“That’s where we said goodbye to my honey river,” Charolette said, looking for the exact spot, next to a white boulder with an address painted on it. “My big rock is bigger than that,” she said.
Darnell felt the wind scouring the wetness under his arm. The moving air was taking on that edge of sound, that absent roar, that he remembered, and he knew the fire was turning to a storm, making its own wind, its own weather. “Shit!” he yelled out the window. “What the hell is goin on?”
Charolette started screaming, and he said, “Stay here!”
“No, Daddy! Nooo! Don’t go!” she said, but he screamed, “Stay here! I’ll be right back!” He got out and ran behind the Bronco driver to the curve, where he saw the van and two small cars waiting behind a moving van that had turned too sharp trying to get out of someone’s tiny driveway. The cab was at odd angles to the trailer, and three men stood hollering at each other near the open door. “It’s full of my goddamn house!” one guy yelled, and the Bronco driver, his heavy beard hiding his mouth, shouted, “There’s a fucking fire coming!”
“I know that!” the guy yelled, and a young guy in a baseball cap and brown uniform said, “Fuck it, somebody give me a ride.” He jumped into a car, and Darnell ran back to Charolette.
She was purple near her temples, around her mouth, screaming, her hands held stiff out in front of her for him to pick her up. “We’re goin!” he shouted, and he saw the van had backed up into someone’s hedge, the doors open, driver gone. The Bronco wheels ran up the side of the bank when the driver tried to go around the cab blocking the street, and Darnell dug into the hard dirt, skidding down the other side. “Shit!” Darnell said, feeling his left tires go up. This ain’t no four-wheel drive. He tried not to jam the gas, felt the tread skim for a moment, and he kept his foot steady, the tread catching again. Charolette’s screams were regular waves of sound, and sirens floated everywhere. The truck slid down the other side with a jerk and he hit his head on the window frame.
He raced down the wall of hedges and trees and came to the open field at the corner of the next street; the Bronco was long gone, and when he looked up the street to see if anyone was racing fast enough to hit him, he saw embers flying, shooting from a ranch-style house above, landing in the field. Fricke called it spotting—the fire was hitting houses with enough force to blow shakes off the roofs and burning debris from the windows, sending baby torches raining and arcing everywhere to start the next blazes. And the wall of flame was shaking the trees up the street, breathing into his window. Downhill—now it was stronger than nature, creating its own balance. A shingle shot past him when he stepped on the gas; it landed in the branches of the eucalyptus that sheltered the next house, and the dangling leaves exploded into flame.
No ax, no shelter, no guys’ shouts to surround him. He had to touch her, try to calm her while he drove, and she was rigid, fingers splayed in the air. He saw sparks curling above him when they raced down the grove, and he ducked instinctively. No canyon to hide in, no rocks. Just metal cab, Charolette’s skin, black clouds of smoke billowing from the grove across the road, and in the rearview mirror he saw her boulder, the white boulder that marked the wide avenue, disappear behind the flames when the truck raced onto Woodbine and into the gapped line of speeding cars. He ran the corner stop sign by going around the shoulder, and headed the back route toward Terracina, where no one was going. He held Charolette’s stiff fingers, but she wouldn’t bend them to his, and he turned around to see the veins of flame advancing across the block walls into the newest tract, a huge plume of black smoke darkening the western sky and the hills.
He wanted to stop when they reached the flats of Terracina, but he waited until he found a McDonald’s at the far eastern edge, and she was quiet, stunned, in the walled parking lot. He unbuckled her and pulled her onto his lap, and her hands dug into his ribs, her braids under his chin. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, like Brenda, repeating himself and not getting tired.
EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
ASHES AND BURNT VEGETATION had sifted all the way onto the Westside from the smoke that raced over the sky from Grayglen. The fire was so explosive that whole eucalyptus leaves littered Darnell’s yard, their gray merely blasted to brown, their oil leaving a scorched-popcorn smell on his hands when he gathered them. And long ribbons of bamboo, charred, but the faint grooved striations still intact, caught in his rake.
Charolette held out her sugar-sticky fingers to him, and he took the last bite of cinnamon toast, handed her the paper napkin after he’d wet it between his lips. He saw the sparkle of sugar grains on her cheeks, heard Brenda’s heavy steps in the house.
He had lied again, lied straight out. Necessity. Charolette’s face had shone copper-clear, new, after they’d eaten cheeseburgers, drunk milkshakes, played in McDonald’s children’s room and on the slide. She’d slept for a long time at his mother’s, while he pretended to work on the chain saw and washed the truck. “Juan and José still don’t feel good,” he’d told his father, who wondered why he was hosing down the windshield. He watched the waves of water push black cinders from the ridged truckbed, the papery shreds of burned leaf and bark. He tried to breathe slow when he took a rag to the faint brown stain near the front fender, where the flames had roared close, blown onto the paint, where they had started to melt the tires and make rubber smoke, thick and black.
He had pulled out a eucalyptus leaf from the wheel well, the spear tip curled black, when Brenda came out, her feet soft and swollen as sponges. “Where you going?” she asked.
“Lawnmower repair shop.” Darnell dropped the leaf, but he ran his fingers under his nose to smell the oil.
“She shouldn’t go with you,” Brenda said, nodding at Charolette, who rubbed her face with the napkin. “I didn’t do her hair yet.”
“Daddy,” Charolette said suddenly, staring at his chest. “You better don’t leave your shirt in the truck if you want Mama to wash it. Last time you was naked on your skin, you got a ouchie.”
He stopped, leaning the rake against the side of the house, remembering the dried blood he’d chipped from his forearm, and then he dragged the trash can to the backyard, smelling the acrid ashes piled on the cinder-block wall. Pressing his palms against the powdery flakes on the Spider’s hood, he felt the jagged twist inside his ribs, like a leap of metal, when he saw Louis’s blood, mixed with his, dried black over his skin. He smeared the ashes on the hood—ashes, Louis’s skin and bones charred to powdery fragments. He brought the hands to his face to breathe the wood in these curled flakes, but then he remembered that houses had burned in Grayglen, houses and cars and people.
When he came back, keys in his hand, Charolette said again, “Daddy!” but Brenda cut her off sharply.
“Quit nagging your daddy,” she said. “You want him to run away?”
Darnell looked at her, surprised, but Brenda moved her knees carefully where she sat on the porch. “What if this one is a girl, and you have three women nagging you?” she said softly, looking past him to the palm tree at the edge of the yard. Darnell didn’t answer. He saw Charolette’s lowering brows, her poked-out lip, and when he got into the truck, he heard Brenda say, “Or maybe it’s a son.”
The baby pine cone Charolette had found yesterday, the one that had slid wildly back and forth on the dashboard, was in her car seat, and he heard the last word again. A son? He’d asked Roscoe, What would you keep? He held the tight-sheaved cone, felt its weight, and after he left the repair shop, he drove up Pepper Avenue, watching the thick, swirling pall that still darkened the sky to the east. Can’t drive up there even if I wanted to, he thought. Nobody’s allowed past Hampton Avenue, and ain’t nothin to see now.
But he turned on the road he and Charolette had fled down yesterday, the seldom-used route, and found that someone had taken down a barrier. He made it to the edge of the still-smoking tract that had lost the last street to the flames, and from there he could stand outside the truck and look up the
steep, nude slope at what was left.
Like a cemetery, he thought, his breath shallow. Like GranaLene’s old cement outline, only gray-squared foundations in uneven rows like neglected gravesites. Two cars were blank-eyed on the street, and tall evergreen cypress spears were the only things standing near the heaps of smoldering rubble. Chimneys were short and lonely as headstones, and he squatted, his nostrils stinging, watching the ground still breathing, still smoking, alive.
Like zombies, he thought, eyes blurred, covered with ash and barely panting, like the souls his grandmother said breathed under the earth, trapped, roaming at night; like the haunts in the alleys breathing white smoke. Ghosts. Louis gone. Donnie and Leon and Gas—all floating. He stared at the ground, wishing for red embers, not ash, remembering the shooting flames arched across the asphalt and the taste of clean heat in his throat. I need flames, not ashes, he thought, not just the skeletons that get left. I had Charolette in the truck and didn’t even know—I need to be back up there in the hills, just me. He bit the inside of his lip until he tasted salt.
He drove toward the Westside, trying to think of how to tell Brenda, and Victor shouted him to a stop near the market. “Brothaman! We need a ride to Picasso!”
Darnell looked at Victor’s braids, fading blurry and wide from his forehead, and he nodded. When he’d slid across the seat, Victor complained to Ronnie, “Man, why you always get shotgun? I’m tired a sittin bitch.”
Darnell pulled back onto the street, taking shallow breaths with his lungs full of grainy smoke, his shoulders mashed to window and skin. “Victor, I’m tired a hearin ‘bitch.’ Stall out, around me, okay? Bitches, hos, skeezers, hoochies.” He paused, seeing the unborn baby’s foot trace itself down Brenda’s skin, a blind nub moving quickly. “My house fulla sistas, okay?” Darnell forced a breath farther down.
“So you a damn fool,” Victor said. But he grinned slightly. “Man, I gots to give you a few props. Take a brave fool to live in a house fulla… females.”
Ronnie laughed. “Man, call Esther a bitch while she braidin your hair and she liable to do it so tight you look Chinese.” He gestured with his chin then. “There’s your pops, Darnell. And Mr. Wiley.”
He left them at Esther’s and walked into his fathers driveway. His father sat with a pair of clippers on the spool table; his fingers tested the new-sharpened blade, still etched silver from the grinding stone.
Darnell raised his eyes to Roscoe, who leaned against the tailgate of the Apache, slumped comfortable like he used to be, but his forehead carved with a triangle of lines above his brows, like he’d been squinting for days. “I went by your place, and Brenda told me you went to Harper’s shop, so I knew you’d stop by here to complain about how much he’s charging to fix the carburetor.” Roscoe didn’t smile, but he pulled one side of his mouth hard.
Darnell licked his lip. “Charolette see you?” he asked. “She been missin you.”
“She told me you saw a fire,” Roscoe said. Darnell saw his father’s eyes narrow, fix on his face.
“Everybody saw it,” Darnell said. Necessity. All kinda necessity.
“I saw it from Marietta’s,” Roscoe said. “All those ashes floating down, big as cornflakes.” He stopped, lifted his face slightly. “I watched for the crows. They hit that smoke and got so confused that the whole flock broke up.”
“Saw whole sticks and pieces a bark flyin in the air,” Darnell’s father said. “Musta been explodin trees all over. I was in Arroyo Grande.”
“He’s been in a bronze box, all this time,” Roscoe said, his eyes above the roofline. “At Marietta’s. Damn—I’m scared as hell, but I’m gonna have to do it. I figured it out yesterday, when I saw all that in the air.” He looked at Darnell’s father now, then at Darnell. “I’ve never flown before. But I was thinking about going up in one of those small planes, letting the boy fly.” Before they could say anything, he turned on his hip, jarring against the tailgate, and got into the Apache.
When the engine had faded around the corner, Darnell’s father worked the clippers and put them in their leather sheath. “You have the symptoms yesterday? You get the shakes, wantin to pull a hose?” he finally said.
Darnell leaned against the warm wooden gates full of branches, a leaf brushing his neck. “Yeah,” he said. “I got em. I’m applyin for paid call reserve, so they can give me a coupla jobs a month. Make some extra cash.”
“They musta called in the whole damn state yesterday,” his father said. “Gave a lotta guys work. Still ain’t out all the way.”
“No,” Darnell said, imagining the still-throbbing embers, the red veins coming to life. “Contained.”
“Roscoe’s got his truck back in shape to work,” his father said, studying a wrench. “Said he’s had trouble with the gas line.” He looked up. “I appreciate you helpin out. Seem like the three of us could keep up a good schedule, if Juan and José do all right on their own.”
“Cool with me,” Darnell said, swallowing, pushing off from the truckbed. “I gotta get home.”
“Hey,” his father said, clenching his fists on the splintery tabletop. “I thought—seem like a couple times this year, I thought I’d have to figure out how to say goodbye to you. Like Roscoe. I don’t want to do that. Like he said, it ain’t natural.”
Darnell’s throat was full, and he said as casually as he could, “Hey, I’m the nature boy, right? Nothin but natural. See you tomorrow, Dad.”
He saw his father run long fingers up the hair at his temples, and only the wide, swollen knuckles showed in the curls, like stones.
They were in the baby pool, under the elm tree. He’d bought it at Kmart, and Charolette had begged him for a Big Wheel, too, but he’d told her to wait until Christmas. The hose trailed into the pink plastic, and Charolette was splashing naked, Brenda sitting on the low beach chair, soaking her ankles. He went down the driveway and inside, to the kitchen.
“Let me be whore of the day,” he murmured absently, looking at the dishes in the sink. He rinsed the plates. Whore of the day. Can’t be sayin that now. Ho—can’t you say it right, man? Two years ago? Ho, ho, ho. Almost time for Christmas. Brenda told Charolette that Santa Claus might bring her the Big Wheel. Pops always did the Santa thang—ate all the cookies Mama put out for him, drank the milk.
He breathed the ashes that had drifted powdery onto the window screens, sifting through to the sill. He scoured out the spaghetti pot. Whore of the day, when it was fire season. Ho. Strawberries. Andretta—somebody said knock the rest of her teeth out so she can do it better. Collarbones like broom handles on all the zombies. Two women at my crib. Maybe three, if this one’s a girl.
I acted like a zombie yesterday. And she was with me. I’ma show Brenda the papers tonight, tell her I’m going for next season. I don’t want to go for long—just if they call me. For a couple days, maybe, if there’s a Seven Canyons. And then I’ll be home. He looked down into the sink. This is where Charolette took a bath when she was a baby—in the sink. He saw how scared he’d been to hold her sliding butt in the water, how scared he’d been of the crease where he’d had to clean when he changed her. No bitches in my house. Man, you need to stop trippin like this. Just tell her.
He dried his hands by wiping the water across his neck, up his arms, and he went out to the driveway to clean the truck again, running the rag over the painted letters, the hood, the smoke-licked wheel well.
Brenda leaned against the door with her hand resting on her belly, on the baby. “You afraid Juan and José’ll be mad if you don’t keep their truck clean as they do?” She smiled.
“Maybe,” he said. The sky was turning lavender between the branches, dark as eggplant toward Grayglen. This was the time he’d lied to her yesterday, right about bath time. “We saw a fire,” Charolette had told Brenda, taking off her shoes. “It was big.”
He went inside now and turned on the news. The fire was still smoldering in areas higher than he’d seen today, and the cameras panned over the houses r
educed to charred tangles between driveway tongues and cloudy pool eyes.
Brenda had frowned last night when Charolette pointed to the flames on television and said, “See?”
“You could see it for miles,” Darnell had said casually, and Brenda studied him.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. The screen showed aerial shots of whole streets aflame, and she narrowed her eyes.
The same footage played now, and a quick-dripping Charolette came out of the bathroom, Brenda behind her. “You still watching that?” Brenda said. “You didn’t get enough yesterday?”
“Enough TV?” He held the papers rolled loose in his fingers.
She shrugged. “Enough whatever.”
He handed her the application and said, “I think I’ma take this to the county. For next year.”
She was silent, reading, and Charolette struggled to pull up her panties over her damp legs. Brenda handed it back to him and said, “So you can’t just watch it on TV. You still wishing you were a hero.”
He kept his eyes from the bright mass of flames on the screen. “Hey, don’t make me all that,” he said, trying to grin right. “When I was up in the mountains, I had stamina, baby. Now you women got me workin myself to death. I just have the energy for a few calls now and then, and that’s probably all I’d get. Especially since Scott and Perez got busted.”
She didn’t laugh. She got up and went into the bedroom, and before he could get up, Charolette came at him with the brush.
“Oh, no,” he said, and he grabbed her, set her down fast, and clumsily twisted her hair into a puff that he fastened with a pink-sparkled tie. Then she whirled from his hands and went behind him, saying, “Be still now.” She rubbed the bristles over his scalp, pressing her wet knees against his T-shirt. The skin on his forehead, then his neck, felt melted-warm, but he stood up.
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights Page 45