Task Force Barker, Americal Division, Republic of Vietnam.
6. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Minnesota Poll, July 3, 1986, and August 17, 1986, p. 1.
7. Interview, May 6, 1990, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
8. Interview, June 6, 1989, Angle Inlet, Minnesota.
9. Interview, June 10, 1993, Angle Inlet, Minnesota.
10. Interview, January 3, 1991, Baudette, Minnesota.
11. Interview, June 9, 1993, Angle Inlet, Minnesota.
When he was fourteen, John Wade lost his father. He was in the junior high gymnasium, shooting baskets, and after a time the teacher put his arm around John’s shoulder and said, “Take a shower now. Your mom’s here.”
What John felt that night, and for many nights afterward, was the desire to kill.
At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn’t. He wanted to take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying. But he was helpless. He didn’t know where to start.
In the weeks that followed, because he was young and full of grief, he tried to pretend that his father was not truly dead. He would talk to him in his imagination, carrying on whole conversations about baseball and school and girls. Late at night, in bed, he’d cradle his pillow and pretend it was his father, feeling the closeness. “Don’t be dead,” he’d say, and his father would wink and say, “Well, hey, keep talking,” and then for a long while they’d discuss the right way to hit a baseball, a good level swing, keeping your head steady and squaring up your shoulders and letting the bat do the job. It was pretending, but the pretending helped. And so when things got especially bad, John would sometimes invent elaborate stories about how he could’ve saved his father. He imagined all the things he could’ve done. He imagined putting his lips against his father’s mouth and blowing hard and making the heart come alive again; he imagined yelling in his father’s ear, begging him to please stop dying. Once or twice it almost worked. “Okay,” his father would say, “I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” but he never did.
In his heart, despite the daydreams, John could not fool himself. He knew the truth. At school, when the teachers told him how sorry they were that he had lost his father, he understood that lost was just another way of saying dead. But still the idea kept turning in his mind. He’d picture his father stumbling down a dark alley, lost, not dead at all. And then the pretending would start again. John would go back in his memory over all the places his father might be—under the bed or behind the bookcases in the living room—and in this way he would spend many hours looking for his father, opening closets, scanning the carpets and sidewalks and lawns as if in search of a lost nickel. Maybe in the garage, he’d think. Maybe under the cushions of the sofa. It was only a game, or a way of coping, but now and then he’d get lucky. Just by chance he’d glance down and suddenly spot his father in the grass behind the house. “Bingo,” his father would say, and John would feel a hinge swing open. He’d bend down and pick up his father and put him in his pocket and be careful never to lose him again.
Their seventh day at Lake of the Woods passed quietly. There was a telephone but it never rang. There were no newspapers, no reporters or telegrams. Inside the cottage, things had a fragile, hollowed-out quality, a suspended feeling, and over the morning hours a great liquid silence seemed to flow in from the woods and curl up around their bodies. They tried to ignore it; they were cautious with each other. When they spoke, which was not often, it was to maintain the pretense that they were in control of their own lives, that their problems were soluble, that in time the world would become a happier place. Though it required the exercise of tact and willpower, they tried to find comfort in the ordinary motions of life; they simulated their marriage, the old habits and routines. At the breakfast table, over coffee, Kathy jotted down a grocery list. “Caviar,” she said, and John Wade laughed and said, “Truffles, too,” and they exchanged smiles as proof of their courage and resolve. Often, though, the strain was almost impossible to bear. On one occasion, as she was washing the breakfast dishes, Kathy made a low sound in her throat and began to say something, just a word or two, then her eyes focused elsewhere, beyond him, beyond the walls of the cottage, and then after a time she looked down at the dishwater and did not look back again. It was an image that would not go away. Twenty-four hours later, when she was gone, John Wade would remember the enormous distance that had come into her face at that instant, a kind of travel, and he would find himself wondering where she had taken herself, and why, and by what means.
He would never know.
In the days ahead he would look for clues in the clutter of daily detail. The faded blue jeans she wore that morning, her old tennis shoes, her white cotton sweater. The distance in her eyes. The way she rinsed the breakfast dishes and dried her hands and then walked out of the kitchen without looking at him.
What if she’d spoken?
What if she’d leaned against the refrigerator and said, “Let’s do some loving right here,” and what if they had, and what if everything that happened could not have happened because of those other happenings?
Some things he would remember clearly. Other things he would remember only as shadows, or not at all. It was a matter of adhesion. What stuck and what didn’t. He would be quite certain, for instance, that around noon that day they put on their swimsuits and went down to the lake. For more than an hour they lay inert in the sun, half dozing, then later they went swimming until the cold drove them back onto the dock. The afternoon was large and empty. Brilliant patches of red and yellow burned among the pines along the shore, and in the air there was the sharp, dying scent of autumn. There were no boats on the lake, no swimmers or fishermen. To the south, a mile away, the triangular roof of the Forest Service fire tower seemed to float on an expansive green sea; a narrow dirt road cut diagonally through the timber, and beyond the road a trace of gray smoke rose from the Rasmussen cottage off to the west. Northward it was all woods and water.
He would remember a gliding, buoyant feeling in his stomach. The afternoons were always better. Waves and reflections, the big silver lake planing out toward Canada. Not so bad, he was thinking. He watched the sky and pretended he was a winner. Handshakes and happy faces—it made a nice picture. A winner, sure, and so he lay basking in the crisp white sunlight, almost believing.
Later, Kathy nudged him. “Hey there,” she said, “you all right?”
“Perfect,” he said.
“You don’t
