Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He stood in throbbing music, waiting for Karin Schluter. Above his head, someone growled in techno-pain, begging for euthanasia. A lunch dive, a long line of kids in retro, acid-washed jeans, Weber stark among them, having forgone the coat and tie in favor of khakis and a knit vest. Karin suppressed her giggles as she walked up. “Aren’t you warm in that?”

“My thermostat runs a little low.”

“So I’ve noticed,” she teased. “Is that from all the science?”

She’d chosen a place on the local college campus called Pioneer Pizza. Her nerves from yesterday had settled. She played less with her hair. She smiled at the surrounding flock of students as the hostess seated them.

“I went to school here. Back when it was still Kearney State College.”

“When was that?”

She blushed. “Ten years. Twelve.”

“No way.” The words sounded ludicrous on his lips. They’d have sent Sylvie into convulsions. Karin just beamed.

“Those were wild days. A little too close to home for me, but still. My friends and I were the only people between Berkeley and the Mississippi to protest the Gulf War. This gang of Young Republicans man-handled my then-boyfriend, just for wearing a “No Blood For Oil” button. Tied him up with a yellow ribbon!” Her glee hid as fast as it had surfaced. She cast a guilty look around the restaurant.

“How about your brother?”

“You mean school? They pretty much had to give Mark an honorary high school diploma. Don’t get me wrong. He’s no idiot.” She worked her mouth, hearing her present tense. “He was always shrewd. He could read a teacher and figure out the barest minimum needed to pass her tests. Not that it took a genius to outsmart the Kearney High faculty. But Mark just wanted to fix up trucks and dink around with video games. He could twitch over a new game cartridge for twenty-four hours without even getting up to pee. I told him he should get a job as a play-tester.”

“How did he make a living, after graduation?”

“Well, ‘a living’…He flipped burgers until Dad threw him out of the house. Then he worked at the Napa parts store and lived like an Indian for a long time. His buddy Tom Rupp got him a job at the IBP plant in Lexington.”

“IBP?”

She wrinkled her nose, surprised at his ignorance. “Infernal Beef Packers.”

“Infernal…?”

Her face flushed. She pressed three fingers to her lips and blew on them. “I mean, Iowa. Although, you know: Iowa, Infernal. You have to squint to tell the difference.”

“He worked for a slaughterhouse?”

“He’s not a cow killer, or anything. That’s Rupp. Markie repairs their equipment.” She looked down again. “I guess I mean ‘repaired.’” She lifted her head and studied him. Her eyes were the color of oxidized pennies. “He’s not going back there anytime soon, is he?”

Weber shook his head. “I’ve learned not to make predictions, over the years. What we need, as in most things, is patience and cautious optimism.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m trying.”

“Tell me what you do.” Her lips traced his words, and she looked at him blankly. “Your work.”

“Oh!” She pressed her bangs with her right hand. “I’m a consumer relations agent for…” She stopped, surprised at herself. “Actually, I’m between job opportunities.”

“Your employers let you go? Because of this?”

Beneath the table, her knee pumped like a sewing machine. “I didn’t have any choice. I had to be down here. My brother comes first. It’s just the two of us, you know.” Weber nodded. She bubbled over with explanations. “I have a little war chest. My mother left us some life insurance money. It’s the right thing. I can start again, once he’s…” Her tone was optimistic, fishing.

The waitress came to take their orders. With a guilty glance around the room, Karin ordered the Supreme. Weber chose at random. When the waitress left, Karin eyed him. “I can’t believe it. You do it, too.”

“I’m sorry? What do I do?”

She shook her head. “I just thought that someone with your accomplishments…”

Weber grinned, puzzled. “I really have no idea…”

She flicked the air with her left hand. “Never mind. It’s nothing important. Something I notice in men, sometimes.”

Weber waited for Karin to explain. When she didn’t, he asked, “Did you bring the pictures?”

She nodded. She reached into her shoulder bag, a brightly patterned knit sack made by some indigenous people, and withdrew an envelope. “I picked ones that would mean the most to him.”

Weber took the photos and thumbed through them.

“That’s our father,” Karin said. “What can I say? Blind in one eye from an argument with the livestock. Ready to recite ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor’ anytime after the night’s third shot, at least when we were young; he didn’t go in much for poetry, in his later days. He started out as a farmer, but spent most of his life trying to break into the commercial class with a parade of get-rich-quick schemes. On a Christmas-card basis with every bailiff in bankruptcy court. He lost a lot of money selling privacy boxes. You hooked them up to your TV so the cable company couldn’t track what you watched. He came up with this idea for peddling identity-theft insurance. He only sold things that he couldn’t buy enough of himself. That was his downfall. The man thought the nine-digit zip code was a Democratic Party plot to control the movements of ordinary citizens. Even the local militia guys thought he was a little out there.”

“And he died…?”

“Four years ago. He couldn’t sleep. He just couldn’t sleep, and then he died.”

“I’m sorry,” Weber said, pointlessly. “How would you describe their relationship?”

She screwed up her mouth. “Nonstop slow-mo death match? Give or take a couple of happy camping trips. They liked to fish together, back when. Or working together on engines. Stuff where they didn’t have to talk. That next one’s our mom, Joan. She didn’t look quite that good by the end. Which was a year or so ago, I think I said.”

“You say she was a religious woman?”

“A big, big speaker in tongues. Even her ordinary English was pretty colorful. She often had the house exorcised. She was convinced that it hid the souls of children in torment. I was like, ‘Hello! Earth to Mom! I’ll name those tormented child souls for a dime!’” Karin took the picture of the pretty, chestnut-haired farm wife from Weber and studied it, sucking in her cheeks. “But she kept us alive through all the years of Dad’s self-employment schemes. Clerk-Typist III, here at the college.”

“How did Mark get along with her?”

“He worshiped the woman. Worshiped them both, really. He just sometimes did it while shouting and waving a blunt weapon around.”

“He was violent?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know. What’s ‘violent’ anymore? He was a teenage guy. Then, a guy in his twenties.”

“Did he share your mother’s…? Was he religious?”

She laughed until she had to hold her hands in the air. “Not unless you count Devil worship. No. That’s unfair. The black-magic phase was me. Here, look. Karin Schluter, high school senior. Your advanced Goth vampire look. Pretty scary, huh? Two years before that, I was a cheerleader. I know what you’re thinking. If my brother hadn’t had an accident to explain this Capgras, you’d be looking for a schizophrenia gene. That’s the Schluter family. Let’s see what else I’ve got.”

She talked him through the rest of the loose scrapbook. She had family photos going back to a great-grandfather, Bartlett Schluter, standing in front of the ancestral sod house as a young boy, his hair like corn silk. She had pictures of the beef-packing plant in Lexington, a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot, windowless box with a hundred forty-foot containers lined up alongside it, waiting to be hauled away by semis. She had portraits of Mark’s best friends, two scraggly men in their mid-twenties enjoying themselves with smoke, drink, and pool cues, one in a camouflage tee and the other in a shirt reading “Got Meth?” She had a photo of a gangly, black-haired, pale-blue woman in a hand-knit olive V-neck, radiating a fragile smile. “Bonnie Travis. The group’s moll.”