We left her like that and walked on toward the pit.
“What do you think it’s like?” I asked Clayton. “Being crazy like her.”
“I think it’s like being high!” he said.
“What do you know about being high?”
“I’ve seen lots of high people. What do you think it’s like?”
“I think it’s like being on another planet. Mars, say!”
“What’s so good about that? They don’t have air up there!”
“You bring your own air, Clayton. Didn’t you ever read Tom Swift?”
“No. Who’s that?”
“A kid in some books.”
Clayton just shook his head.
“You think we’ll ever get like that woman?” I asked him.
“You will, for sure,” he said. “It runs in your family.”
“You don’t go crazy from having it run in your family.”
“Don’t you know anything? Going crazy is a hereditary thing. Everybody knows that. Count on it.”
A few years before this, my father’s father had become senile. He started traveling across the city of Newark to see people who were no longer alive, stopped strangers on the street and claimed to be their friend. He thought his reflection in the mirror was another person, and sometimes he didn’t recognize his wife. He was only fifty-seven years old when they took him away, and that was the thing my folks marveled over with their friends, the way a person’s mind could evaporate at any time. My grandfather lived in a home where they kept him on drugs all day. My parents had taken me to visit him and I’d seen the miserable situation he was in. I’d bragged to Clayton about how bizarre it was—the way he had his meals in a high chair like a baby and didn’t even know my name.
“Well, what about your family?” I said now. “How about your old man? Talk about crazy!”
“Yeah, but he’s not crazy crazy,” Clayton said.
The school we attended was a bad place twelve miles away, populated by greasers and hoods and sniffers of glue. I should have lasted five minutes there, but I arrived in the same van that brought Clayton to school and I was shielded by his protective coloration. The nastiest thugs left Clayton alone, though they despised black people in theory. It was rumored that I, too, lived at the lunatic asylum. Clayton and I allowed this mistake to go uncorrected. He became my closest friend. My parents were appalled by this turn of events, but what could they say?
My friendship with Clayton consisted of countless little riffs we played over and over, but the special seal and symbol of our brotherhood was a prehistoric being known as Piltdown Man. Early in the year, our teacher, Mr. Marsh, had done a lesson on him in history class. They’d unearthed Piltdown Man’s skull in England somewhere. It had the cranium of a human and the jaw of an ape, and this made Piltdown Man the original human being, the missing link, the hairy angel who’d vaulted evolution’s monkey-chasm to become the thing we were today. Single-handedly, Piltdown Man had crossed the dark threshold into species-hood.
Mr. Marsh told us all this in his usual boring way, but then something inspired the man. It hit him that he should become Piltdown Man to show us, and this he did brilliantly—stooping over to half his height so that his arms slid out of his jacket sleeves, swinging his arms ape-fashion, grunting and bellowing as he lurched back and forth the length of the blackboard. He was a tall, goofy man with a crew cut and a bad complexion, and he was perfect as the man-beast responsible for all humanity. Clayton and I regarded each other with bugged-out eyes, our heads nodding up and down. Yes, yes! our startled faces said. This is the real stuff! Check this out!
Nobody said anything out loud. Nobody laughed. The whole class was transfixed by Piltdown Man. Because the insane were never far from my mind, I wondered if Mr. Marsh was ready for the funny farm—as people always called it who didn’t know exactly where the farm was located and what it was like. Then students around me started cackling. Clayton had joined Mr. Marsh at the dawn of human time. He was up from his desk, hunched over and grunting in the back of the room, doing a stunning black version of Piltdown Man.
The two of them carried on this way for a minute to our general delight, groaning and gesturing to each other across the room. It was Mr. Marsh’s most successful interaction with Clayton. Then the big white ape-man cast his eyes around our world of people and people’s things. “Piltdown Man!” he boomed, straightening up to become Homo erectus again. “Later proved to be a hoax.”
We sat there with idiotic grins on our faces.
“Hoax?” Clayton finally said, still dangling his arms. “What hoax you talking about?”
“Piltdown Man,” said Mr. Marsh. “Discovered, nineteen-eleven. Proved to be a hoax, nineteen-fifty-three. Those bones turned out to be fake.”
“What!” Clayton cried out.
“That’s right,” Mr. Marsh said with enormous satisfaction. Astonishing Clayton, laying Clayton flat out with disbelief, was the greatest pedagogical achievement he could hope to have in our class.
“With people believing in him all that time?” Clayton said, returning to his desk. “Nineteen-eleven to nineteen-fifty-three?”
“Yup,” said Mr. Marsh.
“How could anybody do that?” I said. “Make fake bones like that?”
“Well, they were very clever,” Mr. Marsh answered with a smile. “Kind of like you guys.”
“Bullshit!” Clayton said.
The girls gasped and the boys snorted like little pigs. Mr. Marsh’s happiness disappeared. “I don’t want to hear that again, Clayton,” he said, for probably the three-hundredth time. Like all the teachers at our school, Mr. Marsh had to take great care not to appear to be picking on Clayton.
“You told us Piltdown Man was real,” Clayton stated.
“I did not,” Mr. Marsh replied.
I said, “You showed us how he walked and everything!”
Mr. Marsh turned to face me. “Gabriel,” he said kindly, “I was showing the class what people thought Piltdown Man was like. When they believed in him.”
“Well, how are we supposed to figure that out!” Clayton cried. “You’re supposed to be teaching us stuff, and instead you’re getting us all confused!”
Mr. Marsh leaned on the blackboard’s eraser tray and rubbed his eyes.
“Did they get in trouble?” one of the girls asked. “The people who did the hoax?”
“They never found out who did it,” said Mr. Marsh.
“They never got caught?” the girl exclaimed.
“They got away with it?” cried one of her friends.
“Yes,” he said, looking at Clayton and me. “They got away with it.” He stared over our heads. “The perpetrators of that hoax took the secret to their graves,” he said, as if to himself.
His remark chilled the room. The idea of being in one’s grave withered the triumph of not getting caught, and the class settled down. Mr. Marsh opened his English book and started diagramming sentences on the board. But Clayton did not agree that history was over. He raised the wooden top of his desk and put his head inside. The metal book-cavity was empty and made an echo chamber for his voice. “Piltdown Man!” he bellowed.
Mr. Marsh spun around. “Clayton, that’s enough,” he declared.
My own desk had books and papers inside, ruining my echo. “Later proved to be a hoax!” I cried, but it came out muffled and indistinct.
We were sent to the principal’s office. I was brave until they separated me from Clayton. Clayton was brave the whole time. He’d been to the principal’s office many times before. The principal told me that if we ever again called Mr. Marsh “Piltdown Man” we would be expelled. “We weren’t calling him Piltdown Man,” I said. “We were saying it about ourselves.” And only in saying this did I understand it was true. The principal, being the principal, didn’t get the point.
We stopped making our joke in class. But like dogs we kept returning to the rotten thing we’d found—roaming the halls and playgrounds in the Piltd
own crouch, grunting and hollering his name followed always by the heart-wrenching “Later proved to be a hoax!” Piltdown Man became our universal sign of everything the world contained. The authors of our textbooks were Piltdown Men, our classmates were Piltdown persons, all schools and governments and works of men were frauds. But the purest form of the Piltdown hoax on earth was the lone black boy among the whites, the indisputably impossible creature.
The cinder pit was just off the public road that looped the hospital grounds. A guardrail kept cars from driving where the shoulder of the road thickened to become the cliff. The pit resembled a quarry. Bulldozers moved the glistening blackness and loaded it into trucks for the asylum’s icy roads in winter. The cinders themselves were a loose, oddly lightweight substance, like crushed pumice stone, but dirty. Walking across the pit, you sank past your ankles and the coarse, sooty grit filled your shoes. It was a filthy place to play. The cinders turned my skin jet-black, which my mother bemoaned when I fouled her tub and washing machine, but which gave Clayton as much pleasure as seeing me blush in school. Cinder soot didn’t make his skin any darker, and he couldn’t turn red in the face. Nothing showed up on Clayton.
The pit was a prehistoric place where Piltdown Man would have felt at home. I always thought of him when we went there, that cave dweller no one believed in anymore. I stood on the cliff and imagined Piltdown Man on the desolate black plain below, wandering the primeval landscape in his crouch, human but not really, hunting and foraging, his eye out for a mate, never imagining that someday people would call him a hoax.
We took a few jumps off the cliff, me from the shallow end, Clayton from the thrilling peak, plunging knee-deep into the granular stuff and then scrambling back up the side to do it again. When I wasn’t looking, Clayton grabbed me in a headlock and dragged me to the highest place. He said he would count to three, but he jumped on two. I went over head-first, fell short into the scooped-out face of the pit, and somersaulted twenty feet down. When Clayton saw I wasn’t dead, he laughed. I was still struggling out of the cinders when a voice spoke to us.
“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.
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