In the Lake of the Woods (29 page)

Late in the day he switched on the radio. He listened for a moment and then switched it off again.

The world was elsewhere. All static.

And then a zone of white time went by, a mind blizzard, long drifting sweeps of this and that. He was conscious of the cold and little else. Sometimes he was Sorcerer, sometimes he wasn't. His grip on the physical world had loosened. Grip, too, was relative. At one point he heard himself weeping, then later he was back at Thuan Yen, clawing at the sunlight.

Toward dark he turned into a small sheltered bay and dropped anchor twenty yards offshore. He measured out two inches of vodka, drank it down, then tried the radio again. This time Claude's voice came back at him. "Read you weak-weak," the old man said. "Sounds like Alaska. Over."

Wade could think of nothing to say.

"You there?"

"Where?" Wade said.

"Yeah, very comic." Claude's voice came through frail and sickly. "Just so you know, Lux and company are probably monitoring this, so if you don't want nobody to ... See what I mean?"

"Crystal clear."

"You're okay?"

"Snug as a bug. Lost as can be."

"You found the chart book?"

"I did," Wade said, though he hadn't looked for it. "I'm grateful. Thanks."

The old man snorted. There was some static before his voice returned. "... ripped up every board, right now they're prying off the shingles. Search and destroy. Vinny's down on his hands and knees with the sniffer dogs. Ain't found zero."

"They won't," Wade said.

"For sure."

"I appreciate that too. Listen, I didn't hurt her."

"Now there's a fact."

"I didn't."

Claude laughed. "Better late than never. I'll keep it between you and me." The airwaves seemed heavy with sentiment. "You read my little note? Winnipeg's not such a bad place. Calgary, I don't know."

"Thanks again."

"A possibility, don't you think?"

Wade was silent.

"Yeah, well," Claude said. "Try not to fuck up my boat."

Wade turned off the radio and sat still for a while. The afternoon had passed into dark. He took nourishment from his bottle and then found a screwdriver and spent ten minutes disconnecting the radio's twin speakers. Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone?

He turned off the boat's running lights. In the twilight he ate half a sandwich, wrapped himself in a blanket, and curled up on the front seat with the vodka and his anthology of bad dreams.

The night passed slow and cold, with intermittent snow, and on occasion Wade was compelled to remind himself that misery was in part the point. Except the point sometimes eluded him. Current circumstances, he decided, were not explicable to the likes of a psychiatrist or clergyman.

The
point?

To join her in whatever ways were possible.

To feel what she felt.

To harm himself? Certainly not. And yet harm was also relative. Happiness and harm. Clear as a bell, was it not? Had he been happy? Had he harmed her?

Well, no, but yes.

And then soon other thoughts intruded. If time and space were in fact entwined along the loop of relativity, how then could one ever reach a point of no return? Were not all such points contrivance? Therefore meaningless? So, again, what was the point?

Not to return.

Ipso facto,
he reasoned.

Yet he could not stop returning. All night long he revisited the village of Thuan Yen, always with a fresh eye, witness to the tumblings and spinnings of those who had reached their fictitious point of no return. Relatively speaking, he decided, these frazzle-eyed citizens were never quite dead, otherwise they would surely stop dying. Same-same for his father. Proof of the loop. The fucker kept hanging himself. Over and over, the bastard would offer shitty counsel at the dinner table—"Stop stuffing it in"—and then he'd slip out to the garage and climb aboard a garbage can and leap out into endless returning, his neck snapped by no point in particular, all points unknown.

Late in the night Wade turned on the radio and broadcast these thoughts to the wee-hour ethers.

Emboldened with vodka, he pooh-poohed the notion of human choice. A scam, he declared. Much overrated. "At what point," he asked, "does one decide on rafters and a rope? Answer: No points to be had. There is merely what happened and what is now happening and what will one day happen. Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit—we
fall.
We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed,
the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us. Gravity has a hand. Bear in mind trapdoors. We fall in love, yes? Tumble, in fact. Is it
choice?
Enough said."

Once or twice his voice failed. He lay under an inch of snow, mike in hand, remarking to the airwaves on how hard and well he had fallen. Few fell farther.

Senator Sorcerer.

High ambition, eternal love.

"Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it."

 

He slept a brief numb sleep, waking to the danger of frostbite. It was a little past three in the morning when he switched on the radio. "Sinners and spinners, welcome back, you're tuned to WFIB, station of the stars, and we're socked in here at Storm Central on this treacherous Sunday morning. Traffic's light, roads are slick." He sneezed and wiped his nose. "As promised—and we deliver—here's our up-to-date list of closings. No services at Disciples of the Lost Shepherd. No mass anywhere, no velocity. Certainly no way out. Other cancellations to follow."

 

As dawn broke he was conducting a one-man talk show. The interview was going well. "My love, my life. The purpose of all deceit. She is what I had. Have I yet discussed her way of chasing me with a squirt gun? She did indeed. With a
squirt
gun. 'Squirt, squirt!' she'd cry. During a party once—this was years ago—we drove home and made Yum-Yum against the refrigerator and took a delicious little bubble bath and then drove back to the party in time for the speeches. Senatorial behavior this was not. It was her
way.
Did I tumble in love? I did. Did I remain in love? Oh, yes. Remember: a
squirt
gun.
The girl of my dreams. Her skin, her soul. So in this time of desolation, let us strive to be honest—would
you
not tell a fib or two?"

 

He went off the air at six-thirty.

His fingers were wooden.

It took twenty minutes to remove the radio from its mounting. He dropped it overboard. He fired up the twin Johnsons and swung north into Lake of the Woods.

It is in the nature of the angle that starlight bends upon the surface of the lake.

The angle makes the dream.

An owl hoots. A deer comes to drink in the topmost branches of a pine. From the bottom of the lake, eyes wide open, Kathy Wade watches the fish fly up to swim in the land of sky blue waters, where they are pinned like moths to the morning moon.

 

On a map of Minnesota, the Northwest Angle juts like a thumb into the smooth Canadian underbelly at the 49th parallel. A geographical orphan, stranded by a mapmaker's error, the Angle represents the northernmost point in the lower 48 states, a remote spit of woods and water surrounded on three sides by Canada. To the west is Manitoba; to the north and east lie the great dense forests of Ontario; to the south is the U.S. mainland. This is wilderness. Forty miles wide, seventy miles north to south. Gorgeous country, yes, but full of ghosts. A lone hawk circles in hunt. A mouse lies paralyzed in the blooded darkness. And in the deep unbroken solitude, age to age, Lake of the Woods gazes back on itself like a
great liquid eye. Nothing adds or subtracts. Everything is present, everything is missing. Three middle-aged fishermen vanished here in 1941; two duck hunters lost their way in 1958, never to find it again, never to be found. Thickly timbered, almost entirely uninhabited, the Angle tends toward infinity. Growth becomes rot, which becomes growth again, and repetition itself is in the nature of the angle.

 

The history here is hard and simple. First the glaciers, then the water, then much later the Sioux and Ojibway.

The French came in 1734—men of adventure, explorers and Jesuits—converting or killing Indians, whichever seemed appropriate. Then fur traders and lumbermen and sawyers. And in 1882 the first settlers built their cabins along the southern and western shores of Lake of the Woods. A log church went up, later a granary and storehouse. A few hardy Swedes and Finns carved out their small square homesteads in the forest, but the land was never good for wheat or corn, and soon the farmers were gone and the wilderness reclaimed itself. For nearly four decades the Northwest Angle belonged once more to the mosquitoes. The Angle's border with Canada was not surveyed until 1925; until 1969 the area was accessible only by boat or float plane.

Even now, there are no highways. A single tar road runs through deep forest to the small community of Angle Inlet. The nearest city is Winnipeg, 122 miles to the west. The nearest bus station is in Roseau, 47 miles to the southwest. The nearest full-time law enforcement officer is in Baudette, the county seat, a 90-mile plane ride over Lake of the Woods.

And here, along the peninsula's northeastern shore, an old yellow cottage stands in the timber overlooking the lake. There are many trees, mostly pine and birch, and there is a
dock and a boathouse and a narrow dirt road that winds through the forest and ends in a ledge of polished gray rocks at the shore below the cottage.

 

It is by the nature of the angle, sun to earth, that the seasons are made, and that the waters of the lake change color by the season, blue going to gray and then to white and then back again to blue. The water receives color. The water returns it. The angle shapes reality. Winter ice becomes the steam of summer as flesh becomes spirit. Partly window, partly mirror, the angle is where memory dissolves. The mathematics are always null; water swallows sky, which swallows earth. And here in a corner of John Wade's imagination, where things neither live nor die, Kathy stares up at him from beneath the surface of the silvered lake. Her eyes are brilliant green, her expression alert. She tries to speak but can't. She belongs to the angle. Not quite present, not quite gone, she swims in the blending twilight of in between.

Everybody at the office, we used to talk about it constantly, we'd sit around at lunch and try to figure out if Kathy ever showed any signs of—like depression, problems at home, things like that. But you know what? Nobody ever came up with anything. She seemed just like everybody else. You got the feeling that she was basically happy, or that she thought she
could
be ... Maybe she was just a great actress.

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

 

With missing persons, it's like digging a hole in this big pile of sand, the damn thing just keeps filling up on you ... We looked every single place there was to look—the boathouse, the cottage, every inch. Brought in divers and a couple of State Police sniffer dogs. No luck. He was gone by then, of course. Didn't find a one thing.

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

 

So he dumped her deep. So what?

—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

 

The Bureau of Missing Persons in New York has handled, since its inception in 1917, more than 30,000 cases a year.
¹¹⁸

—Jay Robert Nash (
Among the Missing
)

 

My plan, so far as I have one, is to go through Mexico to one of the Pacific ports ... Naturally, it is possible—even probable—that I shall not return. These be "strange countries," in which things happen; that is why I am going.
¹¹⁹

—Ambrose Bierce

 

Sometimes people just up and walk away. That's possible, isn't it? I don't see why everybody assumes the worst.

—Ruth Rasmussen

 

There
was
one clue, I guess. It was right after the primary, maybe a day later. Kathy was getting ready to head up north, and so naturally I asked when she'd be back in the office. Like a general date, I meant. Anyway, she goes over to this window. She looks out for a while and finally starts to laugh, except it wasn't real laughing. Like she
knew
something.

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

 

Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery ... Truth is not accessible.
¹²⁰

—Sigmund Freud

 

Too bad I never got the chance to ask the man more questions. Vinny was right—some things just plain didn't add up. I don't care what Wade said, one plus one don't
never
equal zero, not in my book.

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

 

I can't say Claude was too happy about the way they come in that day and ripped the whole place to hell. Wasn't called for, and the old man made sure everybody knew what he thought. A few times he got pretty mouthy—harassment, he kept saying—and he'd let out this cackle every time they came up empty. I miss that old-timer. Miss him bad. He had faith in people.

—Ruth Rasmussen

 

All I know is, I know the guy gave me this weird look. The day before he took off, he comes in and pokes around and buys all this stuff—like I told you already, the compass and maps and all that—and he ambles up to the cash register and starts to say something and stops and just gives me this
look.
Soon as he was gone, I real quick locked the door.