Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  In a doughnut shop, he read down the list. Automotive Sales. Banking. Bookkeeper. He turned the newspaper page. Cable TV Sales. Cashier. Clerical. He thought of Brenda and the rustling women typing, talking. “Yeah, right,” he said out loud.

  Collections—plenty of those. Construction—Experienced. He’d been to sites all over Rio Seco and San Bernardino. Data Processing. Dental Assistant took up eleven squares. “Lotta teeth in Rio Seco,” he mumbled. Engineering. He backed up to Driver and Delivery.

  Fountain Park was another new industrial zone past Terracina. He drove there, saw the two blue-mirrored buildings reflecting the sky. Fountains, poppies, marble floor in the lobby. He went to the suite, filled out the application, and waited for the secretary to ask for the DMV printout. Damn.

  Every time he applied for a driver job, he had to wait in line at least an hour for a DMV printout. He started up the El Camino, staring at the rippling light on the glass. Still windy and hot. Two men came out and got into a Lincoln. Black car, silver hair, gray suits. Three kinda guys, he thought suddenly. Guys movin paper around, talking on the phone. Guys makin something and sellin it. And guys cleanin up, cookin food, movin things around. What do they call it? The service industry—that’s what Brother Lobo said. Welcome to Darnell’s. How may I serve you today?

  “You may get out the way,” his mother said from beside the crib.

  “Go on do somethin,” her mother said. “You ain’t confine.” Her mother had been there two days now, making gumbo, Brenda’s favorite, and people kept dropping by to see the baby because Brenda wasn’t allowed out of the house for a month. “She need to be careful, cause the baby too early, too small,” Mrs. Batiste kept saying. They were delicate; they had to do things the old way. Not leave the house for thirty days, neither of them—Mrs. Batiste had a whole regimen, a ceremony, for each new day, and Brenda only nodded, her eyes on the legs poking out from Charolette’s diaper. She was watching them fatten; the eyes were already bigger, brighter, moving now, even though when Darnell leaned over the back of the couch, they still focused their blurred purple only on Brenda’s face. She lived in Brenda’s arm, tucked into the crook of her elbow, her head hidden in Brenda’s shirt, sleeping draped over her thighs.

  He picked her up, held the tiny skull, his fingers across her temples, pulse stuttering against the inside of his fingerprint. Afraid of her neck, spindly as a straw, he tried to look into her face, to see Brenda there, but he could only see the low down-crested forehead and the private features still blunt. The skin peeled back from her fingertips and toes, the blind eyes and her silty smell. “You women always talk about that baby smell,” he said. “It doesn’t get me.”

  “Don’t need to get you, huh?” his mother said, rolling her eyes.

  He held her against his chest, remembering something Fricke had told him. Baby prey were born able to walk, even run, with their mothers and their herd. Llamas, deer, horses. But predators were helpless for a long time, until they were fed, taught, trained. Wolves, lions, humans. She woke and right away rubbed her cheek against his chest; it was too hard, too smooth, and he didn’t smell right to her, either. She opened her mouth to cry; he’d seen her naked, damp from the women washing around her navel, and she always took in such a deep breath to scream that a hole depressed itself into her chest.

  “Give her back to her mama,” his mother said. “You ain’t got no groceries.” They laughed, and he gave her to Brenda, who slid her under the blouse. “Go on, you don’t need to clean up, I’ll do that,” her mother said.

  Don’t matter if I smell the baby perfume or not, he thought, going down the stairs. What the guys all say? Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe. Nah—I seen that nose, and she mine. But she don’t need nothin else from me but cash. Just like Pops said.

  “You ain’t findin nothin in there you ain’t already seen,” his father said, pulling a chair up to the wooden table and putting his coffee cup onto a wavery stain-ring. “Her belly button fall off yet?”

  “Yeah,” Darnell said. The clamp had held a green-black stick that went inside the navel, something Darnell couldn’t look at. The hole in the center of her made him weak, but Brenda rubbed alcohol and something her mother gave her all around it, even over it, without flinching.

  His father smiled. “Look at you, squinchin your face. I had four of you, and I never got used to seein that, either. Women don’t mind.” His father lifted up a heavy workboot and stomped his heel in better.

  “Five,” Darnell said. “You had five.” His father stopped. Darnell looked back at the ads, knowing his father didn’t even like to bring up Antoine.

  “This one’s exactly a month before you,” his father said. “Hope you two don’t have the same hard head. Yours ain’t got softer in twenty-one years.”

  Darnell swallowed. He’d thought everyone would forget his birthday; he’d been hoping they would, since he didn’t feel like partying. “Where you think I got my hard head from?” he said.

  “I bought it for you at Woolworth’s when you was Charolette’s age,” his father said, standing up. “I bought somethin else for you this week. You can come pick it up on your birthday.”

  He looked back at the newspaper. The article read, “Although authorities say the region is weeks from official fire season, firefighters have already fought two blazes in the riverbottom area near Doloreaux. Investigators say the fires may be attributed to homeless drifters living in makeshift shelters in unincorporated areas just east of city limits.”

  Paid reserve or volunteers helpin out on those, Darnell thought. I could put in my application. But Fricke said paid reserves get six-somethin an hour, and you might not get called much. Maybe in a drought year… But it ain’t steady enough.

  Darnell looked at the photo, the caught flames in a palm tree, orange boiling at the center of the fronds, and he knew it was just before the tree exploded. He touched the color with his forefingers. I used to be sprung hard over this—sprung just as hard as the zombies. He shook his head and stood up to go outside.

  The gumbo had left a stain smeared in the sink, so he got out the cleanser and dumped on sprinkles. Not too many brothas even know how to do this, okay? Just us Nature Boys had to survive in the woods. He turned the shiny can around and read: Calcium carbonate. He thought Brother Lobo had told them calcium carbonate came from Jamaica.

  Man, quit this, okay? Who cares? You ain’t gon make no Ajax. He scrubbed the stain. His father used to say he’d get stuck on one track, get lost in that groove and couldn’t come out. When GranaLene kept him, all he did was talk about spirits and zombies and stare at his mother’s stomach, at neighbor cats and neighbor ladies’ stomachs. Then, with fire, he’d see smoke and gauge the direction from his bike, even when he got his young butt whupped with his father’s belt for the disappeared hours.

  The girls—all of them—came for the weekend. His mother, Brenda’s, his sisters, and his two women. The living room was strewn with filmy-thin pattern tissues and pieces of material. They were knocking out a blitz of bigger-girl clothes for Charolette, a new outfit for newly thin Brenda, and the early planning for someone’s prom dress. “It’s at the end of May,” Mrs. Batiste said. “You two went, Darnell.”

  “Remember?” Brenda said, grinning. “And me and Mama started the dress just about April.”

  “How would he know?” Mrs. Batiste said. And she leaned over to Paula and Sophia. “All boys care about is how much skin they can see that night.”

  His jaw hot, he said, “Well, I’m gettin out of here.” He stopped to look one more time, heard the radio playing, saw Charolette sleeping on her belly on the couch, with pillows on the floor just in case. He remembered when a big wedding was coming up on the Westside, he and Melvin and his father were banned from the front room while the dresses were being made; their boots and hands were too dirty.

  As they handed out the coffee in his father’s driveway, a white truck full of PVC pipe and black irrigation tubing pulled up. “Ain’t that your
cousin Trent?” Darnell’s father said to the Kings.

  Nacho looked up from the tire he was filling, and Snooter called, “You slummin? My Grayglen relation—how you livin, up there in the hills?”

  They’d given him a hard time since he moved from the Westside after his father died. Darnell remembered when he’d hung out with Melvin and Snooter in school; now he wore Dockers, moccasins, a T-shirt, and his hair was old-style shag, thick at the neck. When he said, “Hey, Darnell, right?” Darnell nodded, surprised, and Trent said, “I thought you were a firefighter. You’re here now?”

  Darnell folded his arms. “Budget cuts.”

  Trent just nodded. “Some raggedy tires, cuz,” he said to Nacho. Turning to Darnell’s father, he said, “Got a woman with a pepper tree she’s tired of. She wants me to redesign the yard. It’s Grayglen.”

  “See, he don’t cut grass like us,” Snooter said. “He designs it.”

  “Shut up, Snooter,” Nacho said. Whenever he and Darnell talked about the right color for the Spider, Snooter said, “Don’t paint your boring landscape shit on it, and it’ll be fine.”

  Trent handed Roscoe a piece of paper. “I told her you’d give her an estimate.”

  Roscoe said, “Wait. Darnell, why don’t you go up there? We’ve got that tree to do for Mrs. Tribeleaux.”

  His father only said, “Don’t underbid us, damnit. Go on.”

  In the cab, Darnell smelled the plastic hosing heated in the truckbed. Trent said, “So you working with your dad, huh? You got competition from the Samoan guys.”

  Darnell hesitated. Nacho and Snooter said Trent talked yang about guys who didn’t leave the Westside, about their old trucks and equipment. “Not really,” he said. “Just waitin to hear if I get called back for fire season.” The lie sent jabs of anger into his ribs, and he went on. “He wants me to look for some gardening jobs. I heard you’re livin large with your business. If you hirin any extra help, let me know.”

  Trent looked at him with a blank face. “Man, I just do the planning and landscaping. I’m not into maintenance. After the irrigation, I’m gone.”

  You ain’t gotta get that polo-ass tone, brothaman, Darnell thought. He said, hard, “So you went to college for this, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s landscaping. Not gardening.” Trent sped up Hampton, and the sea of new red-tile roofs waved over the first, low hills. The stucco walls and bare windows were close together, and Darnell said, “They cram em in tight.” His father always said he’d rather have his shack—at least he didn’t have to hear the neighbors flush the toilet.

  Trent said nothing. Darnell knew Trent’s house was up here somewhere, but he didn’t want to seem nosy. Brothaman might think I want somethin else. Each tract was enclosed by beige block walls, with an opening for entry and a sign proclaiming the name of the development. Grassridge. Stonehaven. Hillcrest Estates. The higher up the long slope they drove, the more elaborate the entryways became, until the last one: Grayglen Heights—the name Snooter mentioned when he talked about going to Trent’s house.

  “That’s how he made his money,” Mr. King had said. “Bought him a house in one tract, sold it, bought a more expensive one. Made a damn bundle each time.”

  The huge, sprawling development covered the base of the foothills with red and dark-gray tile. Darnell saw a few of the houses over the wall, some Spanish style, some Victorian with balconies, before Trent turned off on the narrow road that led to old Grayglen.

  “We took out two carobs at this one,” Darnell said when they passed the driveway, and before he laughed about Gasanova’s truck, he saw the new wrought-iron gate. Trent wouldn’t think that was funny, man, but Gas would bust up. She thought she IDed the brotha quick.

  Trent wound around to the far side of the highest hill, where the eucalyptus and oak were heavy and gray, shrouding the land to give the area its name, and he relaxed. “Everybody hates carobs,” he said. “All my clients do.” He pulled down a long drive so hemmed in by tall spears of cypress that Darnell felt spiderwebs near his elbow in the window. Trent parked in the tight circular drive near two other trucks.

  Around the back, Darnell saw piles of reddish dirt everywhere. “Mrs. Shaefer’s got big plans,” Trent said, unrolling the paper he carried. “She wants something half-English, half-California. To go with the Tudor-style house. She read about a garden called ‘Controlled Nature.’ A knot garden…”

  Darnell glanced at the bluish paper covered with tiny circles and shapes, and the two white guys with cement-smeared pants came up from the pathway they’d been forming to get Pepsis. “Hey,” said the older guy, with silver stubble. “You brought reinforcements, huh?”

  “Just came to give a bid,” Darnell said, nodding toward the pepper tree. He walked around it, at the far end of the property, figuring his father would say $575 to pull it out and haul it away. It was old, with huge gnarls on the trunk, the kind that were hollow and sometimes held bee or wasp nests.

  “Drip system,” Trent was saying, and he led Darnell to where the woman sat looking through garden catalogues. She was small and plump, eyes tinyslitted with her constant smile, and when Darnell clenched his fingers nervously and gave her the bid, she grinned and said, “The sooner the better.”

  Beside the truck, Trent picked up circles of hosing and said, “Man, have you heard of hydroponic farming?” Darnell shook his head, and Trent said, “You can grow all kinds of vegetables and plants just using water. No soil. Life is liquid.”

  “Now you sound just like Roscoe,” Darnell said, grinning. “Or Brother Lobo.”

  “Great.” Trent smiled back, wider than before. “A street poet.”

  Darnell looked at the hard-packed ground, spat, watched his saliva stay in a dime-sized circle. Water. Spit. Brenda’s milk always leaking through her shirt, so he could smell it chalky sweet. Charolette’s tears. He stepped on the circle to press it into moisture.

  Darnell found a book at his feet when Trent drove down the hill. Gardens of the World. “See—that’s what I like,” Trent said, pointing to a page. A wall, old and beige, had gray-green plants spilling over. “That’s Italy. I like those old gardens, with the rosemary draping over, and the white roses. Real subtle. I’m talking Mrs. Shaefer into some of this.”

  “Where’d you get this garden stuff, man?” Darnell said. “Your pops just cut grass, right?”

  Trent shrugged, and Darnell could see he was embarrassed that he’d shown his enthusiasm. “Hey, for all I know, my great-grandfather was into landscaping. Maybe he designed Jefferson’s garden in Virginia.”

  “After he worked in the cotton field,” Darnell said without thinking, and then, trying to take it back, he went on, “I mean, most brothas ain’t into flowers.”

  “I’m not interested in what most brothers are into,” Trent said coldly. “Not Westside brothers. Sorry you don’t consider it normal.”

  Darnell’s neck was hot, and he thought of his own boots, of the fire station, Fricke cooking, and the smoke calling, and he said, “I wasn’t trying to talk shit, man. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah,” Trent said. His wrists were rigid near the steering wheel.

  “Snooter and them always call me Nature Boy,” Darnell said. “I’m the last one should talk yang.” He watched Trent’s hands loosen on the circle of the wheel.

  I missed the whole thing, he thought, pulling into the stall under the darkened apartment. He didn’t hear the TV. They probably woke up, walked around, ate something, and went back to sleep.

  When he opened the door, though, Brenda’s mother was sitting in the dark singing to the baby, who was almost hidden in her arm, sleeping. Darnell heard the slurred-soft words. “Fais dodo, petite. Fais dodo, cher cochon. Papa bring gâteau, fais dodo.”

  She looked up at him, rounding her lips for him to hush, and stood up to put the baby in her cradle in the bedroom. The cradle Brenda had slept in, she said.

  She moved the piles of clean, folded clothes from the table and poured him the strong coffe
e. “What’s all that mean?” he said. “My GranaLene used to sing somethin like that, but I don’t remember.”

  Mrs. Batiste smiled. “Means go to sleep—what else a granny gon sing? It’s a old song from my gran. From carceration time.”

  “Carceration?”

  “That how she call slavery.”

  “And that Papa stuff?”

  “Papa will bring cake.”

  Darnell kept his eyes on the coffee shine. Yeah, if he ever get some ducats he will. If he get a steady slave. He heard his grandmother singing her other favorite. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Papa gonna buy you a mockingbird.”

  In the morning, he left Charolette a tiny beetle under the blanket, Brenda curled on her side around the baby. When they were dividing up the newspaper and debating about how early Mrs. Shaefer would want them to start chain saws, his father handed him the classified section automatically, taking the sports pages for himself and giving the national news to Roscoe. “You got a floor jack?” Snooter said, and Darnell went to get it. When he came back out and slid near the big truck’s tires with Snooter, his father said to his feet, “You stopped hidin in the hills. Now you need to quit hidin over here.”

  Darnell sat up. “Ain’t nobody hidin. Nothin for me to do at home.” He looked at Snooter. “I saw Victor and Charlton on the road camp when I was up there. Hey, I could get me a job like that easy. All I gotta do is be me and drive in the wrong place. Get my ass arrested and get a place on road camp. Dig firebreaks, even work the big jobs.”

  Roscoe said, “You getting righteous with the wrong folks, son. I did my time on the road camp.” Darnell looked up at Roscoe’s half-lowered eyelids, his hard-held lips, and he slid back under the truck to breathe rusted metal. The night Brenda had gotten pregnant—the weekend police searched for Ricky Ronrico—officers had seen Louis walk into Roscoe’s house when nobody else was out on the streets. It was the only time Louis had crossed the front steps since he’d quit college, and when the batons pounded the door, Roscoe refused to let them search the house. A few months later, he’d gotten so many tickets, expensive tickets, that he’d done three months by the freeway.