They stood looking out at the lake. Pat reached down and splashed a handful of water against her face.
"God," she said. "I'm afraid."
"Yes."
"The last time I talked to her ... I don't know, she seemed so happy. Like she could finally relax and get on, with her life."
"Happy?" Wade said.
"The fact that it was all over. The politics."
"I didn't know."
"You should have." Pat waited a moment, then sighed and hooked his arm. The gesture startled him—he almost back off.
"Bother you?" she said. "Body contact?"
"Just the surprise."
"Oh, I'll bet. Let's walk."
They followed the dirt road for a quarter mile, then turned south on a path that curled through deep forest toward the fire tower. Leafy autumn filled the air, but even so the afternoon had the temperate, almost silky feel of mid-summer. They crossed an old footbridge and followed a stream that bubbled along off to their left. Despite himself, Wade couldn't help scanning the brush. Kathy had walked this trail almost every day since they'd taken the cottage, the same spongy earth, and now he was struck by the sensation that she was somewhere close by. Watching from behind the pines, maybe. Playing some ghostly game with his life.
After twenty minutes they reached the fire tower. A green and white Forest Service sign warned against trespassing.
"Nice spot," Pat said. "Very outdoorsy."
She sat down in a patch of sunlight, studied him for a moment, then yawned and tilted her face up to the sky. "So tired," she said, "so dead, dead tired."
"We can head back."
"Soon. Not yet."
Wade lay back in the shade. The forest seemed to wash up against him, lush and supple, and presently he shut his eyes and let the glide carry him away. A butterfly sensation. Maybe it was the mild autumn air, or the scent of pine, but something about the afternoon made his breathing easier. Pleasant memories came to mind. Kathy's laughter. The way she slept on her side, thumb up against her nose. The way she'd go through five or six packs of Life Savers a day. Lots of things. Lots of good things. He remembered the times back in college when they'd gone dancing, how she'd look at him in a way that made him queasy with joy, totally full, totally empty.
Joy. That was the truth.
And now it was something else. Ambition and wasted time. Everything good had gotten lost.
For a while he let the guilt take him, then later he heard Pat sit up and clear her throat. A woodpecker was rapping in the woods behind them.
"John?"
"Yes."
"Nothing. Forget it." A few minutes passed. "You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking what a good person she is. Just so good."
"I know."
"In love, too. Crazy about you."
"It went both ways."
Pat shook her head. "Like a little girl or something, all tied up in knots. Couldn't even think for herself—John this, John that. Drove me up the wall."
"I can understand that."
"Can you?"
"Sure. I think so."
Pat brushed a clump of pine needles from her arm. In the streaky sunlight her hair took on a color that was only a tone or two away from gray. "What I mean," she said, "I mean Kathy sort of—you know—she almost lost herself in you. Your career, your problems."
"Except for the dentist," Wade said.
"That was nothing."
"So I'm told. It didn't feel like nothing."
"Knock it off. The guy was just a walking panic button, something to wake you up. That's what the whole stupid fling was all about—to make you see what you were losing. Besides, it's not like you didn't have some private crud of your own."
"Not that kind. I've been faithful."
"Faithful," Pat muttered. She waved a hand. "And what about Little Miss Politics? Wooing the bitch day and night. That's faithful, I'm the rosy red virgin."
Wade looked straight at her. "I had my dreams," he said. "So did Kathy. It was something we shared."
"You're not serious."
"I am."
"Man, you really didn't know her, did you? Kathy despised it all. Every shitty minute. The political wifey routine-paste on the smiles and act devoted. It gets pretty damned demeaning."
"But we had this—"
"John, listen to me. Just listen. Hate, that's a polite way of saying it. She used to get the shakes out in public, you could actually see it, like she was packed in ice or something. Completely obvious. All you had to do was look."
"I did look."
"All the wrong places. Which is something we haven't touched on yet. The great spy."
Wade shook his head. "There were problems, maybe, but it's not like we were on different tracks. I wanted things, she wanted things."
"Wanted?"
"Want. Still want."
"I won't argue."
"Pat, there's nothing to argue about."
She sat rocking for a time, toying with a heavy silver bracelet on her wrist, then made a small, dismissive motion with her shoulders.
"We should go."
"Right, fine," Wade said. "Just to be clear, though, Kathy and I had something together. It wasn't so terrible."
"That's not quite the point."
"Which is what?"
Pat seemed to flinch. "We shouldn't talk about it."
"What point?"
"Let's just—"
"No. What's this wonderful point?"
They looked at each other with the knowledge that they had come up against the edge of the permissible. Pat stood and brushed herself off. "All right, if you want the truth," she said. "Kathy got pretty scared sometimes. The detective act. The stuff you'd yell in your sleep. It gave her the heebie-jeebies."
"She told you that?"
"She didn't have to. And then the headlines. One day she wakes up, sees all that creepiness splashed across the front page. Finds out she's hooked up with a war criminal."
"Bullshit," Wade said. "It wasn't that simple."
"No?"
"Not by half."
"Well, whatever. She's your wife. You could've opened up, tried to explain."
Wade looked down at the palms of his hands. He wondered if there was anything of consequence that could be said.
"Very noble, but it's not something you sit down and explain. What could I tell her? Christ, I barely ... Looks real black and white now—very clear—but back then everything came at you in these bright colors. No sharp edges. Lots of glare. A nightmare like that, all you want is to forget. None of it ever seemed real in the first place."
"What about the dead folks?"
"Look, I can't—"
"Awfully goddamned real to them." Pat swung around and looked at him hard. "You didn't do something?"
"Do?"
"Don't fake it. You know what I mean." She watched him closely for a few seconds. There were birds in the trees, ripples of sunlight.
"No," Wade said, "I didn't do something."
"I just—"
"Sure. You had to ask."
Ruth and Claude were waiting for them back at the cottage. Wade made the introductions, excused himself, and went to the phone to put in a call to Lux. The sheriff's voice seemed hollow and very distant. "No dice," he said, "I'm sorry," and after a short silence the man made a clucking sound that could've meant anything, maybe sympathy, maybe exasperation.
When he hung up, Wade looked at the clock over the kitchen stove. The cocktail hour. Reformation could wait. He fixed four stiff screwdrivers, got out a box of crackers, and carried everything on a tray to the living room. Claude and Ruth were talking quietly with Pat, who sat cross-legged on the sofa.
The old man lifted his eyebrows.
"Nothing," Wade said. He passed out the drinks. "I'll want a boat tomorrow. Probably all day."
Claude nodded. "Six-thirty sharp. Just be ready."
"Fine, but there's no need to tag along."
"Hell there isn't. Last thing I need, it's
two more customers out there. Public relations, all that."
Wade shrugged. "Fine, then. Thanks."
"Nothing to thank. Six-thirty."
After fifteen minutes Pat went back to the spare bedroom. Claude and Ruth stayed for another drink, then Wade walked them out to the old man's pickup. When they were gone, he went back inside, built a fire in the stone fireplace, freshened his drink, and sat down with a Star-Tribune that Claude had picked up in town. Kathy was page-two news. He skimmed through the piece quickly, barely concentrating. There were quotes from Tony Carbo, who expressed his concern, and from the governor and the parry chairman and a couple of Kathy's colleagues at the university. Below the fold was a grainy photograph taken on primary night. Kathy stood with one arm hooked around Wade's waist, the other raised in a shielding motion. Her eyes were slightly out of focus, but there was no mistaking the radiance in her face, the purest elation.
Wade put the paper down. For several minutes he sat watching the fire.
"Oh, Kath," he said.
He finished his drink and went out to the kitchen for replenishment.
It was a bad night. Too much vodka. He kept tumbling inside himself, half asleep, half awake, his dreams folding around the theme of depravity—things he remembered and things he could not remember.
Around midnight he got up.
He put on jeans and a sweatshirt, found a flashlight, and made his way down to the boathouse.
He wasn't certain what was drawing him out. Maybe the dreams, maybe the need to know.
He opened up the doors and stepped inside, using the flashlight to pluck random objects from the dark: an anchor, a rusty tackle box, a stack of decoys. A sense of pre-memory washed over him. Things had happened here. Things said, things done. He squatted down, brushed a hand across the dirt floor, and put the hand to his nose. The smell gave him pause. He had a momentary glimpse of himself from above, as if through a camera lens. Ex-sorcerer. Ex-candidate for the United States Senate. Now a poor hung-over putz without a trick in his bag.
He sniffed his hand again, then shook his head. The dank odor revived facts he did not wish to revive.
There was the fact of an iron teakettle. Kill Jesus, that also was a fact. Defeat was a fact. Rage was a fact. And there were the facts of steam and a dead geranium. Other things were less firm. It was almost a fact, but not quite, that he had moved down the hallway to their bedroom that night, where for a period of time he had watched Kathy sleep, admiring the tan at her neck and shoulders, her fleshy lips, the way her thumb lay curled along the side of her nose. At one point, he remembered, her eyelids had snapped open.
He stood still for a moment. The wind seemed to lift up the boathouse roof, holding it briefly, then letting it slap down hard. Even in the weak light Wade could make out a number of grooves and scratchings where the boat had been dragged out to the beach. He tried to imagine Kathy handling it alone, and the Evinrude too, but he couldn't come up with a convincing flow of images. Not impossible, but not likely either, which left room for speculation.
The thing about facts, he decided, was that they came in sizes. You had to try them on for proper fit. A case in point: his own responsibility. Right now he couldn't help feeling the burn of guilt. All that empty time. The convenience of a faulty memory.
He stepped outside, closed the doors, switched off the flashlight and walked back up the slope to the cottage.
Pat sat waiting for him on the porch.
"Out for a stroll?" she said.
20. Evidence
The man was like one of them famous onions. Keep peeling back the layers, there's always more. But I liked him. Her, too. In some ways they was a lot alike, more than you'd figure. Two peas in a pod, Claude used to say, but I always claimed onions.
—Ruth Rasmussen
There was plenty he wasn't saying. Plenty. One of these days I'd like to go out and do some more digging around that old cottage, or dredge the lake. I bet bones would come up.
—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.68
—Edith Wharton (The Touchstone)
He was constantly doing weird things, like he'd trail her around campus like one of those private eyes or something, except he was a klutz and Kathy always knew about it. She used to call him Inspector Clouseau—that fumble-bumble detective in The Pink Panther. Not to his face of course I can't sec how she tolerated it but she did Head over heels you could say69
—Deborah Lindquist (Classmate of Kathleen Wade, University of Minnesota)
Johnny had slick hands. With magicians that's a compliment. Ten, eleven years old, he could work freestyle, no apparatus, just those beautiful little hands of his. And he knew how to keep his mouth shut.
—Sandra Karra (Karra's Studio of Magic)
You will never explain your tricks [to an audience], for no matter how clever the means, the explanation disappoints the desire to believe in something beyond natural causes, and admiration for cleverness is a poor substitute for the delight of wonderment.70
—Robert Parrish (The Magician's Handbook)
Forget the dentist! Too damn personal. She was my sister— why can't you just leave her alone? It's like you're obsessed.71
—Patricia S. Hood
GLOSSARY
Effect: The professional term for a magician's illusion.
Stripper deck: A deck of cards whose sides or ends have been planed on a taper so that if a card is reversed, it can be located by feeling the protruding edges.
Vanish (noun): A technical term for an effect in which an object or person is made to disappear. Transposition: A magic trick in which two or more objects or persons mysteriously change places.
Causal transportation: A technical term for an effect in which the causal agent is itself made to vanish; i.e., the magician performs a vanish on himself.
Double consummation: A way of fooling the audience by making it believe a trick is over before it really is.72
He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know ... and another life running its course in secret.73—Anton Chekhov ("The Lady with the Dog")
Q: How many people did you gather up?
A: Between thirty and fifty. Men, women, and children.
Q: What kind of children?
A: They was just children.
Q: Where did you get these people?
A: Some of them was in hootches and some was in rice paddies when we gathered them up.
Q: Why did you gather them up?
A: We suspected them of being Viet Cong. And as far as I'm concerned, they're still Viet Cong.74
—Paul Meadlo (Court-Martial Testimony)
I didn't shoot nobody. I shot some cows.
—Richard Thinbill
Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in one as in the other.75
—Miguel de Cervantes
I found his father in the garage. I knew. I really did. Even before I went in.
—Eleanor K. Wade
[Houdini's father] took the young Houdini to a stage performance by a traveling magician named Dr. Lynn. Dr. Lynn's magic act featured an illusion called "Palegenisia." In this illusion, he pretended to administer chloroform to a man, and then, after tying him in place inside a cabinet, Dr. Lynn proceeded to dismember the man with a huge butcher knife, cutting off legs and arms, and finally (discreetly covered with a black cloth) the man's head. The pieces were then thrown into the cabinet and the curtain was pulled. Moments later, the victim appeared from the cabinet restored to one living piece, and seemingly none the worse for the ordeal. Many years later Houdini purchased this illusion ... It is significant that, at an early age, Houdini had been fascinated by this particular illusion literally embodying the theme of death and resurrection, for this was a motif that reoccurred in all of Houdini's per
formances throughout his career.76
—Doug Henning (Houdini: His Legend and His Magic)
I told you how secretive he was—you never knew what he was thinking—and it just got worse after his father hanged himself.
—Eleanor K. Wade
[Woodrow] Wilson's own recollections of his youth furnish ample indication of his early fears that he was stupid, ugly, worthless, and unlovable ... It is perhaps to this core feeling of inadequacy, of a fundamental worthlessness which must ever be disproved, that the unappeasable quality of his need for affection, power, and achievement, and the compulsive quality of his striving for perfection, may be traced. For one of the ways in which human beings troubled with low estimates of themselves seek to obliterate their inner pain is through high achievement and the acquisition of power.77
—Alexander and Juliette George (Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House)
We'd just started gym class. I had the kids shooting baskets and after five or ten minutes the school principal came in and called me over and gave me the news. Then she walked away—a pure coward. I wasn't much better. I told John to hit the showers, his mom was waiting. A kid that age, it breaks your heart.78
—Lawrence Ehlers (Phys-Ed Teacher)
Another cousin, Jessie Bones, recalled a typical instance of Dr. Wilson's "teasing." The family was assembled at a wedding breakfast. Tommy [Woodrow] arrived at the table late. His father apologized on behalf of his son and explained that Tommy had been so greatly excited at the discovery of another hair in his mustache that morning that it had taken him longer to wash and dress. "I remember very distinctly the painful flush that came over the boy's face," Mrs. Brower said.79