Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  Darnell took a buttermilk bar. “They had to start the route. Anyway, Juan and José like tortillas or these buns called bolillos. They say doughnuts are too sweet.”

  Roscoe held up his bear claw. “You get bolillos from the panadería, doughnuts from the Asian woman in the minimall, or biscuits from a mother.”

  Darnell’s father came from the sideyard and said, “I’ll take the biscuits and homemade jelly. Come on, we need to see if that tractor gon start up.”

  Roscoe and Darnell drove the tractor slowly and painfully up Pepper Avenue from Treetown, where Mr. Lanier kept it stored. Listening to the iron grating on the pavement, Darnell remembered riding on this old tractor with his father.

  When they got to the fields, his father nodded to Darnell. “No fancy government dozer, huh, no nice wide fire roads.”

  “You can quit remindin me,” Darnell said.

  His father nodded again. “You up against government dozers right now. Cacciotti gave us the bid cause last year he didn’t get around to clearin his property and the city did it. Charged him a leg and half his dick.”

  Darnell fired up the tractor and started to move the yellow monster he had always been afraid of when he was small, belching smoke and grinding the discs into the dirt. Pink squares of paper were posted on stakes all through the fields, telling owners to clear the trash and brush for fire season. Darnell started the long rows, flattening the tall, spindly stems already beginning to lie down in the sun.

  Sweat streamed into his eyes, and he pulled out the bandanna to wipe his face. The heat rose off the crushed grass and empty seed heads in front of him, and gold dust hung heavy in the air. Already ninety out here. Hella drought, he thought. Fricke and them laughing. They gon be busy this year again. I’ma be busy, too. Home boy. But I’ll see you next season.

  The first field was nearly done when his mother pulled up in the El Camino. Charolette’s face popped up, too. He got down off the tractor and chewed on the crispy skin of the fried chicken, giving Charolette strips of breast meat, sips of soda. When she tried to climb onto the tractor, he lifted her onto the seat, and his mother called to him across the fallen stems. “You tryin to make her into a boy, and she wild already.”

  After they’d gone, he rubbed his fingers on his dusty jeans and tried to fire up the tractor, but it shuddered hard, refused to catch. “Damn!” he shouted after a few more tries. His father and Roscoe had gone to the dump. He walked across the straw to the street.

  Jackson Park was the closest; he figured he’d find Victor and Ronnie, but only the old men were around the domino table, and the zombies didn’t stir from the far porch. Darnell sat for a long minute on the warm curb, not wanting to walk again. From the avenue, black doors glinted clean and waxed, and he saw Gas’s smile flashing in the window behind the music.

  He stood up, and then he saw Leon’s face beside his brother’s. They stopped in front of him, and the singing chanted hard.

  “House of Pain,” Darnell said, leaning into the window. “Leon like this, too.”

  Gasanova’s face went stony, and he didn’t look at his brother. “Yeah, well, Moms just asked me to give him a ride. It jams out the speakers the same for everybody, right?”

  Gas got out and walked across the street to the tiny market, and Leon stared ahead at the people half hidden in the shade of the porches. Darnell sat next to him. “Where’s the Bronco?”

  Leon shook his head. “I didn’t want to drive it today. Been rough and shit; I had to let my crib go and get a hotel. Gotta be mobile right now.”

  “Where’s Vernon?”

  “He sit up all night in the room, watchin the parkin lot, talkin to his gauge. That’s all he care about—he packin a gauge and his nine.” Leon folded his arms, his eyes on the porches. “Them LA niggas been hangin over here, talkin yang about product. And some dude got smoked last night in Terracina.”

  “Terracina?” Darnell smelled the dusty yew branches near his face, heard the shots chopping out.

  “I don’t go over there,” Leon said. “But I heard somebody saw that tall dude over here a coupla times. The enforcer. See, I never knew what was goin on in Louis’s head, but he heard all my business. And he fucked up big time for me, so he probably workin with somebody else.”

  Darnell looked at the wild tobacco, still springing green from the ground near the cinder-block walls; tobacco didn’t need water. “Louis just called me, man; he ain’t even out yet,” Darnell said. He remembered Leon laughing at Louis’s upturned face, at his repeating the words over and over: Banded quail? Red hawk. Egrets. Leon had shaken his head when Darnell pedaled toward the smoke. “Louis don’t have nothin to do with you now.”

  Leon shouted, “Damn, he wasn’t doin nothin for me back then! Some ranger got him! Louis just figured he go and do his time now, get some friends, come out and work for them. Probably the dudes he got busted for.” Leon’s face lowered back onto his bones, and he slumped in the seat. “He musta called you a while ago. Tommy got out last week, and he told me Louis went to a halfway house when he got his release.”

  Darnell stared at Gas walking back toward the truck, carrying a soda. Gas kept his face blank. “You remember that night last year when Donnie went off in the Bronco?” Leon said softly. “Everybody’s trippin.”

  “Not me, homey,” Darnell said. “I don’t have time. I got kids.” But Leon didn’t even hear the plural; he kept his face level with the dashboard now, closing his eyes like he was sleepy.

  Gas said, “You need a ride?”

  Darnell sat between them, shoulders sliding against each other, and no one talked into the music.

  The tractor still wouldn’t start by the next morning, even though Mr. Lanier and Mr. King had spent all afternoon working on it. “Ancient equipment,” Darnell’s father grumbled. “You gon have to tell Cacciotti to get somebody else. Damn! Two more days of work gone.”

  Darnell stood looking at the seed heads turning golden in the heat. “I’ma check at the park,” he said. “It’s Saturday morning—somebody should need money.”

  The curb was bare again, though, and Darnell got out to ask a guy on the couch under the pepper tree where Victor and Ronnie were. “Man, police gaffled them brothas last night. Talkin about drunk in public. Had the K-9 unit right here, talkin about, ‘Watch yo ass, boy, this dog like dark meat.’” The man leaned his head back on the cushion and closed his eyes.

  Darnell sat in the cab of AnTuan’s truck, feeling the trickle down his backbone, the saliva and clicking paws. Uh-uh, he told himself. No time for trippin.

  He drove to Juan and José’s, and they stood up from where they’d been sitting in the shade under a tree. Two other men squatted in the dirt near the tree trunk. “Juan,” Darnell called. “You know anybody got a tractor?”

  “Tractor?” Juan said. “For the farm?”

  “Yeah.”

  Juan said something to José and the other men, and then José gestured to the truck. “Show the job, okay?” Juan said, getting in.

  At the fields, Mr. Lanier stood watching the Thompson brothers hook up the tractor to tow it. Juan leaned against the truck and frowned. “Darnell? Is to knock down weeds? Not to pull out?” Darnell nodded, and Juan said, “We do that. Come on.”

  They stood in the field, the oats thigh high, bending to swing the sharpened machetes in wide swaths, low curves. The ground turned soft-quilted under their feet with the crushed stems broken to straw.

  Darnell and his father watched for a minute. “I can’t do that,” Darnell said.

  “I don’t want to do that,” his father said. “Go on and get that trash from near the fences, and I’ll call Cacciotti.”

  When he brought Charolette, the sweet smell beginning to rise with the cool of early evening, Juan and José were in the third field, their straw cowboy hats bobbing. They’re not workin for AnTuan today, Darnell thought. Not with machetes. Charolette pulled him down to squat beside her in the field. “Daddy,” she said. “Oatmeal.” She tou
ched the burst seed heads, with their fuzzy legs like an insect’s.

  “Close,” he said. “And here’s your favorite. Foxtails.” She loved those, rescued a few still standing near the fence.

  “Tickle tickle baby!” she said, trying to brush his neck like he used to do hers.

  That night, he sat on the couch, listening to the helicopter circling near the house. Charolette lay on the floor near his feet, playing with her Barbie, tugging on the skirts and shirts Mrs. Batiste had sewed with tiny snaps and Velcro fasteners. “I can’t do this one, Daddy,” she said, and he looked up to see Brenda’s shadow still in the kitchen, back and forth over the counter, the stove.

  He pushed the metal snaps closed over Barbie’s pointy breasts, the blue-shadowed eyes staring out from chocolate skin. Charolette peered closely. “She’s goin to school,” she said. “Like Hollie.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She looked at Barbie’s bare feet. “Hollie my cousin,” she said. “But she doesn’t have daddy.”

  Darnell rubbed his forehead, still gritty with field dust. “Yeah, she does.”

  Charolette shook her head slowly, while Brenda stood behind her, a laundry basket bumping her rounded stomach. “Hollie lives with her Pop-Pop,” she said.

  “But she still has a daddy,” Brenda said, softly. “Everybody has a daddy.”

  Charolette took back the Barbie, frowning. “Not if he don’t live there,” she said, and walked to her room to get the tiny sharp-heeled shoes Darnell had banned from the living room because they hurt like hell when he stepped on them.

  Brenda threw white socks at him, one by one, from the tangle of clothes she’d bleached. She smiled when he held a fistful. “It’s like a buncha snakes in here,” she said, starting to fold dishtowels and T-shirts.

  Darnell straightened the socks into one pile and heard the clattering blades when the helicopter passed over the roof. Drop some Alumagel on all them fields, he thought suddenly, torch the lots and be done quick. He leaned back, feeling the night air on his neck from the screen. I can’t even clear private property right. Fire season started, and foxtails and wild oats—that’s about as wild as I’ma get this year.

  “Is Louis coming or not?” Brenda asked suddenly. Charolette’s feet padded down the hallway. Darnell looked at Brenda’s hands, stopped in the air holding a small shirt, wrists bent like swan necks.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t want to tell her about what Leon had said, didn’t want her even to think about Leon and Vernon, watching, waiting. She said her dreams were full of the babies now, instead of him running, driving, red lights and silver beams circling his neck.

  He had to pull foxtails and field oats and the wild tobacco trees from the edges of someone’s estate in Grayglen; the seeds blew over the cinder-block wall and sprouted every spring. Now, true summer heat hung in the eucalyptus branches. Darnell added another day to Juan and José’s route, finally. His phone rang more often when the sun rose already glaring, when the smog still hid the mountains at dusk. The new transplants to Rio Seco from LA and Orange County didn’t want to cut their grass when gray heat thick as syrup coated their lungs with each step.

  He drove all over the city, with his father and Roscoe, with Juan and José, with Victor and Ronnie. Talk. Palaver. He was quiet, thinking of all the trees they’d trimmed, fingering the blades of grass clinging to his jeans. Everything manicured. Better be, or we ain’t keepin the account. Convenient trees only. Up in Grayglen, on the big estates with oaks and eucalyptus and five acres, there were benches and statues and Jacuzzis and decks. What had Trent called it? Darnell dragged the branches toward the truck. Controlled nature.

  When the first riverbottom fires trailed smoke, he didn’t drive to the bridge. The cane, that arundo, still green, he thought. Grapevines clingin tight. It won’t burn that good yet. Early summer’s still holdin wet way down there.

  He washed the trucks on the front grass, letting Charolette spray the tires and the windows and Brenda’s ankles, resting on the steps.

  After Brenda had lain down in the bedroom, near nine o’clock, Charolette kept stalking the living room, saying, “But I’m not sleepy, Daddy.” She pulled at her hair, twisted in long spirals and tucked into a stretchy pink headband for sleep. “I’ma comb your hair,” she said, picking up the brush on the floor.

  Darnell said, “I’m tired, chica. Let me watch this show, okay? Then you gon have to crash whether you ready or not.”

  She lifted the brush and then froze. “Daddy! You got a ouchie.” She touched the fresh thorn tear on his forearm, the zipper of dried blood.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, watching her eyes well with tears, and he felt a sharp twist in his throat, seeing himself examine his father every night, the rough wrists, the huge palms and thumbs so much bigger than his.

  “Look at mine,” she said, showing him the lines of her last scrape, the shrunk beaded scab on her leg. Suddenly she bent to kiss his arm, and she fingered the black line on his hand—the stem burn. She put her lips there, too, and then she stood on the couch behind him to examine his ears.

  “Ouch!” he said. “Be careful.” He tried to keep his eyes on the TV, but she moved his head to the side.

  “Is that you, D.?” a deep voice said into the window screen. Darnell jerked his head sharply, Charolette’s finger hitting him in the eye, and Louis said, “It’s only Birdman.”

  Charolette eyed his faraway face from the couch once he was inside, standing near the wall, shoulders stiff. She pressed herself into Darnell’s back then, and Darnell watched Louis smile. “Is that you?” Louis repeated.

  Like they used to ask each other about girls: Oh, man, is that you? Yeah, homey, that’s me. Darnell nodded. “She’s about as me as possible.”

  Louis sat and waited until Darnell put her to bed; she clung to his chest as he lowered her to the sheets, and she whispered, “He tall like a tree.”

  “I couldn’t hang at the halfway house for too long, man,” Louis said. “It was in Pomona, like right near downtown.”

  Darnell turned the brush over in his hands. “You runnin?”

  Louis shook his head. “I told em where I was goin.”

  Darnell waited. He could hear Charolette’s feet in the hallway again; she was probably going to climb into bed next to Brenda.

  “I need to make a little money, so I can head up north,” Louis said, rubbing his fingertips near his temples. “I can’t go back up there with no cash.”

  “All I got is the side jobs, unless you want to work with Pops and… your pops.” Darnell watched Louis frown and look out the dark screen. “But if we get a coupla big jobs in a few weeks, you could make enough.” He hesitated. “How’d you know where we moved to?”

  “I saw Victor at Jackson Park,” Louis said, his eyes moving to Darnell.

  “You didn’t see Leon?”

  Louis shook his head. “Just some strawberry girls hangin out.”

  Darnell said, “You gon have to tell me, man. I can’t be nubbin with Leon and Vernon cause they think somethin’s up. Last time I saw Leon, he still thought you were out for payback. And he was still ballistic about somethin you messed up.”

  Louis finally leaned forward, his elbows on his bony knees, like he was afraid for anyone to hear him. “You was just there, man.”

  “What?” Darnell remembered the Lincoln, the highways, and Vernon shooting out the window. He felt the girl’s tongue on his skin.

  “By the riverbottom,” Louis whispered. “Didn’t you go see the fire today?”

  Darnell breathed in hard. “No, man, I was workin. I didn’t have time.”

  Louis stared at him. “But you got pecans last year. Past the pecan trees, between the grove and the riverbottom, all them fields?” His eyes were blurred, so close to Darnell’s face. “Four blue herons live over there; they like it right there. They steal fish from that county park, where they stock carp and stuff.” Darnell nodded. “The fields all covered up with tumblewee
ds during winter, and the birds can’t get in there. But around spring, the county clean up all the tumbleweeds, in big piles. You know that.” Darnell nodded again, seeing the thorns burst from the bushes when he shoveled them, seeing the flames ball and roll.

  “The mice been growin all spring, man, and then these blue herons just hang out by the piles, waitin for them.”

  “Don’t no bird eat mice, man,” Darnell said.

  “Yeah, they do. Herons do. Mice, fish. Herons are big, man, got a big wingspan and long beaks. You ever see them rise up over you you see how big they are.” Louis stopped, glancing around as if people were listening.

  “What do herons gotta do with Leon?” Darnell said, leaning back.

  “You don’t never get to be alone with Leon and them. He hates bein alone—he always gotta have his boys with him. Vernon, Mortrice. I wanted to use the Bronco, go over by the river.” Louis stopped. “I used to always walk, but then dudes saw me with Leon and they wanted to smoke me, remember? I told you. And I wasn’t doin nothin.” He took a breath. “Leon let me use the Bronco, but he said bring it back in a few minutes. I got over there and started walkin into the fields to look for the herons. You can’t drive, cause it’s no roads, just horse trails. I guess somebody seen me, seen the Bronco, cause it was like, two hours later, and the cops busted me. And two rangers. They found some product Leon was gon move.”

  “Why you didn’t tell Leon what happened?’ Darnell said, pressing his feet hard into the floor.

  “That was big money, D.”

  “Why you didn’t tell the rangers it wasn’t yours?” Darnell stopped, shaking his head. “Yeah, I know.”

  Louis grinned slightly. “Come on, Darnell. Don’t you think the rangers was suspicious? Hey—a nigga with no binoculars?”

  Darnell heard Brenda’s slippers clacking soft into the kitchen, and he waited for her to come out. She clutched her robe around her belly, even though it was hot, and she squinted into the living room. “Brenda,” he said.

  When she saw Louis, her eyes widened. “You’re back?”

  “Just for a minute,” he said, biting his lips. “Darnell didn’t tell me he was doin the daddy thang again.”