his lips against his father’s mouth and blowing hard and making the heart come alive again; he imagined yelling in his father’s ear, begging him to please stop dying. Once or twice it almost worked. “Okay,” his father would say, “I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” but he never did.

In his heart, despite the daydreams, John could not fool himself. He knew the truth. At school, when the teachers told him how sorry they were that he had lost his father, he understood that lost was just another way of saying dead. But still the idea kept turning in his mind. He’d picture his father stumbling down a dark alley, lost, not dead at all. And then the pretending would start again. John would go back in his memory over all the places his father might be—under the bed or behind the bookcases in the living room—and in this way he would spend many hours looking for his father, opening closets, scanning the carpets and sidewalks and lawns as if in search of a lost nickel. Maybe in the garage, he’d think. Maybe under the cushions of the sofa. It was only a game, or a way of coping, but now and then he’d get lucky. Just by chance he’d glance down and suddenly spot his father in the grass behind the house. “Bingo,” his father would say, and John would feel a hinge swing open. He’d bend down and pick up his father and put him in his pocket and be careful never to lose him again.