Charolette was grumpy, murmuring, “My pillow, Daddy! Pillow!” He’d forgotten the special flowery pillow Mrs. Batiste had made for her.
“We’ll get it when we go home,” he said. “Come on—take five. Take a snooze cruise. Take a flash crash.” She closed her eyes, holding the stems of fountain grass.
Juan and José were working their way across the top of the bank, digging the deep holes a few feet apart for the black plastic gallon pots. Trent knocked out a ceanothus, holding the small trunk, and put it in one of the holes along the side of the bank, and Darnell picked up the pot nearby. “See, Mrs. Shaefer is cool cause she listens,” Trent said. “I put this kind of drought-resistant garden in for one lady in Corona, and she turned on the sprinklers all the time. Killed every plant. If you water ceanothus and flannel bush later, in the summer when they’re used to dry heat and no rain, they can’t handle it.”
Darnell tamped down the dirt around the base of a flannel bush, remembering its pale yellow blooms in the spring on the slopes near Poppet Flats. Where my last fire was, he thought. It wasn’t acceptable. He murmured, “All that time I was up at the station, I never thought I’d be makin a damn chaparral slope in some lady’s yard.”
“Huh?” Trent said. “Hey, your beeper.”
Darnell laughed, looked at Trent’s pager. “Two brothas with beepers up here—no product in sight.” Trent frowned. “We ain’t normal, man.” He clambered down the slope to use Mrs. Shaefer’s phone.
When he went back up to where Juan was pulling the Matilja poppy plants from their pots, he said, “Mrs. Shaefer said those are expensive, so do it soft.”
Juan looked at the small plant, its shaggy gray leaves. “Why expensive?”
Darnell knocked them out and smelled the wet dirt. “They’re hard to grow. From the semilla.” He moved away, not wanting to explain it to Juan. The poppies were what Fricke told him about: fire followers. They’d changed over the decades to survive, and the seeds needed intense heat to germinate. Fricke had laughed, saying that people had to build pine-needle blazes around their seeds to try and grow Matiljas at home.
He’d laughed again when people stopped by the station to ask if they could please dig up just one pine seedling to take home. Darnell and his father had taken out countless spindly, brown-needled pines. They hated the smog.
He knuckled down the dirt around the roots silently, feeling the cool wind. When the drizzle started again, he and Juan and José began putting away the tools. “We could leave the plants out,” Darnell called to Trent. “Just another teaser.”
“Yeah,” Trent said. “Won’t do much.”
Darnell felt the mist on his neck. He went inside to shake Charolette’s shoulder. “Come on, babygirl,” he said. She turned limp on her side, just hitting deep sleep, and when he picked her up, she fell into one of those new half-conscious too-tired rages. Brenda said they were the beginning of the terrible twos—Charolette was early again. “Come on,” he said, and she screamed so loud that Trent and Mrs. Shaefer stared at him. “She’s just pissed,” he said, heat rising up his back when he carried her kicking and screaming to the car seat.
“My pillow!” she began to scream. “My pillow!”
“Damn, Charolette, how can I get it if you don’t get in the car?” he hollered back, and then he lowered his voice. “My monster’s in the houuuse,” he sang, trying to rap to her. “Charolette’s in full effect.” He held down her soft knees and forced the belts over her arms. She saw nothing—not his smile, his face, the fountain grass he tried to place in her clenched fists.
When he drove down the twisting Grayglen roads, he said, “There’s your rock,” at the huge white boulder marking the turn onto the last street out, the stone she loved. But her tantrum had darkened the creases by her nose and between her eyebrows, and her mouth was twisted open shapeless as a rag. He hit Woodbine, racing down toward the city, thinking, Okay, now I’m drivin like I live around here. Trent said to be cool, cause people get mad when the rain cancels golf.
He didn’t even see that the red Chevy truck was going first at the stop sign, and he braked the El Camino hard. A white guy with reddish-blond eyebrows leaned out the open window and said, “Damn, nigger!” before he jerked his wheel and sped around the El Camino. Darnell went straight through after he’d gone, Charolette’s cries rounder, smaller, like a siren fading down the street. Darnell’s eyes, his forehead, rang with anger. Fuck you! Why I gotta be a nigger? Why I can’t be an asshole, or blind? Why I can’t be pussy-whipped? A new daddy? A jerk?
He swerved around the next turn and got on the freeway. He goin home tonight talkin bout, “That’s why I wanna move—too many niggers out here now.” Or “Niggers can’t drive.” Or “Niggers—he probably had that rap music on so damn loud he…”
Loud. Charolette’s eyes were closing again, her whole face swollen with spent anger, her cheeks pushing her wet lashes.
He turned on 92 The Beat and kept it low. “See? Luther sings for ladies, and you qualify.” He watched the light drizzle on the glass, hearing Victor say the words about a girl. “She don’t qualify. She ain’t acceptable.”
That was what he’d thought over and over about the last fire—the boot stomper loping thin up the hill. He looked over at Charolette’s hands, finally falling loose on her leg, and he drove to the county building to get the application.
When the clouds were gone, a freeze settled in for several days, the sky hard and glassy at night. He smelled the fire when he went out to the dumpster with the bag of trash. The smoke was close, and he ran toward the pale roils in the dark sky, hearing the sirens already.
An old two-story house was burning. From the cars crowded into the dirt yard, he could tell it had been converted to apartments. A few Mexican and Vietnamese people stood outside, gesturing and crying, while the fireman trained the hoses into windows and onto roofs. The smell of wet black wood and burned upholstery was chemical and acrid. Darnell stood with the growing crowd. These fires started from space heaters and gas stoves left on, oven doors open, people trying to keep warm. The smoke hung low in the still, freezing air. No wind to move the cold, no breeze to fan the flames. The fire was out quickly, charred wood falling from the attic in chunks.
Darnell had always hated these fires, the way they smelled and burned, the nasty alligator-scaled walls he could see now, blackened thick and mottled into deep cracks. The piles of burned clothes and refuse, people gathered in the yard. No clean woodsmoke or creosote bush, no roar or racing or exhilarating fear. Just melting plastic and smoking paint, wet ash, and the crackle of radios from the hook-and-ladder trucks.
He walked back to the apartment in the ice-tinged air, and before he went up the stairs, he took the application from the glove compartment. Paid call reserve firefighter. He pulled out extra flyers—AnTuan’s—and stared at the handful of paper before he clicked the compartment closed.
Sitting at the kitchen table, no sound from the darkened bedroom, he filled in all the lines. When he wrote Fricke’s name, he smiled a little and bit the inside of his cheek. I’m still sprung, man, he thought. You knew it. I don’t want city battalion, no road camp. I gotta hope they need somebody in the mountains. Even county reserve, like Scott and Perez. Long as it’s me.
He parked off one of the fire roads before the station. The chaparral was frosted slightly, but there was no snow this far down the mountain. The pines, with their circular bursts of needles, were bright as thousands of exploded sparklers in the just-risen sun, and the light was hard everywhere.
“I don’t even know why I brought you,” he said to Charolette’s hair after he pulled her from her car seat. She half slept on his chest, her breath under his jaw steaming up her own circle on the glass. “If your mama wasn’t sleepin like a hangover, beggin me to take you outta there, you’d be yangin to yourself.”
“Time for a serious conflagration up here,” he said, pushing her off him and holding her up for a moment. “All this drought, decades of chapar
ral down there. Plenty of poppies comin soon.” She looked at him sleepily. “Did you know some of the burls under there, the chaparral, some of the burls are two hundred fifty years old?” He raised his eyebrows dramatically. “They’ll be good to go a week after the flames. No problem.”
She reached up to touch the new razored cuts above his ears, like she had yesterday morning. “Come on,” he said. “I see you gotta act like a girl just when Fricke might see you.”
He’d brought the application just to show Fricke, to hear who might be hiring, but when he pulled into the station’s driveway, he saw the door open and the engine gone. They had to be out on a call, Fricke and Corcoran probably still the whole crew. February—they wouldn’t get seasonals until maybe April, if the season held off. If anybody got hired at this station at all.
Charolette picked up a few pine cones when he let her walk around, and he slid the application into an envelope to keep it clean before he put it back in the glove compartment. “Time to go down the mountain,” he said. “Workday. We need a bear claw for Pop-Pop and a buttermilk bar for Uncle Roscoe.”
The men were all sitting in their trucks drinking coffee when he drove up with the box of doughnuts. “Oh, no, babygirl, we gotta share,” Darnell said, pointing at Floyd King, Nacho, and Snooter.
They all made a big deal of Charolette, still in her footed sleeper, stamping from lap to lap in the truck cabs, trying to pull dashboard knobs and see what was in the ashtrays. Roscoe gave her a smell of his coffee. “Red Man, this girl stubborn as you,” he said to Darnell’s father.
Darnell watched Charolette poke at the glass. “Dirty,” she said, frowning.
“Least she look a lot better than her grampa,” Floyd King said from his cab. “Next one gotta look like Brenda, cause this one look like Darnell spit her out his ownself.”
Brenda hated hearing that. He said, “What next one?”
“Oh, your mama keep talkin about some dream she been havin,” his father said. Charolette chewed on her glazed doughnut, and when Darnell’s mother came out to the driveway for her part of the newspaper, she said, “Why you gon give that baby a sugary breakfast? She don’t need y’all bad habits. Bring her in here for a biscuit and egg.”
“You still dreamin, huh?” Darnell said.
“I told you I been done dreamed about fish five, six times,” she said. “You know what that means.” His father snorted and looked at Floyd, who bit his lips to keep from laughing. “Hush,” she told them. “Ain’t you looked at Brenda’s face, Darnell? She full round the jaw, huh?”
Darnell winced. “Mama, I’m lucky if I see the back of Brenda’s head now and then. She workin, I’m workin.” In the silence, he heard Nacho’s lips hissing up some coffee. Darnell said loudly, “Why it gotta be me? Maybe Melvin’s having another baby.”
His father said, “Melvin don’t stay in one place long enough to know,” and Darnell turned his head at the anger in the words. Then he said, “And don’t even think about my girls. They got sense.”
Darnell pictured the boys who came around the driveway trying to talk to Sophia and Paula, unnerved by the linked shoulders and wall of spilling words. Sophia and Paula didn’t need boys yet. They told him all the time, “He ain’t got nothing for me. He think he so fine.” They would turn to Charolette, digging in her widening depression, and say, “He probably don’t even know where Cincinnati is, huh, Lette?”
He stared at Charolette now, scrambling from the truck cab, her legs stiff before her. Lette. Like Quelle. Quelle—some girl who was willing to lick his back to get a ride to California. To Rio Seco. Charolette stopped in front of him and held her arms up, her face lifted to his. No. She ain’t gon be no nickname. She ain’t gon need to do nothin she don’t want to. She gon know where Cincinnati is, Honolulu, and anyplace she want to go. Laughin cool like Sophia and Paula. So Floyd King tell her, “Go on with your bad self, girl,” when he see her.
His mother’s voice broke the quiet. “You ain’t gotta look so scared,” she said, frowning.
“Damn, man, you okay?” Nacho said, staring at him.
Darnell nodded, lifting Charolette into his arms. His mother tucked the newspaper section into the fold of her robe under her arm and said, “Y’all need to look for a bigger place, even if it’s just the three of you. Like you said, you both workin so hard. Charolette need to have a yard to play in, cause she run around here like she just got off a leash. Ain’t nowhere to rip and run in that apartment. And you get a house, we can find a washer so Brenda won’t drag all that laundry up and down them stairs.”
Floyd King called, “Mr. Nard gon be rentin out his brother’s house on Pablo pretty soon. About five blocks down. Got two bedrooms, and he want six-fifty a month.”
“Yeah, and I can barely pay the rent now,” Darnell said. He sipped his coffee, thinking, It ain’t been that long I helped pay bills at all.
Charolette went inside with his mother, and Darnell drove to meet Juan and José. At the first tract, he took out the application one more time, fingering the words, and then he wedged it carefully into the envelope again.
He waited a few weeks, to see if she would tell him. On Charolette’s second birthday, Brenda’s cheeks were gold in the candlelight from the cake, but he couldn’t tell if they were wider or not. But he knew that she slept deep as Scott and Perez used to after bottles of Yukon Jack, when even hollering and shoving only filmed their eyes further. And no, he hadn’t checked out her jaw, he told his mother. But in the dark he felt the heaviness of her breasts, the curve underneath getting harder. Her nipples had swelled bigger, too, and on Friday he picked up Charolette early and went to Taco Bell’s drive-through window. “We gon surprise your mama,” he told her. “Cause she waitin to surprise me. We gettin her favorite for lunch. Used to be your favorite. Gave you all that hair.”
Man, I always used a jimhat, he thought, sitting on the bench near her office. Great—she havin Hercules Tucker. Victor can laugh uproarious. He saw the women push through the doorway, and he and Charolette went closer to look for Brenda. An older white woman with crinkled eyes behind glasses smiled at him, and Darnell said, “Hi, Mrs. Stovall.”
This was the woman named Waltrina. Brenda liked her, and always said she was patient with the computers. “She’ll be out in a minute, Dad. She’s in the bathroom.” She rolled her eyes and said, “I threw up at the moment of conception. Of course, my husband’s face didn’t help.” She laughed and bent near Charolette carefully. “But you have a handsome daddy, huh, darling?”
So all these women probably know, Darnell thought, looking at their faces when they passed, their heavy eyelashes and moving lips. Those smells. They all know. And Brenda don’t want to tell me. She probably think I’ma hat up real quick. Book. Jam. Vacate.
He saw her walking with the Oriental girl again. The Asian girl—Connie Lee. One-syllable. He shook his head to clear it. Brenda’s face was composed when she saw him and Charolette, but he saw the moisture above her lip when she smiled.
“Hey,” he said. “We brought your lunch.” He led her to a bench in the shade. “See, we already prepared, so you can get a good spot.” Charolette hugged Brenda and laid her cheek against Brenda’s neck. Then she saw the bag from Taco Bell again and scrambled down for french fries.
Darnell pulled out the two burritos with red sauce and put them on the slatted wood between him and Brenda. “Here’s the appropriate meal, huh? For a woman gets that craving sometimes.” He looked under her ducked face, lifted up her small chin. “Must be immaculate conception, cause we ain’t even done nothin.”
Brenda’s eyes glittered with tears, and she pulled in her bottom lip hard, folded her arms. “So go on and holler. Run. Whatever.”
“Why should I run?” he said, lifting another french fry out for Charolette, who was instantly surrounded by pigeons when she ran onto the grass. “I know what all the women in the neighborhood say; I hear Mama and them talkin. You want another baby, you ain’t gotta ask no man. You just
do what you gotta do.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“That’s an original rap,” he said, still smiling. “Hey, I ain’t mad. I just always wanted to quote that back to you.”
She ducked her head. “Everybody says you must want a boy anyway.”
“Nope,” he said. “They eat too much. That’s what Pops always said.”
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t make me cry again.”
“I’m serious,” he said, grinning. “I don’t need a boy. Look at this hard chick over here, wantin to work with me. Every time my mama give her some old dishes and spoons she don’t feed her dolly, she start diggin to Honolulu. You shoulda seen her this morning, tryin to rip bark off…” He stopped, remembering the silent yard in the station, the puzzle bark she’d pulled. Looking off at the greenish windows, he thought, I damn sure can’t show Brenda the application now. I can’t go on a three-day call when she’s pregnant.
“If it’s a girl, you could still name her Darnella,” Brenda said, putting her arm around his neck, pulling him close.
“I told you about that,” Darnell said, and Charolette ran up to them, slapping his hands off Brenda’s wrists.
“My mama,” she hollered.
When he got home, the phone rang before he could put Charolette down. He held her giggling under his arm and said, “AnTuan’s Landscape.”
A man said, “This sounds like a really great deal. I live in the Grayglen area, and your prices are pretty reasonable compared to Orange County.”
“Yes, sir, we try to keep the prices down.” He was out of breath, and he said, “Can you hold on, sir?” He put Charolette down. “When do you want us to start service?”
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Page 36