“She lost the knife when her hand hit my knee and my first thought is… find the knife. I know if I get the knife first she can’t hurt me. We’re both scrabbling around looking for it — it was dark in that parking lot — and I find it first. It was this big-ass switchblade — in fact, I gave it to her a long time ago as a present — and I find it and pick it up and she sees I’ve got it and she takes off running. I’m standing there with this switchblade and I tried to close it and couldn’t ‘cause it’s bent in two-three places. I just stand there until I see the reflection of her lights go on in the other parking lot and hear her tires burn out, and then I walk over to Patsy, who’s standing up against a car.
“Well, this sounds weird, but it’s the truth, Manny. I’ve got this knife in my hand and everything but it still doesn’t dawn on me that Patsy’s been stabbed. It just happened so fast. Patsy didn’t know she’d been cut either.
“I walk up to her and say, ‘Are you all right?’ She’s got this white silk blouse on and chinos and I see little tiny sprinkles of blood on the blouse, looked like somebody’d sprinkled red salt out of a shaker, or tabasco sauce… yeah… more like tabasco sauce. ‘You been hit,’ I said. ‘You got a nosebleed.’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘she missed me. I ducked and she hit me in the back.’
“She turned around, and man! Her whole back was solid red and blood was running down her pants like she was peeing herself. ‘You been stabbed,’ I said, what had happened finally dawning on me. ‘I have?’ she said. She didn’t even know it herself.”
Just then the dorm hack came by, motioned at us to come over. He was taking the count. Even though he knew us, he made us tell him our names and he read the numbers off our shirts, made check marks on his clipboard, and then left, probably to take a nap downstairs where his desk was.
We went back and sat down at the table.
“You sure you want to hear the rest of this?” I asked Manny.
“Fuck, yes,” he said, grinning. “This is some wild bitch!”
I went ahead with the story.
“Well, I wanted to take her over to Charity Hospital, but she said no. She wanted us to go up to my apartment and get a better look at where she’d been stuck. We climbed up the stairs, and I’m thinking she’s not that bad, being as how she can go up stairs and all. When we get to my apartment I took off her blouse and all I can see is an entry wound about this big [I held up my fingers to show about an inch and a half or so], so my mind says the knife only went in a couple inches and hit a bone. That’s what bent the blade, I’m thinking. Anybody knows you can bleed a lot from even a small cut. The blood’s not running anymore, it’s kind of just bubbling a little. I bandage her up with a bath towel and some electrician’s tape I had, and then she says maybe I ought to take her over to the hospital as she’s feeling a little woozy. That’s smart, I tell her, and we go downstairs.
“I drive her over to Charity and pull up to the emergency room entrance and the rent-a-cop comes out and they get a wheelchair after I tell them the score and wheel her in.
“I tell the rent-a-cop what’s gone down, and he calls the real deal, and when that guy gets there, a uniform, I tell him the same story and give him the knife. I tell him where he can probably find Donna. ‘Look over at the Godfather in Metairie,’ I say. ‘How’s the girl got stabbed?’ he asks, and I tell him I don’t know, I don’t think it’s that bad, and give him my reasoning about hitting the bone and all. ‘But check with the doctor,’ I said.
“Well, he doesn’t check with the doctor, just leaves, and they pick up Donna the next morning and all she gets charged with is simple assault, not assault with a deadly weapon or attempted murder or any of that, only I don’t know none of this until the next day.
“About an hour after I bring Patsy in, I’m sitting by my lonesome in the waiting area and in comes this lady and man. The man looks exactly like that guy used to be on Miami Vice, the TV show? You know, the captain? The one with all the acne scars? Remember? Anyway, this lady comes over to me, no howdy-do, nothing, and she says, ‘If my little girl dies, you die, and this guy will kill you.’ She means the scarface with her. It must be Patsy’s mom, I guess, which it is, and I try to explain how it isn’t my fault — that if it wasn’t for me Patsy probably would be dead as Donna was fixing to stab her again when I broke it up.
“ ‘Don’t matter none,’ she says. ‘If she hadn’t been at your place, she wouldn’t have got stabbed to begin with.’ I guess she’d already talked to the cops or the hospital or somebody, got the lowdown on what happened. You couldn’t reason with her. This guy she was with, later I find out he’s connected, would’ve done what she said, terminated my ass. Him I never talked to. In fact the whole time, the four hours we sat there the only ones in the waiting room, he never said a word to me or her. Just sat there mugging on me with no expression on his face. It was creepy.
“I went to the john a couple of times and each time I’m thinking, Should I just take off now, go to California or something? See, I was convinced that if Patsy died her mom meant business. There was no doubt in my mind. The only thing kept me there was I still thought Patsy wasn’t hurt all that much.
“Shit. It was serious all right. Along about daybreak this doctor comes out to talk to us. ‘We think she’s gonna make it,’ he says to Patsy’s mom, ‘but it’s still a little shaky.’ Turns out the knife went all the way in, almost came through the other side. It did hit a bone, and that’s what saved her. ‘We were looking to see if the blade hit the lung,’ he said. ‘If it had even nicked it, we couldn’t have saved her. Her lungs would have filled up with blood and she would have basically drowned.’ As it was, they ended up giving her six units of whole blood and the doc said she died on them twice and they had to bring her back from the dead. They had to wait until the blood clotted and moved away from the lung to get a clear picture. The x-ray showed it had missed, but how he didn’t know. It was a miracle.
“For her and me. Once we found out she was out of the woods, we all left. Before we did, her mom turned to me and said, ‘You’re still on the hook, Mayes. She might still die. If she does, you’re dead, Mister.’
“Way it turned out, Patsy came through fine, although she was a little sore.”
“So why’d you try to kill yourself? I don’t get it.”
“Wait a minute. I’m getting to it.” I saw Manny was getting antsy now that the bloody part was all over, so I speeded up a couple of the in-between details and cut to the grand finale. “Patsy gets out of the hospital, sore but OK, and we even started dating kinda heavy, although we had to fuck real easy or else open up her wound again. Her mom decides she likes me, and she tells me what she told me in the hospital was for true — I’d’a been dead meat if her darlin’ daughter’d croaked. She says she’s glad she didn’t ‘cause now she likes me, but somehow that didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. She’s an okay enough gal, but every time I see her I still get a little nervous.