Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  “You go ahead and climb, Mountain Man,” Victor said from the bottom of the slope.

  From the front yard of Mrs. Panadoukis’s house in Arroyo Grande, Darnell had seen the bruise-brown pall of smog drifting toward the city from LA, but in the backyard only the huge bank rose before him. The iceplant was mostly dead, and the woody, tangled mesh tore from the dirt easily, but he had to dig his boots into the steep incline.

  He didn’t look behind him at Victor and Ronnie. He bent to pull another webby mess of stems up in a thick mat, but he wouldn’t let himself see manzanita or creosote. He kept seeing the Mexican man’s face from last night, under his hat, and the men laughing over their machetes today, but he couldn’t figure out why.

  The piles of iceplant were heavy. Victor and Ronnie raked and pushed the heaps onto the burlap sacks they’d laid out at the base of the bank. They took off their shirts. Darnell remembered that they didn’t have anywhere to wash them unless they were springing for a motel room or boarding house this month, something they usually did when it rained or a vicious Santa Ana came through.

  “I don’t go nowhere without my jimhat,” Victor sang along with Digital Underground on Ronnie’s radio. “Yeah, my man Darnell didn’t use no jimmy, and now he doin the daddy thang. You gon have some more if you keep up the sex with no Latex, man.’”

  “When you desperate for some ass, man, you don’t care,” Ronnie said, and Darnell heard a scraping step on the cement. He saw Mrs. Panadoukis, her face frozen, standing by the back sliding door with her purse. She clenched her lips tight and fumbled with her keys. They were silent, the music thumping loud.

  When she’d closed the glass door, her neck curved toward them, Victor busted up. Darnell saw her held-tight cheeks. He bent to the pile of iceplant and saw the machetes flashing at the ivy. The Mexican guys had been laughing—he looked at Ronnie’s chest, Victor’s braids touching the nape of his neck. The Mexican guys could be saying anything, talking dirty or yanging about the lady they were working for, but it would be in Spanish and they’d sound happy; their radio was jolly, funny, that bright, quick music spangly as mariachi suits Darnell saw at Rancheria Park. Ronnie’s radio. Uh-uh. The bass was low, shuffling around her, and the drums slapped her in the face. Booming.

  “You ready?” Darnell said, and they went back to the far end of the bank to tear out the last patches.

  Victor was steady making them laugh. “Darnell, you just graduated a couple years ago, man, you remember Mr. Rentell, that drivin teacher we had? Serious redhead, always talkin hip. He came by the park the other day, saw me. ‘Victor, is that you?’ He start storyin bout why was I hangin out, couldn’t I do better? I told him, ‘Man, I can still drive, don’t worry—let me have your car, I’ll show you right now.’” He threw iceplant down the bank to Darnell.

  They loaded the Chevy in the front yard. Mrs. Panadoukis had already come to the front door and handed Darnell a check, her eyes averted. Darnell thought, Sorry we don’t look good. He saw a Baggie on the lawn and bent to pick it up, thinking it had dropped from the truck. But someone else had put it on the grass; he saw a flyer inside and a small rock. Looking down the street, he watched a silver Toyota truck stop for a second at each lawn. A hand threw out Baggies. Darnell saw rakes and shovels and mower handles in the truckbed.

  “Nguyen’s Oriental Gardening Service,” the flyer read. He spread it out on his lap in the truck, and Victor said, “Come on, man, it’s hella hot.”

  “Let experienced Oriental Gardeners keep your yard look neet-clean & nice. Professional. Mowing, edging, trimming, and cleaning up for only $60 four times monthly.” Darnell squinted. They gon come every week, he thought. The printing look nice, but they shoulda proofread this baby. The note had been printed on a computer, and a picture of a bonsai tree was in one corner. In the opposite corner was a stone lantern and a curved bridge. Darnell turned the flyer over and saw a phone number. Below it he read, “Also Sodding and Relawnscape. All the Works Guaranteed.”

  “Darnell, man, quit trippin,” Victor said, running his hands over his braids. “Hit the bank.”

  Driving down the hill, he saw the city shrouded now in smog, brown with dust raised from the wind. I can’t see Hillgrove or Grayglen, but all those new houses gotta want gardeners. Landscapers. Trent makin a grip up there, he thought. He felt the little rock in his jeans pocket. Nguyen—he remembered Don Nguyen and Tom Bui, two Vietnamese guys who talked to him in biology sometimes. Nguyen—Don had explained that last name was like Smith in Vietnam. “Like Johnson for brothas,” Gasanova had said, laughing.

  His father and Roscoe were stacking wood. “Y’all finish the doctor’s wife’s job?” his father said.

  “Yeah,” Darnell said. “Iceplant was dead anyway.”

  “She pay you? She love to talk when she get started,” his father said.

  Darnell looked at the spirals of gray above his father’s temples. “She didn’t get started with us,” he said. His arms and back ached, his chest was fist-tight with smog. When he drank the warm Coke he’d carried, the liquid trickled through the gray dust webbing his lungs. Avoiding his father’s eyes, he said, “Roscoe, can you drop us off?”

  After the Apache had turned the corner and Victor headed to the store with Ronnie, Darnell started the walk to Treetown. When he got to the olive groves, instead of turning down the street to the Thompsons’ barn, he followed the arroyo to the riverbottom, where the deep-gashed banks flattened out to a sandy fan of jimsonweed and wild grapevines.

  The river itself was a winding strip about twenty feet wide, but the wild flats extended half a mile between the banks, which were covered with wild tobacco in bending plumes, the flowers like long yellow macaroni tubes, and stiff-stemmed arrowroot.

  Darnell walked along one of the narrow paths, sand shifting under his boots, to the cottonwoods and wild palms and vine-draped giant cane that hid the water. The shadows were full of the day’s heat, and he looked for smoke, for the old fires’ blackened earth. Good day for a fire, with a nice dry wind steady off the desert. If Scott and Perez show up, I could just grab the hose and go—maybe check out their captain if he comes.

  Maybe I’ll see the dude that’s startin these little conflagrations, he thought, ducking under a curtain of wild grape that hung from a stand of cane. He touched a thick stalk—arundo, the giant cane taking over the whole swath of land from here to San Bernardino. Fricke said the only way to get it out was burn it deep and then take a dozer to the rest; you’d still have to dig some clumps. This stuff burns good and hot, he thought. He stopped, hearing voices behind the stand.

  Bamboo grew near the cane, the greener, thinner stalks shaking now when two people walked out from another tiny path. The old woman stared at him from under her pink umbrella. Her wide, square mouth and small eyes were still, and he saw that she was afraid. Vietnamese. He looked at the boy, about ten, and recognized him from one of the chopped-up houses near his apartment. “Hi,” the boy said, smiling shyly, and Darnell nodded.

  “What you doin?” he asked, looking at the plastic bag in the boy’s hand.

  The woman stood very still, but the boy held out the sack. “Bamboo shoots,” the boy said, embarrassed. “My gramma won’t eat em from a can.”

  Darnell remembered Fricke showing him a can of pale squares, and he smiled. “Grammas never do,” he said, and the boy frowned, puzzled, when Darnell kept walking.

  He found the ashes and charred cane trash around the next bend. The fire had stopped abruptly at the edge of one path leading to the river, and the concrete-chunked levee on the other side only had sooty licks up a few slabs.

  Darnell wandered around the blackened earth for a long time. Why would anybody want to be an arson investigator? he always wondered when he walked in already burned places. The carbonized tree branches and thick-scaled trunks, the headless palms, the ashes wet and muddy in old puddles. He sat on a flat chunk of concrete and stared at the burn swath. Plenty more fuel down here. The river-bottom stretche
d for miles.

  When the cement grew cooler with evening, he started walking toward the freeway bridge. I guess I ain’t bustin no wild pyro arsonist today, he thought. Damn, and I was sure if I was the hero the fire department might give me a job. He breathed the last traces of carbon.

  Near the concrete pillars of the bridge, covered with graffiti, he saw two guys carrying water jugs. The brotha was dressed in green fatigues, and the white guy was shirtless, his back burned deep red. Darnell frowned. Those guys lived down here, and they weren’t going to start a fire until now, he thought, when it was cooled off and dark. But none of the fires this year or last had been at night. Must not be homeless guys. He stared at the men disappearing into the stand of trees near the bridge.

  Three Mexicans about his age looked up when he crossed the dank path under the bridge; they wore only their undershorts, and he saw their clothes drying on the scrabbled cement beside them, a trail of soapy water dripping down to the tiny stream that ran parallel to the river here.

  When he came up out of the riverbottom past the bridge, at the street that led to Rancheria Park, he picked up a long stick and jabbed it into the shoulder of the road. His arms prickled cool. The evening had turned purple, and the packs of wild dogs that roamed the river-bottom would be cruising now. When he and Louis used to finally meet up after going their separate ways, for wings and flames, they’d run in the dark, afraid of the dogs, the other boys long gone home. Afraid of the callused palm, too, his father’s big-knuckled hand hard at his ear when he’d make it home in the true dark smelling of smoke and ash and sweat from racing.

  He called her from the same phone booth as before. He could hear Charolette talking near Brenda, saying, “Mama! Mine! Mine!”

  “So what did you want to be, when you were a kid?” he said to her. “See, this is my rap. I didn’t do it right in high school, when I used to call you.”

  Brenda was silent, and he heard forks drop into the sink. “A nurse,” she finally said, hesitant. “A model, but I was too short. Get married and have kids, I guess.”

  He stared at the empty playground, the black skeletons of slides and swings, and the fire beyond, with shadows of men crowded in the lot. Dudes ain’t like that. “You ever hear your brother James say, ‘I’ma get married and have kids?’” He paused, watching a car cruise past. She was silent. “Remember what Leon used to say? ‘Whatever I do, I’ma get paid.’ And Donnie talked about playin ball. Louis used to bug hell out of us with that word—ornithologist.” He heard her rough breath in the receiver. “Me—you think I’m out here dreamin about smoke, and I mean, I am, but that ain’t why I’m gone.”

  “Are you gone?” she whispered.

  “I ain’t comin home broke, Brenda. That’s all I can say. I got some plans, but…” He threw his head back to stare at the weak gray light in the ancient booth. “Everything I say sound like a joke. I’ll call you back.” He hung up, slamming the stick into the curb.

  At his father’s house, he lay on the couch he’d sometimes imagined was a boat, rocking through the living-room air, or a coffin open around him while he stared up at the night ceiling and heard the embers glisten. GranaLene would say, “I hear that nose, you,” and he would be afraid of his snuffle-wet nostrils, the prickle in his throat.

  “Cold turn to pneumonia and take you on,” she would say. “Get up here by the fire.” And she’d hold him in her lap, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of sour coffee.

  He slept hard and woke with his fingers trailing the carpet, his other hand pulling the stiffness between his legs, moving it in his jeans till he could breathe. Like high school stretched out here thinkin about Brenda, hearin Pops snore. Music chattered slight as crickets from behind his sisters’ door; they had always slept with the radio on, since they couldn’t stand voiceless silence.

  A dishtowel slapped his neck, and his mother snapped, “Get your hands off your pants, boy.” He jumped, sat up with his back hunched and rubbed his face. His mother sat in the old chair across from him. “What the hell you doin sleepin here?” she said. “You don’t live here.” Her face was creased with anger, dark in the dim morning light through her drapes, the heavy drapes she’d made and kept perfect-pleated.

  “Ain’t no need for me to be there,” he said, but she cut him off with the flat of her hand across the air.

  “Don’t give me that. You’re—you’re a man of color, like Melvin used to go on about. A black man. Negro. You got no business staying out all night. Brenda thinkin you dead! And you done did this before, call yourself showin up early for work.”

  He stared straight at her. “I ain’t workin hard enough for Brenda.”

  “Please. Don’t even try my patience with that.”

  “So what can I tell you, Mama?” He looked past her furious eyes, her swinging earrings, to the creamy drapes, the lining he used to touch, satiny, holding the daylight away now.

  “Why y’all get married?”

  He straightened. “Not cause she was pregnant. I didn’t even have to do that. We woulda got married anyway.”

  “So?”

  He rested his head on the couch back. She had gone to the mountains with him—he couldn’t even ask any of the other girls. She’d say she wasn’t into the nature-girl thing, and she cut her eyes sideways for snakes, but when he tried to explain the north-side vegetation and the chaparral, she didn’t fold her arms and stick her chin out. And down in the flatlands—in the theater, biting her cool neck, watching her go into a dressing room and come out with a tight miniskirt on just to show him when he was helpless in a store full of women. Her face through the windshield while he watched a fire, waiting.

  “You two was young for nowadays,” his mother said to his chin. “But I was seventeen. Your daddy was nineteen. We had us some long tussles, but I told him, You ever stay away all night—I don’t care you call and say you in bed right now with some woman and be home soon—but you stay out till the sun come up, I’ma do my best to kill you when you come through that door. Cause it’s no justification for that. Your daddy drink with Floyd and Roscoe and whoallever he want, and I don’t always like it. But he have always honored me by comin home.”

  “Maybe Brenda don’t feel like that. Maybe she glad I’m gone, so life’ll be easier.” He looked at his boots, heard Fricke’s drawl. “Maybe we ain’t metaphysical soulmates.”

  “You fulla crap,” his mother said. “Who you gon find better than Brenda? Huh? You ain’t got nothin to say. Look, me and your daddy was in love. That gotta be obvious, cause I still gotta put up with my floor. We been married twenty-nine years, and he know how much a clean floor mean to me, but he and Roscoe tramp in here daily to get a coffee or some Pickapeppa. Leave mud worms everywhere.”

  She paused, and Darnell saw the brown tubes, the dried dirt from their boot soles, intact on the floor.

  His mother flicked the towel toward him. “He always talkin about, ‘This my house—my feet.’” She bent to lift his face up with her gaze; he couldn’t look at her, remembering his father’s shouts.

  “That’s what I’m sayin, Mama. That ain’t my house. I can’t even pay no rent—Brenda does that.”

  His mother bit her lip hard, reached out as if she would touch his face, then dropped her hand. “Brenda’s mama love a clean floor, too. You don’t know how hard Brenda come up with her daddy like he is—me and her mama don’t even know how hard he come up. But Brenda don’t need to be barely survivin, all alone with that baby, worryin about you all night.” She tried to smile. “Me and your daddy showed you marriage is fightin and hollerin. Sometimes. It ain’t no Brady Bunch.”

  He had to smile at that. Melvin had watched that show when they were young, and she’d grump around the room telling them to turn off that garbage. He heard his father’s shoes thump heavy on the floor now from behind the bedroom door, and his mother said, “Go on and walk home, cause she makin a 7 Up cake for Memorial Day.”

  “Damn—I forgot,” he said, and she frowned.

>   “You owe her to take her round and pay your respects,” she said.

  From the doorway, he could feel the oven pouring heat into the already-stifling kitchen, and Charolette had flung ladles and wooden spoons on the floor. When Brenda turned, eggs cradled in her fingers, she stepped on a metal edge. “Darnell!” The knife-thin cords rose taut from her collarbone. “Daddy!” Charolette called, waving her spatula at his knees.

  The mountains were missing, hidden in the gray shroud, and he passed the listless, dusted palms lining the street to Rancheria Park. “Gon be hot as hell, and sticky down there by the lake,” he said, keeping both hands on the wheel.

  Brenda was silent, the foil-wrapped cake on the floorboards between her feet, and he saw her arms gold against the white tank top, her thighs smooth in the denim shorts. Charolette’s spiral-twisted hair brushed his arm when she turned to look past him to the crowds in the park.

  The Sunday before Memorial Day was unofficially Oklahoma Day. Everybody in Rio Seco who had people from that state gathered for the day and half the night, and barbecue smoke drifted thick above the tables. Oklahoma people—some from LA and San Bernardino and Indio, but most from Rio Seco—profiling, looking, eating, and talking serious yang while they caught up for the year. Then they went as families to visit the graves.