Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

by Susan Straight

  Brenda was bent over the sink, her sides showing plump as bread loaves around her back. She scrubbed the grime from the soap dish, then took an old toothbrush to the grout around the tile. He looked at his oil-blackened knuckles and put his hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t turn.

  This whole lie part of my life, this way I’m addin up secrets—I can’t do this, he thought. “Look,” he said, “I come home every night. I give you my money. I’m a good boy. When I go on call, if I’m gone three days on a fire, you can’t trip out. If I don’t call you then, it’s cause I’m workin. But can’t nothin happen to me up there worse than down here, Brenda.”

  She swung around and leaned against the rim of the sink, slanted on one arm, and he saw two small tucks under her bottom lip where she’d held it hard. He imagined her seeing the flying embers yesterday, the shingles arcing across the street, the tears joined by saliva at Charolette’s chin, and he pulled her forward against him as well as he could with the baby between them, so he wouldn’t have to look into her eyes.

  Hell, he thought, if I get hurt up there, if I get caught in a canyon, at least the government’s gon call her. If I get smoked down here in the Wild Wild West, I ain’t nobody. He remembered that long night in Jackson Park, when he’d thought about the gun, the insurance, and he blinked. If somethin happen while I’m on call, the government owe her and Charolette some dinero.

  But he couldn’t tell her that, couldn’t say it out loud. He said, “It’s extra money, Brenda. And I won’t be around to mess up the sink or make dirty laundry a few days a month.”

  “Like I’m worried about that,” she said, pushing away from him to stare at his face.

  He stared back, into her gold eyes, flecks of dark like silt near her pupils, and then he grinned. “You holdin that old toothbrush like a lethal weapon. You must want me out your way. Or you gettin that energy burst right before the baby comes. Either way, I won’t do nothin to make you mad.”

  “Now you know that’s a lie,” she said, and her mouth quivered upward. “But you’re hopeless. I can’t fix that.”

  “Nope,” he said, lacing his fingers behind her neck.

  “Silver mornings used to balance my skin,” Roscoe said quietly.

  Darnell sat by the spool table, and when he sipped the coffee, he finally felt it. Hot coffee inside hot skin made you run sweat and work loose. But the heat that radiated out to touch chilled arms and necks was what used to make Roscoe smile and raise his steaming cup to the mist. Darnell remembered his confusion during those late fall mornings when Roscoe would call them that, silver, when he’d name the days by color over his coffee cup.

  At the fire station, with Fricke, was where Darnell had finally learned to drink coffee. Mrs. Batiste had always offered it to him in high school, when he came to pick up Brenda, but the mud-rich liquid she held had always scared him, reminded him of Mr. Batiste’s uninterested gaze and the certainty that Darnell would disappear eventually if he refused to look at him.

  And he and Melvin used to hate milk in the mornings, wanting root beer in old coffee cups so they could swirl something brown, trying to be grown. His mother would laugh and push them out the door to the driveway, where the men talked, warmed their hands, laced their boots, where later Louis and Darnell and Nacho folded their arms and glared at the foggy-morning work.

  Charolette ate her buttermilk bar, sitting in her pink plastic chair near his leg. Darnell’s father said, “Old ladies gon be lightin fires today, wantin some wood, and still got ashes all over their yards from Grayglen.”

  “Maybe them little pieces of Grayglen that fell down here make our property values go up,” Floyd King said, and Nacho crossed the tired, drought-matted lawn, raising powder with his boots.

  “Charolette, you workin with your daddy today?” Roscoe asked her, his voice thick, and she shook her head.

  “Halloween,” she said proudly. “It’s a holiday.”

  Darnell’s father raised his eyebrows. “Halloween? On a Wednesday? Your lazy daddy gon call that a holiday? Boy don’t never want to work.”

  “We gotta go around and look at all the decorations,” Darnell said. “It is a holiday—ask Juan and José. They’re takin off for Day of the Dead.”

  “Some Mexican guys up there died in the fire,” Roscoe said, staring toward Grayglen. “Does Juan know the guys who started it?”

  Darnell shook his head. Maybe it was the three guys on the bikes, he kept thinking. But who could ever tell? Some workers had been sleeping in the eucalyptus grove, maybe guys who didn’t want to pay someone to sleep under an avocado tree, maybe guys who’d just gotten to Rio Seco that night and heard there was work in Grayglen. The arson investigators had found a cooking fire that was probably the first small embers.

  “Day of the Dead,” Roscoe said. “All the souls flying around?”

  “Juan’s gon show me tonight,” Darnell said. He looked at his father. “Like GranaLene’s day. La Toussaint. All Saints.”

  “Lotta souls hoverin around here,” his father said. He worked his lips. “Been a long summer. And they say what—five or six people died in their houses?”

  Darnell nodded, thinking of the swaths of hillside looking like graveyards. Countless houses gone—the teardown they’d done, new houses and old mansions. Cars melted to heaps. And the fire had skipped, random and powerful, like all storms. He’d seen Mrs. Shaefer’s house on TV, untouched, and another home still had pumpkins on the porch. The wind had blown the firestorm all the way across streets and block walls to the end of Trent’s tract, burning the last five houses on his cul-de-sac.

  Trent’s house was rubble. He’d called Darnell to say, “Man, I lost it all. Everything.”

  “What you plannin?” Darnell had asked.

  Trent paused. “I don’t know. Get some land, maybe plan a custom-built somewhere. New garden.”

  Darnell stood up and said to his father, “We gotta go.” He took Charolette’s hand. “You notice how the Mexican yards look? They serious into Halloween.”

  Many of the houses were festooned with spiderwebs, trees hung with sheet ghosts, and a few had real dummies hanging, and headstones pitted gray, and half-propped coffins with dry-ice smoke wafting out gently. “You scared?” he asked Charolette, and she shook her head, staring. “That’s right—you don’t know what none a this is.” He blinked hard, thought of the row of headstones her grandmother would whitewash, the ones his grandmother used to decorate. He walked faster.

  Juan saw them coming down the street, and he waved. Charolette waved back. Darnell nodded, still breathing hard, trying to keep his eyes clear. “Come in,” Juan said. “His wife’s grave is not here. So he make this.”

  José sat near a shrine by his mattress in the garage, and he nodded at Darnell and Charolette. There was a picture of his wife, her almond eyes, her hair in a wide bun. Marigolds, candles, crosses, and sparkling candies were arranged around her, and the candle flickered to make the sweets shine. “Here,” José said, giving one to Charolette.

  It was a skeleton, his bones white sugar. “La calaca,” José said, when she peered down at the ribs, the skull. “Eat.” He mimed, bringing his hand to his mouth, and Darnell felt a chill in his own ribs.

  But Charolette had only seen the skeletons made of paper, dangling from people’s porches and guarding their windows, and she didn’t know they were scary. She said they looked funny. She licked the glittering hipbone of the skeleton and said, “La calaca.”

  “The candle burn for three days,” Juan said. “So los muertos can see to visit, and eat and drink. If a man, you give mescal and tequila and cigarettes.” José’s wife’s altar held bread baked in special shapes, and the candies.

  “The dead people come to visit?” Darnell asked.

  Juan nodded. “The inside,” he said, touching his chest.

  José held out a skull to Darnell, and he licked it, the grainy sweet rough on his tongue. When I take Charolette out tonight trick-or-treatin, maybe Louis and Antoin
e and GranaLene might come. He licked the skull again. But what about all the ones that aren’t dead—just gone? Floatin. Like Leon and Donnie and Gas, Melvin, all the zombies? He watched Charolette cradle the skeleton in her palm and stare at the picture of the young woman.

  José spoke in rapid Spanish to Juan, and Juan said, “You have no zócalo, like Mexico, no place to meet.”

  “Like a mall?” Darnell asked.

  Juan hesitated. “Like a park. A plaza, that’s it. So the kids walk around the street and trickitreat. They have trickitreat in Mexico now, too.” José said something else. Juan smiled. “He says when you walk tonight, his baby walk, too. He no have picture, but he know what she look.” José smiled and nodded at Charolette.

  “You don’t need to take her out in the streets, it’s too dangerous,” Brenda said. “The paper said there could be poison in the candy, and I heard people saying some gang might even be shooting.” She folded her arms high in the crease between her breasts and belly. “I can’t walk, cause my feet are too swollen.”

  Charolette was trying on her costume. Her two grandmothers had taken a long piece of lace, sewed pearls and sequins and ruffles on it to make a princess dress. She glowed white, twirling on the porch.

  Brenda said, “Waltrina said her grandkids only go to a party in the mall now, cause it’s safer.” Darnell rolled his eyes. “And I thought you were only gonna take her to your mom’s and Marietta Cook’s.”

  “We’re gon walk over there and meet Hollie.” Darnell spun Charolette around by her braids and said, “She’s magic.” He looked at Brenda. “She’s mine, okay? I got her back. Nothin’s gon happen to her when she’s with me.”

  After dinner, she gave in. “Okay, let me put on her makeup and do her hair,” Brenda said, and they disappeared into the bathroom.

  “I better get used to this makeup stuff,” Darnell said to himself, sitting on the steps to read the paper. Another article called the fire an “urban interface” blaze and then discussed the drought, development, and future fires. He put the paper down and stood on the sidewalk. The night was cool. The day had stayed mild gray, as if all the ashes had risen up to the sun and said, “Give it a rest.”

  He heard them coming. A group of kids paraded down the sidewalk already.

  Clinton swung his stuffed-sock blackjack and said, “Homey don’t play dat!” Lamont wore his junior-tackle football uniform, with black slashes under his eyes. And another boy with them opened his overcoat to show Darnell a black plastic Uzi. “What the hell are you?” Darnell said. The boy grinned and pulled out two plastic bags: one held flour, the other grass clippings. “You better take your little ass home with that shit,” Darnell said, hard. “That ain’t funny.”

  “You gon give us some candy or what?” the boy said, hard-voiced.

  “That’s my uncle,” Lamont said. “Don’t try and front on him.”

  Darnell gave each of his nephews three of the miniature chocolate bars he’d bought, and the other kid stomped off. He took the bowl to the porch, eating a baby Milky Way. Brenda had said they were too expensive, but he remembered how happy he and Louis and the others had been when they saw chocolate bars.

  “You know it’s too cold to be out long, cause she has a runny nose,” Brenda announced behind him, and he turned.

  Charolette wore a glittery tiara on her braided hair, and she had on pink lipstick and sparkly eyeshadow. She grinned and held up her princess wand and her plastic pumpkin. “Let’s go, Daddy.”

  The sky was fading behind the trees, and he held Charolette’s hand clenched around her wand. “I thought you were a tomboy,” he said.

  She looked puzzled. “I’m a queen.”

  “You kinda young for a queen,” he told her. “Queens are married, like your mama.” He smiled. “Yeah. Mama’s a queen, okay? You can be a princess.”

  “I’m a princess.” She turned up her face. “We goin to see Hollie and Gramma Mary and Pop-Pop and Unca Roscoe…”

  “Yeah, all of em. But you better go next door and get you some candy.” He walked her up the steps, and the three girls answered. “Trick or treat,” Charolette said shyly, and they dropped bubble gum into her pumpkin.

  The next house was dark, but the one after it, and all the rest, had jack-o-lanterns with wide grins and glowing eyes. Darnell hadn’t seen many decorations in the new tracts when he’d worked all month, he realized. He looked down the street at the graves surrounded by wispy cotton, the sheet ghosts in the trees, and calacas everywhere, loose-jointed, smiling, wearing black suits and top hats. He held Charolette back while two big groups of kids raced up the next driveway, and a breeze flickered all the tiny flames in the pumpkins. Charolette frowned and said, “Fires in the pumpkins can’t burn us, huh, Daddy?”

  “No,” he said. “They’re just candles.”

  She looked up at the trees lining the street. “The wind is soughing.”

  “What?” He laughed.

  “Uncle Roscoe told me and Hollie. The wind is soughing in the leaves.”

  “Like blowin?” he said. “We gon walk over there and see Hollie and ask Uncle Roscoe. I never heard that word, and I spent a long time around trees.”

  She drew her chin back and said, “You don’t know everything, Daddy.”

  “Yeah?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You don’t know how to sew pearls.”

  “Nope,” he said. “You ready?” The kids swarmed past. Then Charolette shook off his hand.

  “I can do it myself,” she said, marching up to the door. He waited. The soft wind came through again. Soughing? Palm trees sounded sparkly. All those Halloweens with Donnie and Nacho and Leon and Louis, running the streets, roaming all the way to Treetown, where the Thompson brothers fought them for their candy-filled pillowcases. The palm fronds always sounded sparkly. And the pepper branches moved silently, waving. He saw Charolette turn, her pearls gleaming and crown falling crooked, and she came down the porch steps holding out her hand for him.

  About the Author

  Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Susan Straight

  Cover design by Angela Goddard

  978-1-4804-1088-6

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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