I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  That’s probably what happened to Helen-Anne: one day she’d looked up and she caught a glimmer of something shiny just beyond her reach. It could have been anything—a fast car, a fancy dress, a pair of high-heeled shoes. It wouldn’t have taken much, just enough of a glimpse of another kind of life to awaken a hunger inside her for something that she had never tasted. Now, as she lay there helpless, her life in Doc’s hands, the lines in her face vanished as if hard times and bad luck were soluble in morphine.

  The way Doc saw things, it was a crapshoot. Where you were born, who your people were—that’s all that mattered. Law and morality had nothing to do with it, let alone anything like justice.

  It wasn’t like good girls from good families didn’t get abortions. Doc used to see them all the time back in New Orleans. The family doctor would register the patient under an assumed name and write her up as a D & C, that is, dilation and curettage, an obstetric housekeeping procedure that consisted of scraping the wall of the uterus with a long, thin surgical instrument, resulting in the expulsion of any material contained therein. If there happened to be a fetus present, then it was an abortion by any other name.

  That’s what pissed Doc off the most. The duplicity. The way that the rules were bent or even broken for the daughters of doctors, lawyers, and bankers because they had so much to look forward to. College, marriage, summers in Europe. A waste and a shame, the patricians would whisper, to lose all that to the impetuousness of youth. So they looked the other way.

  But when the child of a carpenter or a truck driver sought the same service, she had no one to turn to but criminals. Criminals like Doc with some semblance of a medical background, if she was lucky. Shady doctors, ex-doctors, nurses, even dentists and vets, but a girl like Helen-Anne could do worse on the street. Much worse.

  By the time Helen-Anne had recovered sufficiently to move down the hall to her own bed, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Doc stripped the bloody sheets from his bed and collapsed fully clothed on the bare mattress.

  He was awakened by the midmorning sun but he pretended that he was still asleep and watched through nearly closed eyes as Graciela came in from Dallas’s room and stood before the mirror brushing and plaiting her blue-black hair into one perfect waist-length braid. The sunlight sifted through her cotton nightgown, forming luminous pools the color of butter about her feet, along the way silhouetting her tiny but graceful form: smallish breasts, gently curving waist, and rounded hips. The smell of coffee brewing and the first pangs of withdrawal urged Doc to haul himself up out of bed but he dared not move for fear that the vision before him would evaporate, so he feigned unconsciousness for well over an hour.

  Finally satisfied with her hair, Graciela crossed her arms and pulled the nightgown over her head in one motion, then walked naked to the washbasin against the back wall. As she bathed, she occasionally shivered; the ice-cold water that she squeezed from the washcloth ran down her back and across her spine in one glistening rivulet after another. Doc was deeply ashamed that he continued to watch her, but he could not bring himself to close his eyes. He told himself that his years of practicing medicine afforded him at least a semblance of detachment. His feelings toward Graciela had certainly deepened but remained, at least in practice, patently paternal. He knew, after all, that she venerated him as an elder and a healer, and he held that trust sacred. As long as she was a patient under his care, he told himself, he and she were more or less safe from any intrusion of his baser instincts.

  But Graciela wasn’t Doc’s patient anymore. She was strong and vibrant and more beautiful than ever, tightening her jaw and stamping her feet and setting the whole neighborhood in motion by the sheer power of her will and the audacity of her innocence. Graciela had become, in Doc’s eyes, far too formidable to be considered childlike ever again. Maybe, reckoned Doc, it was time that she had her own room.

  He waited until she was fully dressed before making a big production of yawning and stretching and sitting up on the edge of the bed. Graciela heard him stirring and she poured him a cup of coffee and set it on the table and then started breakfast.

  She wore the same simple peasant dress that she had worn the first day Doc had laid eyes on her. When she finished cooking she set the skillet on a hot pad in the center of the table and served Doc before taking her seat and helping herself. It wasn’t until Graciela began to clear away the breakfast dishes that Doc was reminded of the dressing he had applied to her injured wrist the night before.

  “Let’s have a look at that, child.”

  Graciela surrendered the affected member, wincing ever so slightly as Doc cut away the bandage with the stainless steel scissors from his bag.

  “That hurt? I’m sorry, honey. Let’s just see what we got goin’ on here. Uh-huh. Well, it looks pretty good, no sign of any infection that I can see.”

  He felt her forehead with the front of his hand and then the side of her neck with the back.

  “No fever. That’s good. Now, you sit tight right there for a minute.”

  Doc got up and put the kettle on the hot plate. While the water was boiling he fished around in his bag for Mercurochrome, cotton gauze, and adhesive tape. When the water was ready, he scalded out the washbasin and filled it with clean soapy water, adding the remaining contents of the kettle to warm it up. He gently cleaned the area with the soap and water and then applied a healthy coat of Mercurochrome. The blood-red disinfectant soaked through the fresh dressing and made the abrasions on Graciela’s wrist look a lot worse than they were, which suited Doc just fine. Though he was well aware that the injury wasn’t serious, fussing over it allowed him to feel better about putting off any disposition of his and Graciela’s sleeping arrangements until another day.

  Doc packed up his bag, excused himself, and went down the hallway, intending to look in on Helen-Anne on his way out, but the whore blew by him in the hallway, fully dressed and painted up and headed out to catch the lunchtime trade. She preempted Doc’s protests by simply talking louder and faster than he did.

  “Now, Doc, before you go and get your shorts all in a knot, I heard what you said, and I promise, blowjobs only for at least a week.”

  “That is not what I said, young lady. My orders were to stay in bed for the rest of the day and not to work, at all, for a week to ten days, depending on how you were feeling—”

  “Well, I’m feeling just fine, but jiminy cricket, Doc! A week? You gonna keep me straight for a week? Me and Wayman? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Look, I promise, I’ll keep my drawers on until I heal up some, but I can’t lay off for no week, Doc. You ought to know that better than anybody else.”

  She was out the door and gone before he had a chance to regroup. Doc stomped back down the hall muttering obscenities under his breath, though, in truth, he wasn’t sure whether he was cussing Helen-Anne for her obstinacy or her honesty.

  She was right. Who was he trying to fool anyway? Obviously, Helen-Anne wasn’t going for it. She knew better. She knew that a dope fiend’s got to do what a dope fiend’s got to do and that if push came to shove, Doc himself would be out behind the beer joint right now with a cock in his mouth.

  Slacking off was one thing, but the only cases of a permanent cure for morphine addiction that Doc had ever heard about involved people who went off to live as monks or missionaries somewhere, and he wasn’t the evangelical type. Doc knew that when all was said and done, he was right where he belonged and beyond the grace of anyone’s God. Sooner or later this little respite Graciela had afforded him would be over and he would continue his descent, and if the Catholics and the Baptists were right, no act of contrition or good works he ever performed would wash the blood of a thousand aborted fetuses from his hands. In the meantime maybe he could spare a frightened girl from being butchered by some quack in a back alley somewhere, and that was worth going to hell.

  Doc hollered, “I’ll be at the office!” on his way out. “Hasta la vista,” Graciela replied, popping out of the bathroom wh
ere she was washing the breakfast dishes. Then she frowned and shook her head and said, “No!” and when Doc turned around she was drying her hands on the hem of her dress; she stood up straight and proudly beamed and said, “See you later!” and Doc couldn’t help but smile.

  “Later! That’s good, hon, that’s very good.” He waved with his fingers, like a child. “Bye now!”

  “Bye!” Graciela repeated and waved back.

  About halfway up the block it suddenly occurred to Doc that his casualness of language might be confusing to Graciela. He wondered if she believed that the English word for cantina was office. If that was true, what other misconceptions was she laboring under as she struggled to acclimate herself to a new life in a strange country? More to the point perhaps, exactly what kind of life was she preparing herself for?

  Doc looked up and down the block at the sad little ramshackle buildings, the pothole-riddled streets, and the girls filing in and out of Manny’s spot behind the liquor store. This was where he belonged, all right. He had been afforded every opportunity to make something of himself; in fact, he had been handed a life on a silver platter that most people would have given anything to earn, and he had single-handedly fucked it up. The same could be said for most of the folks down here. Yeah, maybe they weren’t born into privilege, but not everyone who grows up poor becomes a whore or a pimp or a pusher. They had all made some choices along the way that they probably wished they could take back, but now it was too late.

  But what did Graciela ever do to wind up down here?

  She fell in love. She fell in love, and she believed her punk-ass little pachuco boyfriend when he told her that he loved her too. Then when she was in trouble he dragged her down here to this shit hole to get rid of the baby, and then he dumped her. Truth was her mother might have understood the unwanted pregnancy. She would probably have cried a lot and yelled a little and maybe even taken a hairbrush to her, but in the end Graciela would have been allowed to raise her child with her sisters and brothers and be part of a family.

  But not now. Graciela had committed, in the eyes of her mother’s God, the most unforgivable of all sins, and she could never, ever go home again.

  Doc looked down at his hands and found that they were beginning to shake a little. And he was sick. Not the nerve-racking, head-splitting, puking-and-shitting kind of sick he used to wake up to, but he needed a fix, just the same.

  Manny was open for business as usual, leaning against the front fender of his car holding forth for whoever would listen about the previous day’s events. He retraced every mile of the ride out to the airport, and some of the younger, more ambitious hustlers made mental notes to take a trip out to Alamo Heights and have a look around. Doc arrived just in time to vouch for Manny’s veracity when he got to the part about the president’s limo.

  “Hey, Doc, tell ‘em that it’s bulletproof, ain’t it?”

  “That’s right, Manny. Says so in the Express. It’s a custom-built 1963 model Lincoln. It’s got a radiotelephone, and it’s armored with one-inch-thick steel plate and has a removable bubble top made out of bulletproof glass. And it weighs three and three-quarter tons.”

  “Tons?” marveled one of the listeners.

  “Yep, that’s nearly seven thousand pounds.”

  “Damn!”

  Doc slipped Manny a twenty and tucked the proffered balloon into his hatband, leaving the big Mexican to tell the tale about how he had blown in and out of the federale-infested airport with a carload of outlaws, and the cops hadn’t even looked twice.

  “We was so cool,” Manny asserted.

  Down at the beer joint it was Teresa’s turn, and her audience hung on her every word.

  “She was sooo beautiful. The face of an angel, I tell you! In all of my life I have never seen a more beautiful smile, and she waved at all of the people like a queen. And then Graciela wiggled her way right up to the front of the crowd like a fish and she reached through the fence. Poor Graciela! Her poor little hand! But she didn’t even notice that she was bleeding and she pushed her hand through and she waved and she shouted and Jackie waved back! She waved and she smiled right back at our own little Graciela! I swear on our Blessed Lady of Guadalupe that’s the truth.”

  So captivated were the regulars that no one took any notice of Doc as he made his way to the men’s room in the back to get straight.

  Once alone in the stall, Doc considered dumping the whole bag in the spoon but thought better of it and settled for half, as had become his habit of late. “Child’s portion,” he muttered under his breath as he shoved it home.

  “That don’t look like much dope, Doc.”

  Doc cracks the stall door to peek out and there’s Hank sitting on the counter between the two sinks, his weight shifted forward and his feet dangling. Doc stands and flushes out of habit and steps up to the sink and, literally looking through Hank at his own image in the mirror, produces a pocket comb that Hank’s never seen before, wets it, and drags it through his hair.

  “It’s enough, I reckon,” Doc assures him.

  Hank retaliates by hopping down and walking through Doc.

  “Goddamn it, Hank!” Doc shivers. “I hate it when you do that!”

  Hank’s behind Doc now, his head nearly resting on Doc’s shoulder, and two tortured faces stare back from the mirror, reflected side by side, and Doc’s hard put to swear that one is more substantial than the other.

  Hank hisses between clenched teeth, “Yeah, well, I’d just as soon you didn’t try and pretend that I ain’t here neither. Where you been, Doc? I looked all over hell for you!”

  Doc only grunts and continues in vain to establish a part in his unruly mane. Hank presses the attack.

  “Primpin’.” Hank spits out the word. “Primpin’ like a prom date. It’s that little Meskin whore, ain’t it, Doc? After all you and me been through. You can’t just run off and leave me like that. We’re in this together, you and me.”

  Doc turns to confront him, and Hank, caught off-guard, gives ground, backing up into the stall.

  “We’re not in anything together, Hank. I’m still alive and stuck in this shit hole, and you’re—well, you’ve gone on, Hank, and if you had any sense you’d just keep on going. Hell, anyplace has got to be better than this.”

  Doc takes a step toward the door but before he can get there Hank’s already indistinct image breaks apart into waves that shimmer like a mirage on a desert highway, rising up and slipping over the top of the stall to reassemble themselves in Doc’s path.

  But there’s no menace left in Hank’s presence. He’s fading, becoming less solid by the second, and he can feel it and in desperation he plays the only card that he has left.

  “You’re all I got, Doc,” the specter admits, the hint of a sob at the back of his throat.

  Empathy has always been Doc’s downfall.

  Hank was never a bad sort in life, the usual foibles of fame and fortune aside. Just a shade intemperate, that’s all.

  Well, maybe more than a shade, but Doc’s certainly in no position to sit in judgment about that, and truth be told, he knows every single song Hank ever sang by heart and had considered it an honor to be a member of his ever-shrinking circle of friends.

  Of course, that was before the son of a bitch died and then took it upon himself to come back and haunt him from one end of the Ark-La-Tex region to the other.

  Now here’s Hank with whatever passes for tears in the great beyond streaming down his face, and he’s growing dimmer and fainter until finally there’s not enough left of Hank to prevent Doc from walking out the door.

  “I’ll see you around, Hank. I mean, where else am I going to go?”

  It was only a few steps from the door to Doc’s table, and he dragged out a chair and sat with his back to the wall watching all the comings and goings in the center of his ever-contracting universe, which at that moment didn’t seem like such a bad place to be.

  Manny came in on his re-up break about eleven thirty and p
lopped down in the chair opposite Doc. Teresa preempted the umpteenth telling of the Jackie and Graciela saga when she realized that it was time for her favorite soap opera and distractedly served the regulars with one eye on the TV above the bar.

  “Finally,” observed Doc, “things are getting back to normal around here.”

  Manny opened the domino game with a double-six, slamming the black-on-white Bakelite tile down with a flourish and a loud crack! as Doc mulled over a mediocre draw and cussed him for a son of a bitch. Behind the bar Teresa shushed a paying customer who’d had the audacity to order a beer just as the soap-opera organ swelled to a dramatic crescendo in anticipation of a climactic revelation that never came.

  “We interrupt this broadcast for a special bulletin…”

  At first Teresa desperately manipulated the rabbit ears atop the set in an attempt to get her soap opera back.

  “…shots fired at the presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas, Texas …”

  There was no face on the screen, only the CBS eye and the legend special news bulletin, but the voice was unmistakably Walter Cronkite’s. Doc stood up and strained to make out the details over the din, finally resorting to wielding Manny’s beer bottle like a gavel and hammering on the table for order. “Listen up, goddamn it! Something’s going on!”

  “…several unconfirmed reports that the president and others may have been wounded…”

  As the gravity of the situation slowly began to sink in, the beer joint took on the atmosphere of a hospital waiting room. Most of the patrons held silent vigil around the bar, but some sat apart in groups of two or three, segregated by language, and nervously conversed in hushed tones.

  The Spanish speakers crossed themselves and dutifully recited the rosary, for this president was one of their own. Some among the Anglos present weren’t exactly Kennedy supporters. They knew for a fact that he was a Yankee and a Catholic, and they reckoned that he was probably a Communist to boot, but he was the president of the United States and this was happening in Texas, damn it, in Dallas, fewer than three hundred miles up the interstate. Only the day before they had all proudly watched the evening news as he addressed the nation from their fair city. That made this national crisis personal somehow. Late arrivals didn’t have to be told that something was terribly wrong; they could feel it as soon as they walked through the door. One after another, they wordlessly found themselves places to sit where they could see or at least hear the television coverage. The static CBS logo had been replaced by a stark, monochromatic image of an unusually harried Cronkite holding his earphone in place with one hand and receiving Teletype printouts from someone offscreen with the other. Everyone in the beer joint and the entire nation watched and waited and held its collective breath as one terrible rumor after another turned out to be true.