Crazy Horse's Girlfriend (9781940430447) (3 page)

“Because I want out of here,” I said. I was tired. And I was angry and they were so stupid. I just wanted to go into the basement and smoke and sleep and stop thinking.

Mom and Dad looked at me then. I could hear the TV in the silence, the sounds of the late night news filling the room, the voices of the newscasters, who always reminded me of mannequins talking calmly about death, money.

“Here's what's going to happen,” Mom said. “You are not going to leave this house except for school. You are going to stay in that room and do your homework. And you,” she said, turning to Dad. “You are going to put that goddamn scotch down.” Mom grabbed for the glass in Dad's hand.

“Don't you tell me what to do!” Dad said, pulling his hand back, the scotch sloshing over the edge. “I'm fine! This isn't about me.”

“The hell it isn't about you! You're an alcoholic Doug, and you need to put that glass down and go to sleep. I'll take care of this because God knows you can't take care of anything.”

“You bitch,” he said, his breath heavy.

Suddenly, he stood up and almost fell. Mom and I stepped back. He began charging for her. I walked in-between. I could hear the girls from their room as he hit me again, his fist connecting with the side of my face in the same place it had before. I started crying as Mom pushed him. He fell easily, quickly.

“Mommy!” It was Carrie. She sounded scared.

“Don't come out! Everything's fine!”

“Mommy!”

“Quiet, Carrie!” Mom yelled. Dad got up again and started for Mom.

“Stop! Stop!” I said, getting in between them again and holding my hands out to block him but he was huge. As tall as Jake, and 350 pounds. My mom was tiny in comparison, but she fought hard.

“Get out of my way,” he growled and kept charging, pushing me to the side and somehow managing to hit my face yet again with his elbow in the process. It was my turn to hit the old, orange shag carpet. Mom and Dad wrestled and I buried my head in my arms and entered the highway, the fog filling my head and turning everything into light, silence. After a few minutes, I came out of my reverie and could see that they had stopped. Dad was heading for his office, where he had an old graphic design style desk and miles and miles of booze.

 

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2

 

The next day I woke up to the sounds of
Sesame Street
. It was the twin's favorite show. I sighed, looked at where the needle had been. They had put a Band-Aid over it, but I had pulled it off before I went to sleep, which had come quickly after I had read a few pages of the book I'd just checked out of the library,
Hyperion
. I fucking loved it. But I was too tired to read more than a page or two; there had been too much drama. I coughed and reached under my bed for my pipe and baggie, and sat up. I kept both taped to the bottom of the bed, and Jake and me kept the rest of it under an old plank in my bedroom that Mom and Dad didn't even know was loose.

I smoked. I listened. I wondered why Mom had married Dad. She had told me once that she'd gotten pregnant with me while she was finishing up her teacher's certification in Denver and after that, he proposed. But that she loved him. That she definitely loved him. She told me about watching Mel Brooks movies together and other artsy stuff like that, about dancing with him by the gulf on a pier in Texas, where her family was from, about how shy and quiet he was. How he held her and told her that she was his home on their wedding night. How he drank and though it seemed like he drank a lot, it hadn't seemed like too much until later, much later, when he began to hit her after I was born. I went to the bathroom to look at my face, my side. My face wasn't too bad, just a little bruised up. Nothing a little makeup couldn't cover. And my side was sore but it was nothing bad.

I put on the pink house shoes Mom had given me for Christmas and shuffled upstairs. I knew that Dad, unless he had called in sick, was at Bill's Auto where he worked. He called in sick a lot, and it was getting harder and harder to pay the bills. I tried to help out as much as Mom would let me. She paid most of them with her job at the elementary school, where she taught fifth grade English.

The twins were sitting in front of the TV and eating the brightly colored generic cereal that they loved. They sat too close to the damn thing, but it was old, and you had to turn the channels by hand. I fixed a bowl of cereal and sat down by Mom at the old wooden table that she had inherited from her parents when they died.

Mom was grading. It seemed like she was always grading. She looked up, smiled, her dark eyes full of exhaustion. She touched the bruise on my face with the back of her fingertips and I took her hand. We watched each other like that and then our hands dropped and I ate my cereal.

“Grading?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Margaritte—”

“Mom, c'mon. Not this early.”

She looked at me angrily, straightening one of the many old, oversized t-shirts she used as nightgowns. “You didn't even wait to see what I was going to say.”

“I know what you're going to say. Can't I just eat my stupid cereal in peace?”

“No! I… ” She closed her eyes, sighed. “I mean, yes. Eat your goddamn cereal. But you are going listen to me.”

I was silent.

“Just do your homework, go to school. And I will let Jake come over, of course, but you are not to go out with him or anyone else for a long, long time. Not until I see your report card at the end of this semester, and then I'll let you out only if you have more than passed every class. You're not stupid. I wish you were stupid. Then I could just give up.”

I had stuffed half a bowl of cereal into my mouth by the time she was done.

“Are you finished?”

Mom expelled an angry puff of breath. “I guess.”

“Look Mom, I do my homework, but with Dad drinking and you two yelling about it all the time—”

“How dare you!” She said, standing up and picking up my bowl. “I do the best that I can!”

I sputtered. “The best? The best? Look, I love Dad. Sometimes when he's not too drunk and not too sober he's pretty cool. We sit around and watch
NOVA
and it's nice, and he's funny and sweet and he asks me questions but that's not enough. I don't know why it's enough for you. And where are you going with my cereal? I'm not finished.”

She set the cheap, blue Walmart bowl down—hard. So hard I thought the glass would shatter.

“Mom!”

“What.”

“He's too messed up! This is too messed up. We can't live like this forever. Someday he's going to do something really fucked up.”

“Don't say ‘fucked,' Margaritte. And, well, look—what do you want? You want to live in a shitty one-room apartment like some of your friends on the edge of town? You want to get on welfare? Is that what you want? And you know what? He was doing better before this little incident of yours.”

I looked at her, shoved the rest of the soggy, cheap wheat cereal in my mouth, put the bowl in the sink and started washing dishes. I could feel Mom at my back.

“Mom, you always, always say that.”

“Say what?”

“That he's doing better.”

She was silent as I finished the dishes and when I turned around, she was sitting at the table with her head in her hands. I looked at her, wiped my hands on the dishtowel and set it down.

“I used to love him, you know,” she said. She was looking at the pile of papers in front of her.

“Do you still?”

“Sometimes. Or, I'm not sure. Maybe I love the memory of what he was. Or maybe… I still love him when he's not… you know he does love you, in his way.”

“I know.”

I sat down and took her hand. “Mom, look, I think Jake and Treena and Julia are coming over. We're gonna do homework, I promise. Let's just forget this for now.”

She nodded. She was too tired to fight me. And she liked Julia. She didn't like Treena, but if Julia was around, Treena came. They were a package deal. They always had the same orange home perms and Lee Press-On Nails with flowers and shit all over them, even though they were nothing alike. Julia's a thin, pretty, mixed-blood Choctaw and Chickasaw, Treena a short, round Mexican chick. Julia lives in a foster home and is crazy, parties all the time, but she makes great grades. She'll launch outta this shithole like a fucking rocket. She'd never met her dad, but she thought he was white. Sometimes her mom would come to visit her at the foster home. Her mom's a meth-head though, so most of the time it wasn't exactly a celebration when she came to visit. I mean, one of the last times she came to town, she brought Julia a feral cat as a gift. I mean, Christ. Treena on the other hand could care less about grades, or getting out. Her big thing was dudes. Especially dudes that Julia was into, which killed me. Crazy bitch would go to dances, bars with Julia and just follow her around waiting for one of the guys chasing after her to give up and move onto Treena.

“Just make sure they're gone by the time Dad comes home at five.”

“OK.”

I walked into the living room and sat down by the twins. They were so cute, their big, amber colored eyes fixed on the TV like it was God. Big Bird was up and he was their favorite.

“I just love Big Bird,” Carrie said and Mary nodded.

“He's so friendly even though he's so big!” Carrie said, smiling. She watched in a small, satisfied silence for a few minutes but after a while, she began to frown. She turned to face me. “Margaritte, why were all of you guys yelling last night?” She put one of her small, yellow hands on my face and furrowed her brow.

“Because people are stupid,” I said, patting her hand. “Stick to Big Bird.”

“I do love him,” she said, turning to the TV again. “But he's not real.”

“Yeah he is!” Mary said. She usually let Carrie lead the way, but every once in a while she'd disagree.

“Nuh-uh! My teacher told me. He's not. I love him anyway.”

I laughed. “You two are silly. You're the silliest six-year-olds I know.”

Carrie looked at me incredulously. “No way. Sam's the silliest. He said that he wanted to live on a planet with only Sams on it.
That's
silly,” she said, shaking her head.

“That is pretty silly,” I said. We watched TV together for a while,
Sesame Street
ending and
Electric Company
coming on. I remembered watching these shows, in this order, when I was their age. I remembered Dad's mom visiting from New York and saying that there were too many ethnic people on the show just loud enough so that everyone could hear. I remembered my mom walking out of the room.

“OK, you two. Be good,” I said. They had moved on to playing with their Barbies, Mary whispering in her ratty Beach Barbie's ear. She always did that. The freaking Barbie Whisperer, I swear.

I took a shower, got dressed, walked downstairs and picked up my homework. I knew that when everyone came over, we wouldn't work. I figured I might as well try to get something done. My grades were shitty, which was sad considering that the goddamn place graduated illiterates. But I just hated school. I read Stephen King under my desk in math. I was always getting caught.

A few hours later, Jake came ambling downstairs.

“You OK?” he asked, sitting down on the beat up, frankensteined futon across from my bed.

“Yeah. At least Dad went to work. How's Will?”

“Oh, I didn't see him. He and Megan had a fight over bills and he ran off before I even came in. She was up with the baby anyway, nursing.”

“That guy,” I said. Will was weird. All I really knew about him was that he was gay, but that he'd never admit it though he brought strange dudes over to spend the night all the time. He'd also said that his mother had been a drunk and his father had never been around. But Megan had it rough too. Single mother. You'd think Will would have a little sympathy for her but all he ever seemed to see in her was another person who owed him something. To look at the world like that seemed vast, empty.

“So… Julia and Treena are coming over. I talked to them Friday, at school,” I said.

“Sounds cool,” Jake said, trying to not look excited. Jake adored the ever-loving shit outta Julia, though he kept that to himself.

“Jake, are you gonna marry Julia?” I asked and Jake jumped up and put me in a headlock.

“Goddammit, Jake, let me go!”

“Take it back,” he said, as my hair got caught under one of his pits and pulled as he twisted me around.

“Jake! Dude! You fucker! Ouch!”

“Take. It. Back!” he said.

“Never!” He gently twisted me around for a little bit more and then let me go. I adjusted my hair and my sweatshirt and gave him the evil eye. He looked at me with a guilty expression on his face then and asked, “I didn't hurt you did I? You've suffered enough physical shit for any kid your age for a while.”

“I'm fine, Jake,” I said, walking over to him and hugging him. “Now let's call your fiancé to see if she and her life partner are still coming over.” Jake's eyes narrowed and he punched my arm.

I walked over to the phone, and made a big production of picking it up, dialing and then making out with it and looking over at Jake and winking before anyone picked up.
I hate you,
he mouthed and I laughed. Julia's foster mother answered on the third ring. Dumb bitch did nothing but sit on the couch, eat Twinkies and Doritos and watch her five trillion foster kids run around and fend for themselves.

I talked to Julia for a minute or two and hung up.

“She and Treena are gonna come over when the
Real World
is over, which should be soon. They are totally addicted to it.”

“What the fuck is the
Real World
?” Jake asked.

“Jealous of a show?”

“No. I just don't know what it is.”

“It's some stupid MTV show where they take these people and make them live in a house and film them all the time. They made me watch it once. It's like a soap opera for people our age.”

“Huh,” Jake said, looking puzzled. All Jake really watched was sports, everything else to him was girlie shit.

Jake sighed and started up the stairs. “I'm gonna go get something to eat.”

“Sure.” I lifted the remote and stared at it limply.

I looked around and then turned to the old wooden table next to me. There were some magazines Jake had brought with him so I rifled through one of them for about twenty minutes before putting it down and sighing heavily. They were all motorcycle mags. Much as I liked riding the bike with Jake, reading about it interested me about as much as reading about turtles mating.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. After a couple of minutes, I could hear Jake on the stairs.

“Hope you brought something good,” I yelled. I could hear Julia laughing, then saying, “I did.” An unfamiliar male laugh followed hers. I sat up.

Julia came down first, and she was followed by a boy I'd never seen before, or at least didn't recognize. He was lanky, a little taller than me and quite a bit darker too, with long dark eyes and short, spiky black hair.