I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  In a basket beneath her bed she found a Mason jar half filled with milagros, tiny, shining lead charms. She shook them out across her bed and selected four.

  The Eyes of Santa Lucia. The saint sentenced to be defiled in a brothel, then blinded and martyred when her persecutors found they could not move her there.

  The Praying Man. For her grandfather, that the old curandero’s wisdom and knowledge might flow through her.

  The Sacred Heart of the Blessed Virgin. For her devoted mother, who said the rosary every day of her life, expecting nothing in return.

  The House. For the protection of the Yellow Rose and all who dwelt within its walls.

  She fastened them with straight pins to a thick white candle, kindled it, tilted it at odd angles to nurture the flame until it was tall and bright, and then anchored it in a puddle of molten wax on a saucer that she stationed on the windowsill, where it would be visible from the street.

  She selected the herbs required to help repel the onslaught that was coming: manzanilla, verbena, and more sage. While the water boiled on the hot plate, she bruised them between her fingers, occasionally glancing out the window to scan the street below.

  The priest was nowhere to be seen. But he would be back, if not today, then tomorrow, or the day after that. But he would come. Graciela was certain of that. She had known a priest who felt like this.

  Back home in Dolores, Father Gutiérrez, the old parish priest who had christened her and all of her brothers and sisters, had died suddenly, without ever having had a day of illness though he was well into his eighties. He had simply gone to sleep at the end of a typically long day of service to his flock and failed to awaken in this world. Even Graciela’s grandfather attended the old priest’s funeral Mass, and afterward Graciela realized that in all of her life she had never seen the old man inside a church before, and she asked him why.

  “There are those among these”—he took a breath as he chose an appropriate word—“women … who are uncomfortable sharing their God with an old curandero like me. At least, until they have a boil on their backside or an unfaithful husband. Then they come and see me after dark when they think no one is watching.” He had winked and nudged Graciela playfully and rolled his eyes up to heaven. “But I think He knows!” The old man crooked his finger, drawing Graciela into whispering range. “Even Father Gutiérrez visited me from time to time, when his back was acting up.”

  The old priest’s replacement, Father Contreras, although he was fifty years younger and ostensibly more progressive, was nowhere near as open-minded when it came to spiritual matters. Her grandfather had dismissed him as a sacerdote mundano, a “worldly priest” more concerned with canon than creed but harmless. For his part, the new pastor, after canvassing the local gossips, had wasted no time in focusing his attention on the old man’s occupation. He preached sermon after sermon on the evils of superstition and the practice of all manner of unholy rite and ritual, no matter how mundane. “Satan,” the new priest exhorted, “is subtle and cunning and comes to us cloaked in familiarity.”

  Of course, the new priest found no duplicity in the long-established practice of co-opting indigenous tradition and mythology whenever there were souls at stake. He even told his own version the tale of La Llorona, clearly targeting the young women in his congregation, and Graciela’s older sisters stared at the floor and fingered their rosaries whenever the priest preached on chastity or the sanctity of life.

  But Graciela, even at her tender age, knew hypocrisy when she encountered it, and she avoided Father Contreras whenever possible. Still, he cornered her at every opportunity and submitted her to barrages of questions about her grandfather and the comings and goings at the family’s house—especially those that transpired after dark. Why was her grandfather never at Mass? Graciela answered the questions vaguely or not at all. One day the priest, in his frustration, lost his temper. Graciela would follow her grandfather into hell if she wasn’t careful, the zealot warned her, and his long fingernails had left a mark on her arm when she wrenched it from his grasp and ran away. From that occasion forward she had never set foot in the little church again. She traveled by bus to San Miguel Allende to take Communion and give her confessions.

  Bang! Rattle! Bang! Rattle! Bang! Rattle!

  “Marge! Open the goddamn door!”

  It was Doc. Graciela dropped the herbs in the water and inhaled the cloud of vapor that arose in one long deep breath before racing down the stairs.

  Bang! Rattle! Bang! Rattle! Bang! Rattle!

  “Goddamn it, Marge! We got a client comin’!”

  He was just about to rip through the screen when Graciela opened the door.

  “Marge ain’t here!” She panted. “She went to meet Dallas at the jell. But Doc—”

  “Marge isn’t here,” Doc corrected. “And it’s jail. Long a, child, not eh.” That was how Graciela had learned to speak English: Doc patiently pointed out her mistakes, and Graciela didn’t take his corrections personally. But this was no time for an English lesson.

  “Doc, there was a priest here!”

  “A priest?”

  “A bad priest!”

  “What the Sam Hill are you talkin’ about?”

  “He was asking a lot of questions!”

  “Here? This evening?”

  “Just now!” The girl nodded, following him to the kitchen and back, wringing her hands and biting her lip.

  Doc stepped out on the porch and squinted into the failing light. “Well, he’s gone now. Sheets and towels, hon, and boil some water, could you? We got a girl in trouble on her way down here.”

  Graciela gave up. She knew that there was no time to make Doc understand, especially when she wasn’t sure exactly what it was about the priest that she found so unsettling. She bobbed her head in acknowledgment and resignation and disappeared in a whirl. She rematerialized an instant later with an armload of linens and took the staircase in a few nearly silent bounds. She dumped the spent herbs in the wastebasket and refilled the pot with water before she replaced it on the hot plate. In a box atop a homemade bookshelf, she found a Zippo lighter and an unused taper candle, long and red. She kindled it and completed her rounds of the altars in the four corners of the room. Then she replaced the bloody bandage around her wrist with a double thickness of fresh, clean gauze and white medical tape before gliding down the stairs and, for the second time that day, being stopped in her tracks by the figure of a man darkening the screen door.

  “Doc!” she yelped. “It’s the cops!”

  Doc was behind her now. “It’s all right, honey,” he assured her. “Detective Ackerman is accompanying our patient. Come on in, Hugo. It’s open.”

  The cop was so massive that he had to lead with one shoulder in order to fit through the door. He took a step inside and then stopped, eclipsing the porch light. Doc had never seen the cop act like this before, fidgeting uncomfortably in the parlor, his hat literally in his hand until Doc reached the bottom of the stairs and offered his own.

  “You alone? Where’s your girlfriend, Hugo?”

  At first, Doc thought the detective was blushing. His ears and his cheeks were edged in brilliant red, and drops of sweat popped out of every pore on his face. He wore an anguished expression, as if he were desperately trying to put exactly the right sentence together and failing miserably. Doc took a moment to assess the situation. On second glance, Hugo may well have been embarrassed, but he was angry too; he took a stiff step to one side and somebody in back of him moved with him, maintaining the cover that the massive man afforded. Hugo reached behind and tugged gently on a skinny arm, and a young girl, a very young girl, with tears overflowing both eyes, peeked around at Doc and Graciela.

  “Come on out, honey. This man’s a doctor. He’s going to help you.” He tugged again and the girl stood out in the open, twisting in his gentle but unyielding grip and covering her face as best she could with one hand.

  Graciela glided past Doc and was on her knees with her arm
s wrapped around the tiny figure before Doc could open his mouth.

  “My God, Hugo! How old is this child?”

  There was a sharp, deliberate, threatening intake of breath, followed by a long, slow release as the big cop replied in carefully measured words.

  “It ain’t my baby, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  The girl wrestled free of Graciela, a look of horror on her face as she realized what was being suggested, and she retreated to her haven behind Hugo. The cop’s cheeks and ears were blazing now.

  “I don’t know who the daddy is and she won’t tell me.” He dropped to one knee and guided the girl around in front of him once more, and after hugging her and whispering in her ear he slowly turned her around.

  “But the answer to your first question is she’s fourteen. This is Elaine. She’s my daughter.”

  Hank watches from his perch on the rail around the boarding-house porch as Doc lowers himself wearily into the rocking chair and lights up a smoke. A ribbon of opaque white seeps from the physician’s nostrils to the corners of his mouth, and in and out again, wasting nearly nothing as he holds the rapidly disappearing cigarette in place between bloody fingers.

  “You ought to wash that off,” Hank observes.

  Doc drops the hand long enough to glance at it, front and back. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Hell no, I’m serious as a heart attack!” The ghost checks over one shoulder and then the other before alighting on the porch. “Somebody might be watchin’!”

  “Oh yeah!” Doc chuckles. “Somebody’s always watching, all right.”

  “I meant somebody like the Law!”

  Doc takes another, deeper drag and lets it go.

  “The Law just left here, Hank, after aiding and abetting a crime against the people of Texas and God Almighty. I don’t reckon we need to worry about the cops tonight.” Doc cocks his head as he considers the ghost’s motives. “What’s it to you, anyway?”

  The screen door swings open and it appears that Graciela and the ghost are of the same mind. She carries a basin of warm soapy water. She nods in acknowledgment of the onza cat spirit. “Tell him!” It hisses, every hair on its back standing on end. Doc doesn’t hear the spirit’s cat form, and Graciela ignores it and kneels before Doc and waits expectantly. Neither she nor the ghost flinches when the physician flicks his cigarette over both their heads and surrenders a bloody hand.

  Graciela wrung out the washcloth and gently probed every fold and crevice between Doc’s oaken-colored fingers, tracking down all hidden traces of blame by feel and excising them by means of gentle steady pressure and whispered incantations in Nahuatl. She believed it to be her vocation, the purging of the residue of death from Doc’s skin, though she held no illusions that she could offer him anything like absolution. There would be a price to pay for all of this, she reckoned. Maybe Doc had been paying all along and she herself had only just begun. A part of her, perhaps her most worldly part, the part that aspired to her grandfather’s constancy, believed that by keeping Doc’s hands clean she was helping to forestall any retributive atrophy that the powers might visit upon him. One thing was for certain: Graciela shared whatever debt was owed for the death of her own unborn child equally with Doc, and she and the physician would carry that common stain for the rest of their days and nothing would ever wash it away.

  She struggled within herself to reconcile feelings in Spanish with an inadequate arsenal of English words. It had become her and Doc’s custom not to speak at such times, but she could still taste the tang of malevolence that the afternoon’s encounter with the priest had left hanging in the air.

  The onza/Hank insists, “Tell him, goddamn it! Tell him about the priest!”

  “Doc, we need to talk …” she began.

  Tires grinding gravel. V-8 rumbling and rattling to a stop. Headlights on high beam cut the Hank/cat in half and blind Doc while encircling Graciela’s head with light.

  The old house shivered as Manny bounded up the steps and planted a shiny size-15 tangerine-colored shoe on the porch. The big Mexican headed for the front door until he spotted Doc and Graciela and lurched to a halt. In a glance he took in the rusty-colored water in the basin Graciela cradled in her lap.

  “All done here, then?” he asked.

  Doc stood up. “Let’s go for a ride, Manny. I need some air.”

  Graciela sighs and rises and retreats indoors, leaving the cat to take the next watch alone.

  ***

  Manny drove and Doc rode shotgun in silence for a half an hour; downtown to Commerce Street, west to Zarzamora, then north and west again out Culebra Road. They rolled over the very underpaved streets where Manny had learned to drive, a cloud of bone-colored limestone dust following behind them. Kids recognized the car, stopped playing, and waved from nearly grassless yards in front of neat, flat-roofed frame houses painted bright shades of blue, yellow, and purple. This was the west side, Manny’s San Antonio. He felt safe here, and the big Ford practically steered itself. The big man broke the silence first.

  “You see that house, Doc? The yellow one with the blue mailbox?”

  Doc squinted and shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “That’s where I grew up. My sister and her husband live there now. My daddy died when I was fourteen, and my mama finished raisin’ eight kids in that house all by herself. Everybody finished high school except for me. Even the girls. I’m the only one that ever been in any kind of trouble with the law, not that I’m complainin’, as lucky as I been.”

  Manny knocked on his head with his great knuckles, and Doc had to smile.

  “Anyway, when you raise eight kids around here on nothin’ and only one goes bad you got to be doin’ somethin’ right. Look, I know that shit I peddle hurts a lot of folks. Good folks, a lot of ‘em, who’d never hurt a fly if it wasn’t for a hundred-dollar habit. Most people that sell this shit as long I have eventually get locked up or shot dead. Even if nothin’ bad happens to ‘em right off, it’s just a matter of time before they end up gettin’ high on their own supply and then they get what’s comin’ to ‘em on the installment plan.” Manny saw Doc’s eyes widen in the rearview mirror. “What? You think I ain’t never been tempted by a taste now and then, as much of that shit passes through my hands every day? Shit! I ain’t no saint, Doc. Anyway …”

  They were stopped at a four-way at the corner of Twenty-sixth and Delgado streets when the big man finally began to home in on his point. He looked back to the mirror and met Doc’s eyes again.

  “Doc, how long you been clean now?”

  Doc shifted in his seat, trying to escape the big man’s reflected gaze, but couldn’t. “I don’t know. Six, maybe seven months?” He was lying. He knew damn well it was precisely eight months and seventeen days.

  “Without a slip?” Manny persisted. “Not even a sniff?”

  “Manny, you know me better than that. I wouldn’t bother—”

  “You ever think you’d be able to do that? Pull up and not shoot dope for seven months?”

  Doc shrugged again, then cracked a smile that matured into a nervous laugh. “Well, no, to tell the truth.”

  Manny trumped him with a grin. “Me neither. No offense!”

  “None taken.”

  “It’s just that … I’m kind of the same way. Ever since Graciela came, or maybe it was when we all rode out to the airport—hell, Doc, I can’t tell you exactly. I just know my heart ain’t in the hustle no more. Truth is, here lately I can’t bring myself to sell a single solitary dime bag of dope, and it just don’t feel right lettin’ other people do my dirty work for me! I mean, that boy Ramón is a re-tard, Doc, but he’s my sister’s kid. Hard as I tried to school him, he’s already strung out, and you know as well as I do that it’s just a matter of time before he gets pinched and gives me up. That’s the main reason why I’ve always done it all myself. No loose ends, see? I always figured as long as I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut and greased Hugo whenever he came around I was all right.
But hell, I know my luck can’t hold out forever. The thing is, after everything my mama went through raising eight kids, it sure would be a shame if she had to watch my dumb ass, the only bad apple in the bunch, go away to the penitentiary just because I lost my hustle. And that’s exactly where I’m headed, Doc, if I keep this shit up.”

  Doc didn’t answer right away. He looked down at his hands and followed the scars along the veins in the backs of his hands around his wrists as he rotated them, palms up. He reached across and shoved his sleeve up above his elbow, exposing the inside of his left arm. More scars. If he lived forever, they would never go away. But there were no new marks. No swellings. No flecks of fresh blood on his sleeves. “You really believe Graciela’s got something to do with all this?”

  Manny snorted. “You don’t?”

  “That’s not what I asked you. You don’t even want to know what I believe. I’m not even sure I know what that is anymore. The question was, what do you believe?”

  Manny paused, as if taking an internal inventory of some sort.

  “I believe that Graciela touched me somewhere deep inside and now I can’t stand to sell poison just to make a buck no more. I believe she touched you too, Doc, and now you can’t poison yourself.”

  “Yeah, all that may be true, but then how do you explain that I’m still getting paid for killing babies?”

  Manny sighed, relieved that Doc had come out and said it first.

  “I used to worry about that, Doc. Worry for you, for the girls. I mean, just because I don’t never go to Mass don’t mean I ain’t a Catholic! But, you know, Doc, every girl you’ve laid hands on since Graciela came has changed, really changed. I believe that, Doc, with all my heart! So maybe some good comes from what you do. Maybe as long as Graciela’s standin’ next to you it’s all right, Doc, I don’t know. But me? As far as I know there ain’t no good that’s ever come from any piece of dope I ever sold.” He ended the sentence with an emphatic sigh, obviously intended to be a period. Then a smile spread across his wide, brown face from ear to ear. “Unless it was them two bags that killed that asshole Jaime. You remember that pendejo, Doc? Used to beat the girls up and rob ‘em all the time?”