Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  Darnell stared at the El Camino, running his tongue over teeth coated with coffee and Swisher Sweet smoke and Vernon’s sleeping breath. Damn. She should be at work. One o’clock. And he had no money.

  Vernon had awakened in LA, taken the envelope in Pomona, and said nothing until he dropped Darnell at the corner. Then he mumbled, “Come to the man house at ten. He want to talk to you.”

  Darnell climbed the pebbly stairs, sucking his furred teeth, his head large as a balloon. He couldn’t say, “Look, baby, I was doin that big job with Nacho way out past San Bernardino and the truck broke down, so we had to stay with the equipment all night, but I got paid.” No cash—and smellin like a party. His hand stung at the heated black paint of the railing.

  The living room was immaculate, the piles of folded laundry that usually covered the couch and coffee table gone, and the apartment was quiet except for the radio in the bedroom. He stood near the gleaming clean counter and small table where they ate.

  She waited. When he went into the bedroom, she was sitting on the made bed in a silky flower-printed dress, sewing the little snaps that always came off Charolette’s pants. Lunch break, he thought, and she didn’t look up. He stood by the doorway and waited, too.

  “Apartment looks good, huh? You can pack your stuff and go. It’ll be easier to keep everything clean without you tracking dirt and making laundry anyway,” she said conversationally. “Go on and sleep at her house tonight, too.”

  Her elbows jerked with the thread, and he didn’t want to go closer. Just piss her off more. He folded his arms, leaning against the wall. “I didn’t do that, Brenda.”

  “Was she good?” she whispered, head down. “She do it for three hours and hang upside down and holler? I know you don’t get it when you want it here. She didn’t give a damn what her kids thought—or she didn’t have no kids. She didn’t have to go to work this morning, either, huh?” She bit off a thread and finally looked up. Her eyes were whiskey-dark, her skin pale, and gray nudged the inside corners near her nose.

  Melvin and Snooter always say, Just let her finish talkin when she mad. Females hate when you interrupt what they done already planned to say. They always got it planned out. Darnell closed his lips, breathed through his nose, and she went on. “Cause you weren’t workin with your dad or Nacho. No, I didn’t call em up. I wasn’t about to say, ‘My husband didn’t come home.’ Not me, Darnell. My mama did that. I don’t do that. No. Uh-uh.” She stared at him. “So I went over there late to tell your mom I needed a seam ripper and thimble. Yeah, so I could see Nacho in back with your dad, Roscoe, all of em. And they said, ‘Darnell home sleep, huh? Lazy brotha.’” She bent her head to the snaps again, the tiny silver circles. Her hair was brushed flat and shiny against her small head. He swallowed bitter tobacco. It take a while sometimes, man, Melvin said. Just let em finish.

  “And I even went by Jackson Park. No, you weren’t hanging out,” she said. “Charolette thought it was a party; I had the radio on and I was singing to her. And I came home, put her to bed, and started waiting. Still waiting now, for the cops to come and tell me the bad news. Or you, to come in here with some kinda lie and your dick soft.” She whispered, “One of the girls at the park, they’ll do you for five dollars.”

  “Damn, Brenda, you don’t talk like that,” he said, but she laughed.

  “Marlene and them always do,” she said. “They got left—now I got left.” She lifted her head again. “When I took Charolette, your dad said how come you didn’t need the car, and I said you had a job with some guy. But she musta dropped you off, huh? What kinda car she got? She must be real good if you walked.”

  “I didn’t sleep with nobody, Brenda,” he said, feeling the tiredness spread back out to numb his forehead, his scalp. “And I called coupla times, but you weren’t here.” He sat on the other edge of the bed and rubbed his eyebrows. Melvin probably right—this works for him cause he messes with dumb women, and they give up fast. He looked at Brenda, tried to keep his voice casual. “Nothin I can say, right? Look at me, Brenda. No hickeys on my neck, no perfume. What you want me to do?” She put down the red corduroy overalls and covered her eyes, shoulders starting to shake. He thought, I can’t say the truth. I was workin. I got close to this woman, but I freaked. Then I finished up the shift. Just touch her—maybe that part of Melvin’s plan right.

  He moved over on the bed and said, “Brenda, come on. You know me better, you know I wouldn’t do that.” He put his arms around her neck and pulled her face into his shirt, and she wouldn’t look at him. She spoke into his neck.

  “I ended up hoping you were with somebody else. Cause if not, the cops would come. I stayed out there on the couch, watching for the lights, and then after I took Charolette this morning, I decided I couldn’t sit out there all day waiting for them to find your body.” She wiped her eyes on the overalls, pulling away, and folded them. She touched the darker wet spots. “You need to pack your stuff, Darnell. I won’t live like this. I know where you were now.”

  “My body, Brenda? What you talkin about?”

  She stared at him. “All that time you were gone, I waited for them to come and tell me they found it.”

  “Damn, Brenda, why you want to dream me like that?” he said, looking away from the shimmering film over her eyes.

  “I don’t dream you like that. It’s just in my brain, like in the cells. Like I inherited it from my mama.” She twisted the rings on her fingers. “She probably had it in her brain, too,” she whispered. “That’s why I want you to just go. I can’t even see you a couple of hours late and I don’t think somebody got you. The good guys, the bad guys. Whoever. A fire.”

  “What I’ma do at a fire now?” he said sharply.

  But she went on like she hadn’t heard him. “And everything scares me, Darnell,” she said, looking at his collarbone, her eyes blurred. “Everything. When you take Charolette with you, I see accidents. I see her in the street, after somebody was chasing you. I see a branch flying off in a yard. I see her hand, it’s so small.”

  “Brenda, Brenda,” he said, cutting off her deepening voice. “You scarin me now, too. If I thought like that, I’d never get out the front door again.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “That’s why you need to go. Back to wherever you were last night.” She stood up, holding the overalls, but he pulled her back toward him.

  “You don’t know,” he said. “Look, if I was with somebody else, could I do this?” He kissed her, said into her ear, “You think I’m that bold, I’d be doin this?” He pulled at the skin between her neck and shoulder with his teeth, gently, smelling nothing, no perfume or smoke. Just skin. She didn’t push him away, she pulled him down onto her, hard, her palms holding on to his shoulder blades through his shirt, and when her dress was off and her nipples were hard against his chest, she didn’t keep him at wrist’s length with her fingers splayed against his collarbone, like she had been doing since Charolette.

  She collected half-moons of dark under her fingernails. When she lay on her stomach, her head turned away from him and resting on her arms, he saw the crescents edging the white of her nails. She had his skin, loosened with sweat and scraped from his back, where crisscrossing lines glowed warm now. He felt his heart slowing down, thought maybe Melvin was right, always saying fights made sex better. “You gotta get they blood racin somehow—trust me, young boy,” he used to say, laughing.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” he whispered, and she turned her face toward his.

  “I know where you were,” she said. “You were with your other lady. You went to that fire. You were with the lady you still love more than me—ain’t no difference.” She swung her legs slowly over the bed and pulled on her dress. She smoothed her hair, twisting it back tighter. “I’m going back to work; I’m late from lunch,” she said. Then she knelt over him on the bed. “Darnell. Why you still want to get lost in the flames? I love you—why can’t you stay?”

  “I’m here, right?” he
said, sleep dissolving the sand behind his brows.

  She put her nails fierce and close to his eyes when she laid her hands on his face. “I don’t know where you are,” she whispered, hard. “I love you.” He thought she was gone, but she came back in to lay the newspaper on his chest. “But this is what you love,” she said. “This is your lady.” She ran her finger across her wet cheek and turned to go.

  He heard the jangle of keys dropping on the table, and he knew she was walking back to work. The door clicked. Wrapped in the damp sheets, the wetness beneath him from when he pulled out of her, he looked at the picture of flames in a riverbottom palm, the orange boiling at the center of the fronds, and he knew it was just before the tree exploded. The text read: “Although authorities have postponed an official declaration of the county’s fire season due to sharply reduced funds, firefighters have already fought two blazes in the riverbottom near Doloreaux. Investigators said the fires, near the freeway, could have been caused by discarded cigarettes, but last year many fires were attributed to homeless drifters living in makeshift shelters along the river.”

  He lay staring at the ceiling’s rough plaster, remembering the cupfuls of water he’d poured over his hair, the wood popping like gunshots. I want to be out there like I’m sprung. Like they say—it just comes up through your neck and into your head like fireworks. Like sex. He closed his eyes.

  Charolette was nestled into her pallet of sheets on the floor, arms thrown out on either side like she was flying in her dreams. Her fingers curled loose, her breath snarled in her throat. He swallowed, his own throat tight, and backed out to close his mother’s bedroom door.

  She was pulling the hem of a dress from under the silver foot of the machine. Earrings swinging, she looked up and said, “We ain’t seen you for a couple of days.”

  “I had a job,” he said, and when she frowned, he kept walking. He heard wall-shaking bass. Gasanova was cruising toward his mother’s house.

  “Hey, homey, you get that waitress yet?” Darnell said, glad to have someone else to talk about.

  “Tamiko,” Gas said, shaking his head. “I’m serious this time, but she says, ‘You gotta wait awhile.’ I say, ‘Yo, the while has been waited.’ She says, ‘We gotta take some time,’ and I say, ‘Yo, that concept is outdated.’” He smiled.

  “Listen at your sorry rap!” Darnell laughed.

  But Gas looked embarrassed. “I think I might be ready to buy the ring, man,” he said.

  “What? You? Kick your homey Kreeper off shotgun?” Darnell said. “Hey, rappin don’t work the same when you married, let me tell you that right off.”

  Gas shrugged. “But I gotta try it to know, right? Maybe you just can’t say it right. You never could—that’s why Brenda the only fine woman put up with you.”

  “Give me a break,” Darnell said, and he heard Charolette screaming with joy, staggering onto the lawn in front of his mother.

  “Here come your other lady,” Gas said, smiling wide.

  Darnell shook his head, laughing still, and he couldn’t believe the watery vapor that rose in his chest, flooded his cheekbones. “There your daddy,” his mother said, and Charolette slammed her palms down on the sidewalk when she stumbled. But she pushed back up, came at him with her arms outstretched, her two front teeth lonely in her wide-open mouth, her dusty hands reaching for him.

  She held a tin pie plate in front of her like a shield, going around and around the coffee table, ducking under Brenda’s legs stretched out to rest on the top. Darnell lay on the floor, and she pulled at his hair to turn over his face, stuck her index finger deep inside his ear until he shivered and said, “I still got brains in there somewhere, babygirl!” He caught her on his chest, and she said, “Daddy! Daddy!” pointing to the telephone wire glinting in the low sun. “Irdy!” she said, like it had been just this morning.

  “She always looks for you,” Brenda said. “She never wants to cuddle or sit in my lap anymore. Too busy.”

  “Just like you,” Darnell said, looking at her upside down. “You always too busy to cuddle, too.”

  Brenda smiled when he reached for her leg, but she said lightly, “You ain’t taken your boots off yet. You planning on going somewhere?”

  Darnell let Charolette bounce on his chest. “Pops wasn’t home when I picked up wild thang here, and Mama says he got a job for me.” He hesitated. “I need to swing by and pick up my money from the last job.”

  She looked at him. “Yeah. I know how long it takes to get there and back.”

  Darnell sat up, swallowed. “I know you do. So you want to come?” He raised his eyebrows, put his hands palm out.

  She looked at Charolette, then back at him. “I would if Sophia and Paula was there, but they have practice for some school play.” She rubbed her eyes. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, and I have to go to the store.”

  Darnell stood up, Charolette holding a crease in his jeans leg. It was almost eight. “Oh, no,” he said, seeing the baby’s face gather redness at the temples, the bottom lip turn under like a red, fat moon. Brenda scooped her up, and she began to cry.

  The courtyard was deserted, but all the doors were open and the railings fluttered with drying clothes and upended mops and Charolette’s fluttering pieces of yarn. Darnell heard the televisions and clinks of washing silverware, and he sat in the El Camino, smelling Brenda’s perfume, coconut hairdress and Charolette’s baby powder. The car seat was inside, because somebody might steal it, but he felt Charolette crumbs with his palm. This ain’t even my hooptie no more, he thought. I gotta get the Spider fixed. He looked at the dashboard; his screwdriver and coffee cup were gone. On the floorboards, he saw two of Charolette’s sparkly hair ties, and in the pulled-out ashtray was a tiny bottle of pink lotion. He rubbed some into his bare arms and started the engine.

  His father and Roscoe were alone in the back room, drinking Miller’s and watching an old Western. “Quiet in the front,” Darnell said when they looked up.

  “Sophia and Paula gon get to yammer in front of a whole audience now,” his father said casually. “They good at it—never forget any lines.”

  “Where you been for the last few days?” Roscoe said.

  “Workin.” Darnell looked at the grayish cowboys on the old black-and-white TV. The truth, he thought. “I had a job for a dude downtown.”

  His father frowned. “One-man job? What you doin over there?”

  Darnell said, “Just movin stuff around.”

  “He let you use his equipment? I didn’t see you come over here to borrow nothin,” his father pressed.

  “Yeah, I used his.” Shit, this was too close, Darnell thought. The truth. Nothin but the truth.

  “Well, shit, one-man job and he got the equipment, why he didn’t do it his own self?” his father grumbled.

  “Why, when someone will do it for you?” Roscoe said, watching Darnell.

  That’s enough, Darnell thought. I hate this shit, tryin to keep stories straight. He said, “Mama told me you got a job.”

  “Mrs. Panadoukis, the doctor’s wife up there in Arroyo Grande, she’s got a bank full of dead iceplant and two dead pine trees. She wants it all cleared out right away because she’s planning an anniversary party,” Roscoe said.

  “You and Victor and Ronnie could knock it out,” his father said, looking at him hard, the long nose pulled over his mouth. “Y’all can take the Chevy so Brenda won’t be without a car. She been talkin to your mother about the grocery bills. Maybe this extra money cheer her up.”

  Darnell closed his lips tight and drew air in hard through his nose. Don’t even start that shit—I ain’t in the mood, he thought. I know—I ain’t about nothin. I don’t know what hard work is. He stood up.

  “Early, boy,” his father said. “Not no leisure hours—it’s gettin hot.” Darnell said nothing, walking to the door, and his father said, “You been hangin around with Donnie Harris?”

  Darnell stopped by the door. “Why?”

  “I asked you a question.�
��

  Darnell heard the wire in his father’s voice. “No, I ain’t seen him.”

  His father’s eyes were hard in the window’s reflection. “He come around here yesterday, lookin bad. Say he need to talk to you. He smokin that shit?”

  Darnell thought of Donnie’s ragged voice on the phone. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll check him out.” He pushed the screen door, but Roscoe spoke behind him.

  “Donnie always asks me, every time,” Roscoe said. “‘How’s Birdman doin?’ I have to tell him I’m the last person to answer that. If he’s doing fine in prison, I must have prepared him for that.”

  Darnell paused in the sideyard, touching the Spider’s dusty hood, his toes deep in the high grass around the tires. He remembered Roscoe telling his father about the drive up to Louis’s college, the same route Darnell had just taken. “You’d think the boy be excited about the team, about ball, but all he did was look for egrets,” Roscoe had said. “I don’t understand how his brain works.”

  What’s Pops thinkin about my brain? He ain’t supportin his family—he’s wanderin around dreamin about somethin he can’t have. He straightened from where he’d peered into the Spider’s interior. Let me go get paid, he whispered to the headlights. Odd job. I ain’t goin home broke. And I’m tired of walkin.

  “You weren’t nervous, were you?” the consultant said, settling back on the leather couch in the dim living room. MTV looked garish and jumpy in the darkness, and Darnell pushed himself back in the easy chair.

  He hesitated. Look into the man’s eyes. You know him. He gon pay you now, just like they do after you rake up the trash and stack the wood. “I don’t know,” he said, concentrating on the heavy laps of skin by the mouth. The truth is the easiest. Why lie? You ain’t doin no more odd jobs for this dude, so who care if he think you ain’t got no cojones? “Nervous about cops. And Vernon actin a fool.”