Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

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?

Of their years of estrangement, Cappy and Luther said nothing. They sat at opposite ends of a ratty sofa in front of the river stone hearth in Luther’s hand-built cabin, one of them calling out a name from their Nebraska childhood and the other identifying. Luther told his niece and nephew fantastic tales about young Cappy: how he’d gotten the gash through the bridge of his nose by dropping a granite boulder that he was lifting over his head on a dare. How he was married to a girl before Joan. How he did time over a misunderstanding involving a two-ton Chevy grain truck and thirty-eight bales of hay. With every fable, their father grew stranger. Strangest of all was how Cappy Schluter sat still and abided the remembrances, in awe of this sallow, shaky old man. The children had never seen their father so cowed by anyone. Their mother, too, put up with comments from the recovered relative that she wouldn’t have suffered from Satan.

They left after two days. Luther gave each child five dollars in silver and a copy of The Outdoor Survival Field Manual to share. Karin made him promise to come out to Nebraska, pretending not to understand that the man would be dead within four months. As they left, Karin’s new uncle grasped Cappy with two talons. “She did what she did. I never meant her memory no disrespect.”

Cappy barely nodded. “I made things worse,” he said. The two men shook stiff hands, and took leave. Karin remembered nothing of the trip home.

Uncles from nowhere and siblings disappearing. On Dedham Glen’s fake duck pond, she felt Mark’s distress. She was causing it, by not being who she was. His amygdala , she remembered. His amygdala can’t talk with his cortex. “Do you remember Uncle Luther?” she asked. Tugging at him, maybe unfairly.

Mark hunched against the wind in the baseball jacket and blue knit stocking cap he’d taken to wearing to hide the scars under his returning hair. He walked as if performing acrobatics. “Don’t know about you, but I got no uncles.”

“Come on, Mark. You remember that trip. A third of the United States, to visit a guy they hadn’t even bothered to tell us about.” She grabbed his arm too hard. “You remember. Sitting in the backseat for hundreds of miles, not even allowed to pee, you and your friend Mr. Thurman, chatting away like the two of you…”

He pulled his arm free and froze. He narrowed his eyes and pressed his cap. “Man, do not mess with the insides of my head.”

She apologized. Mark, shaken, asked to go back in. She steered him toward the building. Mark zipped and unzipped his coat, thoughts racing. He seemed for a moment about to break free, to know her. At the door of the lobby, he murmured, “I wonder whatever happened to that guy.”

“He died. Right after we got back home. That was the point of the trip.”

Mark stumbled, his face twisted. “What the fuck?”

“Serious. They’d had some fight about their mother’s death. Cappy had cut the man off, for saying…But the minute he heard Luther was dying…”

Mark snorted and waved her off. “Not that guy. He was never anything to me. I mean Mr. Thurman.”

She stood gaping, appalled.

Mark just laughed, low and clicking. “I mean, imaginary friends: do they go bug another whacko kid when you’re done with them? And hey!” His face screwed up, mystified. “Whoever told you about that trip? They got it all wrong.”

Jack is that person’s father, but that person isn’t Jack’s son.Who is that person? The question’s obviously meaningless, to anybody who thinks twice. The questioner should be in rehab, not him. How in living hell should he know who that person is? Could be anyone. But they keep asking him such crap, even when he politely points out that it might all be just a wee bit screwy. Today the questioner is a woman fresh from the university in Lincoln, about Mark’s age. Not a dog, but with an awful growl, spewing out craziness like:

A girl goes into a store to apply for a job. She fills in the application form. The manager looks at her data and says: “Yesterday we got an application from someone with your same last name, same parents, and exact same birthday, down to the year.” “Yes,” the girl explains. “That was my sister.” “So you must be twins,” the manager concludes. “No,” the girl says. “We’re not.”

And Mark is supposed to figure out what the hell they are. So…what? One of them is adopted or something?

But no, the university chick tells him, with a mouth like two little bait worms doing it. Useful little mouth, probably, in a pinch. But a pain in the ass at the moment, with its trick questions. She tells him: two girls with the same last name, the same parents, the same date of birth. Yes, they’re sisters. But no, not twins.

Do they look alike, or anything?

Super Questioner says it’s not important.

It is important, Mark tells her. You’re telling me that if two girls who have to be twins say they aren’t twins and you can’t tell whether they’re lying or not by looking at them and seeing if they look identical, that’s not important ?

Let’s go on to the next question, Super Questioner says.

I’ve a better idea, Mark says. We go into that supply closet and get to know each other.

I don’t think so, the worms say. But they twitch a bit.

Why not? Might be nice. I’m a good guy.