Praying for Sleep (36 page)

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 forensic 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 woman 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 uttering 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 "Oh, darkie, how my heart is yearning," which to Michael referred not to a slave but to darkness, specifically at 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.