Crazy Horse's Girlfriend (9781940430447) (28 page)

I pulled my hand slowly down from my face and looked up at her. She was standing above me, an expression of fury mixed with pain on her face.

“No.”

“Yes you do. That's what you think, you idiot!” she said, beginning to cry.

“I don't, you know, think that. It's not about him. I just can't. Why won't you understand that? We can work it out. We can, I don't know, I can get on welfare, and—”

“Welfare?” she said, shaking her head. “No. No child of mine will be on welfare! You are not going to do that! You're going to call them back up and make another appointment and you are going to have this abortion, do you hear me? Or I am going to kick you out! Your father won't have it! He will kill you, don't you understand? I won't have it! I'll call them myself!” She said, going to the phone.

She talked to Murna first, shakily writing a number down on a pad next to the phone. Then she slammed the phone down and I watched her dial the clinic. I closed my eyes, tears running down my face as she dialed the number. I watched her talk to them, make an appointment I knew I would never keep. This had all gone terribly wrong. Mom finished the conversation and dropped the phone into the receiver. She walked over to me.

“OK, your appointment is next Saturday, ten AM. I'm assuming you're not that far along?”

“No. Mom, you don't understand. I'm not doing this.”

She looked at me with so much fury in her face, I worried for my life.

“You
are
doing this. This is not a discussion. You are sixteen years old. You have your whole life ahead of you. You are not going to ruin it over some guy.”

I slapped my forehead, hard. “Don't you get it? It's not about him! As far as he knows, I'm having the abortion! It's about me, about what I want, about making something different—”

“Different?” she said. Her tone was mocking. “You think you're going to be different? Than who, Margaritte?”

I sighed, heavily. “I'm not saying different than you, Mom, but just different. I'll be fine. If I get on welfare—”

“Don't you goddamn use that word again.”

“Mom, I won't be like, trashy, or anything.”

“How are you going to support this baby?”

“I'll get on welfare, finish school and then figure out what to do.”

“I guess you've got it all figured out then.”

“No, I don't. But what I'm saying is that this is not the end of the world. I can make it work. Why don't you leave Dad? We could live here together, you could get him an apartment in town, and—”

“No.”

I stared at her, hard. “After all that he's put you through. After the shit he's done.”

“This is not your choice, Margaritte.”

“And this is not yours.”

We stared at each other, nostrils flared, breathing heavily. She broke the silence.

“You cannot live here if you have that baby.”

“You're going to kick me out,” I said incredulously. “You would kick your own daughter out of your house.”

“I will not be a part of this. And your father, you know what he'd do.”

“I'm so sick of him! Why am I bothering. I've told you to leave him so many times I'm blue in the fucking face! And you know what? You realize you're choosing him over me, right?”

She looked shocked and then reached over to slap me again, but I pulled back.

“That's enough,” I said, getting up. “I've had enough of this shit! I'm not going to live like this anymore!”

I started stomping angrily towards the stairs. I could feel Mom behind me and I wheeled around. She took both of my wrists and shook me, hard, once. “Don't do this!” She whispered. “Don't!”

I looked at her, her disheveled hair. Her anxious face. I knew that she was only doing what she thought was best for me, what she thought would spare me the life she'd lived. I sighed. I leaned over and hugged her, hard. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said quietly. “Just please, please keep that appointment. I know you'll do the right thing. I know you.”

I smiled at her. There was no use in discussing this anymore. And I was exhausted.

“I'm going downstairs, Mom, OK? I need to rest.”

She let me go and I walked down the stairs. I could see that she was still at the top when I got to the bottom. I sighed and closed the door. I could hear the shuffle of her feet a few minutes later and the sounds of dinner being started. Pots and pans clinking. The sound of the front door opening and closing, and a few minutes later what was surely the sound of a bottle of scotch being set down on an end table. The twins waking up. The TV going on. I felt a twinge of sadness move in my body like a fish in a bowl. I lay down on my bed and put my hands over my stomach. I could swear that I could feel the slightest of bumps and I imagined what I knew was my daughter, kicking for her life, playing in there, her dark, fuzzy head bent around my body. I wondered how big she was. I picked up the phone.

 

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1

3

 

Megan is calling me from the kitchen. She's wanting to know where I put the cereal. I yell back that it's in the cabinet over the sink.
Thanks
she yells back. I can hear her kid screaming and running happily across the floor, her feet making a clack-clack-clack sound across the linoleum that fills me with something good. Something that feels like light in a yellow room. I look over at Christine. She's in her crib and crying a little in her sleep, her tiny hands pushing around her little brown face. She makes one more kitteny mummppph sound and goes back to sleep. She's been fussy lately. But she's not quite six months old and well, a fucking baby. They're born to fuss and puke and shit and generally still look so cute that your heart kinda bursts like a big, red balloon at a carnival. I walk over to her in her crib and stroke her tiny face with my right index finger. So soft.

Living with Megan this last year has been good and Megan had been more than happy about me moving in; it meant that she didn't have to go back home to the Lakota rez. There were just no jobs for her there, there were hardly any jobs for anyone there. One weekend, she'd taken me home to hang with her family. They were great, funny, tough. Her mom especially was hilarious. She reminded me of my auntie. And the land: oh, wow, long green and brown stretches of plains that seemed to go on forever and ever until you felt parts of you pulling into something strange and deep and wide. But so many people sitting by the sides of buildings, wrecked, their eyes distant and sad. There was something about it all that reminded me of Idaho Springs. But there was something else, too. One thing Megan said, was that everyone's cousin could draw, had work in some gallery. She said that for all the shit the government had put them through, they had come out with at least one foot kicking, hard.

Megan was talking about getting her nursing degree and she knew that if she did, she could maybe work at IHS back home but she knew she'd have to think long and hard about that. She wanted her kid to learn the language, know her family, know her culture, but there were so many things that could bring the both of them down. I told her that they had language classes in Lakota at the Indian Center in Denver, that maybe we could move there next year, and she nodded and looked thoughtful. I knew though that her mom missed her and wanted her and the baby back home. When we left, Megan cried for a long time. Her little girl was in her lap and she kept saying,
It's OK, Momma, it's OK
, her little dark eyes filled with worry.

As to her husband, he wasn't going to get out of prison for a few more years and she wasn't even sure they'd be together once he did. She went and saw him less and less. He'd gone to prison on a rape charge, she finally told me. At first she'd believed that he was innocent, hated the bitch who'd charged him, but she said that over time, she'd added a few things up. And she was beginning to doubt him, doubt that she would be the same person she was when he went in, whether it would work between them anyway by the time he got out. Either way, she was starting to get pretty determined to go to nursing school, and I told her I thought that was a good idea. I even found a school listed in the phone book in Denver, and called them and asked them to mail us some brochures. They did and not long after, an envelope came in the mail with the name of the school on it. That night when she came home from waitressing at the Derby, after she'd thrown her shoes to the walls and we'd made some dinner, we sat down on the floor and poured over the brightly colored brochures. They were glossy as hell and though there were some brown people, it was mainly really happy-looking skinny white people being hovering over other happy-looking skinny white people who looked like they were telling them something important. Megan seemed kinda intimidated. But I told her that all she had to do was take it one day at a time. That brochures were always stupid, that they didn't really show what anything was really like. That she could just apply, and I'd help her with the application fee, and that she didn't have to take a full load at first and not to worry, 'cause sure as shit she was a lot smarter than most of the dumb bitches I was always encountering at the hospital. She laughed and punched me on the arm, hard. I laughed back and rubbed my arm where she'd punched me. Megan was strong, man.

Once she kicked Will out the last time, he'd never shown up at her place again. At least not during the day anyways. Megan said she coulda sworn that she'd heard the door handle jangling in the middle of the night a couple times right after their last big fight. But she'd changed the locks and honestly, there were a couple of fuckers in that complex I could see jangling handles of all kinds in the middle of the night. We'd heard that he'd gone home, that he'd shacked up with a boy somewhere in Albuquerque, that he'd gotten cancer. But then one day driving around Denver, we saw him under an underpass not far from the bar I'd been with him and his buddy Miguel, passing around a 40 with a bunch of Urban Skins. Megan was all set to spit on him. I told her not to. She did anyway, telling me to slow down, leaning out the passenger side window, yelling
winkte
as loud as she could and spitting hard in his direction. He looked up and narrowed his eyes, and then lowered his head, his hand still on the bottle that someone was passing to him, sorta frozen in that position as someone he was related to, someone he'd lived with, screamed faggot in his language and spit at him.

I only got a glance at him but he looked bad. Dirty. Clothes that had clearly either come out of dumpsters or off of other, dead bums. A pitiful collection of graying hairs that you could maybe call a beard. And he was skinny as shit, except for his belly. I couldn't imagine what his day-to-day life was like. And I couldn't help but feel bad for the poor fucker, though when I said as much, I thought Megan was gonna punch a hole in my throat. He just blew my mind, that's all. He just seemed to be unable to get anything right. And I felt that way sometimes. But I guess the difference was that I tried so hard not to take anyone down with me. Will seemed to do nothing but take anyone around him down into his darkness, into total shit. What else could you do with people like that but learn to get out of their way?

As for my mom, I'd called her up the day after I'd moved out while she was at work and told her where I was, that I was going to live with Megan, that I was going to have the baby, whether she thought I should or not. She'd yelled at me for a long time, her voice growing hoarse and hysterical. She told me I was going to keep that appointment, that she was going to tell Dad and that they were going to come get me. That I was underage and not a legal adult. That I didn't have any choice in the matter and not to make her involve the authorities. I went silent. Then I told her that if she did that, I would go to social services and tell them about Dad. About what went on in the house. About his drinking, his hitting me, her, about how he had held us at gunpoint. I told her that there would come a time when he would hurt the twins and that she would be very, very sad then. She made a noise of pure pain and fury and then I could hear her crying and she slammed the phone down. I had stared at the receiver for a long time, wondering if I'd done the right thing. But then I looked down at my stomach and knew that I had.

I called her every day after that. I wanted to see the twins again. I wanted my mom to know her grandchild. For a long time, every time I'd call and say
Mom?
she'd just hang up the phone and I'd cry and cry and put both of my hands over my stomach, feeling more alone than I ever had in my life. Darkness.

After a month of this, I called Auntie Justine. I told her that I was pregnant, that I'd moved out, which I was sure she already knew. She yelled at me for a long time too, and I feared for my life. I always told Mom that I knew that my life would end when Auntie Justine would finally kill me in my sleep. Mom would always laugh. But seriously, the woman scares the living hell outta me. She's tiny, but she packs one hell of a Jesus punch. After a long lecture about what an idiot I was, what a disappointment to my mom and Native women everywhere I was, she ran out of steam. That's when I told her that I was going to keep the baby. She seemed to calm down then. Then she began with the Jesus and Mary and God talk and I had to listen to a lot of praise all three of those fuckers shit. I didn't bother to tell her that that wasn't the reason I was keeping it. That if I was anything, I was Native American Church and even that was a stretch. But she told me that she could see if her church could help me with the cost of the baby, and I told her thanks. I was able to get on assistance, and with help from Auntie Justine's church and the money I'd saved up from dealing, I had the baby in Saint Lutheran's in the summer, on a warm, windy, snowy day in January. My water broke the night before and Megan had piled me and her baby up in the car and drove as fast as she could without scaring either me or herself. I was so excited. So scared. I kept looking down at the hugeness that had become my body and thinking about how I couldn't wait to see her. To know her.

She came out fierce: her little brown fists clenched, her long, slanted black eyes like a panther's, her tiny, wicked mouth screaming
—
she looked like a little Aztec warrior. I laughed and I cried and Julia (who Megan called when I got to the hospital) and Megan hugged me and I held her in my arms and felt a big, fat, sloppy pile of happy encircle me. But I was scared too. Scared I would never give her the life I wanted to give her. But then I looked at the people around me and thought about how much I had. Justine came a few hours later, my mom behind her, tears in her eyes. I looked at her and held her grandchild out to her, and she cried so hard I thought my heart would just fucking up and break right there. She came up to me and plucked her out of my hands and leaned to breathe her sweet baby smell in, like she was a little brown flower.

Mom sat and we caught up, and I could tell she was still pissed at me for the shit I'd said, telling me that Dad was doing better and all that. I asked her if he'd quit drinking and she went silent and then said,
no but he really is doing much better
. I nodded and held my baby closer, breathed in her new, new smell. Mom had made some kind of choice years ago that I could never understand, a choice she kept making over and over and over. Most people were like that; they just couldn't imagine how to get out of their shit. But I worried hard for the twins. They were still innocent. I told Mom I'd really like it if she would come over with them sometimes and she asked me if I'd like to come back home. That I was welcome to move back in. I said no, but thank you. She seemed angry and sad but seemed to accept it after I leaned over and asked her to hold the baby while I went to the bathroom. I placed her carefully in her arms and the baby sort of looked up at her and put out one of her fists in greeting. Mom laughed and took it, shook it gently and put her finger into her tiny little fist. I smiled and Megan helped me up and into the bathroom. When I came out I could see that Mom was still holding the baby, Julia above them making little bluesy cooing noises. I lay back down and watched them. I knew Mom felt sad that I wasn't coming back, ever. But there was no way I was going to live with Dad again. I loved him and I wanted to see him, but only during the day, and only when I felt like it was safe for me and my baby. To cheer her up, I told her that I was going to have a celebration for the baby with all of my friends at the park as soon as the baby was old enough and I would like it if all of them came, including Dad. She seemed happy then. Then she looked up suddenly and asked what the baby's name was.
Christine
I said, and Mom's mouth trembled and she cried all over again. I leaned over and hugged her and my baby and felt good, good, very good.

I spent half the morning in the hospital, waiting for the doctor to come around and check me out. Megan and Julia had to go, they both had to work and Auntie Justine and Mom stayed to keep me company and take me home. About an hour later the doctor came, checked me and Little Christine out, and made a follow-up appointment. Mom and Justine helped me and Little Christine into the car, buckling the baby into the car seat I'd bought at the thrift. On the drive back, Mom let me sleep and Justine told her to drop her off at home, where the twins were being watched by her husband. She told us that she'd be happy to watch them for the day. Mom came back with me to my place and we talked, and I slept, and we fed the baby and Mom told me she could bring the twins over after school and help me while I adjusted to life with a new baby. I thanked her. I told her that I was studying for my GED and that I was thinking about community college. She told me she was glad.

I got my GED not long after. I'd heard as long as you're literate you could pass it, so I had figured that it was a go. I may not be fucking Einstein but I
can
fucking
read
. I made the appointment for a few weeks after the baby was born. Megan watched the baby while I took it. And I got
myself
some glossy brochures
—
for Red Rocks. I found out that you can get a few grants for college when you have a kid that you don't have to pay back, and the rest shouldn't be too expensive because it's community college and for that I can take loans out. I figured on Red Rocks since that's the community college closest to me, so it'll be the easiest to commute to from Idaho Springs. I mean, even though I'm not sure what I'm gonna do, I definitely want to go to college. I'll never be like Julia, some kind of Super Indian, but I'd be happy to make decent money. I figure I'll just register for a bunch of classes of different kinds and then go from there. I mean, I know you can't exactly major in Stephen King and even if you could, I can only imagine that it wouldn't exactly rake in the billions.