In the Lake of the Woods: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

“One evening,” while John is still in the midst of his political career, John and Kathy are at a political party. At this point, they have been married for almost seven years, and are still very much in love. John gets drunk, drives home with Kathy, and makes love to her. Afterwards, they return to the party, where John makes a speech and does magic tricks.

John went to Vietnam because of love, not because he wanted to be a good citizen or a hero. He imagines his father praising him for fighting. He thinks to himself that he sometimes does bad things to gain other people’s love, and that he hates himself for needing to be loved.

In college, John and Kathy often go to a bar called The Bottle Top. One night, John dares Kathy to steal a bottle of Scotch from the bar. Kathy talks the bartender into going into a back room, then takes a long time choosing which bottle to steal, and then takes it back to where they’re sitting. This makes John love Kathy, and he says that they should get married. He looks into her eyes, and thinks that they have a light that could only belong to her.

Before John and Kathy can marry, John fights in Vietnam. He sends Kathy letters in which he talks about love, but not the deaths he’s seen. He compares their love to a pair of snakes he saw in Vietnam. Each was eating each other’s tail, until their heads almost touch and a soldier ended their lives by chopping them with a machete. He also mentions that the other soldiers call him Sorcerer, a nickname he enjoys.

As a child of nine or ten, John would lie in bed, surrounded by catalogs of magic tricks, making note of all the prices. The next day, he would travel alone by bus to a magic shop. There, he would try to work up the nerve to go inside. When he walked inside, a women with red hair would call, “You!”, and he would rush back outside and return home. At home, John would talk to his father. His father would ask him to watch a baseball game tomorrow, and John would say, “maybe.” In response, his father would say, “Maybe’s good enough for me.”

One day in Vietnam, John senses, “Something was wrong.” He’s surrounded by gunfire and dead women. He sees dead animals and burning villages, and thinks that he doesn’t know where to shoot. He shoots at smoke and trees, and his only desire is to make what he sees go away. PFC Weatherby greets him as Sorcerer, and starts to smile. In response, Sorcerer shoots him.

Back in Minnesota, John is elected to the State Senate. He celebrates by hosting a small party, and getting a hotel suite with Kathy. In the suite, he and Kathy sing “My Way” by Frank Sinatra, and make love.

The narrator returns to describing John’s experiences in Vietnam. One evening, Charlie Company approaches a small village. The company is attacked by mortar fire, but no one is hurt. Afterwards, Sorcerer helps round up every villager, takes them back to the company, and performs a magic show. He performs card tricks, and turns a pear into an orange. He also makes the village disappear—a trick which, the narrator notes, involves artillery and white phosphorus. Everyone who watches the show finds the vanishing village “trick” spectacular.

As a child, John practices magic tricks in front of the mirror. He thinks that he can use magic to read his father’s mind. While looking in the mirror, he imagines his father thinking that he loves John. In general, John thinks, the mirror makes everything better. In the mirror, John’s father always smiles, and John doesn’t have to think about empty vodka bottles. John’s father drinks in the garage, always promising John that he’ll smash his bottles after he has one more drink.

John’s father is a popular, charming man. The other boys in the neighborhood love to play football with him and listen to his stories and jokes. In school, John’s classmate, Tommy Winn makes a speech about how much he likes John’s father, and gives John a sad look that seems to say, “I wish he was my father.” At the time, John thinks that Tommy doesn’t know about his father’s drunkenness, or about how his father made fun of John when he got fat in the fourth grade, calling him “Jiggling John.” John’s mother insisted that John was only getting a little husky, but his father insisted that this wasn’t true, and criticized John for doing magic like a “pansy,” instead of playing sports.

As an adult, before he’s found political success, John goes on walks with Kathy and discusses buying a house. Kathy wants to buy a blue Victorian-style house she’s seen, but understands that she and John don’t have the money for it. She dares John, jokingly, to rob a bank.

Sorcerer, the narrator says, thought he would get away with murder. Shooting PFC Weatherby was an accident, just a reflex, Sorcerer thinks. He tricks himself into believing that he hadn’t killed Weatherby, and tells himself that he loved Weatherby the way he would love an animal. He and the other soldiers blame the Vietcong for Weatherby’s death.

In 1982, John Wade is elected lieutenant governor of Minnesota. He is 37 at the time. At the time, he and Kathy have begun arguing, but he’s proud to stand next to Kathy and take the oath of office. He plans to buy Kathy a blue Victorian house. After being inaugurated, he and Kathy dance with each other. John thinks that Kathy’s eyes are “only her eyes.”

At the age of eleven, John and his father drive to Karra’s Studio of Magic to buy John’s Christmas present. John notes that the store hasn’t changed since he was younger, and sheepishly walks inside. The red-haired woman still yells, “You!” at him. She and John’s father laugh with each other and talk like old friends.

At the magic shop, John chooses a magic trick called the “Guillotine of Death,” which is heavy and almost two feet high. The red-haired woman says that the Guillotine is her favorite trick. She demonstrates that there is a sharp blade on the Guillotine, and tells John’s father to put his arm under it. John’s father is reluctant to do so, but John urges him to, saying that he knows how to do the trick. The red-haired lady tells John, “Let him have it.”

As an adult, John thinks that he wants to crawl inside Kathy’s belly. He’s afraid of losing her, and spies on her, following her to the drug store and the post office. As he watches her run errands, he thinks that he loves her eyes so much that he wants to suck them from their sockets. Later, Kathy tells John that she feels as if he’s worming inside her, a suggestion that John doesn’t deny. He tells Kathy that they must be like snakes gobbling each other up.

In Vietnam, the narrator says, Sorcerer is in his element. Vietnam is a place with tunnels, trap doors, monsters, and magic. There is no way of telling where the Vietcong are, or what the villagers are thinking. Secrecy, Sorcerer thinks, is key in Vietnam. Sorcerer’s own secrets include shooting PFC Weatherby, and the fact that he loves Vietnam. The biggest secret of all is about a place called Thuan Yen.

John knows that he is sick. He tries to tell Kathy about his sickness. As they prepare dinner, he says that he’s afraid to look at himself in the mirror. Without ceasing to chop onions, Kathy tells him that she loves to look at him. John insists that he has to tell Kathy something important, but Kathy says, “It doesn’t matter.” She says, “We’ll be fine.” As John and Kathy look at each other, the narrator says, anything could have happened.

John doesn’t tell anyone about killing PFC Weatherby. However, he sometimes thinks he sees PFC Weatherby waving and smiling at him.

When John’s father died, John was a teenager. The day he was buried, John performed magic in front of the mirror. He tells his father that he wasn’t fat, but normal.

After John returns from Vietnam, Kathy doesn’t insist that John talk to a psychiatrist. At times, though, John yells out in his sleep, and Kathy says that he’s speaking in a voice she’s never heard. Later in the night, Sorcerer would stare at Kathy, and call her, “My Kath.” As he stares at her, Sorcerer pictures Weatherby, and his father’s coffin. He imagines two snakes eating each other, and dreams of the possibility that they eat all of each other, so that nothing—including his memories of Vietnam—will be left behind.