Praying for Sleep

27

On April 15, 1865, Doctor Samuel A. Mudd splinted John Wilkes Booth’s leg and put him to bed in one of the cots that served as a small infirmary in his home office.

Dr. Mudd had an idea who his patient was and what he’d done the night before but the doctor chose not to ride to town and report Booth to the authorities because his wife was afraid to be left alone with the eerie, feverish man and begged him not to go. Mudd got arrested as part of the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and came one vote from being hanged. He was finally released from prison but he died a ruined man.

Michael Hrubek, now reflecting on Mudd’s ordeal, thought: He had a woman to thank for that. Just goes to show.

He also thought a doctor might not be a bad idea right at the moment. His wrist burned wildly; it had slammed into the steering wheel when he drove his car into the conspirator’s truck. It didn’t hurt much but the forearm was glossy, swollen nearly double. From fingers to elbow it was a log of flesh.

As he walked through the rain, however, he grew too excited to worry about his injuries.

For Michael Hrubek was in Oz.

The town of Ridgeton was magical to him. It was the end of his quest. It was the Promised Land and he looked at every strip of pale November grass and every rain-spattered parking meter and mailbox with respect. The storm had darkened most of downtown and the only lights were battery-driven exit and emergency signs. The red rectangles of light added to the mythic quality of the place.

Standing in a booth, he flipped through a soggy phone book and found what he sought. He recited a prayer of gratitude then turned to the map in the front of the book and located Cedar Swamp Road.

Stepping back into the rain Michael hurried north. He passed darkened businesses-a liquor store, a toy store, a pizza restaurant, a Christian Science reading room. Wait. A scientific Jesus Our Lord bless us? Jesus Cry-ist was a physic-ist. Cry-ist was a chem-ist. He laughed at this thought then moved on, catching ghostly images of himself in the plate-glass windows. Some of them were protected by wrinkled sheets of amber plastic. Some were painted black and were undoubtedly used for surveillance. (Michael knew all about one-way mirrors, which could be purchased for $49.95 from Redding Science Supply Company, plus shipping, no COD orders please.)

“‘Good night, ladies,’” he sang as he splashed through a torrent of water in the gutters. “ ‘Good night, ladies…’ ”

The street ended at a three-way intersection. Michael stopped cold and his heart suddenly began to crawl with panic.

Oh, God, which way? Right or left? Cedar Swamp is one way but it is not the other. Which? Left or right?

“Which way?” he bellowed.

Michael understood that if he turned one direction he would get to 43 Cedar Swamp Road and if he turned the other he would not. He looked at the signpost and blinked. And in the very small portion of a second it took to close and open his eyelids, his rational mind seized like an overheated engine. It simply stopped.

Explosions of fear surged through him, so intense that they were visible: black and yellow and orange sparks popped through the streets, caroming off the windows and wet sidewalks. He began a fearful keening and his jaw shook. He sank to his knees, pummeled by voices-the voices of old Abe, of the dying soldiers, of the conspirators…

“Dr. Anne,” he moaned, “why did you leave me? Dr. Anne! I’m so afraid. I don’t know what to do! What should I do?”

Michael hugs the signpost as if it’s his only source of blood and oxygen and he cries in panic, searching his pockets for the pistol. He must kill himself. He has no choice. The panic is too great. Unbearable terror cascades over him. One bullet in the head, like old Abe, and it’ll all be over. He no longer cares about his quest, about betrayal, about Eve, about Lis-bone and revenge. He must end this terrible fear. The gun is here, he can feel its weight, but his hand is shaking too badly to reach into his pocket.

Finally he rips the wool and slips his hand inside the rent cloth, feeling the harsh grip of the pistol.

“I… can’t… STAND… IT! OH, PLEASE!”

He cocks the gun.

The brilliant light swept across his closed eyes, filling his vision with bloody illumination. A voice was speaking, saying words he couldn’t hear. He relaxed his grip on the gun. His head jerked upright and Michael realized that someone was talking to him, not Dr. Anne or the deceased president of the United States or conspirators or good Dr. Mudd.

The voice was that of a scrawny man in his late fifties, sticking his face out of a car window not three feet from where Michael huddled. He apparently hadn’t seen the gun, which Michael now slipped back into his pocket.

“Say, you all right, young man?”

“I…”

“You hurt yourself?”

“My car,” he mumbled. “My car…”

The gray and skinny man was driving a battered old Jeep with a scabby canvas top and vinyl sheets for windows. “You had an accident? And you couldn’t find a phone that worked. Sure, sure. They’re mostly all out. ’Causa the storm. How bad you hurt?”

Michael breathed deeply several times. The panic diminished. “Not bad but my car’s in a state. She wasn’t that good. Not like the old Cadillac.”

“No. Well. Come on, I’ll ride you over to the hospital. You should get looked at.”

“No, no, I’m fine. But I’m turned around. You know where Cedar Swamp is? Cedar Swamp Road, I mean.”

“Sure I do. You live there?”

“People I’m supposed to see. I’m late. And they’ll be worried.”

“Well, I’ll drive you over.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“I think I ought to be taking you to the emergency room what with that wrist of yours.”

“No, just get me to my friends. There’s a doctor there. Dr. Mudd, you know him?”

“Don’t believe I do, no.”

“He’s a good doctor.”

“Well, that’s good. Because that wrist is pretty surely broken.”

“Give me a ride”-Michael stood up slowly-“and I’ll be your friend till your dying day.”

The man hesitated for an uncomfortable moment, then said, “Uh-huh… Well, hop in. Only mind the door. You’re a tall one.”

“Owen’s trying to make it back here to the house,” Lis explained. “I’m sure of it. And I think Hrubek’s chasing him.”

“Why wouldn’t he just go to the station house?” the deputy asked.

“He’s worried about us being here, I’m sure,” Lis said. She said nothing about the real reason that Owen wouldn’t go to the police.

“I don’t know,” the deputy said. “I mean, Stan told me-”

“Look, there’s nothing to talk about,” Lis said. “I’m going out there.”

The deputy objected uneasily, “Well, Lis…”

Portia again echoed his thoughts. “Lis, there’s nothing you can do.”

Heck took off his pitiful baseball cap and scratched his head. When he replaced the hat, he left a forelock of curly hair dipping toward his right eye. He was studying her. “You testified at his trial?”

Lis looked back at him. “I was the chief prosecution witness.”

He was nodding slowly. Finally he said, “I arrested me a fair number of men and testified at their trials. None of them ever came after me.”

Lis looked into Heck’s eyes, which immediately fled to an old Shaker chair. She said, “You were lucky, then, weren’t you?”

“That I was. But it’s pretty, you know, rare for an escapee to come after somebody. Usually they just hightail it out of the state.”

He seemed to want a response but she gave none other than, “Well, Michael Hrubek probably isn’t your typical escapee.”

“No argument from me there.” Heck didn’t continue his line of thought.

Lifting the bright rain slicker from the hook by the door Lis said to her sister, “You stay here. If Owen gets back before I do, honk the horn.”

Portia nodded.

“Uhn, ma’am?”

Lis glanced at Heck.

“That might make you a bit, you know, obvious, don’t you think?”

“How’s that?”

“The, uhn, yellow.”

“Oh, I didn’t think about that.”

Heck lifted away the sou’wester and hung it up. Lis reached for her dark bomber jacket but Heck held up a hand. “Tell you what. I’m thinking let’s don’t any of us go tripping over our own tails here. I know how you feel and everything, him being your husband and all. But I’m speaking as somebody’s done this sort of thing before. I get paid to track people. Let me go out there by myself. No, let me finish. I’ll go out and look for your husband and if he’s anywhere nearby I’ll stand a chance of finding him. Probably a sight better than you. And not only, if you’re wandering around out there too, it’ll just distract me.” His voice was taut, anticipating Lis’s protest.

She guessed his essential motive was the reward. Yet what he said was true. And even if Lis happened to find her husband, she wondered how persuasive she would be in urging him to give up the hunt for Hrubek and return home. He hadn’t listened to her before; why would he now?

“Okay, Trenton,” Lis said.

“What I think we should do is I’ll go out in the woods, toward the front gate. He could climb the fence, of course, but I’ll risk that. He won’t be swimming the lake, not in this wind. That’s for sure.”

Heck then glanced at the deputy. “I’d say you stay closer to the house. Like a second line of defense. Somewhere near here.”

The deputy’s interest was rekindled. He’d done his duty and what more could he say to an ornery woman of the house? Now he had allies and might see some action and glory after all. “I’ll back the car into the bushes over there,” he said excitedly. “How’d that be? I can see the whole of the yard and he won’t catch a glimpse of me.”

Heck told him that was good idea then said to Lis, “I know your husband’s a hunter. Now, you might not feel too comfortable with sidearms but you think maybe you could turn one up for yourself?”

Lis took perverse glee in lifting the pistol from her pocket. She held it, muzzle down, finger outside the trigger guard-just as Owen had solemnly instructed her. Portia was appalled. The deputy guffawed. But Trenton Heck merely nodded with satisfaction as if one more item had been crossed off a checklist. “I’ll leave Emil with you here. Storm’s too fierce even for him. Keep him by you. He’s not an attack dog but he’s big and he’ll make a bushel of noise if someone was to come by uninvited.”

“I don’t have anything darker that’ll fit,” Lis said, nodding at the sou’westers.

“That’s okay. I’m pretty impervious to water. But I’ll take a Baggie for my gun. It’s an old German Walther and rusts easy.”

He slipped the pistol into a bag and tied the end closed, returning the gun to his cowboy holster. He gazed outside and stretched his leg out for a moment, wincing. She supposed that whatever was wrong with his thigh wouldn’t be helped by the rain. The pain seemed quite severe.

The deputy went outside to the car though not before he’d unsnapped the thong of his automatic and circled his fingers around the grip several times like a bad actor in a bad Western. Lis heard the car start. He backed into the bushes halfway between the garage and the house. He could turn on his spotlights and illuminate the entire backyard from where he was parked.

Trenton turned to her and spoke in a low voice. “You know how to use that weapon, I’ll bet, but I don’t suppose you ever did use it, not in a situation like this.” He didn’t wait for confirmation but continued, “What I’d like you to do is shut all the lights out in the house. Sit yourselves away from the windows. I’ll keep my eye on the property as best I can. Flick the lights if you need me and I’ll come running.”

Then without a word to either woman, or his dog, he vanished into the sheets of rain. Lis closed the door behind him.

“Jesus, Lis,” Portia whispered but there were so many things she might be shocked by that her sister had no idea to what she was referring.

Thoughts of his wife are long gone from Dr. Ronald Adler’s mind. The way she tastes, the arc of her thigh, her skin’s texture, the smell of her hair-memories that so occupied him earlier in the evening are wholly absent now.

For Captain Haversham called him not long ago with the news.

“Cloverton,” the trooper growled. “Hrubek just killed a woman. The lid’s off it now, Doc.”

“Oh, my God.” Adler closed his eyes and his heart seemed to fibrillate as he was lanced with the mad thought that Hrubek had committed this crime solely for the purpose of betraying him. He held the phone in quivering hands and heard the trooper explain with ill-concealed fury how Hrubek had murdered a woman and carved her up, then stolen a motorcycle to escape to Boyleston.

“A motorcycle. Carved her up?”

“Cut words on her boobs. And two cops in Gunderson are missing. They were cruising down Route 236 and called in with a report on him. Last we heard. We’re sure he’s killed ’em and dumped the bodies somewhere. Low-security? Harmless? Jesus Christ, man. What were you thinking of? I’ll be in your office in a half hour.” The phone went dead.

Adler is now on his way back to his office from the hospital’s cafeteria, where he had taken Haversham’s dismaying call and where he had then sat, numb, for the next thirty minutes. But the doctor isn’t making very good progress.

Alone in the dark hallway he pauses and spends a moment considering the chain reaction of miraculous physiology that’s now causing his neck hair to stir, his eyes to water, and his genitals to contract alarmingly. And although he’s thinking about the vagus nerve and adrenaline release and synaptic uptake, what’s most salient in his mind is how fucking scared he is.

The corridor is 130 feet long. Twenty doors open off it and all but the last one-his-are closed and dark. Every other bulb in the overhead fixtures has been removed as an economy measure and of those remaining most are burnt out. Three corridors also lead off this one. They too are dark as graves.

Adler looks down the dark hallway and wonders, Why aren’t I walking?

He’s left the elevator alcove and he knows that Haversham is waiting impatiently in his office. Yet here the doctor stands frozen with fear. His arms are weak, his legs too. He squints away an unfunny apparition-a huge pale form that has stuck its head out of a corridor nearby and darted back into hiding.

The patient’s ghostly wailing is displaced by the howl of the wind. It reverberates in Adler’s chest, and he thinks, All right. Enough. Please.

Adler walks five paces. Again he stops-on the pretext of flipping through a file he carries.

It is at this moment that he is struck by the sudden awareness that Michael Hrubek has returned to kill him.

That there’s no logic to this mission doesn’t lessen Adler’s growing panic one bit. He gasps as the elevator, summoned from below, grinds downward. He hears a patient somewhere utter a guttural moan of infinite, inexpressible sorrow. As this sound strokes his neck, he places one foot before the other and doggedly starts walking.

No, no-Michael Hrubek has no need to kill him. Michael Hrubek doesn’t even know him personally. Michael Hrubek couldn’t have made the journey back to the hospital in this short time, even if he did feel like eviscerating the director.

Dr. Ronald Adler the veteran of the state mental-health-hospital system, Dr. Ronald Adler the fair-tomiddlin’ graduate of a provincial medical school-these Dr. Ronald Adlers believe that he’s probably safe.

Yet the man whose head was entwined between his wife’s fragrant legs earlier in the night, the man who mediates board-meeting conflicts far better than he cures madness, the man who now pads down this murky, stone hallway-these Ronald Adlers are paralyzed by the sound of his own gritty footsteps.

Please, don’t let me die.

His office now seems miles away, and he gazes at the white trapezoid of light falling onto the concrete from his open doorway. He continues on, passing one of the arterial corridors, and exhales a fast astonished laugh at his inability to turn and look down it. If he does he will see a Technicolor film clip of Michael Hrubek reaching into Adler’s mouth. The hospital director cannot purge from his thoughts the passages of Hrubek’s transcripts he read earlier in the evening. He recalls in particular detail the patient’s lively discussion of locating and rupturing a spleen.

Enough. Please!

Adler passes by the corridor safely but a new worry intrudes-that he’ll lose control of his bladder. He’s insanely furious at his wife-for gripping his cock earlier in the evening and unwittingly putting in mind the now-consuming fear of incontinence. He must urinate. He absolutely must. But the men’s room is a lengthy way down the corridor he now approaches. The restrooms are dark this time of night. He considers pissing against the wall.

I don’t want to die.

He hears footsteps. No, yes? Whose are they?

The ghosts of one woman and two troopers.

What’s that sound›

Hah, they’re his own feet. Or perhaps not. He pictures the urinal. He turns toward it and begins to walk through the dim hall, and as he does a thought comes to mind: that Michael Hrubek’s escape tugs at everything he’s ever done wrong as a doctor. The escape is the crib sheets that accompanied him into organic-chemistry exams, it’s the charts he misplaced, the misprescribed medications, the aneurysms he forgot to inquire about before dispensing large dosages of Nardil. The madman’s escape is like lifting a twenty-pound line and watching rise from a murky pond some diseased fish snagged by your hook, bloated and near death-a prize you regret ever seeking, a token you wish would forever go away.

“Listen to me, you son of a bitch,” Haversham growled, after he hung up the telephone. His audience-the hospital director and a glazed-eyed Peter Grimes-stared at him numbly. A grating rain fell heavily on the windows of Adler’s office. The wind screamed.

“We just got ourselves another notice,” Haversham continued. “This one’s from Ridgeton. Seems there’s a report somebody crashed into a truck and drove it off the road. Both drivers disappeared into the woods. The truck got hit was registered to Owen Atcheson.”

“Owen-?”

“The husband of that woman testified against Hrubek. The fellow who was here before.”

So now, maybe four dead.

“They know for a fact it was Hrubek who did it?”

“They think. They don’t know. That’s what we need you for.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Adler muttered. He touched his eyes and pushed until he heard soft pops of pressure beneath the lids. “Four dead,” he whispered.

“It’s up to you, Doc. We need to know where to put our resources.”

What was he talking about? Resources?

“No cuddly-pup psychocrap. I want a straight answer. We’ve had two reports-Boyleston and Amtrak, or Ridgeton and that woman testified against him. Where’s he headed?”

Adler gazed at him blankly.

“I think they want to know where to send their men, sir,” Grimes explained delicately.

“That’s the problem, yeah. Two reports. They don’t jibe. Nobody knows jack shit for certain.”

Adler looked from his assistant to the tall cowboy of a trooper and thought: Sleep deprivation, that’s my problem. “Well, the Ridgeton sheriff has men he can send, doesn’t he?”

“Sure he does. Only they got but four in the whole of the department. They sent somebody out to the house so the woman’s safe. But I need to know where to deploy. We gotta catch this boy! I got four Tactical Services troopers ready to go. The rest of the men won’t be available for close to an hour. Where should I send the van? It’s your call.”

“Me? I don’t know the facts,” Adler blurted. “I need facts. I mean, are they sure Hrubek hit Atcheson? Where did he get a car? Was he actually sighted on the motorcycle? We can’t decide anything until we know that. And-”

“You’ve got all the facts there are,” Haversham muttered, gazing steel-eyed at the doctor. “This boy’s been in your care here for four months. Whatever you know about him is all you got to go on.”

“Ask Dick Kohler. He’s Hrubek’s doctor.”

“We would. But we don’t know where he is and he ain’t answering his pager.”

Adler looked up as if to ask, Why me? He leaned forward and pressed his palms together. He chewed compulsively on a red index finger.

Boyleston…

The doctor’s finger left his mouth and traced along the same map on which earlier in the evening he had plotted Michael Hrubek’s capture and Richard Kohler’s downfall.

Ridgeton…

Suddenly his face began to bristle, and nothing in this mad universe was as important to Dr. Ronald Adler as capturing his errant patient. Capturing him alive if possible but if not then putting him on a slab with his meaty toe tagged for burial in potter’s field, lying cold and blue and still.

Oh, let this night be over, he prayed. Let me slip back home and lie against the hot breasts of my wife, let me find sleep under the thick comforters, let this night end with no more deaths.

Adler ripped open Hrubek’s file and leafed frantically through the sheets. They spun out and scattered on his desk. He began to read.

Hrubek, Adler considered, displays classic paranoid-schizophrenic symptoms-thought content illogical, flights of ideas, loose association, pressure of speech and increased motor activities typical of manic episodes, blunted and inappropriate affect…

“No, no, no!” Adler spat out in a whisper, garnering troubled glances from the two men nearby. What, he raged to himself, do these words mean? What is Hrubek doing? What is driving him?

Who is Michael Hrubek?

Adler spun his desk chair and gazed out the rain-spattered window.

Item: Hrubek suffers from auditory hallucinations and his speech is a typical schizophrenic’s word salad. He might have told that truck driver, “Boston,” meaning to say, “Boyleston.”

Item: Revenge, the purported reason for going to Ridgeton, is a common element of paranoid-schizophrenic delusions.

Item: A schizophrenic would shun the circuitous path of getting to Boyleston via Cloverton.

Item: Amtrak runs through Boyleston. Train travel has a far lower stress factor than air travel, and accordingly would be preferred by a psychotic.

Item: Despite being off Thorazine, he is driving a vehicle. Thus Hrubek has, through will or miracle, tamed his anxiety and might make the more arduous and complicated journey south to Boyleston rather than the logistically simpler trip to Ridgeton.

Item: With all his tricks tonight, his false clues and cleverness, Hrubek was displaying astonishing cognitive functionality. He could easily be setting up a feint to Ridgeton, intending all along to go to Boyleston.

Item: But on the other hand he might be so high-functioning that he was double-feinting-appearing to head for Ridgeton when that town was in fact his destination.

Item: He’s capable of unmotivated murder.

Item: Some of his delusions have to do with United States history, politics and government agencies. And several times in his therapy sessions he mentioned Washington, D.C.-a place he could get to via Amtrak.

Item: He has a hatred of women, and he has a rape conviction. He threatened the Atcheson woman several months ago.

Item: He has a fear of confrontation.

Item: He cheeked his medicine, in anticipation of this evening, indicating a long-thought-out plot.

Item… Item… Item…

A thousand facts cascaded though the doctor’s sumptuous mind. Dosages of Haldol and Stelazine, intake-interview observations, milieu-therapy encounters, verbatims of his delusional ramblings, psychopharmacologists’ and social workers’ reports… Adler spun back to confront the files, spearing some sheets of paper beneath his narrow fingers and clutching others randomly. He looked at a page of transcript but he saw instead Michael Hrubek’s face-eyes that revealed no ebullience or lethargy, no affection or contempt, no trust or doubt.

Adler sat very still for a moment. Suddenly, he looked up at the lined, exhausted face of the state trooper and spoke what he devoutly believed to be the truth. “Hrubek’s making for the train station. He’s going to Washington, D.C. Send your troopers to Boyleston. Now!”

The two sisters went about their tasks, combing the house, shutting out lights. They walked in silence, jumping at the noise when there was thunder and at the shadows when there was not. Finally, the house was lit only by ambient light from outside and a few blue up-lamps in the greenhouse, which Lis had left on for the comfort of the faint illumination; she reckoned they’d be invisible from the outside. Shadows fluttered on the walls and floors. Together, they returned to the kitchen and sat side by side on a bench, facing an army of pine and birch trees through the rain-swept backyard.

Five minutes of quiet passed, the rain battering the greenhouse, the wind screaming through the holes and cracks in the old house. Finally Lis was no longer able to keep from speaking. “Portia, there’s something I started to tell you tonight.”

“Earlier?”

“The affair,” Lis whispered discreetly, as if Owen were in the next room.

“I don’t know if this is the time-”

Lis touched her sister’s knee. “This thing’s been between us too long. I can’t stand it anymore.”

“What’s between us? Lis, this isn’t really the time to have a talk. For heaven’s sake.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“Later.”

“No, now!” Lis said heatedly. “Now! If I don’t do it now, I may never.”

“And why’s it so important?”

“Because you have to understand why I said those terrible things to you. And I have to know something from you too. Look at me. Look!”

“Okay, you told me you were seeing somebody. So what? What does Indian Leap have to do with it?”

“Oh, Portia…”

Lis must have unknowingly inhaled a huge lungful of air; her chest stung suddenly and she lowered her forehead to her drawn-up knees to ease the pain. In the turbulent silence that flowed between them Lis felt the pain drift away and she lifted her head again to face her sister. As she was about to speak, a faint, not unpleasant roll of thunder filled the room and as it did Portia’s eyes harrowed with understanding. She said, “Oh, no.”

“Yes,” Lis said. “Yes. My lover was Robert Gillespie.”