In the Lake of the Woods. Tim O’Brien
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air. All around him there was machine-gun fire, a machine-gun wind, and the wind seemed to pick him up and blow him from place to place. He found a young woman laid open without a chest or lungs. He found dead cattle. There were fires, too. The trees and hootches and clouds were burning. Sorcerer didn’t know where to shoot. He didn’t know what to shoot. So he shot the burning trees and burning hootches. He shot the hedges. He shot the smoke, which shot back, then he took refuge behind a pile of stones. If a thing moved, he shot it. If a thing did not move, he shot it. There was no enemy to shoot, nothing he could see, so he shot without aim and without any desire except to make the terrible morning go away.
When it ended, he found himself in the slime at the bottom of an irrigation ditch.
PFC Weatherby looked down on him.
“Hey, Sorcerer,” Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him.
John Wade was elected to the Minnesota State Senate on November 9, 1976. He and Kathy splurged on an expensive hotel suite in St. Paul, where they celebrated with a dozen or so friends. When the party ended, well after midnight, they ordered steaks and champagne from room service. “Mr. Senator Husband,” Kathy kept saying, but John told her it wasn’t necessary, she could call him Honorable Sir, and then he picked up a champagne bottle and used it as a microphone, peeling off his pants, gliding across the room and singing Regrets, I’ve had a few, and Kathy squealed and flopped back on the bed and grabbed her ankles and rolled around and laughed and yelled, “Honorable Senator Sir!” so John stripped off his shirt and made oily Sinatra moves and sang The record shows I took the blows, and Kathy’s green eyes were wet and happy and full of the light that was only Kathy’s light and could be no one else’s.
One evening Charlie Company wandered into a quiet fishing village along the South China Sea. They set up a perimeter on the white sand, went swimming, dug in deep for the night. Around dawn they were hit with mortar fire. The rounds splashed into the ocean behind them—a bad scare, nobody was hurt—but when it was over, Sorcerer led a patrol into the village. It took almost an hour to round everyone up, maybe a hundred women and kids and old men. There was much chattering, much consternation as the villagers were ushered down to the beach for a magic show. With the South China Sea at his back, Sorcerer performed card tricks and rope tricks. He pulled a lighted cigar from his ear. He transformed a pear into an orange. He displayed an ordinary military radio and whispered a few words and made their village disappear. There was a trick to it, which involved artillery and white phosphorus, but the overall effect was spectacular.
A fine, sunny morning. Everyone sat on the beach and oohed and ahhed at the vanishing village.
“Fuckin’ Houdini,” one of the guys said.
As a boy John Wade spent hours practicing his moves in front of the old stand-up mirror down in the basement. He watched his mother’s silk scarves change color, copper pennies becoming white mice. In the mirror, where miracles happened, John was no longer a lonely little kid. He had sovereignty over the world. Quick and graceful, his hands did things ordinary hands could not do—palm a cigarette lighter, cut a deck of cards with a turn of the thumb. Everything was possible, even happiness.
In the mirror, where John Wade mostly lived, he could read his father’s mind. Simple affection, for instance. “Love you, cowboy,” his father would think.
Or his father would think, “Hey, report cards aren’t everything.”
The mirror made this possible, and so John would sometimes carry it to school with him, or to baseball games, or to bed at night. Which was another trick: how he secretly kept the old stand-up mirror in his head. Pretending, of course—he understood that—but he felt calm and safe with the big mirror behind his eyes, where he could slide away behind the glass, where he could turn bad things into good things and just be happy.
The mirror made things better.
The mirror made his father smile all the time. The mirror made the vodka bottles vanish from their hiding place in the garage, and it helped with the hard, angry silences at the dinner table. “How’s school these days?” his father would ask, in the mirror, which would permit John to ramble on about some of his problems, little things, school stuff, and in the mirror his father would say, “No problem, that’s life, that’s par for the course. Besides, you’re my best pal.” After dinner John would watch his father slip out to the garage. That was the worst part. The secret drinking that wasn’t secret. But in the mirror, John would be there with him, and together they’d stand in the dim light, rakes and hoses and garage smells all around them, and his father would explain exactly what was happening and why it was happening. “One quickie,” his father would say, “then we’ll smash these goddamn bottles forever.”
“To smithereens,” John would say, and his father would say, “Right. Smithereens.”
In all kinds of ways his father was a terrific man, even without the mirror. He was smart and funny. People enjoyed his company—John, too—and the neighborhood kids were always stopping by to toss around a football or listen to his father’s stories and opinions and jokes. At school one day, when John was in sixth grade, the teacher made everyone stand up and give five-minute speeches about any topic under the sun, and a kid named Tommy Winn talked about John’s father, what a neat guy he was, always friendly and full of pep and willing to spend time just shooting the breeze. At the end of the speech Tommy Winn gave John a sad, accusing look that lasted way too long. “All I wish,” Tommy said, “I wish he was my father.”
Except Tommy Winn didn’t know some things.
How in fourth grade, when John got a little chubby, his father used to call him Jiggling John. It was supposed to be funny. It was supposed to make John stop eating.
At the dinner table, if things weren’t silent, his father would wiggle his tongue and say, “Holy Christ, look at the kid stuff it in, old Jiggling John,” then he’d glance over at John’s mother, who would say, “Stop it, he’s husky, he’s not fat at all,” and John’s father would laugh and say, “Husky my ass.”
Sometimes it would end there.
Other times his father would jerk a thumb at the basement door. “That pansy magic crap. What’s wrong with baseball, some regular exercise?” He’d shake his head. “Blubby little pansy.”
In the late evenings, just before bedtime, John and Kathy often went out for walks around the neighborhood, holding hands and looking at the houses and talking about which one they would someday have as their own. Kathy had fallen in love with an old blue Victorian across from Edgewood Park. The place had white shutters and a white picket fence, a porch that wrapped around three sides, a yard full of ferns and flower beds and azalea bushes. She’d sometimes pause on the sidewalk, gazing up at the house, her lips moving as if to memorize all its details, and on those occasions John would feel an almost erotic awareness of his own good fortune, a fluttery rush in the valves of his heart. He wished he could make things happen faster. He wished there were some trick that might cause a blue Victorian to appear in their lives.
After a time Kathy would sigh and give him a long sober stare. “Dare you to rob a bank,” she’d say, which was only a way of saying that houses could wait, that love was enough, that nothing else really mattered.
They would smile at this knowledge and walk around the park a couple of times before heading back to the apartment.
Sorcerer thought he could get away with murder. He believed it. After he’d shot PFC Weatherby—which was an accident, the purest reflex—he tricked himself into believing it hadn’t happened the way it happened. He pretended he wasn’t responsible; he pretended he couldn’t have done it and therefore hadn’t; he pretended it didn’t matter much; he pretended that if the secret stayed inside him, with all the other secrets, he could fool the world and himself too.
He was convincing. He had tears in his eyes, because it came from his heart. He loved PFC Weatherby like a