In the Lake of the Woods Read Online Free PDF

down under fire, avoided trouble, trusted in luck to keep him alive. By and large he was well liked among the men in Charlie Company. In the evenings, after the foxholes were dug, he'd sometimes perform card tricks for his new
buddies, simple stuff mostly, and he liked the grins and bunched eyebrows as he transformed the ace of spades into the queen of hearts, the queen of hearts into a snapshot of Ho Chi Minh. Or he'd swallow his jackknife. He'd open up the blade and put his head back and make the moves and then retrieve the knife from somebody's pocket. The guys were impressed. Sorcerer, they called him: "Sorcerer's our man." And for John Wade, who had always considered himself a loner, the nickname was like a special badge, an emblem of belonging and brotherhood, something to take pride in. A nifty sound, too—Sorcerer—it had magic, it suggested certain powers, certain rare skills and aptitudes.
    The men in Charlie Company seemed to agree.
    One afternoon in Pinkville, when a kid named Weber got shot through the kidney, Sorcerer knelt down and pressed a towel against the hole and said the usual things: "Hang tight, easy now." Weber nodded. For a while he was quiet, flickering in and out, then suddenly he giggled and tried to sit up.
    "Hey, no sweat," he said, "I'm aces, I'm golden." The kid kept rocking, he wouldn't lie still. "Golden, golden. Don't mean zip, man, I'm
golden.
"
    Weber's eyes shut. He almost smiled. "Go on," he said. "Do your magic."
    Â 
    In Vietnam, where superstition governed, there was the fundamental need to believe—believing just to believe—and over time the men came to trust in Sorcerer's powers. Jokes, at first. Little bits of lingo. "Listen up," somebody would say, "tonight we're invisible," and somebody else would say, "That's affirmative, Sorcerer's got this magic dust, gonna sprinkle us good, gonna make us into spooks." It was a game they played—tongue-in-cheek, but also hopeful. At night, before heading out on ambush, the men would go through the ritual of lining up to touch Sorcerer's helmet, filing by as if at Communion, the faces dark and young and solemn. They'd ask his advice on matters of fortune; they'd tell each other stories about his incredible good luck, how he never got a scratch, not once, not even that time back in January when the mortar round dropped right next to his foxhole. Amazing, they'd say. Man's plugged into the spirit world.
    John Wade encouraged the mystique. It was useful, he discovered, to cultivate a reserved demeanor, to stay silent for long stretches of time. When pressed, he'd put on a quick display of his powers, doing a trick or two, using the everyday objects all around him.
    Much could be done, for example, with his jackknife and a corpse. Other times he'd do some fortune-telling, offering prophecies of things to come. "Wicked vibes," he'd say, "wicked day ahead," and then he'd gaze out across the paddies. He couldn't go wrong. Wickedness was everywhere.
    "I'm the company witch doctor," he wrote Kathy. "These guys listen to me. They actually
believe
in this shit."
    Â 
    Kathy did not write back for several weeks. And then she sent only a postcard: "A piece of advice. Be careful with the tricks. One of these days you'll make
me
disappear."
    It was signed, Kath. There were no endearments, no funny stories.
    Instantly, John felt the old terrors rise up again, all the ugly possibilities. He couldn't shut them off. Even in bright daylight the pictures kept blowing through his head. Dark bedrooms, for instance. Kathy's diaphragm. What he wanted was to spy on her again—it was like a craving—but all he could
do was wait. At night his blood bubbled. He couldn't stop wondering. In the third week of February, when a letter finally arrived, he detected a new coolness in her tone, a new distance and formality. She talked about a movie she'd seen, an art gallery she'd visited, a terrific Spanish beer she'd discovered. His imagination