The shoes… heels so high they looked painful. Narrow, shiny, leather, snakeskin. He remembered Brother Lobo talking about black women and shoes. Even dudes who loved shoes. “It’s simple. When we were slaves, we had no shoes. Sometimes we were denied shoes. We’re still making up for that. It’s genetic, by this generation.”
At the table on the stage were the mayor, his mother, and other women giving or getting awards. Darnell glanced at them; they were part of the reason for the extra attention the hotel manager wanted from him and Donnie. Let me get on before Donnie holler into the radio, he thought. I’m up here trippin again, like he always says, lost in space.
Donnie walked, then Darnell. He saw a police car cruise past on Main as he neared the fence. Up and down the concrete stairs to all the parking levels, around the perimeter, down the center of the garage and up to Donnie at the booth. They were both heading to the main entrance when a group of women came out early, laughing, standing in the central courtyard by the fountain, digging in their purses. Lookin for the keys, Darnell thought. I hope they don’t all lose their cars at the same time. They went down the stairs, and he heard somebody scream.
Donnie ran from the lobby toward the stairs; high shrieking from the garage echoed off the concrete everywhere. Darnell shouted to the doorman, “Call the cops!” and he ran after Donnie, his flashlight thudding against his leg. He took it off the belt and held it tight, hearing Donnie yell.
Screeching tires sounded behind him, and he ducked into the stairwell. Was somebody stealing a car? Or the cops already here? He saw two women kneeling over a third, who was sobbing on the ground, her shiny green pumps drawn up to her skirt. She was smaller than Brenda, and blood was smeared purple-dark under her nose, on her lip. Darnell saw the terrified faces turn up to him, and one screamed again. She think I’m the dude, she think I’ma jack her. “Ma’am!” he shouted. “Security!” Their eyes were blank. “Security,” he said again.
“They took our purses,” one woman cried, and the other added, “she wouldn’t give him her bag, and he hit her in the face! With his fist! He didn’t slap her, he hit her.” She was standing now, facing him, screaming. Beads glittered on the ground by the curled woman’s arm.
“Okay, we’ll find them,” he said, hearing the foolish words slow in his mouth and he took off down the ramp. He heard a car behind him again—no, on the street level—and he yelled, “Donnie!”
“Loading dock!” Donnie hollered, his voice muffled. “Darnell!”
The shout was fading. Darnell ran to the exit and saw two blurry dark figures and Donnie’s wide-jacketed back. Black shiny wind-breakers. Young dudes, one with a black cap, one bareheaded.
He heard the screeching again, right behind him now, and he ran faster. Shit, they got a friend in a car, gon run me down. Damn! He saw the two guys leap at the wall around the loading docks, and in the streetlight a long, floppy braid lifted behind one, the black hair glistening. Not a brotha, he thought automatically, and someone yelled, “Police! Freeze!” behind him.
The two guys were up and over the wall, and Donnie hit it hard. “Freeze!” the cop yelled again, and as Donnie turned, the flashlight in his hand, the shots popped out like exploding pine knots, echoing even louder. Donnie went down, and Darnell threw himself into the open stairwell.
“My leg! Darnell!” Donnie moaned. “Security!”
“You, in the stairwell, come out with your hands held away from your body. Now! Hands held away!” Darnell’s body shook. The flashlight. His badge: metal shine like a gun. Shit. Shit. He shivered against the wall, smelling the filmy smoke on the warm cement. “He’s not coming,” he heard the voice say, and then the dog was upon him, the teeth buried in his leg, tearing pain into his calf, and his shoulders still shaking so hard his teeth chattered.
When the wet teeth lifted off, the heat rushed up from the concrete to his cheek, pressed into it, and he felt the flaming hot pouring from his leg. He could hear Donnie whispering, “It burns like, man, it burns,” but Darnell kept his lips clenched shut until they were icy numb. He saw the helicopter beam knifing blue trails through the street toward them, and he heard the muffled click of paws moving away, the wet growing cool and sending streams of chill up his back, into his skull.
BURNING
CLOUDS PLAYED WITH THE sun. Strong yellow light would fill the curtains and numb his eyes for a minute, then pewter would recede from the window. His head expanded, then shrank with the light until he turned over to get away from the shifting glare.
His leg throbbed, burned. Donnie moaning—it burns, man, it burns. The huff-rattling throat of the dog. The saliva hot on his skin. He pushed his face into the sheet, stiffening. The skin was tight as ready-to-split fruit, as dead possum belly in summer.
Darnell’s stomach roiled, and he breathed into the cotton sheet, smelling Brenda’s hairdress faint and sweet. The bites were in the flesh of his calf. He wouldn’t turn his neck to look. He held his leg perfectly still. What color was calf muscle if it was infected—fever hot and pulsing with yellow? He’d seen the cloth rags Brenda’s mother took away. His throat tried to hold down the bile. Bile was green. He ground his molars hard.
She heard him moving. He smelled the heavy tobacco smoke come in with her. “Your husband know you still here?” he said into the mattress.
“I ain’t studyin him,” Mrs. Batiste said. She straightened the curtains she and Brenda had made months ago. “Your mama went home for a while.”
He stayed belly down, tensing. She pulled off the wet poultice, and the air against the swollen bites made tears press against his eyelids. He clenched his fists slowly so she wouldn’t see the movement. He heard her blowing softly on the burning sugarcane stalk, and the charred-sweet smoke drifted over him.
“Do it itch yet?” she asked, between breaths.
“No.”
“You hot.” She didn’t ask.
“Yeah.”
“Fever workin. Try and kill them dog germs.” She blew, blew, the smoke dancing over his legs, wisping lighter around his ears. He stared at the wall, the swirl of black.
“I been gone from the Westside so long I don’t even know for sure that Puerto Rican man still have sugarcane grow by his yard. One dollar a stalk. He must be ninety,” she murmured. She propped the reed in the tall jar by the bed; he heard the hollow clunk. Then she sat to make a new poultice with the strange tobacco.
“Stuff stink like no cigar I ever smelled,” Darnell said.
She laughed. “That perique. Blacker than black. Only grow in Louisiana, by one place. You can’t get it nowhere else in the world.” She showed him a mashed weed. “And la mauve. From Louisiana, too. That pull out the infection.”
“How you know all this voodoo?” Darnell whispered. His leg throbbed in the moving sunlight, like the heat swelled the skin worse.
“My granny was part Cajun,” Mrs. Batiste said. “She was traiteur, a doctor for people in the country. She could pray better than me.” He let his eyes fall on the string knotted around his wrist; another string held the ankle of his bitten leg. Nine knots in each string, and she’d whispered nine prayers. He couldn’t understand the slurred words in any of them.
Her hands pressed the poultice on his leg, and he pushed his fists deep into the mattress. “We waitin for the itch,” she said. “You tell me.” She went back into the kitchen, and he thought she was finished. He closed his eyes, but then she was beside him again, pulling at his arms. “I want that fever stay down in your leg, work down there. I don’t want the heat work on your head.” She circled his wrists, the insides, the pulses, with fresh-cut potatoes in thick bracelets.
He heard the TV in the living room, and the thump-hissing of the iron. She had washed and ironed all the curtains and bedsheets in the three days she’d been here. Brenda kept circling the bed at first, holding Charolette, crying so hard her chest shook tears from the baby’s eyes, too.
He was still supposed to be in the hospital. The guys in the emergency room ha
d said, “You’re gonna have to stay here a few days, so we can drain the wound and watch it. Puncture wounds, when they’re serious like this…”
“Fuck that,” Darnell had said. “I’m gone.” The doctor had argued with him and the cop who’d brought him. An ambulance had taken Donnie, but the older officer, who’d sent away the young cop with the dog, the K-9, had put Darnell in the front seat of his patrol car, then moved him past the crowds of waiting emergency-room faces and into one of the small cubicles, where doctors appeared. While they were alone, the officer had looked out the window, but Darnell could see his lined cheeks in the night-dark glass. “Damn,” the cop said, his face twisting tight. “Why the hell didn’t you two just follow procedure?”
Darnell said nothing. He saw the tiny woman, smaller than Brenda, the purple-dark blood under her nostrils, the glittering beads all around her; he heard Donnie’s heavy shoes slap-fading into the garage. The cop shook his head, silver hairs like pins moving on the back of his head. Darnell stared at them, fascinated, imagining them flying off into his leg, his calf, which was screaming cold in the air-conditioned room. Shit! This damn uniform cost money. He ground his molars at the pulsing in his leg, and the cop said, “You guys have been watchin too many movies.” He turned around, his voice soft. “You don’t chase the perps. You leave that to us.”
Darnell looked away, staring at the pale green wall while the doctor slid needles past him and muttered. Yeah, he thought. Next time. He heard the cop say to the doctor, “I can’t make him stay, he isn’t a suspect yet, not in this investigation.”
The police sent Tommy Flair to the apartment. Short, bowlegged, he’d run track with Melvin, and he’d wanted to be a cop since he was a kid. Darnell had read about him in the newspaper last year, an article his father had saved: Tommy Flair had been chasing a drug dealer through alleys and outrun him, so the paper featured his old track-star photo beside a picture of him in the alley.
Tommy said, “Bangers are out there carryin Uzis, Darnell, man, you know that.” His forehead creased, and sweat collected at his temples when he stood up from his chair beside Darnell’s bed. The other cop, the older one, Sergeant Thomas, sat with his arms folded, smiling slightly. Tommy paced, and Darnell knew he was working hard for himself as much as for Darnell. “It’s hard out there, man, gettin harder every day. Every night, man. Sue the department, and that ain’t gonna get anybody anywhere.”
Darnell was afraid to look at the sergeant’s face; he stared at Tommy Flair’s black shoes, thinking, It’s hard out there, man. Every night when you drivin, or walkin to the store, you fit the description. Assume the position. He heard Tommy stop and he looked up. “Darnell. Look, Kleiser’s a good cop, man, he’s not, he’s not like an asshole, man.” Tommy kept his eyes hard on Darnell’s. “I’m serious, Darnell.”
Sergeant Thomas said, “But there’s a lotta assholes out there, you know what I mean?” His eyelids were half dropped, he was still smiling, and Darnell reached up to rub his eyes like he was tired. The man’s eyes—like when you were driving on the freeway or back from the Ville and a patrol car passed you.
Donnie had called after they left. Darnell had closed his eyes and felt his hips go liquid with the pain pill. Donnie said, “You got my back, Darnell? We gon sue, oh, most def. Big time. They send my man Flair over to your crib to talk?”
“Donnie,” Darnell said. “I ain’t into lawyers. You see people goin to court for three, four years on suits. And I don’t want nobody callin me all the time for instant replay, okay? No—I’m serious, man.”
Donnie said angrily, “So you ain’t gon testify, man?”
“I got your back, okay?” Darnell said. “If I have to, I’ll go up there for you. If you ever get up there. But listen, man, I can’t live watchin for Rio Seco PD watchin me—see if I use my blinker when I turn, keep a eye on my registration, see how far I park from the curb. You know what I’m talkin about. And what if I’m drivin at night from the Ville and somebody say I was weavin in traffic?”
“Goddamn,” Donnie said. “I can’t believe you.” But his voice was fading, and Darnell knew he was sleepy, too.
“Does it hurt?” Darnell whispered. “I mean, can you feel it?” He had his eyes closed, pictured the bullet resting in muscle like a seed, a peach pit.
“No,” Donnie said, his voice lower. “But you know it’s there. It’s weird, I mean, it’s by my hipbone and shit.”
Hipbone connected to my thighbone, thighbone connected to my kneebone. Darnell felt his wrists thumping against the tight potato bracelets, and the milky smell rose to his face. The kneebone connected to the shinbone. Behind the shinbone was the other one… the tibia and the fibula. Biology class. Brenda sitting way in front—Batiste. Donnie trying to cheat off somebody’s tests all the time. Louis daydreaming. The femur, the metatarsals. Darnell loved to recite them, loved to look at the skeleton, the huge life-size poster of the guy with his skin peeled away to show all the red-layered muscles, the tubing of veins and arteries. Blue blood, red blood. Put the skin back on the dude and sew it all up—take a hella lotta thread. Brenda’s mother leaning over him that first night, when he’d left the hospital; Mrs. Batiste had put her face so close to the stitches, the four long wounds, that he could feel her breath on his skin, like the dog’s, and he trembled. “I could have sew you better,” she’d said. “I see much worse at home. In Louisiana.” And she’d turned to Brenda’s tear-shined face, his mother’s ashen lips. “Go on outta here. Cryin like that and scare the baby, she don’t need to know none a this. Go out to the couch.” Mrs. Batiste had sent his father away, and Sophia and Paula, Snooter and Nacho. Everyone. She sent Brenda to his mother’s with Charolette in the morning, told Brenda to drop off the baby and go to work.
Work. Procedure. The hotel had called him and Donnie. Proper procedure. Violations that jeopardize your probationary status. Report. Description. He slept. He felt her change the potatoes, colder ones for the warm rings he’d browned with his blood racing too hot. He knew when it was three o’clock by the clattering applause he heard. Oprah. Three o’clock meant Mr. Batiste would be gone to work.
When she came in again, he said, “Your husband know all these Louisiana cures, too?” He saw the contempt in Brenda’s father’s face that night, the thin lips and sharp-curved eyebrows and matching pencil-line edges of hair under the nose.
“Etienne?” she said, smiling a little, holding the perique tobacco in a pouch. “No. He don’t have to know no more. He forget.”
With the slamming door and women’s voices came Charolette’s high burble, and then he lifted his head to see her crawling into the bedroom, her mouth dripping a constant string of spit like a lead rope pulling her along the floor. Brenda’s hands scooped her up, and his mother pushed splinters of ham into his mouth, because suddenly he couldn’t even move his hands with their heavy potato jewelry. His eyelids were coated with heat. Brenda’s lips pressed on his cheek, his neck—he could smell her, the scent inside her shirt when she leaned forward—and then the baby left a thread of saliva across his forehead.
The wedding cake was still half frozen when they put a forkful past his teeth. The crumbs were pellet hard, and he tasted the dye in the frosting flowers. Honoré’s cake. The brotha bake like nobody else. And George do hair. My hair too long. I need to go see the man, get me a new fade, some serious razor cuts. Lightning bolts and shit in the back of my head, so somebody know me from behind. Like somebody could identify me from behind. Like Donnie and me if we both faced the wall and put our hands up. Both get a D on the back of our heads. We all look the same anyway, like gangbangers. That nigga probably slingin cane. Cane sugar—so sweet in my pipe—what them sprung brothas always say. Sprung dudes do anything for some rock cane sugar. Sugarcane smoke. The black whirls kissing his leg again, Brenda’s mother pushing the veils of smoke over him now. Smoke crowning. Now! Fire comin over the ridge, man! Go, go, go! Get out your fire shelter. Head away from the flames, lie with your head away from the fl
ames. No—you’re dead again, you asshole, you lay down the wrong way—Fricke always yellin at Scott in practice. Your head’s burned and your feet are okay, but with you there isn’t much of a difference, is there, Scott?
Smoke in his eyes, burning in his leg, hands on his wrists to push them into the sheet’s softness, keep them away so he can’t touch the burning.
“The itch come now.” She smiled. “You keep tryin to get your hands on it, we see you all night try and get to it.”
Deep inside his leg, farther down than the heat, the itch began now that the pulse and fade of fire had stopped. Fierce, constant, like tiny ants chewing hard and circling frantically, the itch ate at his bone.
Brenda’s mother spread the cool-mashed weed on again, covered his leg with layers of cotton cloth, and sat on a chair by the bed, sewing and humming. “You gon try and touch it,” she said when he looked at her.
He didn’t want her there watching. “No, I’ma be good. No lie. I’ma keep my leg up like this, like a good boy. No touchin.”
She lowered her forehead at him and went out to the kitchen. When the phone rang, he picked it up right away and Donnie’s voice sounded slurred, like he was on some serious tablets. “Darnell? Somebody wanna speak to you, man.”
Darnell bent his leg at the knee. A strange voice said, “Hello, Darnell, this is Jerry Tarcher, and Donnie suggested that I call you to discuss possible representation for you, so that you can get some reasonable compensation for the terrible…”
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Page 16
