“If she were running the place, she wouldn’t be caring for your brother.”
“True.” Fake sagacious monosyllable: copying Daniel. Her old chameleon complex. Be the one you’re with.
“Career advancement can be toxic,” Daniel said. “A person should do what they love, whatever the status.”
“Well, that’s Barbara, all right. She picks his dirty underwear off the floor like she’s doing ballet.” Daniel’s hand traced cautious circles on her arm. It dawned on her: he was jealous of this woman, of Karin’s description. Patience was his secret vanity, something he wanted to do better than anyone else. “She sits and listens to Mark while he launches these bizarre notions, like everything he’s saying is totally plausible. Like she completely respects him. Then she just explores things with him, without condescension, until he sees where he’s gone wrong.”
“Hmm. Was she ever in the Scouts?”
“But she seems somehow sad to me. Totally stoic, but sad. No wedding ring, or any tan lines from one. Who knows? It’s just so odd. She’s exactly who I’ve tried to be my whole life. Daniel? Do you believe there are purposes out there?”
He pretended confusion. The man lived like an anchorite and meditated four times a day. He’d sacrificed his life to protecting a river tens of thousands of years old. He worshipped nature. He’d put Karin herself on a pedestal since childhood. By any measure, he was faith incarnate. And still, the word purpose made him nervous.
She waffled. “It doesn’t have to be…Call it anything. Ever since the accident, I’ve thought: Maybe we’re all on invisible paths? Paths we’re supposed to follow, without knowing. Ones that really lead somewhere?”
He tensed on the bed. The rapids of his breath cascaded across her breasts. “I don’t know, K.S. Do you mean your brother’s accident was meant to lead you to this woman?”
“Not me. Him. You know what his life was like, before. Look at his friends, for God’s sake. Barbara Gillespie is the first nonloser he’s been taken with since…” She rolled to face him, draping her arm over his flank. “Since you, all right?”
He winced at the forlorn compliment. The bond of childhood, broken with puberty. The Danny Riegel whom Mark once loved was not this man lying across a foot-wide gap from her. “You think this might be his…path? This woman has arrived to save him from himself?”
She drew back her arm. “Don’t make it sound so crude.” At least he didn’t mock her, as the other man would have. But she heard herself, how desperate she was. She’d end up like her mother, using the Living Scriptures volume like a Magic 8 Ball.
“Does this woman need to be fate?” Daniel asked. “Couldn’t she just be something lucky in his life, for a change?”
“But he would never have met her without the accident.”
Daniel stood and walked to the window, stark naked, oblivious. Like a wild child. The chill of his apartment didn’t touch him. He tried on the idea. She loved that in him, his eternal willingness to try her on. “No one is on a separate path. Everything connects. His life, yours, hers, his friends’…mine. Other…”
Watching him stare out the window on all those tangled paths, she thought of the policemen’s three sets of linked tracks. Three that they saw and measured. How many drivers sped by that night, leaving no trace? She sat up in bed, covering her bareness with the blanket. “You’re the most mystical person I know. You’re always proclaiming some living essence we can’t even…” Robert Karsh had mocked him mercilessly. The Ent Man. The Druid. Green Giant Junior. Karin had joined in—any cruelty, to be affirmed.
Daniel spoke to something out the window. “One million species heading toward extinction. We can’t be too choosy about our private paths.”
The words reproached her. She felt the slap. “My brother was almost killed. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. Whether he’ll be able to work again, whether his brain, his personality…Don’t begrudge me for needing a little faith to survive this.”
In silhouette against the window, he grabbed the crown of his head. “Begrudge? My God, no!” He came back to the bed. “Never.” He stroked her hair, contrite. “Of course there are forces bigger than us.”
She felt it in his stroking hand: forces so big that our paths mean nothing to them.
“I love you,” he said. Ten years after the fact, yet somehow premature. “You seem to me everything that’s best about humans. You’ve never felt more decent to me than you do right now.” Frail, he meant. Needy. Mistaken.
She let his judgment ride. She burrowed into his meager chest, trying to smother her own words even as they came out. “Tell me that something right could still come out of this.”
“It can,” he said. Any cruelty, to affirm. “If this woman can help Mark, then she’s our path.”
Daniel meditated: his version of a plan. She had to leave the apartment whenever he drew his legs up into the lotus. She wasn’t afraid of bothering him; he was oblivious, once tuned to his breathing. It just upset her to see him so tranquil and removed. She felt abandoned, as if all her problems with Mark were just impediments to Daniel’s transcendence. He never tranced out for more than twenty minutes at a time, at least by her watch. But to Karin, that always threatened to become forever.
“What do you want from it?” she asked, trying to sound neutral.
“Nothing! I want it to help me want nothing.”
She fisted her skirt hem. “What does it do for you?”
“It makes me more…an object to myself. Disidentified.” He rubbed his cheek and glanced upward, eleven o’clock. “Makes my insides more transparent. Reduces resistance. Frees up my beliefs, so that every new idea, every new change isn’t so much…like the death of me.”
“You want it to make you more fluid?”
His head bobbed, like she’d just met him halfway. She found the idea almost hideous. Mark had become fluid. She could not be any more fluid than Mark’s accident now forced her to be. What she wanted—what she needed from Daniel—was dry land.
The last crane disappeared, and Kearney returned to itself. The crane peepers—twice as many as had visited just five years before—vanished with the migrants. The whole town relaxed at not having to play itself for another ten months. Famous each spring, for something that at best resented you: it screwed up a place’s self-image.
Other birds came in the cranes’ wake. Wave after wave, birds by the millions passed through the tiny waist of a continent-sized hourglass. Birds Karin Schluter had seen since childhood but had never noticed: Daniel knew them all by name. He carried around alphabetized life lists of all 446 Nebraska species—Anas, Anthus, and Anser, Buteo, Branta, and Bucephala, Calidris, Catharus, Carduelis—covered in penciled checks and smudged, unreadable field notes.
Karin went birding with him, a way of staying sane. On afternoons when Mark raged against her and she needed to escape, she and her birder went northwest into the sandhills, northeast into the loess, or east and west along the twisting braids of river. She whipsawed between elation and guilt over abandoning her brother, even for an afternoon. She felt as she had at ten, returning home from a summer’s evening of hide-and-seek to realize, only when her mother shrieked at her, that she’d left her little brother curled up in a concrete culvert, waiting to be found.
Only outside, in the warming air, did Karin sense how close she’d come to collapse. Another week of caring for Mark and she’d have begun believing his theories about her. She and Daniel picnicked near the sandpit wetlands just southwest of town. She’d just bitten down on a slice of cucumber when her whole body began trembling so hard she couldn’t swallow. She bent down and covered her quaking face. “Oh my God. What would I have done, back here, with what’s happened to him, without you?”
He lifted her shoulders. “I’ve done nothing. I wish there was something I could do.” He offered her his handkerchief, the last man in North America to blow his nose into cloth. She used it, making horrible noises and not caring.
“
I can’t get away from here. I’ve tried, so many times. Chicago. L.A. Even Boulder. Every time I make a start, try to pass myself off as normal, this place drags me back. My whole life, I’ve dreamed of self-sufficiency, far away. Look how far I’ve gotten! South Sioux.”
“Everyone comes home, sometime.”
She coughed a phlegmy laugh. “Never really left! Stuck in a stupid loop.” She swept her hand in the air. “Worse than the damn birds.”
He flinched, but forgave her.
After lunch, they made fresh sightings: redstarts, pipits, a solitary golden-crowned kinglet, even a vagrant male Lewis’s woodpecker passing through. Grassland gave few hiding places. Daniel taught her how to see without being seen. “The trick is to make yourself small. Shrink your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight. Widen your periphery; watch only motion.” He made her sit still for fifteen minutes, then forty, then an hour, just watching, until her backbone threatened to split open and eject some other creature from her cracked shell. But stillness was salutary, like most pain. Her concentration was shot. She needed slowing, focusing. She needed to sit silent with someone from choice, not from injury. Her brother still refused to recognize her; his persistence had grown truly spooky. She could not imagine the bizarre, unstable symptom lasting as long as it had. Motionless for an hour, on a rise of returning bluestem, inside a bubble of wild silence, she felt her helplessness. As she shrunk and the sea of grass expanded, she saw the scale of life—millions of tangled tests, more answers than there were questions, and a nature so swarmingly wasteful that no single experiment mattered. The prairie would try out every story. One hundred thousand pairs of breeding swifts pumped eggs into everything from rotting telephone poles to smoking chimneys. A plague of starlings wheeled overhead, descended, Daniel said, from a handful of birds released into Central Park a century ago by a drug maker who wanted America to have all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. Nature could sell at a loss; it made up in volume. Guess relentlessly, and it didn’t matter if almost every guess was wrong.
Daniel was just as profligate. The man who denied himself even hot showers lavished her with attentions all afternoon. He interpreted markings and tracks for her. He found her a wasp’s nest, an owl pellet, and a tiny bleached warbler skull beyond the skill of any jeweler. “Do you know that Whitman line?” he asked her. “‘After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains.’”
He meant to give comfort. But it sounded to her relentless, indiscriminate, indifferent: much like what her brother had become.
When they got home from the day’s exploration, Daniel handed her a shirt box that had sat in the back of his twenty-year-old Duster for the last month. She’d guessed it was for her, waiting for him to find the nerve to give it. She opened the flimsy carton, already preparing some show of gratitude for whatever natural-history exhibit he’d found her. The box flapped open, and she was the specimen inside. Every trinket she’d ever given him. They sat in the lot behind his apartment as she sifted through the embalmed past. Notes in her elvish scrawl, written in colors of pen she never could have owned, punch lines of running jokes that now meant nothing to her, even half-finished attempts at poems. Pairs of ticket stubs to films she couldn’t have seen with him. Sketches from back when she could draw. A postcard from her mishap in Boulder: “I knew I should have sold the stock options last month.” A plastic action figure of Mary Jane, Spiderman’s object of desire. Karsh had given it to her, claiming she was the spitting image. Karin had passed it on to Daniel—stupid tease—instead of melting the thing down to dioxins as she should have.
By all evidence, she’d never given him anything of value. But he’d kept it all. He even had her mother’s obituary from The Hub, clipped long after he should have consigned the whole box to an incinerator. His zeal was as spooky as Mark’s distance. She looked at this time capsule of scraps, horrified. She wasn’t worth preservation.
Daniel watched her, stiller than when birding. “I just thought, if you were feeling a little rootless, K.S., that you might like…” He held out his hand, ten years snug in his palm. “I hope this doesn’t seem obsessive.”
She clutched the box, unnerved by his pointless conservation, but unable to scold him. His entire worldly possessions fit into two suitcases, and he’d kept this. She could start to give him real things, gifts she picked out just for him, things it wouldn’t be pathetic to preserve. He could use a light spring coat, for starters.
“Can I just…Could I hang on to this for a little? I need to…” She pressed the box, then her forehead. “It’s all still yours. I’m just…”
He seemed pleased, but she was too shaken to be sure. “Keep them,” he said. “Keep them as long as you like. Show Mark, if you feel like it.”
Never, she thought. Never. Not the sister she wanted him to recognize.
Despite Mark’s refusal to acknowledge her, he rebuked her when she skipped an afternoon. “Where were you? Had to meet your handlers or something? My sister would never have cut out like that, without saying. My sister is very loyal. You should have learned that when you trained to replace her.”
The words filled her with hope, even as they demoralized her.
“Tell me something. What the hell am I still doing in rehab?”
“You were really hurting, Mark. They just want to make sure you’re one hundred percent before they send you back home.”
“I am a hundred percent. One hundred and ten. Fifteen. Don’t you think I’m the best judge of that? Why would they believe their tests before they believe me?”
“They’re just being careful.”
“My sister wouldn’t have left me in here to rot.”
She was beginning to wonder. Even though any small change in routine still rattled him, Mark grew steadily more like himself. He spoke clearer, confusing fewer words. He scored higher on the cognition tests. He could answer more questions about his past, from before the accident. As he grew more reasonable, she couldn’t help trying to prove herself. She dropped casual details, things only a Schluter could know. She would wear him down with common sense, inescapable logic. One gray April afternoon, taking him for a spin around Dedham Glen’s artificial duck pond in the drizzle, she mentioned their father’s stint as a rainmaker, flying his converted crop duster.
Mark shook his head. “Now, where in the world did you learn that? Bonnie tell you? Rupp? They think it’s weird, too, how much like Karin you are.” His face grew overcast. She saw him think: She should be here by now. They won’t tell her where I am. But he was too suspicious to speak the thought out loud.
What did it mean to be related, if he refused relations? You couldn’t call yourself someone’s wife unless they agreed; years with Karsh had taught her that. You weren’t someone’s friend just by decree, or she’d be surrounded by support. Sister was no different, except technically. If he never again recognized her as his flesh and blood, what difference would all her objections make?
Their father had a brother once. Luther Schluter. They learned about him overnight, when Karin was just thirteen and Mark almost nine. Cappy Schluter suddenly insisted upon taking them to a mountainside in Idaho, even though it meant missing a week of school. We’re going to visit your uncle. As if they should have suspected such a person’s existence all along.
Cappy Schluter dragged his children across Wyoming in a burgundy and mint Rambler station wagon while Joan rode shotgun. Neither child could read in a moving car without vomiting, and Cappy forbade the radio because of all the subliminal messages that manipulated the unconscious listener. So they had only their father’s stories of the young Schluter brothers to see them across 890 miles of the earth’s most ruthless scenery. He got them from Ogallala to Broadwater on tales of his family’s Sandhills days, first as Kincaid Act homesteaders, and then, when the government pulled the land out from underneath them, as ranchers. From Broadw
ater to the Wyoming border, he entertained them with accounts of his older brother’s hunting skills: four dozen rabbits nailed to the barn’s southern wall, seeing the family through the winter of ’38.
To get his children through Wyoming, Cappy Schluter resorted to grim detail about every opponent Luther Schluter had bested on his way to third place in the Nebraska state wrestling championship. “Your uncle is a powerful man,” he repeated, three times over a two-mile stretch. “A powerful man who could take anything. Saw three men die before he was old enough to vote. The first was a grade school friend who drowned in grain while the two boys were playing in a silo. The second was an old ranch hand who popped an aneurysm while arm-wrestling and expired in the crook of Luther’s arm. The third was his own father, when the two of them went out to rescue fourteen head of cattle stranded in a snowstorm.”
“Uncle Luther’s father?” Mark asked, from the backseat. Karin shushed him, but Cappy just sat ramrod straight, his Korean War–vet posture, hearing nothing.
“Three men before voting age, and one woman, not long after.”
The kids sat in the backseat, traumatized. For most of the trip, Mark withdrew into a cocoon against his door handle and muttered to his secret friend, Mr. Thurman. The hundreds of miles of confidential murmuring between boy and phantasm infuriated Karin; she couldn’t visualize her own best flesh-and-blood girlfriend, ten hours away, let alone an imaginary companion. By Casper, she was riding Mark. Their mother took to whacking them from the front seat, first with the rolled up Rand McNally and then with her hardback copy of Come Judgement. Cappy just gripped the wheel and drove, that grotesque Adam’s apple jutting from his throat making him look like a stalking heron.
At last they arrived at their uncle’s, a man who, until three weeks ago, hadn’t even figured in a family photograph. Whatever power the man had possessed was long gone. This uncle could not have withstood the breeze from a flapping barn door. Luther Schluter, a furnace repairman holed up on a solitary cliff near Idaho Falls, began almost immediately to spout even more bountiful theories than their father. Washington and Moscow had concocted the Cold War together to keep their populations in line. The world was awash in oil that multinationals kept a spigot on for their own profits. The AMA knew that television caused brain cancer, but kept quiet about it for the kickbacks. How was the drive? Car give any trouble?
The Echo Maker Page 9