I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  There was no light. No angels singing from on high. Neither was there a bolt of retributive lightning. Doc was not at all surprised and only mildly disappointed. Years of lowered expectations had inoculated him against any hope of divine intervention. He expected little of himself and therefore nothing at all from God.

  Graciela crossed herself and rose, placing her hand on Doc’s shoulder for support. Doc instinctively gripped her wrist, gently, he thought, but she flinched in obvious discomfort.

  “Let me see that, child.”

  The bandage, which Doc had changed just before they left the boarding house that morning, was soaked through with fresh red blood. Graciela shrugged it off.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  The yellow-white morning sun is blinding as they step out of the church, and in the instant just before his eyes adjust, Doc can make out the figure of an ambulatory skeleton leaning against a cottonwood tree in the shadow of the mission wall. He shades his eyes with his hand and squints against the glare but Hank is gone.

  Back at the boarding house Doc carefully removed Graciela’s dressing and was surprised to find that there was no new injury, no puncture or laceration to account for the bloody bandage. There was only the original abrasion, a scrape really, like children get on their knees and elbows every day. The area was clean and there was no sign of infection. There was also no indication that the wound was healing the way that it should. The abrasions appeared fresh, the flesh still raw and pink. Graciela had nearly bled to death during her termination procedure, but Doc knew that true hemophilia was a condition that only men suffered from. Stranger still, the new bleeding had inexplicably stopped on its own; no clotting, no scabbing, none of the usual signs that Doc usually depended on to formulate any kind of a prognosis. Doc was completely baffled but he cleaned and rebandaged the wrist, doing his best to conceal his concern.

  Marge and Dallas were still glued to the TV. Dallas glanced up long enough to look over Graciela for a moment.

  “You feelin’ any better, honey?”

  Graciela only dragged up a metal chair and joined them. Doc stood in the doorway and watched for a minute or two, then slipped out the back and down the street to Manny’s spot.

  Manny wasn’t there. Doc beelined for the beer joint, fighting off a mild panic that began to subside only when he got close enough to recognize Manny’s Ford parked out front.

  Manny never varied his routine. Seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, including holidays. Roll in at nine, open the shop, flip the pack, and then stop by the beer joint for a beer and a game of bones around lunchtime. Here it was not even eleven, and the big man was sitting at the bar jawing with Teresa, already on his second beer.

  “Goddamn, Manny! You scared the bejesus out of me. I thought the vice squad had rolled up on you when you weren’t looking, or worse. You on vacation or what?” Doc offered Manny his hand, a neatly folded five-dollar bill tucked discreetly between his thumb and palm. Manny glanced over his shoulder for an instant, but his hand never left the longneck beer bottle resting on the bar before him. “Sorry, Doc. I sold out about an hour ago.”

  “Sold out?” Doc bellowed. “What the fuck is that? First come, first served? Is that how it is? Sold out! What the fuck’s the matter with you, Manny? I reckon I deserve some kind of fucking consideration around here. Turn around and face me when I’m talking to you, goddamn it!”

  Every eye in the bar was on Doc. Though most folks considered the old sawbones to be more than a little prickly, no one in the beer joint had ever seen him lose his cool before. If anything, he was known as the lone voice of reason on many a South Presa Saturday night. Now he was scaring the hell out of everybody in the joint. Manny shook his head, pivoted on his stool, and stood up.

  “Hold your horses, Doc,” he said calmly. “I was just getting ready to go re-up. You can ride with me if you want.”

  Doc rocked back and forth on his heels in the shadow of the much larger man once or twice and then, pulling his hat down low over his eyes, mumbled, “Well, all right, then. Let’s get moving.”

  The oppressive combination of Manny’s shock and Doc’s embarrassment made for a virtually silent ride across town. Doc didn’t know what to say, and besides, he was still more than a little preoccupied with Graciela’s persistently bleeding wrist.

  Fifteen excruciating minutes later they parked across from a nondescript frame house on the deep west side. Doc waited in the car while Manny went inside and took care of his business, returning in a little under half an hour with a small grocery bag that he unceremoniously tossed onto the seat between himself and Doc. They were halfway back to the beer joint when Doc broke the ice.

  “Manny, I don’t know what to tell you. You weren’t at your spot and … I mean, you never sold out at a quarter to eleven before …”

  “I know! It’s crazy. I can’t bag the shit up fast enough. Bad news, I guess. Makes people want to get high. That and good news. I would have saved you one, Doc, if I had known. But, hell, I ain’t seen you fix in the middle of the day in a couple of months.”

  All that was true enough. A bag a day. Half in the morning, half around suppertime. Hell, Doc used to do twice that much before breakfast. But this morning’s fix wasn’t hanging in there like it had been. Maybe Manny was stepping on it a little too hard, or maybe all the goings-on of the last couple of days were just a little more than Doc’s nerves and a half a bag of dope could handle.

  They rolled.

  “Manny, you believe in God?”

  “Sure.” The big man shrugged.

  “You ever go to church?”

  “Not since I was a kid. If I was to go after all this time, the confession would take half a day all by itself. I’d feel bad for the priest. Besides, somebody’s got to go to hell, I guess.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Doc agreed. “Well, tell me this, then. You believe in miracles? Maybe not like the burning-bush kind of deal but, you know, signs?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Doc. My aunt and uncle drove all the way down to the valley when I was a kid to see a tortilla with Jesus’s face on it. They brought back pictures. Looked like a burnt tortilla to me. I guess when it’s all said and done, I reckon God’s God and He don’t need to prove nothin’ to nobody. Least of all me.”

  Manny reached into the paper sack and handed Doc a bag of dope.

  “If you want me to I can pull into this Texaco station up here so you can get yourself straight, Doc. This neighborhood’s pretty cool.”

  “Naw, I reckon I can hang on to this one until suppertime.”

  The next morning Marge, Dallas, Graciela, and Doc all watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald dead on the same black-and-white TV, and not one of them saw the same thing.

  “Didn’t they see the goddamn gun?” Doc wondered. “I saw it! Stuck out there in front of him like that, just as plain as day!”

  Marge didn’t care. She believed that what they had all witnessed was not only justice but a particular brand of retribution that she approved of wholeheartedly. “Serves the Commie son of a bitch right!” she said with a snort as she poured herself a second cup of coffee.

  Dallas wasn’t so sure.

  Her real name was Dorothy. She was called Dallas because that was, indeed, where she came from, and when Jack Ruby’s name and likeness flashed across the screen she shook her head and wrung her hands and wondered out loud what the world was coming to. “Did you see that? The way the bastard just walked right in there! Into the police station and shot that poor man on TV and all! In front of God and everybody! At the very least he had the right to expect a fair trial. Ain’t that how it’s supposed to be?”

  “No,” Doc said matter-of-factly. “He saw it coming. You could tell. You could see it in his eyes.” Before anybody had a chance to ask what the hell he meant by that, he retired to the bathroom in the hall for a little lick of dope. He caught his own eye in the corner of the mirror and he shivered when he saw the same resignat
ion there that he had seen on Oswald’s face just before the bullets bent him double.

  Graciela only wept silently and bled through the second bandage that Doc had applied that morning. She bled intermittently all that day and into the next, whenever, it seemed to Doc, another heartbreaking monochromatic image flickered across Marge’s TV: the president’s daughter kneeling beside her mother to kiss the flag that draped her father’s coffin; his three-year-old son standing soldier straight and saluting as the funeral cortege rolled through Washington, DC. Doc changed her bandages each time, carefully avoiding conversation with Graciela or anyone else who might acknowledge that something extraordinary was taking place.

  ***

  Thanksgiving that year, coming as it did on the heels of a national tragedy, went almost unobserved in much of the country, not that any holiday constituted much more than a slow business day on South Presa. If it weren’t for the Macy’s parade and the football games preempting Teresa’s soaps on the beer-joint TV, it could have been any Thursday.

  Sometime Friday afternoon Marge and Dallas abandoned their vigil in front of the TV and drifted back into the daily logistics of running a combination hotel, brothel, and emergency room. By nine o’clock that night, Teresa was busily slinging handfuls of pitchers of draft beer, and Doc had extracted a .22-caliber slug from the hand of a small-time thief who had evidently not heard that it was customary in the barrio to ask the husband for permission to dance with his wife. Then, just before midnight, he scrubbed for the first of three terminations that he would perform before Sunday.

  The girl was young and frightened and she sobbed softly through the entire procedure. When it was all over she broke down and bawled, and there was nothing that Doc could do to console her. At his wits’ end he hollered for Dallas, but it was Graciela who burst through the door and intervened. Doc’s first impulse was to shoo her out of the room, to shelter her from the bloodstained sheets, not to mention complicity in the procedure. But before he could object she climbed up into the big iron bed, cradled the young girl’s head in her lap, and began softly singing in Spanish and rocking her like a baby. The girl stopped crying within seconds and the sudden silence rang in Doc’s ears as he gazed in wonder at the tableau before him, a living breathing Pietà. Somehow he managed to scribble instructions on a scrap of notebook paper, fold it into a makeshift envelope, and enclose a dozen penicillin capsules while Graciela tenderly helped the girl dress.

  That night, without a word exchanged between them, Graciela became the extra pair of hands that boiled the water, rolled the bandages, and changed the sheets, as well as the better half of Doc’s bedside manner. Doc was careful to limit her involvement in termination procedures to holding the girls’ hands, but she was quickly up to her elbows in all other surgeries, no matter how gruesome. Her English improved daily, but by and large she and Doc spoke very little when they were working, each instinctively augmenting the actions of the other as the situation required. Doc’s livelihood had always depended on the consequences of his fellow humans’ transgressions, and being no angel himself, he was slow to judge his patients on anything like a moral basis. He did, however, suffer from a low tolerance for stupidity and a temper, which had been exacerbated of late by an inadequate level of opiates in his bloodstream. Graciela compensated for these occasional lapses with a gentler hand and a kind word, and to Doc’s amazement she seemed to be able to locate the source of any complaint instinctively, though her methodology left him more than a little uncomfortable.

  She simply closed her eyes and laid her right hand over the patient’s forehead as if she were checking for a fever, except that her skin never actually came in contact with the patient’s. That is, until she opened her eyes and moved her hand so it came to rest directly on the affected area. Sometimes Doc could swear that a wave of relief washed over the face of the afflicted. All of the patients they treated together recovered quickly, too quickly perhaps, most up and able to leave under their own power within hours if not minutes. Once the patient had been tended to and sent on his or her way, Doc knew even before he examined Graciela that he would find her bandage once again soaked through with fresh red blood.

  There was a fair amount of talk out on the strip about miracles.

  But that, Doc would tell the curious, was ridiculous. He was just a defrocked country doctor of some minor gifts, and Graciela was just a child. A child who, for some perfectly sound medical reason beyond his diagnostic skill, didn’t heal very well.

  “She’s some kind of sorceress, that’s what!” Hank hisses, hovering maliciously above Graciela’s cot as she sleeps on her side, her face turned toward the wall. “A she-devil! It ain’t natural, the things she can do.”

  “Natural!” Doc barks, raking his paraphernalia back into the bag. Hank’s spoiling his wake-up shot. “Now if that ain’t the pot callin’ the kettle black!”

  Hank self-consciously descends to floor level, smoothes the front of his jacket, and straightens his tie. “It ain’t right, that’s all. There’ll be a reckonin’ for all this somewhere down the road. You mark my words!”

  “Yeah, well, that’s true enough,” Doc concedes. “The reckoning part, I mean, but that little girl there will be way behind you and me in that line.” Doc looks at his hands, turning the palms down and back up again. “I used to believe that that’s why you were here, Hank. To punish me for all the harm I’ve done in this world.”

  “What makes you think I ain’t?” Hank rasps, trying to sound as threatening as possible.

  “Come off it, Hank. I told you. You don’t scare me and you never did. As a matter of fact, I’ve grown rather fond of you over the years, although you could call in the ghosts of George Armstrong Custer and the entire Seventh Calvary and never get me to admit it to a living human being. At any rate, I’ve gotten kind of used to you being underfoot, or overhead … well, you know what I mean. I even miss you some when you’re not around. Come to think of it, where do you go, Hank? When you’re not making a nuisance of yourself around here, I mean.”

  “Oh, I’m always around. You just don’t always pay attention, that’s all. Especially since that little witchy girl turned up and glamoured you.”

  Doc cocks his head and closes one eye, as if bringing the apparition into sharper focus will make his ramblings any easier to understand. “Is that what you think? That she’s got me under some kind of spell?”

  “Go ahead, Doc. Make fun. But you’ll live to cuss the day that little Jezebel from hell walked through your door. You mark my words!”

  “Shh! You’ll wake her up.”

  “Oh, don’t you dare, Doc. You know she can’t—”

  Graciela yawned and stretched, extended her arm as far up as she could reach, then let it fall to the edge of her covers. Then, suddenly, she rolled over and sat up, peeling back the bedspread in one motion.

  “There, there. It’s okay, child. You had a bad dream is all.”

  Graciela said nothing, but she knew better. She sensed something between a mood and a smell hanging in the atmosphere that the ghost had only just vacated.

  Christmas was a multicultural affair. There was no discussion, no consensus. Nobody invited anybody anywhere. But on Christmas Eve, Marge assembled the ingredients for eggnog according to her daddy’s special recipe, which called for copious quantities of sour mash whiskey rather than rum, and poured them into a small washtub. Dallas had spent the day baking sugar cookies shaped like Christmas trees and stars, transforming the boarding-house kitchen into a confectionery wonderland; every surface was covered in a dusting of powdered sugar and glittering red and green sprinkles. Graciela and Teresa made several varieties of tamales, some savory and some sweet, under the watchful eye of the more experienced but arthritic Maria. A pot of frijoles simmered on the stove, filling the air with the aroma of cumin and red chili.

  Doc and Manny went out and bought a tree, one of the last half dozen on the lot, a little flat on one side but priced to move as the sun set on the last
shopping day before Christmas.

  The delegation assembled at the beer joint just after dark and decorated the tree with strings of popcorn and pull-tabs and multicolored lights appropriated from their year-round position behind the bar. The joint was open but there was nobody around. Doc, Manny, and Santo broke out the dominoes and started up a game at the table in the back. Teresa loaded the jukebox with quarters and punched in both sides of every Christmas record on offer. Unable to interest any of the men in joining her in a two-step to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” she grabbed Graciela and walked her through the steps.

  Graciela was a natural. Within minutes she glided effortlessly from corner to corner of the tiny dance floor, creating delicate floral tracings in the fresh sawdust beneath her feet. Teresa had only to imply a turn or a spin and Graciela was there, pirouetting beneath her up-stretched arm like an exquisitely animated marionette, stopping and changing direction without missing a beat, until she suddenly became self-conscious. She was being watched.

  It was Doc. She wondered how long he’d been staring at her like that and why it didn’t make her more uncomfortable than it did. She shifted her left hand from Teresa’s shoulder to her waist, and the older woman surrendered and allowed her to lead. Marge and Dallas were the next to hit the floor and it was immediately obvious to everyone present that the pair had danced together before. Maria collected old Santo from the domino table and dragged him into the fray, and as they danced, one anticipating the other’s every nuanced maneuver, the question of why they had stayed together for all those years, cuttings and beatings notwithstanding, was answered in two turns around the floor. Doc was still transfixed, unable to take his eyes off Graciela, so Manny finally gave up and shoved his hand to the middle of the table.