“Next one’s on you,” she said. “Come on, let’s go home.”
By the time they left Grand Island, night was falling. Ten miles out of town, Mark took off his seat belt. It shouldn’t have unnerved her. Just the opposite: the old Mark never wore his belt. Here he was, coming back to normal, trusting her again. But she panicked. “Mark,” she shouted. “Buckle up.” She reached to help, and he slapped her hand. Shaking, Karin pulled over onto Highway 30’s dark shoulder. She refused to continue until he fastened. He seemed perfectly happy to sit there in the dark, enjoying their Mexican standoff.
At last he said, “I’ll put the belt on. But you have to take me.”
“Where?” she said, knowing.
“I want to see where it happened.”
“Mark. You don’t, really.”
He stared straight ahead, into his own universe. He spun his hand around his head, the sign for gone. “I might as well never have been there.”
“We can’t. Not tonight. It’ll be pitch-black. You won’t be able to see a thing.”
“I can’t even see that much, now.”
“Let me take you home. I promise you, we’ll go first thing in the morning.”
He turned on her. “That would be convenient, wouldn’t it? Take me back ‘home,’ call your people, and then go and smooth out everything, while I’m sleeping. And I wouldn’t ever know the difference.”
Solid shapes, artfully altered in the night, data manipulated while their backs were turned. Everything certain, carried away downstream.
“Tampering with the scene of the crime,” he said. He flipped the glove compartment of her Corolla up and down.
“Crime? What do you mean? What crime?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Going through the ditch and removing the evidence. Laying down false tracks.”
“Mark, anybody who wanted to tamper with the evidence has had almost half a year. There’s no evidence left. Why would they wait until now?”
“Because I didn’t want a look, until now.”
His jiggling accelerated, and she reached out and stopped his hand. “There’s nothing left to see. It’s all been washed away or grown over.”
He sat up, excited. “You agree with me, then? Somebody’s altering every clue I might have to crack this thing?”
This thing. His life. “Nature, Mark.” Overgrowing all that ever happened. “Put your seat belt back on. Let’s go.”
He did as instructed, but on the condition that she stay the night in the Homestar where he could keep an eye on her. “I have this hide-a-backache thing in my front room you can sleep on.” They rode back to Farview in silence. Mark wouldn’t let her play the radio, not even KQKY, which he claimed no longer played the kind of music it used to. At his house, Mark asked for her car keys, to put under his pillow. “I’ve been sleeping kind of hard. I probably wouldn’t hear you if you snuck off during the night.”
While her brother showered, Karin called Daniel. She tore him out of deep meditation. She told him about the evening and said she was staying at Mark’s. “See you tomorrow?” she said, wanting off the phone. For just an instant, he failed to respond. He didn’t believe her. She closed her eyes and teetered. History under the floorboards, waiting to flame up.
Daniel grew solicitous. “Is everything all right? Would you like me to come over?”
“Who’s that?” Mark demanded, materializing in the living room doorway, dangling a towel in front of him and dripping on the gold pile carpeting. “I told you not to contact anyone.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Karin said into her cell, then powered off.
“Who was that? Damn it. I can’t turn my back on you for a second.”
“That was Daniel Riegel.” Mark cocked a forearm in front of him, warding off the name. “We’ve been seeing each other for, for a little while. I guess I’m living with him, you could say. It’s good with him, Mark. After all the crap we dumped on each other. Finally good between us.” She didn’t add: because of you.
“Danny Riegel? Mother Naked boy?” He sat, still damp, on the arm of his Naugahyde recliner, abstractedly toweling his chest. A little late, Karin looked away. “So you two really are an item?”
“He came to see you in the hospital.” Stupid, forced, irrelevant.
“He did? Danny Riegel. Well, he can’t hurt me. He wouldn’t hurt an amoeba. He can’t be in on any big doings. Not Danny Riegel. But, shit. How did you know to get involved with him? That’s really eerie. My sister and him were, like, some tape loop. They must have programmed you in advance, put it in your DNA, or something.”
She turned back to him, past fatigue, slipping back into what she would have to do every day for the rest of her life, if she stayed on nursing him. “Mark, go for the easy solution, for once. The obvious.”
“Ha! In this life? You’ve lost it.”
He wrapped the towel around his waist and helped her open the sofa bed. Later, after midnight, she lay on that mat of shifting ball bearings and razor springs, listening in the dark for movement. Everything was alive: air conditioning cutting on and shuddering off, lightweight creatures scuffling in the walls, warm-blooded branches tapping the window, something the size of a subcompact reconnoitering the azaleas, insects excavating her ear, their beating wings like dentist’s drills drawing near her eardrum. And every creak sounded like her brother, whoever he was, slipping into the living room.
After a habitual, puffed-sugar breakfast, Karin brought him out to North Line Road. The early-morning air was already asbestos, ready to break one hundred humid degrees before noon. Yet Mark wore his long black jeans. He couldn’t get used to the scars on his legs and didn’t want anyone thinking that was how he looked. The stretch of shimmering road seemed almost featureless: sedge-lined pasture and grassy fields, the rare road sign and scrub tree, and crossroads named only with numbers. But Karin pulled over within thirty feet of the accident.
“This is it? You sure this is where I rolled it?”
Wordless, she left the car. He followed. They combed the deserted road in opposite directions. They might have been a vacationing couple, stopping to search for a map that had blown out of their car window. The scene offered even less than when she’d come with Daniel, nothing except the brute business of nature, the base of the whole pyramid, too small and sprawling to bother with: a green, ground-hugging cover running all the way to the horizon, with a trickle of melting asphalt burned through it.
Mark drifted across the road, as baffled as the herd of Simmental on the hillock three hundred yards to his right. Only, the drifting cows didn’t shake their heads.
“Which way was I going?” She pointed west, back toward town. Whatever evidence he sought had long ago been whisked away by forces intent on erasing his life. “See? Nothing here. Told you. It’s all been moved out.” He squatted and brushed the asphalt with one palm. At length, he dropped to the ground and sat on the drooping road edge, his arms around his knees. She came over to him, to beg him to move off onto the shoulder. Instead, she dropped down beside him, both of them targets for any passing vehicle faster than a combine. He didn’t look up. He held his arms in the air, lifting the emptiness. “We were at the Bullet. I remember that.”
“Who?” she whispered, trying to sound as blank as he.
“Me, Tommy, Duane. Couple guys from the plant. Music, the band, I think. It was cold. I was arm-wrestling somebody. And that’s it. Total blank. I don’t even remember getting in the truck. Nothing, until I’m sitting up in a hospital bed drooling on myself. How long was that? Weeks? Months? Like I’m locked away somewhere and somebody else is living my life.” The monotone came out of him, in poor computer speech.
She rested her arm on his shoulder and he didn’t pull away. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just try to…”
He tapped her arm and pointed. An ancient Pontiac wagon lumbered in from the east. They rose to their feet and moved a yard off the road. The car slowed to a stop in front of the
m, its windows open. The seats were piled high with gear—boxes full of clothing, stacks of dishes, books, tools, even a corsage of plastic flowers. In the back, an air mattress lay covered with a ratty cotton blanket. A thick-featured, crimson-faced man of seventy, unmistakably Winnebago, leaned across the front seat. “Car trouble?”
“Kind of,” Mark said.
“You need a lift?”
“I need something.”
The Winnebago man opened his passenger door. Karin pushed forward. “We’re okay. We’re good.” The man looked through them both and stared a long time before closing the door and driving away, slower than a riding mower.
“That reminds me,” Mark said, no faster than the vehicle.
She waited, but patience produced nothing. “Of what?”
“It just reminds me.” He strayed from the roadside to the center line. She tagged behind. He held out his hands, re-creating the imagined path. “I know I rolled the truck. I know they operated on me.”
“They didn’t really operate on you, Mark.”
“I had a damn metal spigot coming out of my skull.”
“That wasn’t exactly brain surgery.”
He flashed a palm to silence her. “I’ll tell you what else. That car reminded me. There was someone else out here. I wasn’t alone.”
Insects burrowed in her skin. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? In the damn truck. I wasn’t the only one in there.”
“I think you were, Mark. You know, if you can’t remember being in the truck yourself…”
“Well, you were not fucking there, either! I’m telling you what I know. Somebody was sitting there talking to me. I remember talking. I distinctly remember another voice. Maybe I picked up a hitchhiker somewhere.”
“There was no one else anywhere near your truck.”
“Then whoever it was just picked up their death bed and walked away!”
“If the investigators found any prints, they would have—”
“Judas Christ! Do you want to know what I remember or not? I’m telling you what this thing’s about. People appearing and disappearing, like that!” He snapped his finger, a vicious crack. “First they’re right there, then they’re not. In the truck, out on the road, gone. Maybe I dropped them off somewhere. Anybody can disappear on you, at any point. One day, they’re your blood relations, the next day, they’re plants.” He scrambled into his pocket and pulled out the crushed scrap of paper, his sole anchor. The gift that kept on taking. His eyes welled up, blinding him. “First they’re angels, then they’re not even animals. Guardians that won’t even admit they exist.” He threw the scrap of paper on the pavement. The crosswind raked it over the road into the ditch, where it snagged on a stand of switchgrass.
Karin cried out and tore after it as if chasing a straying baby. She ran headlong into the ditch, scraping her bare legs on a patch of prickleweed. She leaned down and snatched the scrap, sniffling. She turned to face him, triumphant. Mark stood frozen in the road, looking east. She called him, but he didn’t hear. He didn’t break his gaze, even as she came back to him.
“Something was right there.” He swung around in a half-circle. “I was coming this way, just over the rise.” He turned back east again, nodding. “Something in the road. Just here.”
Her spine ignited. “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s right. Another car? Swerving over the center line. Coming at you, in your lane.”
He shook his head. “No. Not that. Like a column of white.”
“Yes. Headlights—”
“No car, damn it! A ghost, or something. Just floating up, things flying. Then gone.” His neck caved forward and his eyes widened, pulling himself from the wreck.
She guided him back to the car and got him into the passenger side. He ran the same continuous calculation, all the way back to Farview. A mile before town, he demanded the note. She almost had to stand up behind the wheel to extract it from her too-tight shorts. He read it again, nodding.
“I’m a killer,” he said, as she pulled into the Homestar’s empty driveway. “Some kind of guiding spirit in the road, and I tried to kill it.”
So the note writer’s not a churchgoer. Fine. He’s proved that much, at least. Visited all the non-illegal churches, shown the note to every believer in town, and nobody’s claimed it. Time to head out among the heathens. People don’t generally know this about Nebraska, but it’s filled with heathens. He takes Bonnie-baby with him. Old missionary trick: send out the youngest, sexiest girl you’ve got. The core cults are all over this. People are nicer to foxes. Send a fox to somebody’s front door, and a woman will assume that you can’t possibly be a serial killer, while a man will stand there melting, emptying his pockets for the charity of your choice. Even read the Book of Mormon, if she smiles at him right.
The two of them set out together, the fox and the grapes. Like they’re married or husband and wife or something, which he personally would have no problem with, if it meant getting your claws painted and your ashes hauled on a regular basis. Sometimes they even take the dog—one big happy family. Bonnie’s not crazy about the idea at first, but she gets into it. They go on a door-to-door campaign, note in hand. House-to-house fighting, to flush out the messenger hiding behind the message.
A lot of people are familiar with Mark Schluter, or say they are. He recognizes some of them, but you never can tell, with people. Maybe he went to school with them, or worked with them out at IBP or at his prior not-so-gainful employment. Small-town life: worse than having your picture up at the post office. A lot of people say they know him, although they don’t really mean know. They just mean: Oh, the dumbass we read about in the Hub who flipped his truck and had to work his way back from a vegetative condition. It’s pretty easy to read their real thoughts, just by how nice they are to him when he and Bonnie ring the bell. At least, when they sit him and Bonnie down and serve them the fizzy drinks, he can check their handwriting. Maybe they’ve left some letters out to be mailed. Maybe a shopping list stuck on the refrigerator with the little Star Wars magnet. Or they’ll make some pathetic suggestion—some number to call or book to read—and he can go, Hey, great idea. Can you write that down?
But nobody writes like the note. That handwriting died out a hundred years ago, in the Old Country. Everyone he shows it to gets all quiet, like they know that those twisting letters could only have come from beyond the grave.
The note is disintegrating, turning back to dust. He gets Duane-o to laminate it, up at the plant. Make it perpetual, for however long he needs to haul it around. But in early August, something strange starts happening. They’ve been knocking on doors for weeks. No one in Farview will admit to anything. Farview’s pretty much eliminated, checked off his list. He wants to tackle Kearney. They could stand out at the Speedway station pumps, or alongside the Sino-Mart greeter. At worst, they get thrown out of the store. But Bonnie gets weird about the whole thing. Then he picks up on it.
Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary? he asks her.
Ordinary how, Marker?
She’s in a white sleeveless blouse and cut-off jeans, like way cut off, and that straight black hair of hers and that navel that just won’t quit. She really is maximally adorable, and it’s kind of a mystery that Mark was never onto that fact in any systematic way before this whole accident.
Unordinary. Extraordinary. Notice any peculiar…well, let’s just say, patterns?
She shakes her pretty head. He wants to trust her. She’s a little too close to the Pseudo-Sister for comfort’s sake, but that woman has everyone fooled, even Barbara.
You’re saying that nobody we’ve talked to…seems at all odd to you?
The little laugh, like a music box. Odd, how?
He has to make it sound like something that won’t scare her. Nobody’s going to believe something that endangers their whole world-view. Okay, he tells her. A lot of those people who’ve been answering the doors when we knock? I’m not saying all of them.
I’m just saying…some, some of them are like the same person.
The same…? The same person as what?
What do you mean, same as what? Same as each other.
You’re saying…you’re saying they’re…the same as themselves?
Well, it’s not rocket science; not even brain surgery. Kind of a simple concept, actually: somebody’s been following them around. They shouldn’t have been going up and down the streets so obviously. They should have mixed things up, randomized. They’ve been suckers, predictable. Walked right into this.
Listen. I know this is going to sound a little out there. But there’s…one guy who keeps coming back.
Coming back? Back where?
You know what I’m saying. Following us. One house to the other. And I think I know who this person is.
This prompts her to say a number of fairly dopey things. Understandable: she’s freaked. Him, too, but he’s had a little more time to think about it. Bonnie is still back in beginner’s denial: How can anybody be following us? How could they get into the next house, put on a disguise, etcetera, all before we get there?
Pretty lame objections, that dissolve the minute you examine them. But Bonnie’s upset; she doesn’t want to make the rounds anymore. He should have guessed this would happen. She probably thinks her life is in danger. He tries to explain: the disguise artist is interested in one person and one person only: Mark Schluter. But Mark can’t convince her to stay with the search. Maybe that’s best, after all. The hunt has produced nothing, and who can say when this little cat-and-mouse game might turn violent? After all, there’s been violence already. Last February 20, to be precise.
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