Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  “Mama did,” he said, and she nodded, her mouth slightly open.

  Brenda was waiting on the porch, and she held out her arms for Charolette. “I gotta pay the guys,” Darnell said. “I’ll be back in a few.”

  The heat rippled off the pavement, wavered the figures of the men standing around the pepper trees and card tables. Darnell parked behind Gas’s truck and counted the money again. He glanced up and saw a woman in bike shorts and a pink bra, standing on the corner waiting for a slowed car; her reddish hair stood up stiff and uncombed, like a single dust-threaded flame.

  Victor and Ronnie were in the shade, sharing a forty-ounce, and Gas and Louis stood near Brother Lobo, laughing. When Darnell handed Louis his money, Brother Lobo said, “I haven’t seen this young man in a long time.”

  Louis nodded and said, “I was migratin, you know.”

  “I’m gone,” Darnell shouted to them, and Gas walked beside him.

  “Yo, Leon,” a voice called from the alley. Gas shook his head, his cheek hollow when he sucked his teeth impatiently and ignored the man. “People always sayin we look alike,” he said. “Do I look like a fool?” Darnell smiled, and Gas went on: “Man, I’ll be due on shift and Moms says, ‘Give your brother a ride; he don’t want to take his car.’ Damn.” He grabbed for a swig of Darnell’s soda. “He hidin out, says somebody followin him.”

  “Darnell, man, wait up,” Louis hollered from the pepper tree.

  “I’m due on home shift,” Darnell said to Gas. “Hot as hell at the crib, too. We been livin on the porch.”

  When they neared the El Camino, Darnell saw a shine of pink, and he heard Louis laughing behind him. “Check you out,” Gas said. “Daddy.”

  Barbie had fallen from the cab, headfirst into the gutter, and Darnell bent low to pick her up by her long hair. He had squatted to brush a leaf from her headband when he heard wheels slipping loose on the corner, an engine accelerating ragged. He balanced himself with his hand on the wheel well, and when the hammering shots sounded, he smashed his cheek against the metal, his eyes burning he clenched them so tight. He heard the beats separately, three, four, regular, each explosion a breath apart, semiautomatic, the time it took the finger to pull the trigger, and when he dropped himself flat in the gutter behind the tire, the doll’s foot stiff in his chest, pepper berries crushed to release sharp scent near his face, he heard a bullet chunk into a tree trunk like a high-thrown stone into deep water. The shots, eight, nine, ten, were wet to his ears, and he thought, Cuttin the devil’s throat, the chunking image still flickering behind his lids when the last shot sounded, farther away.

  The field was so silent that they heard tires loop-screeching all the way on Pepper Avenue before someone started screaming. “Got-damn! This hurts—Got-damn!”

  Darnell lifted himself from the oil-stained gutter, feeling ferny leaves stuck to his cheek, and he saw Gas lying silent on his stomach, trying to rise, clapping his palm to his ear. And just beyond him, Louis was curved long on his side, his back fanned wide in the creamy shirt, his shoulder flat. When Darnell bent, the damp explosions still burning in his ears, he saw the blood pooling thick-edged in the dust from under Louis, from the ribs beneath him, the red darkening as if the heat had already hardened it. Darnell pushed Louis’s shoulder to find the wound; Louis’s head was bent forward, heavy, the blind, paler back of his neck glittering with moisture.

  The men were moving everywhere now, shadows falling across Darnell’s hands when he felt the throbbing in Louis’s neck, and his own chest began to tremble now. Pulling off his shirt, he bunched cloth on the blood at Louis’s ribs, looking up to see who was shouting.

  Brother Lobo was the one yelling, holding his shoulder when Victor pushed him toward the street, and then Darnell felt hands pulling him up roughly. Mr. Taylor said, “We gotta take him—who knows how long nine-one-one take for down here. Darnell! Come on, now. He ain’t gon fit in your truck.”

  Darnell slid his arms under Louis’s rib bones as two other men, strangers from the alley, bent and straightened with him. Louis’s back was thick-wet, the chalky-sweet smell of carob dust rising from his hair, and his mouth left a trail of shine on Darnell’s bare shoulder when they put him in the long, cavelike backseat of Mr. Taylor’s Cadillac.

  He felt the blood tightening on his wrists, and Mr. Taylor pushed him again. “I’ma take him! You go and get his daddy, go on, bring him to County.”

  Darnell backed toward the El Camino. Gas’s skull glistened red in a trail through his hair, a line above his temple, and he said to Ronnie, “Don’t call Leon, hell, no, you take me to County. I ain’t ridin with my goddamn brother.”

  “I told you where to go,” Mr. Taylor shouted, his eyes squinted to slits when he pulled around on the street, and Darnell moved, smelling the residue of burned tires and cordite ahead of him like a trail. The passenger window of the El Camino was shattered, and he stared at the open driver’s side, wondering where the bullet was now.

  Vernon—it had to be Vernon, he thought, driving, his jaw feeling huge as if metal had gathered above his ears, and he turned the corner to Picasso Street, seeing Roscoe’s Apache parked at his father’s.

  He ran through the sideyard and slammed into the back room, filled with the wet mixed smell of cold beer and the swamp cooler. His father and Roscoe looked up, and Darnell’s forehead felt melted behind his eyes, the sheets of childish water blinding him. “I gotta take you to the hospital, Roscoe,” he said, and blinked, Roscoe’s face swelling huge when he rose from the table.

  That smell, the night he’d been in the hospital lying face down in the swimming chemical air and the fluorescent light, with the razor-cold air on his leg, shivered into his bare chest when he saw Roscoe’s back go up the hallway. He turned to face the wall, eyes passing over his father’s folded arms, and he clenched shut his eyes, thinking, Don’t see that. Breathing in hard, he remembered the smell, clinging to Brenda’s hair and neck when she lived here with Charolette for those first days, when Charolette was lavender and spindle-thin as the tubes snaking into her skin. When he brought his palm up to his forehead, though, the tight tracing of blood on his forearm broke; the black-red coating was a mosaic, sealed to his skin, but the edges turned to dust when he laid his fingers over them, and his father said, “Goddamn.” Roscoe was coming out of the hallway, walking slow, each step away from the door meaning that there was nothing to wait for now.

  “Nobody’s had to take me anywhere for a long time,” Roscoe had said, hard, when he stood up, and now he pulled away, alone, in the Apache.

  By the El Camino, Darnell’s father looked down and saw the glass glinting scattered on the seat, and he shouted, “Goddamn you boys! I drove you and Louis all over in this damn car and… y’all killin each other like you think it’s a game.” He pushed the heel of his palm over his forehead and turned his eyes straight on Darnell, who leaned against the door.

  Darnell felt his cold skin prickling in the heat of the parking lot; his neck was rough with dirt when he put his fingers there. “Tell me a Mississippi story, Pops. Oklahoma story. What you think you can do? What you think I can do?” he said, keeping his eyes on his father’s, staring at the muddied whites almost lost in his father’s squint. “Tell me some huntin stories. Open season, Pops.” He felt his throat close on the last word, the one that always had to come from far down behind his tongue, and he opened the car door.

  His father said nothing all the way back to the Westside, just kept his boots placed carefully on the glass slivers, his eyes on the windshield. When Darnell stopped at his father’s driveway, he said, “Roscoe went to Marietta’s, huh?”

  His father nodded, still in the seat. “What you fixin to tell your wife? You were standin right there.” His father turned to look at him.

  “I’ma lie,” Darnell said. “Lie straight up. You know I can’t tell her that—she probably go into labor early again.” He saw his father’s jaw move.

  “Ain’t the first time,” his father said.
“And it probably ain’t the last.” When Darnell started to speak, his father shook his head. “I wasn’t talkin about penny-ante. I’m just talkin about necessity. Go on home.”

  It wasn’t even close to dark yet. He rinsed his eyes with warm water from the hose at the steps, smelling fish from the open window, and he threw back his head and breathed hard. I don’t want to go inside and be Pops. Daddy. I can’t tell her, not right now, not even nothin about me or where I was—he stopped, closed his eyes, saw the fine dust on the back of Louis’s neck, the snail-curled hairs growing long at his nape. Biting his lips until they swelled, hurt, he opened the door, the doll’s sharp plastic thighs in his fingers.

  Charolette ran to him before Brenda could speak. She grabbed the doll, shouting, “Barbie! You find her, Daddy!”

  “Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t want to come home without her,” he said, looking at Brenda. She glanced up from stirring the rice, but she only nodded. He leaned against the refrigerator, his chest full of water, and he felt Charolette’s fingers hot on his elbow.

  “You get a ouchie, Daddy?” she said. Brenda looked up, too, and he twisted his arm to see the smears of blood he hadn’t noticed above his elbow.

  “It’s just from a splinter,” he said, closing the door to the bathroom, putting his palms on the tile counter. He stared at the bottles of makeup and perfume and shampoo and hairdress—all theirs, all women’s things, their smell rising sweet where the sun had heated the counter all afternoon. He washed off the blood, his mouth filling with saliva at the image of the liquid gelling on the dirt, the dust flecking so fast. He checked the clean skin on his arm, clenching his teeth, hearing them talk in the kitchen, and he knew Charolette would examine him closely for wounds. Staring out the window at the El Camino, where he’d parked it far up the driveway, he saw the jagged remnants of glass.

  He went down the hallway, through the bedroom, quickly, hearing Charolette still talking in the kitchen to Brenda, and outside by the car, he grabbed a shard of glass from the floorboards. Reaching behind him, he made a quick, thin scratch above his elbow, where she had seen the blood.

  He sat on the porch while she applied the Mickey Mouse Band-Aid carefully to the cut. “I fix it up,” she said, and Brenda only watched, sitting near the door. How I’ma tell her about Louis? he thought. Not about me—first, just about Louis. He’d thought she would ask about him at dinner, but she sat, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed, her hand resting on that high, hard curve under her breasts.

  Charolette began smoothing the plastic strip over his arm again, and he said, “That’s enough, babygirl.” After Brenda had gone inside to give her a bath, when the sky turned purple, he still sat, hearing the palm fronds rustle and the threading whine of the helicopter.

  Just after dark, Leon stood on the porch, his face swollen around the eyes, his tongue working the left corner of his mouth furiously, the skin shined raw.

  “You know that was for me,” he said. “Darnell, man, you know it was.”

  Darnell had just gone inside for another can of soda. He stepped out the door, onto the porch. Brenda had come up behind him, and she put her hand on his elbow. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  “Nothin,” Darnell said. He felt her soft finger pads press his skin. Charolette was asleep now, and Brenda’s hair was damp-curled around her forehead from the shower.

  Leon didn’t look at her. “My brother won’t even speak, man. He don’t want nothin to do with me.” He moved down the steps, came back up wild. “I can’t talk right here, man, come on.”

  Leon turned, and Darnell said, “I’ma be right back, Brenda; let me go talk to him.” He uncurled her fingers gently, whispering. He didn’t want Leon to say it, to ask.

  “I can’t stay out here, I gotta ride,” Leon said. “Darnell.”

  Brenda grabbed his arm and said, “You ain’t goin nowhere. No. Uh-uh.”

  Leon stopped and turned. “Yo, Darnell, man, I gotta talk to somebody. I’m leavin in the mornin.”

  Darnell moved Brenda’s hand gently, whispered, “Brenda, stall out.” He called to Leon, “Where’s Vernon?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Leon said. “He gone, too.”

  Darnell’s skull vibrated with the humming streetlights, the wires above the yard, the helicopter circling somebody in the distance. He closed his eyes. Gone. Everybody gone. “I’ll be right back, Brenda.” He moved in a dream toward the Bronco, and she ran after him and jerked him around by his elbows.

  “Leon, stop. Cause Darnell ain’t goin nowhere.” She was shouting, her voice higher than singing. “And I don’t want to hear that shit. ‘Homey, I got your back. Don’t worry.’” She held him hard, imitating him, Leon, all of them. “No. I got your back, every time you go out the damn door, I’m watchin your back. Not this time. I ain’t playin, Darnell.” Her thin fingers were locked around the indentation above his elbow, pressing his muscle against bone, and he saw the street-lamps swimming at the outer edges of her wide, black-lined eyes, she stood so close.

  “Come in the house and talk,” she said.

  “I ain’t sittin in no living room,” Leon said. “Fuck it. I gotta ride.”

  Brenda didn’t move, Darnell stared at her. Her lips were open, waiting, and she didn’t blink. In the porch light, her irises were steady gold. He turned and said, “Hold up, Leon.”

  Leon hesitated on the grass, and Darnell went to stand close to her. He saw the tiny sharp line cleaving her upper lip. Like a dart. She’d shown it to him last week, told him she’d finally figured out it was from kissing Charolette all the time, absently, lips pursed, her head turning automatically like the nearby fat cheek was a magnet.

  He couldn’t tell her about the pepper berries under his face in the gutter, the bullets chunking into the trees and vacant house. Louis, the silence, and the blood filmed with dust.

  “Brenda,” he said, to her forehead. “I’ma take him in the backyard. I ain’t goin nowhere, okay? I ain’t leavin. Go open Charolette’s window and you can see me. I ain’t leavin.” He turned her shoulders and ran his palms down her arms, and she moved away.

  He led Leon through the dark sideyard, the block wall still warm under his hand. He opened the glove compartment of the Spider and took out the flat bottle of Jack Daniels, the one he’d bought a long time ago. After the dog. The gun had been in there, too.

  “Get a taste, come on,” he said, offering the bottle to Leon. “Sit down for a minute.” He saw Brenda’s face smudge pale in the screen, and then the window was dark again. Leon sat in the low bucket seat, the doors open, and after he’d had another drink, he slumped down a little.

  “You ain’t even askin me,” Darnell said.

  “I know—Birdman went to County,” Leon began, but Darnell cut him off.

  “He’s gone.” Darnell waited, but Leon’s face remained loose and damp, his eyes on the cinder block. “I didn’t see Gasanova over there.”

  “He at the crib,” Leon said, his voice high. “He got a bandage on his head—it was like a burn.” Darnell saw the red trail in the cut-short fade at Gas’s temple.

  “It wasn’t a damn burn,” Darnell said, and Leon went on, like he was happy to talk about his brother instead of Louis.

  “Gas won’t tell me shit—not what the dude was drivin, nothin. He said he rather walk home from Louisiana than ride with me—Tamiko told me he said that shit. He told Tamiko pack her stuff, cause they movin to Vegas.” Leon put his forehead in his fingers. “You should see his truck. It’s all fucked up, got bullet holes in the body.”

  Darnell was silent. He heard the rounds—twelve or thirteen. He leaned his head back.

  “I ain’t seen Vernon, okay, so don’t even ax me,” Leon whispered. His eyes sagged sleepy, and he rested his head against the seat, too. “See, you don’t know. It was probably somebody jackin for me. Business here all messed up, Vernon been loc wild, and the consultant said he movin him to Portland, let him go, once he get up there, if he keep buckin.�
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  “We ain’t never gon know who did it,” Darnell said, flat, his voice blurred inside his ears.

  Leon said, slurred, “Vernon feel like that money was his, too—what Birdman fucked up. That was gon be Vernon’s first time, his first big cut.”

  “That ain’t just money,” Darnell said, heat ringing his eyes at the shift in Leon’s voice. “You know Victor and the brothas at the park gon be lookin at you. Ducats ain’t a damn thang to them. Vernon, neither.”

  Leon’s legs moved near the stick shift. “I know.” He waited. “Vernon one a them LA brothas. Hard as hell. He ain’t got no homeys out here in Rio Seco—he like it like that, so he can do what he want.” Leon threw back his head. “But I don’t know if he did it or not. I ain’t lyin. Lotta brothas just do what they want.”

  “You can’t.” Darnell wouldn’t look at him.

  “I know. I’m gone, man. I’m goin to Seattle.” Darnell heard a tiny wet click, and he knew Leon’s tongue was working pink at the loose corner, but he kept his eyes to the blank, smoggy dark until Leon’s shoes crunched grit on the sidewalk.

  The silence was thick in the corners, but in Charolette’s bedroom he heard a noise, and he saw Brenda kneeling awkwardly beside the sleeping head, holding the tiny limp hand between her fingers, metal flashing. She looked up at him fiercely, warning him away with her eyes, and he saw that she was cutting fingernails.

  She came out a few minutes later, holding the tiny clippers. “Every week,” she said, holding her side. “They grow so fast, and it’s hard to catch her asleep.” She began picking up clothes from the floor of their bedroom, and he frowned. Charolette’s almost two and a half, he thought, and I ain’t never even looked at her fingernails.

  When she sat on the bed, waiting, folding a T-shirt, he knew he couldn’t tell her in the dark, airless cave of their bedroom, the place where they never did anything but fall exhausted onto the sheets and listen to the night for a few minutes. He said, “Come out here for a minute.”