Twice they spotted other search boats moving silently in the distance. Later, as they approached Magnuson's Island, a small red pontoon plane banked low overhead, close enough to make out the pilot's beard and straw hat. Mostly, though, things were flat and empty. At Buckete Island they turned west, crossing over to American Point, where for well over an hour they moved along at half speed just off the shoreline.
By late morning the sky had cleared a little. There was still a wind, which kept the chop high, but to the west a spray of sunlight fell across the lake's horizon. Pat took off her jacket and hunched forward. She was wearing a yellow basketball jersey, a size too small, and it was clear that all the weight training had produced results. An imposing creature, Wade thought. Her whole posture. The way she attacked the world. He sat up straight, of the soft double fold at his own belly.
No more booze, he decided. Not a drop.
At noon they ate the sandwiches and then continued north through mostly open water. Wade kept to himself. There was still that sense of being watched—the elaborate way Pat had of turning her head, how her eyes always settled on things in the middle distance. He told himself to ignore it. Nothing he could do. A prime suspect. Not just with Pat—everyone. Art Lux and Vinny Pearson, the newspapers, the party bigwigs, the whole prissy state of Minnesota. He couldn't blame them. He'd tried to pull off a trick that couldn't be done, which was to remake himself, to vanish what was past and replace it with things good and new. He should have known better. Should've lifted it out of the act. Never given the fucking show in the first place. Pitiful, he thought. And no one gave a shit about the pressure of it all. Twenty years' worth. Smiling and making love and eating breakfast and keeping up the patter and pushing away the nightmares and trying to invent a respectable little life for himself. The intent was never evil. Deceit, maybe, but the intent was purely virtuous.
No one knew. Obviously no one cared.
A liar and a cheat.
Which was the risk. You had to live inside your tricks. You had to be Sorcerer. Believe or fail. And for twenty years he had believed.
Now it ends, he thought.
One more fucker with no cards up his sleeve.
It was almost twilight when they tied up at the Angle Inlet boatyard. The mood of the place was somber. More than a dozen boats bobbed against the docks, their hulls restless in the approaching dusk. A bonfire was burning on the beach, and groups of dark-faced men stood around it, smoking and drinking beer. Even from a distance, Wade decided, there was something distinctly mournful in their voices. Now and then a note of laughter rose up, but even the laughter seemed part of a deeper and more permanent gloom. It reminded him of the way men talked in the hours after a firelight. After Weber died, or Reinhart, or PFC Weatherby. That same melancholy. The same musical rise and fall.
Claude stood surveying things for a few seconds. His face looked gaunt in the dimming light. "I'll say this," he muttered, "it ain't no celebration."
"I keep hoping—"
"No shit. We all do."
The old man hitched up his trousers, took Pat's arm, and led her down to the beach. Wade followed a few steps behind. A peculiar frothiness had come into his stomach. Bubble-gut, Kathy used to call it. The tension of the public eye. He could feel heads turning, the air going dead behind him. He moved straight ahead, toward the fire, trying for the correct balance of poise and husbandly concern. Here and there voices rose up in encouragement—dark beards, hooded stares—and as he made his way forward, the whisperings seemed to gust up and push him along.
Ahead, near the fire, Art Lux and Vinny Pearson were shaking hands with Pat. Wade stopped and waited, not sure what to do with himself.
Someone clapped his shoulder. Someone else pushed a can of beer at him. "Tomorrow's tomorrow," Lux was saying, then for a second his voice was lost under the sound of a big double-engined boat approaching the docks. He turned and nodded at Wade. "No luck, I'm afraid. In the morning we'll be out there again. Nobody's got the quits."
The big boat's engines went dead. The running lights flashed off and a thick silence filled up the dark.
Lux took a step forward. His eyes were mild and solicitous in the firelight. "Glad you're up and about, sir. Looking fit."
Vinny Pearson laughed. "Like a fiddle," he said. "Fit to fart. Three days it takes."
The sheriff waved a hand. He looked at Wade as if anticipating a joke. "Just tune it out, sir. What we'll do, Miss Hood and I'll go find a place for a chat. Maybe you two boys can figure a way to patch things up."
"No thanks," Wade said.
"Just a thought."
Wade tried to smile but couldn't manage it. "Christ," he said. "What's the point?"
"Sir?"
"Everybody thinks—" He made himself turn away. "I've had it. A bellyful."
"Poor man," Vinny Pearson said.
"Especially from this one."
"Right, and if I was you—"
"The great albino detective."
Vinny lowered his shoulders. His eyes were a smooth, lustrous yellow. "Ain't albino," he said. "Swedish."
"Good for you."
"A fact."
They stood at angles, not quite facing each other. Claude maneuvered between them. "Hey, back off. We don't need this."
Vinny snorted. "Ain't no albino."
"A fetus," Wade said.
"Now that's about all—"
"Our great white albino deputy fetus."
Vinny's fingers twitched. The thought came to Wade's mind that the two of them shared some intuitive understanding about the nature of the human animal. Things that were possible, things that were not.
He felt relaxed and dangerous. That gliding sensation.
"Well, I'll tell you this," Vinny said slowly. "Albino or no albino, I never mass murdered nobody."
"Here's your chance."
"Fuck you."
"Sure. Both of us."
Vinny waited a moment, turned away, then stopped in the shadows beyond the fire. "Truth serum," he snarled. "That's what we need, a nice big bellyful!" He cackled and walked off.
Wade was aware of voices behind him. When he looked up, Lux was guiding Pat to a wooden bench across the beach. Claude clamped a hand on Wade's shoulder. "Don't pay it mind. The albino stuff tickled me."
"Right. Tickled."
"Come on, let's park ourselves."
They moved up closer to the fire. Six or seven dusky faces nodded beneath their caps as Claude made the introductions, and then for a long while Wade sat listening to a conversation that seemed to transpire in another language. Impossibly abstract: tides and winds and channel currents. It was hard to achieve focus. Partly it was Vinny, partly the glide. Once or twice he found himself tugged away on the backwash of voices, drifting here and there. Another universe, he thought. Everyday logic had gone inside out; the essential substances that had once constituted his daily being had been transformed into something vaporous and infinitely mutable. What was real? What wasn't? Kathy, for instance. No firmness. It was difficult to imagine her out there right now, at this instant, looking up at this same starry sky.
He couldn't feel much. He took a slug of beer and tried to brace himself.
"These boys here," Claude was saying, "they're water-smart. Real pros. They'll dig her out for you."
Positive murmurs came from the dark.
Across the beach Lux and Pat were huddled in conversation. Wade watched them for a few seconds, wondering if he should walk over and demand the handcuffs. Blurt out a few secrets. The teakettle and the boathouse. Tell them he wasn't sure. Just once in his life: tell everything. Talk about his father. Explain how his whole life had been managed with mirrors and that he was now totally baffled and totally turned around and had no idea how to work his way out. Which was the truth. He didn't know shit. He didn't know where he was or how he'd gotten there or where to go next.
Much later, it seemed, Claude clapped his arm. They stood up and walked over to where Pat and Art Lux were conve
rsing in the dark. Vinny Pearson had disappeared.
Wade zipped up his jacket.
"Convicted?" he said pleasantly.
They went out again in the morning, and every morning for the next two weeks. The lake was huge and empty.
On October 8 the Minnesota State Police recalled its three search aircraft. Four days later the U.S. Border Patrol downgraded its operations to routine, and by October 17 only three private boats still remained on active search.
The weather mostly held—crisp days, cold nights. There was a snowfall on the morning of October 19, a light frost two days later, but then the skies cleared and a warming wind came up from the south and the autumn sunlight remained bright and steady.
The routine kept Wade going.
In the mornings Ruth Rasmussen would be ready with a cooler of sandwiches and soft drinks. Claude and Pat would look over the chart book, marking it up with a red pencil, then they would troop down to the boat and spend the day cruising back and forth in long silvery sweeps. The wilderness was massive. It was a place, Wade came to understand, where lost was a rule of thumb. The water here was the water there. Nothing in particular, all in general. Forests folded into forests, sky swallowed sky. The solitude bent back on itself. Everywhere was nowhere. It was perfect unity, perfect oneness, the flat mirroring waters giving off exact copies of other copies, everything in multiples, everything hypnotic and blue and meaningless, always the same. Here, Wade decided, was where the vanished things go. The dropped nickels. The needles in haystacks.
There was nothing to find—he knew that—but he felt a curious peace looking out on the endless woods and water. Like the box of mirrors in his head, the way he used to slip inside and just disappear for a while.
"No can do," Claude said.
"We'd cover more country."
"No."
"But it wouldn't be ... I'd have maps."
"Maps my ass. No means no."
"I could do it anyway."
"You could."
"So why not?"
The old man sighed. "Just no."
At dinner that night Wade brought it up again. It wasn't a question of practicalities. It was something he should be doing.
The old man stared at him. "Agreed," he said. "You're already doing it."
"Alone, I mean."
"Don't con me."
"I'm not conning."
"Either way. Still no."
Wade looked over at Ruth, who shook her head, then at Pat, who rolled her shoulders in a gesture that suggested something close to ridicule. "Seriously, I'd be fine," he said. "A compass and maps, no problem. Maybe a radio."
"So?" Claude said. "And then what?"
"Just look."
"Right. End up same place as your wife."
"It's something I have to try."
Pat lifted her gaze. "God, such chivalry. I love it. I bet Kathy would too."
"I don't mean—"
"The Lone Ranger."
Claude glared across the table. He pulled out his upper plate, dipped it in his cup of coffee, and slipped it back in. "Whatever your personal problems, let's be real extra-clear. There's this word no, it means not a chance. It means forget it."
"He's good at that," Pat said. "A good chivalrous forgetter."
"Quiet," said Claude.
"I'm just commenting."
"Oh, yeah."
"All that gallantry," Pat said. "Hi ho Silver."
There was snow the next morning, which turned to heavy rain, and at noon Claude swung the boat back toward the cottage. They spent the day waiting. By midafternoon it was snowing again, with a hard slanting wind, and from the cottage windows there was nothing to be seen of the dock or the boathouse or the lake beyond. For a couple of hours they played a listless game of Scrabble in front of the fireplace. Around five, Wade went outside with a shovel, slowly working his way from the porch to the driveway. His thoughts were mostly on magic. He scooped up the heavy wet snow, digging hard, his mind ticking through the mechanics of a last nifty illusion. A piece of causal transportation. It could be done. Like those two crazy snakes in Pinkville.
Curiously, as he worked out the details, Wade found himself experiencing a new sympathy for his father. This was how it was. You go about your business. You carry the burdens, entomb yourself in silence, conceal demon-history from all others and most times from yourself. Nothing theatrical. Shovel snow; diddle at politics or run a jewelry store; seek periodic forgetfulness; betray the present with every breath drawn from the bubble of a rotted past. And then one day you discover a length of clothesline. You amaze yourself. You pull over a garbage can and hop aboard and hook yourself up to forever. No notes, no diagrams. You don't explain a thing. Which was the art of it—his father's art, Kathy's art—that magnificent giving over to pure and absolute Mystery. It was the difference, he thought, between evil and a bad childhood. To know is to be disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed. All the petty hows and whys, the unseemly motives, the abscesses of character, the sordid little uglinesses of self and history—these were the gimmicks you kept under wraps to the end. Better to leave your audience wailing in the dark, shaking their fists, some crying How?, others Why?
When dusk had come, Wade put his shovel aside and moved down the slope to the dock. The snow had let up.
He didn't think about it. Quickly, he stripped naked and filled his lungs and dove to the bottom where Kathy was.
To his bemusement there was no chill, or else the chill was lost on him. He did not open his eyes. He located a piling at the point where it had been driven into the gravel, took hold and propelled himself beneath the dock, belly-down, feeling only the discomfort of his own vague intentions. There was the quality of a rehearsal. Like a test run. Maybe his father had once done things very much like this in the musty stillness of the garage, emboldening himself, examining the rafters with an eye for levitation.
For a few moments Wade considered opening his eyes, just to know, but in the dark it wouldn't have mattered.
He came to the surface and went down again.
The possibilities were finite. She was there or she wasn't. And if she wasn't, she was elsewhere.
And even that didn't matter.
Guilt had no such solution. It was false-bottomed. It was the trapdoor he'd been performing on all these years, the love he'd withheld, the poisons he'd kept inside. For his entire life, it seemed, there had been the terror of discovery. A fat little kid doing magic in front of a stand-up mirror. "Hey, kiddo, that's a good one," his father could've said, but for reasons unknown, reasons mysterious, the words never got spoken. He had wanted to be loved. And to be loved he had practiced deception. He had hidden the bad things. He had tricked up his own life. Only for love. Only to be loved.
The cold pressed into his rib cage. He could taste the lake.
Eyes closed, deep, he glided by feel along the water-polished pilings beneath the dock. He could sense her presence. Yes, he could. The touch of her flesh. Her wide-open eyes. Her bare feet, her empty womb, her hair like wet weeds.
Amazing, he thought, what love could do.
He let out the last of his air, pushed to the surface, hoisted himself onto the dock, dressed quickly, and trotted through the snow to the cottage.
Shortly after eight Art Lux called. He spoke first to Pat, then to Wade. The man's dairy-farmer voice rode the scales of apology as he explained that the official search was being discontinued. Purely a formality, he said. Paperwork to file. Red tape and so on.
Wade shifted the receiver to his other hand. He glanced over at Pat, who was crying. "Give it up?" he said. "Just like that?"
"Not exactly."
"It sounds—"
"No, sir, we're not quitting. Still places to look, if you know what I mean."
"I don't," Wade said.
"Sir?"
"I don't know."
Lux paused. "Well. Places."
There was a sound on the line that Wade took to be someone else's voice. After a s
econd Lux asked if he could speak with Claude.
Wade handed the phone over. He stood awkwardly at the center of the kitchen, off balance, wondering if there was something he should be doing or saying. Some overlooked gesture. Tears, maybe, except he was tired of pretending. He went to the refrigerator, took out a tray of ice cubes, built himself a vodka tonic. Pat's low crying irritated him. It seemed profoundly wrong. When all was lost, he thought, the thing to do was grab a hammer or mix a drink. Like father, like son.
In a few minutes Claude hung up and motioned at Wade. They went out to the living room.
The old man looked very tired. "Whole thing's ridiculous," he said, "but I guess you know what's gonna happen."
"Pretty much."
"I can't say no."
"That's fine."
Claude slumped on the couch, massaged the pouches under his eyes. "Wouldn't help none anyway. Lux was clear. Either way, they'll rip this place apart. They got this idea—you know—they figure probably she's around here somewhere. The boathouse. On the grounds."
"She's not," Wade said, "but it doesn't matter."
"Fucking does matter. Christ, I just wish—"
The old man closed his eyes. Watching him, Wade was struck by the notion that he had a genuine friend in the world. Unique development, he thought.
Claude blinked and looked up pensively from the couch.
"A situation, isn't it?"
"That's what it is," Wade said.
"No win, no tie. They don't find anything, you're still a sinner. After what happened with the election, all the garbage that leaked out—" The old man looked at Wade's drink "You mind?"
Wade gave him the glass. They were quiet for a time, passing the drink, then Claude reached out and put a hand on Wade's knee.
"I don't want to be sappy. She was all you had, right?"
"Yes."
"And you didn't do zilch."
"I did things. Not that."
"Right." Claude took his hand away. "And there ain't nothing else—you know—nothing else you can say?"
"There never was."