Praying for Sleep

12

Owen Atcheson knew the harrowing logic of cornered animals and he understood the cold strategy of instinct that flowed like blood through the body of both hunter and prey.

He would stand motionless for hours, in icy marshes, so still that a drake or goose would pulse carelessly thirty feet above his head and die instantly in the shattering explosion from Owen’s long ten-gauge. He’d move silently-almost invisibly-inches at a time, along rock faces to ease downwind of a deer and without using a telescopic sight place a.30 slug through the relaxed shoulder and strong heart of the buck.

When he was a boy he’d doggedly follow fox paths and set dull metal traps exactly where the lithe blond animals would pass. He’d smell their musk, he’d see the hint of their passage in the grass and weeds. He’d collect their broken bodies and if one chewed through the stake line he’d track it for miles-not just to recover the trap but to kill the suffering animal, which he did almost ceremoniously; pain, in Owen Atcheson’s philosophy, was weakness, but death was strength.

He’d killed men too. Picked them off calmly, efficiently, with his black M-16, the empty bullet casings cartwheeling through the air and ringing as they landed. (For him, the jangle of spent shells had been the most distinctive sound of the war, much more evocative than the oddly quiet cracks of the gunfire itself.) They charged at him like children playing soldier, these men and women, working the long bolts of their ancient guns, and he’d picked them off, ring, ring, ring.

But Michael Hrubek wasn’t an animal driven by instinct. He wasn’t a soldier propelled by battle frenzy and love-or fear-of country.

Yet what was he?

Owen Atcheson simply didn’t know.

Driving slowly along Route 236 near Stinson, he looked about for a roadside store or gas station that might have a phone. He wanted to call Lis. But this was a deserted part of the county. He could see no lights except those from distant houses clinging to a hilltop miles away. He continued down the road several hundred yards to a place where the shoulder widened. Here he parked the Cherokee and reached into the back. He slipped the bolt out of his deer rifle, pocketing the well-oiled piece of metal. From the glove compartment he took a long black flashlight, a halogen with six D cells in the tube, the lens masked by a piece of shirt cardboard to limit the refraction of the light. Locking the doors he once again checked to see that his pistol was loaded then walked in a zigzag pattern along the shoulder until he found four hyphens of skid marks-where a car had stopped abruptly then sped off just as fast.

Playing the light over the ground he found where Hrubek had jumped from the hearse: the bent grass, the overturned stones, the muddy bare footprints. Owen continued in a slow circle. Why, he wondered, had Hrubek rolled in the grass? Why had he ripped up several handsfuls of it? To staunch a wound? Was he trying to force himself to vomit? Was it part of a disguise? Camouflage?

What was in his mind?

Six feet from the shoulder was a muddle of prints, many of them Hrubek’s, most of them the trackers’ boot prints and the dogs’ paw prints. Three animals, he noticed. Here Hrubek had paced for a time then started running east through the grass and brush just beyond the shoulder. Owen followed the trail for a hundred yards then noted that Hrubek had turned off the road, plowing south, aiming for a ridge of hill paralleling the highway fifty feet away.

Owen continued along this track until it simply vanished altogether. Dropping to his knees he scanned the area, wondering if the man was smart enough to deer-walk, an evasion technique used by professional poachers: stepping straight down on the ground, avoiding the most telltale signs of passage (not prints but overturned pebbles, leaves and twigs). But he could find no bent blades of grass-the only evidence most deer walkers leave behind. He concluded Hrubek had simply backtracked, aborting his southward journey and returning to the path beside the road.

Fifty yards east he found where Hrubek had once again done the same-turned south, walked a short way then backtracked. So, yes, he was moving east but at the same time was drawn to something south of the road. Owen followed this second detour some distance from the highway. He stood in the midst of a field of tall grass and once more saw that the trackers had paused here.

Shutting off the flashlight, he took his pistol from his pocket and waded into the pool of cold darkness that rolled off the rocky hills in front of him and gathered at his feet like snow. He paused here and, against all reason, closed his eyes.

Owen Atcheson tried to rid himself of the hardened, savvy, forty-eight-year-old WASP lawyer inside him. He struggled to become Michael Hrubek, a man consumed by madness. He stood this way, swaying in the darkness, for several minutes.

Nothing.

He could get no sense whatsoever of Hrubek’s mind. He opened his eyes, fingering his pistol.

He was about to return to the Cherokee and drive on to the truck stop in Watertown when a thought came to him. What if he was allowing Hrubek too much madness?› Was it possible that, even if his world was demented, the rules that governed that world were as logical as everyone else’s? Adler was fast to talk about mix-ups and doped-up patients ambling off. But step back, Owen told himself. Why, look at what Michael Hrubek’s done-he’s devised a plan to escape from a hospital for the criminally insane, he’s executed it and he’s managed to evade professional pursuers. Owen decided it was time to give Hrubek a little more credit.

Returning to the spot where Hrubek’s trail ended he placed his feet squarely in the huge muddy indentations left by the madman’s feet. With eyes open this time, he found himself looking directly at the crest of the rocky hill. He gazed at it for a moment then walked to the base of the rock. He dabbed his fingers in mud and smeared it on his cheekbones and forehead. From his back pocket he took a navy-blue stocking cap and pulled it over his head. He started to climb.

In five minutes he found what he sought. The nest on the top of the rocks contained broken twigs and grass and the marks of boots. Their indentations were deep-made by someone who’d weigh close to three hundred pounds. And they were fresh. He also found button marks from where the man had lain prone and looked at the highway below, maybe waiting for the trackers and their dogs to leave. Pressed into the mud was a huge handprint above the word rEVEnge. Hrubek had been here no more than an hour before. He’d gone east, yes, but only for clothes, perhaps, or to lead his pursuers astray. Then he’d backtracked west along a different route to this outcropping, which he’d spotted on his way east.

The son of a bitch! Owen descended slowly, forcing himself to be careful, despite his exhilaration. He couldn’t afford a broken bone now. At the bottom of the rocks he played his flashlight over the ground. He found a small patch of mud nearby and observed bootprints walking away from the rocks-the same prints he’d seen on the top of the cliff. Although they weren’t widely spaced, they were toe-heavy, an indication that Hrubek was jogging or walking fast. They led to the road then back south into the fields, where they turned due west.

Following these clear imprints Owen walked for a short way through the grass. He decided that he would make certain that Hrubek was indeed going west then would return to his truck and cruise slowly along the highway, looking for his quarry from the road. Just another ten yards, he decided, and climbed through a notch in a low stone fence, leading to a large field beyond.

It was there that he tripped over the hidden wire and fell, face forward, toward the steel trap.

The big Ottawa Manufacturing coyote trap had been laid brilliantly-in a section of the path with no handholds for arresting falls, just beyond the stone wall so that a searcher couldn’t get his other foot to the ground in time to stop his tumble. In an instant Owen dropped the flashlight and covered his face with his left arm, lifting his pistol and firing four.357 Magnum rounds at the round trigger plate in a desperate effort to snap it closed before he struck it. The blue-steel device danced under the impact of the powerful slugs. Stones, twigs and hot bits of shattered bullets flew into the air as Owen twisted sideways to let his broad shoulder take the impact of the fall.

When he landed, his head bounced off the closed jaws of the trap and he lay, stunned, feeling the blood on his forehead and fighting down the horrific image of the blue metal straps snapping shut on his face. An instant later he rolled away, assuming that Hrubek had used the trap as Owen himself would have-as a diversion-meant to hold him immobile and in agony while Hrubek attacked from behind. Owen glanced about, huddling beside the fence. When there was no immediate assault he ejected the spent and unfired cartridges then reloaded. He pocketed the two good rounds and scanned the area once more.

Nothing. No sound but a faint wind in the lofty treetops. Owen stood slowly. So the trap had been meant merely to injure a scenting dog. In fury Owen picked up the bullet-dented trap and flung it deep into the field. He found the spent shells and buried them then, by touch, surveyed the damage to his face and shoulder. It was minor.

His anger vanished quickly and Owen Atcheson began to laugh. Not from relief at escaping serious injury. No, it was a laugh of pure pleasure. The trap said to him that Michael Hrubek was a worthy adversary after all-ruthless as well as clever. Owen was never as alive as when he had a strong enemy that he was about to engage-an enemy that might test him.

Hurrying to the Cherokee he started the engine and drove slowly west, staring at the fields to his left. He was so intent on catching sight of his prey that he grazed a road sign with the truck’s windshield. Startled by the loud noise he braked quickly and glanced at the sign.

It told him that he was exactly forty-seven miles from home.

Michael Hrubek, crouched down in a stand of grass, caressed his John Worker overalls and wondered about the car at which he stared.

Surely it was a trap. Snipers were probably sighting on it with long-barreled muskets. Snipers in those trees just ahead, waiting for him to sneak up to the sports car. He breathed shallowly and reminded himself not to give away his position.

After he’d passed the GET TO sign he’d hurried west through the fields of grass and pumpkin vines, paralleling the dim strip of Route 236. He’d made good time and had stopped only once-to place one of the animal traps beside a stone fence. He’d set a few leaves on top of the metal and hurried on.

Now, Hrubek raised himself up and looked again at the car. He saw no one around it. But still he remained hidden, in the foxhole of grass, waiting, aiming the blade sight of his gun at the trees ahead and looking for any sign of motion. As he smelled the grass a dark memory loomed. He tried his best to ignore it but the image refused to disappear.

Oh, what’s that on your head, Mama? What’re you wearing there?

Mama…

Take off that hat, Mama. I don’t like it one bit.

Fifteen years ago Michael Hrubek had been a boy both very muscular and very fat, with waddling feet and a long trunk of a neck. One day, playing in the tall grass field behind an old willow tree, he heard: “Michael! Miiiichael!” His mother walked onto the back porch of the family’s trim suburban home in Westbury, Pennsylvania. “Michael, please come here.” She wore a broad-brimmed red hat, beneath which her beautiful hair danced like yellow fire in the wind. Even from the distance he could see the dots of her red nails like raw cigarette burns. Her eyes were dark, obscured by the brim of the hat and by the amazing little masks that she dabbed on her eyes from the tubes of mask carrier on her makeup table. She did this, he suspected, to hide from him.

“Honey… Come here, I need you.” Slowly he stood and walked to her. “I just got home. I didn’t have time to stop. I want you to go by the grocery store. I need some things.”

“Oh, no,” the boy said tragically.

She knew he didn’t want to, his mother said. But Mr. and Mrs. Klevan or the Abernathys or the Potters would be here at any minute and she needed milk and coffee. Or something. She needed it.

“No, I can’t.”

Yes, yes, he could. He was her little soldier. He was brave, wasn’t he?

He whined, “I don’t know about this. There are reasons why I can’t do it.”

“And mind the change. People shortchange you.”

“They won’t let me cross the street,” Michael retorted. “I don’t know where it is!”

“Don’t worry, honey, I’ll give you the instructions,” she said soothingly. “I’ll write it down.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it for me. Please. Do it quickly.”

“I don’t know!”

“You’re twelve years old. You can do it.” Her composure was steadfast.

“No, no, no…”

“All you have to do”-her mouth curved into a smile-“is go by the store and get what I need. My brave little soldier boy can do that, can’t he?”

But the Klevans or the Milfords or the Pilchers arrived the next minute and his mother didn’t get a chance to write down the directions for him. She sent him on his way. Michael, frightened to the point of nausea, a five-dollar bill clutched in a death grip, started out on a journey to the nearby store.

An hour passed and his mother, stewing with mounting concern and anger, received a phone call from the market. Michael had wandered into the store ten minutes before and had caused an incident.

“Your son,” the beleaguered manager said, “wants the store.”

“He wants the store?” she asked, bewildered.

“He said you told him to buy the store. I’m near to calling the police. He touched one of our checkers. Her, you know, chest. She’s in a state.”

“Oh, for the love of Christ.”

She sped to the market.

Michael, shaking with panic, stood in the checkout line. Confronted with the apparent impossibility of doing what he’d been told to do-Go buy the store-his conscious thought dissolved and he’d belligerently grabbed the checker’s fat arm and thrust the cash into her blouse pocket as she stood, hands at her side, sobbing.

“Take it!” he screamed at her, over and over. “Take the money!”

His mother collected him and when they returned home, she led him straight into the bathroom.

“I’m scared.”

“Are you, darling? My little soldier boy’s scared? Of what, I wonder.”

“Where was I? I don’t remember nothing.”

“ ‘Anything.’ ‘I don’t remember anything.’ Now get out of those filthy clothes.” They were stained with sawdust and dirt; Michael had belly-flopped to the floor, seeking cover, when his mother, eyes blazing beneath her stylish hat, charged through the pneumatic door of the supermarket. “Then I want you to come out and tell my guests you’re sorry for what you did. After that you’ll go to bed for the day.”

“Go to bed?”

“Bed,” she snapped.

Okay, he said. Okay, sure.

Was he being punished or comforted? He didn’t know. Michael pondered this for a few minutes then sat on the toilet, faced with a new dilemma. His mother had dumped his clothes down the laundry chute. Did she want him to apologize naked? He gazed about the room for something he might wear.

Five minutes later Michael opened the door and stepped out into the living room, wearing his mother’s nightgown. “Hello,” he said, trooping up to the guests. “I tried to buy the fucking store. I’m sorry.” Mr. Abernathy or Monroe stopped speaking in midsentence. His wife raised a protective hand to her mouth to stop herself from blurting something regrettable.

But his own mother… Why, she was smiling! Michael was astonished. Though her masked eyes were cold she was smiling at him. “Well, here’s our pretty little soldier boy,” she whispered. “Doesn’t Michael look fashionable?”

“I found it behind the door.”

“Did you now?” she asked, shaking her head.

Michael smiled. Fashionable. He felt pleased with himself and repeated his apology, laughing harshly. “I tried to buy the fucking store!”

The guests, holding the cups that contained tea not coffee and lemon not milk, avoided each other’s eyes. Michael’s mother rose. “I’ve changed my mind, Michael. You look so nice why don’t you go out and play?”

“Outside?” His smile faded.

“Come along. I want you outside.”

“I’d feel funny going outside wearing-”

“No, Michael. Outside.”

“But they might see me.” He began to cry. “Somebody might see me.”

“Now!” she screeched. “Get the fuck outside.”

Then she escorted him by the hand, thrusting him out the front door. Two of the neighborhood girls stared at him as he stood on the doorstep in the pale-blue nightgown. They smiled at first but when he began to stare back, muttering to himself, they grew uncomfortable and went inside. Michael turned back to his own front door. He heard the lock click. He looked obliquely through the dirty glass window and saw his mother’s face, turning away. Michael walked to the willow tree in the backyard and for the rest of the afternoon huddled by himself in a nest of grass similar to the one in which he sat tonight. Looking for snipers and staring at the car.

As he listened to the rustle of this grass, feeling it caress his skin as it had so long ago, Michael Hrubek remembered much of that day. He didn’t, however, remember it with perfect clarity for the very reason that made it so significant in his life-it was his first break with reality, his first psychotic episode. The images of those few hours were altered by his mind and by the intervening years, and were buried beneath other memories, many of which were just as haunting and sorrowful. Tonight, moved by the smell and feel of the grass, he might have delved deeper into that event-as Dr. Richard had been encouraging him to do-but he’d grown so agitated by now that he could wait no longer. Snipers or no, he had to act. He rose and made his way to the road.

The sports car had apparently broken down earlier in the evening. The hood was up and the windows and doors were locked. A red triangular marker sat in the road near the rear fender. Hrubek wondered if its purpose was to help snipers sight on their target. He sailed it into the brush like a Frisbee.

“MG,” he whispered, reading the emblem on the hood. He concluded this meant “My God.” Paying no attention to the inside of the car he walked directly to the trunk. A gift! Look at this. A gift from My God! The rack was locked but he simply grabbed the mountain bicycle in both hands and pulled it free. Bits of metal and plastic from the mountings cascaded around him. He set the bicycle on the ground and caressed the tubes and leather and gears and cables. He felt a chill from the metal and enjoyed this sensation very much. He lowered his head to the handlebar and rubbed his cheek on the chrome.

He took a marker from his pocket and wrote on his forearm: Oh, strANGE aRe the works of GOD. Thank YOU GOD for thIs beautIFul gIFt. Next to these words he drew a picture of a serpent and one of an apple and wrote the name EVE. He licked the name and stepped back, studying his new means of transportation with an uneasy but grateful gaze.

Richard Kohler found himself in an alien world.

He was wearing a wool-blend suit, a silk tie, red-and-green Argyles and a single penny loafer-what other proof did he need, he reflected, that he was no outdoors-man?

Bending forward as far as he dared he pulled his other shoe out of a pool of soupy, methane-laced mud and wiped it on the grass beside him. He stepped back into the wet loafer and continued his journey westward.

Curiously this forest invoked in him a claustrophobia that he’d never felt anywhere else-even in his dark tiny office, where he would often spend fifteen straight hours. His pulse was high, his limbs itched from this fear of confinement and he was having trouble breathing. He also heard noises where no noises should be and his sense of direction was terrible. He was on the verge of admitting to himself that, yes, he was lost. His points of reference-trees, signposts, bushes-were vague and shifty. More often than not, as he walked toward them, they simply vanished; sometimes they turned into grotesque creatures or faces in the process.

Over his shoulder was his ruddy backpack, containing the syringe and drugs, and on his arm was a black London Fog raincoat. He was too hot to wear it and he wondered why on earth he’d brought the coat with him. The radio updates about the impending storm suggested that a helmet and armor would be better protection than gabardine.

Kohler had parked his BMW up the road, a half mile from here, and had made his way through a field into this forest, making slow progress. His leather soles slipped off the damp rocks and he’d fallen twice onto the hard ground. The second time he’d landed on his wrist, nearly spraining it. The vicious thorns of a wild rosebush hooked his pant leg and it took five painful minutes to free himself.

Kohler recognized, though, that he’d been lucky. The nurse who’d alerted him to the escape reported that the young man had run from the hearse in Stinson and had apparently gotten as far as Watertown.

As Kohler had sped in that direction down Route 236, he was certain that he’d sighted Michael in a clearing. The doctor raced to the turnoff, climbed from the car and searched the area. He’d called his patient’s name, pleaded with him to show himself, but received no response. Then the doctor had driven off once more. But he hadn’t gone far. He pulled off onto a side road and waited. Ten minutes later he believed that he’d seen the same figure hurrying on once more.

Kohler had found no sign of Michael since. Hoping he might stumble across him by chance, the psychiatrist had taken to the wilderness again, heading in the direction in which Michael seemed to be headed-west.

Where are you, Michael?

And why are you out here tonight?

Oh, I’ve tried so hard to look into your mind. But it’s as dark as it ever was. It’s as dark as the sky.

He tripped again, on a strand of wire this time, and tore his slacks on a sharp rock, gouging his thigh. He wondered if there was a danger of tetanus. This thought discouraged him-not the risk of disease but the reminder of how much basic medicine he’d forgotten. He wondered if his knowledge of the human brain compensated for the long-forgotten facts of physiology and organic chemistry he once had learned and recited so easily. Then these thoughts faded, for he found the sports car.

There was nothing remarkable about the vehicle itself. He didn’t for a minute think that Michael had lifted the hood and tried to hot-wire it. His patient would be far too frightened at the thought of driving a car to steal one. No, Kohler was intrigued by something else-a small object resting on the ground behind the rear bumper.

The tiny white skull ironically was the exact shade of the car itself. He stepped closer and picked it up, looking carefully at the delicate bones. A tiny fracture ran through the cheek. Trigeminal, he thought spontaneously, recalling the name of the fifth pair of cranial nerves.

Then the skull teetered on the tips of his fingers for an instant and tumbled with a soft crack onto the trunk of the car, rolling into the dust of the shoulder. Kohler remained completely still as the muzzle of the pistol slid along his skin from his temple to his ear, while a fiercely strong hand reached out and fastened itself to his shoulder.