Let’s be perfectly clear about this. I never had a dad.
Okay, I admit that I must have had a father. I’m not foolish enough to believe that I was the result of a virgin birth just like the Baby Jesus. Yeah, I fell out of the sky and right into the manger. I’m not that dumb. From what Granny said, as soon as the dude learned the news about me being around, he took off and never looked back. I heard later he joined the Army and never returned to the state. Granny always said he was part Indian, but he had blue eyes – that must have been the part that wasn’t Indian.
“My father” was a ghost in our house. Granny never referred to him as being mean or no-good or that she didn’t like him. He was just too young; he was only 16, so he ran. Personally, I can see how this happens. It’s not easy to be a teenager and have your girlfriend pregnant.
My mother wasn’t much of a mom either. In fact, I never called her “mom.” I always called her by the nickname her brothers gave her, which was “Pansy.” Why they called her that remains a mystery because her real given name was Joyce. She wasn’t pleasant or pretty like a flower, that’s for sure. Well, maybe she was when she was really little, but she didn’t end up that way later on. My mother had me when she was 14, so early motherhood probably pounded any sweetness out of her.
The weird thing is that Granny wasn’t really mad at Pansy for getting in the “family way” while she was just entering high school. If I was the mom, and the time was now, I would have a freaking cow and kill my daughter and her boyfriend. Yeah, even though I can understand how teenagers have raging hormones and all. Then I’d go over to his parents’ house and kill them, too. Not my granny. She took it all in stride. To Granny, this was all in the normal range. Probably it’s because Granny had her first child when she was 16, too.
Granny was the one who mostly took care of me. She was on disability, so she didn’t work. If she drank, it was only a beer or two. She said she didn’t like the taste much, but really she was so tiny, it only took a couple of beers and she’d be flying. Granny was a chicken, though, and she never liked to fly very high.
I ended up with my mother’s dark hair and my father’s blue eyes. Blue eyes are spooky if you’re a Native American. None of the 100 percenters in our town wanted to have anything to do with me or my family. Most of the white kids didn’t want to have anything to do with me either. What was left was my family, which wasn’t much of one, if you ask me.
My uncles were often drunk and when they got drunk, they were mean. And I mean, REALLY mean. They’d hit their girlfriends (thank goodness no one was dumb enough to marry any of them) and break up furniture or throw beer bottles around. They’d twist my Granny’s arm to try to get her social security money out of her for more alcohol. Pansy tried not to drink in the house, but she worked in a bar and came home wasted on a regular basis. She’s just fall into bed and black out. Pansy’s thing would be to get mean and angry when she woke up.
One day, a new girl came to school. She was a real brute, probably the biggest girl I’ve ever seen, and she had the palest white skin and dark hair. She looked like she easily beat up all boys in my school. I’d bet she could take on my uncles, too. For some reason, this girl, who was named Suzie, liked me. She would sit by me at lunchtime, and no one else ever did, and give me the parts of her lunch that she didn’t really care for. She especially hated tomatoes and plums, so I got a lot of those. This was a very good thing, because otherwise I would have to make my own lunch and a lot of times there wasn’t any food in the house. Certainly there wasn’t any worth packing up to take to school where everyone else in the whole world could see the kind of crap I was eating.
Pretty soon, Suzie started showing up at my house. I’d never think to invite her, ever! Are you kidding? I didn’t have any friends, and even if I did, I would never ask them to come over. My house was too weird. While my Granny was a nice old lady, she was really a strange bird. She’d come up with lots of strange sayings and she’d cuss like a sailor. My uncles were all pieces of work, and when Pansy was home, all she would do was sleep, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she was chain smoking and watching TV.
One day when I was about 13, I was minding my own business, trying to get my homework done. Pansy was gone, working at the bar. Granny must have been gone, too. I think she went to the store. She might have been disabled, but she liked walking to the store and chewing the fat with some of the customers. My two uncles Tom and Gerald came in. They were really drunk, too, because they were falling over the furniture. I heard them coming, you couldn’t help but hear them, so I tried to make it out of the back door before they saw me. If they were drunk, it was better to just get the hell out of their way before anything bad happened.
It was too late. They came in, saw my books and started giving me shit about my schoolwork. “You think you’re better than us, now?” one of them said. The other one jumped on the band wagon and called me a Smarty Pants, too big for my britches. Then one started slapping me, and the other joined in.
I was small and pretty quick on my feet. I tried to get out of the way, but with the two of them coming at me, I just couldn’t do it. I kept up a good fight for a couple of minutes, but with two big guys, it was hard to keep fighting.
All of a sudden, I heard a terrible crashing. First, Tom flew away from me like he was a toy a giant had picked up. He fell against the screen door and took it right off the hinges. I think he bounced all the way down the stairs. Then I saw a beer bottle come down on Gerald’s head. He staggered away and landed on the couch and rolled off. The bottle didn’t break, but there was blood on it.
I couldn’t believe it. It was Suzie, who must have come in after they did. She picked those two goons up like they were rag dolls and beat the crap out of them. Then she grabbed me by the arm and we ran fast out the back door.
After that, my uncles stayed far away from me when they were drunk. And Suzie became my best friend.
