Praying for Sleep

map, spending more time than he thought normal for a smart man like himself to calculate that he’d be in Bangor by four the next afternoon.
    A young man, the driver wore his Dolphins cap backwards and Nike Pumps on his feet. In the Blaupunkt was a grunge tape, backed up by a half dozen rap and hip-hop cassettes (a secret never to be shared with any blood relation). He climbed out of the cab, pausing long enough to glance in the side mirror with discouragement at the constellation of acne on his cheek, then dropped to the ground. He was halfway to the diner when the voice barked, “Hey, John Driver!”
    The huge man was suddenly next to him, hovering on legs like tree trunks. The driver stopped, astonished, as he looked up into the glistening round face, the spit-flecked grin, the eyes as excited as a kid’s at a ball game.
    “Howdy,” the driver stammered.
    The big man suddenly grew awkward and seemed to look for something to say. “That’s quite a machine, it is,” he offered though he didn’t look toward the truck but kept his eyes fixed downward on the driver.
    “Uhn, thanks. You excuse me, I’m pretty beat and I’m gonna get some chow.”
    “Chow, chow. Sure. It’s lucky seven. See. One, two, three, four, five, six . . .” His arm was making a circuit of the vehicles in the parking lot. “Seven.” The man adjusted the wool tweed cap that was perched on his bowling ball of a head. He seemed bald and the driver wondered if he was a Nazi skinhead. He said, “Lucky,” and laughed too loud.
    “Uh-oh. That’s eight.” The fellow was pointing to another truck just pulling into the lot. His mouth twisted up in a smirking grin. “Always some fucker who ruins it.”
    “That does happen. You bet.” The driver decided he could outrun this bozo but was as troubled by the thought of looking like a fool in front of fellow truckers as he was of getting stomped. “Well. Yessir. G’ night now.” He sidled toward the diner.
    The big man’s eyes flashed with concern. “Wait wait wait! Are you going east, John Driver?”
    The young man looked up into the murky eyes. “That’s not truly my name,” he said cautiously.
    “I’m going to Boston. That’s the home of our country. I really have to get to Boston. ”
    “I’m sorry but I can’t give you a lift. I work for—”
    “A lift?” the man asked with great curiosity. “A lift?”
    “Uhn, I can’t give you a ride ? You know what I’m saying? I work for a company and they’d fire me I was to do that.”
    “No such luck, huh? No such luck?”
    “A rule, I’m saying.”
    “But what am I going to do ?”
    “They don’t like it too much you try for rides in truck stops?” This wasn’t a question but he was too frightened to offer the man a declarative sentence. “You might go up the road a spell and thumb?”
    “Up the road and thumb.”
    “Somebody might pick you up.”
    “Up the road and thumb. I could do that. Can I get to Boston that way?”
    “That intersection up there, see the light? That’s 118, turn left, that’d be north. It’ll get you to the Interstate and that’ll put you in Boston in no time.”
    “Thank you, John Driver. God bless you. Up the road and thumb.”
    The big man started through the lot in a muscular, awkward lope. The driver said a short prayer of thanks—both for surviving this encounter and, equally important, for ending up with a good story to tell to his fellow truckers, one that needed hardly any embellishment at all.
     
    Peter Grimes returned to the hospital director’s office and sat in a desk chair. Adler asked casually, “He did what ?” as if resuming a conversation recently interrupted.
    “I’m sorry?”
    Adler slapped a green file folder. “The nurses’ duty report. Hrubek was authorized to be in C Ward. He had access to the grounds. He just walked right into the morgue. That’s how he got there. He just strolled into the freezer. Oh, Peter, Peter, Peter . . . This is not good.” Adler had conceded the dankness of his office and was now wearing a beige cardigan into whose bottom buttonhole he poked his little finger.
    “And I found out why,” Grimes announced. “He was part of Dick Kohler’s program.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, not the halfway house?”
    “No. Restricted to the grounds here. Milieu Suite and the work program. For some reason he had a job at the farm. Milking cows, or something, I suppose.” The assistant gazed out the black window toward the part of the