Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  When she’d lived on his street, Picasso Street, when they were kids, he’d watched for her face when he knocked, the small ears above two thick braids at her neck. She’d peer out, but she never opened the door. Her father was strict.

  “Mrs. Batiste, Mama say here your pattern,” he used to say, and behind Brenda was Mrs. Batiste’s cushioned chest, her knees touching the hem of her housecoat, and behind them both was a white-cloth dummy with jutting hips and mesh-stretched breasts.

  “You want to take back these bobbins, baby,” Mrs. Batiste would say, and while he waited in the kitchen, staring at Brenda’s baby brother playing with army men under the table, Mrs. Batiste would call, “Give him some teacakes!”

  Brenda would say, “Here,” and then stand near the doorway, watching him. Her mother came out with the silver wheels tiny in her palm, saying, “I see you start to get you daddy’s color, I see that red under there.”

  Everyone called Darnell’s father Red Man, for the skin and nose he’d gotten from his Creek grandmother and passed on to Darnell. And Darnell watched Brenda’s narrow back, her eyes flickering. He’d heard what they called her. But she wasn’t yellow; he thought about her when his mother sent him to check the apricots on the tree in the yard. They weren’t ripe yet—they stayed a blurry gold. Brenda’s color.

  Out of the Sandlands, he sped through the few farms that skirted the last mountain range. Flatlanders—that was what Fricke called everyone who lived off the mountain. Darnell had been the last to go. Scott and Perez were both going to Corcoran’s house near the beach, and they spun out of the driveway together. Darnell packed up his stuff, took out the trash one last time. Peering over the edge of the dumpster with the bag, he saw a torn picture from Penthouse. Scott was into centerfolds, but this photo was just bootie, a round behind tanned except for a long strip of white. “No tigers for me,” Darnell said, “I like mine all one color.” He closed the lid tight. Brenda’s color. She’d probably been sitting up every night, waiting for him to call, cussing him out into a wet pillow so her parents wouldn’t hear her cry. “What could I say if I called?” he muttered. “What I’ma say now? Hey, baby, want to get married? I just got laid off, I ain’t got my last check, and my clutch about to go out. But I love you, baby. Smooth rap, brothaman.”

  In the kitchen, he’d asked Fricke, “Why you like so many different women?” He kept his voice low, like the others were still drifting around the room.

  “Instead of one?” Fricke folded his fingers around his cup.

  “Yeah.”

  “Because the pursuit is more interesting than the capture. Captivity isn’t good for men nor animals.”

  Darnell had frowned. “You always make it somethin fancy, man, a great quote. I’m just talkin about don’t you ever think you might just want one?”

  “Nope,” Fricke said. “But you do. You think you do.” He stood up and headed outside to the garage, leaving Darnell with his gear. “Let me know how you survive. I hope your burn heals nice. I hope your brain heals quick.”

  The bare-plowed ground smacked up against the low pass through the Agua Dulce Mountains. Darnell ground the clutch hard to shift down for the gradual descent. Rio Seco spread in a half-circle below what everyone called the Sugar Ridge, the wall of rock and scrub that caught smog and held it in the basin for days.

  But the wind-cleaned air still wavered over the sparkles of streetlights tonight, and he could see the fog rolling in from LA and the coast, pulling close like a quilt.

  Even the huge boulders beside the freeway were creamy bright. In school, books had only shown triangular mountains, shark-toothed points with pine trees and snow. Darnell had always stared at the Sugar Ridge, an arc of brown humps with boulders and the blinking red lights of the police radio tower at the highest point. The green sign flashed by now: RIO SECO—POP. 324,000.

  The tiny dots, laid out in miles of squares, grew larger, and he could see the freeway cutting through the center, passing over the riverbed to head for LA. The police helicopter sent its gray-blue beam slanting over the streets, and Darnell smiled. “Yeah, you can point me home in a minute,” he said, leaning into the windshield. “Put the spotlight on for me.” The shaft of light swept back and forth over the Westside, found something, and the helicopter began its tight-lassoing circle, the glare pinned down.

  But Darnell turned off early, following the exit at the base of the foothills. He stopped at the wide turnout, littered with glass and fastfood wrappers and condoms, where everyone from Brenda’s neighborhood parked to fool around. The first time he’d pulled in here, she had ducked her head, but he motioned toward the fire. She’d laughed then, and he said, “Up here you got much better fires than on the Westside. Too crowded down there. You got plenty of hills, even though there’s not much to burn.”

  The red taillights had circled the freeway at the pass, and the brighter-glowing flames moved jagged up the hillside. He was afraid to explain the fire to her, and her lips were soft on his, her hands fanned out along his back.

  She understood the fires, but she hated his absence. “You have to live up there, too, even for seasonal?” she’d asked. Darnell ground the clutch again to leave the glittering lot. Season’s over, he thought. And people been gettin what I missed right here. I haven’t touched her for two months.

  He followed the wide avenue to the Ville. The streets were quiet, bare and open with the city-planted palms that never grew into shady tunnels like the Westside’s pepper and carob trees. His parents had driven up here with everyone else when these tracts had been built, when he was in elementary school; his mother liked the ranch-style shingles and Spanish-style stucco houses, so sprawling compared to the old wood-frame houses on the Westside. Melvin and Victor had named it Casperville right away, and now even though the neighborhood wasn’t white, like it was when Brenda’s father had moved his family here, people on the Westside still called it the Ville.

  He turned on Brenda’s street, looking for the black New Yorker in the driveway. Her father wasn’t home yet, but he would be soon. Darnell slowed at the curb. A square of light showed at her bedroom. A dim glow—one small lamp. She was getting ready for bed. He cut the engine, glad he was heading downhill because of the lousy clutch.

  Crossing the grass, he stood between the two large bushes on either side of Brenda’s window. Pops comin home in a few, and I ain’t hardly acceptable. Don’t even qualify. Just give me a minute to look at her, he said to the helicopter, waiting for a face like his poking around in the Ville.

  In the crack between curtains, he saw her sitting on the bed’s edge, her hair in a wide, flat braid. The back of her neck was thin and pale, a narrow hollow down the center. He wanted her to turn around—how big was her belly? Let me see her mouth—the lips, two narrow front teeth slightly longer than the others, like a pair of piano keys, that made her keep her mouth closed when she smiled, made her look even shyer, more distant, than the other girls in school.

  “Miss Thang think she too good to speak,” they’d said. She whispered to Darnell how she had to be quiet at home, and then quiet was wrong everywhere else. He heard her voice now, wafting through the glass. Her shoulders bent over a magazine; she sang with Anita Baker on the radio.

  He stood frozen, not letting his feet shift and crackle leaves. She only sang when she was alone. Her voice swirled and hummed softly, spiraling past his face like a night moth. She never sang in the school choir, which was dramatic-type white girls and churchgoing Westside girls. She only sang in the car, a few times when he watched a fire and she slumped, waiting, in the front seat, her feet dangling from the open door and no one else around but him, staring at flame loping up the hillside. When he came up behind her, caught her with a dark-trembly voice flying out of her heaving chest, her eyes went wide and her mouth thin.

  A car passed on the street, and Darnell pressed closer to the thorny hedge. Brenda’s voice murmured smaller, the song fading away, and then she stood up and walked to the door. He couldn�
�t see if her back was thicker inside the nightgown, but when she turned to the closet, her silhouette was wider through the cotton nightgown. His breath caught at his ribs; he heard the door click, and he squatted for a moment to smell the damp-dripping earth near the hose.

  Sitting in the pew nearest the Virgin Mary, he breathed candle smoke and polished wood and hot brass. Our Lady of Perpetual Help was a tiny whitewashed chapel, with close walls, where his GranaLene had brought him every day while he stayed at her little house in Gray Hollow. His father took Melvin to school, took Darnell to Granny Zelene’s, and dropped his mother at work. But Darnell had never been to mass here; his father always said, “He ain’t gon be no Catholic cause he need to know more than that. It’s reasons things happen, not just fate and now forgive me, please. No. Uh-uh. You can’t confess all that shit away and fix everything with no candle.”

  He stared at the wavering baby-flames that always swayed the whole room, swayed his body stronger and dizzier than a real fire. Mountain flames were sheets of color shifting, racing, while he stood still and watched the water rush from his wrists and fingers. The eye-pricks of yellow had lined up to watch him while his GranaLene had lit wick after wick for her dead children, and when she’d turned to him finally and said, “So many souls,” he’d felt his forehead bulging with heated cotton. “Marie Eulalie. Marie Anastasia. Marie Dominique. All my baby girl gone when they just commence to smile. And I name you mama Mary. No French no more—cause I leave there, that Louisiana. Mary Therese. And she have Melvin. Then I light a candle for her one die before you. Antoine. And the twin who leave her while you till restin inside. He don’t have no name. But you here—look at you, so strong and smart. Five years old. Come on.”

  When she’d stood, he’d looked back at the five new, tallest flickers. And she’d pulled at his shoulder. “Come on. Time we go and have some lunch.”

  He’d felt the hard wood at his spine. He asked his mother at night about the twin, and her eyes sheened over with tears. “Why you tell him all that?” she said to GranaLene, who slitted her own eyes and cracked pecans in her chair by the fire.

  “So he know how much he mean,” GranaLene said.

  “And he think on things too much,” his mother said, going out to the front yard to call Melvin in from playing football with the older boys in the street.

  GranaLene said, “I seen you drop that egg,” as if his mother were still there, her blouse big with Sophia. “You drop two yolks on the floor, both red as could be. And you too big.”

  When his mother came back in with Melvin, his grandmother pushed a pecan into her mouth and one into Darnell’s, and stared at his face. “Come on read GranaLene a book, baby,” she would say, and Melvin crowed, “While he readin, can I have his piece a cake?”

  Darnell stood up, hearing voices behind him. Spanish. Two Mexican women came into the church, shawls over their hair, nodding to him, and he held on to the smooth wood for a moment before he faced the door, the gold lights still blinking behind his eyes.

  His father was from Oklahoma, and he hated all that Louisiana Catholic talk, so his grandmother would stop when he came inside. But when his mother’s belly had been swollen with his sisters, GranaLene’s curl-fingered hands were always touching the thinned skin.

  Darnell sat in his car, looking at the few shacks left in Gray Hollow. The small low-lying area off the Pepper Avenue arroyo used to be housing for citrus-grove workers, and there were pockets of shotgun shacks left near the riverbottom. Blue Hollow, White Hollow. He saw shadows of men walking near Jackson Park, at the far end of the hollow, and the vacant lot where his grandmother’s tiny house had been. He smelled candle wax on his fingers and touched the hot line on his hand. “All that death,” his father used to grumble at him. “Don’t listen to them Louisiana people. Country and Catholic a hella combination.”

  His mother would say, “No. Not all. Just her.”

  Brenda’s parents were Creoles, from Louisiana. This had been Mrs. Batiste’s church, too, when they’d first come here to Rio Seco. He’d seen her lighting candles, too, when he was small. Maybe she lit candles now to bring Darnell home. She’d always liked him, told him to be patient.

  He drove away from the park, out the back way up the narrow alley that dipped sharply and then rose up to Pepper Avenue. The striped windows of the few storefronts were dark, but the fast-food signs were still lit. Crossing Sixth into the Westside, he passed the two tallest Victorian houses at the edge, the ones that were in the middle of lemon groves years ago. Now they were apartments. He saw that one small, leaning bungalow had been straightened, the peeling wood covered over with light-blue stucco since he last came home. More Mexicans and Guatemalans, he thought, cause they always use plaster and stucco and wrought iron. Those guys know how to keep a house warm.

  He saw Roscoe’s yellow house with the small river-rock porch. The big Apache truck was in the long driveway, but the lights were off. Roscoe must have walked over to Pops’, Darnell thought. Roscoe Wiley was his father’s partner in the tree-trimming business. His wife had died when their son, Louis, was small, and now Roscoe took care of Louis’s daughter, Hollie, because Louis was out of the house, running the streets.

  Darnell waved at Mrs. Dauphine, who stood in her yard with a trickling hose, and the wind made the water jump and sparkle. He turned down Picasso Street and saw all the trucks gathered in the packed-dirt area between his father’s house and Mr. King’s.

  His father’s faded-red Chevy had the plywood gates up, and when Darnell parked, he could smell the crushed eucalyptus branches. Mr. King’s two old Fords, the ’49 and the ’72, were full of scrap concrete chunks and twisted chicken wire. They must have cleared another construction site.

  Mrs. King sat on her front porch, still in her white nurse’s uniform, and she lifted her face when Darnell got out of his car. “Hey, Mrs. King,” he said.

  “How you doin, Darnell?” she said. “They all back there—can’t you hear em? I don’t know how your mama get any rest.”

  He smiled. “She can sleep through what she wants to.” The house that his father painted white every other year was dark at the front, and the boards had gathered dust from the wind. The small porch, just a wood overhang above a cement slab with three steps, was an empty cave lined with his mother’s tiny pots of miniature roses. She and his sisters were asleep, he knew, and he heard the deep voices from the back. He walked through the narrow sideyard, past the hulking trucks.

  The back used to be a screened-in laundry porch, but over the years his father and Roscoe had built walls with scrap lumber and spare time. Now it was a small, warm wood-brown room, where the men gathered in winter. His father, Roscoe, Floyd King and his son Nacho, his nephew Snooter were probably here. Snooter yelled, “Take yo ass to the boneyard, Roscoe!”

  The domino slammed onto the table, and Mr. King said, “He got fitteen out that.”

  Darnell stepped up to the doorway and called, “It’s me, Pops.” His father let him in, the big grease-knuckled fingers on the doorknob, and Snooter called out, “Nature Boy! He back from the wilds!”

  “Shut up, man,” Darnell said. “How you doin, Mr. King? Hey, Nacho.”

  They all nodded, and Snooter said, “Mountain man! You freezin yo ass off yet?”

  “It ain’t that much colder up there,” Roscoe said.

  “Not with that hot Santa Ana wind still blowin,” Darnell said. “But now it’s fog time.” He sat down near the table and looked at the sharp corners of the domino game laid out between Roscoe and Snooter. “I see y’all cut up a eucalyptus.”

  “Big one,” his father said absently, looking out the black-reflecting window at the sideyard. “Them shallow root systems were poppin up from last week’s weather.”

  “Domino!” Snooter shouted, slapping down the ivory piece so hard the paper cups full of liquor trembled. Snooter liked Canadian Club.

  “What’s wrong with you, Roscoe?” Mr. King asked. “You let this shit-talkin boy beat you—
that ain’t right.”

  “I’m tired,” Roscoe said. “Nacho can play him.”

  Nacho stood up, slapping Darnell’s shoulder. “You ready for me to do that bad paint job yet? No other color like it…”

  Darnell took a tiny sip of his father’s gin. He shivered and said, “I’m thinkin about it, man.”

  “Get your underage hands off my drink, boy,” his father said. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I know them mountain men be drinkin serious up there,” Snooter said, whirling the dominoes on the table so they clicked and clicked.

  Darnell sat back against the wooden slats of an old chair and waited. “Where you get the chair?” he asked his father, who sat in a new black recliner in the corner of the room.

  His father shook his head, and Roscoe answered for him. “Melvin came by last weekend with some dude from LA, had two chairs on a truck. Don’t ask where this other guy got em. He took one down to the Hunters’.”

  Darnell’s father grumbled. “He didn’t spend no time with them boys. They rip and run around like they ain’t got no sense.”

  Darnell looked at his father’s boots. Melvin had two sons with Alicia Hunter, who lived at the far end of the street with her parents. Clinton and Lamont—they were wild and smiling, in and out of his mother’s kitchen for snacks and whacks.

  “They got in trouble last week,” Roscoe said. “Throwing rocks and hit Calvin Cook’s new Mercedes. Dented the door! You shoulda seen him carrying the boys up here, asking who they belong to. They cried like women on a soap opera.”

  Snooter laughed. “I’d cry if Calvin Cook came after me—shit, everybody in the NFL cry.”

  Roscoe was seeing a woman whose sons played football for the LA Rams. Darnell said, “That where Hollie is now? Over at Marietta Cook’s?”

  Roscoe nodded. “She’s got her grandson Freeman, and Hollie wanted to spend the night over there.” Darnell looked down at the scratched wooden table, covered with layers of faint rings from cups. Hollie—who Louis ain’t takin care of. Lamont and Clinton—who Melvin don’t take care of. Damn, I’m real set up here now. Let me just tell Pops and Roscoe about mine, so I can be just another foolish, irresponsible nigga—I can hear their favorite words right now. I can say em for myself. He felt the taste of gin ringing in his stomach.