In the Lake of the Woods Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    February was a wretched month. Kathy was one problem, the war another. Two men were lost to land mines. A third was shot through the neck. Weber died of an exploding kidney. Morale was low. As they plodded from ville to ville, the men talked in quiet voices about how the magic had worn off, how Sorcerer had lost contact with the spirit world. They seemed to blame him. Nothing direct, just a general standoffishness. There were no more requests for tricks. No banter, no jokes. As the days piled up, John Wade felt increasingly cut off from the men, cut off from Kathy and his own future. A stranded sensation—totally lost. At times he wondered about his mental health. The internal terrain had gone blurry; he couldn't get his bearings.
    "Something's wrong," he wrote Kathy. "Don't do this to me. I'm not blind—Sorcerer can
see.
"
    She wrote back fast: "You scare me."
    And then for many days he received no letters at all, not even a postcard, and the war kept squeezing in on him. The notion of the finite took hold and would not let go.
    In the second week of February a sergeant named Reinhart was shot dead by sniper fire. He was eating a Mars bar. He took a bite and laughed and started to say something and then dropped in the grass under a straggly old palm tree, his lips dark with chocolate, his brains smooth and liquid. It was a fine tropical afternoon. Bright and balmy, very warm, but
John Wade found himself shivering. The cold came from inside him. A deep freeze, he thought, and then he felt something he'd never felt before, a force so violent it seemed to pick him up by the shoulders. It was rage, in part, but it was also illness and sorrow and evil, all kinds of things.
    For a few seconds he hugged himself, feeling the cold, and then he was moving.
    There was no real decision. He'd lost touch with his own volition, his own arms and legs, and in the hours afterward he would remember how he seemed to glide toward the enemy position—not running, just a fast, winging, disconnected glide—circling in from behind, not thinking at all, slipping through a tangle of deep brush and keeping low and letting the glide take him up to a little man in black trousers and a black shirt.
    He would remember the man turning. He would remember their eyes colliding.
    Other things he would remember only dimly. How he was carried forward by the glide. How his lungs seemed full of ashes, and how at one point his rifle muzzle came up against the little man's cheekbone. He would remember an immense pressure in his stomach. He would remember Kathy's flat eyes reproaching him for the many things he had done and not done.
    There was no sound at all, none that Sorcerer would remember. The little man's cheekbone was gone.
    Later, the men in Charlie Company couldn't stop talking about Sorcerer's new trick.
    They went on and on.
    "Poof," somebody said. "No lie, just like that—
poof!
"
    At dusk they dragged the sniper's body into a nearby hamlet. An audience of villagers was summoned at gunpoint. A
rope was then secured to the dead man's feet, another to his wrists, and just before, nightfall Sorcerer and his assistants performed an act of levitation, hoisting the body high into the trees, into the dark, where it floated under a lovely red moon.
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    John Wade returned home in November of 1969. At the airport in Seattle he put in a long-distance call to Kathy, but then chuckled and hung up on the second ring.
    The flight to Minneapolis was lost time. Jet lag, maybe, but something else, too. He felt dangerous. In the gray skies over North Dakota he went back into the lavatory, where he took off his uniform and put on a sweater and slacks, then carefully appraised himself in the mirror. His eyes looked unsound. A little tired, a little frayed. After a moment he winked at himself. "Hey, Sorcerer," he murmured. "How's tricks?"
    In the Twin Cities that evening, he took a bus over to the university. He carried his