Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Quit with the licking. Get out of my face, will you? Can somebody please leash this thing?

Pretend sister hangs on the driver’s door, her face one of those birthday streamers gone soggy. You’d think he punched the woman in the gut or something. She starts to rag him again. Mark! Look at her! What other animal on earth could love you like that?

The dog starts this confused little squealing. Barbara moves toward the fake Karin, calling her sweetie, saying: It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. You did a good thing. We can try again later.

What later? Mark groans. Try what? What the hell is this about? This dog is mad. Rabies or something. Somebody put this beast down, before it bites me.

Mark! Look at her! It’s Blackie.

The agent’s dog starts yapping in bafflement. It’s got that much right. Blackie? You gotta be shitting me. Down!

Maybe he makes a motion, like he’s gonna strike the dog, because Barbara steps in between Mark and the howling thing. She gathers up the dog and waves at the imitation Karin like it’s time to get back in the car.

Mark goes a little wild. You think I’m nuts! You think I’m blind. It’s going to take a lot more than this to fool me.

Barbara bundles the howling animal back into the car and Karin starts the ridiculous four-cylinder engine. The miserable cur spins in circles on the passenger seat, whining and staring at Kopy Karin. Mark curses everything that moves. Don’t bug me anymore. Don’t ever let that thing back in my sight.

Later, when he’s alone again, he feels a little bad about it all. It’s still eating at him the next day, after he sleeps on it. When Barbara comes to check on him, he tells her. I shouldn’t have yelled at that dog. It wasn’t the dog’s fault. Certain human beings were just using it.

Karin dragged Daniel out to North Line Road.She’d shunned the scene for two months, as if it might harm her. But she needed to understand what had happened that night. When she at last summoned the courage to see the site, she brought protection.

Daniel pulled off the road where Mark must have spun out. The intervening weeks had erased most of the evidence the police had mentioned. The two of them picked through the shallow shoulder ditch on the south side of the road, looking for all the world as if they were tracking an animal. Bring your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight. They crawled over the new spring sedge and grasses, the pokeweed, thistle, and vetch. Nature’s job was to grow over, turn the past into now.

Daniel found a patch of ground dusted with glass, invisible to anyone but a naturalist. Karin’s eyes adjusted. She saw where the truck must have lain for hours, upside down. They climbed to the road, crossed over to the north side, and drifted back east, toward where Mark had lost control. The road was empty, the middle of the afternoon in the thaw of the year. The surface was layered in smears. She couldn’t tell the age of a given track, or what had made it. She walked two hundred yards in each direction, with Daniel in her wake. The forensics investigators must have combed this stretch, re-creating that night from a few ambiguous measurements.

Daniel saw it first — a faint pair of westbound burn marks, all but erased by the weather, that swerved into the eastbound lane. Karin’s eyes picked it out; the violent skid feinted to the right before veering, as close to a left turn as a light truck at high speed could make. She worked her way along the lip of the skid, head down, searching for something. Against the long, low, bathwater-gray horizon, with her fall of carrot hair hanging in the windless air, she might have been some Bohemian immigrant farm girl gleaning the fields for grain. She spun around like a struck animal, flinching as the accident unfolded in front of her. When Daniel reached her, she was still shuddering. She pointed down at a second set of tire skids at her feet.

The second skid broke one hundred feet in front of the first. Another vehicle coming from the west had careened into the oncoming lane, where it fishtailed before swinging back into its own. From the start of the second car’s jag, Karin looked east and downward into the ditch where her brother had landed, the hole down which her own solidity disappeared.

She read the snaking lines: the car coming from town, perhaps blinded by Mark’s headlights, must have lost control and swerved into Mark’s lane, just in front of him. Startled, Mark dipped right, then swung back hard to the left, the only slim chance of survival. The swing was too sharp, and his truck left the road.

She stood with her toe on the tire mark, shaking. A car approached; she and Daniel drifted to the southern shoulder. A townie woman of about forty in a Ford Explorer with a ten-year-old girl strapped in the backseat pulled over to ask if everything was okay. Karin tried to smile and waved her on.

The police had mentioned a third set of tracks. She took Daniel and crossed to the north side of the road. Side by side, they tracked back eastward, like foraging juncos. Daniel’s tracking eye again discovered the invisible signs, a patch of crushed, sandy ground, two faint hints of wheel scrape that had not yet vanished in the spring thaw. Karin pinned Daniel’s arm. “We should have brought a camera. By summer, every one of these tracks will be gone.”

“The police must have photographs on file.”

“I don’t trust their pictures.” She sounded like her brother. He tried gentle reassurance, which she shook off. She scanned the tracks. “These people must have come up behind Mark. The whole thing happened in front of them. They had to roll off the road here. They must have sat awhile, level with him, then pulled back onto the road and headed on to Kearney. Left him lying in the ditch. Didn’t even step out of their car.”

“Maybe they saw how bad it was. Better to get to a phone fast.”

She scowled. “From the Mobil station on Second, halfway through town?” She scanned the road, from the modest rise toward the east to the shallow declivity in the direction of Kearney. “What are the odds? It’s five o’clock on a beautiful spring weekday, and look at the traffic this road gets. A car every four minutes? What are the odds, after midnight, at the end of February…?” She studied Daniel. But Daniel wasn’t calculating. Asked for numbers, Daniel returned only consolation. “I’ll tell you the odds,” she said. “Somebody swerving by accident in front of you on a deserted country road? Zero. But there’s something that would make those odds a lot higher.”

He stared at her, as if another Schluter had just gone delusional.

“Party games,” she told him. “The police were right.”

The wind picked up, the early evening turning. Daniel hunched, swinging his head through a half-circle. He had gone to school with all three boys; he knew their proclivities. It wasn’t hard to see: a punishing February night, machines with too much horsepower, young men in their twenties in a country sick with thrills, sports, war, and their many combinations. “What kind of party games?” He looked down at the oily pavement as if he were meditating. In profile, his face framed by shoulder-length sandy hair, he looked even more like an elfin archer escaped from a marathon dice-dungeon crawl. How had he grown up in rural Nebraska without her brother’s friends beating the life out of him?

She grasped his skinny upper arm and drew him back down the road toward their car. “Daniel.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t know how to play if they strapped you in a NASCAR racer and put a cinder block on the accelerator.”

Mark still limped and contusions still lined his face, but otherwise he seemed almost healed. Two months after the accident, strangers who talked to him might have found him a little slow and inclined toward strange theories, but nothing outside the local norm. Karin alone knew how unready he was to fend for himself, let alone tend to complex packing plant equipment. His days were laced with flashes of paranoia, outbursts of pleasure and rage, and increasingly elaborate explanations.