I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (23 page)

"Oh, I don't know, Doc. I think you'd be surprised. But I've been thinkin' about that too. Maybe I'll just ... drive."

"Oh, your big-rig scheme. I don't know, Manny. You don't see that many Mexicans—"

"Naw, Doc! I ain't talkin' about no job ... I mean, maybe later. There's plenty of time for all that, but for right now, I got a little extra change and this old Ford runs like a top. So what's wrong with the idea of just hittin' the road for a while? Do a little travelin'."

"Well, nothing, I guess," Doc scoffed. "But where would you go?"

"Nowhere. Everywhere. Just go. See the country before I settle down. Hell, Doc, I ain't never been nowhere. I hear California's nice and there's plenty to see between here and there. Carlsbad Caverns! I ain't so sure I really wanna go
down
in no cave. Get the creepers when things get close like that, but they say that if you get there right at sunset you can watch a million bats fill up the whole sky! And the Grand Canyon, Doc. That's on the way to California, ain't it? Hey, you know what? What if you and Graciela was to go with me?"

Doc's reaction was startlingly visceral. "Me? Aw, hell, no, Manny! I never was much of a traveler."

"Aw, come on, Doc. Don't you ever wanna just roll down that highway to wherever it goes?"

"Not really. In my experience, wanderlust is vastly overrated. Every time I've ever taken to the road it's carried me to someplace worse than where I was before. When I finally wound up on South Presa I decided that I better quit while I'm ahead ... more or less."

"You don't ever think you might be pushin' your luck, Doc? Doin' business, illegal business, in the same spot, day after day, year after year? I know I do. I'm hotter than a two-dollar pistol; I can feel it, Doc. And you got an awful lot of traffic runnin' in and out of that boarding house every day. Somebody's bound to notice. And it ain't just you. Graciela's illegal, and what about Marge and Dallas?"

"What about 'em?"

"I mean, what's gonna happen to them if the police shut the Rose down?"

"For chrissake, Manny! Nobody is shutting anything or anybody down. Hugo's got our backs—"

"Hugo ain't nothin' but a broke-down ol' vice cop, Doc. He can't help you once the big dogs downtown get on your trail."

"Big dogs? Aw, Manny, no big dog, downtown or up, is even remotely concerned with anything that's happening here at the ass end of South Presa Street. Besides, like you said yourself, maybe, just maybe, I'm beginning to do some good in this fucked-up world. Maybe some of these girls will go on to make something of themselves or do some small kindness for somebody else, and, who knows, maybe all this will add up to something someday. Hell, I don't know. All I'm saying is that something—I don't know what you call it, Manny; instinct, maybe—all I know is it's telling me to stay right where I am and keep on doing exactly what I'm doing until the day that I die. And even though I've never had a single solitary notion of my own steer me anywhere but dead-center wrong in my entire life, that's exactly what I intend to do."

"What about Graciela?" Manny sighed in a last halfhearted effort.

"Graciela's grown. She can stay or go, as she pleases."

"She won't go without you."

"Look, Manny, Graciela's going to do what Graciela's going to do and you're going to do what you're going to do no matter how many times I tell you that there's nothing out there on that highway except for maybe ghosts."

"Ghosts?" Manny scoffed.

"Yeah, well, never mind, Manny. You go! See the bats and the Grand Canyon. Roll down the highway until your wheels come off, if that's what you've got in your mind to do. But first drop me off at the Yellow Rose."

Doc stepped out of his shoes and carried them as he tiptoed up the stairs. He even undressed in the hallway and gingerly backed onto the edge of the bed in hopes of not disturbing Graciela, but it was no use. She was awake.

"Can we talk now?" she began before his head even hit the pillow.

"I'm listening." Doc sighed and turned to find Graciela lying on her back, the sheet pulled up nearly to her chin, her eyes wide open as if she were contemplating the ceiling fan above. Her tone was quiet, matter-of-fact, but deadly serious.

"We need to go, Doc. We need to leave this place."

"Oh, hell, Graciela. Not you too!"

"Please, Doc!" Graciela implored him. "You said that you would listen."

Doc growled softly, took a deep breath, and then literally held his tongue between his teeth. Graciela went on.

"Do you remember when I came here? How frightened I was? I had no money, no English. I didn't even understand what this place was at first, this South Presa Street. There is no street like this back home in Dolores. Maybe in Guanajuato or Querétaro, I don't know. So much pain. So much shame. And I brought my own shame with me and then I made it worse by taking the life of an innocent—"

"No!" Doc interrupted. "That's not fair! It was me who—"

"It was my decision, Doc, and we both will pay a price, not only for my child but for every other life that we have taken together!"

Doc turned his back to Graciela and faced the empty darkness. "You only assisted. You never touched an instrument during a termination procedure."

"Do you really think that matters, Doc? I've been watching you. I'm a fast learner. I could do it myself! I know I could. There's no need for all the blood to be on your hands."

"Absolutely fucking not!"

"Why, Doc? We share this. It is what brought us together and we will both pay for it for the rest of our lives. It is a great sin, this thing we do in this house, maybe the greatest of all sins, but my child, for one, was spared a life of paying for the mistakes of his mother, and what if I hadn't found you? What if Armando had taken me to someone else or simply abandoned me on the strip? Someone would have found me. Someone like Wayman, some animal, and my story would be like Helen-Anne's or worse. It was my choice, Doc, and I made it before you ever laid eyes on me. My mother hated Armando. She tried to warn me about him but I wouldn't listen. When the worst she could imagine came to pass, I only knew that I couldn't bear to bring up Armando's child in my mother's house where he would be unwanted and unloved through no fault of his own. And you saved my child from that. And you've saved at least a hundred others from worse. There was a reason, I believe, that you came to this place dragging your little black bag and your cat-man ghost and a reason that I found you here and we came together to help all of these people who somehow find their way to us here in this place at this time. But now, I fear, that time is past and it is time for us to go."

"That can't be right," Doc said, ruminating. "All these years stumbling and falling farther and farther behind. Digging my own grave with a teaspoon, and now when I finally feel like I just might be getting somewhere, I'm supposed to pull up stakes and run? To where? Let me guess. Disneyland? You and Manny got together and cooked up all this California talk, didn't you? Well, you can just save it. I told Manny and I'm telling you: I'm not going anywhere!"

Graciela waited until Doc fell silent before turning over and draping a tiny arm over his barrel chest and drawing herself close behind him. "Like spoons," she whispered, and a smile, unseen in the darkness, creased the corners of Doc's eyes. She had learned the expression from him and it had represented a breakthrough in her English lessons, Doc utilizing two real spoons to patiently demonstrate the idiom as he lay behind her one afternoon months ago. Now, their positions reversed, Graciela's anxiety seemed incongruous. "I'm afraid, Doc."

"Afraid? Of what? A priest? Well, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical, but I haven't been farther away from you than I can spit in the better part of a year now and I'd be willing to wager fairly serious money that you're not afraid of any-fucking-thing."

Graciela sat up and threw the sheet back so that Doc couldn't hide. "Is that what you think? That I'm fearless? Why? Because I'm not afraid of the dark? Shadows never hurt nobody, Doc."

"Anybody."

Graciela was out of bed. "Anybody! Nobody! Doesn't matter, Doc! There's nothing out there in the darkness for anyone to be afraid of. But this priest scares me."

"Why? What did he say?"

"It's not what he said. It's the way he feels."

"Goddamn it, Graciela! What kind of sense am I supposed to make of that?"

She crossed the room to the window and surveyed the street below for an instant and then she shook her head. "He just doesn't feel right," she said. "It's like his lips are smiling but his eyes are doing something else. Asking questions or something and no matter how hard I try I can't hide the answers because they're written all over my face."

"But he's a priest, for chrissake! Don't you people tell your priests everything anyway?"

"There are priests and there are priests and I never tell anybody everything and neither should you."

Father Padraig Killen fidgeted in an impossibly uncomfortable black leather chair in the foyer of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, Texas. He had been waiting for nearly an hour, as he had arrived half an hour early for his two o'clock appointment, and the clock on the wall behind the receptionist's desk now read 2:25.

He was reminded of countless hours spent outside the principal's office when he was a boy. The waiting was always the worst part of the punishment. By the time the ruler or the strap was administered by the presiding nun or priest, any amount of physical pain was usually anticlimactic.

If only Sister Mary-Margaret or Father Cudahy could see him now; she who had assured him on several occasions that he was undoubtedly bound for prison on his way to hell, and he who had never passed up a single opportunity to publicly humiliate him. "If I were you, Paddy Killen, I'd set my sights a little nearer to the ground," Father Cudahy had told him when he inquired in class as to the prerequisites for seminary admission. "You simply haven't the marks."

Well, he showed them. He had entered seminary and been ordained a priest as well. Now he was pastor of his own parish and waiting to be received by a bishop.

Not the archbishop himself, of course, but one of two auxiliaries who, he presumed, presided behind the massive oaken doors that flanked their superior's on either side. The letter summoning Father Killen to the archdiocese had borne the signature of the Most Reverend Thomas Meriwether, auxiliary bishop of San Antonio, whose name also appeared on a brass plate attached to the door on the right. The priest had been pleasantly surprised to receive a response by courier less than a week after he had posted his formal request for an audience. He had labored over his own letter for hours into the long night following his portentous meeting with the Mexican girl, poring over dusty volumes of canonical lore in search of any corroboration, no matter how thin, of his now-incontrovertible belief in her powers. He had seen the Mark on her wrist with his own eyes. She had touched him, and all evidence of his shameful rage had been erased from the back of his hand. It was a sign! It must be! His eyes were trained on the three doors, so he was startled when he was greeted by a voice from behind him.

"Father Killen?" A familiar accent. Irish, but not of the west and not Dublin. Cork, he decided, filtered through a Latin education. "I'm Father Monaghan." The man was a decade older than he, and taller, though slightly built. He wore a dark suit and tunic with a white collar similar to Father Killen's own, but there was no ring to kiss on the hand that he offered, so Father Killen shook it. His host was only a priest, then, and not a bishop at all. He invited the visitor to "Follow me, please." Not "His Excellency will see you now." Confused but obedient, Father Killen trailed a step behind him, down the central corridor to the end, through a door, and down a dozen steps to the basement level. They passed by six or seven open doors on both sides of a narrow hallway in which busy-looking priests manned desks shoehorned into tiny offices and piled high with all manner of clerical flotsam and jetsam. The older priest stopped at the last door on the right and gestured with an open hand. "Please," he insisted.

Father Killen took a seat and then Father Monaghan squeezed into an ancient wooden office chair that creaked loudly as he settled in.

"So." He smiled, folding his hands and leaning across the battered desk between them. "How long since you've seen the Old Sod then?"

"I came over straight out of seminary, Father. Nearly ten years ago."

"That's me as well. Four years in Rome. Two in New Orleans, then Dallas. And not so much as a sight of Ireland in all of these years. But it's a sign of the times, I suppose. Young people leaving, going abroad to make a life somewhere, and there's nothing there to hold them. No jobs. No future." He leaned closer and lowered his voice, but not enough, Father Killen suspected, to prevent anyone who was really listening from hearing. "And now even the Church is gathering in her best and brightest"—he pointed at the younger priest and then tapped his own breast—"and shipping us overseas! So, you've been here in San Antonio all of this time?"

Father Killen suspected that this bureaucrat already knew the answers to most of his questions. "Yes, Father, I served as parochial vicar for the mission under Father Cantu until his death, but—"

"Dear Father Cantu! Yes, I knew him. He was a credit to his people ... and his calling. What an honor to be blessed with the opportunity to follow in his footsteps."

"Yes, Father. A great honor. He was a good man and a good priest. He will be missed—I mean, he
is
missed. Especially by all of us who were his flock. Uh, Father Monaghan, is it?"

"Yes, Monaghan. Ciaran Monaghan. My mother was from Aran and she had beautiful Irish and she loved the old names! I grew up in Cork myself."

"Beautiful city, Cork. But if you don't mind me coming to the point, Father ..."

The older priest sat back in his chair as if genuinely surprised.

"The point?"

"My letter. My letter to His Excellency."

"Well, of course! That's why you're here. It's just that I read your letter and I noticed the name and peeked at your file and, well, surely you must get homesick from time to time, I know I do, and I just thought—"