Don't Worry About Donald

“You never heard anything like it. She was screaming screams like off this earth and Russell gave her his shirt and she just kept screaming and screaming. The seat of her jeans was soaked with blood, and down along her back. She had this tiny cut up there, up in her back, up under her shoulder blade. All the blood was from that one little cut, and as soon as Marty saw it he just flew into action. He got her patched up and the cops called and they got here fast, too, you know; they’re trained to do that because of the gambling, I guess. We just flew out of the room when we heard it. I didn’t know what it was, just her sitting down on the carpet in the hall with her back all bloody to us, she didn’t have any shirt on. Then the cops came and as soon as she saw them she quieted down and they kept asking her if she was all right and to tell them what happened. She was just crying then and then she got to her hands and knees like she was going to crawl somewhere and down the hall this door opens and it was this boyfriend of hers walking out like he’s in no hurry and she sees him. She looks up and there are these just incredible screams coming out again, like a whine and a howl and a scream, I didn’t even know people could make a sound like that, and this boyfriend guy just starts motoring, he is really trucking, and Marty starts yelling ‘Stop!’ at him and two cops coming upstairs grab him and Marty runs down and just jumps on the three of them and this guy is worming and kicking and fighting and all the time she keeps on with this screaming like she’s on fire or something. I don’t know what happened next because me and Marty had been smoking some weed in our room and with all those cops around I thought I’d better go back in and open a window, but the smell was so strong when I got back in that I thought I’d better just stay in and lock the door. I turned the TV on because she kept on screaming. I don’t know how the guy got away, but he did. She was all right, too, because I saw her walking away with the ambulance crew guys and they found the knife. This maid I talked to said it was stuck way inside the mattress. At first people thought she’d been shot, but she hadn’t. It was a little knife, like a little letter-opener or a penknife, she said. Then the next day I saw her, not the maid, but the girl. She was in the airport playing one of the slots so Marty went up to her and she acted like she didn’t even know him and then the boyfriend came up and shook Marty’s hand and thanked him for helping him and gave him three hundred dollars worth of chips. These were those black chips worth a hundred dollars each. That’s why we stayed the extra day so we could cash them and Marty lost it all playing Blackjack then I hit the five cherry jackpot on the fifty cent machine and that paid us three thousand, six hundred just when I was getting so afraid we was near to broke but they all came up just perfect for me so now we won’t be back until Thursday. You should have heard all those quarters clinking into the tray. Marty had to go get three big paper buckets to hold all the quarters and one of the security guards that had been upstairs when that girl was screaming walked with us to the cage, helping Marty carry the buckets, and he said the guy that stabbed her was some famous musician and everything got hushed up cause he was headlining at the Casino and that he had hustled her out of town and had paid a lot to shut her up and that she was the second woman the guy had beaten up, that he had hushed that one up, too. I think the whole thing was really shitty, but now both Marty and me have sort of taken his money, too, but who is going to listen to us? Marty said just to forget about it, that that kind of stuff goes on all the time, people just don’t hear about it. Tell me what you think. I’m very curious to know. Marty also said you have to think of it as luck, that we were just lucky to have been on the same floor as them, that we were just lucky to have been in our room when it happened, that we were lucky that he got away, and even more lucky that we ran into her and then him at the airport at the same time, and lucky that our whole trip has been paid for, not to mention getting to stay three days longer. Oh, I almost forgot this part; the hotel comped us for everything, even food and drinks, as well as the room, so I took a thousand dollars from Marty and have it in my purse right now and haven’t let him touch it so, all in all, we will be coming home winners, no matter what happens this evening unless I get stabbed, that is, ha, ha, but there is something more. When we went back upstairs the next night there was this funny smell in the hallway right outside our door, and I could still see the outline of where the girl had been sitting because they had used some sort of solvent on it to clean it up and didn’t do a great job and as I was staring at it I got the feeling that something wrong like this was going to happen again, maybe not to that girl, or to some other girl right away, but to someone else because I wasn’t doing anything about the musician guy, but then maybe I don’t know the whole story, like maybe she was stealing from him or something like that. There’s a little town right outside Vegas called Blue Diamond and I made Marty drive us out there to get away from the Casino and we rented some horses and rode out into the desert and it was really nice just to get away from people. Marty proposed and said we could get married in the Chapel of Dreams just off the Strip, but I said, no, that I wanted to get married in a church, a real church, and he got his feelings hurt and stopped talking to me for a couple of hours, but I think he’s over it now. At first he wanted to break up and rode off and then rode back when I was already back at the stables and apologized. Any time you tell a man no they get mad and want to do something about it right away. So don’t take anything Donald says seriously. He’ll change his mind and be back at your door before you know it. Well, Sis, I guess that’s all I have to say. I’m glad to get that off my chest. I’ll see you soon. And I’ll take you out to lunch. And this time I’m buying. I don’t want to hear, ‘Well, you’re the one that had to listen to all my troubles so I’m buying.’ This time we’ll both tell each other our troubles, but I’m paying with my Vegas money, okay? Oh, we got into this real cute motel out there and it was the first time I ever slept in a canopy bed, and that was a lot of fun, and it was nice to get away from the casinos and just soak up some sun out by the pool and not think about anything.”