I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  “You got to help me, Doc, I’m in pretty rough shape.”

  Doc always tries to tell himself that it’s just the dope talking but that never stops him from talking back.

  “I can’t do nothin’ for you, Hank. I told you. I’m not a doctor anymore.”

  “Now, Doc,” the ghost admonishes in a stage whisper too thin to conceal his contempt, “we both know you weren’t no doctor when I first laid eyes on you. Just another snake-oil salesman hangin’ around after the show as far I knew. But I took all them potions and powders you was hawkin’. And you took my cash money, make no mistake there. But let’s forget all that. That’s business. Why, we’re old fishin’ buddies, you and me!”

  Doc opens his eyes and finds the apparition perched on the edge of the spare chair in the corner, narrow shoulders hunched over as if he were racked by pain or cold. Impossibly thin, Hank is, and the straw-colored western-cut suit he’s wearing hangs flat and limp on his frame as if there is nothing substantial inside to fill it out, and there’s not. His silverbelly Stetson hat casts a diagonal shadow across his face, which is as pale and drawn as it was in life, and his one visible eye is hungry, expectant, one of a pair of frightened-animal eyes frozen in a perpetual, silent scream, and Doc knows better than to allow himself to look in there. He focuses his gaze a little lower and shudders as he realizes that he can easily read the house rules posted on the door through the visitor’s transparent torso. There are some things about being haunted that Doc will never get used to.

  “The way I remember it, Hank, you called me whenever your back hurt, you or your mama, God rest her, and I came running. Maybe I got a line wet at some point in the process but that was small consolation when it was all said and done!”

  “You were always paid for the shots, Doc. In advance. Hell, I’ve shelled out a small fortune to quacks like you for one remedy or another. Some helped. Some didn’t. You said it yourself, Doc, that you never in all your life seen nobody walkin’ around with such a bad case of the spinal-whatever-it-was you called that bump on my back.”

  “Spina bifida, Hank. It’s Latin. Means ‘divided spine.’ And I have no doubt that it hurt like hell when you were alive—”

  “That’s another thing!” the ghost hisses. “I’ve been thinkin’, Doc. Maybe I ain’t dead!”

  “Oh, you’re dead all right.”

  “Well, what if you got it wrong? I mean, I’m sittin’ here talkin’ to you, ain’t I? Maybe this is all just a bad dream and any minute now I’m gonna wake up—”

  Doc’s patience collapses.

  “Well, wake the fuck up then, Hank! It’s about goddamn time, being that it’s the summer of nineteen-sixty-fucking-three. That’s ten years! Ten fucking years and God only knows how many miles and it would appear that you have, indeed, expired somewhere along the way, amigo, seeing as how you’ve taken to walking through walls and exhibiting all manner of other unnatural fucking behavior. Actually, it is my own personal belief as well as my professional opinion that you are merely a figment of my fucking imagination but that hasn’t deterred you from dogging my every step from Louisiana to hell and back to here, now, has it? But you’re dead all right, Hank! That is, if you are who you say you are and I must say that if you ain’t Hank Williams then you’re his spittin’ image and one thing I know for certain is that Hank Williams is dead. Deader than the proverbial doornail, don’t you know, and if you’re him then there ain’t no fucking way that you’re in any kind of physical pain, not anymore, anyway, and even if you were I’m still not sure I could bring myself to feel sorry for you. Hell, to tell you the truth there are times that I wish I had the luxury of an incurable, chronic infirmity to cry about every time I get a hankering for a shot of dope!”

  The ghost stands up or maybe he simply grows like the afternoon shadow of a ramshackle church spreading across a graveyard until he looms over Doc, wagging a skeletal finger in his face.

  “Now, you just hold your horses there, Doc! Maybe I’m dead and maybe I ain’t, but one thing for goddamn certain is I ain’t no hophead. I never took nothin’ that a doctor didn’t order. Never give myself a shot neither, and I always took mine in the pants pocket, not straight in the mainline like a goddamn nigger!”

  Suddenly conscious of the tourniquet that still encircles his upper arm, Doc unwinds it and puts it away. As he rolls down his sleeve he rests his hand palm-down on one quivering knee, shielding tiny telltale flecks of dried blood from the phantom’s view … or maybe not. If Doc can see through Hank, maybe Hank can see through him as well. He stands up and pulls on his coat.

  “How many of those other doctors told you to stop drinking, Hank?”

  “Oh, here we go…”

  “How many times did I tell you the same goddamn thing? You weren’t listening to them back then. And you’re not listening to me now.”

  “Okay, so I drink.”

  “No. Actually, Hank, you don’t,” Doc parries.

  “Maybe, sometimes I drink a lot. It ain’t like I got nothin’ goin’ on in my life that wouldn’t drive a man to drink, Doc.”

  “You can’t drink, Hank. And you’ve got no life because you’re dead, goddamn it!”

  Hank continues to whine. “People buzzin’ all around like skeeters on a hog!”

  Doc sidesteps to the dresser, uncaps the bottle of pure grain alcohol there, pours two fingers into a dusty tumbler, and slams it down on the table next to Hank.

  “Here you go, Hank.”

  The spirit begins to quiver, or maybe shimmer is a better word. Doc persists.

  “What you waitin’ for?”

  The ghost recoils into the corner, flattening into two dimensions, twisting and writhing like a ribbon in the wind.

  “Go on, Hank, have a goddamn drink!” Doc barks, and he empties the contents of the glass in the phantasm’s face, but both the alcohol and the ghost instantly vaporize, leaving a sickly-sweet fume hanging in the air.

  ***

  “Asshole.” Doc exhaled.

  When he opened his eyes the Mexican girl was sitting straight up in bed watching him, wide-eyed but surprisingly calm. He hurriedly scooped up his paraphernalia and hid it away in his coat pocket and then dragged the rickety chair to the side of the bed.

  “Shh! There, now,” he whispered. “I must have scared you to death.”

  Up close, her eyes were darker and even sadder.

  “Christ, child. How old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?”

  She was eighteen, but her last birthday had passed nearly unobserved while her family crossed the border as cargo in the back of a twelve-foot-box-back truck. Her father had spent his life shuttling back and forth from Mexico in search of a better living than he could hammer out making tin boxes for the tourists in tiny Dolores Hidalgo. She carried only the vaguest memory of him, and it grew dimmer with every day, like a fading photograph. For most of her life the only connections between them were her mother’s assurance that he would return one day soon and a pasteboard box containing every gift he had ever brought back from his wanderings in the north: cheap plastic dolls with slightly off-kilter red lips, and games that she couldn’t comprehend. The box and its contents were long gone now, culled and jettisoned as nonessential when the family followed him to San Antonio.

  Her father had finally found a more or less permanent job with an outfit contracted to build housing on the military bases that encircled the city. He saved enough money to pay the coyote to bring his family north, and then less than a year later he suffered a massive heart attack, collapsed on the job site, and died.

  Now her mother and her older sisters had to ride the bus up to the north side to clean rich gringos’ houses; she was left at home with the younger children, and her days were long and hot and humid and punctuated by lapses into longing for the cool high-desert nights of her home in Mexico.

  She had never met anyone like Armando before. He was a second-generation Tejano, dark and dangerous and sure of himself in this strange land, and she was lonely
and homesick and easy prey. She barely remembered giving herself to him in the back seat of his car; he had fed her sloe gin mixed with 7-Up, and the encounter was brief. More vividly she recalled that he’d slapped her so hard that her ears rang for an hour because she threw up on his new black-and-white tuck-and-roll upholstery.

  She was sick to her stomach again six weeks later, and again the next morning, and then, for the second month, her period failed to arrive.

  She couldn’t bear to face her mother. Her mother was a pious woman hardened by misfortune who had assured her children that if they didn’t behave, La Llorona would come and carry them away. According to legend, the Weeping Woman was the spirit of a young widow who had drowned her three children in hopes of enhancing her eligibility to marry a rich nobleman. When her horrified suitor turned her away, she threw herself in the river after them. Now she wandered the banks in search of her children’s souls. The tale was told so convincingly that there was no doubt in Graciela’s mind that her mother believed every word was true.

  So Graciela went to Armando, bursting into tears as she told him the news. He only shrugged and allowed that he might know a guy who knew a guy who could take care of her “little problem” and that he would foot the bill on the condition that she keep her mouth shut.

  She was heartbroken. Not that she loved Armando, but she had assumed that he would do the right thing like her cousin Rosa’s husband had done. Diego and Rosa were never in love but they both worked hard and they had three children now and seemed happy enough.

  Armando only laughed and informed her in no uncertain terms that when it came time for him to settle down he would find a good girl from his own barrio, a Tejana who would make him fat flour tortillas like his mama made instead of thin, coarse corn.

  Now he had abandoned her here in this awful place with this old gringo, and she knew he would never be back.

  She awoke several times during the night to find the gringo there beside her, cooling her with a wet rag or gently lifting her head so that she could sip water from a thick, bone-colored coffee cup. Once she thought for a moment that her mother had found her and forgiven her of her great sin, but then the gringo spoke to her in a soft, low rumble and she was disappointed but she wasn’t afraid. There was something oddly familiar about this perfect stranger. An appearance of calmness she’d witnessed before.

  Her grandfather had chosen to stay behind in Dolores, where he’d buried his wife and two of his sons. He was kinder and infinitely more patient than her father and the other men in the prime of their lives that she had known. He wasted no motion but he was by no means feeble and he still gathered firewood to sell every day. He hauled his wares to the market on the back of an ancient burro called El Piedro, whom he drove with constant flicks of a creosote switch. There and back he bypassed the cantinas and the domino parlor and he was always home before dark bearing the fruits of his labor, a bundle containing an assortment of unrecognizable roots and oddly scented herbs and a stalk of sugar cane for each of his seven grandchildren.

  But the girl shared some special connection with the old man and for as long as she could remember she had followed him wherever she could. Her brothers and sisters grew to know that their father’s father was a man who commanded no small amount of respect in their barrio. Everyone in Dolores called him Don Tomas, and it was whispered that he was a curandero, a healer, and even her mother, who spent half of her life in church and crossed herself when anyone appeared at her door inquiring after the old man, overcame her trepidation when one of her children fell ill.

  But Graciela alone had actually witnessed her grandfather’s handiwork, breathed in the aroma of the manzanilla and agave leaves steeping in the cauldron, seen the steam rising in waves and fashioning itself into shapes that moved and changed. Perhaps this gringo wasn’t talking to himself after all. Perhaps he invoked something older and darker on her behalf. Something akin to the spirits her grandfather sometimes enlisted in his battles against disease and malaise. Was there something cat-shaped there in the corner? Perhaps her new benefactor had summoned it to watch over her while she slept? She only knew that for some reason beyond her understanding she felt safer in the care of a stranger in a forgotten part of a foreign city than in all the time since she’d left Mexico.

  She had always admired her grandfather’s constancy, which she perceived as the badge of wisdom and strength gleaned from years of experience. To her eye this gringo was cut from the same solid fabric. He moved slowly and deliberately, as if he could make time stand still and had no more pressing business than to watch over her until, little by little, she began to recover her strength.

  She had no way of knowing that in their youth, both her grandfather and the gringo were every bit as restless as her father, and that what she mistook for stability was merely resignation.

  II

  Hank’s cold. A sharp, dry kind of cold, deep down where the marrow in his bones used to be, but he doesn’t shiver and he doesn’t shake. In fact, he hardly notices at all. Hank’s been cold for as long as he can remember now, and it’s only when some errant echo of human warmth accidentally strays into his colorless domain that he even bothers to give it a name.

  It’s the girl.

  Hank hates the girl. He doesn’t know why. For some reason that he doesn’t understand it really gets his goat when Doc makes over her the way he does. Watching over her. Waiting on her. Spoon-feeding her like a goddamn baby.

  What’s so special about this girl anyway? Okay, so she’s young and she’s not half bad-looking if you like them skinny (and Hank doesn’t), but if it’s dark meat you hanker after, Hank reckons you might as well go all the way. On top of all that she doesn’t understand a single word of American! What’s an educated man like Doc want with a woman like that?

  Ask Doc, and he’ll tell you it’s not about that. This girl’s like all the others. In trouble. Nowhere to turn. That’s what Doc does. He helps them out if they got the money.

  Well, sometimes even when they don’t.

  But something’s different this time. Hank’s been haunting Doc for a while now, and Doc’s never looked at or talked to or touched anybody the way he does this Mexican girl. Oh, he’s always gentle enough in his manner, if a little gruff in his words now and then, but with this girl he’s downright … tender … yeah, that’s the word, tender. The way you treat a tiny baby or a brand-new lover.

  If Hank didn’t know any better, he’d swear Doc’s sweet on the Mexican girl.

  And if anybody else in the world besides Doc could hear or see Hank, they’d swear Hank’s jealous.

  But that’s crazy! Just because Hank wants to yank the little bitch out of the bed by her hair and slap the beans out of her doesn’t make him jealous, because that would make him some kind of a queer, wouldn’t it? Besides, it don’t matter anyway because he can’t touch her, her or anybody else. Otherwise, he’d send the dusky little whore running like a scalded dog back to wherever the hell it was she came from, after he told her a thing or two, that is, but then there it is again, the fly in the ointment. Only Doc can hear Hank. And Doc rarely listens. And he never answers except when he’s got him an armful of dope.

  Why is that? Why Doc? Why not somebody else? There are folks he was closer to in life, folks he loved, who loved him back even though loving him wasn’t easy sometimes. Surely he has more unfinished business elsewhere in the world, isn’t that what a haunting is all about? But for what seems like an eternity now … perish the thought … Hank’s followed Doc wherever he traveled. Bossier, Mobile, Houston, one shit hole after another. Sometimes days or even weeks pass by in a new town before Hank’s aware he and Doc have moved on.

  So, how come they’re still hanging around this particular corner of hell? Hank’s tried steering Doc by sheer will back east toward Montgomery. That’s where Hank’s bones are buried; maybe he can rest there. Or what about Nashville, or even Shreveport, someplace Hank has people, old friends and ex-lovers who either love him or hat
e him, no matter, just as long they don’t walk right through him and then shiver like he’s nothing but a draft coming up from underneath the door.

  But for whatever reason, Doc’s in the driver’s seat now. And to be sure, he’s a strange one, wandering from pillar to post all these years, and of all places to finally settle down, why here? What’s so great about this shit-hole room, in this shit-hole town? Hell, what’s so great about his whole shit-hole world?

  Seems to Hank that Doc’d get tired of all this hustling around from one shot of dope to the next. Like he’d be good and ready for a nice long rest about now. How come Doc’s not sick and tired of being sick and tired and lonesome?

  Not lonely. Lonesome.

  Lonely’s a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a spell and then makes the sunshine seem even brighter after it travels along. Like when you’re far away from home and you miss the people you love and it seems like you’re never going to see them again. But you will, and you do, and then you’re not lonely anymore.

  Lonesome’s a whole other thing. Incurable. Terminal. A hole in your heart you could drive a semi truck through. So big and so deep that no amount of money or whiskey or pussy or dope in the whole goddamn world can fill it up because you dug it yourself and you’re digging it still, one lie, one disappointment, one broken promise at a time.

  Both Doc and Hank crossed over that line between lonely and lonesome a long time ago. One fateful step, way back up the road. Hank doesn’t know where, but he sure enough knows lonesome when he sees it. As a matter of fact, Hank’s a goddamn leading authority on lonesome. Just ask anybody in any honky-tonk anywhere in the world. And Hank reckons that Doc’s got about the worst case of lonesome that he’s ever seen and it’s just a matter of time until Doc comes to a bend in the road he can’t negotiate and then, alone in the middle of nowhere, he’ll surrender to complete and utter despair. And Hank will be waiting.