Read Online In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien - Free Book Online Page B

through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press his gums against the firm red muscle of her heart. He wanted to suture their lives together.
    It was terror, mostly. He was afraid of losing her. He had his secrets, she had hers.
    So now and then he'd play spy tricks. On Saturday mornings he'd follow her over to the dry cleaners on Okabena Avenue, then to the drugstore and post office. Afterward, he'd tail her across the street to the supermarket, watching from a distance as she pushed a cart up and down the aisles, then he'd hustle back to the apartment and wait for her to walk in. "What's for lunch?" he'd ask, and Kathy would give him a quick look and say, "You tell me."
    Briefly then, as she put the groceries away, Kathy's eyes would darken up with little flecks of gray. Such eyes, he'd think. He'd want to suck them from their sockets. He'd want to feel their weight on his tongue, taste the whites, roll them around like lemon drops.
    Instead, he'd watch Kathy fold the grocery bags.
    "You know, maybe I'm way off," she'd say, "but I get this creepy feeling. Like you're always there. Always worming around inside me."
    John would smile his candidate's smile. "Very true. Not worming, though. Snaking."
    "You didn't go out today?"
    "Out where?"
    "I don't know where. It just seemed—"
    He'd pin her against the refrigerator, tight. He'd run a hand along the bone of her hip. He'd whisper in her ear. "Boy," he'd say, "do I
love
you. Boy, oh, boy."
    "So you didn't go out?"
    "Let's be cobras. You and me. Gobble each other up."
    Â 
    Sorcerer was in his element. It was a place with secret trapdoors and tunnels and underground chambers populated by various spooks and goblins, a place where magic was everyone's hobby and where elaborate props were always on hand—exploding boxes and secret chemicals and numerous devices of levitation—you could
fly
here, you could make
other
people fly—a place where the air itself was both reality and illusion, where anything might instantly become anything else. It was a place where decency mixed intimately with savagery, where you could wave your wand and make teeth into toothpaste, civilization into garbage—where you could intone a few syllables over a radio and then sit back to enjoy the spectacle—pure mystery, pure miracle—a place where every object and every thought and every hour seemed to glow with all the unspeakable secrets of human history. The jungles stood dark and unyielding. The corpses gaped. The war itself was a mystery. Nobody knew what it was about, or why they
were there, or who started it, or who was winning, or how it might end. Secrets were everywhere—booby traps in the hedgerows, bouncing betties under the red clay soil. And the people. The silent papa-sans, the hollow-eyed children and jabbering old women. What did these people want? What did they feel? Who was VC and who was friendly and who among them didn't care? These were all secrets. History was a secret. The land was a secret. There were secret caches, secret trails, secret codes, secret missions, secret terrors and appetites and longings and regrets. Secrecy was paramount. Secrecy
was
the war. A guy might do something very brave—charge a bunker, maybe, or stand up tall under fire—and afterward everyone would look away and stay quiet for a while, then somebody would say, "How the fuck'd you
do
that?" and the brave guy would blink and shake his head, because he didn't know, because it was one of those incredible secrets inside him.
    Sorcerer had his own secrets.
    PFC Weatherby, that was one. Another was how much he loved the place—Vietnam—how it felt like home. And there was the deepest secret of all, which was the secret of Thuan Yen, so secret that he sometimes kept it secret from himself.
    Â 
    John Wade knew he was sick, and one evening he tried to talk about it with Kathy. He wanted to unload the horror in his stomach.
    "It's