Praying for Sleep

by Deaver, Jeffrey

  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 anxiet
y. 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.

  23

  You’ve got this thing to do ahead of you. . . .

  Owen Atcheson remembered his platoon lieutenant looking steel-eyed and crazed from hits of local funny-dust but sounding calm as a college professor. “You’ve got this thing ahead of you, and you’ve got to go out and meet it. . . .”

  Owen and three other Marines more often than not rolled their eyes at this pep talk. But, inspired by it nonetheless, they then clipped on their gear and blackened their faces and disappeared into the jungle to cut the throats of thin soldiers or murder politicians with silenced pistols or rig gelignite and C4 satchel charges.

  Owen thought of those times now—as he stood on the ridge of a hill, looking at the antique Cadillac that sat upright, its roof half-staved in and windows spidered with fractures, one parking lamp the only light that had survived the crash. He opened the cylinder of his gun. He’d owned revolvers all his life and, fastidious about safety, had always kept the chamber under the hammer empty. He now loaded a sixth shell into the gun and swung the cylinder closed. He started toward the car. The incline was steep and Owen needed one hand to steady himself as he climbed down to a low hedge.

  He felt a stunning exhilaration and told himself that he shouldn’t be enjoying this so much. The thrill diminished when he recalled that Hrubek was armed and saw that there was no way to approach the car under cover. It had crashed through a line of juniper and tumbled for thirty feet into the center of a grassy clearing.

  The rain wasn’t heavy and the wind was subdued; his approach would be noisy. And Hrubek—assuming his injuries hadn’t prevented him from doing so—had also had plenty of time to establish a defensive position. Owen considered tactics for a moment then decided not to bother with a cautious approach. He clutched the gun hard, inhaled long then ran at top speed, ready to aim and shoot from a tumbling position. As he sped across the grass, a primitive howl bubbled in his throat and he suppressed the urge to let this grow into the Marines’ battle cry.

  He charged the car straight on and slid into the grass like a runner stealing home, ending up behind the rear bumper. The muddy leaves scattered by his run settled around him and he looked about frantically. The rear windshield was less obscured than the others but he still was unable to tell if Hrubek was inside. He crouched, using the trunk as cover, and looked behind the car.

  Nothing.

  He moved toward the rear door. . . .

  Underneath!

  Owen dropped to his stomach with a grunt and aimed the gun under the car. A shattered pipe hung like an arm and startled him but Hrubek wasn’t hiding there. He stood and breathed deeply several times then switched his gun to his left hand and yanked the car’s right rear door open.

  Empty. The Cadillac held no evidence of Michael Hrubek other than a smell of animallike musk and sweat and fragments of shattered animal skulls—like the one Hrubek had left on the woman’s lap in the house in Cloverton. The keys were in the ignition.

  Owen stood and looked around him. The spongy leaves had left no footprints and there was no sign of blood or other trail. Owen stepped behind the Cadillac and turned his back to it as he scanned the vast forest, damp and gray and dark. His heart fell. He knew how hard it was to track on wet leaves and through dark woods. And after an accident this bad Hrubek might be disoriented or stunned and could wander pointlessly in any direction. He might—

  The trunk!

  Owen cocked the gun and spun on his heels, aiming at the broad dented plain of metal—a perfect hiding place. The trunk was secured by a keyhole button but—since the Caddie was an older car—it did not automatically lock. Owen approached. He touched the cold chrome latch, pushed it in. The mechanism snapped open. He pulled the lid up and leapt back.

  The spacious trunk had ample room for someone as large as Michael Hrubek. But it did not in fact contain him.

  Owen turned toward the forest and in a crouch ran to the closest opening in the tall fence of brush and trees. In an instant he was swallowed up by the cold darkness around him. He shone his shielded flashlight on the ground in a slow U pattern. After ten minutes he found two of Hrubek’s boot prints. They led deeper into the forest. He smelled pine in the damp air. The psycho might have headed out of the deciduous trees and Owen would find a clear trail in pine needles. He had proceeded only thirty feet when he heard a thud and a snap nearby—a careless footstep, it seemed.

  He aimed his pistol toward the sound.

  Owen gauged his footsteps perfectly and placed them on foliage-free ground, making no noise as he moved. He crouched, pistol in front of him, and stepped onto the bed of fragrant needles.

  The man was sitting on a fallen tree trunk and massaging his outstretched leg, as if taking a break on a Sunday-afternoon hike.

  “Looks like we just missed him,” the lanky man in a New York Mets cap said to Owen, looking up without a trace of surprise in his face. “So you’re the other bounty hunter. Guess we got a few things to talk about.”

  The woman was thirty-six years old and had lived in this prim little bungalow all her life, the past six of those years, after her mother’s death, alone. She hadn’t seen her father since the
day the old man got his other daughter pregnant, was arrested for it and taken away. One week after the trial the sister too moved away.

  The woman’s life consisted of filling cartons with electronic circuit boards that did something she had no desire to understand, of lunch with one or two fellow workers, sewing, and—for entertainment—church and the newspaper on the day of rest, and television on the other six.

  The house was an island of caution and simplicity in a grassy clearing carved out of what had been one of the oldest forests in the Northeast. The half acre of grass was almost a perfect circle and was marred only by a rusted hull of a pickup that would never go anywhere under its own power and a doorless refrigerator her father had been meaning to cart to the dump one Saturday morning ten years ago when he chose instead to pay a visit to his daughter’s bedroom.

  Blonde, thin and fragile, the woman had a plain face and a good figure though on the rare occasions when she and a few girlfriends went to the rocky beach at Indian Leap or the riverside at Klamath Falls, she would wear a high-necked swimsuit that she’d bought mail-order so she wouldn’t have to try it on in a store. She dated some—mostly men she met at church—though she rarely enjoyed the outings and had recently started to think of herself, with some comfort, as a spinster.

  Tonight she’d just finished preparing a bedtime snack of Jell-O with mandarin oranges and a cup of hot milk, when she heard the noise in the yard. She walked to the window and saw nothing other than blowing leaves and rain then returned to the maple dining table.

  She sat down, said grace and put her napkin in her lap then lifted a spoonful of Jell-O as she opened TV Guide.

  The knocking on the front door seemed to shake the whole house. The spoon fell to the table and the gelatin-cube wobbled off her lap then escaped onto the floor. She stood abruptly and shouted, “Yes, who is it?”