I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (3 page)

But by four o'clock, the bleeding had finally stopped for good and the girl was resting comfortably enough that Doc felt safe asking Dallas to keep an eye on her while he slipped out to Manny's spot to cop.

The afternoon's windfall allowed the purchase of a
quarta—
two and a half grams of dope for fifty dollars—and Doc still had a few bucks left over for a week's rent, some groceries, and a carton of smokes. He looked in on the girl, shot another lick of dope, and by four thirty he was back at his table in the beer joint nursing a beer and chain-smoking Camels in hopes that lightning would strike twice in one day.

The happy-hour crowd began to filter in. Unlike the daytime patrons, these folks were mostly squares who busted their backs all day long building houses that they could never afford to live in or repaving perfectly serviceable roads in neighborhoods way across town. They arrived in groups of three or four, drank a pitcher of beer among them, and maybe shot a game of pool before hurrying home in time for supper. It was always one of them who dropped the first nickel in the jukebox.

The Mexicans usually played records by the local
conjuntos,
like Santiago Jimenez or Trio de San Antonio, or maybe one of the big mariachi bands from Mexico, with blaring trumpets and a singer with a voice to match. Songs about the black-eyed girl they left behind and the beautiful mountains they would never see again.

Fine. Sad songs in a language that he barely understood were easy enough for Doc to tune out. He knew some of the melodies by heart and hummed along when he was in the mood.

But when one of the redneck boys lurched toward the box, fishing in his Wranglers for a nickel, the hair stood up on the back of Doc's neck. He knew it was only a matter of time before one of these peckerwoods bellied up to the Wurlitzer and punched in N26.

Now you're lookin' at a man that's gettin' kinda mad
I've had a lot of luck but it's all been bad.

"Fuck me," Doc grumbled under his breath. He'd spent a lot of his life in bars all over the South, and it never fucking failed. If you sat there long enough, some asshole would play a Hank Williams record. Ol' Hank dead and buried beneath six feet of rusty red Alabama dirt for the better part of a decade now, still taking their nickels and making them cry. Doc looked around the room. There were construction workers, warehouse hands, soldiers from Fort Sam, and layabouts on disability. They ranged in age from their early twenties to seventy-something but they all loved Hank. They loved him when he was alive and now that he was dead they loved him even more. Even the Mexicans loved the son of a bitch, even though most of them couldn't understand what he was singing about. Hank's songs were their very own trials and tribulations set to a rock-steady beat that they could dance to. Each and every one believed that Ol' Hank was singing to him individually, or at least exclusively to people like him. Regular folks with kids to raise and bills to pay, most of them overdue. They had no way of knowing that at this very moment somewhere across town, in solid, old-money Victorian houses in Olmos Park and Alamo Heights, doctors, lawyers, and politicians were mixing themselves highballs and cranking up Hank on their hi-fis. Oh, they had plenty of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole records on their automatic changers, but when they were drinking, only Hank would do, and there wasn't one of them who would pay a dime to hear any other hillbilly singer in the world.

Doc didn't wonder why they all insisted on doing this to themselves. He knew what was getting ready to happen. When one of Hank's records dropped into place on an automated turntable, even the initial rumble of the needle in the well-worn grooves sounded lonesome. The crying steel guitar was the bait but it was the beat that set the hook, and by the time Hank's voice crackled from the speaker it was too late. There was no escaping now.

No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive.

Jesus Christ! That voice. That gut-wrenching, heart-rending wail that got down in your bones like a cold wet day. The keening of a hillbilly banshee, heralding imminent doom.

"That's enough, goddamn it!" Doc shouted out loud—but only a handful of patrons paid any attention and none of the regulars even looked up from their beers. They'd all witnessed outbursts from "that crazy old man who sits at the table in the back of the joint," but they could never make heads or tails of what he was going on about. "He just does that," they'd whisper. "He talks to himself sometimes."

Doc pried his fingers loose from the edge of the table and propelled himself through the door and out into the street.

It was hot and dark and quiet. The streetlights cast elongated shadows on the empty street, out-of-kilter trapezoidal ghosts of simple one- and two-story structures that had housed respectable businesses. The pawnshop was a barbershop once, a place where people gathered to trade neighborhood gossip and tell tall tales. The abandoned building across the street was a family-owned hardware store, bins filled with shiny new fasteners and fittings of every description: wing nuts and carriage bolts and ten-penny nails.

But, like Doc, the buildings were derelict. Has-beens; shadows of their former selves waiting around for time to take its slow but steady toll.

***

The familiar fall of faltering footsteps follows behind him. The shuffling echo ceases abruptly each time Doc breaks his stride, but he knows from experience that if he turns around he'll see only his own shadow stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk like a black chasm opening in the middle of the street. So he just keeps on walking and the ghost follows him all the way home.

The Mexican girl was still sleeping soundly so Doc excused Dallas; he sprinkled a good lick of dope on a Juicy Fruit wrapper, which she accepted gratefully before hurrying away. He had intended the
quarta
to last for a while. At least a couple of days. It would have been like taking a little vacation, a rare reprieve from the daily grind. Just sit up, reach for his outfit, and get straight without having to leave his room, just like the old days. Maybe put a pot of coffee on the hot plate and read the morning paper like a citizen.

Maybe next time. He needed to get high. Mindful not to disturb the girl, he located his outfit by feel, carefully fishing around between the mattress and the box spring for the blue velvet bag. It had once dressed an elegantly shaped bottle of Canadian whiskey. Now it held all Doc's paraphernalia: bent-handled spoon, rubber tourniquet, and gleaming glass-and-stainless-steel syringe.

Most junkies had to settle for homemade contraptions contrived from eyedroppers and rubber bands, but not Doc. His rig was a family heirloom, part of a fine old set of German-made instruments that his grandfather had given his father when he graduated from medical school. Dr. Ebersole the second had kept them unused in a glass case in his office until the proud day they were handed down to Doc. Only the syringe had survived, and at times he'd been tempted to toss it into the nearest trash can, but the truth was that Doc hadn't carried it around all these years for sentimental reasons.

In a half cc of water (the capacity of the average rig on the street), three bags of Mexican brown cooked down to the consistency of a good milk shake. Granddaddy's giant-size German behemoth held three times that amount, so Doc could load up without fear of a clogged needle and a wasted thirty-dollar shot.

Yeah, Doc liked the big shots, the kind that would kill most junkies, the kind that rattled his teeth and made him sweat and drool as he rocked back and forth on the edge of his chair. But he never fell out. He always came back at the last possible instant, blinking and sighing in resignation as he found himself back in his shit-hole room. And the ghost was always there watching him.

"
You got to help me, Doc, I'm in pretty rough shape.
"

Doc always tries to tell himself that it's just the dope talking but that never stops him from talking back.

"
I can't do nothin' for you, Hank. I told you. I'm not a doctor anymore.
"

"
Now, Doc,
"
the ghost admonishes in a stage whisper too thin to conceal his contempt, "we both know you weren't no doctor when I first laid eyes on you. Just another snake-oil salesman hangin' around after the show as far I knew. But I took all them potions and powders you was hawkin'. And you took my cash money, make no mistake there. But let's forget all that. That's business. Why, we're old fishin' buddies, you and me!
"

Doc opens his eyes and finds the apparition perched on the edge of the spare chair in the corner, narrow shoulders hunched over as if he were racked by pain or cold. Impossibly thin, Hank is, and the straw-colored western-cut suit he's wearing hangs flat and limp on his frame as if there is nothing substantial inside to fill it out, and there's not. His silverbelly Stetson hat casts a diagonal shadow across his face, which is as pale and drawn as it was in life, and his one visible eye is hungry, expectant, one of a pair of frightened-animal eyes frozen in a perpetual, silent scream, and Doc knows better than to allow himself to look in there. He focuses his gaze a little lower and shudders as he realizes that he can easily read the house rules posted on the door through the visitor's transparent torso. There are some things about being haunted that Doc will never get used to.

"
The way I remember it, Hank, you called me whenever your back hurt, you or your mama, God rest her, and I came running. Maybe I got a line wet at some point in the process but that was small consolation when it was all said and done!
"

"
You were always paid for the shots, Doc. In advance. Hell, I've shelled out a small fortune to quacks like you for one remedy or another. Some helped. Some didn't. You said it yourself, Doc, that you never in all your life seen nobody walkin' around with such a bad case of the spinal-whatever-it-was you called that bump on my back.
"

"
Spina bifida, Hank. It's Latin. Means ‘divided spine.' And I have no doubt that it hurt like hell when you were alive—
"

"
That's another thing!" the ghost hisses. "I've been thinkin', Doc. Maybe I ain't dead!
"

"
Oh, you're dead all right.
"

"
Well, what if you got it wrong? I mean, I'm sittin' here talkin' to you, ain't I? Maybe this is all just a bad dream and any minute now I'm gonna wake up—
"

Doc's patience collapses.

"
Well, wake the fuck up then, Hank! It's about goddamn time, being that it's the summer of nineteen-sixty-fucking-three. That's ten years! Ten fucking years and God only knows how many miles and it would appear that you have, indeed, expired somewhere along the way, amigo, seeing as how you've taken to walking through walls and exhibiting all manner of other unnatural fucking behavior. Actually, it is my own personal belief as well as my professional opinion that you are merely a figment of my fucking imagination but that hasn't deterred you from dogging my every step from Louisiana to hell and back to here, now, has it? But you're dead all right, Hank! That is, if you are who you say you are and I must say that if you ain't Hank Williams then you're his spittin' image and one thing I know for certain is that Hank Williams is dead. Deader than the proverbial doornail, don't you know, and if you're him then there ain't no fucking way that you're in any kind of physical pain, not anymore, anyway, and even if you were I'm still not sure I could bring myself to feel sorry for you
.
Hell, to tell you the truth there are times that I wish I had the luxury of an incurable, chronic infirmity to cry about every time I get a hankering for a shot of dope!
"

The ghost stands up or maybe he simply grows like the afternoon shadow of a ramshackle church spreading across a graveyard until he looms over Doc, wagging a skeletal finger in his face.

"
Now, you just hold your horses there, Doc! Maybe I'm dead and maybe I ain't, but one thing for goddamn certain is I ain't no hophead. I never took nothin' that a doctor didn't order. Never give myself a shot neither, and I always took mine in the pants pocket, not straight in the mainline like a goddamn nigger!
"

Suddenly conscious of the tourniquet that still encircles his upper arm, Doc unwinds it and puts it away. As he rolls down his sleeve he rests his hand palm-down on one quivering knee, shielding tiny telltale flecks of dried blood from the phantom's view ... or maybe not. If Doc can see through Hank, maybe Hank can see through him as well. He stands up and pulls on his coat.

"
How many of those other doctors told you to stop drinking, Hank?
"

"
Oh, here we go...
"

"
How many times did I tell you the same goddamn thing? You weren't listening to them back then. And you're not listening to me now.
"

"
Okay, so I drink.
"

"
No. Actually, Hank, you don't," Doc parries.

"
Maybe, sometimes I drink a lot. It ain't like I got nothin' goin' on in my life that wouldn't drive a man to drink, Doc.
"

"
You can't drink, Hank. And you've got no life because you're dead, goddamn it!
"

Hank continues to whine. "People buzzin' all around like skeeters on a hog!
"

Doc sidesteps to the dresser, uncaps the bottle of pure grain alcohol there, pours two fingers into a dusty tumbler, and slams it down on the table next to Hank.

"
Here you go, Hank.
"

The spirit begins to quiver, or maybe
shimmer
is a better word. Doc persists.

"
What you waitin' for?
"

The ghost recoils into the corner, flattening into two dimensions, twisting and writhing like a ribbon in the wind.

"
Go on, Hank, have a goddamn drink!" Doc barks, and he empties the contents of the glass in the phantasm's face, but both the alcohol and the ghost instantly vaporize, leaving a sickly-sweet fume hanging in the air.