Roscoe shook his head. “Used to be a big deal. Eighteen you could vote, join the service, twenty-one you could drink. Now you boys can buy cocaine in elementary school.” He slammed down a domino. “Dampens the celebration.”
Darnell took a sip of the liquor, felt it harsh-hot in his chest. “It ain’t like they vote, neither,” Floyd King said.
“Who I’ma vote for?” Snooter said. “Who give a shit?”
“I don’t want to hear that,” Darnell’s father said. “People died so you could vote.”
“Oh, no,” Snooter said, rolling his eyes, slapping down his piece. “Here we go again. To Missippi.”
Darnell didn’t want to hear them fight. He said, “So what you get me, Pops?”
His father stood up. “Take his place, Floyd, he losin anyway.”
At the metal shed where he kept the chain saws, his father unlocked the door, pulling out a lawnmower and then a weed whacker. “I know you don’t think doin yards is worth anything, but this’ll get you some cash when you need it.”
Darnell felt the heat from the liquor pull together and tighten in his chest. It was like when he played outside in the smog, as a child, and his chest was full of gray particles. The whiskey had cut through it, but now it just hurt more. “You think I ain’t workin?” he said. “Shit.”
His father’s voice was quiet. “You only part time. You the last hired, first fired if somethin go wrong. It don’t hurt to get a gig on the side, work for yourself. Then you ain’t always dependin on somebody else.”
Darnell shouted, “Why you always gotta remind me? Why you gotta expect the worst from me?” He took a breath, folded his arms, and said, lower, “You seen all them guys out there with a truck and a mower. You want me workin twenty-four-seven?”
His father kicked aside a piece of metal near the shed. “You got a baby now. You gotta feed her. When I had Melvin, I mopped floors and cleaned toilets after I was done haulin trees.”
Darnell said, “I wouldn’t care if I had a part-time job at the fire station, even volunteer or reserve. Just so I could be outta here, and up there.” He turned away from his father.
“But you can’t be up there!” his father shouted. “You can’t be chasin them fires like you a boy. You got people to feed. Unless you want Brenda to feed em by herself.” Before Darnell could answer that, his father walked back to the house. “Lock them things up,” he said. “Rockheads stole my new hose last night.”
Darnell pushed the mower into the shed. He stayed there, smelling all the metal gathering cool from the night, until Roscoe came out. “You better get your cake before it’s gone,” Roscoe said, touching his shoulder.
“He thinks I don’t know shit,” Darnell said, keeping his voice even, his lips careful.
“No. He knows the same things you do. Same things I do. How loud hungry kids cry. How loud women can get.” Roscoe looked up into the sky. “New moon. Louis used to stare at the moon till I thought his neck would break.” Roscoe paused. “He never ate much. Always skinny.” Darnell bit his lips, and Roscoe said, “He won’t be twenty-one until July. Hollie’s five—she hasn’t seen him since he left for college. Now she won’t see him for three years.”
Darnell said, “He wasn’t even slingin. I know it.”
“He’s still a fool.” Roscoe kept looking up. “I’m glad I don’t have to see him by accident, riding around in that damn Bronco. His face is gone.”
Darnell said, “Pops just called me a fool, too.”
Roscoe brought his eyes down. “Your father just told me he could never offer Melvin a mower. He said he knew you had some sense. He just can’t tell you.” Putting his hand on Darnell’s shoulder, he said, “You still got a face.”
Marietta Cook was in the dining room with her grandson Freeman and Hollie. “Happy birthday,” she said to Darnell. “Take a piece for you wife. She need she sweet, too.” He felt his mother’s arms twine around him from behind. “I love you,” she said, holding him tight.
“Hey,” Brenda murmured drowsily when he bent down to kiss her. Charolette was beside her elbow. Darnell left the bedroom to put the foil-wrapped cake on the counter. On the couch, he folded his hands, lined up his toes the way he always had to keep from falling off.
But she came out, carrying a box. Her hair fell in spikes across her cheek when she knelt next to him. “I know the season is about to start,” she whispered. He frowned, and she said, “Since you miss the mountains, maybe you can take me and Charolette hiking up there sometime. If we ever get a day off.” She put new honey-colored work boots on his chest.
He grabbed them by the heels. “Pretty good,” he said, dropping them on the floor, “but I want somethin better.” He pulled her on top of him, holding her by the hips, and put his lips on her neck.
He didn’t wear the new boots to the mountain. He wore the old water- and ash-stained pair, pushed them hard on the floorboards up through the Sandlands. Windy, hot May. The grass on the slopes was already brown, still green at a few crevices and near boulders, but wilted dry in the open. He smelled the clean wind when he wound up the mountain, saw the dark chamise and manzanita purple on the steep banks.
They can’t torch trails—we only got about three inches of rain. I remember four or five days, that’s it. So they sittin up here waitin for the first one.
Only Fricke’s old truck and Corcoran’s Sidekick were parked on the dirt. Darnell slid his feet on the pine needles to feel them smooth, smelled the trees and dry chaparral all around.
He heard them inside, and he knocked. “It’s Tucker,” he yelled, opening the door, and they looked up from the table. Fricke was writing something. Corcoran was cracking peanuts. “Seasonal’s greetings,” Darnell said.
Fricke smiled. “I can’t say we missed you, can I, Corcoran?” He laughed. “But we did notice you weren’t here.”
“More than I can say for home,” Darnell said. “But that’s just life in the flats. So what a large and merry crew we have here. You gon let the road-camp guys fight on the line, too, let em fly the tankers and drop the Phoscheck? They free, right?”
Fricke stood up. “We’re as large as we have the money for. How do guys in your hood say it? We’re living as large as we can.” He got a cup for Darnell.
“Man, they don’t say it like that,” Darnell said. “So, Corcoran, you got the call, huh?” He felt his jaw shifting hard.
“Permanent crew, man!” Corcoran said, throwing out his arms. “I finished up EMT, academy, everything.”
“We’re operating with a skeleton crew,” Fricke said, leaning against the kitchen doorway. “No seasonals. Just us. If we get a big one, we call for backup from the region.”
“You don’t look too skeletal to me,” Darnell said, nodding at Fricke’s stomach. “Still cookin, and you don’t have Scott to poison you or Perez to eat all the grub.”
“Come on outside,” Fricke said. “Show you what we did during off-season.” Darnell followed him to the garage, knowing Fricke wanted to talk to him alone.
“How was the biologist, or whatever she was?” Darnell asked.
“Interesting,” Fricke said. “And far away, so she’ll stay interesting. How’s flatland life?”
Darnell looked at the engine, then walked toward the trees. “I’m married, man,” he said, turning to smile at Fricke. “Got a baby—three months old.”
For once, Fricke was silent. His mustache was still, and he wet his lips. “That was fast,” he finally said.
“Neither one of em takes too long,” Darnell said. “Long as offseason.”
“What about your first love?”
Darnell broke off pine bark. “Hey, I ain’t gon lie. I think about it all the time. The last one, man…” He stopped, the puzzle bark in his hand. The sound, the canyon. Darnell Tucker Canyon. “What kinda name is Fricke, anyway? Corcoran’s Irish.”
“Mutt,” Fricke said. “My dad left when I was born, so I don’t know.” He bent down to pick up a pine cone the squirrels had frayed looking for nut
s. “All you have to do is take the college classes. The budget freeze can’t last forever. And you can go Corcoran’s route.”
Darnell shook his head. “I don’t have the time or money to go all the way out to San Bernardino. They don’t have Fire Science in Rio Seco.”
Fricke’s voice was sharp. “So you’re gonna give me that ‘I have to stay stifled and oppressed in the ghetto because I’m only into the short term’ shit.”
Darnell jerked his head from the tree. “No—I ain’t sayin all that. The Westside ain’t all ghetto, okay?” He crumbled the bark. “I know brothas that went to college; I talked to this guy named Trent the other day. All I’m sayin is I had to get a job, okay?”
“So what are you doing?” Fricke said, the words flat.
Darnell put his hands behind his head. “Hey, same thing as up here. We were just security up here, right, that’s what you said sometimes. You were always sayin fires are meant to clear out the old chaparral, and we should let em burn, but people were stupid enough to build things where they shouldn’t be. Like Seven Canyons.”
“So you’re a guard?”
“Guardin my life, man.” Darnell smiled. “But I sure as hell miss torchin trails.”
“I thought Brenda had a good job,” Fricke said. “Plenty of women put their husbands through college.” He smiled now under the brush of hair. “That word still scares the hell out of me. Husband. But that’s how doctors and lawyers and professors are made.”
“Not in my hood,” Darnell said. “Home boy.” He pulled off more puzzle bark, loose and dry, remembering Gas’s favorite line: “When you live in my residence, you gotta earn them presidents.” But Fricke would say, “Translate that shit, okay?” Fricke drew down his brows, and Darnell said, “We don’t grow too many Nature Boys. That’s what they used to call me.”
“What do they call you now?” Fricke said.
Darnell shrugged. “Daddy Darnell, when they talkin yang.”
“You keep her? Uh-uh, she doesn’t even know you.” Brenda came away from the phone. His mother had told her she and Marietta Cook were going to LA.
“She doesn’t want to know me,” Darnell said, watching Charolette watch him from Brenda’s arms. That was how she liked to see him—from somewhere else.
But in the morning Brenda hovered around like a nurse, making Charolette a pallet on the living-room floor. “If you put her in the crib in our room, you can’t see if she’s breathing,” Brenda said. “And she’s moving around now. The doctor said she’s really strong for her age. You can never leave her alone, cause she’s trying to roll over.”
“A new trick, huh?” Darnell said, smiling, but Brenda didn’t find it funny.
“She’s not a dog, Darnell.” Charolette woke from the quick nap she always took right around eight; she lifted her head and kicked her legs like a frog, bowed and quick.
“I won’t say it,” he mumbled. “Come on, babygirl, you gotta get used to me,” he said, reaching for her. Her tongue curled in rage, her head banged against his collarbone, and she got even madder. “No, I ain’t got nothin soft and warm up there,” he said. Brenda looked like she would cry, too, and he told her, “Go on. You said you wanted the exercise, unless you want us to walk with you.”
“No,” she said, and he stood by the window to watch her go down the sidewalk. “Your mama looks good,” he said to the baby, whose eyes were slitted with her screams. He looked closely at her cheek in the sun, saw traces of glittery sparkle like she was wearing makeup. He smelled the skin. Brenda had rubbed her cheek against Charolette’s, left perfumed shine. A girl already.
“What I’ma do with a screamin woman?” he asked her. “Snooter and Melvin always say nothin you can do. Just let em get done.” She cried on the blanket and he gritted his teeth, sat right there on the couch so she could see him. Phil Donahue ran from woman to woman like a fly on a picnic table. Charolette’s cries grew lower and more pitiful, and he said, “Let’s ride, babygirl. I’ma call you that till you start feelin like it. Come on.”
She screamed all the way down the stairs, her howls moving aside the curtains in the Vietnamese woman’s front windows. Darnell put her in the car seat.
She was quiet then, watching the shifting sun and squinting. Her eyebrows were feather straight like his, but more delicate, each hair a tiny curved-in pattern. “You already got them thick eyelashes, too, huh?” he told her. “Ladies love us both for that.”
She stared at his mouth, and he said, “Oh, you want to talk, huh? How come women always want to talk? Damn, that’s what Scott used to say up in the mountains. But I can’t tell you what he wanted the women to be doin instead. Nope. You don’t need to know that. A girl. Hmm. I don’t remember nothin about Sophia and Paula when they were babies except it was scary.”
He stopped, but she was perfectly still in the seat. “Okay, so we cool long as Daddy run his mouth. That’s not really my style, you know, but I’ma try it for you. Let’s go check out Daddy’s work.” He drove slowly past the Hilton, the garage’s huge mouth even darker in the bright sunlight. “There the big castle where I sit,” he said, pointing to the guard booth.
He took her to the city lake, carrying her to the water’s edge to see ducks and geese. They honked and swam closer, but he didn’t think Charolette could really see that far. She mostly stared up at the shifting patterns in the pepper branches near the water. “Don’t stare at the trees!” He laughed. “Don’t let your grampa see you lookin at branches! He’ll put you to work tomorrow.”
At lunch, he told her sleeping face, “Watch this. Your mama gon run out that door right there and start home, so she can see if you still alive.” He sat with the windows rolled down, Charolette’s head drooping low, her cheek so fat that it pushed against the seat strap to squish her lips into a pucker. Sweat sparkled in her flat curls, and he touched the moisture, watching for Brenda.
She came out with the other women and broke off toward the street. “Look at her stridin,” Darnell said to Charolette, who breathed even. “Say, girl,” Darnell called in his best Melvin/Snooter voice, leaning his upper body out the window. “You lookin fine, baby. You want a man with a ready-made family?”
She ran toward the car. “What’s wrong?” she said, not even glancing at him, going straight to the passenger door.
“Just kickin it,” Darnell said. “Me and my daughter been cruisin, talkin about world politics and thangs.”
Brenda perched on the seat. “Look at her sweating; you got her too hot.”
“You know she sweats every time she sleeps, in the crib or on you, too.”
“She been crying?” Brenda finally looked at him, and he saw her eyes and cheeks still sparkling in the light through the windshield.
“She was too busy havin a good time,” he said.
She screamed when the engine started, and he said, “We almost home, and I’ll get your bottle.” But at the long red light, he couldn’t stand it, and reaching beside him, he let her suck on his index finger for a moment, curling it up so he stroked the roof of her mouth. Her gums felt rough as asphalt. She stared at him over his knuckles.
On the pallet, she screamed for an hour. He’d tried holding her, singing, “Angel baby, my angel baby,” real slow like it was coming out of a lowrider. He’d given her the bottle, and the milk had dribbled out with crying spit. He’d changed her diaper full of brown mustard, careful to dig in there and clean like Brenda told him to every time, but that was all long ago. Her mouth didn’t move now, just stayed propped open while rhythmic yowls poured out. His ears throbbed, and his heart pounded—somebody was gon call the police about child abuse.
He lay on his back next to her. “Ain’t nothin I can do,” he said to the ceiling. “I’m tired, and I gotta go to work in a few.” He watched, his temples numb, and she shuddered, her face toward him. Her eyelids fell, rose, fell, as she fought sleep, pulling her mouth back in an automatic yell a few times. He saw the lids half closed, and the deep brown irises dropping, rollin
g, and finally the eyelids eased shut over white.
“You one tough little chocolate Chiclet,” he whispered. “Too stubborn to sleep. Now I wonder where you got that from.”
The late July heat stayed dry, even drawing the dank cool from the walls in the bottom level of the garage when he walked. Outside again, he could smell perfume where women had just walked past the fountain. Then he smelled blank hot again, rising from the cement. He picked up a piece of palm bark, light as breath in his hand, and touched the spongy end.
Through the street-level lot, hearing the electronic farts and burps of car alarms being set, he stayed close to the fence. Black iron bars rimmed the rough cement block, tipped with spikes all along the top, winding around the lot and the hotel pool. He saw a few people swimming behind the hedge that screened the water from the entrance; the hotel was full for a jazz festival.
He heard a voice from the sidewalk. “Yo, brothaman,” someone said. He turned to see Frankie Randall peering through the bars.
Frankie was always downtown, looking into open car windows at red lights, waiting in the center divider for pedestrians. “Brothaman, can you spare a dollar for a meal?”
Darnell looked right into Frankie’s eyes, the deep street creases over the bridge of his nose. Frankie looked past him, to the fountains. He don’t see me at all, Darnell thought. Played football with me in junior high, beat my ass up close and personal four times walkin home on DaVinci. Frankie’s fingernails were curved thick, black, resting on the shelf of cement. Darnell pulled a dollar from his pocket and Frankie nodded. “Thanks, brothaman,” he said, formally.
The palm fronds above Darnell rubbed hollow and dry, shifting noisily. His notepad and walkie-talkie were stiff in his pocket, the heavy flashlight clanked against his leg, and he didn’t want to think about Frankie; he remembered the equipment he’d carried in the mountains, on the line. The Pulaski, the gear.
The fronds danced again. The old, dead ones waited for a strong winter wind to pull them off, and landed in the street cracking loud as gunshots. He’d always lain awake on the couch, listening. The wind would gust so hard around the house that the weather stripping, old and warped, would hum loudly, as if ghost mouths were breathing on the glass. In the morning, the palms like the ones above him would lean with their fronds all to one side so they looked like giant toothbrushes.
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Page 14
