Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  “You see Fricke’s famous now,” Corcoran said, leaning against the doorway. “Big shit.”

  Darnell handed the paper back to Fricke, who said, “Perez told the reporter he needed the ten dollars an hour. Something about you Rio Seco home boys—maybe it’s the toxics and heavy metal in the river.”

  “They don’t live with me,” Darnell said. “And I don’t set fires.”

  “They didn’t do it for pyro love, man, they did it for money,” Corcoran said.

  “You know a thrill was involved,” Darnell said. “Get a bottle of Jack, check the riverbottom fuel. Everybody blames the homeless guys.”

  Fricke shook his head. “Homeless. What an urban media term. In Montana, they’re still bums.”

  Darnell saw the needle-shifting light through the pine branches. Jackson Park—sleeping in the car, in the cane stand. Louis—dozing in the pecan grove. “Maybe they’re just peripatetic,” he murmured.

  Fricke stroked his mustache exaggeratedly. “Whoa—been taking college classes?”

  “A client,” Darnell said. Fricke and Corcoran waited, but Darnell didn’t mention the truck, the name. “I’m doin landscape maintenance. Got two guys workin for me. I work for the guys drivin their Beemers to work in LA. Just like you do. Sometimes.”

  “They’re multiplying out here like cancer,” Fricke said. “Canyon Estates. Wildridge Ranch.”

  “You guys should be gettin a big job out here pretty soon, all this heat and no humidity.” Darnell watched Corcoran smile and walk toward the door; he remembered all the mornings, waking up to smell the resin in the wind, the sage-sharp dirt flying. He handed Fricke the envelope he’d been holding all this time. “I’ma turn the application in for next season. Paid call. You put in a few good words for me?”

  “My words don’t mean much when the legislature cuts the funds,” Fricke started, but he scanned the papers, avoiding Darnell’s eyes. “I heard they might need a few paid-call reserves out in San Bernardino soon.” When he handed the papers back, he slanted his head thoughtfully to one side. “Remember your stunt in Seven Canyons?”

  Darnell nodded. He touched the stem scar near his knuckles; Charolette still kept trying to put Band-Aids on it.

  “We used to talk up here, right, about some guys having liquor in their veins,” Fricke said. “Remember? And some guys have travel. Some guys have smoke.” He scratched his neck.

  “Yeah, well, I drained a couple of my veins, okay?” He saw that Fricke didn’t get it. “My kid’s got some a my blood. Maybe I gave her some smoke.” He thought of Charolette’s wariness near the flames. Fricke’s lips were curling, and Darnell said, “I ain’t lyin, I still got it, but maybe not like before. Maybe not like dyin.”

  He went farther up the mountain, not down, and he spun into the scenic turnout to look at the blank, black chamise covering the slope below. One match. Some ready wood. Not a boot stomper. He reached into the glove compartment, touching a few of the white rocks, and pulled out the matchbook. He lit one, and the windows reflected him back, wavering. What up, homey? He watched his fingers hold the lengthening flame, felt the heat closer to his fingertips. My ID. You gon ID me, sittin here, when you pass? The flame burned him, and he sucked the thumb and forefinger, then lit another match. He saw the cover this time when he pulled it across. Zamora’s. He’d treated Juan and José for lunch last month, told them it was his favorite. Mr. Zamora had given him a stack of tortillas for Brenda.

  Darnell let the match burn until the fire touched his fingers again, and he held it until the pain seared down the knuckle and bone. He leaned back against the seat, sucking on the throbbing skin, but his spit was too hot. He started the truck and drove to the spring a mile up the highway, and he let the water trickle icy over his hand. Then he sat, hearing the rustle of animals and leaves and wind, until a camper passed slow, laboring up the grade, and moon faces stared at him. He nodded to the moving windows. “What up?” he said to the black air and asphalt trailing them.

  She sat on the porch awkwardly, legs wide under her belly. He dropped the keys on the cement and sat down one step lower, so that her voice brushed across his temple.

  “When we were sitting in the car that night, after you told me about Louis? I kept looking at the Spider, and I remembered how I used to act mad when you were always fixing it in your dad’s driveway. But I’d be sitting in there while you worked on it, remember? You’d have me test the brakes or the signals, and I’d be thinking that at least I knew where you were. You couldn’t get in trouble.”

  “Nobody to get in trouble with now,” he said, staring at the sidewalk, the deeply chipped curb.

  When he finally came inside, Charolette was stumbling toward him, blinking, carrying her brush. He could tell she’d been crying; the skin around her eyes was still swollen reddish. “You supposed to be asleep,” he said, but Brenda came behind her, shaking her head.

  “She’s been waiting for you for hours,” Brenda whispered. “She thinks you’re gone.”

  He sat down heavily on the couch. Lately, she kept wanting to brush his hair, to finger the razored lines. “I’m not in the mood, chica, my hair already hurts from too much thinkin.”

  But she stood on the pillow behind him, stamping a moment for balance, saying, “Turn around, baby. You got pretty hair.” She pushed the soft-bristled brush roughly down the back of his head. “Be still—you gon look real pretty when I’m finish,” she said. She applied the brush carefully to his temple, his nape. She put her palm right on top of his head to steady it, and the hot air from the screen door rushed in. Her belly pressed warm against his back, her knees digging under his armpits. He remembered all the times he’d watched women do hair in his mother’s living room, the faces under hands dreamy-still, slack with sleepy thoughts. His mother, GranaLene, His sisters, Brenda. The brush tingled his scalp, and she pulled on his ear, her voice not sleepy at all now. “Be still,” she commanded. “I’m not finish.”

  When the wind came, the sky turned blue-gold again, the smog swirled away and trash blew from the dirt to cling to chain link and wrought iron. It took two days for the gusts to pick up grit and fling it into ears and windows, to loosen the dry-heaved roots of eucalyptus, to cut power and telephone lines here and there. Juan and José squinted into the dust that rose even from soft new sod, and Darnell worked silently, hearing people argue, chasing leaves and branches that flew away from the chain saws while his father shouted and finally had to come down from the tree. The wind dried people’s eyes, coated their teeth, sucked up the damp from drip systems, splintered pepper trunks. The streets were laced with fallen palm fronds.

  The sun had been hundred-degree hot for seven days, glaring onto boot-tamped dirt and broken fine stems and ground glass. The old women on Picasso frowned at the too-yellow mornings, dragging hoses and waving weakly at sunrise when he and his father passed on their way to a downed eucalyptus. Roscoe hadn’t worked for weeks; he’d been driving around the desert, even the mountains, he told Darnell’s father, and he’d been to the Salton Sea, fishing with Marietta Cook, thinking.

  The wind was steady, making its way through hair, even protective-tight curls, to layer itch around the forehead. Darnell woke on the eighth day with a wind headache, from the dry air riding under the scalp to pull taut the damp covering around his brain, and he rubbed the sand at his lashes, looking at the bronze-warm windows.

  Charolette whined to come with him after Mrs. Shaefer called. “I’ll bet your daughter misses the koi pond,” Mrs. Shaefer said. “I’ve got a gift for her. And I’ve got a friend who’d like you to give an estimate on maintenance for her property up here in Grayglen.”

  “It’s too hot, babygirl,” Brenda said absently when Charolette tripped, “CamIcome witchu Daddy?” four times off her tongue.

  That made Charolette angrier. “I’m not the baby girl, I’m the big girl,” she said. “That gonna be the babygirl.” She jabbed her finger at Brenda’s belly.

  “I don’t know if I can ha
ng with three women,” Darnell said.

  “It’s hot,” Brenda murmured again, her eyes closed.

  “It’s too hot in here,” Charolette said, and Darnell shrugged when she clutched the outer seam of his jeans. She never let go of his knee, his sleeve, his baby finger, it seemed. In a moment, she was on the floor, trying to force her feet into her stained pink canvas sneakers, the ones she called her work shoes. “The tongue, Daddy, it’s stuck.”

  She brought the tea-party set his mother had given her for Christmas, along with the new Barbie his sisters had bought her last week. In the truck, Darnell looked at the doll’s Hershey skin and long hair, her chest pointy as two pyramids. “So what’s this home chick’s name?” he asked.

  Charolette frowned at him like he had no sense. “Barbie, Daddy.”

  He drove blindly up the avenue to Grayglen, remembering the ginger-colored Barbie in the gutter, feeling her sharp ledge of toes in his breastbone. Louis lying curve-backed in the dust.

  He blinked hard when they began to wind up the narrow streets toward the address Mrs. Shaefer had given him on the phone. Darnell parked at the turnout in the street; the woman was on vacation, but he didn’t want to take a chance on getting too close to the house for security. Security. He stared ahead at the tiny sign planted in the flower bed, and that only made him think of Donnie, of the metal lodged in his blood, liquid racing around it like a stream around a stone. Or white tissue growing around it like a pearl?

  “Stay here,” he told Charolette, fanning his fingers over his forehead and pushing hard. She smiled; she loved the white truck, always clean because Juan washed it almost every day. She loved to trace the fancy lettering on the doors, to say “AnTuan’s,” to snap open the glove compartment.

  When he was finished walking the yard, he sat on the curb to rest. The property next door was silent, too, and someone was watering far up the sloping street, just a trickling hose. The overflow ran slowly down the gutter. Still no rain, he thought. Nothin to wash all this stuff out. Charolette bent to watch the water finger through pine needles, pepper berries, tiny sand dunes. The gutter was bone dry, and the rivulet crept along like all the fine dust was catching on its belly, to slow it coming toward her sneakers, pushing through leaves and falling into cracks by the curb.

  “It’s a river, Daddy,” she said, putting down the jar with filaree seeds she’d found. “A honey river. Go, river, hurry!” She jumped up and squatted by the water, rushed with the stream when it finally burst free of a pine-needle jam, and crouched to help it along like a TV golfer urging his ball to roll the right way.

  Darnell watched the water turn bronze when it ran under the shadow made by his legs. “Daddy, it’s leaving! Come on!”

  “You go—I’ma sit here,” he said. Pepper berries and sparkles of silt were magnified in the tiny pool left behind. A lake—she hadn’t seen a real lake yet. He could take her to the mountains and show her one near the station. He’d always hung out there when he could. He watched her bend to touch the water and then jump up to follow it, oblivious of everything else. When he was small, he’d followed a gutter creek like this, in dusted hot concrete on Picasso one day, and then the meandering water had turned the corner to head down Pepper Avenue. He’d kept going, following the turns until the deep shade overhead made him look up and realize how far from home he’d come. He was all the way to Treetown, where the gutters turned to gullies and the water slipped down into the ditch carved off the asphalt.

  His father had yelled at him. “You only six! Who you fancy yourself to be, runnin off like that? What the hell you thinkin? Oh—you was in dreamland again, huh? You wasn’t thinkin!”

  I still ain’t always thinkin. Wasn’t payin attention with Louis, with security, with the girl named Quelle. Pay attention, man. “Charolette,” he called, and her face swung up from the water. “Come on back, it could be a car comin.”

  “The river’s down here,” she called, and he stood up.

  “Come on!” He heard tires, and he was standing beside her when the minivan chugged slowly up the hill. The two boys’ faces pressed against the glass to see Charolette, who knelt by the trickle.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Mrs. Shaefer’s house was cool and mauve. She heard the truck come down the drive, because she had opened the front door, flanked by pumpkins. “My fishies missed you,” she told Charolette. “I don’t have any grandkids to play with them.” She gave Charolette a papier-mâché goldfish, light as palm bark when Darnell held it.

  By eleven, it was 92 degrees and the wind was gusting hard. The pond water was murky at the edges, but the fish darted and Charolette bent close. Mrs. Shaefer had shown Darnell the bank, the patches of flannel bush and ceanothus solid like the mountains. The helicopter went over, circled back again, and Darnell looked up. The blade-whirring halo hovered, then sped somewhere else. The lady standin right here, Darnell thought, so I can’t be burglin the house, okay?

  Mrs. Shaefer knelt next to Charolette, telling her about the fish food, and Darnell drank the juice she’d brought him. No competition—this is the best client I’ve had, he thought. The helicopter zoomed over again, circling somewhere close, and Darnell said, “I guess we better get back home, chica. Your mama said it’s too hot to keep you out long.”

  Mrs. Shaefer walked them out to the white truck. “I look forward to Juan every week,” she said. “I love the way he trims the rosemary and the weeping willow.”

  Darnell heard the blades clattering, and he smiled. “Thanks for the fish,” he said, putting Charolette into her car seat.

  “Thank you, Gramma Tend,” Charolette said.

  Mrs. Shaefer leaned close to Darnell. “I told her I could be her Pretend Gramma, for visiting sometimes,” she whispered.

  He drove slowly from the yard, letting Charolette wave, but on the street he felt fear spread across his back. The helicopter flew in a regular circle now, and Darnell drove up to the stop sign.

  The first puff of smoke he saw was a delicate balloon, collapsing and curling back around itself like a jellyfish, rising slow. The fear spread under his armpits and around to his chest, a warm prickle he breathed in quickly, familiar, tingling. Charolette was absorbed in the small picture book about fish Mrs. Shaefer had given her, and he thought, I’ma just see if anybody else know about the smoke. Maybe I could help out with a shovel.

  But he knew now the helicopter had been eyeing it. He drove up past the avocado groves near Mrs. Shaefer’s, but the street narrowed here and he couldn’t see anything but the still, sullen leaves. If I go up to the water tower at the top, I can see the other side of this hill. I think this is the street. The warmth was different from the heat pressing in outside, blowing in the window. He felt the relaxing of his muscles, like Scott used to say about whiskey. Like when he was on the line. Itching. Yeah. The itch. Who told me about the itch? He drove, turned, and then saw the concrete water tower, squat and circular, with graffiti all around the base. He drove up to the chain-link fence.

  The mass of flames was rising in a eucalyptus grove, and the wind wouldn’t let the long streamers of fire rise up for a few minutes; it blew the blaze across a small road and over to a gray-wood grove of dead orange trees that someone was trying to sell. Another teardown, Darnell thought. The flames caught in the gnarled branches for a moment, and then the wind blew the fireball in a wall across the rows. Better get down there and start a line, over by that dirt road in the grove. He put the truck in gear.

  Who the hell threw a match in some eucalyptus? Nothin else could have started a fire up here—sure as hell no train tracks in Grayglen. And as the helicopter lingered over him, puzzling at the truck, the fire shook and roared into a hedge and a house. He saw the windows glow and explode, the white stucco walls disappear under orange, and the red-tile roof melt lighter. Charolette smelled the ashes now, heard the helicopter close, and she said, “Daddy, a bad man run away?”

  “No,” he said, moving the truck. Sometimes the helicopter circ
led for a long time near their house, and over the loudspeaker she’d heard the police tell a suspect to stop running, telling residents to stay in their houses.

  “A fire,” she said, nervous, leaning toward the dashboard to see out the windshield. He turned the truck around in the sandy dead end and heard the sirens pulling ribbons of sound up the hills.

  This was a county road, he remembered from when Trent had brought him up here to see part of Grayglen overall. He could smell the wind carrying traces of smoke into the car. It was blowing west off the hills. We going west—back to the Westside.

  They were higher up than usual; he hadn’t worked any jobs over this far, where the houses were still older, original Rio Seco money, his father had always said. A few scattered tree-trimming jobs, but most of the teardowns and new tracts were just below. He wound around the street back to the main avenue, and fire trucks raced by, Charolette pointing at the men in yellow holding on to the back. “They gon fall off, Daddy!” she yelled, and he looked at her panicked face. The smoke, wind, the sirens, and the truck spinning around on the curving streets—he’d been casual, thinking of Seven Canyons and Fricke, wondering if they’d call a crew from the mountains for a city fire like this one. Was CDF closest? And Charolette was crying now, looking up the road where the yellow coats had disappeared. Several Mexican men on ten-speeds flashed around the curve and sped downhill.

  “We’re goin home, babygirl,” he said. “It’s okay.” He drove over the crackle of fallen eucalyptus branches in the gutter and followed a van and a Bronco. He remembered doing the teardown, trying to think of which street it was on. Damn, we had trouble gettin a little dozer up here for that job—how they gonna get the fire rigs up these roads? That bridge over the gully is too narrow for fire trucks. He shook his head, Charolette craning her neck to see landmarks like she always did. “Daddy! My honey river!” she yelled, and he couldn’t tell by now if her voice was loud from fear or excitement.

  “Yup,” he said, glancing at the curb where she’d watched the water. The long cement drive where he’d faced the Doberman’s heated breath and curled tongue, the ridged gums. Why we stoppin here? The driver of the Bronco leaned out his open window, and so did Darnell, but he couldn’t see anything around the curve.