Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  Darnell remembered the rabbits and snakes fleeing the fires, and he said, “I know that. I worked that land, remember?”

  His father’s jaw worked, pulsed, near his ear. “You better work for yourself. Ain’t no good jobs now. Memory lane done closed down, okay? You got a baby comin.” When Darnell opened his mouth, his father raised a hand. “You first told me about this firefighter thing in high school, about the college classes and the academy you’d have to get in, and I thought it might work. But you done made your choice now, and you got people to feed. I was thinkin, maybe when you get a vehicle, we can go in on a mower and edger and you try to get some yards.”

  “Like Snooter and Nacho, huh?” Darnell smiled. “I don’t want to be out there cuttin grass all summer in the smog.”

  “Better than starvin all summer,” his father said, starting the engine. “Does Brenda get time off with the baby?”

  Darnell breathed hard. “Six weeks, I think.”

  “Let me tell you somethin from experience. You was a baby, hard as it is to remember.” His father paused. “You don’t want to be a man at home all the time with a mother and her new baby. You’ll be in the way. You’ll be about as useful as a third tit.”

  Darnell laughed. “Great. I feel useless now.”

  His father looked down the steep road. “When you got kids, only thing useful is money.”

  “How’d you get so good at this?” Brenda said. “I thought guys didn’t know how to do this. Your father sure doesn’t.”

  Darnell gave her more of the spaghetti and garlic bread. “The mountains, remember? We had to cook for ourselves.” He stared at his plate. Yeah, seem like ten years ago, he thought. Ho of the day. Fricke makin curry and Chinese. Scott puttin a whole jar of jalapeños in the Sloppy Joes, till even Perez was cryin. He wondered if they had jobs. Fricke’s gotta call me back in April. Baby’s due in April.

  He washed the dishes, too, and sat next to her on the couch. “I didn’t get the call,” he said. “I got the letter.”

  He showed her the paper. “We have reviewed your application….” Brenda laid it on the coffee table. “I knew,” she said. “Cause after you told me about the questions, I asked Waltrina Stovall. Her cousin works in Park and Rec. She said that one question, about the fight, was cause the city’s liable.” She bit her lip. “They’re liable if anything happens.”

  Darnell nodded, staring at the TV. “I ain’t liable to find out, right?”

  “We just have to be patient, Darnell,” she said. “I’m not in a hurry. I mean, we’re living.”

  “We’re livin small,” he said, remembering Leon.

  After a while, she fell asleep on the couch, with her head in his lap.

  Demetrius Thompson was silent when they went up and down the rows. Most of the cars out by the riverbottom were ancient, and Darnell used to poke around here when his father was getting a truck fixed. When he was small, he’d touched the heavy chrome on the ’57 Chevy too smashed for even a lowrider to love; he’d run his finger over the rust patterns on the ugly Pintos and Pacers. If a car made it to this lot, none of the men who hung around had spoken for it, no one had asked the Thompsons to keep an eye out for it, and it would probably never move again.

  Darnell said, “You ain’t got much new.”

  Walking back to the barn, Demetrius said, “No shit. The cops don’t bring their tows here no more; they take em to Abella’s.”

  In the shade near the sawhorses, Darnell said, “You gon find a cheap two-door for me, man, somethin with a straight-six, just for transportation? Like a Nova.”

  “Dude brought in a nice deuce-and-a-quarter last week,” Kickstand said.

  “I ain’t got the cash for no Buick like that,” Darnell said.

  “You done fightin fires? Why you ain’t working with your pops?” Demetrius asked.

  Darnell squatted near the stone wall. “My pops and Roscoe usually get just enough jobs to make it themselves, unless they get some big removal calls. I guess I’ma do one with Pops next week.”

  “You don’t want a truck?” Demetrius went on. “You can’t do no pickup jobs or nothin in a Nova.”

  “Yeah, but I need some room for a car seat.” He raised his chin.

  But nobody made fun of him this time. “Don’t your dad still have that old El Camino, the one he used to bring in here?” Kickstand said. He rested his foot on an old battery, and his bandanna was tight around his forehead.

  “Yeah, but he blew the head and cracked the block big time,” Darnell said. “You know that was a long time ago.”

  “Shit, that got enough room for your woman. Bring it in here, and I’ll drop a new engine for you. Six hundred.”

  Darnell rubbed his knees. He and Sophia and Paula used to fit on the bench seat of the El Camino when they were small; his father kept chain saws and axes in the back, and they would slide back and forth, scratchy metal on metal. His father and Roscoe had first started the tree-trimming business back then, and soon they needed a bigger truck to haul all the branches and wood.

  On the walk back through the olive groves, he touched the trunk of one wild tobacco tree sprouting from a ditchbank. Trimming trees with his father. He wondered how his father would divide the jobs if business was slow. Uh-uh, I can’t see it. Man, I wouldn’t be able to do anything right anyway. Pops used to holler at me steady ballistic, just outta habit, and Roscoe was the same with Louis. He thought of Louis, rolling with Leon. Roscoe had wanted Louis to play ball, even when Louis hated every free throw he took in the long driveway. What does Pops want me to do?

  At Jackson Park, a big crowd surrounded the smoking trash barrel, and he saw Ronnie Hudson. Then Victor Smalls turned around, lifted his chin. “What it is? You a daddy yet, brothaman?”

  “Not yet,” Darnell answered. “Almost.”

  Victor laughed. “Ain’t no such thing as almost. You feedin the kid now.”

  “No, I ain’t,” Darnell said, smearing a line of broken glass from the sidewalk with his shoe. “Brenda is.”

  Ronnie said, “You lookin, too? I was fittin to ax you if your pops had any big jobs comin up. He don’t need no help?”

  Victor said, “Floyd King had a big construction haul goin.”

  “I ain’t heard,” Darnell said. A car with a loud muffler pulled up, and two men got out. One was thin, walking slow and careful up to the curb; his eyes lifted blankly toward Darnell, and his small goatee pointed stiff from his chin.

  “Brother Lobo!” Darnell called. “You still here.”

  “Darnell Tucker. The boy who so loved fire he was willing to risk his only begotten butt every time he saw one.” Brother Lobo sat at the domino table.

  He had been their Black History teacher back in junior high, and his classroom was where Darnell, Nacho, Louis, and the others had gathered to draw on the blackboard and insult each other while Mr. Green, as he was known to everyone else, told them stories and read passages from his huge book collection. But he was legally blind, almost sightless in one eye, and one of the newer, louder teachers. He was laid off when the school district decided that in the eighties a separate Black History class wasn’t really necessary.

  Brother Lobo squinted at the dominoes and prepared for his performance. Darnell held his smile tight when each of the seven bones almost touched the eyelashes, and then Lobo slammed down the double six. The man who had driven him there, Mr. Talbert, slammed down the six-three and yelled, “Fitteen! You got it over with.”

  “Darnell,” Brother Lobo said, shifting the bones in his palms. He took his time, looking up for a second in the circle of shouted conversation. “How is your fire? Has it been contained, partially or fully? Those are the right terms?”

  Darnell said, “Fire’s out. I’m home.”

  Brother Lobo slapped down his domino. “The shy Brenda?”

  “Still workin downtown at the county,” Darnell said. He stopped, but Victor was silent.

  “I don’t know how you drink that weird shit,” Mr. Talber
t said, looking at the red can on the sidewalk by Lobo’s foot.

  “Dr Pepper isn’t weird,” Lobo said. “People all over the South drink it religiously.”

  “You from the South?” Victor said.

  “No. I have been to the South,” Brother Lobo said. He slammed a domino so hard the table shook, and said, “Twenty! Please!”

  “Where you from?” Victor pressed.

  “A place where I am not now,” Lobo said, turning to squint at them. Then he drew his face back down to the table and the snaking line of dominoes.

  Darnell leaned against one of the abandoned couches near the pepper tree, feeling wispy branches brush his neck. No More, Louisiana—where Brenda’s daddy was from. “Place so little you never find it,” was what his GranaLene always answered.

  A place where I am not now. Darnell listened to the shouting, heard more car doors slam. The sun was bright on his eyelids. Whenever someone asked his brother, Melvin, “Where you stay now, man?” he would always smile small and answer, “Not here.”

  She was vacuuming, not singing but muttering along with the radio, not hearing him, and when the door slammed, she shook.

  “Only me,” he said to her startled face. “Why you look like that?”

  “Yeah, I’m both,” she said angrily. “So?”

  He’d meant her twisted-tight forehead and her frown. “Huh?”

  “Barefoot. Pregnant. Mama always told me to vacuum barefoot so I can feel the dirt I missed. The dirt you can’t even see.” She looked down at the linoleum near the counter.

  “So your mama ain’t comin over,” he said.

  “She taught me to clean like that cause my father hates dirt. He found a piece of rice in a corner one time, and when he still saw it the next day, he cussed her out.”

  Darnell put his arms around her, coming from the side because she hated him to feel how big she was now. She kept saying she was huge, and his mother kept saying it was because she had started out so skinny and the baby knew what it needed. “I ain’t worried about no dirt,” he said.

  “And I ain’t worried about you,” Brenda snapped. “I been vacuuming this way since I was six, okay?” She turned the machine back on and he got out of her way. He sat on the couch to wait.

  When she was finished, she stood in front of him. “When you came to walk me home, you didn’t see that woman ahead of us, huh?” she said. “Blonde, about forty. She looks like Vanna White. She’s a supervisor in Accounting, and she decided she wanted a baby. She went to a sperm bank in San Diego, and she’s due before me. I hear the other ladies talking to her, and she says it’s, like, some life-style choice or something like that. Me? Yesterday these two old ladies saw me come out of the county building, I had to run something over to Health, and one of em said, ‘What a shame.’ Like I’m deaf. See, I’ma be a welfare mama no matter what I do, what I look like.” She stopped, walked to the window. “Remember when we were in school, if I wore nice clothes, people from the Westside talked about me. And if I didn’t, my daddy got mad.”

  “You ain’t livin with your daddy” was all Darnell could think to say. He pulled her toward the couch gently. “Didn’t you tell them old ladies your wedding ring didn’t come from no gumball machine? You mean I paid money for it and you think nobody sees it? Damn.” He touched her chin, grinning.

  Brenda bit her lips and blinked, and then she said, “Okay. I quit.”

  Darnell said, “We’re out of milk again, so I’m fixin to go to the store. Now don’t you want me to bring back some, what, pickles and pistachios or somethin?”

  She shook her head. “Just bring back a clock that goes fast-forward.”

  “What?”

  “Five more weeks,” she said. “So it’ll be over.” She leaned back on the couch finally, her feet up, the huge round belly all the way up under her breasts; he’d seen her pushing baby powder inside the deep creases.

  He couldn’t stand to sit there every night, no talk about what somebody said at work or that damn phone again, nothing like that coming out of his mouth, so he tried to have something to buy all the time, little treats for her. He walked the few blocks to the store downtown. Honeycomb. So far, that cereal was the only thing she really craved. He’d tried a couple, dry, the way she snacked on them, and he stared at the holes in the flower-edged shape. It burst into chalky-sweet powder between his teeth, and he looked at the back of the box. How did they make these? Flour, sugar, all that—but what kind of machine made the shape, the holes?

  When he was alone, it was all he could think of now. A job. He saw the shopping carts abandoned on the sidewalk beside him, at awkward angles to each other like grazing cows under the streetlights. He pushed two of them together, felt the metal heavy and cold. Who made shopping carts, what kind of machine, in what factory? He passed a mailbox, the old cast-iron kind downtown, and he went back to see. BRIDGEPORT CASTING COMPANY—BRIDGEPORT, CONN. said the raised letters. The pitted iron was thick as his mother’s frying pan. Did they pour the metal into molds?

  A few men were pushing cans and forty-ounce bottles into the recycling machines, but since he was walking, they only glanced at him. They figured he didn’t have spare change. He thought of something he’d heard: No such thing as spare change, brothaman. I needs my change. Get you a spare job.

  He wandered the aisles, staring at packages, picking them up to look at the backs. Glasses, spatulas, cereal boxes, egg whisks. Pampers. Toilet paper. Green Giant peas. Popsicles from Mexico. In the back of the store, the meat was red, flecked with fat, cases stocked full this time of night. He knew who cut that up. Produce section—a guy sprayed the broccoli, lettuce, carrots. Farmers owned the farms, the older white men with caps and big belts he’d always seen when his father took him out to roadside stands. Mexicans weeded and picked, moving up and down the rows with bandannas trailing curtainlike over their shoulders, held in place by hats. His father brought cases of strawberries back for several of the women on Picasso Street.

  The cashier pulled the milk carton over the glass square, then the Honeycomb box. Her hair was brown, blown into a high wall of bangs. Darnell paid her, felt the cold milk through the bag. Yeah, Smith’s never called, he thought, going out the door. Surprise, surprise. He looked at the blank, raw outlines on the wall by the recycling machines. The phones were gone. Drug dealers had been camped out, making calls, and the company had taken down the booths. Ring-ring, Darnell thought.

  He left her buried in the blankets when the sky turned gray. Bending to her neck, he said, “I’m goin to work.”

  With his father, he waited for Roscoe in the driveway. Darnell saw the men leaving Picasso as the sun edged out: Floyd King with Nacho and Snooter, in their trucks; The Bug Doctor (ALL MY PATIENTS DIE) from down the street; Mr. Albert in his roofing truck with his hot-tar trailer. “Wake up, boy,” his father said, and Roscoe’s Apache roared around the corner.

  All the way past the new tracts, the few orange groves left between the walled-in acres of houses, Darnell could see the gradual slope and then the steep hills of Grayglen. They wound into the older, narrow streets of old-money Grayglen then, and the thick, ancient eucalyptus and tall cypress cast instant dark over the asphalt. The houses were tucked way back on their land, surrounded by trees, and Darnell said, “Plenty of game up here, Pops. Cats, dogs, gerbils.”

  His father didn’t smile. “Yeah. One rich lady up here has llamas.”

  This house was on a slope, and the two massive carob trees had raised the lawn, buckled the sidewalk over and over, Darnell could tell. The new cement, which the city couldn’t have poured more than two years ago, was already warped. His father watched Roscoe’s truck labor up the narrow street, and he said, “These trees committed the cardinal sin—they messed up the plumbing.”

  Carob roots were notorious all over Rio Seco for wrecking sewer lines and sprinkler systems. Darnell’s father always said carob trees kept him from going hungry—the branches, full of heavy brown pods, needed trimming, and eventually
people got tired of the whole tree.

  They took chain saws to the thick branches, the dust flying, and then while Darnell cut and loaded wood on the truck, his father and Roscoe started on the trunks. Showers of chips and splinters and shavings almost hid them, and then the trees fell the right way, on the lawn. The already-cut branches had left a scarred, short trunk, and Darnell went to work on the logs.

  They rested in the shade of the huge hedge at the edge of the property. “Them stumps gon be hell,” his father said.

  “After all this drought,” Roscoe said, rubbing his chin, staring at the massive circles of wood. “We should start soaking the ground now.”

  Darnell went toward the house to look for the hose. It was one of those wood-and-glass contemporary types, with huge windows everywhere. He saw a figure move from the picture window right in front, and the woman opened the door quickly to step out. “Did you need something?” she asked.

  “Just the hose,” Darnell said, standing still. They didn’t like for you to move around once they were right there. His father had taught him that long ago, when he was ten and just starting to come along on jobs.

  “I’ll get it,” she said, going behind a bush near the house where the hose was coiled neatly. He wondered where her husband worked. She was pretty young, maybe in her thirties, with long brown hair pulled back into one of those ruffly circles.

  “I couldn’t believe just the three of you could do all that,” she said, shading her eyes with her hand. Darnell looked at the trees. She was one of the kind who stood at the windows and watched every move you made; if you looked right at her, she’d step back and pretend to be doing something else. “Do you need a drink?” she said, looking at the hose in Darnell’s hand.

  “No, we have to soak the ground to pull out the stumps,” he said, and she frowned slightly.

  “You don’t have one of those machines, the ones that chew everything up? I’ve seen the city use them.”

  Yeah, stumpers, Darnell thought. Cost much ducats—more than two trucks. “No, ma’am,” he said. “We’ll pull the whole stump out and fill in the hole.”