by Les Edgerton
“Yeah. You’re right there, buddy. Somebody snitched me out but I played dumb. Kept telling them it wasn’t me. They don’t believe me but there ain’t much they can do. It’s my word against whoever snitched me out.”
“That’s good, Manny. Just hang tough. There ain’t much they can do.” He was a standup guy, for sure, and I didn’t think I had to worry about him cracking, but I did feel bad he had to go through this on my account. I decided to level with him.
“It was me lit up that punk,” I said. “But if you hang in there they’ll never know. This’ll all blow over.” I told him when and how I did it and he remembered. I didn’t tell him why.
“Yeah, that’s right. Me and Dusty wondered where you’d got off to. I shoulda figured it was you done him. Only I didn’t know his name. Well, this is some shit, bro, but don’t worry—I’m not gonna snitch you out.”
I thanked him and I meant it and then I had a twinge of conscience. “Manny, there’s something you ought to know.” I wasn’t sure if I should tell him this, but decided I owed it to him. “They can’t prove anything, sure, but you don’t tell them what you know, there’s probably gonna be some trouble for you. You might not make parole first time out. Maybe they work you over sometime.”
“Aw, shit, Jake. I can take whatever they dish out. I don’t give a fuck if they beat me even. It won’t be the first time the Man took a poke at me. I’m Mexican, remember? We were born to be fucked with by the Man.” His whole attitude changed; now he was my friend, proud of how he’d handled the interrogation, hadn’t weakened.
“No, Manny, this may cause you serious trouble,” I said. “No matter if they don’t do anything, they can still fuck you up another way. This’ll go in your jacket and when you come up for parole they’ll use it against you. You’ll probably get denied, first time. In fact, I’d bet on it.”
It was the truth. They couldn’t get at a guy one way, they always had his parole they could fuck with. And they usually did.
He got serious again. “How can they do that? They can’t prove nothing.”
I ran it down for him. “Manny, this is the joint. They don’t have to prove anything.”
He saw I was right. “You think I’ll have to do my whole bit?” He was on a one to ten, should make parole in ten months this hadn’t happened.
“No, they’ll probably deny you the first time, figure that’s enough punishment.” I wasn’t blowing smoke saying that. That was about the way the warden’s mentality worked. “Keep your nose clean the rest of the way and you’ll make it the next time up.”
“Six more months you’re saying.”
“Yeah.”
He was quiet for a minute or two. Then, he said, “Fuck it. Piece of cake. I’m your man, Jake.”
I could have hugged him I loved that guy so much right then. He was willing to give up six months of his freedom for me and we hardly knew each other. Before Pendleton we’d been casual acquaintances, nothing more. He knew what it meant. He was giving up six months for the four or five or more years I’d end up doing if they found out who shanked Boles. More, if he died. What do you say to a guy like that?
“I won’t forget this, Manny.”
“I know,” is all he said.
We talked some more about Boles and came to the conclusion that either he hadn’t come to yet down there in the hospital in Indy or else he was keeping his mouth shut. So far, anyhow. Who knows what he’d do once he got back here, provided, of course, that he lived. I knew what I was going to have to do if he came back. Ice him. I couldn’t take a chance on him deciding one fine day he was going to snitch me out. Even if he didn’t, he would own me. I’d rather do a hundred years in solitaire than have him or any other punk own me.
From then on Manny and I were like brothers. They didn’t question him any more and they never came for me or Dusty. We figured they thought they’d find out what happened when Boles came back to the joint, soon as he was well enough to be transported back. I’d have to find a way to get over to the infirmary, which is where they’d keep him till he healed all the way.
I told Manny about Donna. Not even Dusty or Bud knew what had happened, why I’d tried to kill myself that time.
“She stabbed this girl,” I said. I don’t know why I was telling him all this, stuff I hadn’t even told Bud. “This other girl I dated a couple of times. We’d broke up for about the twentieth time, me and Donna.”
CHAPTER 20
I told Manny the whole story. We were staying in on a Saturday morning while everyone else went to the movie. Sat up at the front table, playing double sol and eating Keebler’s Chocolate Chips and smoking Camels.
“I was hung up on her, bro,” I said, trying to explain it to him. “She owned my ass.”
“I been there,” he said and the way he said it I knew it was true.
“We got in this fight one time. Hell, we were always getting in fights.” I laughed, remembering. “I was back in the bedroom and she pulled out her gun from her purse and fired it at me. It’s a good thing she’s a lousy shot ‘cause she missed me about twenty feet. Put a hole in the living room ceiling. How bad a shot is that? Anyway, I made a run for her, tackled her like she was a ball carrier and got the gun away from her. Gave her a swat. Maybe a couple. Then, the cops came. Somebody, probably downstairs, called ‘em. They took me away. I coulda told them she shot at me but it was an unregistered gun and I didn’t want to get her in trouble. I figured they’d keep me overnight and let me go which is what they did. But that was it. I figured it was all over. How can you live with a bitch shoots at you? I’d never trust myself to fall asleep!” We both got a hoot out of that.
“Soon as I got out of jail I came over and got my stuff and booked, mate. Got me an apartment over off Lake. You know those ones by all those doctors’ offices?
“I started taking out some other ladies,” I went on. “One weekend, a Sunday, I must have had four different chicks come over, different times, got laid each time. I was having a ball but it was crazy. No matter how much fun I was having, I still couldn’t get Donna out of my mind. I was fucked up, man.
“Anyway, the last chick left about eleven that night and I went to bed. To sleep.” Manny cracked up, leaned back in his chair and laughed with his mouth wide open.
“I guess you weren’t gonna pound your trouser worm,” he said.
“I guess not. I was just getting asleep when the doorbell rang and I got up and it was Donna. ‘I got to talk to you,’ she said.
“Fuck, Donna, I said. I’m just about asleep. We’re over, sugar. Why don’t you just leave me alone. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve really got to talk to you.’
“Well, I said, I’m just about asleep and if I don’t go right back to bed I won’t be able to. I oversleep and lose this job my P.O.’ll violate me.
“‘Okay,’ she said, pushing her way in. ‘You go back to bed. I’ll come with you and we’ll talk in the morning. It’s really important.’”
I looked over at Manny. “You know how it is when you’re just about asleep? I told her, all right, come on in but we’re not doing anything, Donna. I just want to go to sleep.
“Well, she came in and I went back and climbed in bed and she came in a minute later and crawled in with me, buck naked. I meant what I said though, I wasn’t going to fuck her. I turned over and closed my eyes, tried to get to sleep again. About five minutes later the doorbell rang again.
“It was a girl I’d seen a couple of times that week. Patsy. ‘Patsy,’ I said, ‘I’ve got company.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘That’s cool. I’ll see you tomorrow then.’ And she left.
“When I came back into the bedroom, Donna jumped up and asked me who that was. Nobody, I said, just a friend. She’s gone. Donna ran to the front door and must have seen her walking away. She came back and she was hot.
“‘You’re fucking that girl,’ she said. I said, No, I’m not but that’s none of your business anyway. We’re broke up, I said.
“‘That’s it
,’ she said, slamming around and throwing her clothes on. ‘I’m outta here.’ That was the original idea, I said, back to her, and she went out, just about busting the door.
That’s it, I’m thinking and went back and laid down. But then I thought I heard voices and got up and opened the door and sure enough, there’s Patsy sitting in a chair by the pool and Donna’s giving her holy hell.
“‘Donna!’ I yelled down. ‘Get your ass out of here right now or I’m calling the cops.’ I didn’t say anything to Patsy even though I knew she didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew Patsy was cool. I figured if I said anything to her that’d fire Donna up again and I’d just tell Patsy the next day what went down and she’d understand. Well, they both get up and head for their cars. Patsy always parked on one side of the complex. I watched for a minute, saw Donna was heading in a different direction and went back inside. I lay back down but then I got to thinking—I know this bitch—Donna—I better be sure she’s left.
“I went to the front door again, and sure enough, Donna’s dogging Patsy, walking right behind her, yapping at her. I ran out of the apartment along the catwalk. All I had on were my jockeys. There’s a little space where you can look out at the parking lot and I ran to that. Patsy’s up against a car and Donna’s giving her the business. I ran downstairs and around the corner and just as I came around the corner, I see Donna’s hand go up and she smacked Patsy. She smacked her hard, dude. I never seen a guy hit another guy the way that broad hit her. I ran over to them and just as I got there Donna’s raising her hand to smack Patsy again. Only she wasn’t hitting her. She was stabbing her. It really didn’t register though. I got there just as she was coming down with the knife and I grabbed her arm with one hand and Patsy with the other and shoved them apart. Donna went down on her knees and then started coming up, trying to cut me. I ducked my stomach back, and at the same time she missed, grabbed her hand with the knife and hit it against my knee. This all happened fast, man. Really fast.
“She lost the knife when her hand hit my knee and my first thought is to 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’d given 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 took off running. I’m standing there with this knife and I tried to close it and couldn’t as it’s bent in two 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. She 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 checkmarks 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 Parkview 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 a width of 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 want to take her in my car but she said she wanted me to drive her over in her car. If she leaves her car there, she said, Donna might come back and fuck with it. That wasn’t the reason only I didn’t know that at the time. What it was, Patsy ran drugs for this guy, mostly grass and she had a couple garbage bags full in the trunk. What I found out later, she was afraid the cops might find it if they came to check out things.
“So, anyway, I drive her over to Parkview 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 don’t see her until the next morning.
“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 North Star Bar on State, 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 scar-face 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 have 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. 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 had ended up giving her a six-pack of 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 seen 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 okay 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’da 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.
“Anyhoo, a couple weeks go by and then I start getting phone calls at work from Donna. She don’t say hello, kiss my ass or nothing when I pick up the phone, just starts talking like we hadn’t ever stopped. ‘I drive by your work every day when I get off,’ she says, ‘and I point my gun at you while I’m going by. One of these days I’m pulling the trigger, motherfucker.’ The first time or so she pulls this I just sort of laugh it off, but after a solid week of these kinds of conversations I had enough and called the prosecuting attorney. ‘Nothing we can do,’ he says, ‘until she does something, but I made a note of this, sir, and if she ever actually shoots at you or anything like that we’ll pick her up.’ That made me feel about as good and safe as finding out I got blood in my urine. I thought once or twice that maybe I ought to do her before she does me, but when I start scheming about how to carry that off, I realize I’m still fucked up over her.”
