I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  “Well, fuck it, Doc. If nobody wants to play, then I’m gonna dance!”

  The big man lumbered across the floor, catching Teresa in mid-spin and excusing himself to Graciela, who smiled and acquiesced, giving her partner a barely perceptible push into Manny’s arms. Their first few steps were tentative until Teresa overcame an understandable fear of being crushed and her genuine surprise at how smoothly Manny moved once they got going. Graciela watched them for a moment before retreating in a series of fluid, sliding motions, still in time with the music, and pivoting on her toe like a music-box ballerina to face Doc and then curtsying expectantly. When Doc remained in his chair, suddenly unable to look her in the eye, she hid her disappointment behind an understanding smile and sat down at the table.

  “Merry Christmas, Doc,” Graciela intoned perfectly.

  “And merry Christmas to you, child.”

  That’s right, Doc reminded himself. She was only a child.

  Doc and Graciela watched the others dance until all of Teresa’s quarters were spent. After the presents were opened—dime-store purchases mostly: chocolate-covered cherries, cheap cologne, and the like—there was more dancing and drinking and grazing on tamales and beans.

  The party broke up about eleven. Dallas and Marge finished off the eggnog and steadied each other for the short stumble home. The Mexican women freshened up in the ladies’ room, covered their heads with lace mantillas, and then, accompanied by Santo, headed downtown in Teresa’s car to midnight Mass at San Fernando Cathedral. Doc, who had seen enough of church recently to last him awhile, politely declined and offered to lock up the beer joint on his way out. Manny stayed behind to keep Doc company.

  Once the women were gone, the spirit of the occasion evaporated instantly. The joint was suddenly dark and dirty and quiet. Too quiet.

  “Game of bones?” Doc offered, mainly to hear the reassuring sound of his own voice.

  Manny grunted agreement and shoved the tiles around in circles, drowning the oppressive silence in the satisfying scrape of Bakelite across the metal tabletop.

  It was amazing, Doc mused to himself, how addictive fellowship was. Most of his life he had functioned as a standalone entity, interacting with others only out of need and self-interest. Now he had to admit, at least to himself, that he was becoming accustomed to company and that Graciela’s absence in particular was excruciating. How long had it been since she had been out of his sight for more than a few minutes? Weeks? No. Months! But this was ridiculous. She’d only just left, and she’d be back directly.

  Manny won the first game and then, snorting, shoved back from the table.

  “I got to take a piss but you need to get your head in the game, Doc, or I’m goin’ home.”

  As soon as the men’s room door closed behind Manny, Doc, no stranger to the joint, was aware of a cacophony of rattling and humming that he had never noticed before. The worn-out compressor in the beer box. The neon buzzing in the window. A barely perceptible whisper, dry and brittle like a last breath.

  “You got to help me, Doc! I’m tellin’ you, I’m in a bad way!”

  Doc ignored the voice. He never answered Hank when he was reasonably sober and anybody else could hear. Instead, he noisily shuffled and reshuffled the dominoes until Manny returned to the table.

  The two played for the better part of an hour, speaking only when they added up their scores. Doc was less distracted and played marginally better than before, going domino a time or two, but Manny knew something was wrong.

  “You okay, Doc? If you need a little somethin’, I got a bag or two left.”

  It was only then that Doc realized that he hadn’t had a shot since his wake-up, and that had been over twelve hours ago. Doc took a quick inventory. Head hurt. Legs ached. Nose was running. Yep, he was sick.

  “Well, now that you bring it up, I don’t feel all that great, but I reckon I’ve almost made it through the day already. Maybe it can wait until morning.”

  Manny whistled. “You’re really pulling up, ain’t you, Doc?”

  Doc ignored the observation. “Hey, Manny, tell me something. The other day, when we were riding back from the west side? You mean what you said? You really believe you’re going to hell when you die?”

  The big Mexican shrugged.

  “You reckon it’s going to be like Dante?”

  “Like who?”

  Doc shook off the familiar sting of guilt he felt whenever he caught himself talking over Manny’s head. Truth be told, Manny, despite his lack of education, was one of the smartest people Doc had ever met.

  “Dante Alighieri,” Doc explained, “an Italian poet. Hell, the Italian poet when all’s said and done. He was the first to describe heaven and hell in a language other than Latin. Everything that ordinary folks know about eternal damnation comes from him. You know. Lakes of fire. Lost souls tortured by demons and writhing in eternal agony.”

  “I dunno, Doc. Maybe it’s different for everybody. Like … maybe I’ll have to stand behind the liquor store forever while every junkie that ever dropped dead from a shot of dope I sold ‘im passes by like a parade and I’ll have to look ‘em all right in the eye and no matter how hard I try I won’t be able to look away. But when I look in there I won’t see nothin’, just empty and black and cold.”

  Doc’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit, Manny!”

  Manny kept going, rescuing the abortionist from a procession of shattered fetuses that danced in his head.

  “But that can’t be right, Doc, can it? I mean, them bein’ there with me? It wouldn’t be fair.”

  Doc shook his head.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, no offense, Doc, but junkies are already in hell. I see ‘em go through it every day. It’s hard work bein’ a dope fiend. Hustle all day and all night … Robbin’. Stealin’. Sellin’ themselves. You’re lucky, Doc. You got a gift so you get by all right. But all them other poor hopheads out there on the street? There ain’t no way God’d make ‘em pay any more than they already paid when they die.” Manny drew a long breath. “Me? I done all right sellin’ chiva. Nice house. Good car. Never served more than ninety days in jail in my whole life. I take care of my mama all right, but that ain’t gonna get me into heaven. No, Doc. I reckon I’m probably fucked.”

  He clapped a handful of black-and-white tiles down on the table.

  The loud metallic clack! was answered with a hollow click from behind them.

  “What the …”

  Both men turned around at once. The sound came from the jukebox, which had awakened seemingly of its own accord and begun rifling through its repertoire.

  “Did you?”

  “Wasn’t me, Doc. Maybe one of them quarters Teresa dropped in there got stuck.”

  Another click and they watched the sickle-shaped selector pick up a disc and place it on the turntable, and the needle dropped with a crackle and a hiss like the final warning of a poisonous snake.

  If you lu-u-u-ved me half as much as I love you

  Doc told himself that it would be all right.

  You wouldn’t w-u-ury me half as much as you do.

  But it wasn’t.

  Doc was on the other side of the room in flash, sliding across the sawdust-covered floor. His hand shook as he reached behind the jukebox and groped blindly for the Reject button on the back. Where was it? Down low on the right somewhere. He had seen Teresa perform the operation a thousand times, but now he couldn’t seem to lay his hand on the damn thing. He finally resorted to pulling the plug.

  “Sorry, Hank,” Doc muttered as the record growled to a halt in the middle of the fiddle break. “I guess I’m not that well yet.”

  He fumbled in his pocket for Teresa’s keys and held them out for Manny.

  “Manny, I think I’ll take you up on that bag after all. You wouldn’t mind locking up for me, would you?”

  Manny swallowed a question and shook his head, taking the keys and trading him a balloon from the top of his sock.

&nbs
p; Back at the boarding house, Doc fished the balloon from the sweatband of his hat on his way up the stairs. What was he thinking about? Sure, he’d cut back. Way back, but Christmas Eve or not, he still needed what he needed. Pulling up was one thing. It felt good not to walk around in a fog all the time, not to mention having the extra cash in his pocket.

  Sometimes he even felt like he was getting his touch back, like he was really helping people instead of merely going through the motions to feed the monkey on his back. And there was Graciela. There was something that was at once humbling and empowering about her very presence in his life. The way she watched intently as he worked to piece together torn flesh or stanch the flow of blood from a lacerated artery, and just last night when he had his hands full treating both combatants of a barroom cutting contest and was rapidly losing one of them, Graciela had stepped in and applied what she had learned from watching Doc with those hands of hers, especially that right hand, and the result was, well, miraculous.

  Miraculous: having the power to perform miracles.

  Now he really needed a fix.

  Then, when he reached under his mattress to retrieve his outfit, he discovered that Santa Claus had left him a little something extra for Christmas.

  It was a bag of dope, one of Manny’s trademark red balloons, that Doc had somehow managed to hide from himself, not an easy thing for a junkie to do. There was no telling how long the thing had been there, and Doc couldn’t imagine how he had missed it. Maybe it had slipped out of his hat when he was flush and too high to accurately inventory his supply. Or maybe somebody else left it there before he had moved down the hall from his old room last spring.

  The previous occupant was an old hophead named Amos whom Marge found dead one morning in that very bed. Doc hadn’t been able to rule out an overdose, as Amos’s outfit was still out on the table beside the bed, but if he’d had to bet, Doc’s money was on a heart attack. Marge had cussed Amos for a son of a bitch because he had departed this world owing her two weeks’ rent. Doc hadn’t even packed his stethoscope away before he asked Marge if it was all right if he moved into the bigger, better-lit room.

  Anyway, hermetically sealed in plastic, heroin had a hell of a shelf life. Now Doc had two bags of dope. His habit was covered for the next seventy-two hours.

  Or maybe not. After all, it was Christmas. He’d been good. In fact, he’d been very good by his own standards, and a little extra Christmas cheer in his spoon couldn’t hurt anything, now could it?

  Two bags. He used to do three in one shot when he could afford it. Now it looked like a mountain of brown powder in the spoon. It cooked up dark and thick and sickeningly sweet, and Doc was immediately sucked in by the big lie that all junkies want to believe in spite of daily evidence to the contrary, that this shot was going to be like that first shot all those years ago. He tied off, found the money vein in the back of his arm, well rested now because he had always reserved that one for the big shots, the teeth rattlers, and it stood at attention like a soldier on payday. He pierced the flesh, backed off the plunger, and let it go.

  Doc knew he’d fucked up before he had the needle out of his arm. Sweat instantly erupted in tiny drops across his forehead, and the floor seemed to open beneath his feet like a gaping trapdoor. He stood up and lurched for his bag on the dresser, though he wasn’t sure why because he knew that there was no remedy there that could bring him back. Not from this place. He didn’t make it anyway. His legs buckled beneath him and he crashed to the floor, conscious only for the instant it took him to roll over on his back. The last thing that he saw was the bare 40-watt bulb suspended from the ceiling, flickering and failing as it spiraled away into a vortex of collapsing black … and then there was cold night air slapping him in the face and the voice of doom.

  “You don’t look too good, Doc.”

  Hank hovers over Doc, his spectral visage only inches away. Near enough to make Doc acutely aware of the absence of any breath emanating from behind a picket of ragged yellow teeth. From Doc’s vantage point, Hank appears even more skeletal than usual, squatting on his haunches, his arms akimbo on his knees, his elbows jutting out at unnatural angles. Almost comical, though Doc isn’t laughing. But Hank is. Right in Doc’s face.

  “What’s the matter? Feelin’ poorly? Maybe that shot had a little too much kick to it. But I’ve seen you take a lot more dope than that before. I guess all that playin’ house with that hot little enchilada of yours is makin’ you soft. Can’t hold your dope no more. What was it you used to say? ‘As high as I can get is flat on my back’? Well, you’re sure ‘nough flat on your back now.”

  The ghost glances over his shoulder to some point in space behind him.

  “Tell me, Doc. You see a light? I mean, when you crossed over. I always heard that there’s this beautiful light and when you walk into it the Lord Jesus is there waitin’ for you with open arms. You see anything like that, Doc?”

  Hank doesn’t wait for an answer. Shakes his head.

  “Me neither. Didn’t see a damn thing, Well, heh, heh, I did see a pair of taillights … but I don’t think that’s what the preacher was talkin’ about. Do you, Doc?”

  Doc tries in vain to sit up but every muscle in his body burns and quivers like the third day of a cold-turkey kick. He collapses in a heap on the asphalt, his elbows scraped raw and stinging. Asphalt? He looks around and finds that he’s lying in the middle of a blacktop road that stretches out for an indeterminate distance in both directions before disappearing into darkling hills.

  “Where the fuck am I?” Doc gasps, immediately regretting that he’s acknowledged the apparition for the first time in months and praying that no answer is forthcoming. No such luck.

  “Hell if I know, Doc. You tell me. Could be Eleven West or Highway Nineteen, maybe. Somewhere in West Virginia, I reckon. Or maybe not. Maybe this ain’t nowhere. Kind of lonesome, ain’t it? Out here in the middle of nothin’. Makes a body feel lost and forsaken. Like there ain’t nothin’ …”

  Doc knows the words to this one so he joins right in.

  “Ain’t nothin’ gonna be all right no how.”

  Hank snaps to his feet as if he’s been shot from a tautly stretched rubber band and spits out his words in angry, sibilant bursts, like a demon christened with holy water.

  “Mock me? Sass me? Where the hell you think you are? I’m the head honcho around here, Doc. This here’s my highway and from now on you go where I go. I’m sick and tired of followin’ you around.”

  With a supreme effort Doc stands up.

  “Then don’t. Go on, Hank. Go on back wherever it is that you came from and leave me alone.”

  “Heh! Go back?” Hank cackles. “You still don’t get it, do you? There ain’t no back! This is it! What do you think I’ve been waitin’ on? Misery loves company. Ain’t that what they say, Doc? Well, I’m one miserable son of a bitch and from here on out you’re keeping me company whether you like it or not.”

  “Why?” Doc pants.

  “So I don’t have to be alone. So I don’t have to wander up and down this road all by my lonesome until Gabriel blows his goddamn horn.”

  “What I meant was, why me, Hank?”

  Hank looks at Doc like he’s just asked the stupidest question in the world.

  “Why not you, Doc?”

  It’s beginning to sink in. Hank’s got him now. The tables are turned, and nobody, not Graciela, not even God, can help him. The first pangs of despair reach up from within and Doc wants to scream but before he has a chance he’s blinded by a light, and it’s not beautiful but it’s certainly brilliant and awesome and it’s coming right at them, rolling down the highway, or is it streaming down from the sky? Hard to tell, but it’s getting closer, bearing down at a tremendous rate of speed. Gargantuan shadows of naked tree trunks line the highway, shattering the onrushing luminosity into stroboscopic shards. Hank is visible now only intermittently as a vaguely human-shaped hole, blacker than black against flashing luminous white. Doc tries t
o turn and flee but in spite of his terror finds that neither his feet nor his spirit are willing and he falls back to his knees.

  “Goddamn it, Hank! There’s something coming! We’ve got to get out of this road!”

  But the shadow that was Hank isn’t listening, and the light overwhelms them both.

  A scream was still ringing in Doc’s ears as he gasped for the first breath of a new life.

  Graciela was beside him, her right hand on his chest and tears of joy and relief in her eyes. Manny and Teresa helped him into the bed, and Dallas and Marge hovered around for a while, chattering like grackles, desperate to convince the others that they’d been sound asleep and had heard nothing when Doc fell out. Graciela shooed everyone from the room, closing and bolting the door against any further intrusions. She helped Doc undress and then literally tucked him into bed, pulling the quilt up under his chin. When Doc tried to apologize, Graciela stopped him before he could get out a single word.

  “It is okay,” she enunciated carefully and then smiled, pleased with herself for answering in English. “Don’t talk now.”

  Graciela had amassed a collection of candles in brightly painted jars emblazoned with the images of various saints and inscribed with assorted blessings in Spanish. She kindled them all and distributed them in strategic positions around the room, chanting softly under her breath, now in Spanish, now in Latin, now in a language that Doc didn’t recognize. She crossed to the bus tray on the dresser where Doc kept his supplies and produced a half a quart of clear liquid and a cigarette lighter, and before he could object she had upended the bottle and atomized a mouthful of pure grain alcohol over the open flame, projecting a plume of blue fire to each of the four corners of the room. Then she sprinkled a little of the remaining liquor over Doc and herself and in a semicircle around Doc’s bed, using her fingers as her aspergillum. She then knelt beside Doc’s bed and whispered every prayer to every saint and spirit that she knew.