I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  Then it’ll be just like old times. Ol’ Hank and Doc, rolling down the highway, going nowhere, but going in style. And then, Hank reckons, it’ll be Doc’s turn to follow Hank even to the very gates of hell. Or Alabama.

  III

  “What’s your name, child? Uh … ¿Cómo se llama usted?”

  For an awful instant Doc was afraid that the girl would laugh out loud at his lousy Spanish, but instead she only smiled and slowly and carefully pronounced her given name.

  “Graciela.”

  “Grass-see-el-uh,” Doc ventured, and this time the girl couldn’t help but laugh but there wasn’t a hint of reproach in her voice and it was impossible for Doc to take offense.

  “Hey, tell you what. How ‘bout I just call you Grace for short. How’d that be?” He pointed at her and repeated, “Grace.”

  Without warning her dark eyes smoldered and her lips pressed together in a thin, determined line.

  “Uh-oh,” said Doc. “That went over like a lead balloon, didn’t it? Listen, child, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just that I’ve always had kind of a hard time with foreign languages. I mean, even back in medical school I had to take Latin over again three times. Grace is a whole lot easier for me—”

  The girl suddenly sat up in bed, one hand gathering the sheet under her chin to keep herself covered. “No!” she complained. “No Gress!” She reached out with her free hand to touch Doc’s lips with two fingers, gently, with almost no perceptible pressure, stopping Doc in midexcuse.

  It was the first time that he realized how beautiful she was, her finely chiseled features more Indian than mestiza, glossy black hair contrasting against her bare shoulders, the color of caramel in the surprisingly flattering light that filtered through the dirty window behind her.

  “Grah-see-ay-lah,” she intoned.

  Even her name was beautiful, strangely musical, like soft rain on a tin roof, and because she was fully aware of just how beautiful it was it became exquisite when she pronounced it herself. It was her name, hers and hers alone. The only one of the many names her mother had given her that she shared with no one else in her family, and she would not stand to hear it profaned.

  Doc tried again and then again, each time with better results. Finally he managed a rendition acceptable to Graciela and she settled back into her pillow. Still she lay there, her eyes wide open and expectant, and Doc realized that he had been remiss.

  “Oh! Me? Me llamo Doc. Call me Doc, child. Everybody else does.”

  Graciela looked confused, so Doc resorted to the Tarzan-and-Jane routine once again, pointing to Graciela and repeating her name accurately enough to make his own monosyllabic moniker sound hopelessly guttural in comparison when he then indicated himself and croaked, “Doc.”

  Graciela’s first attempts came out more like Duck, but after a few tries, she mastered it. Even then there was still a look of puzzlement about her, an unanswered question that began as tiny lines in her forehead and spread quickly to her eyes and then to the corners of her mouth.

  “¿Es todo?” she queried, and for once, Doc understood her perfectly well. The phrase was one of a handful that came up frequently in various contexts in the course of tense transactions and desperate procedures in the middle of the night.

  “Sí, es todo.” Yes, that’s all.

  He was Doc. Just plain Doc. With the exception of a few isolated incidents involving the local constabulary, it was the only name he had answered to in years. Nobody on South Presa knew him by any other name.

  Somewhere back in the Orleans Parish courthouse there was a fading piece of bond paper with an official-looking seal attached that said his name was Joseph Alexander Ebersole III and that he’d been born alive at 10:37 on the morning of January 17, 1910. The same name appeared elsewhere in the state archives as Dr. Joseph A. Ebersole, but there was an ugly red stamp across the face of the document declaring that his license to practice medicine in the State of Louisiana had been permanently revoked. He did possess a valid driver’s license, for what it was worth, but as far as Doc knew his old Buick was still broken down east of town on the side of the highway. That had happened over two years ago and he’d just walked off and left it behind. He had no legal income, no bank account, and therefore no use for documentation of any kind, and what’s more he liked it that way. The fact was that he had been “just plain Doc” for so long now that he no longer identified with that other name previously owned by his father and his grandfather, both of whom had practiced medicine and were at that moment, Doc was certain, simultaneously rolling over in their adjacent marble crypts. And Doc didn’t blame them.

  So he was Doc now. Not Doctor. Not Dr. Ebersole. Just plain old Doc and that was that.

  Graciela, obviously dissatisfied with the exchange but unable to keep her eyes open any longer, finally fell asleep. Doc couldn’t blame her for feeling shortchanged but it couldn’t be helped. He simply saw no need to squander more than a single syllable on a miserable life such as his own.

  Doc spent that night propped up in the corner catching only occasional catnaps. The next morning Dallas produced an old folding cot that had been gathering dust beneath her bed, and Doc accepted it gratefully and set it up against the wall opposite the bed. All that week he left Graciela’s side for only an hour each morning to get straight. Dallas kept watch in his stead, over no small amount of grumbling from Marge, who constantly wondered out loud when “that goddamn beaner” was coming back for his girlfriend. By Friday morning even Doc had to admit that it was unlikely that they would ever see Armando again, and as the weekend approached Graciela’s continuing convalescence became increasingly problematic.

  The moon would be full that night, and Doc’s quarters saw a fair amount of traffic whenever the natives were restless. Even if Marge had been disposed to help, the fact remained that every room in the Yellow Rose was currently occupied. All the big corner rooms on the first and second floors were rented to more or less permanent tenants like Doc. At the other end of the range were the “chicken coops”: eight windowless cubicles formed by subdividing the attic and accessed by the rumbling steel stairs out back. They were dark and cramped, each not much larger than the twin-size bed that was its only appointment, but the rooms saw a brisk turnover on the weekends at an hourly rate. In between were the smaller rooms, like the one that Marge’s special friend Dallas kept for the sake of appearances and to see specialty clients who were more interested in the fulfillment of bizarre fantasies than in the sexual act itself. Marge, more than a little jealous of “the creeps,” as she called them, grudgingly agreed that Graciela could stay when Dallas volunteered to take a little time off, which meant that she wouldn’t need her room. It was settled then: Doc would see patients in Dallas’s room while Graciela recovered in Doc’s.

  By sunup on Sunday, Doc had performed another abortion procedure, treated a half a dozen cases of gonorrhea, and removed an ice pick embedded deep in the left latissimus dorsi of a truck driver, dangerously close to his spine.

  “Another inch to the right, hoss, and you’d have been fucked,” Doc assured the patient as he wrapped his torso in tape to ease the collateral pain of at least two broken ribs. The action had reached a crescendo in the wee hours of Saturday: two gunshot victims, both shot with small-caliber Saturday night specials fired at close range and badly aimed.

  The two young bucks had evidently squared off in the middle of the dance floor down at the beer joint and emptied their pistols into each other at fewer than ten paces. Only one of the sixteen rounds discharged penetrated any vital area, collapsing the unlucky combatant’s left lung. Doc left the bullet where it was, thoracic surgery being a little out of his league, but he did manage to stop the bleeding. Doc kept up an optimistic front for the victim. “That’s why you have two lungs, son,” he observed, “in case something happens to one.” But in the other room, he advised the boy’s compadres that they needed to get him to a real hospital if he was to survive the infection that would
certainly ensue.

  All of Doc’s nonpregnant patients had good reasons to avoid a visit to the emergency room at Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital and the subsequent obligatory police report. Some were in the country illegally and were simply eager to steer clear of any contact whatsoever with the authorities. Others had been wounded by police or property owners while committing crimes or had outstanding warrants for their arrests. Some sought the anonymity of Doc’s practice for more personal reasons.

  Old Santo from the pawnshop showed up late on Sunday afternoon with a nasty gash from a carpet knife above his left eye. The assailant was Maria, his wife of forty-five years, who sat by the bed and sobbed during the entire procedure, all the while holding an ice pack to her face to bring down the swelling of an ugly red welt on her left cheek, as Doc stitched up the old man, not for the first time. Then Doc watched, bemused, from the window above as the couple walked down the street arm in arm on their way back home. “It’ll be a while before he hits her again,” he predicted.

  Back in his own room just after sunrise, Doc half collapsed in his chair and lit up a Camel, only his second smoke of the day. Graciela was sleeping soundly. Dallas marked her place in the romance novel she’d been reading and excused herself, but Doc gently caught her wrist as she reached out to open the door and proffered two neatly folded twenty-dollar bills. Tobacco wasn’t the only habit of Doc’s that had been neglected in all of the rush.

  “Dallas, honey, would you mind finding Manny and bringing us back a good piece of dope?”

  One bag for Dallas, which she tucked away in her brassiere for later. Three for Doc, which he dumped in the spoon all at once.

  Doc was only just able to lay his rig on the table before the rush reached his extremities, and his arms hung limp at his sides.

  This was it. The precipice. Doc balanced precariously on the edge of a tiny flat world, one foot on the ground and one poised to step off into the abyss. Nothing to it. Hard-core dope fiends like Doc sought a destination just this side of death every time they got off. But Doc’s curse was that it was in that place that Hank’s voice grew loudest and clearest.

  “She sure is a pretty thing, Doc.”

  Doc’s out of his chair in an instant but it takes him a second or two to bring the ghost into focus. Hank’s on the foot of the bed, one bony leg crossed over the other and a spiderlike hand reaching toward Graciela’s thigh. Doc lunges on unsteady legs.

  “Get away from her, goddamn you to hell! She’s just a child, for chrissake!”

  Whoosh! Did Hank leap across the bed or simply collapse out of his grasp like smoke and rematerialize on the other side? Doc isn’t certain. He rounds the foot of the bed in an attempt to shield Graciela, but the ghost stretches himself like a rubber band, elongating his already impossibly angular frame and leering over Doc’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, like you wouldn’t fuck her.”

  Still a little wobbly from the dope, Doc drops back down on the edge of the bed, and Graciela stirs but, mercifully, doesn’t wake. The ghost shrinks to life-size or perhaps a little smaller and settles in a chair by the door.

  “You ain’t got nothin’ to worry about, Doc. I can’t touch her no how. You know that.” The ghost takes off his Stetson and hangs his balding, transparent head and sighs. “I just wanted to talk is all. Seems like here lately you been too busy to bother with Ol’ Hank.”

  Doc sighs, checks to make sure that Graciela’s still sleeping, and then picks up his chair, lifts and carries it as quietly as he can manage across the room, and sets it down opposite Hank’s.

  “Okay, Hank. You want to talk? Let’s talk. But quietly, and with a minimum of, uh, theatrics, if that’s possible. You’re going to wake the whole goddamn house up.”

  The ghost leans forward and cranes his neck until his face is only inches from Doc’s and whispers, his breath cold and vaguely foul, like a deep freeze full of out-of-date meat.

  “Them dykes can’t hear me neither, Doc. You know that. They just hear you when you holler back at me and they think that you’re losin’ your mind.”

  “Who says that I’m not?” Doc shrugs. “Who says I’m even talking to you right now? I mean, at the moment I am high enough to hunt ducks with a rake.”

  “You don’t believe that, Doc.” Hank pouts, pivoting noiselessly in his chair and very nearly disappearing altogether as he presents an almost one-dimensional profile, head back with his nose in the air like a wounded schoolgirl.

  “What I don’t believe,” Doc qualifies, feeling a little guilty for hurting Hank’s feelings, “is that there’s any such thing as ghosts. Hell, Hank, I’m an educated man. A medical doctor.”

  “Ex-doctor!” Hank challenges. “You said so yourself.”

  “All right, ex-doctor, but my legal difficulties with the State of Louisiana notwithstanding, I simply don’t believe that you exist, and what’s more, I never have! If I were ignorant enough to believe that the spirits of the dead walked the earth seeking revenge or whatever, I’d be shaking in my boots about now, and I’m not, and there’s the proof right there, Hank. I’m not scared of you and I never have been. Not since the first time I thought I heard you calling my name, back in Louisiana. So either I am crazy, or you’re just as pitiful an excuse for a ghost as you were for a human being.”

  Doc knows immediately that he’s gone too far and braces for some sort of paranormal conniption, but instead the ghost stands up, head bowed, lower lip protruding like a dejected child’s, and dissolves through the wall.

  With each passing day Graciela grew a little stronger and soon it was all her unlikely caregivers could do to keep her lying down. Doc tried to convince her that she still needed rest but the truth was that he put off issuing her a clean bill of health only because he knew that she had nowhere to go. Marge had never been thrilled with Graciela’s presence under her roof in the first place. Though she had found it financially expedient in recent years to abandon her father’s “No Meskins” policy, she was slow to trust anyone whose complexion was darker than her own, and Negroes were still not allowed past the porch. Doc knew that it was only a matter of time before Graciela’s room and board became a bone of contention between the landlady and himself.

  Then one morning Doc looked in on Graciela to find that she was not only out of bed but dressed and cooking huevos con chorizo on the hot plate over in the corner.

  She wore a simple cotton shift that Dallas had scared up somewhere, and the room had been swept and dusted, the bed made, and the windows propped open on sawed-off broomsticks to let in a little fresh air. Doc protested, in English and in vain, while he racked his brain for the Spanish for bed. “¡La cama!” he finally blurted out. “¡Postrado en cama!” but to no avail. Graciela continued fussing over the eggs and shrugged in the direction of the little table by the window, which she had set for two as best she could with what she had to work with. In the end, defeated, Doc plopped down in the chair, and Graciela served up the eggs and sausage, a large helping for Doc, only a spoonful or two for herself, and they were delicious. When they were finished eating, Graciela bussed the table, and the morning paper almost magically appeared with Doc’s second cup of coffee. It was as if he had dropped into a dream. Some sort of vision of what could have been if only he’d never taken that first shot of dope. A part of him wanted to bolt, but he was in no hurry. He’d had a little lick of dope to hold him over and he had to admit that this wasn’t bad, this little anomalous episode of normalcy or whatever it was.

  Doc finished his coffee and thanked Graciela, and in spite of the nagging ache in his legs and the rumble in his guts, he made his way to Manny’s spot with an uncustomary spring in his step. After getting straight in the beer joint men’s room, Doc took his seat in the back and finished his paper.

  Manny’s morning package usually ran out about the middle of the day, and sometimes he’d stop by for a beer and a game of dominoes before he drove over to the west side to replenish his supply. On this particular day, more than
once Doc glanced up from his hand and caught his friend regarding him quizzically, but he let it slide. By happy hour, Doc had dispensed a couple of courses of antibiotics and lined up another pregnancy termination for later on that evening, so he was flush, and he stopped by Manny’s spot to spend his advance. The big man gave him yet another sideways glance when he allowed that he couldn’t hang around as was his custom.

  “What’s your hurry, Doc?” Manny wondered. “It ain’t like you got nothin’ to go home to.” He got a big laugh from his boys out of that one. Doc just kept on walking.

  That night Graciela insisted on repatriating Doc to his own bed, and she slept on the cot across the room. There were freshly laundered sheets on Doc’s bed when he turned in, and he was conscious of the rasp of his own breathing and worried that he was keeping Graciela awake. Graciela was listening but she was reminded of home, her family, all of them together in a single room. They were both soon asleep.

  Graciela made breakfast again the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that.

  On one of those mornings, weeks later, Doc unfolded his paper and half-mumbled, “I’ll be damned,” as he skimmed the story beneath an unusually bold headline. “‘President Coming to San Antonio,’” he read. Realizing that Graciela didn’t understand, Doc folded back the front page and held it up so that Graciela could see the picture of the young president. “¡El presidente!” he translated. “¡Aquí, en San Antonio!” Graciela peered over Doc’s shoulder at the confusing jumble of characters. She could barely read a Spanish newspaper, but she recognized the picture well enough.

  Everyone back in Dolores Hidalgo knew the face of the first Catholic president of the Estados Unidos, as well as those of his beautiful wife and their two small children. The Mexican tabloids followed their daily lives with a level of interest normally reserved for movie stars and unheard-of for the First Family of a foreign country. Graciela and her mother had even lit a candle for them in the parish church when they heard that the First Lady had suffered a miscarriage; they could imagine no greater tragedy that could befall a family than losing a child, especially a boy. Graciela pointed to the picture at the bottom of the page: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, resplendent in her beautiful gown at a recent state dinner. She pronounced her name the way everyone in Dolores had.