The Echo Maker

Read an Excerpt

The Echo Maker

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC

All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-374-14635-7

Chapter One

A neck stretches long; legs drape behind. Wings curl forward, the length of a man.
Spread like fingers, primaries tip the bird into the wind's plane. The blood-red head bows
and the wings sweep together, a cloaked priest giving benediction. Tail cups and belly
buckles, surprised by the upsurge of ground. Legs kick out, their backward knees
flapping like broken landing gear. Another bird plummets and stumbles forward, fighting
for a spot in the packed staging ground along those few miles of water still clear and wide
enough to pass as safe.

Twilight comes early, as it will for a few more weeks. The sky, ice blue through the
encroaching willows and cottonwoods, flares up, a brief rose, before collapsing to indigo.
Late February on the Platte, and the night's chill haze hangs over this river, frosting the
stubble from last fall that still fills the bordering fields. The nervousbirds, tall as
children, crowd together wing by wing on this stretch of river, one that they've learned to
find by memory.

They converge on the river at winter's end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands.
In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one
stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it's a beginner's world
again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.

Half a million birds-four-fifths of all the sandhill cranes on earth-home in on this
river. They trace the Central Flyway, an hourglass laid over the continent. They push up
from New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, hundreds of miles each day, with thousands more
ahead before they reach their remembered nests. For a few weeks, this stretch of river
shelters the miles-long flock. Then, by the start of spring, they'll rise and head away,
feeling their way up to Sas-katchewan, Alaska, or beyond.

This year's flight has always been. Something in the birds retraces a route laid down
centuries before their parents showed it to them. And each crane recalls the route still to
come.

Tonight's cranes mill again on the braided water. For another hour, their massed calls
carry on the emptying air. The birds flap and fidget, edgy with migration. Some tear up
frosty twigs and toss them in the air. Their jitters spill over into combat. At last the
sandhills settle down into wary, stilt-legged sleep, most standing in the water, a few
farther up in the stubbled fields.

A squeal of brakes, the crunch of metal on asphalt, one broken scream and then another
rouse the flock. The truck arcs through the air, corkscrewing into the field. A plume
shoots through the birds. They lurch off the ground, wings beating. The panicked carpet
lifts, circles, and falls again. Calls that seem to come from creatures twice their size
carry miles before fading.

By morning, that sound never happened. Again there is only here, now, the river's braid,
a feast of waste grain that will carry these flocks north, beyond the Arctic Circle. As first
light breaks, the fossils return to life, testing their legs, tasting the frozen air, leaping free,
bills skyward and throats open. And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting
everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dance as they have since
before this river started.

Her brother needed her. The thought protected Karin through the alien night. She drove in
a trance, keeping to the long dogleg, south down Nebraska 77 from Siouxland, then west
on 30, tracking the Platte. The back roads were impossible, in her condition. Still
shattered from the telephone's stab at two a.m.: Karin Schluter? This is Good Samaritan
Hospital in Kearney. Your brother has had an accident.

The aide wouldn't say anything over the phone. Just that Mark had flipped over on the
shoulder of North Line Road and had lain pinned in his cab, almost frozen by the time the
paramedics found and freed him. For a long time after hanging up, she couldn't feel her
fingers until she found them pressed into her cheeks. Her face was numb, as if she had
been the one lying out there, in the freezing February night.

Her hands, stiff and blue, clawed the wheel as she slipped through the reservations. First
the Winnebago, then the rolling Omaha. The scrub trees along the patchy road bowed
under tufts of snow. Winnebago Junction, the Pow Wow grounds, the tribal court and
volunteer fire department, the station where she bought her tax-free gas, the hand-painted
wooden shingle reading "Native Arts Gift Shop," the high school-Home of the
Indians-where she'd volunteer-tutored until despair drove her off: the scene turned
away from her, hostile. On the long, empty stretch east of Rosalie, a lone male her
brother's age in a too-light coat and hat-Go Big Red-tracked through the roadside
drift. He turned and snarled as she passed, repelling the intrusion.

The suture of the centerline drew her downward into the snowy black. It made no sense:
Mark, a near-professional driver, rolling off an arrow-straight country road that was as
familiar to him as breathing. Driving off the road, in central Nebraska-like falling off a
wooden horse. She toyed with the date: 02/20/02. Did it mean anything? Her palms
butted the wheel, and the car shook. Your brother has had an accident. In fact, he'd long
ago taken every wrong turn you could take in life, and from the wrong lane. Telephone
calls coming in at awful hours, as far back as she could remember. But never one like
this.

She used the radio to keep herself awake. She tuned in to a crackpot talk-radio show
about the best way to protect your pets from water-borne terrorist poisonings. All the
deranged, static voices in the dark seeped into her, whispering what she was: alone on a
deserted road, half a mile from her own disaster.

What a loving child Mark had been, staffing his earthworm hospital, selling his toys to
stave off the farm foreclosure, throwing his eight-year-old body between their parents
that hideous night nineteen years ago when Cappy took a loop of power cord to Joan.
That was how she pictured her brother, as she fell headlong into the dark. The root of all
his accidents: too caring by half.

Outside Grand Island, two hundred miles down from Sioux, as the day broke and the sky
went peach, she glimpsed the Platte. First light glinted off its muddy brown, calming her.
Something caught her eye, bobbing pearl waves flecked with red. Even she thought
highway hypnosis, at first. A carpet of four-foot birds spread as far as the distant tree line.
She'd seen them every spring for more than thirty years, and still the dancing mass made
her jerk the wheel, almost following her brother.

He'd waited until the birds returned to spin out. He'd been a mess already, back in
October, when she drove this same route for their mother's wake. Camping out with his
beef-packing friends in the ninth circle of Nintendo hell, starting in on the six-packs for
liquid brunch, fully loaded by the time he headed in to work on the swing shift.
Traditions to protect, Rabbit; family honor. She hadn't had the will then, to talk sense to
him. He wouldn't have heard her, if she had. But he'd made it through the winter, even
pulled himself together a little. Only for this.

Kearney rose up: the scattered outskirts, the newly extruded superstore strip, the fast-food
grease trough along Second, the old main drag. The whole town suddenly struck her as a
glorified I-80 exit ramp. Familiarity filled her with a weird, inappropriate calm. Home.

She found Good Samaritan the way the birds found the Platte. She spoke to the trauma
doctor, working hard to follow him. He kept saying moderate severity, stable, and lucky.
He looked young enough to have been out partying with Mark earlier that night. She
wanted to ask to see his med school diploma. Instead she asked what "moderate severity"
meant, and nodded politely at the opaque answer. She asked about "lucky," and the
trauma doctor explained: "Lucky to be alive."

Firemen had cut him out of his cab with an acetylene torch. He might have lain there all
night, coffined against the windshield, freezing and bleeding to death, just off the
shoulder of the country road, except for the anonymous call from a gas station on the
edge of town.

They let her into the unit to see him. A nurse tried to prepare her, but Karin heard
nothing. She stood in front of a nest of cables and monitors. On the bed lay a lump of
white wrapping. A face cradled inside the tangle of tubes, swollen and rainbowed, coated
in abrasions. His bloody lips and cheeks were flecked with embedded gravel. The matted
hair gave way to a patch of bare skull sprouting wires. The forehead had been pressed to
a hot grill. In a flimsy robin's-egg gown, her brother struggled to inhale.

She heard herself call him, from a distance. "Mark?" The eyes opened at the sound, like
the hard plastic eyes of her girlhood dolls. Nothing moved, not even his eyelids. Nothing,
until his mouth pumped, without sound. She leaned down into the equipment. Air hissed
through his lips, above the hum of the monitors. Wind through a field of ready wheat.

His face knew her. But nothing came out of his mouth except a trickle of saliva. His eyes
pleaded, terrified. He needed something from her, life or death. "It's okay; I'm here," she
said. But assurance only made him worse. She was exciting him, exactly what the nurses
had forbidden. She looked away, anywhere but at his animal eyes. The room burned into
her memory: the drawn curtain, the two racks of threatening electronic equipment, the
lime sherbet-colored wall, the rolling table alongside his bed.

She tried again. "Markie, it's Karin. You're going to be all right." Saying it made a kind
of truth. A groan escaped his sealed mouth. His hand, stuck with an IV tube, reached up
and grabbed her wrist. His aim stunned her. The grip was feeble but deadly, drawing her
down into the mesh of tubes. His fingers feathered at her, frantic, as if, in this split
second, she might still keep his truck from wiping out.

The nurse made her leave. Karin Schluter sat in the trauma waiting room, a glass
terrarium at the end of a long corridor smelling of antiseptics, dread, and ancient health
magazines. Rows of head-bowed farmers and their wives, in dark sweatshirts and
overalls, sat in the squared-off, padded apricot chairs alongside her. She figured them:
Father heart attack; husband hunting accident; child overdose. Off in the corner, a muted
television beamed images of a mountain wasteland scattered with guerrillas. Afghanistan,
winter, 2002. After a while, she noticed a thread of blood wicking down her right index
finger, where she'd bitten through her cuticle. She found herself rising and drifting to the
restroom, where she vomited.

Later, she ate, something warm and sticky from the hospital cafeteria. At one point, she
stood in one of those half-finished stairwells of poured concrete meant to be seen only
when the building was on fire, calling back to Sioux City, the massive computer and
home electronics company where she worked in consumer relations. She stood smoothing
her rumpled bouclé skirt as if her supervisor could see her over the line. She told her
boss, as vaguely as she could, about the accident. A remarkably level account: thirty
years of practice hiding Schluter truths. She asked for two days off. He offered her three.
She started to protest, but switched at once to grateful acceptance.

Back in the waiting room, she witnessed eight middle-aged men in flannel standing in a
ring, their slow eyes scanning the floor. A murmur issued from them, wind teasing the
lonely screens of a farmhouse. The sound rose and fell in waves. It took her a moment to
realize: a prayer circle, for another victim who'd come in just after Mark. A makeshift
Pentecostal service, covering anything that scal-pels, drugs, and lasers couldn't. The gift
of tongues descended on the circle of men, like small talk at a family reunion. Home was
the place you never escape, even in nightmare.

Stable. Lucky. The words got Karin through to midday. But when the trauma doctor next
talked to her, the words had become cerebral edema. Something had spiked the pressure
inside her brother's skull. Nurses tried cooling his body. The doctor mentioned a
ventilator and ventricular drain. Luck and stability were gone.

When they let her see Mark again, she no longer knew him. The person they took her to
the second time lay comatose, his face collapsed into some stranger's. His eyes wouldn't
open when she called his name. His arms hung still, even when she squeezed them.

Hospital personnel came to talk to her. They spoke to her as if she were brain-damaged.
She pumped them for information. Mark's blood alcohol content had been just under the
Nebraska limit-three or four beers in the hours before rolling his truck. Nothing else
noticeable in his system. His truck was destroyed.

Two policemen took her aside in the corridor and asked her questions. She answered
what she knew, which was nothing. An hour later, she wondered if she'd imagined the
conversation. Late that afternoon, a man of fifty in a blue work shirt sat down next to her
where she waited. She managed to turn and blink. Not possible, not even in this town: hit
on, in the trauma-unit waiting room.

"You should get a lawyer," the man said.

She blinked again and shook her head. Sleep deprivation.

"You're with the fellow who rolled his truck? Read about him in the Telegraph. You
should definitely get a lawyer."

Her head would not stop shaking. "Are you one?"

The man jerked back. "Good God, no. Just neighborly advice."

She hunted down the newspaper and read the flimsy accident account until it crumbled.
She sat in the glass terrarium as long as she could, then circled the ward, then sat again.
Every hour, she begged to see him. Each time, they denied her. She dozed for five
minutes at a shot, propped in the sculpted apricot chair. Mark rose up in her dreams, like
buffalo grass after a prairie fire. A child who, out of pity, always picked the worst players
for his team. An adult who called only when weepy drunk. Her eyes stung and her mouth
thickened with scum. She checked the mirror in the floor's bathroom: blotchy and
teetering, her fall of red hair a tangled bead-curtain. But still presentable, given
everything.

"There has been some reversal," the doctor explained. He spoke in B waves and
millimeters of mercury, lobes and ventricles and hematomas. Karin finally understood.
Mark would need surgery.

They slit his throat and put a bolt into his skull. The nurses stopped answering Karin's
questions. Hours later, in her best consumer-relations voice, she asked again to see him.
They said he was too weakened by the procedures. The nurses offered to get something
for her, and Karin only slowly realized they meant medication.

"Oh, no thanks," she said. "I'm good."

"Go home for a while," the trauma doctor advised. "Doctor's orders. You need some
rest."

"Other people are sleeping on the floor of the waiting room. I can get a sleeping bag and
be right back."

"There's nothing you can do right now," the doctor claimed. But that couldn't be; not in
the world she came from.

She promised to go rest if they let her see Mark, just for a moment. They did. His eyes
were still closed, and he responded to nothing.

Then she saw the note. It lay on the bed stand, waiting. No one could tell her when it had
appeared. Some messenger had slipped into the room unseen, even while Karin was shut
out. The writing was spidery, ethereal: immigrant scrawl from a century ago.

I am No One
but Tonight on North Line Road
GOD led me to you
so You could Live
and bring back someone else.

A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take
flesh, nest there, a body part, part body.

Lasts forever: no change to measure.

Flock of fiery cinders. When gray pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so
slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above
knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can't feel it.

Body flat water, falling an inch a mile. Torso long as the world. Frozen run all the way
from open to close. Great oxbows, age bends, lazy delayed S, switch current to still as
long as possible the one long drop it already finishes.

Not even river, not even wet brown slow west, no now or then except in now and then
rising. Face forcing up into soundless scream. White column, lit in a river of light. Then
pure terror, pealing into air, flipping and falling, anything but hit target.

One sound gets not a word but still says: come. Come with. Try death.

At last only water. Flat water spreading to its level. Water that is nothing but into nothing
falls.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Echo Maker
by Richard Powers
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Powers.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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