Praying for Sleep

belly, he thought, and let him die like a battlefield soldier, slowly, with a gut wound from a .54 Minié ball.
    . . . for I love the bonnie blue boy who gave his life for me. . . .
    The footsteps came closer. The beam from a tiny flashlight swept the ground, lit a patch of grass two feet from his foot, then moved on. Hrubek held the gun close to his face. He smelled oil and metal. As he gazed back into the clearing, a dreadful thought came into his mind: What if this wasn’t an impostor. Maybe this really was Dr. Richard. Maybe he was a conspirator too! Maybe he’d been a traitor all along. From the first fucking day they’d met. Four months of betrayal!
    “I’ve been looking all over for you. I want to give you some medicine. It’ll make you feel better.”
    How do you feel better when you’re dead? Hrubek responded silently. How does poison make you feel better? If I were a bettor, I’d say you were a bad bet, you fucker.
    The conspirator was ten feet away. Hrubek’s right hand began to shake as it gripped the gun, which was pointed directly at the belly of Dr. Richard the betrayer (or John Conspirator the impostor).
    “I’m your last chance. There are people who want to hurt you. . . .”
    Well, I knew that all along. You’re telling me something new? How’d you like to be in the news? CNN can do a story about your blown-up guts. He pulled the hammer back. The click was very soft but inexplicably it released in Hrubek a flood of fear. He began to quiver. The gun slipped from his hand and he remained paralyzed for a long moment. Finally his vision grew blacker than the black forest around him and his mind froze, seated like a hot drill bit in oak.
    When he opened his eyes again and was aware of his surroundings, some minutes had passed. The air felt colder, more oppressive, heavy with moisture. The conspirator was gone, his car too. Hrubek found the gun and lowered the hammer carefully, then stowed the weapon in his bag. As he rose to his feet, dazed and discomfited, and started jogging through the night once more, Hrubek wondered whether the entire incident had been just a dream. But he concluded that even if it hadn’t been real the apparition was certainly a message from God: to remind him that tonight he could trust no one, not even those who were—or who pretended to be—his closest friends on earth.

11
    She called it the Berlin Wall.
    A six-foot-high stockade fence of gray cedar, surrounding most of the four acres of the L’Auberget estate. Lis now walked along a stretch of this fence on her way to the dam. To enclose the property had cost Andrew L’Auberget eighteen thousand dollars (and they’d been 1968 dollars, no less). But despite the price he was adamant about the barricade. Lis jokingly named it after the German barrier (the reference shared only with Portia and friends, never with her father) though the man’s concern hadn’t been the Red Peril. Terrorist kidnappings were his main fear.
    He’d become convinced that he, as a successful businessman with several European partnerships, was targeted. God damn Basques,” he railed. “Goddamn them! And they know all about me. The SDS, the Black Panthers! I’m in Who’s Who in American Business. There for the whole world to see! Where I live! My children’s names! They could read your name, Lisbonne. Remember what I told you about answering the door? Tell me what you’d do if you saw a Negro walking around outside the gate. Tell me!”
    The fence, even Lis the naïve child supposed, was easily breachable and less a deterrent to the bad guys than an inconvenience to the family, who had to walk three-quarters of a mile around it if they wanted to go for walks in the woods across Cedar Swamp Road. But like the builders of its namesake, L’Auberget’s purpose seemed only partially to keep the enemy out; he also wanted to restrain his own citizenry. “I will not have the children wandering off. They’re girls, for God’s sake!” Lis had often heard this declaration, or variations on it.
    As she walked along tonight Lis reflected with some irony that while its German counterpart was now dust, Andrew L’Auberget’s cedar folly was still as strong as ever. She noticed too that if the water did overflow the dam, the fence would make a perfect sluice, preventing any flood from spilling off the property into the woods and directing it straight to the house.
    She now approached the beach—a small crescent of dark sand. Just beyond