Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  “Let me think about it,” Darnell said, turning to the street. “I’ll check.”

  “Check your wallet,” Kickstand called after him, “before you come.”

  Darnell started the walk back to the Westside, watching the last of the fog blend in with the gray-shimmery olive trees to make a ghost forest. He touched the trunk of a pepper tree growing spindly by the asphalt. Seven hundred for a new engine, more seats, wheels to look for work. And an apartment. He had four hundred he’d been saving for the Spider’s clutch and paint job. Every month, his paltry Forestry paycheck had gone for board, fast food if Scott or Perez cooked, and weekends with Brenda. He liked to take her to dinner, to movies, and he’d bought her ruby earrings for her birthday.

  Christmas comin up and I ain’t got no present. He looked at the winter-silver sun, late morning high now. Call her? What I’ma say? Hey, baby, you workin hard? I’m back from the station. No shit, Sherlock—she knows the weather, too, by now.

  He heard Gas’s speakers thumping, and waited for the truck. He only nodded and said, “Damn,” and they were silent. Crossing over the five sets of railroad tracks at the edge of Gray Hollow, where the asphalt-and-dirt was pitted deep, Gas drove slow for his frame, and they passed the tiny store built of round stones that sold mostly snacks and beer now. In the alley where ghost men lit the glass pipes and slept on discarded couches and mattresses, where the last two boarded-up shacks always had girls called strawberries haunting the porch railings looking for customers who could pay cash or cane, someone was wrapped in a blanket near a cement foundation, but Darnell couldn’t see whether it was a man or a woman.

  The pile of scrap wood and crates marked the edge of Jackson Park. At the far end of the yellowed lawn was the playground and Our Lady, its round-arched door open, but this end of the park belonged to the men around the domino table. Darnell saw the morning crowd, not the heavy drinkers who gathered by early afternoon and lingered until after midnight. Morning guys had spent the night in their cars parked around the fire in the blackened trash barrel, the guys waiting for someone who wanted day labor, and a few who wanted to play a quick game of dominoes before the card table and folding chairs were surrounded by men three deep and drunk, hollering at the players.

  Gas slowed when he saw Ronnie Hudson, with an army-surplus jacket and knit cap, and Darnell leaned out to nod. “What up, brotha-man? I ain’t seen you in hella long,” Ronnie said.

  “I know,” Darnell said. “I saw your runnin buddy Victor on road camp.”

  “Yeah,” Ronnie said, sipping his coffee from a foam cup. “Homey pulled three.”

  Two men came from the warehouses toward the tracks, carrying paper bags, and Ronnie said, “Here come somebody’s breakfast.”

  “I love dealin with sprung niggas, man, they so desperate,” another man said, pushing his hand into his pocket.

  “Who need some Seagram’s?” one of the men said, holding up a bottle, glancing toward Darnell. He shook his head. Sprung dudes—they smoked rock, and they looked jumpy, jerky, wound up too tight, their eyes poking out in their long-boned faces. The pipe gave them pipe-stem legs, pipe-cleaner arms, he thought. Hair clump-grayed, arms ashy-grayed, palms bloodless when they held out their hands for dollars.

  “I don’t know how they steal that shit,” Gas said, starting the truck. “I wouldn’t even let nobody look like that in the damn do.”

  Do, Darnell thought. Man, don’t let em in the sto. Ho of the day. He saw Fricke’s mustache for a moment, looked at Gasanova’s soft-fringed lip and his fingers stroking down, down. Yeah, they’d be comedy together, but Fricke’s with some marine biologist. And I’m toe up.

  “Look like Dawn of the Dead out here,” Kreeper said. “Serious sprung.”

  He stayed on his back under the Spider for a while, so he wouldn’t have to talk to his mother, or to his father and Roscoe when they rumbled up in the big truck. Then the sound of the chain saw, while they cut more eucalyptus and Darnell stacked the wood, let him be silent.

  After school, Lamont and Clinton came racing down the street from their mother’s yard. Lamont blew out his nine candles fast and reached for the two boxes on the table. He opened Darnell’s present, a Magic Johnson T-shirt, and the other box, which held five pairs of new socks.

  Darnell’s mother saw his face. “What’s wrong with you, Lamont?” she said, folding her arms. “You lookin for more?”

  Clinton said quickly, “He wanted some Air Jordans.” Lamont hit him in the back with a sock package.

  “Well, he need a better air supply to his brain, then, cause he a fool,” Darnell’s father said, going toward the back room. “Them Air Jordans cost damn near a hundred dollars.”

  Darnell’s mother sat down to cut the cake. “What your mama get you?” she asked Lamont offhandedly, and Darnell folded his arms. His parents hated Melvin’s ex-girlfriend, never spoke to her unless one of the boys was sick. When they wanted the boys to come over, they sent someone to Alicia’s mother, who owned the house. “I ain’t got no quarrel with the mama,” Darnell’s father always said. “She didn’t have no raw material to work with, cause Alicia came out a fool.”

  Alicia had dated Melvin in high school, had the boys during their junior and senior years, and then, when he didn’t spend enough time with her, she reversed her car to slam the front end of his old Monte Carlo. She told the police he had rear-ended her maliciously, and he lost his driver’s license. He left Rio Seco a few months later, to stay with a friend in Compton, and he’d never come back for more than a few days.

  “Mama got me a jacket,” Lamont said through the cake crumbs. “She put it on layaway.”

  “Uh-huh,” Darnell’s mother murmured, taking the frosting-coated knife.

  Sophia and Paula came in late, breathless, and grabbed cake. “Darnell, you still here?” Sophia said. “Did Melvin come yet?”

  Lamont said, “My daddy be here.”

  Paula said, “He got us some bad gold chains.” They had turned fourteen in October. Darnell sat on the couch to watch TV.

  Melvin cruised in just after dark, a package under his arm, and Lamont ran to tear it open. The Air Jordans were nestled inside, and Lamont hollered after he put them on; he jumped off the porch and all over the dark lawn.

  “I’m so good,” Melvin said, stretching his arms over his head. “I got a friend to get me discount.”

  “Shut up, man,” Darnell said. “If you gotta tell people, you ain’t good.” He watched Melvin eat the cake his mother had set aside for him. Melvin’s hair was short, pressed waves at the back and gleaming longer waves brushed from his forehead; his lips were square under his little mustache, and his cheeks were rich curry, the color of a sauce Fricke had made once. Victor used to call Melvin “Low Yella” when they were friends. “You ain’t high yella, man, you lowdown yella. And the ladies love it.”

  Darnell heard Melvin talking to the boys on the front lawn for a minute, and then his brother’s voice floated down the sideyard and into the back room. Melvin never stayed long to talk to his father; if more than fifteen minutes passed, they’d be shouting. Darnell waited. Melvin came through the hallway, hugged his mother from behind, while she was gathering up the plates, and then he pulled Darnell out to the curb.

  “What up, baby bruh?” Melvin said softly. “You permanent back at the pad? This ain’t a weekend.”

  “No, it ain’t,” Darnell said. He looked at the boys running down the sidewalk. “Brenda’s pregnant.”

  “Oh, man,” Melvin said. “You gon do the ring thing?”

  “I guess so,” Darnell said, stopping. Why was he telling Melvin? Melvin would bust up laughing, say Darnell was a fool. But Melvin just smiled.

  “Lemme tell you somethin, baby bruh,” he said softly. “Sex with a pregnant woman is the best there is, better than any other time.”

  “What the hell you talkin about?” Darnell said.

  “No, man, listen. Gettin some with a pregnant woman—they ready, they ain’t scare
d, and they tighter.” Melvin walked away, calling to his boys, “Get over here, Lamont. I’m fixin to hat up, now, come and say later to your daddy before I can’t see your little black asses in the dark. Hey,” he said to them both, leaning close, and Darnell couldn’t hear what he whispered, his arms around their narrow backs.

  “He never forgets their birthdays,” Mama said in the back room, where Darnell’s father and Roscoe sat, looking over the checks they’d gotten that week.

  Darnell’s father said, “That and Christmas don’t make him a father.”

  Darnell sat in the chair opposite his father, reading the newspaper. “You talkin to me?” he said, resting his elbows on the edge of the table. “You see me runnin?”

  “I ain’t even studyin you, boy,” his father said, turning over a check.

  Roscoe took a sip of the gin in a jelly jar by his arm. “I wish Louis had been shorter,” he said suddenly, and Darnell was surprised. He rarely heard Roscoe speak his son’s name since Louis quit college. “I wish he’d had his mother’s head—not a dreamer’s head like mine.” Roscoe put down the jar and went outside.

  Darnell thought of Brenda in bed right now, touching her stomach in the dark, waiting for him to call. The baby—a boy?—curled?—his head against her skin, her heart. Whose head? Not mine, he thought. Not the one I got right now.

  One more day. Ain’t no need to call her yet. I’ma do it all tomorrow, and then I’ll just go get her. When I have somethin to say.

  “Did the week come out good?” he asked his father.

  “Why? You need some money?” his father said, looking up.

  “Yeah,” Darnell said, drumming his fingers. “Cause they gon want first and last for an apartment, and I only have four-fifty.”

  His father paused. “You find out first, and come tell me how much. You can owe me. You owe me your ass anyway.” He didn’t smile; he just looked at a pink bill, the kind Darnell recognized from the fabric store where his mother bought her material, and he rubbed the thin chain-saw scar on his forearm absently, like he always did.

  She liked downtown, the old buildings with long windows and courtyards. They used to walk around during her lunch hour and look at these places. He was taking city college courses then, right after graduation, waiting for the Corps, and she already had the clerk-typist job for the county. All those English, typing, and computer classes in school—she had this job on a special World of Work program when they were seniors.

  He checked out the buildings within walking distance of the county plaza. No hooptie yet—she could walk a short way to work until he got a car. A running car.

  The tiny Vietnamese woman who answered the fifth door he tried that said MANAGER told him, “Five hundred, okay? First and last require to rent.”

  It was a tiny one-bedroom, three blocks from Brenda’s building, but the big front window looked out on a courtyard with an old fountain planted with ivy. “I’ll be back,” he told the woman, who closed the door.

  “I don’t know if I can do this, Pops,” he said in his father’s truck. “Fifteen hundred. I’m comin to her with no job and a place rented for two months.” His head burned above his ears.

  His father looked straight ahead through the windshield. “How you think I feel if some boy got a baby on Sophia or Paula?” He started the truck and drove home, silent.

  Darnell sat stiff against the hard seat, staring out the window. The girls in the neighborhood always said, “Yeah, she had a baby for Tiny,” and “Girl, she done had three girls for David and he gone to North Carolina.” For him—he remembered Fricke and Scott and Perez talking one night about women, Fricke saying, “Having a baby with a woman doesn’t guarantee anything except the fact that you can make sperm.” With. For. Get a baby on her.

  Darnell sat in the back room, facing his father and Roscoe. Roscoe said, “Hollie’s only five. She doesn’t gulp down much money yet. You can take this five hundred from me. Pay me back on your own terms.”

  Darnell looked at the fresh hundred-dollar bills. His father said, “I didn’t ask the man to do that—he’s crazy enough to offer you his money. I think you should get a job first, but I don’t want Etienne Batiste to come down here and talk to me about how I raised this son.” His father counted out three hundred more, and pushed the thin stack across the scarred table.

  Darnell swallowed and ran his tongue inside his lip. “You know three of them managers’ offices tried to charge me a big security deposit because I’m black.”

  “You black?” Darnell’s father frowned. “Well, hell, give me my damn money back. Don’t you know black folks is a high lending risk?”

  “Not as high as son folks,” Roscoe muttered.

  The office never changed. The fake-wood desks, with phony striations and grain under his elbow where he waited, leaning on the shelf near the door. The fake plants, too green with impossible turquoise blooms, still sat near the coffeepot and paper cups. The piles of folders everywhere, the stiff-haired woman at the receptionist’s desk who still glanced up fearfully at first, not remembering that he stopped by sometimes for Brenda.

  Lunch was in three minutes. They would all come out this way, the women from Personnel, Accounting, and Benefits. All the women who worked in the huge county building would stream out into the elevators and courtyard. The men, the bosses, either left early or went out later, because there were no crowds of them, just two or three at a time, with their suits and white shirts. Gold-rimmed glasses, gold rings, gold pens.

  She came out with an Oriental girl. Brenda stopped and looked at Darnell, and the other girl stared, her face lifted. Darnell smiled, glanced down at Brenda’s belly, hidden by her loose blazer.

  “Can I buy you a couple of burritos?” Darnell said. “If you aren’t too busy?”

  Brenda whispered something to the girl, who looked hard at Darnell and kept walking. Brenda was silent until they were out the glass doors, and then she turned to him. “You the one who’s so busy.”

  “I’m sorry,” he started, but she cut him off.

  “Two weeks since you called, Darnell. Two weeks, and I’m reading about this big fire in some canyon, I know you were there. And now you’re home for what—two days? Three days?” She kept walking, heading toward a bench at the far end of the pedestrian mall. “I thought you were dead. So you might as well be.”

  “Brenda,” Darnell said, standing while she sat and pushed her hand deep in her purse, looking for something. Her eyes were smaller, swelling pink with tears, and she wouldn’t raise her face to him. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “You know what you wanted to say,” she whispered. “You wanted to say, I’ma keep playin with fire. I’ma stay up here forever.’”

  “I didn’t stay,” he said, sitting down.

  “You didn’t have a choice yet, Darnell,” she whispered, lower. “And I don’t have a choice about this.” Her shoulders were curved over her thighs.

  “I’m choosin, Brenda,” he said, leaning in close. “Come on.”

  Her lips fit into his mouth. They were small, too, and her top lip was plump, delicate, above his tongue. He touched the dip at the center with his finger when she pulled away from him.

  He could see the small belly now, round like a mixing bowl, in the gap of her jacket, but when he touched it, afraid, all he could feel was a ridge of zipper at her skirt. “I had to buy bigger pants last week,” she said. “Pretty soon I have to make maternity clothes.”

  “I couldn’t even see anything last time,” he said, looking at her face. “You weren’t even sure.” Her hair was pulled back into a knot; her eyes were dark gold, liquid-clear as whiskey, and he put his arms around her for a moment. Then he felt the mound press against him, at his own belly. He could feel it better than see it.

  Her eyebrows lifted. “You haven’t been around recently, so how could you see anything? The season lasted forever.”

  He took her to Zamora’s. Mr. Zamora and Darnell’s father had been friends since the Air Fo
rce. Brenda touched the red peppers planted along the parking strip near the adobe building, and Darnell said, “You need some real burritos, not fast food.”

  They sat at a tiny table near the jukebox, which played only Mexican music. The fast-rolling guitars and trumpets swirled with the ceiling fans, and Mr. Zamora said, “Take these to your dad.” He held a long stack of tortillas in a plastic bag. “He cut down that tree tearing up my parking lot, that sucker tree.” Brenda was looking at photos of Mr. Zamora’s grandchildren, lined over the cash register. “Numero sixteen,” he said proudly, pointing to a baby in a white gown.

  Over the fat burritos, Brenda said, “Mama’s thirty-nine. A grandma at thirty-nine.” She stared out the window at the traffic. “She’s happy. But my dad—when we drive anywhere and he sees somebody pregnant, and they look young, he starts talking about welfare mamas and babies having babies.”

  “You ain’t a baby,” Darnell said, rubbing floury powder on his thumb. “I ain’t a baby.”

  “I look young,” she said, half dreamy. “The ladies at work always tell me how young I look. I’m the youngest one in Benefits.” She bit her lips. “I see how people notice me downtown now. In my dresses. Everybody thinks they know what they see when I go in the county building. And they don’t think I’m going to work.”

  Darnell folded his arms. “You can’t worry about everybody. You don’t even know everybody.” But she’d always been like that in school. She watched faces, remembered gossip and frowns. And he didn’t know what to tell her about her father. All he could think of was what the men had always said about Batiste: “Always got two jobs, and come home drinkin hard. But he gon make his money. Make no mistake.”

  “So you home,” she said nervously, and he touched her wrist, where it lay on the gold-specked table, and bent his face up under to see her eyes. He knew he was supposed to say it. Ask her the big question. Tell her, “This is what we gon do—I got a plan.” But he didn’t even have a key yet. Mr. Zamora set down another plate of rice, and Brenda’s face was wreathed in steam.