The summer he was six, the palm outside GranaLene’s caught fire in the long, dead fronds gathered around the fat trunk like a hula skirt. He saw the tree smoking, breathing out wafts of gray like a huge man with a cigar. Rats lived in the palm trees; he’d seen them running the power lines, heard them rustling the fronds.
But with the next hard push of wind, he’d seen orange flames lick out from the heart of the tree, the place where the fronds began, and the fire engine came after GranaLene poked her head out onto the tiny porch and sniffed.
The men’s yellow coats shone glossy, and the ruby lights twirled. The firemen weren’t scary like the police; when they took off their coats, instead of guns he saw suspenders.
The tree breathed. The men uncoiled the hose from the humming engine, and Darnell saw the water blow in the wind, spatter on GranaLene’s roof. A crowd of boys had gathered around Darnell then, and when the city truck brought a cherry picker and one fireman rode up to lean close between gusts that lengthened the flames, the boys all shouted. Darnell smelled the smoke harsh like burning trash in the vacant lots across the street.
He heard Donnie hollering, and he started. “Yo, man, you need to stop trippin when you on patrol, Darnell! I been callin you—hurry up!
One of the ladies from the hotel had lost her car. Darnell walked with her all around the garage in a spiral square, until she found it on the third level. A maroon Sentra, like a hundred others. She smiled weakly and waved when she drove past the guard booth.
“Man, your pops was right. You lost in space sometimes,” Donnie said. “I remember you used to wander off till after dark, and he’d whup your natural ass.”
“I saw Frankie Randall, man,” Darnell said.
“Man, Frankie don’t know nobody. Only face he care to see is Washington’s.”
Darnell looked at Donnie’s big hands holding the flashlight. “You ever miss ball, man? I mean college ball.”
“You know I play ball all the time at the gym, man. Westside brothas are harder than anybody in college. I just hated school. I love playin ball now—no pressure, no coach hollerin.”
“Yeah,” Darnell said. “Your turn to walk.”
“I’m goin. I ain’t gon be dreamin out there like you. You hear the morning guy found two cars busted into by the center? Past the loading docks. See, they know it’s two of us at night and only one old man in the day.” He got up, but Darnell touched him with the pencil.
“So when they gon make me full time, man? I need some more money, some benefits, baby. I got dependents,” Darnell said.
Donnie shrugged. “You gotta be patient, man. They wait to see if new guys are gon steal or let friends in….” He walked toward the fountain, swinging the flashlight. Darnell stayed in the mouth of the garage. You miss fire, man?
Well, yeah, brotha, but I run out and fight one on the weekends, you know, I like it better, no other guys on the line hollerin at me to do this, do that.
Fricke had told him that Scott and Perez were living in Doloreaux, across the riverbottom from Rio Seco, and working as paid-call firefighters. They can afford to do that, Darnell thought, just go out and make ten dollars an hour when the call comes. Cause they only need beer and Taco Bell.
He filled his hand with water from the drinking fountain, wet the back of his neck and splattered the water across the cement, where it evaporated. Yeah, I just start a fire, do my own thing, baby, turn on the garden hose and listen to it sizzle and pop. I do a good job, too. He stared up at the gray waffle squares of the cement roof, the long tubes of fluorescent lights that left white bars inside his eyelids when he closed them.
“Same old story,” Ronnie said. “I heard it. I walked ten miles to school, boy. Man, we couldn’t even go to school in Oklahoma, they made us walk over the border to Texas. And here your lazy ass want a ride.”
Darnell laughed at his perfect Pops imitation. “He think I’ma let his whole business go down while he gone for a week.”
“Didn’t he used to take all of you to Oklahoma?” Victor asked. “I remember Melvin hated that shit.”
“Yeah, cause all they talk about is how hard they had to work, shootin squirrels for dinner. And then how Melvin and the young dudes don’t know how to work cause they spoiled lazy.” Charolette pushed her small palms hard against his chest to see around him to a dog. “My parents took Sophia and Paula, though, cause school don’t start till next week. They wanted to see the funeral. Pops’ second aunt.”
“Man, take us to the park, homey,” Victor said impatiently. He and Ronnie had worked with the Kings, who’d gone to the dump.
Charolette watched their hair pressed to the back glass. He’d had her all week, and he’d figured her out. She screamed when he stayed home and held her because she was bored. If Brenda held her against those soft bumps and that smell, she was in heaven, but with him—no, take me somewhere, she told him loudly.
She touched his lips now when he strapped her in the car seat. “So you ain’t stupid,” he’d said to her determined face. “And you like to drive. Cool.”
Brenda didn’t want her in Jackson Park, but Darnell said, “She’s mine, too.”
“All those guys selling stolen liquor, the cops going through,” she started, but he said. “I got her, okay? Nothin’s gon happen when she’s with me.”
On a hot day like this, men sat on broken couches, stood around the table, rested on lowered truck gates. Victor and Ronnie jumped out to where Brother Lobo was holding court on a folding chair. “Darnell!” he said, squinting. “And the littlest African queen!”
He took her carefully, as always, and kissed her huge cheek quickly before she frowned and twisted toward Darnell. The pride raced up his back—You, Daddy, I want you. I belong to you.
“Five more seconds,” Brother Lobo said, before handing her back. “Look at that cheek—you could rent out office space in there, it’s so big.”
Darnell held her butt, the way he’d gotten used to, with his arm under it and her fist clenching a rosette of shirt; she brushed his ear in constant movement as she struggled to get down, to crawl. Her head bobbed, her arms flung upright.
“What a girl,” Lobo said, watching her closely. “Her head moves around like Katharine Hepburn’s, and her hand gestures like a flamenco dancer.” He laughed. “Too bad she breathes like a telephone pervert.”
“She uses a lot of air,” Darnell said, smiling. Charolette did pant hoarsely, excited and smiling. Brenda said it was the smog, but Darnell knew she was in a hurry even to breathe. “She even sleep rough, move all around.”
“Bad sign, brotha,” Victor said, handing the bottle to Ronnie. “She sleepin between you and your woman, man, that means you ain’t gettin no nappy, huh?”
Darnell felt heat rise in his neck. “Man, how you know? You ain’t got kids.”
“All I gotta have is ears, hearin how daddies like you don’t get no time with your women.” Victor grinned. “Brenda too tired, right, homey?”
Brother Lobo sipped his Dr Pepper and said, “African men had multiple wives for just this reason. Sex and new motherhood are separate by nature. In many African cultures, men cannot even touch a nursing woman.”
Darnell felt strange when Brother Lobo talked about something like they were all still in junior high, even the grandfathers at the domino table. Lobo always sound like that, no matter who’s around, he thought, except usually I ain’t gotta hear about my love life.
He said, “I gotta get her a bottle.” At the car, he thought, No, Brenda’s chest still ain’t mine. Tucked away safe in that thick nursing bra, no lacy push-up bras unhooked in the front. No easy access, baby.
She looked beautiful, too, her hips rounded now, her face fuller under the jaw, her hair thicker splayed out on the pillow. Her arms were softer around him, and when he put Charolette in the crib, if she’d finally stop screaming, Brenda would take him out to the couch for a few minutes. “You have to be quiet—the baby,” she’d say.
Darnell held the
bottle of juice for Charolette, who rested her head on his shoulder to drink. Maybe they done with sex and moved on to somethin I feel like hearin about, he thought, looking back toward the trees. But he saw Victor laughing, Brother Lobo talking so hard his head bobbed, and he slid her into her car seat. “It’s all cause a you,” he told her. “So let’s do some day partyin, since my nights ain’t mine no more.”
At the day-old bakery, he bought three loaves for a dollar, and drove to the city lake. Holding Charolette tight, he tried to show her how to throw bread to the ducks, but she just held the squishy white center, pulling it to her mouth now and then.
“This used to be my homey Louis’s favorite place,” he told her. He saw three Canadian geese, the ones Louis said flew down here during the cold winter. “What you guys doin here so early? Or late,” Darnell asked them. “You lost?”
The three geese stayed away from the others: the huge white geese that hissed and honked, the ducks, the small goofy black birds. What had Louis called them? Coots. Darnell pointed at the Canadian geese, and Charolette’s eyes followed his finger. They were aloof, holding their long black necks still, the black feet paddling patiently, not frantically like the others.
“See, those are the brothas over there,” he told Charolette. “They’re cool, too cool to get in a fight. We gotta throw the bread all the way over there. Yo! Soul brothas! Time to grub!”
On Saturday, he had promised to help Roscoe. A woman had been waiting all week for them to take out her big jacaranda, and with Darnell’s father still gone, Roscoe needed Darnell.
Roscoe had been quieter since Louis had gone to prison, spending most of his time at Marietta Cook’s, and even though he still laughed in the back room and slammed dominoes, he didn’t talk about poetry like he always had, didn’t describe the moon or use the right word for the kind of heat or wind in the morning.
While the saws ripped and whined, Darnell watched Roscoe’s forehead creased under the Dodgers cap. Roscoe had always worn hats, ever since Darnell first remembered him coming to the house. He thought about the way Roscoe had always been patient and gentle when he talked to Darnell, but gruff and short with Louis. And his father was more likely than Roscoe to listen when Louis named a bird in someone’s backyard, but he was quick to holler at Darnell.
He was afraid to say anything, but when they stopped to rest in the midmorning heat, watching smog cover the hills, he looked over at Roscoe. “Charolette be checkin out the birds, just like Louis did,” he said carefully.
Roscoe took a long drink of water from the thermos. “Babies love anything that moves fast,” he said, tongue working inside his cheek.
Darnell brushed the crumbled dead leaves from his bootlaces. Charolette really loved trees—she’d started to stare at the pepper branches, the shifting silvers of eucalyptus, sometimes way up to the tallest, pencil-trunked palms, and he hadn’t even known she could see that far. “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s into trees, and birds in the trees.”
Roscoe said, “Maybe your father can pass on the family business to her, since you’re into security.” He smiled.
“That’s cold, Roscoe,” Darnell said. “I ain’t plannin to secure forever, okay? Maybe she’ll be a forest ranger, or a fire lookout. Sit up high in a tower and stare at trees, watch for smoke.”
“I thought you told me they were cutting all those jobs out because of low funds,” Roscoe said. “But maybe she’ll be a botanist. A tree surgeon.”
“Brenda and Mama look at her eyes, them long old lashes, and all they say is, ‘Oh, she gon be a model, a cover girl.’ But I don’t play that, cause the girl got a brain, I can tell.”
Roscoe’s face was suddenly shadowed when he dipped the hat brim back down. “You can’t tell your children what to be,” he said. “You of all people should see that, from watching me.”
“Man, I didn’t…” Darnell bit his lip, saw Roscoe’s fingers clench the thermos. He remembered the tiny, distant sound of Louis’s basketball on his driveway, remembered Louis hating every minute of practice in school. Roscoe’d had a few beers one night long ago and told Darnell’s father about wanting to be a poet, about his own father laughing at him, saying, “You gon eat paper when you hungry?” And then Roscoe said the same to Louis, over and over, when he and Darnell were loading wood. “What can you do with birds? You gonna be an ornithologist? Lots of positions for that, yeah. Or maybe you can head the Audubon Society. Shit, Louis, you’ve got a forty-two-inch vertical. You can play ball.”
“He didn’t even call me from jail,” Roscoe said now. “Finding out from the newspaper like that…”
“See, I couldn’t even be havin this conversation with Pops,” Darnell blurted out. “He never wants to hear about fire. Hell, he never wants to hear anything from me—just says, ‘We ain’t got time to chat. Get back to work.’ I could always talk to you, but Louis couldn’t.” He paused, smelled the sawdust on his face. “Sometimes he talked to Brenda. And Brenda’s daddy ain’t spoke to her since we got married.”
Roscoe bent to hand him the thermos. “It’s like chess. Checkmate is a hard move to take back and do over.” Darnell watched the grass stay flat even when he lifted his hand from it; the drought had made it limp. Roscoe straightened and said, “We better finish before the crows fly home.” He smiled. “I watch them fly over us every evening, and it’s almost like going back. Remember Louis with his face always up in the air like he was waiting for one of them to drop money in his mouth?”
He saw Trent that night, coming out of the convention center with a woman. “Darnell! This is my wife, Brichee.”
She was light as Brenda, but her makeup was even paler, silvery dry at her jaw. She nodded. “That sounds French,” Darnell said, uncomfortable.
“It is,” she said, giving him a no-teeth fake smile, and moving off toward the garage.
Trent said, “She’s from New Orleans.” He grinned and shook his head. “She loves the weather out here, and hates my relatives. She comes from big bucks.”
“I ain’t your relative,” Darnell said.
“But I got so many cousins, Snooter and all them, when she sees anybody she thinks…”
She thinks they want somethin, Darnell thought. He said, “How she get here?”
“Came out to go to college. Accounting. She works in LA.” Trent glanced at her talking with another woman. “We were at the antique show in there.” He nodded at Darnell’s jacket. “So this is your gig now, huh? I thought you were going into gardening.”
“Pops still wants me to work yards on the side. Lotta competition.” Darnell watched the sparse crowd around the fountain.
“Better to work for yourself,” Trent said. “Especially for a brother.”
“Even a normal brotha?” Darnell said, smiling, and Trent grinned back. “Work for myself—you sound like Pops. Even Snooter.”
Trent mocked fear, saying, “Don’t let my wife hear that!” and he walked toward her, lifting his hand.
As the nights came earlier and the days got cooler, he went to pick up Charolette at his mother’s around four o’clock. His father and Roscoe were just finishing by then, and clouds quilted the sky. He stood out in front with them the first week of November, Charolette on his thigh, where he propped it against a bumper, and they saw the moon come up so fast it left the clouds piled at its base.
“Brenda take the baby to the cemetery?” his father asked suddenly, and Darnell frowned.
“When?”
“On the first. Remember, Mrs. Batiste and Mrs. Dauphine and your mother all go over there.” His father kicked a few twigs off the truckbed.
Darnell tried to remember what they did at the cemetery in November at the graves—was it flowers like Memorial Day? He’d been gone a few years—he heard pounding bass, and Leon and Vernon boomed by in the Bronco, lifting their chins at him. He wondered what they said about him. The drums knocked against his throat. Good boy. Square-ass brotha. Goddamn unarmed security with a walkie-talkie makin some
spare change. Got him a’ spare job, they were laughing.
His father said harshly, “You goin to pick up Brenda? She shouldn’t be walkin in the dark.”
“Like I’ma let her walk downtown in the dark,” Darnell said impatiently. “Me? Personal security for the world?”
Charolette pointed at the sound that had stopped at the end of the street. “Don’t run your mouth, boy,” his father said. “Get goin.”
Roscoe stood up with them and said, “I’ll come with you, Darnell, show you something.”
He was quiet all the way downtown, and then he said, “See?” Darnell parked where he’d pointed.
They stood on the sidewalk, watching the sky. A handful of pepper was flung high in the descending gray, moving, wheeling; then it was a huge swarm of gnats, Darnell thought. But they swooped closer, the great flock of blackbirds looping together, shifting in ever-turning patterns. Charolette’s mouth was open, her eyes following the flock for a long time. Darnell saw two mechanics watching from the gas station across the street.
“They live in these trees every fall,” Roscoe said as the flock suddenly dropped onto the rounded, thick-leaved trees that lined the broad street. “Louis never did find out why. But they fly like that every night till dark.” The birds all began to chirp and screech at once, and Charolette jumped at the noise that drowned out the traffic. Roscoe touched her back. “They’re just birds, baby,” he said gently.
The main ballroom at the Hilton was full of women. The Rio Seco County Women of the Year—dinner, awards, speeches. Darnell and Donnie went in and out of the lobby now and then to make sure everything was okay.
In the doorway, next to the ashcan with white sand on which somebody stamped the Hilton logo every night, Darnell looked at the tight circles of women. The chandeliers lit them up: their jewelry, glittering hair, shiny hose on their calves. Black women, white, Oriental, Chicana. Darnell stared at all the sparkling fingernails at the table nearest him. Women do all that for each other, he thought. Brenda put on makeup every morning to go to work, smear some of it on my face when she say goodbye, and then wash it all off the minute she come home. Take off them dresses and heels and put on her sweats. She don’t wear eyeshadow for me. These women dress up for their friends. He saw an elderly woman at the table, with polyester pants and a shapeless blouse—her stubby nails were painted purple to match her shoes.
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Page 15