Make Me Work (14 page)

“Oh, Leslie,” I said. “Of course I remembered.” I turned to Max and Sam. “Leslie works at the hospital. She does physical therapy there.”

“That's the best kind,” Sam said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Leslie said.

Among friends now, she had a toke on her pot.

“Leslie working on your arm for you?” Max asked me.

“No, this I haven't seen,” she said. “Haven't seen any of this guy for a while now.”

This was true, but for a few months the previous year I couldn't walk into a bar in town without encountering Leslie. Her MO was to come on ridiculously strong and then disappear with somebody else. I danced with her a few times and bought her drinks. The one time she decided to take me home, she phoned out for Buffalo hot wings when we got back to her place, even though it was two in the morning by then. When they arrived she spent a long time at the door with the delivery guy, who'd drawn a happy face on the Styrofoam takeout container and written “Hi, Leslie!” above it. We ate the wings with their Roquefort sauce and Leslie told me things about herself that she probably didn't remember telling me now. She told me her philosophy of life, which was that life was a game. She told me that she liked professors better than guys from the Ag station, but that guys from the army base were best of all. She told me I was a good listener, and then she passed out.

Here in the parking lot, she offered her joint to the three of us.

“Sorry, ma'am, we're on duty,” Max said.

“Professors go on duty?” Leslie asked. “Down at the lake? At night?”

“Hermeneutics Division,” I explained.

“Oh,” she said. “Sounds serious.”

“It is, ma'am,” Max said. “We have to question this suspect here.”

“Good luck. He's one sad case.”

“We know,” Sam said. “Let's just book him.”

“Is it about the girl or the money?” asked Leslie.

“How about if you tell us?” said Max.

“Well, he took all this money from some suckers at cards, and figured he'd stake himself to a big roll in Atlantic City. He asked me to go with him. Promised me the time of my life. When I turned him down, he got all morose and said it didn't matter, ‘cause he just found out he had to get married.”

“He said that?” Max asked.

“Yeah. It's a shotgun deal. He's taking it pretty hard.”

We stood there for a minute watching Russell sitting out there on a large black stone. I'd walked this stretch of lake shore many times with Sam in the evening. He liked a cigar after dinner, so we'd buy some stogies at the magazine store on Exchange and stroll the water's edge puffing away and talking about art. Sam was painting big abstract landscapes in those days—masses of green and brown and blue plucked from the world around here—and he would tell me the right way to look at the lake, how to empty myself of all thoughts of lakeness, and just see the thing.

Which was what I was doing now when I noticed that everybody was looking at me. Without realizing it, I'd been humming the Joey Dee and the Starliters tune. More than humming it, actually, I was giving it the full combo rendition—bass line at the bottom of my throat, drums and cymbals with my tongue and teeth, melody carried somewhere up in my nose.

“He always does that,” Max told Leslie.

“Didn't know you were a musician,” Leslie said.

“Oh, I did some backup vocals in the old days. Played a little tambourine. Nothing too heavy. That was ‘The Peppermint Twist.' Remember that one, Leslie?” I said, though the song had probably come out before she was born.

“Nope,” Leslie said. “I don't. It's an oldie, huh? I don't much go in for oldies. Can you dance to it?”

“That was the whole idea, Leslie. It was a dance. The Peppermint Twist. The song came on, and you did this special dance that went with the song.”

“Oh, one of those,” Leslie said.

“Leslie's not interested in those,” Max said. “Leslie does her own dances.”

“Correct,” Leslie said. Then she jutted her chin at my arm in its sling. “So what happened?”

“Ms. Pac-Man.”

“Ouch. We're seeing more and more of that.” She tilted her head toward the north side of town, where the hospital was. “Well, stop in, maybe I can do something.”

“I might do that, thanks.”

“Can I stop in, too?” Max asked.

“What's your problem?”

“General dislocation.”

“It has to be specific before I get involved.”

“That a girl,” Sam said, nodding his head at the moonlit lake. He was watching a tall, rugged Oklahoman approach us on the glistening stones.

I retrieved the ouzo from Sam's satchel in the car, opened it, and gave it to Russell when he arrived. “Congratulations, Pop,” I said.

He took a slug. “It's really as long as they say, isn't it?” he said, passing the bottle back.

“What's that, Russell?”

“The arm of the law.”

“Oh, that. Yes, indeed it is.”

“You can run,” Sam said, having a swig, “but you cannot hide.”

“You can't even run,” said Max.

I looked at Max's face in the lavish moonlight—the original stuff from the sky along with the reflected version from the surface of the lake. You can read minds in light like that. Max was thinking, I
almost belonged to someone again
. I knew the way he felt. I'd had somebody once myself, right here in this very town, but she left for a better deal in a better place. We'd all had them at one time or another, companions who were suddenly gone when the tide went out, leaving us like porpoises famous for their brains who, finding themselves beached, nonetheless continue to smile inscrutably and sing to one another.

“There's a big Motown dance party this weekend to celebrate Russell's marriage,” I told Leslie. “Maybe you'd like to come.”

“Me? Oh. Would I be, like, your date?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, well. Gee. Thanks. O.K.”

“She probably never shows much enthusiasm,” Sam said. “This probably means the world to her.”

“It does,” Leslie said. “You gonna be able to dance with that wing?”

I tried a few steps there in the parking lot and the arm hurt pretty bad. “You're right. I should probably start some therapy on this immediately.”

“You probably should,” Leslie said.

She got into her virginal Jeep and rolled the driver's window down. “So long, fellas,” she said. Then her passenger door swung open and she waved me in.

“What about our card game?” Russell said. “You owe me money.”

“He should be home writing his dissertation,” Max told Leslie. “He's deliberately trying not to get tenure here.”

Sam handed Leslie the ouzo bottle. “Good muscle relaxant,” he said.

We waved goodbye to my friends and launched into the night. When we reached cruising altitude, somewhere out over the lake, Leslie patted my injured arm. “You're gonna have to stop playing that stupid game,” she said.

“I know it,” I replied. “And it's kind of a shame. Because there's these little blue guys that come after you? The bad blue men? And I just learned how to keep them from gobbling me up.”

PILTDOWN MAN, LATER PROVED TO BE A HOAX

Down at the asylum, the best-behaved patients were out walking around loose, roaming the grounds in their bathrobes and pajamas or sitting on benches staring at the road. Some wore regular clothes, but you could tell they were patients whenever a car went by. Patients had a special way of watching a car. They followed its path as though it magnetized their faces, their heads swiveling together in sync; then they gazed down the empty road long after the car was gone, as though, like a movie in reverse, it might come reeling back. Only a tiny old man was ignoring the cars altogether. He was off by himself on the lawn beneath the massive gray buildings, making his way among the flower beds in his tattered blue robe. At each bed he knelt to speak to the plants, putting his lips close to specific flowers, gesturing to make himself understood. Blossom after blossom failed to respond. I could see the pain it was causing him, the umbrage he was taking. Finally he began to cry. Then he wrenched a clump of daffodils from the ground and lashed them into slivers against a nearby rock.

I was across the road behind a tree. I'd just hiked down from the mountaintop where my family lived—down the old deer-hunters' path and across a field—and I was hiding behind one of the big maples lining the hospital road. Every minute or so I stepped out and stood beside its trunk and waved to the patients on the lawn, and they waved back to me. Then I hid behind the tree for a minute before coming out to do it again. It was a game I'd been playing with the patients since the beginning of spring. First they would see a cornfield and trees, then a dark-haired twelve-year-old boy, then only trees and a cornfield again. They loved things like that. This time a few patients hid behind trees on their side of the road, too, but they lost track of the game and forgot to come out.

I was already late getting over to my friend Clayton's house. When I crossed the road, patients flocked to me like ducklings. Their gauntness did not prepare you for the way they could move, if moving entered their minds. They were terribly gaunt. Even the stout ones seemed gaunt somehow, around the mouth and eyes. I knew they had food to eat because I ate it myself; Clayton's mother worked in the hospital kitchens and gave us whatever the patients were having. Maybe they just did the wrong things with it. Many of the men had dried egg-yolk patches in the stubble on their cheeks.

I revealed a few secrets to them. “The fish refuse to have their pictures taken,” I said. “The bumblebees are meeting to decide what to do.” The patients nodded enthusiastically—a stiff, whole-torso nodding accomplished from the waist. “There's a city in the sky,” I added, looking up at the sliding clouds. “They're having a party today.”

They were eager to tell me things in return. “The doctors play violins all night and never let us sleep,” one patient said. Another said, “They have factories on the moon where they make all the money.” “They're selling our sunsets to the Chinese nation,” I was informed by a third.

I knew these things—they'd told me already—but I put on a good show of surprise and indignation. Then I said goodbye and proceeded across the lawn. The man in the blue robe was still kneeling by the rock, gaping at his scraps of yellow flower on the grass. “I'll be back soon with rubies and diamonds,” I called to him over my shoulder. He looked up at me, and for a second he forgot his troubles. The patients hiding behind the trees were still pretending I wasn't there. Out of courtesy, I pretended the same thing about them.

The asylum occupied a gigantic parcel of state-owned land bisected by a brook that bubbled amid the Gothic gray buildings where people went to live when they lost their minds. The place was much larger than any nearby town, and it suggested boundless bureaucratic mystery as you drove past it on the road—as though a medieval principality had sprung up from dung in the cow country forty miles west of Manhattan. In my whole first summer on the mountain I never saw the asylum except that way, as a passenger in my parents' cars. They had forbidden me to go down there to play.

My father owned fifty acres of land on the mountain overlooking the asylum—not the whole mountain, as Clayton always said to embarrass me. Compared to real mountains like the Rockies it was just a hill, but for New Jersey it was a mountain. We'd moved there the summer before, between my sixth and seventh grades, to escape the colored people my father said were taking over our native city of Newark. My father had been driving an oil truck in Newark when I was born, but he'd worked his way up till he had his own heating-fuel company in the city. He sold it to start another one in the sticks of Jersey and build us a house on the land he'd bought, where he envisioned a whole mountaintop development of superior homes. So far, ours was the only one. In his flight to the country my father was ahead of his time; no one else was ready to buy lots for houses that far away from everything except a lunatic asylum. That was why the asylum was there, my mother said, because it was the middle of nowhere. She, too, had wanted to get out of Newark, but she thought the state hospital was a fatal flaw in my father's plan. She'd heard bad stories about the asylum, including the one about the escaped patient who had appeared the previous year on the streets of a neighboring town—barefoot and crazy and brandishing a razor blade.

Our new house was surrounded by acres of wooded land, yet when the leaves fell off the trees that first autumn, I could see, on the horizon, small but unmistakable, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. I could see the hospital, too, down in the foreground, where Clayton lived in the workers' barracks. School had begun by then, and Clayton was my only classmate from our remote corner of the township. Working for the asylum made Clayton's parents employees of the state, and the state took care of its people—or so his mother, Mrs. Parker, always said. She liked the state for the way it helped her raise her family. The Parkers had five children, Clayton and four younger girls. “I don't know how we could ever do for them
out there,”
Mrs. Parker had told me, meaning out in the world where my family lived.

We didn't have this concept of the benevolent state in our house on the mountain. My father worked for himself and did not like the state. He said the state was hurting those hospital workers by giving them too much and taking their incentive away, and this was the only connection I ever heard my father make between himself and the hospital people, because the state was hurting him as well, with taxes and regulations that seemed designed to keep a man from having ambition and doing business.

I believed him about his taxes, but I didn't get the part about the workers having too much. As far as I could see, they didn't have anything and never would. Their barracks lay huddled in a grassy basin at the edge of the hospital grounds—scores of chalky, lime-green lozenges like an army encampment, each the size of two railroad cars, with a small brick porch at either end. When I first went down to play with Clayton in the fall, I didn't understand how two whole families, not just one, could live in each of those barracks buildings. The rooms were small and dark; there was a tiny stove and a sink, but not really a kitchen. Once, when we were filthy from jumping into the cinder pit, I asked Clayton how many times a week he took a bath, and he said he'd never taken one in his life. He laughed when I didn't get the joke: the barracks had no bathtubs, only showers.