Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  Darnell crouched beside the El Camino. Choose your poison. He dragged the cardboard he’d lie on, staring at the rusty circlets of dried blood on the edge, where his father had cut himself months ago. The baby was riding in a cushion of blood. All that secret stuff with his mother and sisters, with Brenda every month—the baby clung to red soft lining. His grandmother made his mother stay in bed when she was big with his sisters, when Darnell was seven. “I seen a spot a blood—you ain’t takin no chance,” she’d said. “You ain’t forget what happen with him?”

  “Hush,” his mother had said, and Darnell slid from the bedroom’s doorway.

  Snooter shouted, “You bleedin them brakes again?” and Darnell blinked before he nodded, flexing his knees. “Hey, girl, you got your Nature Boy back, huh?”

  Darnell saw Brenda watching from the wrought-iron screen door. “You ain’t even started yet?” she said, her arms crossed high. Darnell slid under the car; he could tell she was gone when Nacho said, “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Bellyache,” Darnell’s father said. “And it ain’t hardly gon get better.” Folding chairs scraped across the driveway and forks clinked on the plates they got from inside.

  He was still under the car when he smelled the burning, acrid and far away. Pulling himself out, he walked into the street to look at the sky. From the way the smoke rose and roiled, hung there while the afternoon turned plum-dark as sunset, he knew the fire was in the riverbottom again. Sometimes homeless people living down there started cooking and didn’t know the wind. This was thick cane and bamboo, black smoke, flames blazing fifty, sixty feet down into the cane stand, where water and retardant couldn’t reach. West of the city, he thought, the sun soon so completely gone that Esther, two doors down, came out looking sleepy, like she’d napped with her new baby, and called to her kids. “How it get dark so fast?” she asked Darnell.

  “It’s not evening yet,” Roscoe said. “Fire.” They squinted at the ashes falling like snow, the flakes rocking back and forth until they settled on car hoods.

  “Look at that,” Roscoe said, his head thrown back. Streams of crows flapped over, quiet, not jostling each other. “They got fooled, heading to the riverbottom because they think it’s time to bed down for the night.”

  Yeah, Louis the one taught us all where the crows sleep, Darnell thought, and then Esther called out past him, “Girl! Look at you!” Darnell turned to see Brenda behind him. “You can’t hide from me!” Esther laughed. “I had six!”

  Brenda bumped him from behind, tickled his sides. He lifted his head again to the sky. “What y’all starin at?” she said into his back. “Helicopter chasin somebody?” Damn, he thought, watching the red-tinged sidewalks, the palm fronds lifting like hair in the wind.

  “Bring that belly over here,” Esther said. “We lookin at the smoke.”

  “Not another one,” Brenda said, swinging around to face Darnell.

  “You better hold that baby,” he said, taking Esther’s girl gently. “You need the practice.” He cradled the heavy head in his arm for a moment, made himself stare at the tiny lips, shiny-wet. And her breath smelled clear and citrus, like 7 Up. He leaned closer, startled, and Esther laughed.

  “Smell good?” she said. “That’s why baby’s breath is a pretty little puff of flowers.” He couldn’t look at Brenda; he’d only wanted to distract her. The baby turned in his elbow, and he passed her to Brenda.

  “I’ma go finish up,” he said.

  Half an hour later, the sun lowered itself from the smoke, hanging in the band of sky between the pall and the line of hills. No progress for the crew, he could tell by watching the smoke, rising just as dark and no white puffs to signal success. The way the whole day had changed, the darkness, called to him like always, like when he was ten and riding his bike for miles to find the fire in the orange-packing house, in the fields near a freeway, on the Sugar Ridge Mountains. He kept his face away from the west, waiting for Brenda to come back from Esther’s.

  But when she padded across the street, Esther behind her, he said, “You want to go for a test drive, see if the brakes are okay?” And she knew that excitement in his face.

  “Nigga—please,” she said, her voice even. “Why would I want to sit somewhere right now and look at a fire? Cause that’s where we’ll end up. Every summer, that’s all we did. Drove around to get as close as you could.”

  His chest filled with panic, and he made his voice angry, not scared. “Hey, wasn’t a whole lot to do for a poor brotha,” he said. “Couldn’t go shoppin with my gold card, couldn’t play golf with your daddy.”

  “No. Uh-uh. Don’t try and shift that over on me or nobody else,” she said. “You in a trance again, and after all these months, that whole season of me worrying about you getting hurt, you want me to look at a fire now?”

  “That’s just the baby talkin,” Esther said. “Y’all ain’t gotta holler and argue.”

  “If that’s how the baby talks now, I’m in serious shit when it gets here,” Darnell said, getting into the El Camino. He was glad the men were all in the back room now. “Come on, Brenda, let’s go home.” He knew better.

  “No, we ain’t gon go home and do nothing like every day,” she said. “We need to go somewhere nice.” Her feet angled outward, like she was off balance, and Darnell wanted to step out and put his hand behind her back, to straighten it and help her to the car. But he couldn’t. His shoulders, heavy as sandbags, held him against the seat. The last one. This is the last one. I promise. “Get in,” he said, softly, starting up the car, and he didn’t watch Esther’s eyebrows.

  “Okay,” she said when they neared the blank drape-backed window of their apartment. Darnell nodded to the black-railed balcony so she could get out before he parked in the stall under their floor. But she stayed. “Go. Get as cozy as you can to it.”

  The sun slid away in the smoky sky, while he drove silently, trying to remember which of the small dirt roads led to that part of the riverbottom. Red glowed near the Jacaranda Avenue bridge; he could see the flames slant forward with the wind and then climb the cane and sky again. Around a swath of cleared land, he found the end of the sandy trail and the taillights he knew would be gathered there.

  When the engine stopped, Brenda said, “See? You never need me for company. You got all your fellow pyros.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

  “Pyros set fires, Brenda,” he said. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He got out and walked to the barbed-wire fence sagging in the sand. The older white guys in baseball caps and binoculars, the ones he’d always imagined were ex-firemen, and the kids on bikes behind him, voices threading high through the gathering dark, all stared when a lone palm tree caught in the canopy of vines and cane below; the top burned wildly, a sparkler held to the sky. He’d parked far from the others. The fire popped and dry tree trunks cracked loud as gunshots. The flames were maybe seventy-five feet high, but far away, wavering in the bamboo, the giant arundo cane. He wasn’t close enough. The shaking silence only came when you were nearly inside, and he paced back to the car, snapping twigs under his feet. Brenda sat in the open doorway of the car, like always, and her knees were round and pale as tiny faces watching him. The panic fisted inside him again.

  “I know you’re not a pyro,” she said, resting her elbows on her knees so that he had to sit on the sandy ground to hear her. “You want to be a hero.”

  “No,” he said, “that ain’t it,” but she went on.

  “Remember when you first started talking to me in school? We used to see each other at the cemetery, on All Saints’ Day, and you never said anything. Then when I moved away, that’s the only place I saw you. And at Fairmount, when you started telling me about the fires, I thought you wanted to be a hero, saving people from burning houses and all that.” She raised her head and pointed to the glow. “In the street today, I knew where the fire was when I saw the big ashes. See, I always listen to you.”

  “I w
asn’t lecturin.”

  “You were just talking, always telling me about the different colors of smoke. Like today with the big pieces of ash—you said that’s vegetation. But I remember once we were driving around and I saw smoke, and you just said, ‘That’s a house,’ and you didn’t even try to find it.”

  He remembered. The black, roiling smoke, carrying the ash of couches and chemicals and clothes and… He’d never tried to go close to a house fire, not since the fire on Pablo that killed three children in his kindergarten class. He’d run from the screams and gray rivers of water pouring down the gutter from the firemen’s hoses.

  “You aren’t into saving people,” she said. “You just love the fire. You told me about fire lines, and then I started getting scared, that you’d be real close, like you told me, and you’d get hurt. Or die.” She stopped, breathed, and said, “Can’t you be a hero just staying here?”

  Darnell placed his palms down in the sand to support himself where he was squatting. He looked at the thin stem-mark on his hand, remembered the boulder where he’d rested his cheek while he waited. Then he looked up at her face, so much rounder, her eyes slashed underneath with darkness, her knees wide. “That doesn’t scare me,” he said, twisting his head toward the fire. “That ain’t scary.”

  “You think I’m not scared?” she whispered, eyes fixed on him. “I am. Every day I’m so afraid. Every night.”

  She kept her face turned away while he drove home. The ashes were powdery on the stairway railing.

  In the dark bedroom, with the passing headlights circling the walls now and then, he knew she wasn’t asleep. She half sat, propped on pillows so she could breathe, and he was afraid to get up and sit in the living room, afraid to leave the breathing he knew wasn’t rest.

  He’d been instructed to bring her to Picasso Street on Sunday morning. Sophia and Paula raced around, arranging food on trays, and women’s faces were lined up on the couch. Women from her job, and Miss Ralphine, Mrs. Tribeleaux. They smiled when he led Brenda inside, and she pressed her fingers into his arm. “Oh,” she said. “Look at this.”

  After the women had gone, hours later, Darnell came back inside where his mother and hers sorted the piles of clothing. A stroller was parked in the corner. “All the ladies at work pooled their money to buy it,” said Brenda, seeing him stare. “Strollers cost fifty dollars.”

  Darnell touched the gray canvas cover, the rubber wheels. He bent down and saw the metal plate, GRACO CHILDREN’S PRODUCTS: ELVERSON, PA.

  Picking up a tiny sweater, he saw the label. Made in Philippines. The clothes were mostly yellow and pale green with ducks and bunnies. “You get yellow or green if you don’t know boy or girl,” his mother said. “You don’t want no boy wearin pink.” Yeah, Darnell thought. I guess not. But he was reading the labels. The rattle was made in India. The white booties in Taiwan.

  I’m a hero, he thought, packing the stroller into the car. See, a man gotta carry all this heavy stuff. Damn. “We have to go to that Lamaze class tomorrow, right?” he said, driving, but she only nodded.

  She went to bed, and he talked to her back. “Your feet hurt?”

  “Just let me be for now.”

  She didn’t move all afternoon, and when night fell, he went into the room to see if she was asleep. She was sitting propped in the bed. Her eyes were closed, but she pressed them tighter now and then, her lips and eyes only thin lines when she hissed in breath. She looked like her father for a moment, he saw, and he said, “The baby kickin hard?” That was how she breathed if the feet got her hard in the lungs or stomach.

  She only nodded. He sat on the couch, watched TV, took the trash down to the apartment dumpster. Lights were on in the other five apartments, the curtains closed. Then he heard Brenda call, “Darnell? Darnell?” It was so soft he barely heard her, but her voice was high. He ran up the stairs and into the bedroom. She looked up, and he smelled sharp, watery vapor all around her. She closed her eyes, and he pulled back the blanket to see damp soaked everywhere.

  “My water’s broken, Darnell,” she whispered. “I’m scared.”

  “How long, I mean, you think you’re in labor?” he said, keeping his back stiff, sitting carefully close to her. He tried to remember Fricke’s EMT stuff, the things he’d mentioned.

  “All day,” she said. “I was scared.”

  At the hospital, her contractions were only three minutes apart, and nurses surrounded her bed, moving things around, saying, “This is awful fast for a first baby, hon. This is four weeks early? Why didn’t you call somebody? Let’s see how far along you are.”

  Darnell stood in the corner near jungle-hung tubes and cords, waiting for her to scream, but she only moaned now and then. The nurse closest to him said, “This baby wants out fast. Did you do Lamaze, Dad?”

  He stared at her, remembering the nurse at the doctor’s calling him and all the men Dad. And the other nurse said, “Look at this impatient baby coming!”

  An Oriental man stood by the bed, touching the inside of Brenda’s thigh, pushing gently. “This is Dr. Liu, Brenda, okay?” a woman said, and the man glanced at Darnell. “You ready, Dad?” he said.

  Darnell touched her forehead, the blood rushing at his ears, his back stiff, and her eyes were still closed. It was like he wasn’t there at all. He heard them saying, “Push now, stop, now, push, now.” Brenda’s neck bulged, that tiny neck grew thick and her shoulders rose up under his hands. Darnell closed his eyes, too, at her face unrecognizable, a swelling mask.

  “A girl!” Dr. Liu said, and the mewling rasp from the baby’s slit mouth jolted Darnell. Brenda opened her eyes and tried to lift her head, but the doctor said, “Aren’t you going to cut the cord, Dad?” He grabbed Darnell’s hand and pushed scissors into the palm; a suction descended over the baby’s purplish face, and the frog-bent arms and legs were stiff. Darnell stared at the waxy-smeared covering, at the membranes shiny and wet. “The cord,” the doctor said softly, and he put his hand around Darnell’s as if Darnell was a child learning to cut construction paper for the first time. Brenda began a laugh-moan, a high catlike sound, over and over, holding out her arms for the baby. The cord pulsed and bulged, like Brenda’s neck, and the metal sliced it where his hand was placed.

  CONFINEMENT

  “THE BABY GONE,” MRS. Batiste said from the doorway. “They already taken her.”

  “What?” Darnell felt the trickle of cold race in his hair. “Gone?”

  Mrs. Batiste’s eyes were red-rimmed, and she opened her mouth; he heard Brenda call, “Darnell? Is he back, Mama?”

  “Gone?” he asked again. He’d driven to the apartment for more of Brenda’s clothes and things.

  “No, no,” Mrs. Batiste said, pulling the bag from his arms, leaving damp across his chest, cold in the air-conditioning. “She too small, so they taken her to the… the place.”

  Brenda’s eyes were all that moved when he went into the room. A nurse was taking away bloodstained paper, and he winced. “She’s only four pounds,” Brenda whispered. “Premature.”

  “So she impatient just like me,” he said, trying to sound normal. His heart was still so big he had no room for breath.

  Dead—I thought she meant dead gone. Maybe Brenda. “I can’t touch you, huh?” he asked. But when the nurse disappeared with the gathered armful, Brenda nodded, her eyes blurred. He bent to cover her with his chest, feeling her shake underneath his collarbone.

  “I was so scared when they started talking fast,” she whispered. “Go see her, make sure she’s okay. They won’t let me get up yet.”

  He pushed off her carefully, put his lips on hers and tasted salt.

  He’d been happy to run back home for her stuff; the blood, the placenta, all the people in the room bent over the baby, bent over the dark flow under Brenda’s legs, made him faint and sick. The nursery was crowded, but he didn’t see his name. When he asked a nurse, she pointed to neonatal intensive care, and he saw two babies, the same shade of pinkish-blue, with arms
and legs thin and round as pencils. Charolette—that was what Brenda had whispered to the baby, no one else, when she held her and stopped laughing. Charolette. Her black hair fringed slick over her forehead.

  For a week, Brenda slept at the hospital, on a cot. Charolette was too small and sleepy even to eat the first few days, and Brenda’s breasts rose full, veins snaking along the skin, hours after the birth. Darnell couldn’t watch when she pumped the milk, when the plastic funnel gripped her nipples. He stared at the too-tiny baby head, the pale lavender legs that Brenda said were filling out by the fifth day, the darker purple wells under Brenda’s eyes and around her lips.

  He listened to his mother’s stories at her kitchen table; her cheeks trembled even now when she told him about how Antoine was small, how the twins had been so skinny, and how he was plump compared to Melvin.

  His father only said, “You feel useful yet?” Darnell stacked the plum wood he’d brought into the yard, and Snooter came over to say, “I need a ride to Jackson Park, man, you goin home now?” Darnell nodded.

  He dropped Snooter off, lingered to tell the men he had a new daughter, and they began in chorus: “You whupped by two women now,” Victor said. “That sweat on your face or tears, boy?” Mr. Talbert crowed.

  Darnell folded his arms, and Brother Lobo said, “Two queens.”

  “And a lotta cryin,” Darnell said, relieved. “Brenda’s happy, though.”

  Lobo raised his head. “That’s her instinct, from the motherland. No—not a pun, I mean Africa. Her instinct is to populate the world with beautiful black children.”

  Victor said, “Seem like Darnell’s instinct the one populatin.” And when they all laughed, Ronnie began flailing his arms and imitating Whitney Houston, singing about children being our future. Victor looked over at Darnell and laughed.

  “Shut up, man,” Darnell said, grinning. “I ain’t talkin about all that.” But when Lobo smiled regally at him, he thought, Yeah, these guys ain’t feedin nobody but themselves right now. And them pale green envelopes from the hospital comin soon—what if Brenda’s insurance don’t cover all this intensive stuff?