Crazy Horse's Girlfriend (9781940430447) (19 page)

“Is that all? Don't you have a fucking thing to say?”

Her lip trembled, and I could see even in that dim, dreamlike near darkness that her lipstick matched her nails.

“No. I have nothing to say for myself. Let me go. I only want out of here.”

Jake shook his head, an expression of disgust on his face. “I loved you, you know. For years.”

She looked back at him with an expression of pain on her face. “I know.”

Jake looked at her in wonder. Mike was still wrapped around my legs, murmuring to himself.

“You know? That's all you have to say to that?”

She looked at him, a strange, not quite angry, not quite anything look in her eyes. “I can't afford to love anyone.”

“You're inhuman,” Jake said, shaking her arm free.

“I'm whatever I have to be to get out of here. If you can't understand that, I'm sorry. You'll be stuck here, then.”

“At least I won't be stuck in your head,” I said. And Julia turned to me, her lip trembling again.

“I'm sorry, Margaritte. I'm really sorry,” she said, and with that she took off.

I tried to pull Mike up, but he was nearing a state of total shitfacery.

“How much coke did you do?” I asked him, and his eyes started to roll back in his head. I slapped his face and he seemed to be coming back.

“You can't do this to me!”

“Mike. How much coke? How much booze?”

He smiled at me. “A lot. Ever since you told me you were going to kill my baby.”

“Mike. We're taking you home,” I said.

“I'm not touching that asshole,” Jake said.

I sighed. “Not now, Jake. Please.”

Jake looked at me and shook his head. “Why do you care what happens to him? A few minutes ago he had his dirty paws all over your best friend.”

“I know. But he looks bad. If he… really got bad I could never live with myself if I just walked off.” I looked down at Mike and saw that he was slumped against my legs. It had only been a few weeks since I'd seen him, but his clothes and hair looked dirty, the black waves of his hair greasy and his jeans and blue t-shirt stained. I had never, ever seen Mike like this. He dressed casually, but fucking perfectly. He was always clean. He always smelled wonderful, like some spicy, expensive cologne. But looking at him now, I could see what a rough state he'd clearly been in for some time. I didn't know how he'd even managed to make out with Julia. He looked half dead.

“We should probably take him to the hospital, and not home.”

“We should dump him off in a landfill,” Jake said, and he took one side of Mike while I grabbed the other.

“Don't do it, Margaritte,” Mike murmured in my ear.

“He seemed OK when I first started talking to him,” I said. “He went down, fast.”

“It's like that with coke sometimes. It feels like you're fucking invincible but when you come down off of it, if you don't do more immediately, you feel like shit. And he's been drinking too. And he's not a very big guy. And I hate this fucker.”

I laughed despite myself but it turned quickly to tears as we dragged him towards the door. The guys doing coke at the kitchen table looked up and watched us drag Mike out, shaking their heads and laughing.

“Weak fucker,” one of them said. The screen door shut behind us and we got him the short distance to the car, my tears flowing hard now. In my periphery, I spotted someone lurking near the keg.

“Hey, it's OK! Have a beer! Don't cry,” the guy said. He was standing lonely at the keg. The party had moved inside by then, the keg totaled. People were either drinking the hard stuff or snorting it. He came stumbling up to us with a beer in his hand. I laughed a little and took the beer in my right hand. “Ever he is, not worth it! Men'r jerks, we really, really we, really are,” he said, shaking his head and stumbling in place. “I definitely always fuck it up. Oh, yeah. I do. Definitely do… ” and with that, he wandered out behind the house. I threw the beer into the woods. A few minutes later we could hear the guy peeing as Jake and me got the back door open and pushed Mike into the backseat.

“Hospital time. Again,” I said. “At least it's not me this time.”

Jake sighed and pulled out of the driveway. “OK. Saint Lutheran's. For you, not for him.” He was silent for a few minutes, probably trying to think of what he could possibly say to make me feel better.

“Thanks, by the way, for trying to spare me.”

“Of course little cousin,” he said, reaching over to pat me gently on the head. “He seemed like a nice dude when we first met him.”

“They always do, don't they?” I said, looking out the window and thinking of the drunk dude who handed me a beer outside, “And they always fuck it up.” I looked at Mike in the rearview mirror. He was passed out. And he was making a funny noise, which scared me.

“
'
Course, I fucked up too.”

“But you wouldn't have done what he did. Or what Julia did.”

“No.”

I looked again at Mike.

“Hold that thought.” I flipped the inside light on and maneuvered so that I could check him out. I let my hand hover a few centimeters over Mike's mouth. He was taking short, shallow breaths. I turned back around.

“Hurry.”

“OK,” Jake said, hitting the accelerator. We had gotten out of the mountains as the house hadn't been too far out, and through town, and were about to hit the highway. It was dark, and the lights of the town, the houses looked ominous, strange and white.

“I'm scared,” I said and Jake patted my knee awkwardly.

About forty-five minutes later Jake was pulling up to the ER and Mike was looking worse. He had gained consciousness for a few seconds, only to vomit violently onto the floor of the car. I had done the best that I could to wipe him up with the Kleenexes that I had stuck in the side pockets of my door, but I noticed when I did that his lips were growing faintly blue, his skin paler and paler by the second.

Jake and I got Mike out of the back of the car and quickly, men in blue scrubs were there, pulling him onto a gurney and asking us questions, wheeling him away from us. I sat down in the waiting room and put my head in my hands, wanting to block out the white hallways and blue, buzzing florescent lights of the hospital. They were making me feel more nauseated than ever. Jake went to park the car and then came back in and sat next to me, his arm around my shoulders.

When I was finally able to pull my head out my hands, the white walls and cheesy paintings covering them came into focus. Across from us sat a miserable looking couple, with sour, resigned, angry expressions on their faces. They were wearing Harley t-shirts, ones that they had obviously picked up at the rally in Sturgis. Hers was an orange number, with a knife over her heart, consumed by flames. His, a long sleeved white one, with red flames going up the arms. I imagined that he also had, among his numerous bad-ass themed t-shirts, a t-shirt with “Big Dog” on it, and a picture of a bulldog in chains, breaking out of them. Both of them were big but they still somehow managed to look strangely weak, like it would take nothing to push them over. I wondered what gave them joy. Their bikes? Bike rallies? Did they even love each other? Had they ever? I felt sick.

“God, please don't let him die,” I said, and Jake pulled me closer.

“He won't,” Jake said. But I could hear unease in his voice.

Around twenty minutes later a doctor came out and asked if we had come in with Mike Walker. I told him that we had and he sat down next to us.

“Your friend will be OK. But his blood alcohol level, not to mention the level of cocaine… well… let me put it to you this way, if you hadn't brought him in, I seriously doubt he would have lived to see the morning.”

I shook my head. “But he's going to be OK?”

“Well. Yes. Though it's clear that he is a habitual cocaine user and that, to say the least, is not good. He's young, but there is definitely damage. We've called his parents and they're on their way here. He's awake if you want to see him.”

“Oh,” I said. Hearing that Mike was going to make it had made me feel so good. But hearing that his parents were coming made that feeling drop away, quick. Mike had never introduced me.

I looked at Jake and he nodded for me to go ahead. I followed the doctor down a long, white hallway and into a room. Mike was in bed, the plain white blanket pulled up around him, making him look like a little boy. He looked weak. His eyes were closed. I went to him and took his hand gently. He opened his eyes, those soft dark eyelashes fluttering open and pulling me in.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, and smiled weakly.

“Actually, I seem to be coming to this joint a lot lately.”

“Cheap drinks?”

“Yeah, must be,” I said, and we both went silent.

“I'm sorry, Margaritte.”

“It's OK.”

He was quiet again and then a tear started in the corner of his right eye and ran down his face.

“I just… don't want you to do this. It's tearing me up inside. The pain.”

I swallowed. “I'm sorry, Mike.”

He began to clench my hand. “Just tell me you'll think about it.”

“God, Mike. Not now. Not when you're like this.”

“I'm like this because of you!” He yelled, starting forward. He gasped and fell back, sweating. He closed his eyes.

“Mike. I don't understand this. Do you even love me? I feel like this isn't even about you and me. Like the baby is more important than I am to you.”

Mike was silent.

“And the coke—”

“Don't start, Margaritte. I got that little speech from the doctor.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to have your baby, but you're not willing to stop snorting coke? What the fuck are you thinking?”

Behind me I heard a woman take breath. I turned around. I saw two pristinely dressed, though disheveled, people hovering in the doorframe. His mom was tall, beautiful and thin, with large cornflower blue eyes and short, light brown hair. His dad looked like Businessman Ken, his coloring the same down to his slightly tanned skin. His mother looked at me and then closed her eyes as if she'd taken a bite of something rotten and was too classy to spit it out. She walked past me and up to Mike, her husband close behind her.

She looked down at him. “We discussed what would happen if you did this again.”

“Again?” I echoed faintly. She ignored me. It was like I wasn't even in the room.

“Mom, no. I'm not going anywhere. I'm fine.”

“You're fine? This is the second time I've had to come and get you in a hospital. You're anything but fine.”

Mike sighed and looked over at his dad. “Talk to her, would you?”

His dad sighed and ran his hand through his perfectly coiffed hair.

“There's nothing I can say, Mike. For God's sake, we relocated in hopes that you would clean up. And you told us you would. And we hoped that living in a small town would put you far enough away from what had been dragging you down. But apparently not.”

“I am not going to rehab. I'm not a junkie.”

My head began to spin. Who was this person?

“Excuse me,” I said, and his parents turned around. “What is going on?”

His mother looked at me with that sour expression she'd had when she'd first come in the room.

“Could you please leave us alone with our son? I don't know who you are, but the fact that you're still standing here as we're trying to have what's obviously a personal conversation with our son shows how rude you are.”

“I'm his girlfriend.”

She looked at me as if I'd sprouted another head and said, “No. His girlfriend is a girl named Julia. We met her this weekend.”

I looked over at Mike and he turned his head away from me.

“Is this true? You introduced Julia to them? And never me? You fucking jerk.”

His head snapped back to attention.

“You're the jerk. No. That's not the word. The word is whore.”

I hadn't even seen Jake at the door, but before his parents could react, before I could say or do anything, Jake was flying past me and he was on Mike, punching him in the head. All three of us rushed over to Jake, tried to pull him off, but he was too strong, too angry, his long dark arms flashing under the fluorescence. I could hear myself begging him to stop. When security finally came, it took three of them to get him off of Mike and by the time they did, Mike was out cold, marks covering his face and arms.

I began to cry violently, and Mike's mother turned to me. “Get out!”

“You are why he's like this,” I hissed angrily.

She drew back in shock. “You little piece of trash.
You
are why he's like this. And he will have nothing to do with that… thing inside you, should you chose to have it.”