I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (11 page)

Sure, why not?

He believed in ghosts. And he damn sure believed in the devil. He had seen sufficient evidence that something evil was, indeed, abroad in the world, men murdering one another over money or dope or simply because they felt like killing. But he had never encountered anything that felt remotely like God in any of the churches he'd ever attended.

Back in Louisiana, he'd been to Catholic weddings and funerals held in big, fancy cathedrals, and as far as he could tell those affairs were no more spiritual than their Protestant counterparts. They were pageants. Fashion shows held in sanctified country clubs. Just another place to see and be seen by all the right people; they said the words and sang the songs, but they were too busy trying to cultivate the appearance of piety to actually pray.

But everybody in this little church was praying. It was eight o'clock on a Saturday morning and there'd been no call to worship and no priest was presiding, but they came of their own free will and they got down on their knees and they prayed. They closed their eyes and they opened their hearts and they praised their God unconditionally, asking only for His will for them. Simple people though they were, they knew that attempting to make sense of the events of the previous twenty-four hours was futile.

For over an hour, Graciela prayed, and Doc watched in awe of her faith and in envy of her tenacity.

But whom was she praying to? This Catholic God, Whose functionaries on earth would excommunicate her and see her cast into hellfire if they knew what she had done?

And whom was she praying for? Jackie? Caroline? John-John? That would be just like Graciela. The Kennedys had one another and the sympathy of an entire nation, and Graciela had nothing. No family, no friends except for a raggedy band of half-assed outlaws with no hope and no future.

Doc wanted to pray too, but he didn't know how. The only prayer that he knew was the Child's Prayer that his mother made him say before he went to bed every night.

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray to God my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake...

What the fuck was that all about, anyway. He clearly remembered lying awake for hours terrified that if he closed his eyes, even for an instant, he might never open them again.

And what should Doc pray for?

That God might forgive Graciela? Wash away even her great sin and restore her to the fold? Then she could go home to her mother ... or maybe one of the good people of this congregation would take her in and rescue her from the guilt and the shame and carry her far away from the South Presa Strip.

Doc could never pray for that. He was nowhere near that selfless.

Well, he was here, so he might as well give it a shot, he reckoned. He closed his eyes and he bowed his head ... and at first he just listened.

The air was filled with prayer, soft sibilant whisperings and low murmuring echoes all around him. He could make out a word of Spanish here and there and he tried to divine their secret meaning but he found, to his frustration, that he was ultimately fixated on the steady thud of his own heartbeat. Maybe he should just start out by introducing himself.

"Lord, You don't know me—" The deep voice rumbled in the limestone chamber, and the entire congregation turned and stared as if some fugitive beast of the field had suddenly desecrated the sanctuary, bellowing at the top of its lungs. Every one of those black eyes, reflecting the light of a thousand candles, was brought to bear, rousing Doc from his fitful meditation, and it was only then that he realized that the offending voice was his own. Graciela stared like everyone else, but there was no judgment in her eyes, and, Doc thought, the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth, even the telltale twitch of suppressed laughter. She reached across to offer a reassuring pat on the back of Doc's hand and then she and the rest of the faithful returned to their prayers as if nothing had happened.

Doc sheepishly bowed his head and tried again, taking care to keep his feeble efforts to himself.

Like I was saying, Lord, You don't know me...

A quick look around to ascertain that he was indeed praying silently this time.

...I mean, I don't get to church much and, well, I'm ... well, I don't have to tell You that I'm a sinner. I'm certain that You can see that for Yourself. I've probably committed every sin that there is at one time or another, and if there's a hell then there's no doubt in my mind that I am going there, and when my time comes I'll go quietly. I think. It's just that, I'm only here today because of this little girl, see, and she could use a little help right now. She's taking this whole thing pretty hard and she's had a pretty rough go of it here lately, I mean, she was in trouble, Lord, and she didn't know who to turn to and, well, look at her! She's not much more than a child herself. Now, Lord, I know You don't approve of me and what I do to get by in this world and I can't say that I blame You because I struggle with the moral ramifications myself from time to time, but please, please, don't punish the girl, Lord. She hasn't got a mean bone in her body and her only sin as far as I know is being young and foolish and scared and putting her trust in an old quack like me. So if there is to be a reckoning, Lord, here I am. Take me, for it was my hands that offended You, Lord, not hers
...
but of course You already know that because You know everything, I reckon, but I'm just saying. Well, uh, I didn't mean to go on so, Lord, I guess I'm starting to sound like some kinda preacher or something; well, You know, not a preacher but ... well, hell ... thanks for listening ... Amen.

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 resignation 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.