Praying for Sleep

minutes then became embarrassed at the unilateral dialogue. He lay back on the bed, gazing at the roiling clouds, and began another silent conversation—this time not with Jill but with Heck’s own father, who at this moment was many miles away, presumably asleep, in a big colonial house that he’d owned for twenty years, no mortgage, free and clear. Trenton Heck was saying to him, It’s just for a little while, Dad. Maybe a month or so. It’ll help me get my life together. My old room’ll be fine. Just fine.
    Oh, those words sounded flat. They sounded like the excuses offered by the red-handed burglars and joyriders Heck used to nab. And in response his father glanced down the long nose that Heck was grateful he hadn’t inherited and said, “For as long as you like, son, sure,” though he was really saying: “I knew all along you couldn’t handle it. I knew it when you married that blonde, not a woman like your mother, I knew . . . .” The old man didn’t tell his son the story about the time he was laid off from the ironworks in ’59 then got himself together and started his own dealership and made himself a comfortable living though it was tough. . . . He didn’t have to, because the story’d been told—a dozen times, a hundred—and was sitting right there, perched in front of their similar but very different faces.
    Times aren’t what they were, Heck thought as he nodded his flushed thanks. Though he was also thinking, I’m just not like you, Dad, and that’s the long and the short of it.
    He took a swig of beer he didn’t really want and wished that Jill were back. He imagined the two of them packing boxes together, looking forward to a joint move.
    A truck horn sounded in the distance, an eerie carrying wail, and he thought of the lonely whippoorwill in the old Hank Williams song.
    Oh, come on, he thought, rain like a son of a bitch. Heck loved the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the trailer. Nothing sent him off to sleep better. If I ain’t going to get my reward money, at least give me a good night’s sleep.
    Trenton Heck closed his eyes, and, as he began to doze, he heard the truck’s plaintive horn wail once more in the distance.

12
    Owen Atcheson knew the harrowing logic of cornered animals and he understood the cold strategy of instinct that flowed like blood through the body of both hunter and prey.
    He would stand motionless for hours, in icy marshes, so still that a drake or goose would pulse carelessly thirty feet above his head and die instantly in the shattering explosion from Owen’s long ten-gauge. He’d move silently—almost invisibly—inches at a time, along rock faces to ease downwind of a deer and without using a telescopic sight place a .30 slug through the relaxed shoulder and strong heart of the buck.
    When he was a boy he’d doggedly follow fox paths and set dull metal traps exactly where the lithe blond animals would pass. He’d smell their musk, he’d see the hint of their passage in the grass and weeds. He’d collect their broken bodies and if one chewed through the stake line he’d track it for miles—not just to recover the trap but to kill the suffering animal, which he did almost ceremoniously; pain, in Owen Atcheson’s philosophy, was weakness, but death was strength.
    He’d killed men too. Picked them off calmly, efficiently, with his black M-16, the empty bullet casings cartwheeling through the air and ringing as they landed. (For him, the jangle of spent shells had been the most distinctive sound of the war, much more evocative than the oddly quiet cracks of the gunfire itself.) They charged at him like children playing soldier, these men and women, working the long bolts of their ancient guns, and he’d picked them off, ring, ring, ring.
    But Michael Hrubek wasn’t an animal driven by instinct. He wasn’t a soldier propelled by battle frenzy and love—or fear—of country.
    Yet what was he?
    Owen Atcheson simply didn’t know.
    Driving slowly along Route 236 near Stinson, he looked about for a roadside store or gas station that might have a phone. He wanted to call Lis. But this was a deserted part of the county. He could see no lights except those from distant houses clinging to a hilltop miles away. He continued down the road several hundred yards to a place where the shoulder widened. Here he parked the Cherokee and reached into the back. He slipped the bolt out of his deer rifle, pocketing the well-oiled piece of metal. From