Crazy Horse's Girlfriend (9781940430447)

PRAISE FOR
CRAZY HORSE'S GIRLFRIEND

 

“Erika T. Wurth's first novel,
 
Crazy Horse's Girlfriend
, is gritty and tough and sad beyond measure; but is also contains startling, heartfelt moments of hope and love. In my opinion, a writer can't do much better than that.”

—DONALD RAY POLLOCK
,

author of
Knockemstiff
and
The Devil All the Time

 

“There's no horror flick or disaster movie scarier than a teenager's life. I found myself wanting to cover my eyes and shout, ‘Girl, don't go there' while reading. Erika T. Wurth writes about a young woman's longing with such heart and soul, it made me want to cry. Here she chronicles the poor with compassion and respect, and depicts their moments of joy with the only language worthy of such heights—poetry. I hope this book is the first in a long series of this young woman's life. If so, sign me up. I can't wait to read the next volume.”

—SANDRA CISNEROS
,

author of
The House on Mango Street

 

“Tough, tender, and funny as hell, Erika T. Wurth's unflinching debut novel
Crazy Horse's Girlfriend
illuminates the grim world of Idaho Springs. Wurth's raw, muscular writing takes the gritty story of a pregnant sixteen-year-old drug dealer and transforms bathos into a revelatory journey. Immensely compelling and readable. Couldn't put it down.”

—EDEN ROBINSON
,

author of
Monkey Beach

 

“Erika T. Wurth's first novel is a knockout—packing a raw punch of emotional truth that makes an unforgettable impact.  I fell for her narrator, the tough urban Native who is alternately wise-cracking and vulnerable, a smart, engaging witness with a big bad beautiful heart. Wurth made me care for everyone in these pages, singing a powerful honor song on behalf of our young people who are fighting their way through difficult times in order to survive. She writes with a voice of courageous, mesmerizing grace.”

—SUSAN POWER
,

author of
Grassdancer

 

PRAISE FOR
INDIAN TRAINS

 

“This is a funny, sad and powerful book. Each poem is lovely, and the cumulative effect is devastating.”

—SHERMAN ALEXIE
,

author of
Flight

CURBSIDE SPLENDOR PUBLISHING

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.

 

This is a work of fiction. All incidents, situations, institutions, governments, and people are fictional and any similarity to characters or persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

 

Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2014.

 

First Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Erika T. Wurth

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014945065

 

ISBN 978-1-940430-43-0

Designed by Alban Fischer

Cover image based on a painting by Douglas Miles

 

Manufactured in the United States of America.

 

www.curbsidesplendor.com

“Survival = Anger × Imagination.”

—
Sherman Alexie

 

 

FOR M.

I hope you're in that blue, blue perfect

place you always dreamed of.

 

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

 

1

 

I was sitting around in the basement of yet another fucking drug fuck, when I decided to get nervous. I was pretty high myself, and felt like I was sitting on the edge of a lake, the sun setting hard and fast, like it wasn't the sun at all, but a wild, terrible stranger who was ready to take me down with him into the dark. Jake was holding a couple of dimebags out for inspection, and two of the guys were fine. It was the dude in the corner I hated. He was not a pot-head, he was a meth-head. And he looked sick. His face looked like someone had broken glass over it, but it was just what he had done to himself, just the goddamn meth.

“Jake,” I said, and elbowed him.

“What?”

I looked over at the guy. Jake looked at him and back at me.

“I got it covered.”

The guy was staring at me. His hair was greasy as shit, dirty blond, and the only time he moved was to pick at the acne on his face.

The two other guys I'd known since kindergarten. They were brothers, and part of one of the Idaho Springs clans, one of the families that was so large they put half the rez families I knew to shame. There were so many of them in this inbred, bullshit, crazy ass town. For fuck's sake, forty-five percent of the dumb broads in my grade had gotten pregnant by the end of the last school year. They had to send this counselor in from Denver to be like Jesus, wear a condom. But the thing I'll never forget is after that guy's speech, some dumb ass chicks going, but condoms are too expensive. Oh, yeah, much more expensive than a baby. I know why they say that, 'cause they know they can just get on welfare like everyfuckingbody else here once they pop one out. To be honest, I think half the chicks around here think that having a baby is gonna make them happy. And then when it doesn't, they get on meth, which is something that rots your soul from the inside out as quick as you can say clusterfuck.

Finally, the meth-head spoke.

“You're, uh,” he said, grinding his teeth. “You're like, here to fuck us or what?”

Jake looked over at him and shook his head, just a little. The guy blinked, continued to grind his teeth, and looked at his pals, the two brothers. They were sitting on an old yellow corduroy couch, already smoking their newly acquired joints, their pale faces nearly featureless from the sad, grey light coming in from the basement window, duct tape crisscrossing the glass. I'd seen a lot of shitholes in this town, but this place could win a shithole contest. The couches were practically rotting into the floor, and cobwebs were everywhere, oddly the only semi-pretty thing about the place. The only natural thing. The rest was full of years of barely giving a fuck about living, full of garbage. Old GI Joe dolls with their khaki covered limbs broken off, destroyed video games, eight-tracks, tapes, parts of guns and, worst of all, old diapers. Every few minutes, I could hear a child, or maybe two crying the way a lost animal might. I was sitting on my jacket so that I wouldn't have to put my ass on about five tons of old fast food wrappers, which covered the place like a fungus. The meth-head flicked his eyes over at my cousin. “What's it to you?” The two brothers tensed, waiting to see what would happen.

Jake stopped sorting the baggies, put them down, tucked his long, dark arms behind his back, sighed and leaned into the couch.

“If you even try to touch my cousin, I promise I will fuck you up.”

The guy looked over at me and then back at Jake. He started laughing.

The two brothers looked real nervous.

“What's so funny?” My cousin asked, but he knew. We both knew. My family is Apache, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and white, but my auntie and her husband adopted Jake when he was a baby. He's Nez Perce, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and black. And big as fuck. Whenever he feels like screwing with me, he palms my face in one of his hands.

“If you two are cousins, I'm—I'm—a pigeon,” he finished lamely, raising his hand to pick at his face again.

“Hilarious,” I said. “You're a regular Rodney Dangerfield.” The two brothers started laughing, one of them choking mid-puff.

“Fuck me Margaritte,” the shorter brother said, wiping his eyes. “You've always been a funny motherfucker.”

“I try,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the meth-head. He looked like he weighed all of 120 pounds, but the darkness coming from him was something real, something that made my stomach hurt. Every few minutes, he looked like he was about to leap out of the wooden chair he was sitting on and cause some serious trouble.

I sighed heavily and looked down at the cold cement floor. I had to go to work that night, and I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. I had been waiting tables at the Sugar Plum for about a year and it sucked, hard-core. No one came in hardly, so the tips were terrible. Otherwise, I was paid two bucks an hour. Jake, he made bank from all the weed he sold from his connection in Denver, which is why I had started helping him. All he had to do was put up with crazy fuckers like this occasionally. Mainly we sold to kids at school, like the two brothers, who were cool. They were regulars. Jake worked in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant, maybe once or twice a week, at most. We kept the jobs so that our parents wouldn't figure out what we were really up to, but I knew Jake's parents at least were beginning to suspect that maybe our money wasn't coming from the restaurant business after all.

Jake shook his head and finished sorting the baggies. “OK, pay up. Much as I enjoy listening to the brilliance coming out of that thing over there,” he said, pointing to the meth-head with his lips and his left hand. “I really have shit to do.”

“You're a dick,” the guy said and Jake looked at him again. The guy looked away, but after a second, he started staring at me again. Staring, grinding his teeth, and picking at his face. I shuddered.

The brothers glanced at each other and then one of them, the older one I think, started digging into the pocket of his ripped up black jeans. He pulled cash, lint, and something that appeared as if it might have once been a grape Jolly Rancher out of his pocket. He plucked the lint and the candy off of the money and slapped it into Jake's palm. “There you go, brother.”

Jake frowned.

“You know what I mean,” he said, and laughed nervously, running his hand through his thin black hair. The whole family had that hair, that and black eyes, though as far as I knew, they were white. I had a flash, a memory of either him, his brother, or one of their trillions of cousins, a memory from the school playground when I was maybe five or six. I was trying to climb the rusty-ass jungle gym, my funny yellow arms reaching for the next rung, when I felt hands on my back and turned, afraid. But he was only helping me up. I let him. Later, he ignored me when his friends were around and I remembered the feeling of his warm, pale hands on my back, the familiarity of it, but the strangeness of it too.

“You want a toke, Jake?” the older brother asked. I figured he was the older one because he was taller. Honestly, It was hard to keep any of them straight.

“Sure, one.”

He handed the joint over to Jake and he took a hit, handed it to me, and I took a hit, and I handed it back to the brother. I looked over at the meth-head. He had an angry, sullen expression on his face. I began to feel truly nervous. The taller brother handed the joint back over to me but I refused.

I looked at Jake. “Let's be on our merry way, shall we?”

“Merry way,” the shorter brother said. “Seriously, you kill  me.”

“Thanks,” I said, thinking that it really hadn't been all that funny.

I stood up, and so did Jake. “Nice doing business with you.”

“Yeah, you too, Jake,” the older brother said.

We were almost to the stairs when I heard a scuffling sound, like that of a giant, dying roach, and then a weight. And then a piercing pain in my side. Then the weight was lifted off me, and I turned around to see why there was pain. And that's when I saw the blood rapidly expanding on my old, white sweatshirt, right over one of the faded blue unicorns that were scattered all over it. I looked up at Jake and he was already pulling the meth-head up by his neck and slamming him against the cold, cement wall. The dude squirmed. I stood up and lifted my shirt
.

“You fuck up!” Jake was yelling, and the brothers were just standing there, stunned. “You idiots,” Jake said, turning to them. “Call 911.”

“No, Jake, don't. It's not that bad. And they'll find the weed,” I said. The blood was flowing, but the guy had barely gotten his knife in so I figured I would be fine. One of the brothers left and the other sat down on the edge of the couch, hard and put his head in his hands. “Shit, shit,” he chanted over and over.

“No,” Jake said. The guy's face was turning blue. His legs were still kicking at the air, but the kicks were getting weaker.

“Jake, let him go. I'm fine. You're going to fucking kill him,” I said. “Serious, hey.” I was bunching my shirt over the wound, trying to convince myself that it wasn't that bad. But I had to admit, I was starting to feel weak.

“I gotta sit down,” I said. Jake turned back to the guy, let go of his neck. He slid to the floor, coughing. I sat down on the old couch. Jake walked over to me, lifted my shirt. The blood was still flowing, even getting on the couch. The brother who'd left came back with bandages and tape and handed them to Jake. Jake lifted my shirt, my hand, and the blood came even harder. I told myself not to cry. Jake folded the bandages over, and placed them on my wound and taped them.

“I'm driving you to the hospital,” he said.

“No, I'm OK.” The meth-head had recovered and was staring at me with a grotesque smile on his face. He began picking at a blackened scab on his chin and stood up. “That's what you get for fucking with me, you Mexican cunt,” he said, his voice still weak from Jake holding him against the wall by his neck. He laughed, a long, sick, angry sound. Jake turned around and headed over to him.

“Jake! Stop,” I said. “We're already in trouble.”

Jake stood over the guy and round-housed him, once. The guy fell to the floor, his greasy hair laying over his scarred face.

The brother with his head in his hands looked up. The taller brother looked at Jake. “Jake, he's a piece of trash. We'll toss him where we found him. You take her to the hospital.” Jake nodded and helped me up. We walked up the steps and out into a living room that was almost as dank and messy as the basement. A young girl was sitting on another old couch, nursing a baby. She looked up, pursed her lips, closed her faded blue eyes and then went back to nursing.

Jake opened the ancient Subaru's side door, the rusty, creaking noise it'd made ever since I'd whacked into the side of the dirt cliff while driving high one stupid night making me wince. Jake got in on the other side, the engine turning over a few times before it started.

“You OK?” he asked, pulling out of the driveway and onto the road. We were on the west side and had to drive through town to get to the exit for I-70. The closest hospital was in Denver.

“Yeah. Tired though.”

“Don't fall asleep Margaritte,” he said, biting his lip. I laughed  weakly.

“I won't. If you stop speeding. All we need is get stopped by the cops,” I said, looking down at the bandages. They were soaked through.

“I just want to get you there,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Great. I get stabbed all the time,” I said, shifting in the seat. There were springs coming through, and they were always poking me in the ass. I planned on getting covers, but I never did. “I can't believe that meth-tard.”

“He's a piece of shit.”

“Yeah. I guess guys like him are sort of an occupational hazard.”

Jake was silent for a few seconds and then said, “This is my fault. I knew not to bring you in on this.”

“It's not your fault that those idiots picked up some pile of steaming shit and brought him home. That could have happened if we were just hanging there. And it was my choice. I wanted to help you deal. Fuck, if I didn't, I'd be poor as hell. And our account would be much emptier. No one comes to the Sugar Plum. I make dick in tips.”

“I guess,” Jake said, and went silent again.

I didn't want him to feel guilty. I had practically begged Jake to let me help, and it had doubled his profits. I looked out the window. It was getting dark and I knew I was supposed to be at work and when I didn't show, Buddy would call my house and Mom would be wondering where I was and what trouble I was getting into. She was always wondering. And I knew when I got to the hospital that they would want me to call my parents because I was only sixteen. I knew that my mom would be making dinner when they called, dealing with the twins clinging to her legs and the TV and when she found out that she would have to come to Denver to pick me up, she would want to punch me in the neck. And my dad would already be halfway to getting motherfucking plastered and when Mom told him what I had done, he
would
punch me in the neck. I sighed. I turned up the volume on the radio. Jake loved Christian metal and I hoped the rough, grating sounds would be enough to keep me awake.

Pulling into the ER at Lutheran's, Jake put the car in park and came around to help me out. I already had the door open and was trying to get out when I fell onto the sidewalk.