Make Me Work by Ralph Lombreglia

Author:Ralph Lombreglia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Make Me Work
ISBN: 9781941088227
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1994-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

I ran down the grassy slope and across the parking lot. Clayton answered when I knocked on the flimsy barracks door, his big-toothed smile floating in the dim entrance of his shabby house. His parents worked on Saturdays and his sisters were out playing somewhere. It was getting toward lunch, but it seemed he’d just gotten up. He came out into the sunny parking lot blinking his eyes.

“Weren’t you expecting me?” I said.

“Sure,” said Clayton, looking at the sky. “I was expecting you.”

We talked about what to do. The choices were not infinite, and we’d end up doing them all anyway—playing in the tunnels, getting lunch from Clayton’s mother, buying stuff at the hospital store, jumping in the cinder pit—so the only question was in what order. I was trying to think of a way to avoid the pit altogether today. Clayton had vowed to push me off the highest part of the cliff the next time we went there.

“Let’s go down in the tunnels,” I said.

“Too nice out,” said Clayton.

“Let’s go look at the cows. We never do that anymore.”

“I don’t want to see any cows. Let’s go to the pit.”

Our game at the cinder pit was to pretend we were paratroopers—sprinting from the road’s edge to the cliff and then leaping out into empty space. Clayton jumped into the pit’s deepest place, where the drop was more than twenty feet. I stuck to the shallow end, where it was less than ten. Clayton lived for danger, which was one of the main differences between him and me. The other main difference was that he was black. For a long time I assumed that all black people liked danger more than white people did, because I didn’t have anybody to compare Clayton to. He was the only black student in our entire school.

“I’m not going off the high end, Clayton.”

“Oh, Gabe,” he said, knowing I disliked that nickname. He punched me in the arm. “I was only kidding about that.”

We crossed a lawn into the center of the asylum and took the wide tree-lined boulevard past white gazebos and a band shell where the patients heard music in the summertime. The springtime grass was tender and pale green. The forsythia had long since lost their yellow flowers, but azaleas still burned like gas jets at the base of every stone-faced building—as though Mr. Parker, an asylum groundskeeper, had gone around adjusting them like the flames of his own little stove at home. The hospital’s reservoir sparkled in the distance, a polished blue platter in an evergreen grove. Puffs of steam rose from metal grates in the grass, the exhaust from the tunnels that connected the whole hospital underground. I caught the sour institutional smell of the subterranean kitchens where Clayton’s mother cooked.

From one of the towering gray buildings, a voice called to us. When we looked up, we saw a woman on the fifth or sixth floor, a paper-white face behind the bars of her window. Framed by stone blocks, she resembled a plant trying to grow beneath the dark weight of a rock.

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