In the Lake of the Woods

  "Profitable," he'd finally said. "Lots of plunder. Maybe it's time to pack it up."

  She remembered laughing. "You're kidding," she'd said.

  "But we shouldn't be—"

  "Watch this."

  She remembered looking over at Tony, smiling, then pushing out four green chips. Her skin felt hot. She was only vaguely aware of John's fingertips digging into her shoulders. When the dealer busted, she yelped and slapped the table. John squeezed harder.

  "Very nice," he said.

  "Very! Very better than very!"

  "And late."

  "Late?"

  "It's getting there."

  "It isn't. My God, they'd have to bomb the place."

  "All right, fine. Just doesn't seem like you."

  Tony looked up with a rubbery sallow smile. "And which you is that? Seems to me she's got yous galore. Yous here, yous there."

  "Does she?"

  "Yes, indeed. She does."

  There was a hesitation before John forced an equivocal little laugh.

  "I don't get the point."

  "Well, no," Tony said.

  She remembered John's hands slipping off her shoulders. He made the stale laughing sound again and moved off into the crowd.

  "Forget it," Tony said.

  "I will. I have."

  "Doesn't mean anything."

  "Of course not."

  They played another few minutes, watching their chips flow back across the table, then they cashed in and moved into a noisy leather-cushioned bar and ordered drinks. Even with the cold streak, she was more than eight hundred dollars ahead, yet all she could feel was the hurt in her stomach. The casino was just a casino again.

  "Cards come, cards go," Tony said. He looked at her attentively. "That's the world. It wasn't his fault."

  "Bastard."

  "He's not."

  "It's still rotten," she said. "Like he can't tolerate things going right."

  "There's that wad in your purse."

  "It isn't money."

  "No?"

  "Not at all. Something better." She was conscious of the resentment in her voice, a sticky bitterness that clung to the roof of her mouth. "I mean, the whole feeling was incredible, wasn't it? Awesome and perfect. Like we had this—I don't know—like there was this spell or something."

  "It wasn't a spell. It was luck."

  "Either way. We made a wonderful team."

  Tony looked down into his drink, stirred it with the tip of a thumb. "Right," he said, "but I wouldn't knock the money."

  "It just felt good, that's all. Then he ruins everything, just breaks the spell."

  "Not intentionally."

  "Who knows?"

  "It's who he is," Tony said. "His character."

  "Let's not talk about it."

  "What then?"

  "Something good. The glow."

  "It was a good long winning glow."

  "Yes," Kathy said.

  "We could try again."

  "In a while. I like sitting here."

  She remembered Tony making a short humming sound like a computer processing a new piece of data. His quick little eyes flicked out across the casino. Nervous, she thought, or apprehensive about something, the way his gaze never quite settled on any one object. An odd creature. Coarse and shy and cynical and vain and rude and insecure to the point of self-hatred. The elements didn't coordinate. Like the way he was dressed now, the corduroy suit pants and pink sport shirt and scuffed-up black shoes. Funny, but mostly sad. The shirt seemed to add another twenty pounds to his belly. His hair had been slicked straight back, thin and colorless.

  Bizarre, that was the word. Especially the eyes. Always darting here and there, always seeking out the angles.

  When he spoke, though, his voice was mild and thoughtful. He didn't look at her.

  "I guess the thing to bear in mind," he said, "is that your significant other doesn't place a whole lot of faith in lady luck. Doesn't believe in risk. The magician in him. Likes to rig up the cards. Luck's irrelevant."

  "You're defending him?"

  "No. I wouldn't put it that way."

  "How would you put it? I'm interested."

  "Just his mode," Tony said. He finished his drink. "You're married to the guy."

  "Well, yes. That's another thought." She looked across the casino to where John stood with a group of young legislators. All of them fresh-faced. All very spiffy and cologned and neatly barbered.

  "Anyway," she said, "he's not a card rigger."

  "Whatever you wish."

  "He's not."

  "Another drink?"

  "Sure, a big one. He's not a cheat."

  Tony looked up and smiled, but his gaze seemed to slip off her forehead. He chuckled.

  "No, I suppose not. Slay the dragons, feed the poor. And I admire that. Thing is, he doesn't care much for losing." He leaned back heavily in his chair. "Like with his hobby. The man yanks a rabbit out of a hat, you don't yell cheater, do you? You know it's a trick. It's supposed to be a trick. All you do is clap like crazy and think, Hey, what a clever fucker. Same with politics. Bunch of tricksters, they're all making moves." He paused and grinned at her. "Dirty isn't operative. Nature of the show."

  "And you too?"

  He smiled. "The trusty assistant. Help with the props. Load him up with bunnies."

  "But you adore it. The intrigue."

  "Sadly, sadly. I do adore it."

  "And John?"

  "My lord and master." Tony sighed. He waved at a waiter and turned his glass upside down on the table. "My David Copperfield. Maybe someday he'll whisk me off to Washington, we'll play the big show together."

  "Go solo," Kathy said. "Be a star."

  "Yeah, right."

  "Seriously."

  Tony rolled his eyes. "Very astute. I'd look real supersvelte in Copperfield's duds. Tight pants, spangled vest."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "What is?"

  "Nobody cares."

  He made a short, almost angry sound. "If what? If I need a periscope to find my own dick? Guys like me—the waddlers—we know our place. And don't give me any crap about losing weight."

  "I won't."

  "It was halfway out your mouth." She nodded at him. "You're right."

  "Okay. I'm right."

  "So?"

  "So nothing."

  "Time out," she said, and covered his hand with hers. "I'm sorry. Let's just be nice to each other. Where's that waiter?"

  "Right. The waiter."

  "I am sorry."

  "Elegant astute Kathleen."

  For the next hour they did what they could to retrieve the glow. She remembered curious little details. His pink shirt clinging to the curve of his belly. How he couldn't keep his hands still. How he kept stirring his drinks and letting his eyes skate across her face and down the slope of her shoulders and then off into the dark behind her.

  Even now, looking out across the flat gray lake, she could feel the discomfort behind his gestures, the way he'd covered himself up with banter and cynicism.

  Odd creature, she thought again. Bizarre.

  Adjusting the tiller slightly, Kathy nudged the boat up against the ruler in her head. The fog now had mostly lifted. A shapeless white sun hung behind clouds to the east, hazy and without heat. Here and there patches of metallic blue glinted among the waves. No rain, she thought. At least there was that. But the morning seemed even colder now, a ragged cutting cold like barbed wire. She felt some fleeting nostalgia for her morning fire. A mistake to have left it behind. Probably a bad mistake.

  Then she told herself not to think about it.

  Anything else.

  What day was it?

  September something—the 20th probably. Or the 21st. Which meant it was still summer by the calendar. She wouldn't freeze. The odds could be beaten. And she would do it—she'd feel that glow again. Yes, she would. With John, too. She loved him so much, despite everything, just so much. She always had. But they used to
have that astonishing glow all around them. It was where they used to live, inside a brilliant white light that seemed to suck them up and carry them beyond all the ordinary limits. Suspended there. That was the exact feeling. Other marriages might go stale, but not theirs, because the law of averages had been suspended, or they were suspended above the averages. A few elections to win, then a few more, and then they'd have the beautiful lives they wanted and deserved—they had wagered on it, they had bet the baby in her stomach—but then the glow had gone away and they had lost very badly and apparently they were still losing.

  She wanted the feeling back. She wanted to believe again, just to hope and keep hoping.

  Kathy closed her eyes briefly. When she looked up, a cluster of starkly silhouetted islands lay a quarter mile off the bow, the lake breaking into six narrow channels that arrowed off into the wilderness like spokes on a wheel.

  She checked her direction against the sun and chose a passage that seemed to run south.

  Go with the glow.

  Flow with the glow.

  And then she permitted herself a little smile. She recalled how in Vegas that night, after three or four drinks, Tony had explained in great drunken detail how luck wasn't something you could force. All you could do, he'd said, was open yourself up like a window and wait for fortune to blow in. And then they'd talked about stuck windows. Tony suggested she unstick herself. So she'd shrugged and said she had tried it once but the unsticking hadn't gone well. Very badly, she told him. She did not say Harmon's name, nor anything about what had happened at Loon Point, but she explained that in the end the unsticking got awfully sticky. Unpleasant outcome, she said. Thoroughly busted. No glow at all. Tony had listened to this with his eyes off elsewhere, and when she was finished he nodded and said, "I get the point," and she said, "No point, I'm afraid." She asked if he wanted to know more. He said no thanks. Maybe he knew anyway. Probably so. But he didn't know about the pain and misery, so she told him that part. She told him how she couldn't sleep for many months afterward. She told him that it was a very terrible unsticking thing she had done, and that after it was over, all she'd wanted was to keep it secret, but the secret had soon become worse than the terrible thing itself.

  "So he found out?" Tony said.

  "Some. Not all."

  "And then?"

  "Weeping, horror. I was holy, he said. My tongue, my in-sides. Our us. He'd be gone forever if it happened again."

  "Will it? Again?"

  "Well, there's a question." She remembered shaking her head, then standing up. "I shouldn't be bothering you. Stupid of me."

  "No bother."

  "But still stupid. Come on, let's try our luck."

  They played for another hour, mostly losing, then took the elevator up to the eighth floor. At her door Tony said, "I'd kiss you if I weren't such a pork chop," and she'd laughed and said, "Good thing," and kissed his cheek, and Tony said, "I'll live forever."

  "Good night," she said.

  "Oh, yes."

  She opened the door and watched him move off down the corridor.

  Inside, John lay cradling a pillow in the dark. His breathing was the forced, wakeful kind. Pretending to sleep—it was something he would do. She remembered undressing and pulling the blankets back and lying down beside him without touching his skin. Tired of trying. All that trying. Not now. He could touch himself. She rolled onto her side and lay there for a long while listening to the afterhum of the casino, watching the bright chips accumulate in front of her. She'd won close to seven hundred dollars. A week's pay. But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happiness because there was no other word. Maybe she'd counted too much on John to help name the things. Maybe so. It didn't feel that way. It felt like something else, like climbing a mountain that rose into the clouds and had no top and no end. It felt like work. The playfulness wasn't there, the fun they used to have. She thought about the way they had once played Dare You in the corner booth of that cozy bar back in college, how they had risked things and challenged each other and made good on the challenges. There was a glow then. They couldn't lose.

  She remembered swinging out of bed. John was mumbling in his sleep—angry things.

  Even then she didn't touch him.

  It would not help. Nothing would.

  In the dark she put on a fresh silk dress and brushed her hair. She found her purse, went out into the corridor, locked the door behind her, and took the elevator down to the casino. Three A.M., but the place was loud and alive. She found a lucky-looking table and squeezed in between a pair of Asian gentlemen. Already she felt better. The light was promising. She ordered coffee and orange juice, bought seven hundred dollars' worth of green chips, smiled at the dealer, asked him for a nice fat blackjack and hit it on the second run.

  Verona, she thought. She'd win herself a future.

  Flow with the glow.

  She took the boat along the edge of the ruler in her head, utterly lost, low on gas, low on odds, looking out on the impossible gray reaches of sky and timber and water. So deal the cards, she thought. Always a chance. No play, no pay.

  23. Where They Looked

  At six-thirty on the morning of September 22 Claude Rasmussen nudged his eighteen-foot Chris-Craft up against the dock below the yellow cottage on Lake of the Woods. John Wade helped the old man tie up, steadied Pat's arm as she stepped in, then trotted back up to the porch for a styrofoam cooler that Ruth had loaded with soft drinks and sandwiches. He felt a rising freshness inside him. Not quite optimism, but a kind of health, a clarity that had not been there for a very long while.

  When he returned to the boat, Claude was bent over a ragged chart book. "What we could use," he was explaining, "is a goddamn divining rod. Pure crapshoot unless somebody's got a piece of razzle-dazzle intuition."

  Wade stowed the cooler and took a seat next to Pat. She did not look at him. She studied the lake briefly, then motioned at a string of islands a mile or two offshore.

  "There," she said. "Close to home."

  Claude nodded. He gave a little shove to the dock, letting the big boat nose out into the waves. "Sit tight," he said. "This mama moves."

  For ten minutes he held a course straight east toward the islands, the throttle wide open. It was a raw, foggy morning, like early winter, and in the brittle light Wade could see his own breath snatched away by the wind, little gusts of silver vanishing into deeper silver. The sky was dull and opaque. As they approached the first little island, Claude cut down on the power and turned north along the shoreline. The solitude was startling—rocks and forest and nothing else. They circled the island and then cruised east past a half dozen smaller islands. There was no sign of human presence, not now, not ever, and after an hour Wade felt himself sliding off into reverie. He had nothing to say, no desire to speak. Sitting back, humming under his breath, he scanned the waters for anything that might present itself. A piece of the boat or an oar or a white tennis shoe: Did tennis shoes float? Would the hearts survive? JOHN + KATH? And what about the human body? What was the float quotient? How long did the gases last?

  It was hard to sustain concentration. He tried dividing the lake into quadrants, carefully inspecting each quadrant. He was humming an old army marching tune. The lyric, he realized, had been spinning through his head all morning—I know a girl, name is Jill! He couldn't push it away; the tune dipped and curled ...I know a girl, name is Jill—babe, babe! ... And he remembered sloshing through the monsoons, everything wet and filthy, the war like fluid in his lungs, the whole company laughing and singing and marching through the rain. Other songs, too; other ghosts; odd flashes of this and that—the way Kathy used to chase him around the apartment with a squirt gun—an old man with a hoe—PFC Weatherby starting to smile—Kathy's skin going slick and moist as they made love in the heat of July, the suction at their bellies, the traffic outside, her
eyes softening and losing focus and rolling high in their sockets—the way she sometimes mumbled in her sleep—yes, and other happy times—the time he was Frank Sinatra—how he stripped down and pranced across the bedroom and sang The record shows I took the blows, buck naked, high-stepping, wiggling his ass, and how Kathy squealed and laughed and told him to put his flopper away and then lay back on the bed and grabbed her feet like a baby and rocked back and forth and kept laughing and squealing and couldn't stop.

  "Senator, you with us?"

  Wade looked up. The old man was reaching back for a can of soda, squinting at him. They were moving along an island identical to all the other islands.

  "Sorry. I was off somewhere."

  "Noticed that."

  Wade tried to frame some appropriate remark. There was the pressure of oblique scrutiny.

  "Green in the gills," Claude said. "For a second there, I thought you was ready to lose breakfast. Say the word, we'll take a breather, find some place to pull in for a while."

  "Not a chance," Pat said.

  "But if he's—"

  Pat made a hard twisting motion. "We just got started, for God's sake. You'd think he'd want to try."

  "I do," Wade said, "I'm not—"

  "Such crap."

  "Pat, cut it out."

  "More of the same. Crap, crap." Her gaze skipped across the surface of the lake. The sound of the wind was conspicuous.

  "Hey, both of you," Claude said, "let's try for some politeness. Mouths shut, eyes open. That's another real good rule out here."

  "But he doesn't even ... Just sits there half asleep."

  "Listen, I wasn't—"

  "Enough," Claude said. "Too much."

  Wade looked out at the water. It occurred to him that he might seize the chance to declare his own innocence. Something indignant. A loud, angry oration. Explain that it was all a mystery and that he loved his wife and wanted her back and that everything else was nothing.

  He squeezed his hands together. "Pat, listen," he said, "I'm not sure what you think. Whatever it is, I'm sorry."

  "Wonderful."

  "That's not an apology."

  "No," she said, "I'm sure it's not."