Praying for Sleep

couple of small-bore targets (center-riddled with tight groupings).
    Because he was feeling sorry for himself he read the foreclosure notice again. Heck opened the blue-backed paper and laughed bitterly as he thought, Damn, that bank moves fast. The auction was a week from Saturday. Heck had to vacate the Friday before. That part was as unpleasant to read as the next paragraph—the one explaining that the bank was entitled to sue him for the difference between what they made by selling his property in the foreclosure and the amount he still owed.
    “Damn!” His palm crashed down. Emil jumped. “God damn them! They’re taking everything!”
    How, he thought bitterly, can I owe more than what I bought with the money they lent me? Yet he knew some things about the law and supposed that suing him for this sum was well within their rights as long as they gave him notice.
    Trenton Heck knew how fast and bad you could ruin a man’s life as long as you gave him notice first.
    He figured he could live without the trailer. The worse tragedy—what hurt him like a broken bone—was losing the land. The trailer had always been intended as a temporary residence at best. Heck had bought these acres—half pine forest and half low grass—with some money an aunt had left him. The first time he’d seen the property he knew he had to own it. The thick, fragrant woods giving way to yellow-green hills gently sloped like a young girl’s back. A wide stream slicing off the corner of the property, no good for fishing but wonderful just for sitting beside as you listened to the water gush over smooth rocks.
    And so he’d bought it. He hadn’t asked the advice of his sensible father, or his temperamental fiancée, Jill. He went to the bank, horrified at the thought of depleting a savings account larger than any he’d ever possessed in his life, and put the money down. He walked away from the office of a surly lawyer the owner of four and seven-eighths acres of land that featured no driveway, well or septic tank.
    Or a dwelling either.
    Unable to afford a house, Heck bought a trailer. He’d allowed Jill a part in that decision, and the young waitress—born never to be cheated—had slugged walls and measured closets and interrogated salesmen about BTUs and insulation before insisting that they buy the big one, the fancy one, the Danger—Wide Load trailer (“You owe me it, Trenton”). The dealer’s men eased the long vehicle onto the pinnacle of the prettiest hill on the property, right next to the spot where he planned to build his dream split-level.
    These hopes of construction he believed could be achieved as easily as he’d built his hundred-yard driveway: easing his pickup back and forth between the trailer and the road fifty times. But the savings he’d planned to replenish never materialized, and therefore neither did the house. Finally it came to the point where he could no longer afford the trailer either. When the first overdue notices arrived, Heck recalled to his dismay that the bank had loaned for the trailer on condition it take back a mortgage on the land as well—all his beautiful acreage.
    The same land that as of a week from Saturday was going to be somebody else’s.
    Heck folded the papers and stuffed them behind a statement from the veterinarian. He walked to the plate-glass picture window, which faced west, the direction the storm would be coming from in just a few hours. In the truck, on the drive back home, he’d heard several announcements about the storm. One of them reported that a twister had cut a swath through a trailer park in a town seventy miles west of here. There’d been no deaths but several injuries and a great deal of damage.
    Hearing this newscast, just as he happened to click on the old radio, seemed to Heck a bad omen. Would his trailer survive intact? he wondered, then whispered, “And what the hell does it matter?” He picked up a roll of masking tape and peeled off a long strip. He laid down one long diagonal of an X. He started to do the cross strip, then paused and flung the tape across the room.
    Walking into the bedroom he sat on the spongy double bed. He imagined himself explaining this whole matter to Jill—the foreclosure, the lawsuit—although he often grew distracted because when he pictured this conversation he pictured it very explicitly and couldn’t help but notice that his ex was wearing a hot-pink peekaboo nightgown.
    Heck continued to speak to her for a few