Wild, Animal Love

Two weeks later, I was in bed with Keokuk.

“I’ve stopped drinking coffee and I feel better,” he was saying. “I only drink tea now.”

“I read somewhere that tea has a higher caffeine content than coffee.”

“No. I know I feel better.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” I said.

“What are your sources?” he said.

“I don’t remember.”

“Well. I know you’re wrong.”

“Right,” I said sarcastically.

We had spent the later half of the day playing basketball with his family, Keokuk screaming at me to get the ball, nearly knocking me over in his attempt to get the ball for me. Before that, in his car on the way to the game, we had talked. I had said that I didn’t like that he wouldn’t kiss me in bed. He had said, “Look, I’m just really not into you. But I can tell you like me.” I had rolled my eyes and said, “Frankly, I don’t know you very well. But it’s cool. I’m not really into you either. If you don’t want to have sex, that’s fine.” He had been silent for a moment. “No, no, he’d said. I don’t want to be alone.”

 

“Well, it’s just that they’re from the reserve,” Justine was saying. We were at a bar with John, her boyfriend. She had heard there was a trivia night and though I had told her that I didn’t want to go, that I was in a grumpy mood, and had, in fact, not answered the phone the seven times that she had called until she’d sent John after me, I was there.

“No, Elyse and Keokuk are not,” I said. “I thought that too, but they grew up in Iowa City. Their dad is though and he’s a prominent tribal politician and businessman. Their Mom is from Burlington and she’s a high school teacher. His parents are separated, and once, after telling me that he really couldn’t stay because his sister wanted him to spend the night at her house, he had told me that he was on Prozac.”

Justine laughed loudly. “I think he just doesn’t like you.”

“I suppose he likes you,” I said, assuming that would make her angry. She looked at me intently, took a few, long pulls on her drink and said, “Do you think so?”

I stared at her. “No, I think his problem is that he’s a jerk and I shouldn’t have slept with him. Hell, even you’ve said that Justine.”

She laughed one of her large, fake laughs. “I never said that!” I looked over at John, who was looking down at his phone.

“OK,” I said. She was getting very, very drunk and was pissed at me because I was sarcastically asking the people around me what the answers were to the trivia questions and a group of men at a table next to ours had noticed. One of them had yelled, “Are you cheating?” and Justine had said, “Oh! Not me! Her!” We had argued about it and I had agreed to stop. “I guess I just care too much about what people think,” she’d said. “I don’t,” I’d said, knowing that it was true after saying it. “I know,” she’d said. I had told her that I hated things like trivia. And I hadn’t wanted to go out in the first place.

Justine sat down. “John! John! Get us an ashtray, John!” he looked vaguely annoyed and then, like always, went to retrieve an ashtray.

“He’s soooo lazy!” she said and laughed.

“You could get one.”

“Oh, but I want him to!” She laughed. I didn’t.

Justine went to the bathroom and when she came back said, “I had to throw up.”

“Do you want to go?” I asked.

“No, now I’m OK and can drink some more,” she said. I felt like crying.

“Anyway, when I was in the bathroom, this girl asked me if you were cheating.”

I sighed. “I get it Justine. I told you, if it’s that important to you, I won’t cheat.”

“Good.”

The game finished, and as soon as it was over, the boys who had been pissed about my cheating got up and left.

“That’s sad,” I said.

“Wha?” Justine said.

“Well, as soon as they realized that they hadn’t won, they just left,” I was about to say that I thought the point of these things was to have fun but Justine looked me in the eyes, her head wavering and said, “I’m sick of your negative animosity,” and then stopped, looking satisfied.

I wanted to tell her that that was a double negative, that if one had animosity, it was automatically negative but I just said, “Well, then maybe you should go.”

“I will!” She walked up to the bar.

I looked over at John. “Well, it’s been nice getting to know you.” I felt sorry for him. I wondered what kept him with her. Love, I guess.

“We’ll hang out again,” he said.

“I don’t think so.” He looked sad.

She sat down and didn’t look at me.

“Justine, I don’t want you to pay my half of the bill.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, you’ll get yours!” she said venomously. “C’mon John!” They stood up. I watched them go. I sat for a while longer, the deep, dank, beer-soaked smell of the bar working its way into me. I walked up to the bar, ordered a shot of peppery-tasting tequila, drank it in one angry swallow, and walked home.

 

I didn’t go to any more meetings. I didn’t see Keokuk again, or Chris for that matter, though six months later Keokuk stuffed a tee-shirt in my mailbox that he had borrowed and emailed an apology of sorts, including, of course, another statement about how he didn’t like me and how he knew I liked him. I didn’t respond.

As I put my groceries away after finding the tee-shirt, I thought of one of the times that, on the way to Justine’s house, she had said that she needed to stop at the grocery store. My stomach had tensed. She had parked, told me that I could wait for her, and sure enough, when she came back there was a bottle of wine at the bottom of her bag. I remember closing my eyes and feeling the same dread I used to feel when my foster father would go into the store for “a little something,” and come out with a bottle of Scotch. And I remembered the time I’d told her about my foster father climbing the tree to get the cat my mother had given me. The time she had cried for him. What I hadn’t told her was that that was the last time I’d ever seen my mother. She had looked at me, and I back at her across a great divide, her arms full of cat scratch and her eyes full of wild, animal love.

Erika T. Wurth’s novel, ‘Crazyhorse’s Girlfriend’, has been accepted for publication by Curbside Splendor. Her work has appeared in numerous journals. She teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and she’s been a guest writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver.