Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  But the fall sun refused to soften or change color, and when Darnell bent his back to work, he could smell only garbage settling, desiccating, in the lots and lawn clippings shriveled to threads in the cookie-cutter yards. Juan and José trotted behind the mowers, twisted under the burlap bags of refuse, watched him carefully. Charolette splayed out her fingers, her palms reaching for him, crying, “I want come to work, Daddy,” but all he could see was her bones, her shoulder blades shifting under her back skin like wings when she swung her arms, her chin jutting out like a bottle cap when she was angry at him getting into the truck alone. Brenda stood behind her, and he saw her swollen, straight ankles and the distended, falling belly of more tiny, toothpick finger bones and amphibian feet.

  He reached for the top of the spear-leafed oleander hedges at the woman’s house. His father had gone off somewhere; Roscoe had only worked a few days in weeks, and the sign in his yard had grown smeared with dirt, the screens shrouded with swirled dust. No chaparral smell rising in the sun, he thought, no oily-bark creosote or bitter chamise. Greenhouse effect? Who had said that? Fricke—he was just tryin to change the subject to the drought back then, cause I wanted to talk about torchin trails. Not hardly acceptable now.

  His father’s client, the older woman with spiderweb hair, brought him some iced tea, and he drank it while she stood there marveling at the heat. “I remember when we first came from Massachusetts, my husband and I, and we couldn’t believe that this was what you southern Californians called fall!”

  Sparrows jumped off the hose trickles while he was standing near a flower bed. Flies and sweat bees and even wasps drank from the sheen on Juan and José’s arms, landed on the back of Darnell’s neck to probe for moisture. When they all bent in one yard to pull out the knife-blade palm fronds springing from the crusted ground, Juan said, “We are past the season of harvest. It is not the harvest here. It is only hot, every week.” He spoke timidly, not looking at Darnell. “The client, two or three, they want the drip system to be more on, for the dry, but I don’t know how. I say, ‘Call my boss.’”

  Darnell shook his head. “Yeah, and I gotta say, ‘Call the guy that installed the system.’ Like Trent. I don’t know about automatic timers and drips.”

  That night, they lingered on Darnell’s porch for a moment, and Darnell gave Charolette the last metallic green-bellied fig beetles in a jar, because he felt bad about the empty car seat beside him. She turned the round jar, marveling at the spiky legs, and José said something to Juan. Juan nodded. “José say it is the angry season.”

  “I heard that,” Darnell said. “The season of the hot and pissed go on a long time in Rio Seco, man. It’s not even close to the end.”

  The temperature never went below ninety during the day, and gray dusted the sky. People called it earthquake weather, but the ground didn’t move—it just lay still, hardening, pushing up tree roots, refusing hose trickles and shovels, burning Charolette’s feet. Darnell worked in a cloud of moving grit, and only the sliding drops of sweat carried the dust from his forehead, his neck. He stayed away from Jackson Park, working alone on the gas stations, feeling the black heat rise on the asphalt all around him until he imagined that he looked like one of the zombies from the alley, his eyes sunk gray into his skull, his palms permanently gray. Zombies, he thought, blinded by the whirring wires of the edger. And everybody else gone.

  “A very angry season,” Juan said again, and lawns were thatched high, the blades and roots pushed out of brick-hard earth. People called about wilted plants, burned leaves, dead patches in the grass. Juan hit a PVC sprinkler head one Friday and didn’t notice; by Wednesday, the lawn had a huge brown spot and the owner came home from work early to jam up Juan. He had wanted to tell the man his eyes were full of salt, Juan told Darnell. He couldn’t identify the house; he was wavering with nervousness on Darnell’s porch. “I say to him my English not good.”

  The guy called Darnell. “I want you over here to replace the sprinkler head today. Please.”

  Darnell said to himself, “I hate irrigation.” He drove to Grayglen, his head sifting chalk the way it had been for all these weeks, and saw the broken sprinkler head near a landscaper’s boulder. He got out of the El Camino and squatted by the spreading dead circle, thinking that this looked like one of Trent’s yards, with the river-rock edgings. A shadow moved behind the etched-glass panes of the front door, and he said, “Damn!” under his breath.

  “Can I help you?” the man said over him, voice guarded.

  Darnell sighed. “Yeah, you called AnTuan’s. …”

  “Oh,” the man said, brightening. “I didn’t recognize you, Trent. Hey, their Oriental kid really took out this sprinkler head. I’m glad you could come out, cause the dead grass looks like shit.”

  Darnell stayed bent to the pipe. “I’m not Trent King,” he said.

  “I’ve seen you around, doing landscape construction,” the guy started, flustered. Darnell saw his face fill with pink like rising water. “I guess I thought you…”

  “I own AnTuan’s,” Darnell said, giving up on the pipe, standing up, and the man’s cheeks faded back to beige.

  “I must have misunderstood,” he said, a little harder. “I thought the company was owned by Asians.”

  “No,” Darnell said. Okay—here we go, he thought. “It’s me.”

  The man flicked his thumbs against his index fingers nervously, and Darnell knew he was flashing the flyer in his memory. “You ever hear of truth in advertising?”

  Always respect the client, Darnell thought, that’s what Pops said a thousand times. To me, to Louis. Don’t touch nothin—don’t say nothin unless they ask you first. He felt saliva rolling behind his molars. “Hey,” he said, keeping his voice light. “Asia’s a lot bigger than people think. Mongolia—that’s Asia. Alaska is Asian.”

  The man gestured at the spreading brown. “Well, we might have to change services if the lawn’s going to look like this.”

  “I didn’t install your irrigation system, but I’ll call Trent King for you,” Darnell said, raising his brows, and the man’s eyes flinched when he said the name. He went back up the lawn, and Darnell got into the El Camino. “He probably think Italians make his pizza instead of Mexicans. He probably got a Latvian domestic. Damn, when he hire somebody else for his grass, I hope he stay home from LA now and then to check.” He took out the route schedule, surprised that his chest was still cool and empty, and drew a line through the address.

  “Fuck you, Jap!” the voice in the phone snarled. “I’m tired of your goddamn flyers! If I see you drop another one, I’m gonna shoot your yellow Jap ass!”

  Tuan ain’t Japanese, you ignorant bastard, Darnell thought, hearing the dial tone. He put the receiver back. But they all look alike, huh? Chinks, Japs, Nips. Wetbacks, Beaners, Mescans. But Juan look like a Jap, huh? And me—I look like a nigga. Most def. Talk like one, too.

  Darnell went into Charolette’s room, where she lay on the bed napping, her hand still clutching a few of the flyers they’d thrown onto lawns early this morning. She had the last of them; he and Juan had saturated the new tracts last week, because they still wanted to work up to five days, and not many half-sheets were left. Charolette had played with the small rocks for hours, and she’d ridden with him in the dark today, chattering and handing him Baggies when he drove to a few houses just for her.

  Darnell slid a flyer from her hand to look at the lantern Nacho had drawn a long time ago. A brotha drew this, he thought. He shook his head. Damn—for the black AnTuans, I guess I should change it to—to what? A lantern and a bridge and a bonsai are on there now. His head throbbed in the heat, and he saw the pecan grove. He bit the inside of his cheek, turning to the door. Wouldn’t nobody recognize that. Or a greens tree. Yeah, I could see it.

  He heard Brenda and her mother in the living room, but he went out the kitchen door to the driveway, reaching into the truck to check the glove compartment for stray flyers. A bird, he thought suddenly. Yeah. A m
ockingbird. I don’t care if it don’t have nothin to do with yards. A mockingbird for one brotha who’s gone. Pine tree for me. Nature Boy. Birdman.

  He glanced at the envelope with his application for fire season, and closed the glove compartment without looking at it or the article about Louis. He thought of the spit-out word a few minutes ago. Jap. Articles had filled the newspaper since the Japanese student on the moped had remained on life support, and when the paper had printed a plea to raise money for his family to visit from Japan, mentioning that the Japanese were critical of the police chase, angry letters had poured in. “Take him back to Japan and pay for his tubes there. He wasn’t obeying American law, and I don’t want my tax dollars spent to keep a criminal alive.” “I’m tired of the media bashing our police. They were doing their job.”

  Inside, he went to the living room, where Mrs. Batiste sat with Brenda, who lay on the couch. She’d felt early contractions in the last week, and the doctor told her to take it easy, stay home from work, keep her feet elevated. He touched her shoulder, shook his head at the mound of stomach so high it was almost level with her face, and she grinned. “You tired that little girl out,” she said. “She never naps that long for me.”

  “I can do that,” he said. “I’m good.”

  Mrs. Batiste was crocheting a baby blanket, and he had already laughed at the safe colors: yellow, pale green, lavender. “Pretty hot for afghans,” he said again, the way he had every day when she came to cook, clean, wash, and braid Charolette’s hair.

  “Get cool before you know it,” she said, as always, and he stared out the front window, thinking that this is what you did when you got a family. You said the same things over and over. He’d watched all the ceremonies, the folding of new baby clothes and washed old ones, the padding of the crib, the tea Brenda drank, the way Charolette sat on the counter with Mrs. Batiste rolling the dough, the baby fingers pushing the floury-edged glass for each biscuit. Had he done that? No—he’d been outside with his father and Melvin, working on chain-saw motors and turning lug nuts for practice. His sisters had gathered flour and lemon rind under their fingernails.

  “Gettin late,” he said, like always.

  Mrs. Batiste shrugged. “Etienne a grown man. He ain’t miss me that much.” She went home in time to make his dinner each night. They heard Charolette’s bare toes swishing on the floor, and her first words were “Where’s Daddy?”

  “She don’t need to be goin far from her mama now,” Mrs. Batiste said. “It’s too hot.”

  But he smiled, and she ran to hold his legs. “Can we throw rocks?” she said. “Mama, you tired, huh?” She knew that was the best excuse for leaving the house.

  “Give me a kiss,” Brenda said.

  The flames were only racing edges up the bank of the freeway, gapped as lace on the edge of his mother’s curtains, and he slowed at the off ramp. He’d taken her with him to Corona to buy a used edger. “Check out the fire, Charolette,” he said, and she stretched her neck like a turtle to see over the dashboard.

  The fire was quick-burning, just started, probably from a thrown cigarette, and the flat grass flames skipped like string. “Be careful, Daddy,” she said when he got out and stood on the freeway shoulder to look down at the well of field in the cloverleaf, at the cars circling around without slowing. “Daddy, when you cook on a fire you get a ouchie.”

  “This ain’t the stove,” he said. “This is different.” He heard the sirens, and the fire pulsed thin over the drain at the bottom of the field. Charolette watched intently from his arms when the trucks fed out hose that the men pulled toward the scattering of orange. When the blackened ground was patchy gray and damp, she said. “I’m thirsty, Daddy.”

  He started the engine, saying, “Your mama always used to want a milkshake after I took her to a fire. She was bored.”

  But that wasn’t what Brenda said when they got home and Charolette said casually, “Daddy and me seen a fire.”

  Brenda shot him a glance from the kitchen chair, where she was looking at the checkbook. “Where? You took her to Jackson Park?”

  “Gettin pretty hot to break out the trash barrel,” Darnell said, ready to stall her out. “Nope, we saw a brushfire.”

  Charolette said, “It was pretty. It was dancing on the ground, huh, Daddy?”

  Brenda fanned her fingers through the hair above her ears, and her eyes glared wide. “I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking, taking her to a fire. What if the wind changes and you get surrounded?”

  Darnell said, “Give me a break, Brenda. I fought fires up in the range, not boot stompers like that.”

  “So you God now, huh? You know everything a fire gon do, even when you got your daughter in danger?” She stood up and slammed her plate into the sink, and Charolette started to cry.

  “Brenda, I survived fuckin Seven Canyons. Don’t tell me shit about a fire,” he yelled, watching Charolette’s lips begin to stretch wider.

  “Well, you won’t survive one fuckin Brenda if you do that again,” she screamed.

  “She’s my kid, too, that’s what you always tellin me,” he shouted. “I can teach her somethin—she smart, she ain’t just into dolls and hair like you and everybody else think she should be.”

  Brenda took a deep breath, her too-wide face shifting, and said, “This isn’t about her, so don’t even try that line. After Louis, and Donnie, your leg all torn up—you think I’m playing, huh? You think this is a game.” She was shouting again, and Charolette’s screams were high-pitched. When he threw the milkshake into the sink, her cries went clotted in her throat; Brenda swung her up awkwardly onto her thigh, and Darnell slammed out the door.

  He drove past the park automatically, but the shadows crowding around the tree and domino table, the crouched figures in the alley, were too many for him, and all he could think of was the word. Gone. Zombies. Gone—Donnie, Gas, Leon. Louis. He drove past Marietta Cook’s house and saw the Apache, but he was afraid to knock on the front door. His chest ached. In the mornings, still too yellow and hot, when his father sat at the spool table in an early sliver of shade, no one rearranged words for a poem about oranges or bolillos or crows strutting along the gutter.

  But as soon as he was in the Sandlands, keeping AnTuan’s truck even with the big semitrailers on their way to Arizona and New Mexico and farther, their trailers tight as boxcars in the slow lane, he felt calm. Drivin, just like Leon wanted to do that night, just like we all do. Drive all the way to Portland, see if the girl named Quelle still hangin out at Rob’s crib. That’s when I was doin something wrong. Yeah. She take me out with that tongue right now, wouldn’t say nothin. Just California. Take me back to Cali, baby.

  October—y’all ain’t goin home for a while, he thought, winding up the highway to the station without even seeing the curves. They were still imprinted, habit, the wheel under his fingers turning without thought. Gone—Scott and Perez and Corcoran. All those hours, days, weeks he’d spent with the square-held lips and clicking cards and screaming radio were faded. He watched the first, low slopes. All summer, the sun had straightened and stiffened the grasses, but by now, late October, the hillsides had passed gold and were tinged rusty-brown. Only the new tumbleweeds were cool blue-green puffs, and they held fast like lichens when the wind tore at the ground. Seven years of drought? Uh-uh. You guys still got a big one to look forward to up here, he thought, pulling into the gravel lot.

  He stood by the truck, breathing the hot resin in the air, looking at the closed garage door where the engine was resting or gone. Fricke’s face appeared in the window, and Darnell thought, he’s gon say, What, your woman let you go on a casual trip up to the hill, huh? Kept on a leash like you—awhoooh.

  The Steller jay screamed from the branches when he moved, but Fricke, coming out the doorway, grinning enough so that Darnell could see teeth under the mustache, said, “Came up here to congratulate me for my well-worded quotes, huh?”

  Corcoran came behind him, hollering, “So, Tucker,
how come you didn’t bust Scott and Perez? You never saw em all that time down there in Rio Seco, all those fires?”

  “What are you talkin about?” Darnell said, frowning. “I saw em a coupla times, workin paid call jobs.”

  Fricke grinned again. “They had plenty of work. You didn’t see the newspaper?”

  Darnell looked at his sunburned face, at the blond hairs glinting on his wrists where his arms were folded. “I ain’t been keepin up with the paper every day. The news ain’t always news to me.”

  Fricke opened his mouth and ran a finger down his mustache, nodding. “Been busy, huh?”

  Darnell nodded, and Corcoran brought him the newspaper before he could say anything. Scott and Perez stared at him from the county page, Scott with his buzz-cut hair and narrow nose, Perez with his Fred Flintstone jaw and caterpillar brows. “Louis said he saw these guys,” Darnell murmured. “He IDed it right.”

  “That a friend of yours?” Fricke said. “He called the tip in?”

  Darnell’s chest felt stained with heat. He shook his head, hearing the single jay’s repeating shriek, making his eyes see the wings, the cocked head watching him. No bullet stories; I’m not tellin Fricke, he thought. It was just a drive-by, buncha home boys standin around. Gang-related. Fricke read it in the paper—just like this. He know what he need to know. No clues.

  He bent his head to the article again to avoid the sky-pale eyes. The fire investigator was quoted: “These two men knew what they were doing. They set the blazes in the riverbottom and vacant lots very naturally, and they didn’t use accelerant because they knew we’d be looking for that.” He read Fricke’s quotes, and Fricke’s dry cowboy voice came in when he read along. “‘We didn’t have any problems with them up here,’” Fricke said, grinning. “‘We had plenty of fires that year. Seven Canyons kept us all busy.’”