I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (28 page)

Graciela watched helplessly while Doc's face grew wan and tiny glistening drops of sweat, unnaturally cold to the touch, appeared on his forehead. His eyes were closed now but his upper lip twitched, and she thought he was trying to say something, so she bent close to listen. There was only a pitiful wheeze, like a broken accordion, from somewhere deep in his chest.

"‘Leaving San Antonio,'" Manny read as they passed the green-and-white reflecting sign on the side of the road. "Now we can make some time."

As the big Ford rumbled into passing gear and bounded ahead down the highway, Doc stirred in Graciela's arms and then mumbled something; she was sure of it this time.

"Manny, the lights!" she commanded, and the big man complied, reaching over his head for the switch and calling over his shoulder, "You okay, Doc?"

The yellowish light revealed that Doc's eyes were wide open but he wasn't looking at Manny or even Graciela.

"
Hank?
"

"
Yeah, Doc," the ghost answers.

"
Will it hurt?
"

The ghost turns to hang a skeletal elbow draped in appliquéd gabardine over the back of his seat and grins.

"
How the hell would I know, Doc? I was drunker than Cooter Brown when I passed.
"

Graciela only heard the question. Then, as she watched, the corner of Doc's mouth twitched. A grimace? No! It was a smile, curling up one corner of his mouth and then the other before rolling up his face in a wave, erasing every sign of wear and tear except for the laughlines around his eyes.

"Cooter Brown!" Doc chuckled and coughed and then he was gone.

***

Doc's standing in the middle of the loneliest stretch of highway in the universe but he's not alone. Hank's there too, about ten yards ahead of him, silently watching as Manny's headlights fade into the south Texas night. Or is it West Virginia?

"
Where the hell are we, Hank?
"

"
Nowhere, Doc. We got a little ways to travel yet before we get somewhere.
"

"
Well, I hope it's not far because I'm tired.
"

"
Far? Naw, it ain't far. At least, it don't matter now. Near or far. Short or long. We'll be there directly and that won't be a moment too soon or too late. The only thing that's important is that we're goin' now and nothin' can stand in our way.
"

"
We? You're goin' too?
"

"
Well, sure, Doc. What'd you reckon I've been waitin' on all these years? I can't go nowhere without you. But it's all over now and I don't have to wait around anymore and neither do you.
"

Doc ponders that. Now that it's all over, Doc and Hank are headed for someplace neither near nor far and it doesn't matter when or if they get there, only that they're free to go. Makes perfect sense, Doc reckons.

"
So which way do we go, Hank?
"

"
Oh, so you're followin' me around now?
"

Doc shrugs and grins.

Hank turns and begins walking down the highway, cocking a thumb behind him in the direction from which they had come.

"
Well, not that way.
"

The young girl sat at a table on the narrow walkway in front of a tiny restaurant in Angangueo, Michoacán, Mexico, stirring instant coffee from a jar into a mug of hot milk. She was dark-skinned and diminutive with features more Indian than European and would have blended right in with the local population had it not been for her traveling companion.

When the pair had first arrived, word had spread quickly that there was a giant in town, the biggest man that anyone in the village had ever seen. Most of the gringos that came every winter for the butterflies were taller than any of the locals, but this man dwarfed them all, and what was more, he was Mexican, though he spoke Spanish with a strange accent. "
¡El gigante Norteño!
" the locals whispered as they passed the restaurant by contrived routes to sneak surreptitious peeks at the travelers.

Graciela and Manny had come for the butterflies as well. All of her life, Graciela had heard stories of the migration of the
mariposas monarca,
the beautiful monarch butterflies, and the creatures fascinated her. Each fall a Methuselah generation of the normally short-lived insects emerge from their chrysalises and make the epic journey from Canada down through the central United States until finally they reach the border between the states of Michoacán and Mexico. There they hibernate for the winter, hanging in dense clusters, their wings filling the air with a sound like whispering angels. In the spring they awake and mate and begin the return journey north. It will take four generations for the butterflies to reach home, and then the cycle begins again.

Graciela had come to witness this miracle firsthand. On their first day in town, she and Manny had hired a local guide to take them out to the forest. She had stood barefoot on the cool forest floor and quieted her mind and listened and now she understood that her affinity for the butterflies was perfectly natural. Graciela and the monarchs had the transformative power of a long and arduous journey in common.

When Graciela and Manny had left San Antonio that night, nine months before, they'd run south as hard as they could go until they were certain that they weren't being pursued. Then, just south of Beeville, they left the highway and followed one randomly chosen gravel road until it intersected with another and then continued to a dead end in a dry creek bed. There they laid Doc to rest, burying his body under a cairn of smooth white stones. They held a service of sorts, Graciela covering all the spiritual bases as best she could. Big tears rolled down Manny's cheeks, but Graciela didn't cry, and it was she who prompted a reluctant Manny when it was time to go. She knew that they were leaving behind no part of the man she loved. Her protector. Her teacher. She had learned her lessons and learned them well, better probably than Doc had ever intended. But for better or for worse, Graciela had assimilated no small dose of the best parts of the physician: the dexterity, the courage, and, most important, the compassion at his very core that no amount of shame and degradation could kill.

She had also inherited his instruments. Manny had suggested that they leave them in the creek bed with Doc, but Graciela refused. As they continued on their journey south the black bag was always at her side. During stops along the road, she inventoried and organized its contents, weighing each implement in her hand, assaying it, closing her eyes and listening as it spoke to her in Doc's resonant, reassuring tones. The scalpel counseled steadiness; the hemostats and retractors restraint. Even the curettage revealed its secrets to her, though not without regret, its previous master having specifically forbidden Graciela to even touch it.

They crossed the border at Brownsville unmolested early in the morning of the second day, and by suppertime they were climbing the first march of the Sierra Madre Mountains behind Monterrey. They didn't stop until they reached Saltillo, where they spent the afternoon with Manny's cousins before continuing south.

There was no one left alive in Dolores Hidalgo that Graciela wanted to see but they visited the cemetery on the outskirts of town in the middle of the night and it was there that Graciela saw the jaguar spirit for the last time, standing on her grandfather's grave.

In the old man's voice the spirit speaks a solitary phrase:
¡Siga las mariposas!
Then he turns and pads silently away, melting into the chaparral.

And Graciela instantly knew what to do. Where to go.

She had been six or seven when the migrating monarch butterflies had passed through Dolores for the first time in her memory. Grandfather had said that they were bound for Michoacán, a place of tall trees on the other side of the mountains, and that they would spend the winter there. She had cried the day that she awoke to find that the
monarcas
were gone, but the old
curandero
had reassured her that in the springtime they would come again on their journey back north.

Within a week of arriving in Angangueo, Manny and Graciela had established a routine that began with coffee and a bite in the little restaurant followed by the morning pilgrimage to the forest. On the drive out they would discuss plans for their own migration back to the border, and Manny would express his misgivings in vain.

"Not San Antonio!" Manny pleaded. "Not South Presa Street!"

Graciela smiled sympathetically but was insistent. "We will go where we are needed. We will stay until it's time to go."

Manny had taken to remaining in the car and reading his paper while Graciela entered the forest alone. He reckoned that only Graciela knew what it was she was listening for and when she heard it she would let him know. When she did he would follow her, or, more accurately, he would drive her wherever she wanted to go and together they would travel from town to town. That was the plan, never staying in any one place for too long, and picking up where Doc had left off.

Or at least Graciela would. She knew the procedure. She'd watched and she'd listened and she knew what to do when a girl was in trouble and no good could come of her bringing an innocent life into an unkind corner of the world.

Graciela never tired of standing beneath the butterflies as they huddled together in living curtains suspended from the towering fir trees, and she was listening and she was watching with every fiber of her being, but truth be told, there was nothing hidden there, no secret signal encrypted in the whispering of the wings. She knew what she was waiting for. Her grandfather had told her.

"
Siga las mariposas.
"

Follow the butterflies.

A single insect drops from a branch far above, and then another, their half-opened wings resembling broken parasols as they plummet to earth. They save themselves only at the very last instant, spiraling upward toward the sunlight filtering through the treetops. Other daredevils follow and soon it's raining butterflies, a deluge of orange and black that never quite reaches the ground.

Manny startled awake as the car door slammed shut and he found Graciela in the passenger seat, her eyes trained straight ahead down the road.

"Time to go," she said softly, and the big Mexican started the car.

Anton Mueller for setting me on the path.

Jenna Johnson for guiding me home.

Jackson Browne and Dianna Cohen for providing a place to start.

Siobhan Kennedy for Catholic insight (forgive her, Lord, for she knew not what she did).

Alice Randall for inventing the very notion of my name on the cover of a book.

Allison and John Henry for thinking I'm cool no matter what.