Praying for Sleep

22

Seven miles outside of Cloverton, along Route 236, Owen spotted the car parked by the roadside near a stand of evergreens.

Oh, you smart son of a bitch!

He drove past the old Cadillac then abruptly slowed and turned off the road, parking the truck in a cluster of juniper and hemlock.

He’d gambled, and he’d won.

About time, he thought. I’m due for a little luck.

Walking over the grounds at the murder site in Cloverton, Owen had noticed that two of the small barns near the house contained antique autos. He’d slipped inside and looked under the blue Wolf car covers to find an old ’50 Pontiac Chief, a Hudson, a purple Studebaker. In one building, a stall was empty, and the car cover was dropped in a heap on the floor-the only disorder in the entire barn. His inclination was to dismiss the possibility of Hrubek’s stealing such an obvious getaway car. But, remembering the bicycle, Owen yielded to his instincts and, after a search of the ground, he found recent tread marks of a heavy auto leading from the barn, down the driveway and then west on Route 236. Without a word to the Cloverton police he’d left the house and sped not to Boyleston but after the old car.

Now he climbed from the truck and walked back toward the Cadillac, the sound of his passage obscured by the steady rain and sharp slashes of wind. He paused and squinted into the night. Sixty, seventy feet away a large form stood with his back to Owen, urinating on a bush. The man’s bald head was tilted back as he looked up into the sky, staring at the rain. He seemed to be singing or chanting softly.

Owen crouched down, slipping his pistol from his belt. He considered what to do next. When it had seemed that Hrubek was heading for the house in Ridgeton, Owen had planned simply to follow him there and then slip into the house ahead of him. If the madman broke in, Owen would simply shoot him. Maybe he’d slip a knife or crowbar into the man’s hand-to make a tidier scene for the prosecutor. But now Hrubek had a car and it occurred to Owen that maybe Ridgeton wasn’t his destination after all. Maybe he really would turn south and make for Boyleston. Or simply keep going on 236 and drive to New York, or even further west.

Besides, here was his quarry, defenseless, unsuspecting, alone-an opportunity Owen might not have again, wherever Hrubek was ultimately headed.

He made his decision: better to take the man now.

But what about the Cadillac? He could leave his truck here, dump the body in the trunk of the old car then drive it to Ridgeton himself. Once there he’d lug the body inside the house and-

But, no, of course not. The blood. The.357 hollow points would cause a lot of damage. Some forensic technician was sure to examine the Cadillac’s trunk.

After a moment of debate Owen concluded that he’d simply leave the car here. Hrubek was crazy. He’d become scared of driving and had abandoned it, continuing on foot to Ridgeton. It occurred to him too that he probably shouldn’t kill Hrubek here-the coroner might be able to determine that he’d died an hour or so before Owen claimed he had.

He decided that he’d just immobilize Hrubek now-shoot him in the upper arm and in the leg. Owen would lug him into the back of the Cherokee and drive on to Ridgeton.

And there the patient would be found, in the Atchesons’ kitchen. Owen would be sitting in the living room, staring numbly out the window, staggered by the tragedy of it all-having fired two shots to try to stop him and finally a third, a lethal, bullet, when the big man would not heed Owen’s orders to halt.

The blood in the Cherokee? Well, that was a risk. But he’d park it behind the garage. There’d be no reason for any investigators to see it, let alone have a forensics team go through the truck.

He analyzed the plan in detail, deciding that, yes, it was chancy but the risks were acceptable.

Cocking the pistol he made his way closer to the looming shape of Hrubek, who’d now finished his business and was staring up at the turbulent sky, listening to the sharp hiss of the wind in the tips of the pine trees and letting the rain fall into his face.

Owen got no further than five steps toward his prey before he heard the distinctive double snap of a pump shotgun and saw the policeman aim the muzzle at his chest.

“On the ground, freeze!” the young man’s trembling voice called.

“What are you doing?” Owen cried.

“Freeze! Drop your gun! Drop that gun!”

Then Hrubek was running, a thick dark mass fleeing toward the Cadillac.

“I’m not going to tell you again!” the cop’s voice was high with panic.

“You fucking idiot,” Owen yelled, his temper flaring. He stepped toward the cop.

The trooper lifted the shotgun higher. Owen froze and dropped the Smith & Wesson. “Okay, okay!”

The sound of the Cadillac firing to life filled the clearing. As the car sped past them, the trooper glanced in shock at the sound. Owen easily shoved the shotgun muzzle to the side and drove his right fist into the side of the trooper’s face. The young man dropped like deadweight and Owen was on him in a minute, slugging the trooper again and again, anger exploding within him. Gasping, he finally managed to control himself and looked down at the bloody face of the unconscious cop.

“Fuck,” he spat bitterly.

The sudden crack sounded some yards behind him. It seemed like a gunshot and Owen dropped into a crouch, snatching up his pistol. He heard nothing else other than the wind and the drumming of the rain. The distant horizon lit up for a moment with huge sheets of lightning.

He turned back to the cop and handcuffed the man’s wrists behind his back. He then stripped off the regulation patent-leather belt and bound the officer’s feet. He stared in disgust for a moment, wondering if the trooper had gotten a good look at him. Probably not, he concluded. It was too dark; he himself hadn’t seen the cop’s face at all. He’d most likely figure that Hrubek himself had attacked him.

Owen ran back to his truck. He closed his eyes and slammed his fist on the hood. “No!” he shouted at the wet, breezy sky. “No!”

The left front tire was flat.

He bent down and noted that the bullet that had torn through the rubber was from a medium-caliber pistol. A.38 or 9mm probably. As he hurried to get the jack and spare, he realized that in all his plans for this evening this was something that he’d never considered-that Hrubek might be inclined to defend himself.

With a gun.

They stood side by side, holding long-handled shovels, and dug like oyster fishermen beneath the brown water for their crop of gravel. Their arms were in agony from filling and lugging the sandbags earlier in the evening and they could now lift only small scoops of the marble chips, which they then poured around the sunken tires of the car for traction.

Their hair now dark, their faces glossy with the rain, they lifted mound after mound of gravel and listened with some comfort to the murmuring of the car’s engine. From the radio drifted classical music, interrupted by occasional news broadcasts, which seemed to have no relation to reality. One FM announcer-sedated by the sound of his own voice-came on the air and reported that the storm front should hit the area in an hour or two.

“Jesus Christ,” Portia shouted over the pouring rain, “doesn’t he have a window?”

Apart from this, they worked silently.

This is mad, Lis thought, as the wind slung a gallon of rain into her face. Nuts.

Yet for some reason it felt oddly natural to be standing in calf-high water beside her sister, wielding these heavy oak-handled tools. There used to be a large garden on this part of the property-before Father decided to build the garage and had the earth plowed under. For several seasons the L’Auberget girls grew vegetables here. Lis supposed that they might have stood in these very spots, raking up weeds or whacking the firm black dirt with hoes. She remembered stapling seed packets to tongue depressors and sticking them into the earth where they’d planted the seeds the envelopes contained.

“That’ll show the plants what to look like, so they’ll know how to grow,” Lis had explained to Portia, who, being four, bought this logic momentarily. They’d laughed about it afterwards and for some years vegetable pinups had been a private joke between them.

Lis wondered now if Portia too recalled the garden. Maybe, if she did, she would take the memory as proof that going into business with her sister might not be as improbable as it seemed.

“Let’s try it,” she called through the rain, nodding toward the car.

Portia climbed in and, with Lis pushing, eased her foot delicately to the gas. The car budged an inch or two. But it sank down into the mud almost immediately. Portia shook her head and got out. “I could feel it. We’re close. Just a little more.”

The rain pours as they resume shoveling.

Lis glances toward her sister and sees her starkly outlined against a flare of lightning in the west. She finds herself thinking not about gravel or mud or Japanese cars but about this young woman. About how Portia moved to a tough town, how she learned to talk tough and to gaze back at you sultry and defiant, wearing her costumes, her miniskirts and tulle and nose rings, how she glories in the role of the urbane femme lover.

And yet… Lis has her doubts…

Tonight, for instance, Portia didn’t really seem at ease until she discarded the frou-frou clothes, ditched the weird jewelry and pulled on baggy jeans and a high-necked sweater.

And the boyfriends?… Stu, Randy, Lee, a hundred others. For all her talk of independence, Portia often seems no more than a reflection of the man she is, or isn’t, with-precisely the type of obsolete, noxious relationship that she enthusiastically denounces. The fact is she never really likes these excessively handsome, bedroom-eyed boys very much. When they leave her-as they invariably do-she mourns briefly then heads out to catch herself a fresh one.

And so Lisbonne Atcheson is left to wonder, as she has frequently, who her sister really is. Is she truly the stranger she seems?

Lis just doesn’t know. But she’s decided to find out. If not through the nursery business, then in some other way. For a thought occurred to her recently-not long after Indian Leap, in fact. A thought she just can’t shake: that the only way the dark heritage of the L’Aubergets can be redeemed-if it can be redeemed at all-is through the two surviving members of the family.

These two, together.

She can’t say exactly why she wants this reconciliation. But nonetheless Lis feels, inexplicably, that this is something she must try. As a student told her last week, after she caught him cheating, “Hey, you play the odds.”

They sling more gravel, as the rain falls heavily in thick dashes through the car’s white headlight beams. Then the stuffy announcer fades in to tell his listeners that coming up next will be Handel’s Water Music. He’s apparently oblivious to the joke, and moves on to other news, while the sisters look at each other for an instant, and laugh, then return to their task.

The Cadillac raced down the highway amid the sticky rush of thick tires on wet asphalt and the hum of the grand engine’s eight calm cylinders.

Michael Hrubek was still anxious from the run-in with the conspirators twenty minutes before. The fuckers! He’d escaped, yes, but his hands quivered violently and his heart pounded. His mind kept slipping off track, and he’d forget where he was and what he was doing. The echo of the gun’s loud crack, the memory of the feel as it jumped in his hand, were prominent in his thoughts.

“Cadillac,” he sang frantically, “hard tack, sic semper tyran-ak… Dr. Anne, won’t you come back?”

After the death of Dr. Anne Muller, Michael began to wander. He occasionally spent time in state hospitals but lived mostly on the street, surviving on cheese sandwiches from social workers and scrounging through Dumpsters outside restaurants. He was ravaged by anxiety and paranoia though the latter condition had a positive consequence: fearing drugs, all of which he believed to be poisonous, he remained uninfected by AIDS, hepatitis and other serious illnesses.

After several months in the Northeast he meandered south to Washington, D.C., intending to apologize for his past crimes to Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant or the current President, whomever he met first. He managed to get to the White House gate and knocked on the door of the guard’s station.

“It’s vital that I talk to you about this assassination business, John Guard. It’s vital!”

Picked up, bang, by the Secret Service.

“That was stupid,” he told himself glumly as he waited in an interrogation room somewhere in the Treasury Department. “Shouldn’t’ve done that.”

But he wasn’t tortured as he’d expected. He was simply asked a series of what he called mind-messing questions and released after two hours. He knew that during the session the agents had somehow planted a tracking device in his body and he threw himself in the reflecting pool of the Washington Monument to short out the battery. He felt better after this dip and moved into Arlington National Cemetery, where he lived for a month.

Finally he grew bored with the capital and wandered back north, looking for his father. After a month of sporadic searching Michael believed he found his family’s house in an old neighborhood of Philadelphia. He walked through the unlocked front door to see if anyone was home. Someone was, though it turned out to be not his father but the wife of a police detective.

Picked up, bang, for that one too.

Released the next day he hiked all the way to Gettysburg and lay in the middle of the battlefield, howling in shame for his role in ending the life of the greatest President the United States had ever known.

Picked up, bang.

Phillie, Newark, Princeton, New York, White Plains, Bridgeport, Hartford.

That was Michael’s life: hospitals and the street. He slept in boxes, he bathed in rivers when he bathed, and he wandered purposefully. Every day was an intense experience. He saw truths with a piercing clarity. There were truths everywhere! Raw and painful truths. In red cars zipping down the street, in the motion of a tugboat easing into a slip, in the part of a teenage boy’s hair, in a symmetrical display of watches in a jewelry-store window. He considered each of these revelations, always wondering if it might ease the burden of his anxiety and fear.

Did it say something to him? Did it offer solace?

Michael met people in his wanderings and they sometimes took to him. If he was clean and was wearing clothing recently given to him by a priest or social worker, someone might sit beside him on a park bench as he read a book. With a Penguin Classic in your hand, you were easily forgiven rumpled clothes and a short stubble of beard. Like any businessman out on a fine Sunday afternoon, Michael would cross his legs, revealing sockless ankles in brown loafers. He’d smile and nod and, avoiding the subjects of murder, rape and the Secret Service, talk only about what he saw in front of him: sparrows bathing in spring dust, trees, children playing flag football. He had conversations with men who might have been chief executives of huge corporations.

This nomadic life finally came to an unpleasant end in January of this year when he was arrested and charged with breaking into a store in a small, affluent town fifty miles south of Ridgeton. He’d shattered the window and torn apart a female mannequin. He was examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist, who believed there were sexual overtones to the vandalism and declared him violently psychotic. Giving his name as Michael W. Booth he was involuntarily committed and sent to Cooperstown State Mental Hospital.

There, even before an intake diagnostic interview, Michael was shuttled into the Hard Ward.

Still in a restraint camisole he was deposited in a cold, dark room, where he remained for three hours before the door opened and a man entered. A man bigger even than Michael himself.

“Who’re you?” Michael challenged. “Are you John Wilkes Orderly? Do you work for the government? I’ve been to Washington, D.C., the capital of this great country. Who the hell do you-”

“Shut the fuck up.” John Orderly slammed him into the wall and then shoved him to the floor. “Don’t scream, don’t shout, don’t talk back. Just shut the fuck up and relax.”

Michael had shut the fuck up but he hadn’t relaxed. Nobody relaxed at Cooperstown. This was a place where patients simply gave up, surrendering to their madness. Michael spent much time sitting by himself, looking out windows, jiggling his legs with nervous energy, repeatedly muttering a single song-“Old Folks at Home.” The staff psychologist who spent about seven minutes a week with Michael never pursued this compulsion but if he had he’d have found that the old Stephen Foster song contained the line “Oh, darkie, how my heart is yearning,” which to Michael referred not to a slave but to darkness, specifically night. Night brought the hope of sleep, and sleep was the only time when he was at peace in this terrible place.

Cooperstown-where nurses would put two women patients in a room together with a single, oiled Coke bottle and watch from the door.

Cooperstown-where John Orderly would bend Michael over the tin washbasin and press into him again and again, the pain crying up through his ass into his jaw and face, the cold metal of the orderly’s keys bouncing on the patient’s thigh and matching the rhythm of his thrusts.

Cooperstown -where Michael slipped far, far from reality and came to believe with certainty that he was living in the time of the Civil War. In his month on the Hard Ward Michael had access to only one book. It was about reincarnation and after reading it a dozen times, he understood how he could in fact be John Wilkes Booth. He carried Booth’s soul around with him! The spirit had flown from the old wounded body and circled for a hundred years. It alighted upon the head of Michael’s mother just as the baby struggled out of her, leaving the red marks on her stomach that she had told him were his fault but not to worry about.

Yes, within him was the soul of Mr. John Wilkes Booth, a fair actor but a damn good killer.

One day in March of this year, John Orderly took Michael by the arm and pushed him into Suzie’s room. He slammed the door shut and aimed the video camera through the window.

They were alone, Michael and this twenty-four-year-old patient, on whose pretty face was only one blemish-a tiny indentation of scar in the middle of her forehead. Suzie looked at Michael carefully with her sunken eyes. She was someone whose only earthly power was in knowing what was expected of her. She observed that Michael was a man and immediately hiked her skirt over bulging thighs. Down went her panties and she rolled onto her hands and knees.

And Michael, knowing that John Orderly was just outside the door, also knew what to do-exactly the same. Pants down, on his hands and knees. Here they remained, butts bare to the world, while John Orderly fled down the hallway when a doctor unexpectedly happened by. The psychiatrist glanced inside the room and opened the door. He inquired what the patients were doing.

Michael answered, “Waiting for John Orderly. I’m ready for him and so is she. Make no mistake. Like all men of medicine, John Orderly’s got a very big cock.”

“Oh, my God.”

The investigation resulted in the dismissal of five orderlies, two nurses and two doctors from Cooperstown. Michael, however, never learned John Orderly’s fate because as one of the most victimized patients he was immediately transferred out of the Hard Ward into the voluntary-commitment section of the hospital. “Due to stabilization of his condition,” the report said. “Prognosis for improvement: fair to good.” In fact Michael was far sicker than when he’d been admitted but the administrators wanted to isolate him from the questioning reporters and state mental-health examiners who descended on the hospital to investigate what one newspaper dubbed “Psycho Ward Atrocities.”

Reforms were instituted, the reporters went elsewhere for their stories, and Cooperstown fell from the public eye-just as Michael himself was largely forgotten within the halls of the hospital.

A month after the scandal he was still a resident of the Cooperstown Soft Ward. One weekend he found himself unusually agitated. On Saturday evening the anxiety increased to massive proportions and he began to feel the walls of his room closing in on him. Breathing grew difficult. He suspected the Secret Service was behind this; agents frequently bombarded him with beams that electrified his nerves.

Michael didn’t know that his anxiety was due not to the federal government but to something much simpler: his medication instructions had been misplaced and he’d received no Haldol for four days.

Finally in desperation he decided to find the one person in his recent memory who might help him. He had, he recalled, accused Dr. Anne of being a conspirator and had even announced on hundreds of occasions that he was happy she was dead. He decided that the only way to find relief was to retract his cruel pronouncements and apologize to her. He spent the night plotting his escape from Cooperstown, a plan that involved diversionary fires and costumes and disguises. The elaborate scheme proved unnecessary, however, because on Sunday morning he simply dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and walked out the front gate of the hospital, right past a guard unaware that he was a Hard Ward patient in the Soft Ward wing.

Michael had no idea exactly where Dr. Anne might be. But he knew Trevor Hill was in the southern part of the state and that was the direction in which he started to jog that spring morning. Soon he became lost in a tangle of country roads and the more lost he became, the greater was his anxiety. Panic crawled over his skin like hives. At times he took to sprinting, as if fear were an animal snapping at his heels. Other times he hid in bushes until he felt unseen pursuers pass him by. Once, he summoned up his courage and climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck, on which he rode for an hour, hiding under the canvas tarps, until the driver stopped at a roadside diner. Noticing that there were four trucks parked in the lot and fearing this very unlucky number, Michael leapt off and escaped down a nearby country lane.

Around noon he found himself in the middle of a large parking lot. He paused, caught his breath and walked through the lot toward a row of trees, nauseous with anxiety. He ran through the lot and disappeared into the bushes just beyond the large wooden sign. He glanced at the words that were carved into it as if by a huge wood-burning iron.

Welcome to Indian Leap State Park

Michael Hrubek thought of that day now, six months later, as he steered his black Cadillac over the crest of a hill on Route 236. He saw before him a long smooth straightaway sailing into a distance filled with flashes of lightning and the soft glow of lights that perhaps were those of Ridgeton. He cringed as rain clattered on the roof and windshield.

“Betrayal,” he muttered. Then he repeated the word, bellowing. He was scalded with anxiety. “Eve of betrayal! Fuckers!”

In an instant his pulse rate leapt to 175 and sweat sprung from his pores. His teeth clattered like galloping hooves on concrete. His mind snapped shut. He forgot GET TO, he forgot Lis-bone, he forgot Eve, the conspirators and Dr. Anne and Dr. Richard… He forgot everything but the icy clutch of fear.

His hands quavered on the steering wheel. He gazed at the Cadillac’s hood with shock-as if he’d suddenly awakened and found himself riding a rampaging bull.

I’ll fight this, he thought. God, please help me fight this! He lowered his head and chewed on his inner cheek. He tasted blood. I will fight it!

And for a very brief moment he did.

For a very brief moment he gripped the ivory wheel firmly and forced the car back into the right lane of the highway.

For this brief moment Michael Hrubek was not a maladroit lunatic, a host holding an ancient killer’s soul. He was not driven by unbearable guilt. Abraham Lincoln was merely a great, sad figure from history whose face graced copper pennies, and Michael himself was just a big, strong, young man filled with much promise, driving a gaudy old car down a country road, scared to death, yes, but more or less in charge of himself.

And then this delusion vanished.

He could fight it no longer. He lost all conception of the controls and it was the pedal on the right upon which he stamped his huge foot in an effort to stop the skid. He covered his eyes, howled a plea for help and kept his foot to the floorboard as the car disappeared into a low stand of juniper and began turning over and over and over.