by Steve Earle
As usual, he made no attempt to keep a tally of the transgressions as they flew by, offering only the occasional semiverbal encouragement or comment, an “I see” or an “um-hum” here and there. Indeed, the stories of these strangers were much the same, including this poor girl’s, and he was ashamed to realize that he had been only half listening until she suddenly burst into tears.
“Oh, Father! Please tell me that it’s not too late! I swear that I can change, really, truly change! And I promise that I’ll try to do good from here on out. Maybe not like she does. I mean, something like that must be a gift from God, don’t you reckon, Father? A great gift that not everyone—?”
The priest was caught completely off-guard. The litany had droned on for long enough that he found it necessary to clear his throat before he interrupted.
“Um-humm! I-I beg your pardon, child! Just so that I’m sure that I understand … who is she?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Father! I guess I thought—well, you know. The girl, Father. Everybody’s talkin’ about her, from one end of the strip to the other!”
“One of the other, uh, working girls, then?”
“Oh no, Father. Not Graciela! I don’t reckon she’s ever turned a trick in her life and one thing’s for sure, Father, she ain’t from around here! What I heard was that she comes from way down deep in Mexico somewheres and that she has powers, Father—”
“Now, now, child!” the priest interjected. “One can’t be too careful about the stories that one hears, especially the ones that come up from, well, dark places.”
“But that’s just it, Father,” the voice insisted, whispering for the first time, forcing the priest to lean in close, his ear only inches from the screen. “This ain’t no story. I seen it with my own two eyes! It’s in her hands. She just lays her little hand on ‘em, wherever they hurt. All she had to do was touch me and, well …”
“A trick. A sideshow act.”
“But it wasn’t like that! Take it from me, Father. I traveled with a carnival for a while. There weren’t no smoke nor flash nor none of that! She just touched me was all, and she smiled at me, and I went away from there knowing, Father! Knowing that I could kick. I mean, I was still sick as a dog for three solid days but I toughed it out this time and whenever I felt like I couldn’t take any more I only had to close my eyes and I could see her face and I just knew that everything was going to be all right! It was a miracle, Father!”
“Now, see here, child—”
“I know, Father, I know it sounds crazy, but how else do you explain a thing like that? I tried everything to kick dope. Had myself locked up in hospitals. Loony bins. Hell, I even handcuffed myself to a Murphy bed once. Damn near pulled my arm out of the socket tryin’ to get loose. Probably would have gnawed it off if the cops hadn’t showed up with a key. Oh, I got all the way through the sick part a couple of times but it was never more than a week before I was right back on the street again. But this time, it’s been over a month and I don’t even think about dope anymore, not even when I see the other girls line up at the spot to get their wake-up. I give it up, Father. I give it up once and for all. And now that I give up the dope there ain’t no need for me to be, well, you know, hustlin’ no more. Truth is, Father, I haven’t turned a trick since that night. It’s like everything changed the minute she touched me, and the funny thing is, Father, I didn’t even go down there for myself. I just carried my girlfriend Esther there so Doc could look after her …”
“To the hospital?”
“No, Father, to the boarding house, the Yellow Rose, down at the end of the strip.”
“But you said that your friend was ill.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, Father, and the Lord’s forgiveness, but I never said nobody was sick. She was … well, it’s just that Doc ain’t that kind of a doctor and if you don’t mind I’d rather not say anything else bein’ that this is my confession and not Esther’s!”
She was right. He had forgotten himself entirely and it had been necessary for a member of his own flock to remind him that his curiosity was threatening the sanctity of the confessional.
“Uh, well, then, is there anything else that you’d like to unburden yourself of, child?”
“No, I guess that’s all I got, Father. I mean, right off the top of my head.”
“Tell me, then, are you sorry for the sins that you have committed?”
“Yes, Padre, with all my heart.”
“Then make an act of contrition. Do you remember how it goes? Come on now, I’ll help you. O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell,” he began, and on the other side of the screen the voice joined in. “… But most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
“Good,” the priest affirmed. “Now I want you to go say a decade of the rosary every day for a week, and not just an Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be to the Father and then about your business, but a proper decade, meditating on all five of the appropriate Mysteries for the day. Do you remember your Mysteries, child? Beginning with Monday, they go Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Glorious. It’ll come back to you. Now go in peace.”
Though he knew it was a sin that he would have to deal with in his own confession, he was unable to keep himself from peeping through the curtain to watch the woman cross the nave, earnestly repeating the order of the Mysteries to herself.
Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Glorious.
XIII
Doc couldn’t see, but the smell of blood filled the air, warm and salty as it settled on his tongue, and he nearly gagged.
“Graciela!” Doc shouted, loud enough, he could only hope, that the girl could hear him over his patient’s screams. In any case she responded again and again, wiping his glasses with a length of gauze wrapped around her hand like a bright red mitten.
Somebody had really done a job on the kid. The bullet had evidently entered at the point of the back of his hip, just missing his kidney, and exited from his groin. Doc reckoned that it had nicked one of the branches of the femoral artery, too high and too deep for a tourniquet to do any good, so the only hope was to locate the lacerated vessel and close it with a stitch or two. Unfortunately there was so much blood that locating the bleeder was proving to be difficult. He probed the wound with his fingers, not really knowing what he was searching for. He wasn’t a surgeon, after all, and he’d seen just enough emergency room action during his residency to know that he wasn’t cut out for it. He was in way over his head and he knew it, but he had to do something or this kid was going to bleed to death. Right here. Right now. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and, ignoring the loudening screams, forced his way past torn flesh until … there it was! He could feel it, a faint quiver of a pulse.
“Hemostat, goddamn it!” he barked.
Graciela had stood beside Doc through enough procedures to know which instrument was needed and not to take offense at his tone. He was cussing the blood, not her. She slapped the long-handled stainless steel clamp into the palm of Doc’s hand the way she had been taught, waiting for him to close his fingers securely around it before she released it. Among her many gifts was an unfailing calmness under pressure, but it wasn’t the cool detachment of a good scrub nurse so highly prized in a modern operating room; it was more like the warm, loving patience of the caregivers of another culture, if not another time. She performed each and every task that was asked of her flawlessly and gracefully; no matter how chaotic her surroundings became, she never stopped praying.
“Santa María de Guadalupe, Mistica Rosa, intercede por la Iglesia, protege al Soberano Pontifice…”
Doc knew this one. It was a prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Graciela always began with it, her voice rising and falling in accordance with the
urgency of the situation at hand. Scattered among the Hail Marys and the Our Fathers were less familiar passages, some in Spanish, some in that other language that she sometimes recited. He had asked her, once, what the words meant and she had answered that she didn’t know. She had learned them by rote from Grandfather. Still, he found the very sound of Graciela’s voice reassuring and was grateful that she never stopped praying until the procedure was completed.
“Got ya, you slippery little motherfucker!”
The clamp snapped into place.
“… Danos un amor ardiente y la gracia de la perseverancia final. Amén!”
That was how they worked together: Doc cussed and Graciela prayed. There were nights when they were literally awash in blood and the screams continued to ring in their ears long after the procedure was completed, but Doc kept cussing and Graciela kept praying and not a single life had slipped through their fingers so far.
Six months ago Doc would have told the kid that there was nothing he could do and retired to the boarding house to shoot a lick of dope big enough to assuage his Hippocratic guilt, and the ghost would have hovered above the scene and agreed.
“There ain’t nothin’ you can do, Doc. Hell, you can’t save yourself, let alone nobody else!”
Oh, Hank was around, all right. Doc would catch a glimpse of him once in a while, lurking in some shadow, but he didn’t hear him anymore or, more accurately, he didn’t listen.
Doc was pretty sure that Graciela saw him too, but they never spoke of it so he didn’t know that she did not perceive the shade of a great hillbilly singer or even the shape of a man.
She had always seen the ghost, and those like him, had seen them since she was a little girl, and her grandfather had recognized her gift. The first day that she’d laid eyes on Doc, back at the beer joint, she had glimpsed something hovering above him. Like a shadow on the ceiling but at least a shade too dark, and whatever it was, it occasionally failed to accurately mimic the shape actions of its host. Sometimes it fleetingly took on the vague form of an animal cowering on the edges of consciousness, a coyote or a feral dog.
Perhaps it was the onza, the wolf-cat her grandfather had told her about. The ancient Mexicans called it cuitlamiztli and it was only one of many animal spirits in the world, and though they were worthy of respect, the presence of any of them was natural and rarely cause for trepidation. All the same, she instinctively imposed herself between Doc and any encroaching shadow. Whatever was out there, if it was coming for Doc and intended him harm, it was going to have to get through Graciela first.
Hank is seething, helplessly pacing from corner to corner. Just who the hell does she think she is, anyway? Doesn’t she know? Doesn’t she see?
But there’s the fly in the buttermilk. She does see. Nobody else but Doc has ever seen Hank.
But the girl sees and she tracks every move Hank makes and watches over Doc every waking moment.
Well, Hank reckons there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Manny was waiting in the parlor and he hauled himself up to his considerable height and followed Doc out onto the porch. He knew better than to ask about the kid’s condition, reckoning that a report would be forthcoming just as soon Doc was good and ready. He scrambled to light a crooked Camel that dangled from Doc’s lower lip.
“Well, he’s lost a hell of a lot of blood, Manny,” Doc lectured. “And he needs to be in a fucking hospital!” He took a deep drag on the cigarette, held it, and then let it go, long and slow, the thick white smoke issuing from his nose as well as his mouth along with the words. “But the bleeding has stopped, for now, and he’s resting, so we’ll just have to wait and see.” He offered one of his cigarettes and Manny accepted it gratefully.
“Thanks, Doc! I owe you! And my sister—”
“You don’t owe me shit. But Marge is another story. And Graciela, her being illegal and all. Hell, nobody in this place needs the police to come snoopin’ around. What happened, anyway?”
The kid was Manny’s nineteen-year-old nephew David, his sister’s oldest boy. He and a carload of his friends had double-dog-dared one another to rob a liquor store that night, and for a minute there it had looked like they would get away with it. The owner had politely handed over $256 and a case of beer and then waited until the fleeing desperados were piling into their car before opening up with a .357 magnum and hitting only young David, who, as shitty luck would have it, was bringing up the rear. His partners in crime had intended to dump him in the emergency room driveway but he was on probation for a previous charge and he had begged them to drive him to South Presa instead. His uncle Manny, he said, was a big man down there. He would know what to do.
“I didn’t know where else to go, Doc.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll tell you where you’re fixin’ to go now. Out there in the street and put your ear to the ground and make damn sure that nobody’s going to show up here looking for this boy. No bondsmen, no migra, no local John Law! I swear to God, Manny, I’ll haul him downtown myself if I have so much as an inkling that something’s getting ready to come down, you hear me?”
“I hear you, Doc, I hear you, but don’t you worry about nothin’. He had a stockin’ over his face and I know that old boleo that owns that liquor store. He’s like all the rest, can’t tell one Mexican from another. No offense, Doc. Anyways, I’ll talk to my man downtown, just to be on the safe side.” He dropped the butt of his smoke on the porch and stepped on it. “So … you reckon he’s gonna be all right then, Doc?”
“I’ve done everything I know to do, Manny. It’s out of my hands now.” He cocked his head in the direction of the bedroom upstairs where Graciela continued to pray at the kid’s bedside. “But she hasn’t lost one yet.”
The big man grinned but Doc wagged a blood-and-nicotine-stained finger in his face.
“Just as soon as he’s well enough to be moved he’s out of here, Manny, you hear what I’m sayin’? Now, come on, it sounds like Marge is up. You can settle with her for the room.”
Marge was back in the kitchen presiding over a skillet full of sausage while the oven heated up to receive a cookie sheet full of drop biscuits. The coffeepot had just stopped percolating. Doc poured Manny a cup and one for himself and then sat down hard, leaning so far back in the chair that the front legs hovered a foot off the floor.
“Don’t do my chair like that, Doc! You’ll break it down.”
Doc straightened up, spilling a little hot coffee in his lap. “Sorry, Marge.” Doc winced and he and Manny exchanged shrugs. Marge had never turned around.
“I heard it creak. It’s bad for ‘em to lean ‘em back like that. Not to mention dangerous. Long night?”
Doc shook his head. “Trust me. You don’t want to know. I am going to need room five for a week or so, though. Manny’ll be pickin’ up that tab. He’ll pay you up front.”
Marge never looked up from the stove. She did trust Doc and she had learned years ago that it didn’t pay to know about everything that transpired under her own roof. Simply looking the other way had always been a way of life at the Yellow Rose. In her father’s day it was simply a courtesy extended to the establishment’s regular clientele. As the South Presa Strip continued to decline, plausible deniability became, more and more, a matter of legal expediency. And since Graciela had arrived, events had transpired in the old firetrap that Marge intuitively felt she was more comfortable knowing little or nothing about.
“That’ll be twenty-five bucks through Saturday, another five if you need linens.”
“That’s another thing.” Doc motioned to Manny, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, and the big man hauled out a roll of bills and began peeling them off. “Those old sheets are about ruined, I reckon. The pillowcases too, along with every last towel that was in that room and a couple that we had to borrow from seven.”
“I see—well, new linens is ten. The extra towels two and a half, plus the two from next door, that comes to—”
“Forty-five dol
lars. Manny, pay the woman.”
And Manny laid the money on the table without complaint and then, turning up the collar of his sport coat against the predawn chill, left to tell his sister the good news.
Marge finally turned around long enough to give Doc a quick look up and down.
“You hungry, Doc? I could fry you a couple of eggs to go with some of this sausage.”
“No, thank you, Marge. I’m about whipped. I think I’ll lie down for a while.”
Doc left a half a cup of coffee sitting on the table and climbed back up the stairs. He looked in on his patient and went through the motions but he knew what he’d find. Stable pulse, steady and strong, respirations normal, no fever, no nothing. And Graciela down on her knees by his side, her hands folded, her rosary beads entwined between her fingers, and fresh blood spotting her bandage. Six months had passed and Graciela’s wound still hadn’t healed.
But the kid’s would. It would heal quickly and cleanly without any trace of a scar.
The kid was going to make it. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in Doc’s mind. It didn’t make any sense. By all rights the kid should be dead, or at least in a coma. An irreversible coma. Hell, he wasn’t even in shock.
In fact, Doc reckoned that David would not only live but probably thrive, maybe even turn over a new leaf that very day and never steal or cheat or lie ever again. He would, against all odds, in spite of where he came from and one hell of a bad start, amount to something someday and make his mother very proud. He might not become rich or famous but he would certainly keep safe for the rest of his days and get married and have children, and when his time came he would go peacefully and face his Maker with his eyes wide open.