“Tomorrow,” he said, walking back to the El Camino.
The trash-can fire was high in the early-morning cool. Brother Lobo looked up from his game with Mr. Talbert and said, “Darnell! I’m glad to see you walking! We’d heard reports that you might have had nerve damage to the leg.”
Darnell frowned. “Who said all that?”
“Leon and Mortrice, said they heard from some other people,” Victor said. “You was the nigga of the news for a minute there.” But even he stood awkwardly now that it had been brought up.
“I came to see if you want a job, man,” Darnell said, hard, “not to talk about the past.” Victor stared at him. “Pops might have a cleanup for the church on Sixth Avenue, and he said it’ll take two of us.”
“You sure you can go back to work?” Victor said, and Darnell sucked in his breath.
“White people with those civil-rights retrospectives on TV,” Lobo said, “watch the dogs and the hoses, and they say, ‘My God, those rednecks were vicious.’ Who’s doing a documentary on police dogs now?”
A young guy Darnell didn’t know stood up from a couch and spat. “K-9.”
“Eat brothas for lunch,” Victor said.
Darnell opened his mouth, but Brother Lobo said, “It’s been documented that the dogs attacked males of color more than ninety percent of the time, but…”
“Save it, okay?” Darnell said, loud, and his chest tightened. “I know all that shit.” He had never spoken that way to Brother Lobo before; Mr. Talbert lifted his face to study Darnell, but Brother Lobo didn’t even look at him. Darnell laced his fingers behind his head like he was stretching. “Sorry, man,” he said, “I didn’t…”
Brother Lobo scrutinized his two bones, held them lightly in his palm, and said, “You the man.” Darnell heard the rebuke.
Victor said, “So your leg okay, huh?” He touched the ends of his braids, his hand curling around the back of his neck, and Darnell thought, He sound like he actually give a damn.
He didn’t answer; he walked to the trash can to throw in the empty milk carton he held. The paper flared, the flame shaking the barrel and licking above, the pepper-tree branches touching his neck, the dominoes clanking between words. See, they all gon talk about it. They think this is it. If I mess up now, if somethin happen to me, they’ll look at me and go, “Well, he never really got over that time when the K-9…” Like Frankie and Tulane, them guys that walk the streets, and when Harris stepped in front of the train. Everybody got a story about why—“Remember when his brother hit him with that piece a wood?” Whatever.
Behind him, Lobo slapped down a domino and said, “I regret to inform you that it’s over!” and then Leon’s Bronco rounded the corner, booming DJ Quik from the windows.
Leon turned the volume down when he stopped by Darnell. “Homes!” Leon said, touching Darnell’s palm. “You stridin fine!”
“You know it,” Darnell said. He nodded at Vernon and Mortrice, who got out of the Bronco with Leon.
“We lookin for you to clarify somethin,” Leon said to Brother Lobo.
Brother Lobo raised his eyebrows. “Oh—clarify, huh?” Victor laughed.
Vernon and Mortrice both wore big jeans, butts invisible in the square-sagging creases; both kept their baggy jackets halfway zipped. Always strapped, Darnell thought. Vernon said, “I need to know what ‘perspication’ mean.”
Brother Lobo frowned. “You must have the wrong variant. You want ‘perspicuity,’ or ‘perspicacious.’”
“‘Perspicacious,’” Leon said.
“What brotha you know gon talk like that?” Victor said.
Leon smiled. “White dude. What’s it mean?”
Vernon raised his chin and said, “Mean the dude sayin Leon sweat too much, huh? He talkin shit about the brotha.”
Lobo said, “It means that Leon has a clear and penetrating mind, that he’s mentally alert, that he’s very wise.”
Leon nodded. “I knew he wasn’t talkin shit, cause he had the word in a different context. Vernon don’t hear when he think he listenin to this dude.”
“What does this man do?” Lobo said, and Darnell chewed on his lip. Not a good idea to bother Leon about who he talk to, since he slingin cane now, he thought. Louis is doin time; Leon gotta be movin a lot of rocks.
“He a consultant,” Leon said, looking straight at Lobo. “He into words. He into p-words this week. He called Mortrice ‘peripatetic,’ and homey took offense and shit.”
“You say that word with resonance and just the right emphasis,” Brother Lobo said to Leon. “‘Peripatetic’ means that he travels a great deal.”
Mortrice nodded. “Yup-yup,” he said. “Like a rollin stone.”
“Like you’re rolling rocks, isn’t it?” Brother Lobo said, and Victor and Darnell shook their heads. “Did this man teach you a word that describes your business? ‘Pernicious.’ Highly injurious, very harmful. Deadly.”
Vernon looked at Leon and frowned. “Pernicious to talk yang. Somebody could smoke your ass.”
Leon looked up at the weak winter sun, dime-sized in the sky, his arms folded, and Darnell’s legs trickled cold. “Man, I remember you tellin us in school that bein a nigga is highly injurious. Ax my man Darnell here. He got some pernicious-ass teeth in his leg.”
Darnell’s mouth ran with saliva, and he swallowed quickly. “I’m off memory lane, man,” he began, but Lobo cut him off.
“I never used the word nigga in my class, Leon,” Lobo said gently. “And you’re twisting a lesson for your own needs.”
“That’s because I’m perspicacious,” Leon said. “And my man Darnell here need to hear somethin about bein peripatetic.” He grabbed Darnell by the shoulder and led him aside, near the Bronco’s bumper.
“I ain’t suin, man,” Darnell said, but Leon shook his head.
“I know. I seen Donnie. I ain’t yangin about that. My brother told me you needed some cash to fix the Spider, but I see you still drivin the El Camino.”
“I ain’t into…” Darnell hesitated, not wanting to disrespect Leon. “I ain’t into distribution, man.”
“Neither am I, like you talkin about,” Leon said. “I been moved up, man, and this dude, the consultant, he need somebody smart like you for special runs. Not no wild child like Mortrice or Vernon.”
Darnell shook his head. “No, man, I can’t hang.”
Leon let his foot fall off the bumper. “That’s cool, D.,” he said. “So where you gon work?”
“I didn’t start lookin yet,” Darnell said.
“Brenda got that steady slave, that’s cool,” Leon said, and Darnell couldn’t tell by his eyes what Leon meant. Before he could say anything else, Leon shoved him back toward the group with his elbow, and Darnell remembered all the summer days and evenings they had played football in the streets, fought in the fields.
“Homey a family man,” Leon said, and Victor smiled hard. Then two girls came out from the alley beside the Gray Hollow houses, cocked their heads to hear the music thumping faint from the Bronco, and they walked toward the men. Vernon walked out to meet them; Leon turned his back. “I hate sprung females.”
“You spring em,” Victor said.
“Uh-uh, man, they put they own lips on the pipe.” Leon spat. “I don’t open they mouth and make em breathe. That’s like sayin the farmer make you eat pig, brothaman. But you buy the meat if you want it. I don’t eat the nasty pork.”
“Choose your poison,” Mr. Talbert muttered, and Darnell walked toward the El Camino, cool pulling off his shoulders like spiderwebs under his shirt.
He lay listening to the crackle of gunfire, regular now even though it was ten minutes to midnight. A shotgun—booyaa, booyaa. Then silence. Brenda’s feet hissed across the sheets when she moved. Charolette’s breath rustled in her throat, her arms thrown above her head, her mouth open.
Darnell lay still, hands folded on his chest, his leg tingling against the cotton bedspread. It only itched at night now; in the day, he put on a c
ream Mrs. Batiste left for him. He was too hot inside the covers. He heard a few car horns, a few faint shots, then the yells. He imagined the giant ball dropping on TV, like he and Brenda used to stay awake and watch.
The shotgun went booyaa, booyaa, booyaa. Then he heard the sharp report of pistols—.357s, a .38. Then stuttering fast and continuous. Automatic. Ooh. Uzi. Somebody real happy.
What you do on New Year’s you’ll be doin the rest of the year, people always say. Partyin, fightin, dancin, makin love. He heard the gunfire mixing in sound and texture, heard more shouting and laughing and car horns. Cool—I’ll be hearin bullets fly, and I’ll be itchin. Baby, I can’t scratch it.
The Uzi sounded alone, chattered like shivering teeth of a big god, one of those long wood masks with scary mouths and fangs. Darnell didn’t hear the helicopter or any sirens. On New Year’s, the cops in Rio Seco parked under shelter, just before midnight. Usually they waited under a freeway bridge or in a parking garage to avoid the raining bullets that could pierce car roofs and pedestrians’ heads and the teeth of children’s upturned faces, bared to the sky.
Parking garages were the safest. Underground. Dark, layers and layers of asphalt winding above you. A guard booth at the front. Darnell rubbed his leg back and forth on the sheet, just an inch either way so he wouldn’t wake Brenda or Charolette. They didn’t even stir with the gunfire. Brenda slept through earthquakes, sirens, shots, but let Charolette cry for a second, and even if Brenda was downstairs at the washer with a Harley idling beside her, she could hear the baby. And Charolette heard every creak of the floor if they tried to leave her in the crib and escape to the living room; she heard every tiny laugh Brenda let out with Darnell. But they both lay motionless now except for their lips, trembling with air and dreams.
The Uzi was the last to quit. Finally the sound Darnell and Louis and Nacho had imitated all through childhood, the doo-doo-doo-doo through their teeth, rough sticks thrust forward in their hands, stopped. The sky was silent. Darnell saw himself hiding behind trees with the others, shooting their mulberry branches at cars until their tongues were tired.
When Mrs. Batiste pulled at the black thread, his skin pulled, too, as though tiny veins were sliding out. He pictured the veins and arteries again, felt her clipping and gentle tugging. Brenda watched silently behind him. He felt stupid lying down on his belly on the bed like this. The women bent over his leg, and then Mrs. Batiste said, “Finish. They heal okay, but the wound still not all closed up. You could wear a loose Band-Aid for a couple more days.”
“You can still see the cuts,” Brenda whispered to him. “Look.”
“That’s okay,” he said, moving off the bed. He didn’t want to look at the back of his leg, or at Mrs. Batiste’s face.
“I made some coffee, Mama,” Brenda said. Darnell felt wetness on his foot, and he jumped. Charolette leaned over his ankle, a heavy tremble of spit at her chin.
Her mother went into the kitchen, and Darnell picked up Charolette to let her look out the window. The back of his leg tingled. “This coffee ain’t strong like you daddy like it, huh?” Mrs. Batiste said. She watched Darnell bend his leg. “I taken more stitches out Etienne many time when we stay in Gray Hollow.” She smiled at Darnell’s face. “Oh, he use to fight all the time. And my uncle, in Louisiana, oh, he worse. We sew him up, too.”
“Your husband?” Darnell said. The stiff-held crescent of mouth, the line of mustache?
“I remember,” Brenda whispered. “One time he bled on the sidewalk, and you were so mad, Mama, cause the city just poured the cement. Blood came all out his arm.”
Mrs. Batiste’s face was still now. “Didn’t nobody cut him,” she said. “He done poke his arm in a broken window. Someplace he don’t need to be.” Before Darnell could say anything, she sipped her coffee and turned to the sink. “I finished at the store now, huh?” she said.
Brenda said, “That where you told him you were? Did you go out last night?”
“What you think?” her mother frowned. “You know your daddy don’t go out. Not no more.” She let the lines fade from her forehead. “Darnell, you can drink the rest of this dishwater. Brenda, you lucky he like that Winchell Donut coffee.”
Darnell remembered the smell of heavy black grounds, floating way out to the steps at Brenda’s when he came to get her. “Guys from Louisiana do everything hard, huh?” he said. “Even gotta wake up hard? You need to pack some food in a bag, so he believe you?”
Mrs. Batiste smiled. “No. You want me to pack you some medicine in a bag, so when you go out you don’t bother that wound?”
“No,” Darnell said, seeing her eyes narrow with concern. “I ain’t choosin that poison.”
Wrapped in a blanket on the couch, he held Brenda on his chest. A faint scrabble of itch started in his leg, tiny legs and antennae crawling under the skin, and he put his lips on hers, touched his tongue soft to her front teeth and the inside of her lip. She put both hands on his temples and pulled back to look at him.
“You sure you okay in the head, too?” she said.
“Why—I gotta be hard like your pops?” He smiled. “You think if I drink some knockout Louisiana coffee and start smokin cigarettes, I’ll be okay?”
Brenda kept her eyes gold on him. “I never was into danger, Darnell.”
“What? We talkin danger?”
She shook her head. “Hard guys. Some girls like danger—you know that. If I was into that kinda man, Ida gone out with Victor or Leon.”
He raised his brows and grinned. “Oh, you would?”
Brenda bit her lips to stop a smile. “You weren’t hard. Not dangerous to anybody except yourself. So I’m just asking,” she said, her fingertips pushing his jaw toward her again.
“Hey, it’s dangerous women, too,” he said. “I never was into them. But you could let that dangerous side out now and maybe scratch me up a little.” He bent to her neck. “On the back.”
He sat up when the phone rang. This late he knew who it was.
“You get your stitches out?” Donnie whispered. “You go to the hospital?”
“It’s a minor procedure, man,” Darnell said, feeling his tongue tap the roof of his mouth when he said the words.
“Man, suin ain’t nothin minor,” Donnie said. “Take forever. I ain’t even heard nothin yet from this lawyer.”
“Make sure you follow proper procedure, man, right?”
“Why you want to say that, Darnell?” Donnie said, and Darnell paced in the living room, watching Brenda get up and go into the bedroom.
“I don’t know, man, I gotta go,” Darnell said, but Donnie whispered for a while longer, about the bullet, where it still rested in his leg, and Darnell stared at the shadowy light in the courtyard.
Brenda was curled under the sheet when he hung up. He said, “That don’t look dangerous,” into her ear.
“I’m not dangerous,” she murmured. “I’m tired, and I have to go to work in the morning.”
The white cotton shirt was ironed. He touched the label at the neck. Made in Macau. Where the hell was that?
He raised the glass of water and saw the tiny letters engraved in the bottom. Indonesia.
The application procedure still had three parts. The application. An aptitude test. An interview. Ten other men always waiting in the office. At the temporary agencies, he fit pegs into holes while a stopwatch ticked, to prove manual dexterity for assembly work. He waited for printouts from the DMV, watching the people behind the counter, their cubicles plastered with memos, photos of children, greeting cards. Brenda’s work space had photos of him and Charolette.
He went to his father’s house after the day’s rounds, and she watched him help Roscoe cut and stack wood. She squatted to pick up a heavy wrench from the driveway and tried to stand up straight from her haunches. She rose and dropped the wrench, bent to try again.
“She’s walking early,” Roscoe said, when she staggered toward Darnell with her stiff-legged, slanting gait.
“She
walk like she toe up,” Snooter said, and Darnell caught her in his arms. Toe up. His boots heavy, the trembling fire roar pushing fast…
“She gon be a year old pretty soon,” Darnell’s father said. Darnell touched the soft-twisted braids caught up in her pink headband. She was getting her color this spring, being out in the sun. She was redder than he, lighter. Clear copper-gold as a new penny, her hair thick and wavy, springing loose after her bath.
“She sure is beautiful,” Roscoe said. “I remember Hollie when she was little like that, all soft cheeks and bright eyes.”
“She looks like you, Pops,” Darnell said.
“You tryin to compliment me, boy?” his father said. “Hell, you ever hear any adult call a baby ugly?”
But everybody mentioned how much Charolette looked like Darnell and his father—her skin, her small spaced-even teeth, her eyebrows. “Her hard head,” his mother said, laughing.
“Take that wood on over to Mrs. Theus,” his father shouted. “You ain’t doin nothin.”
Darnell took Charolette with him. “Maybe Mrs. Theus be too busy cooin over you and won’t ask me the question,” he told her. “Where you workin, baby?”
His father gave wood away to some of the old people whose children were gone, to Mrs. Theus and the others. Darnell put the wood on their screened-in porches or by the back steps, smelling the close, old-people air floating in the doorway around their faces, and they reached out to touch Charolette’s hair, her nose. “Got that Indian in her,” Mrs. Theus said, and Charolette turned her face to his shirt.
His father put a bag of oranges in the back; his mother handed him a stack of collard leaves, already washed, and he drove home thinking, Yeah, like I’m charity, too. Shit, I ain’t doin this application gig forever. In one of the glasses Brenda brought home from the thrift store he read “Italy,” and when he set it down, she said, “Look at the pattern. I found three of them, only fifty cents each.”
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Page 18