In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien Page B

move, he shot it. There was no enemy to shoot, nothing he could see, so he shot without aim and without any desire except to make the terrible morning go away When it ended, he found himself in the slime at the bottom of an irrigation ditch.
    PFC Weatherby looked down on him.
    "Hey, Sorcerer," Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him.
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    John Wade was elected to the Minnesota State Senate on November 9, 1976. He and Kathy splurged on an expensive hotel suite in St. Paul, where they celebrated with a dozen or so friends. When the party ended, well after midnight, they ordered steaks and champagne from room service. "Mr. Senator Husband," Kathy kept saying, but John told her it wasn't necessary, she could call him Honorable Sir, and then he picked up a champagne bottle and used it as a microphone, peeling off his pants gliding across the room and singing
Regrets I've had a few
and Kathy squealed and flopped back on the bed and grabbed her ankles and rolled around and laughed and yelled, "Honorable Senator Sir!" so John stripped off his shirt and made oily Sinatra moves and Sang
The record shows I took the blows
and Kathy's green eyes were and happy and full of the light that was only Kathy's light and could be no one else's.
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    One evening Charlie Company wandered into a quiet fishing village along the South China Sea. They set up a perimeter on the white sand, went swimming, dug in deep for the night. Around dawn they were hit with mortar fire. The rounds splashed into the ocean behind them—a bad scare, nobody was hurt—but when it was over, Sorcerer led a patrol into the village. It took almost an hour to round everyone up, maybe a hundred women and kids and old men. There was
much chattering, much consternation as the villagers were ushered down to the beach for a magic show. With the South China Sea at his back, Sorcerer performed card tricks and rope tricks. He pulled a lighted cigar from his ear. He transformed a pear into an orange. He displayed an ordinary military radio and whispered a few words and made their village disappear. There was a trick to it, which involved artillery and white phosphorus, but the overall effect was spectacular.
    A fine, sunny morning. Everyone sat on the beach and oohed and ahhed at the vanishing village.
    "Fuckin' Houdini," one of the guys said.
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    As a boy John Wade spent hours practicing his moves in front of the old stand-up mirror down in the basement. He watched his mother's silk scarves change color, copper pennies becoming white mice. In the mirror, where miracles happened, John was no longer a lonely little kid. He had sovereignty over the world. Quick and graceful, his hands did things ordinary hands could not do—palm a cigarette lighter, cut a deck of cards with a turn of the thumb. Everything was possible, even happiness.
    In the mirror, where John Wade mostly lived, he could read his, father's mind. Simple affection, for instance. "Love you, cowboy," his father would think.
    Or his father would think, "Hey, report cards aren't everything."
    The mirror made this possible, and so John would sometimes carry it to school with him, or to baseball games, or to bed at night. Which was another trick: how he secretly kept the old stand-up mirror in his head. Pretending, of course—he understood that—but he felt calm and safe with the big
mirror behind his eyes, where he could slide away behind the glass, where he could turn bad things into good things and just be happy.
    The mirror made things better.
    The mirror made his father smile all the time. The mirror made the vodka bottles vanish from their hiding place in the garage, and it helped with the hard, angry silences at the dinner table. "How's school these days?" his father would ask, in the mirror, which would permit John to ramble on about some of his problems, little things, school stuff, and in the mirror his father would say, "No problem, that's life, that's par for the