In the Lake of the Woods (26 page)

 

His dreams that night, as he would remember them, were situated inside a chrome computer. He'd crawled in through
a manhole. He was demanding a recount—"Arithmetic!" he was yelling—but the computer made a coughing noise that turned into a deep mocking purr. All the wires were tangled. The circuitry was composed of electric eels, and there were colorful fish and liquid poisons and numerous examples of evil.

When he awoke, the hour was approaching dawn. He dressed in clean corduroys, cotton socks, a white flannel shirt, a finely woven cashmere sweater that Kathy had presented to him on a Christmas Eve not so long ago.

He rolled up a pair of blankets.

An old sheet, too.

There were traces of early light as he moved down the hallway to the kitchen. It was no great surprise to find the boat key lying squarely at the center of the Formica table. Alongside was an envelope. He pocketed these items, put on a pair of rubber boots, picked up his provisions, and walked down the slope to the dock. He felt no special sentiment. A misled life, nothing else.

Kath, oh, Kath, he thought. It was impossible to conceive of her as dead. Simply lost. Among the missing.

In the frail dark he stepped into the Chris-Craft and secured his things. A little dazed, a little dreamy. After all the lies, a couple of minor truths had now appeared, or whatever the certainty was that held his heart when he thought, Kath, my Kath. He untied the mooring ropes. He started up the engine, felt the boat rise and take to the water. A hundred yards out, he looked back at the small yellow cottage on the slope above the lake.

Love, he thought. Which was one truth. You couldn't lose it even if you tried.

He took out his new compass and swung the boat north.
Later, when he looked back, the yellow cabin was gone. But even then, in his mind's eye, he could see a man and a woman lying quietly on a porch in the dense night fog, wrapped in blankets, holding each other, pretending things were not so bad. He could hear their voices as they took turns thinking up names for the children they wanted—funny names, sometimes, so they could laugh—and he could hear them planning the furnishings for their new house, the fine rugs they would buy, the antique brass lamps, the exact colors of the wallpaper, all the details. "Verona," Kathy said, and then they talked about Verona, the things they would see and do, and soon the fog was all around them and inside them and they were swallowed up and gone. Not a footprint, not a single clue. All woods and water. A place where one plus one always came to zero.

Or maybe she'd left him long ago, in the summer of 1983, when she flew off to meet Harmon in Boston. In the years that followed she had mostly kept the secret inside, where it was like a weight that had to be carried through her life and marriage, and maybe one day it became too much for her. Not just the affair. Everything. A decayed marriage. Deferred dreams, withheld intimacies. For all these years, even before the fling with Harmon, there had been an ever-widening distance between the life she wanted and the life she had.

Suicide?

Impossible to know.

Certainly the pressures were enormous. She was on Valium and Restoril. The ruins were everywhere. Her husband, the election, the unborn child in her heart. So maybe she'd planned it, or half planned it, taking the boat out and aiming it straight north and losing herself forever in Lake of the Woods. At some point—on a rocky beach, perhaps, in the dark—she might've found herself cataloging the events that had conspired to bring her here. The disappointments. The
slow strangulation by politics. How the affair with Harmon had started almost by accident, a chance meeting, a few casual letters, and how after four months it had ended the same way, without choice or volition, as if she were strapped into the back seat of her own life.

And what had changed? Still out of control. Still at the whim of a world that seemed aligned against her. The sadness was crushing. How things were. How things could've been.

Maybe she had already swallowed the medications. Or maybe she did it now, with plenty of lake water, then sat down again and let her thoughts skip back to the Boston airport. Harmon meeting her there. The drive north along the coast of Maine to a resort called Loon Point, where they'd spent four days and three nights, and where on the morning of the fourth day, after breakfast, she had informed him that it was over. A mistake, she'd said. She loved her husband.

She remembered Harmon's round white face. A dentist's face—concentrating. "Well," he'd said.

Nothing else.

And now it was all a mystery. She couldn't recall the color of the man's eyes, or how she had come to care about him, or what had happened to wake her up. The whole affair struck her as something quaint and foreign. She remembered how they'd gone dancing one night at Loon Point, how adventurous it had seemed, how the music and starlight and danger had stirred her to feel close to him, almost giddy with pleasure, but how in a curious way it was not really Harmon in her arms, it was the idea of happiness, the possibility, the temptation, a slow, tantalizing waltz with some handsome future.

For a few minutes, maybe, Kathy looked out across the lake and allowed herself to cry. Or maybe the drugs were at work, a nice dark calm tugging her down.

The flight back to Minneapolis was a blur now. A mostly empty jet. A couple of martinis. It had been late afternoon when she carried her suitcase into the apartment and put it down and stood listening to the quiet. She remembered pouring herself a glass of wine. She remembered filling the bathtub, slipping in, soaking there for a long while. At six o'clock she'd moved out to the kitchen to start supper. A half hour later, when John walked in, she'd fixed her eyes elsewhere, adjusting the heat on her electric skillet, using a spatula to drop on three pork chops. John had come up behind her. "The globetrotter," he'd said, and kissed her neck, his fingers briefly squeezing the inch or two of loose flesh at her waist. It was a habit she disliked—it made her feel fat—but she remembered a quick rush of gratitude. Immediately, by the pressure of his fingers, she knew he had no inkling.

They'd eaten supper in front of the TV. During the commercials, in a voice she recognized as politely forced, he'd asked a few vague questions about the trip. He was interested in the airline food, the weather, the high school friend she'd been visiting. She had kept her answers short. The friend was a bore, the weather hot, the food poisonous. John had nodded at the TV. It was all too easy. At one point she'd apologized to him about the foul-up.

"Foul-up?" he'd said.

"You know. The flight."

"No kidding?"

She'd glanced over at him. "I was due in
tomorrow.
I explained how ... You didn't get the message?"

"Whoops," he'd said, and grinned at her. "Never checked the machine."

She remembered staring at her plate. The pork chops had left a fleshy, rancid taste on her tongue. Stupidly, without calculation, she was seized by the need to retaliate. What she should've done, she thought, was to call in a message describing the dance floor at Loon Point. The cozy hotel room. The wallpaper, the bedspread. All the details.

She remembered carrying her plate into the kitchen, rinsing it off, moving out to the tiny back patio and just standing there in the leaden twilight.

He would never know. Not the specifics. The secret was safe.

Yet in the evening air, like a blank tape, there was the hum of a terrifying question—Does any of it really matter?—which then deepened into the sound of an imperfect, infinitely approximate answer—Who knows?

She remembered opening her robe to the humid night air. There was a huge and desperate wanting in her heart, wanting without object, pure wanting.

Later John had come out.

"Hey, gorgeous," he'd said, and stood beside her in the heavy twilight. "So you had fun? A good trip?"

She remembered pulling her robe tight, turning toward him without contrition or clues.

"Fine," she'd said.

Maybe, in the end, she blamed herself. Not for the affair so much, but for the waning of energy, the slow year-by-year fatigue that had finally worn her down. She had stopped trying. She had given up on squirt guns, she had forfeited her dreams, and the fling with Harmon was just an emblem of all
the unhappiness in her life. Maybe there were secret forces she could not tolerate. Maybe memory, maybe drugs. Maybe in Lake of the Woods, where all is repetition, she whispered, "Why?" and then closed her eyes and sank into the sound of the endless answer—Who knows? Who ever knows?

Reminds me of those three monkeys. The man didn't hear nothing, didn't smell nothing, didn't see nothing. He sure as shit
did
something.

—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

 

Ridiculous. Mr. Wade loved his wife, anybody could see that. Just like Claude and me.

—Ruth Rasmussen

 

All I know is they come into the Mini-Mart awful unhappy. They sat there unhappy. They left unhappy. That's all I know.

—Myra Shaw (Waitress)

 

I don't make guesses.

—Arthur J. Lux (Sheriff, Lake of the Woods County)

 

I had prayed to God that this thing was fiction.
⁸⁹

—Colonel William V. Wilson (U.S. Army Investigator)

 

Exhibit Ten: Photographs
(
12
)
of Victims at Thuan Yen
Date: 16 March 1968
Photographer: Ronald Haeberle

... the attitude of all the men, the majority, I would say, was a revengeful attitude.
⁹⁰

—Gregory T. Olson (First Platoon, Charlie Company)

 

People were talking about killing everything that moved. Everyone knew what we were going to do.
⁹¹

—Robert W. Pendleton (Third Platoon, Charlie Company)

 

Vice never sees its own ugliness—if it did, it would be frightened by its own image. Shakespeare's Iago, who
behaves
in a way that's true to his nature, sounds false because he is forced by our dramatic conventions to unmask himself, to himself be the one to lay bare the secrets of his complex and crooked heart. In reality, man seldom tramples his conscience underfoot so casually.
⁹²

—George Sand (
Indiana
)

 

... we were all psyched up because we wanted revenge for some of our fallen comrades that had been killed prior to this operation in the general area of Pinkville.
⁹³

—Allen J. Boyce (First Platoon, Charlie Company)

 

We were breathing flies when it was over. They crawled up into our noses.

—Richard Thinbill

 

We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.
⁹⁴

—General William Tecumseh Sherman

 

Exterminate the whole fraternity of redskins.
⁹⁵

—Nebraska City Press

 

That day in My Lai, I was personally responsible for killing about 25 people. Personally. Men, women. From shooting them to cutting their throats scalping them to cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongues.' I did it.
⁹⁶

—Varnado Simpson (Second Platoon Charlie Company)

 

No prisoners were being taken, and no one was allowed to escape if escape could be prevented. A child of about three years, perfectly naked, was toddling along over the trail where the Indians had fled. A soldier saw it, fired at about seventy-five yards distance, and missed it. Another dismounted and said: "Let me try the little—; I can hit him." He missed, too, but a third dismounted, with a similar remark, and at his shot the child fell ... The Indians lost three hundred, all killed, of whom about one half were warriors and the remainder women and children.
⁹⁷

—J. P. Dunn, Jr. (
Massacres of the Mountains
)

 

Kathy tried, I'll say that. Way too hard. Personally, I guess, I never gave him much of a chance.

—Patricia S. Hood

 

She wanted to travel. See the world. I remember she used to talk about Verona all the time, but I don't think she knew much about it except for Romeo and Juliet.

—Bethany Kee (Associate Admissions Director, University of Minnesota)

 

You get involved, try to help, put your own needs aside. Then it's twelve years later and you don't know how to have fun anymore. You're exhausted, pissed off, anxious, profoundly depressed, guilty because you can't fix it. As a matter of fact, overfunctioning to hide your partner's problems from others is defined as normal in this society.
⁹⁸

—Patience H. C. Mason (
Recovering from the War
)

 

It stays with me even after all these years. I guess it probably haunted John too, except he tried to do something about it. Erase it, you know? Literally.

—Richard Thinbill

 

They did not fight us like a regular army, only like savages, behind trees and stone walls, and out of the woods and houses ... [The colonists are] as bad as the Indians for scalping and cutting the dead men's ears and noses off.
⁹⁹