Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  “Darnell?” the guy said, coming close, shading his forehead.

  “Kenny!” Darnell said, standing up. Kenny Matsumoro had graduated with him. They’d talked sometimes in Biology, and Kenny had run track with Darnell freshman year. “How’s your distance, man?”

  Kenny shook his head. “Just run from the parking lot to the office,” he said. “How’s your four hundred?”

  Darnell smiled. “I just run after this little chick.” He pointed to Charolette, who was chasing pigeons.

  Kenny sat on the bench. “You waiting for Brenda? I saw her on the elevator twice, and she told me you guys got married. I just started here two months ago.”

  “What are you doin up here in mirror land?”

  “Intern in county planning, man, that’s what I’m going to school for.” Kenny looked at the heat coming off the windows. “You still firefighting? I didn’t ask Brenda. September, about ninety today—good day for a fire.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but I won’t be up there. The funds got cut. You should know about funds.” Darnell saw Kenny nod, and he didn’t want to say it. Yeah, Brenda been feedin me until this past few weeks. “I gotta come down here and get a license pretty soon, matter of fact. I got my own business.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Landscaping—lotta work out there in the new developments.”

  “Yeah,” Kenny said. “I went home last week and my mom showed me this ad she got in the yard.”

  Darnell remembered that Kenny’s father had died last year. “You still live up the street from Brenda’s mom?”

  “Yeah. Boring Street. But man, this ad was funny. We’ve gotten two different ones. This was Tuan’s Oriental Something. Mom didn’t even see anything wrong with it.”

  “What was wrong?” Darnell’s forehead was cool with sweat, and Charolette brought him a penny she’d found.

  “Like, Oriental is old school, man. Oriental means east, when you take it down to the Latin root. Like Oriental is east and Occidental is west. It’s only the Far East if Europe is the center of the world, man. And that’s old shit.”

  Darnell was silent. “So, your mom wasn’t pissed?”

  Kenny laughed. “Old people don’t want to make waves. Remember I used to tell your friend Donnie my name’s Japanese—a bunch of syllables, okay? Chinese names are shorter. My mom was born here, my grandma was born here. I’m sansei—third generation.” Kenny’s face was flushed. “Where’d your parents come from?”

  Darnell said, “My parents are immigrants from hell, I guess. But I get the point.”

  Kenny said, “Calling me Oriental is like me calling you colored. Or Negro.”

  “Not as bad as nigger,” Darnell said. “Or gook. So what’s the right word?”

  “Most people prefer Asian American,” Kenny said, thoughtfully. “Every time Donnie saw me, he’d yell ‘Hai karate!’”

  Darnell laughed, stretching his hands hard behind his head so he would feel pulling muscles instead of buzzing sadness. “Donnie picks up a few foreign words here and there,” he said, remembering the long nights at the hotel. He looked up at the building’s glare. “So where do you get a license?”

  Kenny shrugged. “Upstairs somewhere.”

  Darnell nodded casually. “So did your mom call the number on this ad?”

  Kenny said, “Shit. I’m still her son—I gotta mow the lawn every Saturday for the rest of my life.”

  Charolette watched him walk toward the parking lot and said, “Daddy? Juice?”

  “Here comes Mama now,” Darnell said absently. Asian. He watched the earrings flash and swing toward them.

  He got two more calls that night, and then he sat at the table, looking at the flyer. He crossed out Oriental and stared at the words. Tuan’s Landscape Maintenance… Tuan’s Asian… No. He wrote on a new sheet: “Tuan’s Landscaping Service, with expert Asian landscapers to mow, edge, fertilize, and maintain your property weekly. Only $50 a month will keep your garden beautiful. Call now.”

  He stared at the words again. Trent had told him how much classier the word “garden” sounded compared to “yard.” Like “yard dog,” “yardbird.” My pops always tellin Moms, “Give me another piece of yardbird. You did a hell of a job with it tonight.”

  Asian. Where the hell is Asia, then? Brother Lobo said all peoples came from Africa or Asia: they think the first people over here came on a land bridge from Asia, and that’s who the Indians were. Are. Dude called Juan and José los indios. Indians. Pops is part Creek—Red Man. So I’m part Asian my own damn self. Can’t you see it? Right here around the eyes? The hairline? The color?

  I’ma have to get Nacho to change this up, he thought, taking the flyer to the couch and sitting beside Brenda. She was reading a magazine. He leaned over to see the newspaper beside her, and when he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her arm on top of his, she laughed. Charolette was sleeping on the floor, her blanket puddled around her, and Brenda said, “Shhh!”

  Darnell lined up her soft, pale forearm with his. “Hmmm,” he said. “I can’t see the Asian in you, baby.”

  “Is that right?” she said, her teeth showing long, gleaming, before she ducked her head, and he pulled her face toward him, his, fingers in her hair. He pressed his mouth on hers, curling his tongue under to feel her teeth, to tickle her just behind them.

  “You come over here just for that?” she said into his neck. “Cause I haven’t even seen you lately.”

  “I came over here for the classifieds,” he said, and to the frown on her forehead, he went on, “I might need a new truck.”

  “You think we can handle the payment on something? Why can’t you fix up the Spider?” She kept her hands on his chest.

  Darnell shook his head. “Man, I ain’t even thought about the Spider in a long time. But the truck ain’t for me. It’s for Tuan.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Every time you say that, I think of the film critic on Living Color, the bald guy, you know? I crack up.”

  Darnell threw back his head and laughed so hard Charolette did her periscope imitation from the blanket on the floor. He picked her up and took her into the bedroom, laid her in the crib on her side. Her temples were smooth, new-penny clean from her bath, almost pink under the thin skin.

  He closed the door and went back to the couch, where Brenda had moved the newspaper to make room for him.

  He began trimming the long-arched branches of bottlebrush that streamed out from the peel-bark trunk, remembering the red sprays of bloom and how he and Melvin used to tickle each other with the brushy flowers, leaving pollen yellow on each other’s necks. Tiny wooden knobs lined the stems; they would break those off for ammunition. Darnell rolled a few between his fingers. Charolette would love these—probably call em little biscuits for her Barbie or somethin. I shoulda brought her today, cause this is just a two-hour job.

  He was trimming bushes at an old house in Grayglen, one of his father’s customers. He’d meet up with Juan and José after he was finished. He raked the bottlebrush trimmings and moved to the two huge oleanders. Dusty, spear-shaped leaves. Poisonous. His mother had always lectured him and Melvin: “Stay away from those bushes; don’t even breathe the dust while your daddy cuttin them.” But when they got to the job, his father always said, “Hell, they’d have to eat a whole handful of leaves to get sick. Go on and rake that up.”

  That was mostly what he and Melvin and Louis had done. Raked, pulled the heavy piles of stem and branch and leaf all around the grass and dirt until their shoulders and forearms ached from joint to skin. Roscoe worked the chain saw, and Darnell’s father was always the one in the tree, climbing agile and loose, only paying attention to the best way to cut the branch or reach the limb. His thin legs wrapped and propped against bark, and Darnell would stop to hold his breath, when he was very small, first coming to work. A splintery piece of bitter bark had fallen into his open mouth once; Melvin had laughed.

  He loaded the trimmings and sat in the El Camino a minute to cool off.r />
  Juan and José were in the back; he heard the mowers. This was the Stonehaven tract, where they had the most yards so far, and the houses had wedge-shaped lots with tiny front yards. “I’ma edge this one,” Darnell said to himself, and he was standing in the driveway, concentrating on the spinning wire of the weed whacker, when he saw the shadow across the cement.

  “Excuse me,” the man said. His face was pale and unshaven, and he wore slippers. “Do you work for Tuan’s Landscaping?”

  Darnell’s heart boomed like Gas’s speakers were inside him. He nodded toward the El Camino. “Yeah,” he said to the frown, making his voice deep.

  The frown deepened, and Darnell was tempted to look down the driveway or at the man’s feet, as he always had when someone talked to his father, but he raised his eyes to the short hairs on the jaw. “I thought his workers were Oriental?” the man said hesitantly, and Darnell thought, Cojones, just like you talkin to Vernon.

  “You know, he doesn’t really like that word. Oriental. It’s the opposite of Occidental, and that means, like, Europeans gotta be the center of the world. Callin somebody Oriental isn’t as bad as, like, nigger,” he said, looking into the gray eyes. “But it’s not really acceptable, you know what I’m sayin? The guys prefer Asian.”

  “Uh-huh,” the man said, sweeping his eyes over the grass, looking at the truck.

  “The Asian dudes are in the back,” Darnell said. “But I could help you with somethin specific.” The man met his eyes and nodded slowly.

  “I guess I’ma have to use that one again,” he told Roscoe, in his father’s back room. “Can’t tell if it worked until somebody call up and complain. And then they gon be talkin to Tuan.” He grinned. “I guess I could say, ‘My worker’s black? I had no idea!’”

  Roscoe narrowed his eyes. “Don’t get too full of yourself.”

  Darnell closed his mouth. “Yeah. Okay.” He saw his father’s shadow in the doorway, and he took out his wallet when his father sat at the table with them. Darnell had come early, to try and catch them before the other men finished eating and came over to cool off in the driveway. “Here,” Darnell said.

  “I knew you weren’t a bad risk,” Roscoe said, when Darnell handed him the hundred dollars.

  “First installment,” Darnell said. He watched the twenties in Roscoe’s hand. Brenda hadn’t asked him at all about what he was making now; she saw him pull out twenties for milk, diapers, garlic salt. He needed to give this money to Roscoe so he could ask his father the next question.

  “You gon cosign with me on a truck?” His father was working mink oil into his boots; he always complained about how new ones fit, and tried to hold on to each pair forever.

  The knuckles glistened slightly, didn’t stop moving when he said, “You ain’t got that many accounts yet.”

  “Gettin there,” Darnell said. “If Juan and José got a truck, I can paint the name on the door, send them out. And I can use the El Camino for side jobs with Victor and Ronnie.”

  “You serious, huh?” His father’s eyebrows stretched wide under the forehead lines, and Roscoe sat back, folding his arms.

  “Serious as a heart attack,” Darnell said. “I need to get this goin. I’m still gettin calls, and you see the new tracts. Everybody runnin from LA out here.”

  His father was silent; just the dry-husking sound of the fingers brushing dust off the boot heel before the oil went into the leather. Darnell said, “Just like Nacho told me, they all want their yards done Friday, so the weekend is cool for them. Maintained.” He paused, staring at the vapor sliding up into the air outside the open door, the heat rising from the cement slab. “Most of these dudes call at night, so you know they’re hardly ever home during the day. I heard half of em do their shoppin and eatin in Orange County or LA. Bought the house out here cause it was cheap, but they don’t even like to claim they live in Rio Seco. Nobody’s out when I cruise Grayglen. They don’t care who’s cuttin the grass—they don’t even have to look out the window, just hear the mower.”

  “Juan and José.” Roscoe shook his head.

  “Hey, I don’t look like you guys, like you used to,” Darnell said, hard. He rushed on, before his father could speak. “These guys, in these tracts, they want somebody…” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “I showed Juan and José how to fertilize today. Got some a that granular stuff from Nacho.”

  In the long silence, they could hear all the swamp coolers vibrating in the backyards, even this late in the fall; they could hear Sophia and Paula laugh at Charolette, who was talking to ants near the sidewalk. Darnell’s father said, “Now I gotta cosign for a damn truck. I ain’t never finished.”

  “And I’m just startin, okay?” Darnell said. “So give me a break.”

  Charolette and Hollie played in the bed of the Toyota truck. Darnell had kept it parked in his father’s driveway after work, since there was no room at the apartment complex. He and Roscoe leaned against the Apache, watching the girls. Charolette sang out, “Mit-su-bi-shi!”

  “It’s a Toyota,” Hollie said scornfully, her braids falling over her shoulders when she bent over the gate to touch the big letters.

  “What’d we look at? A Ford, Isuzu, the Mitsubishi and this one,” Darnell said to Roscoe. “And she didn’t care about the prices. Just the words.”

  “I like her instincts,” Roscoe said. “The sounds are important.”

  Darnell sat in the shade, watching the girls. Their hair glistened when they bent, heads together, to line pebbles on the rim of the truckbed. “Daddy throw rocks,” Charolette said. He couldn’t believe how much she talked now, imitating everything his sisters or Hollie said.

  “No, he don’t throw no rocks,” Hollie said. “You ain’t allowed.”

  “Little rocks,” Charolette said, her head disappearing.

  Darnell drank his soda. He heard his father talking to someone in the back. Don’t get bigheaded. His heart had felt too large for his chest long after the man had gone back inside. Who cares? We got more yards now, Juan and José happy cause they workin three days, and I ain’t gotta do much more with them cause they know enough. Almost time to trim trees with Pops, plant bare-root fruit trees. Roscoe said trees are dyin cause of the drought, and people want unthirsty ones.

  He ran the condensation from the can around his hairline, cool circling. You know you were scared, man, he thought. Don’t try to front. His father came through the sideyard then, and Charolette yelled, “Pop-Pop!”

  His father gave her a hug and stood looking at Nacho’s lettering on the truck doors. Tuan’s Landscape Maintenance. Above the words was the small lantern, and below was Darnell’s phone number.

  “Go on in the house with Granny,” his father said, lifting the girls out of the truck. “Me and Daddy be right back,” he told Charolette.

  Darnell pulled out of the driveway, his father listening to the engine. “You gotta pay their worker’s comp,” his father said shortly. “Go on down to Jackson Park.”

  Darnell headed that way. “Yeah, I checked out some papers Brenda brought me.”

  His father spat out the window. “Taxes and all that don’t mean nothin to workers like your guys,” he said. “They want to go back home to Mexico someday, huh?”

  Darnell shrugged. “Maybe José. But Juan wants to stay.”

  His father nodded. “Right now, they ain’t in the system, they ain’t gettin no benefit from taxes. But it ain’t fair to leave somebody hangin if they get hurt workin for you. You gotta set somethin up.”

  “Yeah,” Darnell said. He cruised slowly up to Jackson Park, going the back way by the church, and his father said, “Stop here for a minute.”

  When they got out, his father looked into the church door, and Darnell saw the dancing candle flames in the dim inside beyond his father’s shoulder. He turned away to see the evening start to gather in the pepper trees across the park, where the fire was already started.

  His father was watching him. “You ready to take your Asian truck
over there? Lotta black eyes to see you, read that paint.”

  Darnell folded his arms. “Yeah. Victor and Ronnie gon see it. If they don’t want to work no side jobs with me, I can get another brothaman.”

  His father mashed his lips tight, working his tongue into his jaw. “How long you gon keep up this lyin?”

  Darnell cocked his head to the side. “All them years when I went with you, every time Mrs. Panadoukis or somebody came out, you was smilin like you had gas, noddin and sayin, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ That was a lie, cause you wasn’t in a good mood. I didn’t see her tellin no funny jokes, but you was just grinnin away.”

  “Wasn’t no lie when I got the check,” his father said.

  “Then you know what I’m talkin about. And ain’t no lie when I get my checks, neither.”

  “Come over here,” his father said, walking past the low wall toward the vacant lot. They crossed the dirt, stepping on the fist-sized clods left by the city tractor when it plowed the weeds under. Close to the boarded-up houses where the zombies had peered out at them, the last two houses in the gapped row, his father stopped at a faint square left in the dirt from a crumbled foundation.

  They stood in the center of the tiny rectangle, the concrete rim around them, tall weeds still untouched from here all the way to the men around the fire. The dozer couldn’t hit all this concrete. Darnell looked at the church in the falling light, and he realized where they stood. He hadn’t been here in a long time.

  “Your Granny Zelene’s old house,” his father said, nodding. “Remember when they bulldozed them three houses, the ones they condemned? Long time ago.”

  Darnell squatted down on the square where the old fireplace had been. It looked so small under his boots. “I forgot how little it was,” he said. “Cause I was little.”

  “You used to hang on her every word, and all she talked about was death,” his father said, bending on one knee, too. “That was her specialty. Roscoe always talkin about poetry, and I never said much about nothin. But Zelene could talk about death for days. She was sure a twin got lost when your mother was pregnant with you, and she had your mother so scared she was afraid to move, afraid to eat anything Zelene didn’t like her to.”