“Are you reliable?”
“Yes, ma’am, very reliable. We will come every week, and we do a careful job.” He chopped the words off cleanly, his heart racing heat all the way to his ears.
He talked to Juan for a long time. He told him that they’d have to comb their hair straight back, short, and no straw hats. He took them to Kmart for white T-shirts, dark-green Dickies, and work boots. “And no talkin, I mean if the people are around watchin you,” he said. “I don’t want them to hear Spanish.”
Juan frowned. “But if they say, speak to you? If they want different? The flower or semilla?”
Darnell said, “Semilla?”
Juan looked around in the front yard of Darnell’s father’s house, where everyone was gone and José leaned against the El Camino, watching. Juan bent low to the ground and picked up a sunflower seed. “Semilla,” he said, placing the seed in Darnell’s palm.
Darnell frowned now. “Okay. Just say like this, ‘Please call my boss; he can help you.’”
Juan looked at the flyer closely again and smiled slightly. “I am Tuan?”
“Maybe, man,” Darnell said. “Maybe I am.”
But he felt strange staying home the rest of the day, waiting for the calls in the empty, stifling apartment. June had burned into July, and the shimmering bells of the Mexican ice-cream carts passed on the sidewalk below. Darnell went to the bathroom mirror, pulled at his eyes to make them long and narrow. He touched the new haircut he’d gotten from George. A fade, with three lines above each ear. His father hated the razored cuts, said, “What the hell? Look like a damn mower got you.”
He stared at his face in the speckled glass. “Homey, doncha know me?” He’d seen Victor at a stoplight last week, near the park. Victor’s eyes were half slit and hard. “Work been slow, huh?”
He knew Nacho would have told Victor about the flyer, about Tuan’s. He splashed water onto his face and neck, ran his wrists under the tap. Cold onto the veins. Cold potato bracelets that Mrs. Batiste had given him. You feverish, boy? Thinkin this shit gon work? Cause if it don’t… Homey, doncha know me? His chest was clotted with warmth when he sat on the cold edge of the bathtub. “What you planning to do if somebody doesn’t pay?” Roscoe had said.
“Go over there and collect.”
“Who you—Tuan’s bodyguard? His butler?” His father had laughed.
“Shoot, whoever I gotta be, long as I get the cash.” But he was shaking.
“I was just testing,” Roscoe said gently, touching his elbow. “But I have a suggestion. Get a beeper, so you don’t miss calls if you still want to work with us or get side jobs. Beepers are cheap now.”
“Yeah, and I’ll look like a dope dealer,” Darnell said, turning away. “Ain’t that what I’m supposed to look like anyway?”
He paced around the living room now, the bells fading, and he turned up the radio to pound the walls with music.
PROPER CARE AND MAINTENANCE
“SEE, MAN, I TOLD you she was gon do it. She pimpin you, Darnell. Victor shook his head and watched Charolette hang out the window of the El Camino. “She pimpin you big time.”
“Daddy!” she yelled, her round face bobbing furiously above the door. “Juice-juice!” She disappeared for a moment and then pulled herself up again. He could see her fingers curl over the doorframe as she threw her empty bottle onto the asphalt.
Darnell turned back to Victor and Ronnie, sitting on folding chairs around the cold, blackened trash barrel. “I’m fixin to go check this lot behind that Catholic church near downtown, the one close to the riverbottom,” he said. He was sweating, looking into Victor’s eyes. He’d rehearsed this.
Victor raised his chin a half-inch. “Brothaman, do that mean you need to borrow a shovel?”
“Man, I ain’t seen you for damn near a month,” Ronnie said.
“Need you guys for the job,” Darnell said, waiting. “Cleanup, brush and tires, all that usual junk.”
“Homey, doncha know me? I’m just a nigga wit an attitude,” Victor said. Ronnie and a man near the pepper tree laughed.
“Yeah, but are you still good to go?” Darnell folded his arms. He could hear Charolette screeching behind him.
Victor smiled. “I heard you was hirin illegals, man. Word is you don’t need no brothas.”
“If I don’t want no brothas to work, then I better kill myself, too,” Darnell said. “I been workin with two Mexican guys, doin yards. I’m tryin to get them on a route, so I can do regular side jobs when I get em. But Victor, man, I gotta be sweatin every day. I ain’t like you—I can’t wait till I’m in the mood.” He made his voice hard, thinking of the tumbleweeds, of the balls of flame merging in the ditch.
“Man, you think you big shit,” Victor said. “You been yangin with Trent King too much.” He smiled harder, no teeth showing, his lips curved full, and Darnell suddenly remembered Marlene and her friends saying how fine Victor was. Scary fine, they said. “At least I ain’t no strawberry,” Victor said. “Do anything for a few presidents. Or some rocks.”
Darnell breathed in through his nose, seeing the sparkling white stones in the Baggies, the chalk-pale rocks in Vernon’s hand when he’d turned his head. “I ain’t a strawberry,” he said. He hesitated. He had practiced this, too. “I’m just whipped, like you said, by two women. They kickin my natural black butt. Hey, you always talkin bout ‘Brothas ain’t meant to be out in the sun, absorbin all that heat.’” He turned to watch Charolette, who threw his sunglasses out the window. “Victor, man, proper care and maintenance keep your ass from shrinkin and fadin, okay?” He waited. “You gon be ready Saturday?”
Victor ran his hands over his braids, glancing at Ronnie. “Damn, homey, I might be a stockbroker by then.” They all laughed, and Darnell started back to the car.
He put Charolette back into her car seat, and she said, “My bottle, Daddy.” She watched out the window, pointing to the trash barrel. An older man had arrived, and he threw something inside, dropped a match. “Fire, Daddy.”
“Yeah. Smoke.” She looked triumphant, sticking out her chin.
She’d seen the smoke rising into the sky several times now when he stood at the apartment railing watching the billowing dirty-cream explosion, the scent traveling with the sirens. On the last weekend in August, when the riverbottom went up again, the west wind blew the ash thick as the light snowfall they’d gotten up at the Conservation Corps camp, and he sat on the balcony with her, pointing to each flake. He reached out to smear a piece of cane bark. Brenda said, “It blows this far?”
She sat behind them, her chair in the open doorway, sewing torn overall straps. “Yeah,” he said. “Rides the air pretty far.”
She was still watching him. He thought, I’m not goin to search them out now. Not right now. He’d never been alone in the mountains, he realized, breathing in the scorched-cane smell; with all the other guys in the station or the corps, laughing and farting and talking smack, it was loud and elbow close. But when they worked the fire line or bent to scramble up the slope, every man was by himself with his protective gear and his own circle of chaparral.
He was never alone now. Brenda was silent behind him, only a faint click from the thimble and needle. Charolette worked purple yarn into the wrought-iron railing. Her favorite was to drop the ball all the way into the courtyard when he stood by the car, to watch it roll on the cement near him, and then pull the endless string back up forever.
“What you want for breakfast?” he asked Juan. They sat on a hill in Grayglen, the sun just up, white in the September heat. There were only a few flyers left at their feet in the El Camino.
“I have at home a bolillo and café,” Juan said. He had been trading words with Darnell for several weeks while they worked, his small eyes watching Darnell’s lips from under thick-arched brows. Darnell thought about Charolette and her new words, murmured and shouted over and over. He and Juan speaking slowly, awkwardly. José never spoke at all.
“I got café,” Darnel
l said. “Bolillo a doughnut?”
“Not a—the hole,” Juan said, frowning. “Like a bread. Little.”
A stream of cars was leaving the tracts along with them when Darnell cruised down the slopes. He’d picked up Juan in the dark, and they hit three developments so new that most of the yards were still bare, tamped earth with tractor marks. Only mountains I get for now, Darnell kept thinking. The dirt fronts were dotted with signs that read CUSTOM POOLS and CUSTOM FENCING and CUSTOM SECURITY. Darnell had looked for Trent’s name under a few of the CUSTOM LANDSCAPE DESIGN signs, but it was too dark and he was moving quickly while Juan pitched the Baggies.
“A biscuit?” Darnell laughed. “We can get that from my moms.” But they drove to a Mexican bakery on the Westside, because he didn’t want to see his father yet today. He didn’t want to say how many yards he had on the route—still only two days’ worth. He looked up at the bakery sign: PANDERÍA. Juan brought back coffee and small plain buns. “Bolillo boring,” Darnell said, chewing, and Juan smiled.
“You like the sugar,” he said. “I see you this.” He handed Darnell a flaky, heart-shaped pastry.
“Gracias,” Darnell said.
They picked up José from the tiny garage that had been converted to an apartment, on Twentieth Street. Juan and José shared it with three other men. José was silent, as always; he nodded and sat by the window.
Darnell headed to Hillgrove. He was giving them each the straight $5 an hour for all of Thursday and Friday. After gas, dump fees, the used mower he’d bought from Floyd King, and paying for more flyers, he’d only cleared a few hundred this month. Not enough yet, but he’d worked a few jobs with his father, too.
“Remember, everything’s on timers and drip system,” Darnell told Juan when he’d seen that no one was home at the Stephenses’, the first house. He pointed to the thin black hosing that circled each bush and tree in the backyard. Looking up for a moment at the flat brown hills above them, he tried to see the dark spot etched into the side where he’d parked that night with Leon and Vernon and Donnie, where the ground shimmered with broken glass and evaporated liquor.
“Timers,” Juan said, squatting to examine the hosing. “I see everywhere.” José stood watching, waiting for later when Juan would translate; he kept his eyes on Darnell, his thin lips folded.
Darnell glanced at the mountain again and pulled his eyes back to the yard. “Yeah,” he said. “Automatic, right, so nobody’s asked you to water?” Juan shook his head. “You never stand around with a hose, then. Cool.” And the homeowners aren’t hanging around sprinkling all the time, so they don’t have to see me or you two, he thought.
In the one circular flower bed by the patio, they knelt to weed. “Baby palm tree,” Darnell said, pulling up the straight blade, thick as a knife. He held it up, and the tiny seed clung to the single root. “The semilla, right?”
“Yes,” Juan said. His shirt was soaked transparent across his thin shoulders. He said, “We will plant trees, too?”
“We gon go out with my father and Roscoe pretty soon and plant some trees. Best time to plant em here is late fall. We’re supposed to get rain in the winter to get baby trees established.” He shrugged. “But that’s not the way it’s workin now. Serious drought. I think it’s, what, five years now?” He remembered Fricke laughing: Drought piss.
Juan nodded. “This we have, in Mexico.” The word still slurred Mayco to Darnell’s ear. “In my home, farm was very dry and no growing.”
“What do you guys grow?” Darnell said, going around to the front, pulling at the milkweed rising among the flowers along the walkway.
“Maíz, chiles.” Juan went to the border along the street, sitting back on his heels to weed. “José and I put money to my mother. My uncle help at the land, but no water.”
“You got any sisters?” Darnell asked.
Juan nodded. “Three sisters. In school, the small school.”
“Elementary?”
Juan shrugged. Darnell said, “So we all givin our paychecks to women. That’s the way of the world, man.” Juan moved to the edge of the planter and yanked more weeds. “You pretty good at that. I guess it’s like bein a farmer, weeds are weeds.”
“The pequeño field,” Juan said, but his smile was crooked.
“Pequeño is little. Yeah. But do you want your own farm?”
Juan shook his head. “No. I want to go to college, learn English.”
Darnell looked down the street at the empty driveways. “Anybody try to talk to you when you workin?” he said. He waited every night for the call, the voice that said, “I saw a black guy out there today, writing something down while your guys were working. I was worried about… security.”
Juan stood up. “They say, ‘Are you Tuan?’ One man say this. I say, ‘No, my boss. He work another place today.’” Darnell smiled, but his shoulders felt tight when he pulled out a knife-blade palm seedling. Juan said, “A few lady talk, but I say, ‘My English no good.’ And one say, ‘You take ESL, English Second Language.’”
Darnell squatted on his heels, seeing Juan’s hands move in the air excitedly. What if this whole thing didn’t work? José came silently down the slope from where he’d been raking a few dead bougainvillea flowers on the lawn. Darnell pointed to the clay pot with the geraniums by the door. “What’s that again?”
“Maceta,” Juan said. “Flower pot.”
“Maceta,” Darnell murmured, pulling another palm. Why you care? he thought. So you knew all the names of the typical chaparral habitat. So Scott don’t know it’s arundo cane down there while he workin it. But he said it again. “Maceta. Okay. Let’s get on to the next yard, cause it’s hella caliente out here by lunch.”
Juan nodded, his eyes disappearing when he grinned.
If he was never alone, he didn’t have time to think about the season ending, about what Fricke and the others were doing in their down time, about how the chaparral was turning colors on the slopes. He drove Brenda to work, took Charolette to his mother’s, picked up Juan and José, unloaded burlap-wrapped trimmings and trash at the dump with Roscoe.
Some days, he picked up Victor and Ronnie, and he had to listen to Victor’s long-running yang, his Spanish and yuppie imitations, for the first few hours; then Victor settled into himself and bothered Darnell about his women.
And when he got to his father’s house, Charolette was halfway to Honolulu. They walked around the sideyard, and she looked up, her cheek smeared with dust, a cloud of misty fringe around her forehead where her braids were worked loose. Roscoe’s Hollie, who was six now, was bent over the shallow ditch.
“Hollie and Charolette are diggin to Honolulu,” Paula said. “Hollie told her they could dig to Honolulu and Cincinnati, and you know Charolette doesn’t understand, but she loves hearin Hollie say those words, so she’s goin at it with her little shovel.”
“Daddy! Shov-a!” Charolette cried, and Sophia rolled her eyes.
“Don’t even think about takin that spoon away from her,” Sophia said. “She freaks if you even look at it.”
She held the tarnished soup spoon tightly, but she pressed her face to his shirt. “Daddy!” she said. “Dutty!” She slapped at the dirt on his chest.
“You filthy, too,” he said.
“Check this chick naggin my man already,” Victor said, leaning in the doorway of the back room.
“She my runnin buddy,” Darnell said, smelling grape juice and clay dust at her neck.
Victor shook his head. “You weak, man. She what—goin on two? You supposed to let grown females pimp you.”
He took her to the McDonald’s downtown, near Brenda’s office. He sat at a table in the play area while she tried to climb the forest of hamburger flowers, running back to him every few minutes for a sip of vanilla milkshake. Bigger kids tumbled down the slide, and Darnell took a bite of cheeseburger; he remembered the McDonald’s off the freeway when he drove with Vernon, the cheeseburger, and the air-conditioning rippled up his shoulder blade
s. Tuan’s gotta work, he thought. I’ma get this truck, and it’s gon work. My schedule. All the proper procedures.
Charolette’s mouth was open like a bird’s—her milky white teeth were squared and separate on her bottom gum, like baby tombstones, he thought when he tried to push some soft bun onto her tongue. She snapped her mouth shut and grabbed the bun. “Myself,” she said, frowning.
He carried her across the plaza near the county building. They were early. She leaned over the edge of the fountain, and Darnell stared at the sparkling drops. Every time he sat here, he heard Donnie’s voice, Donnie who’d called him last week to say that he was leaving. He was going up north to the college where he’d played ball, to look for some friends he hadn’t seen in a while.
“Be careful, Darnell, man,” Donnie had whispered. “Okay? Watch your back, cause they don’t like it when you sue. They know you, too.”
“You okay, Donnie?” he’d asked.
“I’ma get away from all this stress, man. My lawyer says stress…” He paused. “You ever trip out when you see a cop? Or just, like, a K-9?”
Darnell couldn’t answer. Yeah. But I can’t afford to trip. I gotta feed people. He finally said, “Uh-uh, man. I don’t think about it.”
He looked up to see a guy in a gray suit come out of the county building. See—the dudes go home early, he thought. An Oriental dude, young, like my age. Check the suit—sharp.
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Page 32
