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

Passed
    Twice during the night John Wade woke up sweating. The first time, near midnight, he turned and coiled up against Kathy, brain-sick, a little feverish, his thoughts wired to the nighttime hum of lake and woods.
    A while later he kicked back the sheets and said, "Kill Jesus." It was a challenge—a dare.
    He closed his eyes and waited for something terrible to happen, almost hoping, and when nothing happened he said it again, with authority, then listened for an answer. There was nothing.
    "Fuck it," he said. "Kill Jesus."
    Quietly then, John Wade swung out of bed. He moved down the hallway to the kitchen, ran water into an old iron teakettle, put it on the stove to boil. He was naked. His shoulders were sunburnt, his face waxy with sweat. For a few moments he stood very still, imagining himself kicking and gouging. He'd go for the eyes. Yes, he would. Tear out the bastard's eyeballs—fists and fingernails—just punch and claw and hammer and bite. God, too. He hoped there was a god so he could kill him.
    The thought was inspiring. He looked at the kitchen ceiling
and confided in the void, offering up his humiliation and sorrow.
    The teakettle made a light clicking noise.
    "You too," he said.
    He shrugged and got out the tea bags and lay down on the kitchen floor to wait. He was not thinking now, just watching the numbers come in. He could see it happening exactly as it happened. Minneapolis was lost. The suburbs, the Iron Range. And the farm towns to the southwest—Pipestone, Marshall, Windom, Jackson, Luverne. A clean, tidy sweep. St. Paul had been lost early. Duluth was lost four to one. The unions were lost, and the German Catholics, and the rank-and-file nobodies. The numbers were implacable. There was no pity in the world. It was all arithmetic. A winner, obviously, until he became a loser. Which was how it happened: that quick. One minute you're presidential timber and then they come at you with chain saws. It was textbook slippage. It was dishonor and disgrace. Certain secrets had been betrayed—ambush politics, Tony Carbo said—and so the polls went sour and in the press there was snide chatter about issues of character and integrity. Front-page photographs. Dead human beings in awkward poses. By late August the whole enterprise had come unraveled, empty wallets and hedged bets and thinning crowds, old friends with slippery new excuses, and on the first Tuesday after the second Monday in September he was defeated by a margin of something more than 105,000 votes.
    John Wade saw it for what it was.
    Nothing more to hope for.
    Too ambitious, maybe. Climbing too high or too fast. But it was something he'd worked for. He'd been a believer. Discipline and tenacity. He had believed in those virtues, and in
the fundamental justice of things, an everyday sort of fairness; that if you worked like a son of a bitch, if you stuck it out and didn't quit, then sooner or later you'd get the payoff. Politics, it was all he'd ever wanted for himself. Three years as a legislative liaison, six years in the state senate, four tedious years as lieutenant governor. He'd played by the rules. He'd run a good solid campaign, working the caucuses, prying out the endorsements—all of it—eighteen-hour days, late nights, the whole insane swirl of motels and county fairs and ten-dollar-a-plate chicken dinners. He'd done it all.
    The teakettle made a brisk whistling sound, but John Wade could not bring himself to move.
    Ambush politics. Poison politics.
    It wasn't fair.
    That was the final truth: just so unfair. Wade was not a religious man, but he now found himself talking to God, explaining how much he hated him. The election was only part of it. There were also those mirrors in his head. An electric buzz, the chemistry inside him, the hum of lake and woods. He felt the pinch of depravity.
    When the water was at full boil, John Wade pushed himself up and went to the stove.
    He used a towel to pick up the