I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (2 page)

Business had been slow lately and there were days that Doc resorted to petty theft and short-change scams to support his habit, vocations that he considered beneath him and that he was never very good at. By noon that day he was beginning to get more than a little discouraged. No one had so much as looked in his direction all morning long and it was only Tuesday; the week ahead loomed like a long, dark tunnel. Then the screen door creaked open, announcing a new arrival, a stranger, and things started looking up.

The tough-looking
pachuco
clicked and clacked noisily across the room, the metal taps on his brilliantly polished tangerine shoes announcing that he was a big man in his barrio and not afraid of anyone in this one. A sad-eyed young girl followed a few tentative steps behind. He ordered a bottle of Falstaff, and when Teresa reached for the dollar bill he laid on the bar, he covered it with a cross-tattooed hand and leaned over to whisper in her ear. She nodded in Doc's direction, and the youth clattered across the room to stand threateningly over Doc, a dark little cloud ringed in fluorescent light. The girl waited by the bar.

"This girl"—the boy motioned behind him with a cock of his head—"is in trouble."

Up close the
chico
didn't look so tough. All the hair grease and attitude couldn't hide the fact that he was just a kid, at most nineteen or twenty. Doc gripped the edge of the table to steady himself and leaned sideways to peer around him at the girl, who was even younger.

"You the daddy?"

The boy only stared coldly back.

"Well, Slick, where I come from a gentleman never leaves a lady who's in the family way standing around on a hard concrete floor." Doc waved at the girl. "Honey, why don't you come on over here and take a load off your feet?"

The kid's fierce features instantly darkened but he still said nothing, and the girl didn't move.

"Okay, Slick, it's up to you. But if you want me to help you, then I need to ask your gal some questions, or maybe you can tell me what I need to know. When did she have her last menstrual period?"

That did it. The boy motioned the girl over to the table. Doc pulled out a chair for her and began talking directly to the girl in low, reassuring tones, though he knew she couldn't understand a word. He eyeballed the boy, who grudgingly interpreted the girl's obvious terror into impatient, condescending English. A big tear that suddenly escaped her eye, trailing down one cheek, confirmed Doc's suspicions that his bedside manner was being lost in the translation.

Doc stood up, and the boy suddenly shrank beside him as Doc threw a surprisingly strong arm around him and escorted him toward the door.

"Tell you what, Slick. First things first. If you cross the street out here you'll be standin' right in front of a liquor store. Walk on around to the parking lot in the back, where you will be immediately set upon by jackals—son, I'm talkin' dope fiends of the lowest order—who will insist on trying to sell you inferior narcotics at exorbitant prices."

"
Chiva?
I don't fuck with that shit, man."

"Of course you don't, son. Of course you don't. It's obvious that you're a pillar of the community. The dope's for me. Listen. You walk right past those charlatans to the back of the lot, where you'll find a black 1950-model Ford occupied by a heavyset gentleman that answers to the name of Manny. Give the man twenty dollars and tell him that Doc sent you. Bring what he gives you straight back here to me."

"Twenty bucks? You must be crazy,
cabrón.
My friend told me you were a
médico,
not a
pinche
junkie."

"I was a physician, once upon a time, but if I were still licensed to practice I would not be sitting here in this, uh, establishment engaged in this tedious conversation. The service that you and your lady friend here require is highly illegal and very expensive. Your friend no doubt informed you what my fee would be."

"He said a hundred and fifty. I paid him fifty up front."

"Your friend is a very enterprising young man. The price is a hundred. Twenty, in cash, to the gentleman across the street and the remainder to me
before
I perform the procedure. You'll have to take up the matter of your friend's commission with him personally. Now run along, son. I'll take good care of her until you get back."

He motioned to the barmaid to come over.

"Teresa, will you help me out, hon? My Spanish leaves a lot to be desired."

The boy stood there seething for a moment, his hand straying to the small-caliber pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants, but then he thought better of it. He was alone there, far from the west side, with no one to back him, so he resigned himself, turned, and slunk out the door. By the time the kid returned from his errand Doc had learned all he needed to know from the girl but he was getting sick again so he held out his hand for the dope and excused himself.

"Boarding house just up the street there. One hour from now and bring the rest of the money.

"Now we're cooking with gas!" Doc rubbed his hands together and none of the regular customers even looked up from their beers as he muttered through his preprocedure checklist on his way to the door.

He made one stop, at the liquor store across the street for a fifth of pure grain alcohol. Most of the liquor store's patrons actually drank the stuff, but Doc bought it only for its antiseptic properties; the owner was an occasional patient, so Doc's credit was good. He was reasonably sure that he had everything else he needed on hand in his room.

Doc couldn't help feeling bad for the girl. The people that Doc usually treated were like him, outcasts of various persuasions, marginalized largely through actions and choices of their own. Granted, almost none of them came from as privileged a background as Doc's, but Doc knew that poverty alone could never account for the complete lack of compassion for one's fellow man in evidence on any South Presa Saturday night. They lied and they cheated and they turned one another in to the police. They cut and they shot and they pounded their neighbors' faces into bloody pulp and strangled their own best drinking buddies with their bare hands, but Doc tried not to judge. Being in the unique position of having lived on both sides of the tracks, he knew firsthand that there was, truly, no more or less honor among patricians than among thieves.

The whores were Doc's most regular patrons. For the most part he treated them for infections of their "moneymakers," which were invariably remedied by large intramuscular doses of black-market penicillin. Over Doc's halfhearted objections, most girls were back at work in less than a week, but he always recited his litany of dos and don'ts for the working girl anyway, if only to make himself feel better.

By far the most debilitating of all the hazards of the world's oldest profession was pregnancy. The girls were all junkies. Most supported their own habits as well as their boyfriends' and could ill afford an enforced nine-month sabbatical. A few were simply careless and came to Doc for help again and again, and he wondered that they were still able to conceive after so many years of abusing themselves. Nevertheless, he took their money and performed the procedure.

And he'd take the
pachuco
's money but only after an intense internal dialogue on his way down the street and up the stairs to his room.

Normally Doc had no compunction about performing the procedure that had long been his stock-in-trade and the primary means of supporting his habit, and he wasn't sure why he was having trouble with this one. Maybe it was the girl herself. Doc didn't need more than one look to know she didn't belong there. She was Mexican and obviously only recently arrived on this side of the border and therefore undoubtedly Catholic. She was also not much more than a child. Doc knew that to someone like her, the very idea of terminating a pregnancy had to be at once deeply shameful and utterly terrifying. Doc had performed well over a hundred abortions since setting up shop on the South Presa Strip, but not a single Mexican girl had sought his services until now. They sat out their pregnancies and then, against Doc's advice, went straight back to work, some taking turns caring for one another's children in shifts. It was the gringo girls, the lost daughters of Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, who came to Doc when they were in trouble. After taking into account the complete lack of character exhibited by the father of the Mexican girl's baby, Doc finally succeeded in convincing himself that it was all for the best.

Marge was a big-boned, snuff-dipping, fifty-something redhead who ran the Yellow Rose Guest Home with an iron hand. Doc knew that if Marge's door was closed before dark, then Dallas, the blonde who ostensibly rented the room next to his, was in there with her, so he didn't knock.

Marge had lived in the ground-floor apartment all of her life, having inherited the property and little else when her father died, when she was barely out of her teens. She understood the secret language of every creaking board in the place and she knew all of her tenants by their footfalls, so when she heard Doc mount the staircase, taking the steps two at a time, she hollered through the closed door like a field hand, her usual mode of communication.

"Doc, you all right up there? Anything I can do?"

Doc was already cooking up the dime bag of dope. "Well, if you ain't too busy you could boil some water for me and ... you hadn't got any more old towels that you were going to get rid of, do you, hon?"

Downstairs, the bedroom door opened and Marge emerged holding her battered terry-cloth robe together with one hand.

"Oh, hell, who's knocked up?"

"Nobody you know. Just a kid. A civilian."

"Civilian? Now wait just a minute, Doc. I don't need no pain-in-the-ass regular citizen down here looking for his slut-of-a-knocked-up-cheerleader daughter!"

"She ain't that kind of civilian, Marge. This one's a Mexican girl. Wetback, fresh up from the interior. Hell, she's just a baby herself. She'll be along directly, her and a sawed-off little west-side punk. Holler before you send them up. And try not to scare the hell out of her, if you don't mind."

Marge got a smile out of that one but she took full advantage of the fact that Doc couldn't see it.

"Scare her? Well, I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Doc."

Dallas emerged from the door behind Marge brushing her long platinum-blond-shot-with-silver hair; it cascaded over one shoulder in a shimmering curtain.

"You know, Marge. Like that little colored gal that Harelip Jimmy brought around. She probably kept runnin' down the river to the Gulf of Mexico you scared her so bad!"

"Well, that's different. She was a nigger and Jimmy should have known better than to bring her up in my house without he gets permission first. Besides, they scare easy when they ain't travelin' in a crowd, niggers do, everybody knows that. Dallas, darlin', if you could put the water on I'll just run out to the laundry room and see about those towels. Scare her! The very goddamn idea!"

Manny had charged the
pachuco
twenty dollars for a dime bag, that is, ten dollars' worth of dope in a red balloon. The one-hundred-percent markup was his usual premium for selling to someone that he didn't know based on Doc's word alone. A South Presa dime bag was a serious shot of dope. Novices usually split one into two shots and did well not to throw up. Doc had been known to bang as many as three at once, but right now he needed to keep his wits about him. Actually, he'd been operating at a deficit for most of the day and the dime bag felt pretty good; he tasted the taste, the tingle, and, for a fleeting instant, his chin dropped down on his chest.

The voice starts out low like it always does but it isn't soft. Subliminally irritating, like a fine grade of sandpaper.

"
Come on, Doc. Can't you help me out? My back's killin' me!
"

"
You're already dead!" Doc barks. "Now leave me alone!
"

"Wha's that, Doc?" Marge bellowed.

But the spell was broken and the voice faded away into a vague ringing in Doc's ears along with any trace of a buzz.

"Nothin'. Nothin' at all. Just thinkin' out loud."

There was a sharp rap on the screen door downstairs.

"Hey, Doc! You got company down here!"

"All right, all right, already! I ain't deaf! Quit your caterwaulin' and send 'em on up!"

Normally, Doc would have completed his business with the young couple in a little over an hour and sent them on their way with a handful of penicillin capsules, but this time there were problems. The girl bled profusely and it didn't want to stop. It was touch and go for a while but Doc's hands were rock steady as long as he had enough dope in him, and his fingers remembered what to do even though morphine had long shrouded his brain in perpetual mist. Without any conscious deliberation, his focus shifted, allowing him to concentrate on the crisis at hand and to forget about anything and everything that haunted him, be it whispering voices or the discarded remains of the fetus in the washbasin on the dresser.

Without a hospital's facilities at his disposal, Doc had to improvise. A transfusion was obviously out of the question, so it was imperative that he stop the bleeding immediately. He knew better than to expect any helping hand from the girls. Marge couldn't be bothered, and Dallas instantly lost consciousness at the sight of blood. He scrambled to rip narrow strips from the sheets, dropping them into the boiling water in hopes of killing any organism that had taken up residence there, and, when they cooled a little, he packed the birth canal full of the makeshift bandages and applied constant pressure with the heel of his hand until the bleeding finally stopped.

The girl had lost a lot of blood and couldn't be moved and so far the boy had only been underfoot, so Doc sent him home, assuring him that she would be strong enough to go in the morning. Doc noted that the little bastard didn't hesitate for a second, leaving without so much as a nod to the girl. The bleeding came back in fits and starts, and the dressing had to be changed every couple of hours, so for Doc it was a long, anxious afternoon.