Make Me Work (16 page)

“That was a brave one, that time,” the voice said. “That one was good.”

We looked up and saw him emerge from the trees, a tall black man in hospital clothes. He'd been hiding in the woods beyond the pit, watching us drop into the soft, receiving lap of pulverized darkness.

“Let me have a look at these young fellows,” he said on his way toward us. “Oh, these are two fine young Negroes. Two fine-looking Negro boys.”

“He's not a Negro,” Clayton said.

“Of course he is,” the man said. “Look at that rich, dark skin.”

“That's dirt,” Clayton said. “He's white. I'm black.”

“Oh,” the man said, sidestepping away as if afraid of me. “Can we trust him?” he asked Clayton.

“Maybe,” Clayton said.

“Sure, you can trust me,” I said.

“How do I know?” said the man.

I didn't answer. Instead, I hunched my shoulders and dangled my hands at the ground, and started walking around like Piltdown Man. My knuckles brushed the cinders as I slogged across the pit. I heard grunting and looked up to find Clayton doing it with me. We lumbered around like space baboons on a shimmering black moon. The man's mouth gaped open as he watched.

“What's that!” he cried.

“What's what?” I said.

“What you're doing!”

“We're not doing anything.”

“You're doing something!”

“We're just being normal,” Clayton said. “You trying to make us feel bad? We can't help the way we are.”

For a second the man got serious and spooky, then he gave us a sly face and started walking like Piltdown Man, too. He made us look like amateurs. Compared to him, we didn't even know how to do it. Even gawky Mr. Marsh couldn't come close.

“Nice!” said Clayton. “Very nice!”

“You're the missing link!” I said.

The man jumped back. “Who said I was missing?”

“Nobody said you were missing, man,” Clayton said. “Be cool.”

“Why did he say I was missing?”

“He was talking about something else. Nobody's missing.”

“Nobody knows you've escaped,” I said.

The man stared at me. Then he started to laugh.

“How long you been in this joint?” Clayton asked him.

He thought about this with some amusement. “I forget,” he finally said. “What are you boys' names?”

We told him our names. He shook our hands in an elaborate way, enveloping them with his left hand while shaking with his right. “My name is Luther,” he told us.

“You shake hands like a king,” I said. “I'll bet you're a king.” I'd met a number of kings and queens while playing at the asylum with Clayton. Luther was the only one who really looked the part—the noble bearing and the outsized face. You needed a big face to be a royal personage, or you looked silly on a throne.

“I'm a prince,” Luther said.

“Where's your princedom?” I said.

“Africa. You boys have any cigarettes?”

“We don't smoke. Aren't you kind of old to be a prince?”

That cracked Luther up. His laughing mouth was full of gold. “I was kidnapped to keep me from becoming King,” he said. “That's why I'm still a prince.” He paused. “I could die a prince and never be King. Unless I return to my people and reclaim my throne.”

“What work crew they have you on?” Clayton asked.

The hospital had barns full of cows and pigs, large fields for growing the white cow-corn they ate, fenced-in tracts of other vegetables. Farm work was part of the rehabilitation practiced there. Driving past the asylum in good weather, you saw crews of patients tending to the animals and plants.

Luther looked down at himself. “They took me to a patch of dirt and gave me a hoe,” he said. “Me, a prince.”

“So as soon as you had your chance,” I said, “you went over the wall.”

“Did I?” Luther replied. “I don't remember that. What wall?”

“It's an expression. You don't actually need a wall to do it.”

“And now you have to get back to your people,” Clayton said.

“Yes. But first I need food and money. And cigarettes.”

“Where are your people, exactly?” I asked.

“I told you,” Luther said. “Africa.”

“Yeah, but what part?”

He didn't answer.

“Nigeria?” I suggested. Mr. Marsh had been trying to teach us something about Nigeria recently, though I couldn't remember what.

“Yes!” Luther said. “How did you know?”

“You look like people in pictures from there. Nice in Nigeria this time of year?”

“It is so beautiful,” Luther said. “The sky is bright red every night and all the people are singing. I must get back to my home. Soon, I must start out soon.”

“Nigeria is ten thousand miles from here,” Clayton said. “You're not gonna make it three miles to town. You're wearing chain-gang clothes, Luther.”

“That's why I was hoping you boys could help me,” he said.

The Administration building stood majestically at the head of the asylum's tree-lined central boulevard, with four columns of polished purple marble and a wide white staircase up to its elegant doors. It looked particularly grand from the grassy ridge we were standing on. Two Jersey state troopers had their cruisers parked in the circular drive around the fountain. They were out talking with hospital security cops and some men in suits.

“Look at this, Clayton,” I said, squeezing his arm. “They're on to Luther.”

“How do you know that?”

“What else could it be? We can't go back there now. Luther's on his own.”

“Gabriel, you are such a baby. Those cops could be here for anything. They make the rounds. I live here, remember? Cops are here all the time.”

“Not state troopers.”

“It's a
state
hospital, man.”

My father had told me that Jersey state troopers were the meanest people on earth, meaner than Marines. “I'm not messing around with them, Clayton.”

“You are such an infant,” he said.

We walked up the boulevard toward Administration. At the base of an adjoining building, wide metal utility doors to the tunnels were standing open. Two black men in white uniforms were unloading a truck, stacking boxes of food on bright chrome carts for the kitchens. When we got close enough, I saw they were Jimmy and Earl, two of Clayton's neighbors in the workers' barracks.

“What's going on?” Clayton asked when we reached them.

Earl, the older man, answered him. “Something,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Don't know. Something not good.”

“You can tell the way folks are acting,” Jimmy said.

“How are they acting?” I asked.

“Scared,” Jimmy said.

Clayton pushed me along. “I'm hungry,” he said.

He led me into the mouth of the tunnels, down the concrete ramp into the broad dim corridor beneath the ground. Naked bulbs burned in small cages on the ceiling. Their murky yellow light looked the way the tunnels smelled—a sour smell of medicines and the fermentation of old age. Orderlies pushed patients strapped to tables along the concrete floors. People in wheelchairs rolled themselves from one building to another, nurses bustling past them in white leather shoes.

You could walk around the asylum grounds all day and never imagine the tunnel world that existed beneath you. When I played down there with Clayton, we ran around pretending to be in a dungeon or escaping from evil pursuers. We spied on the strangest people we could find, took stairways we'd never noticed before, surfaced inside buildings far from where we'd first gone in. Sooner or later we showed up in the basement kitchens to get food from Mrs. Parker. She was a nice lady with a formal, dignified way of speaking and carrying herself. She always seemed glad that Clayton was friends with me. Today she was at a big stainless-steel table, making baloney-and-cheese sandwiches on mushy white bread. Clayton and I stood silently beseeching her while she hummed a tune and layered meat and cheese on many slices of bread. I tried to think of a way to let her know what we were doing.

“We're starving, Mom,” Clayton said. “Can we have two sandwiches each today?”

“How are you ever going to lose any weight, Clayton?” Mrs. Parker said. “You eat all the time and you don't get any exercise. You don't go out for a single sport.”

“I'm going out for football next year,” Clayton said.

Mrs. Parker raised her face to laugh. The shelf of her bosom heaved up and down. “Do you think I believe that nonsense?” She looked at me. “Gabriel, are you ill? You don't look well today.”

“I'm not very hungry all of a sudden, Mrs. Parker.”

Clayton glared at me. “He just told me he was starved!”

“Does Clayton eat the food I give you?” Mrs. Parker asked.

“No, ma'am. I eat it. I'm usually hungry.”

“Maybe you let yourself get
too
hungry this time,” she said. “That can happen. Eat your lunch and see if you don't feel better.” She completed our sandwiches with mustard and lettuce leaves, and turned them over to us in waxed paper bags.

I looked back at her longingly as Clayton dragged me away. We left the kitchens and ran through the tunnels till we were under the building where the chambermaids had their headquarters. Clayton knew all the women who cleaned at the asylum; they lived in the workers' barracks, too. Two maids, Margaret and Shirley, were on the sofa in the lunchroom when we ran in.

“We're putting on a play in school!” Clayton told them. “Can we get some of those old clothes you have? For costumes for it?”

“You never acted in any play, Clayton,” Margaret said, her dark, white-stockinged legs crossed on the sofa, cigarette smoke coming out of her nose. “Besides, we don't have no clothes to fit you.”

“No, it's older kids acting in it,” he said.

“What kind of play?” she asked me.

“It's kind of about the roaring twenties,” I said.

“I like that,” said Shirley. “What characters you looking for?”

“Men,” I said.

“I know that! What
kind
of mens?”

“A tycoon and a politician,” said Clayton.

Margaret and Shirley seemed dazzled by the idea of characters like that. We followed them to big canvas hampers full of patients' unclaimed clothes. They pawed through the bins until a musty miasma filled the small back room we were in. When they were finished we had two whole outfits, a winter one and a summer one—jackets, pants, shirts and socks, two old-fashioned pairs of shoes. There was even a hat, a brown fedora hat. The women put it all into a paper shopping bag.

“Hey, when is this play?” Margaret called as we ran away down the stairs.

“Don't know yet!” Clayton called back. “We'll get you tickets!”

“You better, Clayton Parker!” she cried.

We went back underground and resurfaced at the hospital store. The goods in this store were subsidized by the mysterious entity of the state. You could get cakes and candy for a penny, soda for a nickel, whole packs of cigarettes for a dime. I always bought treats there for Clayton and myself. This time he wanted to do the buying, and asked for money before we went in. He got soda and corn chips and candy bars, and brought them to the counter. “Two packs of Luckies for my pop,” he said to the clerk.

At the phone booth outside, he dropped in one of my dimes and dialed my number. Clayton knew that my mother made a regular Saturday trip to town, and with this knowledge he had conceived a plan. I tried to tell him it was crazy, that it wouldn't work, but he wouldn't listen, and so I got on the phone with my mother and asked her to stop and pick us up on her way.

Luther poked his head out from behind a tree as we crunched into his hiding place in the woods. When he was sure we were alone he scrambled out. “Look what my mates have brought me!” he said when he saw the shopping bag slapping Clayton's leg. “Good work, my young princes!” He sat on the fallen trunk of a tree and wolfed a baloney sandwich while Clayton told him the plan.

Fear was closing off my throat so that I could hardly breathe. I kept looking at my watch. “She'll be here in less than half an hour,” I said.

“What about money?” Luther said.

“He has money,” Clayton said.

I had fifteen dollars left in my wallet, saved from my allowance over the winter. I said I had ten, and that much I turned over to Luther.

“Good boy,” he said.

“I want something in return for that money.”

He dragged heavily on a cigarette. “What?”

“I want to know if you're crazy. If you're really insane.”

He blew smoke at the asylum. “They think I am.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I think they're right.”

“Was your father crazy?”

“Yup.”

“How about his father?”

“Same.”

“See?” Clayton said.

“That's what you wanted to know?” said Luther.

“Not really,” I said.

I stood by the side of the road above the cinder pit and watched for my mother. Her blue station wagon appeared in the distance. I thought of the many times I'd ridden that stretch of road in that very car. This was how the patients saw me coming, I thought, and for a strange moment I felt like a patient myself. My mother pulled onto the shoulder beside me. “You've been in that pit again,” she said, but kindly, because she loved me no matter what I did.

A pathetically false smile possessed my face. “Mom, could Clayton's uncle catch a ride to town, too?”

“Clayton's uncle?” she said. “Doesn't he have a car of his own?”

I wasn't prepared for this question. If a man wants a ride to town, doesn't that imply he has no car? I stood there stupidly, certain she knew I was up to something, until she looked behind me and smiled.