Chapter 52

the sound: Jethro Tull – Witch’s Promise, Jethro Tull – Songs from the Wood, Jethro Tull – Minstrel in the Gallery, Jethro Tull – Heavy Horses, Jethro Tull – Broadsword, Jethro Tull – The Whistler, Jethro Tull – Song for Jeffery, Jethro Tull – Life’s a Song, Jethro Tull – Dark Ages, Jethro Tull – My God

I don’t think I really passed out at that point…but memories are pretty fuzzy in spots around the next few hours. I did, however, shut up for the time being.

Suffice it to say, the man with the knife got hurt, badly, and then he got arrested. My father saw to that before he checked to see if I was still alive….ever the consummate cop.

(I found out later that my father had broken the man’s jaw and one arm and almost lost his job…but I wasn’t really interested at that point…it would end up being just another one of those examples my father liked to throw in my face of things I had done to our family to cause them grief, strife or loss of wages…like I’d done it on purpose or something)

I remember that some man was holding me up off the floor so that while I was supine I was also sitting up enough to be able to watch my own blood pump out of me with some sort of detachment and morbid fascination. There were people gathered around us and as I looked up and was surprised to see the looks of horror. Women were crying….I just for the life of me couldn’t figure out what all that mess was coming out of that hole in my side.

Luck, never having been one of my saving graces, changed then. A woman who had just entered the airport terminal turned out to be a doctor and she used her own hands to hold my guts in my body while barking orders.

As soon as she took control everything moved back into real time and in no time at all I was in an ambulance racing through the city streets on my way to the hospital. I got noisy again for a while and then passed out just before we got to the hospital.

Apparently, for a while, it was “touch and go” as they say. I awoke some time later to my mother sitting in a chair in a private room and a cop at the door. I hurt like a son of a bitch and said so, loudly, then had a fight with a nurse because I wanted to see the injury. This of course convinced my mother that I was gonna make it while the nurse strapped my arms to the rails to “keep me from hurting myself”…..once again…like I’d done something on purpose.

I had a 5 inch wound on my abdomen, starting below my rib cage and following the curve of the bottom rib towards my sternum. Because I was falling by the top of it, it’s was mostly messy was at the bottom end. The area below my rib was sort of shredded and had to be “patched” back together. I could have it covered later, but my father was sure I “wouldn’t be vain enough to need that.” There were questions about just how much damage had actually been done to the inside of me as well…but that was one of those hushed conversations held between my father and the doctor that I wasn’t allowed to be party to.

Later my mother explained that I would require some physiotherapy to be able to stretch and stand straight and that I was one lucky girl to not have been poisoned by my own poison…..in the end, I never went.

Three weeks later, when I got out of the hospital I went to Toronto to stop the threats on my brother and sister and while there I discovered a whole new way to hide in dime bags and points. By that time almost all of Do-All’s family was in jail, as well as most of Bennie and Frankie’s cronies.

The papers had held the story ad nauseum and went on and on about the “young woman being brutally attacked at the local airport as and act of biker retribution”. I could never get anyone to understand that Do-All, Frankie and Bennie weren’t the bikers…I was.

Almost a year later I returned when the case went to court. Court in itself was a horror show of a different kind for me. The threats came back for a while but in the end Frankie and Bennie both got a “deuce less” (2 years less a day) to serve concurrent with the sentences that they’d received for trafficking. And Amelia didn’t press charges over the loss of her child…and I heard through the grapevine that she and her husband had split up. Frankie and Bennie would have not even been sent to a maximum security prison if it hadn’t been for the drugs.

In the end…the whole episode left me scared and frightened and I thought friendless. Then my Grandfather died and friends started climbing out of the woodwork. I didn’t care…by that time all I cared about was dime bags and eight balls….and finding ways to find “clean” needles.