Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Read online

  He sat on the bed, his back near her legs. “You look different now,” he said. Her face was fuller, her jaw wider.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Dark circles. I’m tired, and I got a lot on my mind.” She stared at her window, and he could see her face in the reflection.

  “Brenda, I was trippin hard when I was in the Canyons fire. I can’t lie. But now I’m done. If you worried about that, I’m done. When I was up there, I was thinkin about you.”

  “What an original rap,” she said, smiling a little. “I was thinkin bout you, baby.” She poked out her lips like a guy working hard.

  “See, you can’t talk smack like that to anyone else but me,” he said, laughing. “Come on. You need to marry me.”

  She put her face near his neck. “No fires?”

  He felt her breath. “I don’t know—I might get a job in town, right?”

  “No,” she said, not moving. “You taught me that much. You’d need to get in the fire academy, take the EMT training, all that.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  “Just say you won’t leave,” she whispered. “That’s the woman’s nonoriginal rap. It’s what we all say.”

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Just bring your clothes for tomorrow.”

  On the way to the front door, Brenda held his arm hard, and her mother only smiled, no teeth, not a big smile, just her lips curving tight to carve deep dimples near the corners. He moved his hand to Brenda’s back and went toward the doorknob.

  He kept hearing Melvin’s voice in his head, saying, “Oh, man, it’s the best there is. The best.” It had been weeks since he’d lain on her with arms along her face, his lips at her neck, and now, in their apartment with nobody to burst in on them, no cold leather bucket seat or borrowed bed, on their own mattress, her belly was a slippery, shifting hill. Not hard, not soft, and he imagined the baby, his son, curling away from him, toward her backbone. But she laced her fingers across his back and pulled him down harder.

  HARD WORK

  “YOU DON’T LIKE THIS? Go get you a nine-to-five then.”

  All his life he’d heard that. His father and Roscoe used to say it every time a big job came up, years ago. If a vicious Santa Ana had ripped up a whole stand of eucalyptus, Melvin and Darnell and Louis would have to ride the flatbed for days after school, all weekend. Chopping, carrying the wood, throwing it on the trucks, dodging sawdust at 6 A.M. on a summer Saturday. Melvin, tired from partying the night before, would sit on the curb and bitch.

  “Boy, you can’t handle this then take your ass somewhere and find you a nine-to-five. When you grown and somebody else feedin you. Now get up and move them branches.”

  Fricke always said it when Scott or Perez complained on the fire line or dressed slow for a night call. “You can always go down to the flatlands and get a nice nine-to-five.”

  What the hell were you supposed to wear? A white shirt and gray corduroys. Brenda said loafers, reddish brown. She brought them home from the mall. She’d touched his hand this morning when she left. Her fingers were hot. She said being pregnant made the blood circulate faster, and at night when he lay touching her leg and hip, he felt how heated her skin was, imagined the blood racing furiously.

  The interview wasn’t until ten. He opened the freezer door. Brenda had asked him to make more orange juice. She said the baby needed vitamin C.

  The wedge of cake, wrapped in plastic, sat in the center of the almost-empty compartment. Darnell could see the purple flowers. The women had told him to put a piece in the freezer—he and Brenda were supposed to eat it on their first anniversary.

  “You suppose to put the whole top layer in there,” Brenda’s mother had said softly, standing in the kitchen. “When you have one a them big four-layer cakes, you put by that bitty top one, with the people, for a year.” She ran her hand along the counter, her face turned away.

  Honoré’s cake had been one circle. His mother and Brenda’s had brought dishes and forks. His mother made fried chicken with lemon pepper, and Brenda’s mother made gumbo and rice. When school let out, Darnell’s father and Roscoe picked up Sophia, Paula, and Brenda’s brother James from high school. No one mentioned Mr. Batiste. The little party stood in the courthouse room, at a table, and a woman did the ceremony. Brenda’s mother had stayed up all night to make her a simple silky dress, with tiny pink flowers against the white.

  He took out the juice. Honoré’s cake. Honoré had always made cakes, as long as Darnell could remember, for birthdays, weddings, just plain hungry weekends. People said, “I feel like a Honoré cake. Go by there and see what he got.”

  George did haircuts. His mother and Brenda’s sewed curtains, dresses—especially wedding and bridesmaid outfits. He licked the frozen juice from his finger. It had hurt Brenda’s mother not to sew bridesmaid dresses for a big wedding, not to see the cake and kiss people on the cheeks and clear from long tables the matchbooks printed with “Darnell and Brenda Tucker” and little bells below the date. When it got dark in the apartment, she’d said, “No dollar dance. Y’all didn’t get a dance at all.”

  He and Brenda should have danced the first long, slow song while the wedding guests took their turns, the men handing Brenda fan-folded dollars or fives, the women tucking bills into Darnell’s tux pocket. But he’d worn this jacket, the one he had on now.

  The mirrored windows of the tall county and city buildings glared, silver sheets in the morning sun. Clerks like Brenda, secretaries and typists and receptionists and cashiers, all women, filing and talking on phones and staring at computer screens and nodding and laughing and looking behind them to see what he put on their desks. The stale air, smoky-sealed windows, the silk plants and wormlike letters crawling on computer screens—too green and fluorescent.

  For weeks, he’d watched his hand write on the application papers: Graduated from Fairmount High, one semester Rio Seco City College, one year California Conservation Corps, one year seasonal firefighter for the California Department of Forestry. Didn’t take long.

  He had flipped through the rolls on the job book, stared at the postings on the walls at the city building, the county, the university, and the city college. Custodian, maintenance, landscape maintenance, warehouse. The personnel rooms were always crowded with other guys: young, old, dressed every which way. He’d lay the paper on the woman’s desk, and she’d turn: The application process consists of two parts….

  Behind her and the other women were doors that led to the men he hadn’t even been called to see, until today. Soft stomach. Glasses and ring and pen. He talked on the phone, too, sent out papers, handed files and instructions to the women, who handed them to Brenda.

  He sat in the waiting area, hearing the electronic beeps of the computer letters under the hands of the woman who typed. Brenda would come home to tell him about how long she sat while she input people’s information, how the computer lost things. “Nothing yet?” she’d say, her belly rising when she sat deep down in the couch. “Yeah. I input the stuff for two new guys today. Seventy-eight thousand a year, consulting to the county on transportation. Eighty-two a year, executive administrator for county housing. They give out loans to low-income people. They get full benefits. Vision and dental, too.”

  If she didn’t have the benefits, she wouldn’t be seeing the doctor once a month. Registering at the hospital. He tried not to shake his leg in the chair. Ain’t no need for me to be around. Not unless I’m bringin in some dinero.

  He sat in another chair, across from two men. One had the suit and glasses, and the other had the green Park and Recreation uniform. Like a ranger, Darnell thought, and the man spoke.

  “We’re looking for a landscape maintenance guy for Park and Rec, taking care of property, doing a variety of things. So I see you’ve been firefighting. You didn’t like it?”

  “I liked it,” Darnell said, folding his hands. Shit. I loved it. “But it’s seasonal. I need a permanent job.”

  “Uh-huh,” the suit man said. “Do
you have any landscape experience?”

  “My father is a tree trimmer,” Darnell said. “I’ve worked with him for a long time. And I’ve done gardening work, too.”

  “What’s the first step you take to fix a broken sprinkler?” the ranger man asked.

  Darnell swallowed. “You have to dig all around the area to get to the pipes.” Was that right? Their faces didn’t change.

  The suit man said, “If you saw a fight on city property, what would you do?”

  “Excuse me?” Darnell said.

  “What actions would you take?”

  “Try to break it up, I guess.”

  The suit man only smiled. “How would a young man like yourself feel about going to work in, say, a city park in Terracina? Young men in Terracina often don’t get along with young men from the Westside. I see by your address that you live on the Westside.”

  Shit, Darnell thought. I put down Pops’ address out of habit. What was the man asking? Gangbanger stuff? “Fine with me,” he said, looking straight ahead.

  Ranger man’s turn. “What are the first steps you have to take to clear a field for fire season, with a city-owned tractor?”

  Darnell smiled. “I used bulldozers in the mountains. I guess with a tractor I’d check the field for rocks and gullies that might break the machine.”

  Ranger man grinned back and nodded slightly. “Okay,” he said.

  Darnell walked off the elevator. Fifteen minutes, he thought. He headed off the plaza, feeling the loafers tight on his feet.

  Strip malls were always the same. The small square spaces like garage doors, the shiny plastic signs. He bought a doughnut from an Oriental woman, who smiled, handing him his change silently. He stood in the tiny parking lot. Always a doughnut shop, always an Oriental man holding trays of glazed. A nail salon—Oriental women, small and pretty with carefully painted eyes and nails, sitting at low tables holding women’s fingers delicately, barely touching. Always a fast-food place—pizza or subs or hamburgers or Chinese. Men with skin darker than Fricke’s but lighter than Darnell’s behind the counter and grill. Greek, or maybe Middle Eastern. They looked at him impassively when he bought a soda. Tiny movable letters on the lit-up menu high on the wall spelled out, at the bottom, “Ibrahim, Suleymon, Mina—Allah bless and protect us.”

  And always a liquor store. He knew these men were Korean because of the squared letters on their posters and newspapers. Korean writing looked almost exactly like gang graffiti, he thought, buying a candy bar on his way to the Westside. I’ma borrow a car from somebody and go out to the cement plant past Terracina.

  “If it’s a boy, do we have to name it Darnell?”

  Her voice pressed deep into his chest, and he had to throw his head against the pillow and laugh. “Darnell? No, baby, I wouldn’t do that to nobody else,” He rubbed his fingers up into her damp hair. “You think it’s a boy?”

  Brenda shifted onto her side of the bed. “Women just come up to me like they been known me all my life, touching me, talking about, ‘You carryin that so high, have to be a boy. Look how he’s ridin.’ All kinda women, in the store, at lunch, everywhere.”

  “You didn’t say what you think,” Darnell said. He was still afraid to press his palms against her skin, like she kept making him do to feel the tiny lump kicks. Every time she said, “Hurry up, right here,” the foot or whatever it was receded back inside her, like it didn’t want any part of him.

  “I dream about a boy.” Turning to put her face in the pillow, she whispered, “I dream he has all his teeth and I can’t feed him cause he bites.”

  Darnell lay still, knowing he was hard against her thigh, trying not to see her tightened nipples in the light, the way he used to, trying not to taste them. When they lay on their sides, so the baby wouldn’t press against her heart and lungs, he could barely fit himself inside her, and if he dipped his head to her breasts, she pushed at his forehead, saying, “They’re too sore.”

  He was silent for a long time, not wanting to move toward her or away, and when he thought she was asleep, he put his arms behind his head. “We could name it Darnella if it’s a girl,” she said suddenly.

  “What? You crazy,” he said. “You still thinkin about that?”

  “Yeah. Darnella. There’s a lady at work named Waltrina. After her father. And another lady named Johnetta.”

  “Just because their daddies had big heads don’t mean I’m a fool.” He had to laugh. “Waltrina?”

  “One of the supervisors in Benefits, an older white lady from Kansas. She has pictures of her grandkids on her desk.” She stared up at the ceiling, and then looked at him. “My dad didn’t name James after him because he said Etienne was too French. He said it would sound wrong in California.”

  Darnell said, “I always thought your dad’s name was sharp. It’s different.” He slid one arm under her pillow and pulled her closer. “You like your dad’s name? Maybe he won’t be permanently pissed at me if we name the baby for him.” A soon as he said it, he knew it was a mistake. Her eyes shone brighter and she didn’t make a sound, but her shoulders shook until he held her still.

  “I don’t miss him,” she said. “I miss my mom. Sometimes when she’s sewing stuff for the baby, she calls me and says we have to get a good crib, not a cheap one. Her voice gets funny and we hang up.” Darnell felt the wet on his chest, felt sweat where her belly touched his ribs.

  “Everybody else seen them ads, too,” his father said. “Come on.”

  It had rained hard for two days, and Darnell spent the time playing dominoes with Roscoe and looking through the classifieds. His father was driving him to San Bernardino, where a new Smith’s Food King was opening in a month. The ad said “All positions.”

  The sun was hot and hard already, the clouds gone, and the mud had quickly settled in the few puddles, leaving clear water. Crows gathered in the vacant lots to drink, and broken glass glittered, washed clean. Darnell smelled the watery vapor drying fast. Five inches of rain before you torch trails. Fricke was laughing at him. “That was just a trace, home boy. Drought piss.”

  “Look at that,” his father said, cutting through the valley to San Bernardino. “Snow level’s down to about three thousand feet.” The mountain range was a ridge of dark purple with bleach-pure snow in a perfectly iced line.

  “I’ma have to get a good vehicle if I get a slave out here,” Darnell said.

  “Don’t get too happy,” his father said. The crowd was already gathered at the industrial park. Shit, Darnell thought, seeing the mass of heads in the parking lot, the long line straight up the sidewalk. Brothers in dark knit caps, white guys with baseball hats, Chicano guys with black hair shiny as helmets.

  “Just go on and I’ll catch a ride with somebody,” he told his father, but his father shook his head.

  “Too wet to work today,” he said. “I’ll get some coffee and wait.”

  Darnell stood in the line, listening to the short sentences of people just meeting, hearing the long mumbles of friends who’d come to apply together. He stared at the palm trees, skinny and new, just planted in this fresh business park. Two guys behind him were meat cutters. He heard people talking about cashier experience, box boy, bakery, deli counter. When he got to the women inside, he filled out his application quickly, checking every box under Position Desired.

  In the truck, he had to say something to break the quiet. “Dudes behind me were meat cutters. Drive all over LA, wherever they get sent.”

  “Then they ain’t union,” his father said. “Nobody’s union no more. But butchers still make fourteen, fifteen an hour.” He gripped the wheel. “Kaiser Steel used to pay that. And Goodyear.” Darnell remembered the big smokestacks at Kaiser when they used to puff white clouds. He’d thought they were fire smoke a few times when he was small. “Brenda’s daddy makes them kinda wages at Royal,” his father went on. “One a the last places. And they layin off nonunion, too.”

  “I can’t get in no union,” Darnell muttered, and his fa
ther raised his chin to frown at him.

  “You feelin sorry for yourself already? Been lookin two months?” Darnell tried to say something, but his father cut him off. “You see Floyd King layin cement, boy?”

  “No,” Darnell said.

  “And when we came from Oklahoma, he was a cement-layin fool. Made benches, sidewalks, everything. He tried to get in the union back in the sixties. They let colored work, all right, but then they lay you off just before you get your hours required. Every time.”

  “Yeah, Pops. I know the story.” Darnell looked at the freeway. His father had turned off an early exit and was heading up a canyon road into the foothills. “You lost?”

  “Don’t get smart, boy.” The truck headed slow up past the already-bristling shoots of grass after the rain. “You know, I ain’t seen the snow on a clear day like this for a long time. I hardly ever come out this way. Look up there—Cajon Pass, all the way to the desert.”

  Darnell saw the mountains, the strip of freeway cutting through. “Cold up there today,” he said.

  His father was still watching the hills. “Me and your mother came down that way, when we drove out here from Oklahoma. We could see the whole valley laid out, all the way to Rio Seco. Orange groves, lemon, grapefruit.” He leaned out the window to spit, and his voice was lost for a minute. “And jobs all over. Shoot, we bought that house on Picasso, half the men on the block worked at Goodyear. The other half was in the Air Force.”

  “Memory lane ain’t gon help me,” Darnell said, folding his arms hard. “Hey, I’m not tryin to disrespect you, Pops. I’m just tellin you.”

  His father’s lips pulled tight over his teeth. “You better listen. I came out here, and your mother was pregnant with Melvin.”

  “You didn’t stay at Goodyear. Mama said you quit cause you didn’t like it.” Darnell couldn’t meet his father’s eyes.

  “I wanted to be outside,” his father said, though, his voice softer. “Man, I used to hunt in Oklahoma. Came out here, went up in the mountains, wasn’t no game I could get. All government land.”