Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights
Page 31
Darnell stared at the picture of the German shepherd, tongue hanging, in the upper corner. Like the bonsai tree, he thought, but Trent said, “I hate dogs, cause they mess up flower beds, they crap all over my work.” His speech was slurring, and he downed another shot of Stoli. Darnell slid the flyer onto the floor. A tiny shard of rock stuck to his palm, from the long driveway. He nudged it in harder, so he wouldn’t have to think for a moment.
Trent kept on, almost whispering now. “Brichee wouldn’t like you cause you too black.”
“What was your first clue?”
“You wear that Angels hat. Your hair—you got razor cuts. You don’t wanna talk right on the phone.”
Darnell said, “She a sista, right? Can’t never please a woman on the phone.”
“You know what I’m sayin,” Trent said. “She don’t wanna hear ‘hooptie’ and ‘crib.’” Trent’s eyes closed, and he leaned against the couch. “You scared the shit out of me, man,” he whispered, softer.
Darnell saw the masses of flowers in the backyard through the huge window: they glowed in the garden lights. Yeah, Trent ain’t supposed to like flowers. Not normal. Always talkin Latin names. What was the one he told me for baby’s breath? Gypsophila-somethin. Charolette’s breath. Charolette—pretty name. If it was a boy, I wasn’t gon call him Darnell Junior. The colored give em a name like that, it’s a burden. Tom Corcoran, Billy Scott, Josh Fricke. Those are okay. He reached down to the pile of flyers. Latvian. The dog’s triangular ears. The papers were dimpled from dried moisture. The Baggie is a smart idea. The flyer can’t get wet. And the rock keeps it from blowin away.
Oriental Gardeners. People see the tree, the lantern, they’re thinkin of those perfect Japanese gardens and small, quiet guys trimmin and rakin.
Darnell’s Expert Landscape Service. Professional Brothas. Yeah—that’d go over like Darnell Tucker Canyon. He saw the ravines again, the wall of flame, and he stood, shaking his head. Trent was snoring slightly, and Darnell could tell he fell asleep like this frequently.
“Stay black, man,” he whispered, grinning, and he pulled open the etched-glass and oak front door.
“I’ma take her and do the shoppin,” he said to Brenda on Saturday morning. Brenda lay in bed, her arm over her eyes. The heat streamed in through the curtains.
“Don’t get all that weird stuff we never need,” she murmured. “Get some chicken and a bag of rice.”
“You get some rest,” he said, taking Charolette’s hand.
She put her forehead against the railing so hard dents printed into her skin: she was looking for the Kawasaki that always revved the engine. “Do-do-si-cu!” she said proudly, pointing at the motorcycle.
“That’s Daddy’s girl,” Darnell laughed. “Goin for the ride already.”
When they passed the county building, Charolette pointed to the gleaming glass and said, “Mama.”
“Yeah,” Darnell said. He stopped at the tiny Oriental market, in an old wood-frame house near the building. Brenda had come here with a Chinese girl from work, Connie Lee, and she was addicted to some strange shrimp chips. He carried Charolette inside. Manufactured by Hanmi, Tokyo, Japan: he read the back of the bag. The store smelled of salt and ginger and fish. He looked at the jars of spices and bags of dried mushrooms and seaweed. Fricke probably loved stores like this. Curry powder in a tiny can—he recognized it. India, the back said.
But Charolette found M&Ms by the front counter, where the woman smiled at her and gently took the money from Darnell. She recognized him from the frequent chip trips. “The eggs very fresh,” she said, motioning to a rack. “Come from Chino.”
Chino. What else came from there? Someone had told him. The gun. He froze, hearing Charolette say, “Bye! Bye!” to the woman. His father had fired the gun, lifted his lip in disgust. Darnell jerked his shoulders with the trail of cold across his neck. Louis was doing his time in Chino.
“Mon!” Charolette urged, pulling his wrist. “Mon.”
He stood by the curb, looking back at the faded wooden sign with both foreign characters and English letters: NGUYEN’S ORIENTAL MARKET.
At the grocery store on the Westside, she rode in the cart, and he stared at faces. He kept thinking of Tim Bui and Don Nguyen, how the teachers in school had looked at them, nodded at their pronunciation, but he looked around the store, seeing Mexican faces, too. The guys on the crew that had picked the lemons, the guys working on the block walls. Almost as many Mexican families lived on certain streets in the Westside as black families, and he watched the men outside the store, tying plastic bags filled with food to their handlebars. Ten-speeds. The men carried whole chickens, stacks of tortillas, chips, fruit. There were groups of five or six, one guy guarding clothes in the laundromat while the others stood in line at the store. These were the guys who lived in trailers and converted garages behind houses, the guys who stood on corners waiting for work, the guys who rode the ten-speeds up the hill to Grayglen every morning.
He watched their faces while Charolette rode the horsie three times. She was amazed that he kept producing quarters without a fight. He saw a mariachi band walk through the parking lot and into the schoolyard of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where Donnie and Louis had gone to school. Their huge guitars and glittering suits fascinated Charolette, who pointed when the horsie stopped.
But Darnell looked back at the men on the bikes, their eyes and hair, knowing that he was missing something. “Come on,” he said. “We gotta get Daddy’s equipment.”
His father was working on a chain saw in the sideyard. “Hey,” Darnell said. “I’ma check the gas and oil in the mower. I need it for Monday.”
His father said, “Whose yard you doin?”
“Yours. Roscoe’s. Brenda’s daddy’s.” Darnell wheeled out the mower.
“What the hell you up to now?” his father said, straightening his back. Darnell saw the deep lines, four of them, cut into his forehead.
“I ain’t sure yet,” he said. “What you doin with that spoon?” he called to Charolette, who stood over a fresh-dug hole.
She clutched the spoon to her chest. “Mine!” she said.
All weekend, he kept hearing the music again, turning the radio to the Mexican station. “What are you tripping about?” Brenda said, folding the laundry that lay in drifts on the floor. Charolette moved washcloths from the couch to the table.
“Nothin,” Darnell said, listening to what he thought was an accordion. He smoothed out the flyer, the pink paper ridged with dirt at the creases, and Charolette snatched it from his fingers.
“I need that,” he told her, pulling it back.
On Monday, he drove slowly past the corners where they always gathered, the crowds of Mexican men waiting for day work. And he saw the shortest, Indian-looking guys. Their eyes were slanted almond, their hair thick and straight, their legs short-curved.
The men shifted and scattered when a construction truck stopped at the curb, crowding around the driver. Darnell watched five guys jump in the back of the pickup. Some of the disappointed ones stared at him, and he tried to recall what he could of his high-school Spanish. All that came to his head was “Como se llama?” and Hermano, hermana. Llanteria: the used tire shop where his father and Roscoe were friends with Mr. Sanchez, the owner. He licked his lips while he leaned out the window. He said, “I need a guy who can speak English.”
Three guys came over. “I speak English, bro,” a skinny dark guy said, and Darnell knew from the teardrops tattooed near his eyes that he’d been in prison.
“I’ll give you ten bucks to help me out here, man,” Darnell said. “I need two dudes who know how to mow lawns, and I want them to look Oriental, you know, like those guys over there.” He pointed to the short, slim men.
“He wants los indios,” the guy said, muttering to the men. Several of the Indian men gathered around him, and he brought over four with anxious faces and small, tilted dark eyes under thick brows. Darnell thought of Charolette’s brows suddenly, how delicate and
straight they were, like the youngest guy’s in front of him.
“You guys can do gardening?” he asked. They all nodded, and he said, “But I gotta get somebody who speaks English—even a little.”
The youngest guy said, “I try speak pequeño. My brother not so much.” He gestured to the older man next to him, in a baseball cap.
“Come on,” Darnell said, gesturing, and they got into the El Camino. The other men melted away, then ran toward another truck, and Darnell handed a ten-dollar bill to the tattooed guy, who lifted his face and said, “Later, bro.”
The two men were so small compared to Victor and Ronnie that air still flowed through the cab to touch Darnell’s shoulders. Their shoulders were thin. No government gym. “Where you from?” he asked.
The young one said, “Mayco.”
“Yeah—where in Mexico?” Darnell said.
“Wahaka.”
Darnell frowned. Wahaka? “Write it down, okay?” he said, and the guy printed Oaxaca on the back of the pink flyer.
“O-sa-ka?” the guy said, trying to pronounce it differently, and Darnell smiled. Wasn’t that a city in Japan? He’d heard the name. It was Rio Seco’s sister city; every summer, there was some ceremony downtown, and college students went back and forth to study. Osaka. The younger guy shrugged and smiled, and the older one stared straight ahead.
He watched them work on Roscoe’s small front and back yards. Anyone could mow, and Juan, the younger one, did the front while José weed-whacked the back. Darnell blew the grass off the sidewalk. It took twenty-five minutes for José to finish mowing under the fig tree.
They were sweating, watching him. “Let’s go,” Darnell said.
He pulled into the Batistes’ driveway. The New Yorker was gone. He told Juan to start mowing the front, and he knocked on the door. Brenda’s mother opened it, frowning. “Darnell,” she said.
“My crew,” he said. “We’re gon do your yard, to say thanks for curin me. And Donnie. Mr. Batiste at work?”
“No,” she said. “Just runnin some errand. Come in here.”
In the kitchen, he heard the whining mower and the zipping of the weed whacker starting and stopping. He watched José move around the backyard. Mrs. Batiste’s sewing machine was hot; he touched it, on the table. She came back with a bagful of clothes for Charolette.
“I ain’t came by cause Brenda haven’t call me in two weeks,” she said. “What been goin on with you?”
“Just been busy,” he said, looking into her soft-rimmed eyes. “I had to take care of some things, and Brenda been workin too hard. I’m cool now, and I figured my crew could do your yard every week. Mr. Batiste still won’t hire a gardener, so we’ll come for free. Okay?”
She shook her head. “You know he do his own yard,” she started, but Darnell smiled.
“So he’ll have more free time to spend with you.” He waited, and she smiled and shook her head again.
“Don’t get smart,” she said, and turned him at the shoulder toward the kitchen. “Go on get you some coffee.”
He saw Juan pushing the silent mower down the long driveway toward the backyard. Juan caught his eye at the kitchen window and pointed; Darnell nodded his head. He touched the sheer curtain, remembered Brenda’s face in the glass, framed by the lace. Next time, if there was a next time, if his plans worked out, he’d make sure the New Yorker was here.
After José cut the tiny grass plot in Darnell’s father’s frontyard, while his mother peered out the screen and frowned, Darnell took them back to the corner. “Next Monday,” he told them. “In one week. Be back here, and I think I got regular work if you want it. Five bucks an hour.”
“Every day?” Juan asked. “All day?”
Darnell said, “I hope so, man. Where you learn English?”
“I went in college one year,” Juan said. “I love English.”
“Well, here’s some dinero,” Darnell said, handing them the cash. “Ducats. See you Monday.”
He wouldn’t tell Brenda what he had in mind, and when she said, “You driving me crazy with that little planning smile and won’t give up no information,” Darnell just smiled it again. “Oooh, I’m drivin you crazy, huh?” he said, wrapping his arms around her from behind and rubbing himself against her.
“Not right now you ain’t,” she said, turning around. “Where are you going?”
“I gotta find Nacho,” Darnell said. “Maybe I can make some more money.”
“The suspense is killing me,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You have big money one night, and none the next week.”
But he smiled again. He found Nacho and Snooter sitting on folding chairs in their yard, doctoring a cracked hose. Darnell said, “Nacho, come in the back with me, man. I gotta show you somethin.” He didn’t want Snooter to see the flyer, to make fun of his idea. He hadn’t even said it out loud to anyone.
Sitting at the scarred table in the back, Darnell laid out the sheet for Nacho.
“You the artist—can you make me a flyer like this, one I can copy? I figure half a page—like this.” He laid his sheet out next to the pink one, and when Nacho read the message he laughed hard.
“You serious, man? You want me to print or script, like calligraphy?”
“Print,” Darnell said, “cause it’s gotta be easy to read. But make the letters kinda exotic. And put a picture in opposite corners. I think one a those little incense burners, like you see in a Japanese garden. Like in the garden downtown, for the sister city.” He thought for a minute. “The little bonsai tree is cool, but I ain’t into stealin. Make the other picture a bridge, like in the sister-city garden, too.”
“Curved?” Nacho said, sketching.
“Oh, yeah!” Darnell said.
He had three hundred of the flyers printed on light blue paper, then he went to Trinidad’s Building Supply down in Treetown. The other flyer had been held down with a nondescript gray pebble. Darnell chose the small, sparkling white rocks in bulk. Baggies at the store, with orange juice and cereal. He’d need the Corn Pops in the morning.
He took Charolette with him, long before dawn. She was sleepy for a few minutes, but he whispered to her, and she said, “Dark, Daddy?”
He said, “We’re cruisin in the dark, baby. I got your breakfast in a jar right here.” She loved the plastic honey containers from his mother’s. She shook the cereal in a swirl, and he said, “Watch out for trains.”
He drove up the long avenues, remembering when he’d been in a hurry to get to Brenda’s house and got stuck behind the long trains that came through the Westside. Now they both leaned forward at each track, looking for the headlight on an engine; he always lingered before the tracks, because Charolette loved to catch a train and listen in wonder to the clacking wheels, wave to the engineers.
“Choo-choo,” she said sadly now. They went to Grayglen first, Darnell driving on the wrong side of the street to drop Baggies on lawns. He pitched two onto Trent’s grass, laughing. Charolette couldn’t throw them far enough from her open window, and he gave her a pile to wreck so she wouldn’t cry.
“My door-to-door marketing strategy just wasn’t gettin it,” he murmured, looking at the blank, dark squares of window and door, the grayer shades of lawn. “Get me a sentence.”
“Daddy?” Charolette said. “Papah?”
“Nosy girl. These dudes ain’t even up yet, but they gotta go to work soon, and then they’ll find this when they get the paper.”
“Noo-papah.” She always heard the paper fly against the apartment door, and she had to run out for it every morning.
“You got it.” They twisted through all the new streets, then went to the Ville and dropped some more. Darnell watched her forefinger curl into the corners to extract the rocks, which she put carefully into her lap. “There your grandpa’s house,” he said when they drove up the Batistes’ street. He stopped for a long minute, looking at Brenda’s window, and threw a Baggie as close to the hedge as he could. The arch over the porch was dark.
His father laughed silly. “Tuan’s Oriental Landscape Maintenance Service,” he read out loud to Roscoe. “Boy want to be a damn gardener, talkin bout maintenance.” He frowned at the flyer. “Expert landscapers will mow, edge, fertilize, and maintain your property with weekly service for only $50 a month. Call now to keep your landscape beautiful.” His father turned to him. “Who the hell is Tuan?”
Darnell said, “Nuh-uh. It’s Juan. And José. If I get enough calls this week, I’m hirin two Mexican dudes.”
Roscoe said, “You know, he isn’t crazy. There’s a cachet to that image. But I don’t know how you’ll pull it off when they see your ugly face.”
“They ain’t gotta see me,” Darnell said. “Just send the check here, to your address.” His father raised his eyebrows. “In case we can afford to move eventually.”
“Where you movin to?”
Darnell shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Someplace with two bedrooms.” He turned to look at Charolette pulling down dry laundry with his mother. He wanted her to have a room, so that he and Brenda could have their bed back. I been on the couch all my life, he thought. I want to make love in a big bed. If I can afford one. He took a deep breath.
His father frowned. “You realize you’re encroachin on Floyd King and Nacho’s business?”
“No, I stayed out of Arroyo Grande and downtown,” Darnell said, lifting his hands. “I’ma go with the new tracts and the Ville. Grayglen. Nacho said he and his pops are concentratin on construction sites, cause they pay better. Homey wouldn’t have done the flyer if he was mad.”
“You thought all this out,” Roscoe said, nodding.
“He had plenty time to think, since he ain’t been workin,” Darnell’s father said, and Darnell stretched out his arms.
“But I’m good to go now!”
He practiced his voice in the bathroom. Brenda was at work. He tried to remember Tim Bui’s words, the clipped-short sound, the way each word was exact and separate. He sat on the couch, watching Oprah with the sound off, remembering the wall by the gym, the older guys leaning there. Victor and Trent and Ronnie and Melvin. Melvin laughing at Darnell when he’d first come to high school, laughing at his lack of imaginative rap. He remembered when Tim Bui was allowed to stand there, too, because he could dance as good as Leon and Donnie to the suitcase-sized radio near the brick. “Dude dance like a brotha,” Leon would say, laughing. Darnell drank his soda, sweated, watched the shroud of smog rise to envelop downtown, where Brenda was typing at her computer, thinking about what he was doing. On the third day, the phone rang, and he was ready. A woman said, “Tuan’s Landscape?” and he said, “Yes, ma’am, I can help you.”