Praying for Sleep

surplus there was at local markets. At first he was suspicious of his supervisors. Yet he never once had a panic attack. He showed up for work on time and was usually the last to leave. Eventually he settled into the job—shoveling manure, lugging sledgehammers, fence stretchers and staples from fence post to fence post, carting milk pails. The only times you’d suspect he wasn’t your average farm boy was when he’d use white fence paint on Herefords to even up markings he found unpleasant or scary.
    Still, as soon as he was told not to paint the cows, he shamefacedly complied.
    Michael Hrubek, who’d never in his life earned a penny of his own money, was suddenly making $3.80 an hour. He was having dinner in the hospital cafeteria with friends and washing dishes afterwards, he was writing a long poem about the Battle of Bull Run, and he was an integral part of Kohler’s delusion-therapy program, not to mention the cover boy of his proposal to the State Department of Mental Health.
    And now, Kohler reflected sorrowfully, he was a dangerous escapee.
    Oh, where are you, Michael, with your broken eyes?
    One thing he was convinced of: Michael was en route to Ridgeton. The visit with Lis Atcheson had been doubly helpful. Partly for what it revealed about Michael’s delusion. But also for what it revealed about her. She’d lied to him, that was clear. He’d tried to deduce exactly where her story about Indian Leap deviated from the truth. But she seemed to be a woman used to living with secrets, with feelings unexpressed, passions hidden, and so he hadn’t been able to spot the lie. Yet Kohler felt that whatever she wasn’t telling him was significant—very likely significant enough to prod Michael out of the haze of his deluded but secure life and urge him to make this terrifying journey through the night.
    Oh, yes, he was on his way to Ridgeton.
    And here waiting for him, huddled in the driving rain, was Richard Kohler, a man willing to bribe bounty hunters with thousands of dollars he could scarcely afford, to troop through hostile wilderness, to track down and meet his edgy and dangerous patient all by himself and spirit him back to the hospital—for Michael’s sake and the sake of the thousands of other patients Kohler hoped to treat during his lifetime.
    The doctor now gazed over the spacious parking lot and drew his black overcoat about him in a futile effort to ward off the heavy rain and gusts of wind. He opened his backpack and lifted out the sturdy metal syringe then filled the reservoir with a large dosage of anesthetic. He flicked the bubbles to the top and fired a small spurt into the air to expel them. Then he leaned back, his face pelted with rain, and he looked up once more at the perpetual motion of the sign above his head.

25
    “Look at this!”
    A mile down the road Michael rounded a curve and barked a sudden laugh. He calmly recalled which pedal was the brake and he pressed it gently, slowing to ten miles an hour.
    “Look!” He leaned forward, his head almost to the windshield, and gazed into the sky, filled with rain that reflected red, white and blue lights in a million spatters.
    “Oh, God, what could this mean ?” His skin hummed with emotion and upon his face a vast grin was spreading. Michael pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the Subaru. He stepped out into the rain and, as if in a trance, began walking through the parking lot, his John Worker boots scraping on the asphalt. He paused at the base of the shrine and stood with his hands clasped before him, reverently, staring up into the sky. He dug into his backpack and observed that he had two skulls left. He selected the one in worse condition—it was cracked in several places—and set it at the base of the sign.
    The voice came from nearby. “Hello, Michael.”
    The young man wasn’t startled in the least. “Hello, Dr. Richard.”
    The thin man sat on the hood of a white car, one of fifty, all in a row. Doesn’t he look small, doesn’t he look wet? Michael thought, reminded once again of the raccoon he’d killed earlier in the evening. Such little things, both of them.
    Dr. Richard scooted off the Taurus. Michael glanced at him but his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the radiant sign revolving above their heads.
    Michael ignored the middle portion of the sign, noting only that the word MERCURY was bloody red. What he stared at were the two words in blue, Union-soldier blue: On the top, FORD. On the bottom,