by Steve Earle
Doc drifted in and out of wakefulness until morning. In one instant of clarity, deep in the night, he recognized the part of Graciela’s story where he had come in, except now the principal roles were reversed.
X
Doc slept through the daylight hours of Christmas Day 1963. When he finally came around it was a little after eight in the evening and Graciela was there, kneeling on the floor beside him, her head bowed low and resting on the bed. At first Doc assumed, somewhat self-consciously, that she must be deep in contemplation or prayer. Then in one luxurious catlike motion she yawned and stretched and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.
“¿Cómo están?” she half whispered and then: “No, no, I must English! I mean—I must say in English!” She muttered to herself as she applied a cool, damp washrag to Doc’s forehead and settled beside him on the edge of the bed. She knitted her brow in concentration, silently mouthing the words one more time before committing to another attempt.
“How do you f-fee-ul?” she finally offered, wide-eyed, searching Doc’s features for any sign that she had managed to make herself understood.
“I feel fine, child,” Doc lied. “Very well, thank you very much.”
In point of fact, it was now nearly twenty hours since the shot of dope that had nearly killed him, and he was beginning to get the chills. Still, he was more tired than he was sick, so at Graciela’s urging he rolled up in his covers and turned his face toward the wall and was soon asleep again.
When he awoke the following morning he was in the very teeth of withdrawal. He hurt nearly everywhere: his head, his back; his skin felt like an acid-lined exoskeleton, unshed and at least two sizes too small. He sneezed and he coughed, his stomach roiled, and his bowels rumbled. Experience told him that as miserable as he was, it was nothing compared to what was in store.
So what was he waiting for? There was no urgency, no relentless beat of the drum he had marched to for most of his life. He knew good and well that if he didn’t haul his ass out of bed that instant and hustle up a bag of dope it would only get worse, but he was still lying there. All of the usual symptoms that served as constant reminders that his life was not his own were present and accounted for, with one notable exception.
There was no funk. No blues. No blackness on the horizon that he couldn’t see past or dread rising up with the bile in the back of his throat. No terror to motivate trembling arms and leaden legs and set the tedious routine in motion. Doc grimaced as he was caught off-guard by a strong cramp, and Graciela understood at once. “I go for Manny,” she assured him, but when she removed her hand from his forehead it was as if all of the color had suddenly drained out of the world. Graciela winced as Doc desperately grasped her injured wrist and replaced it by force.
“No, child. Just don’t go anywhere right now.”
Manny showed up anyway, a little after ten o’clock, and stood at the foot of Doc’s bed with his hat in his hand, looking sheepish.
“You okay, Doc?”
“Well, okay would be an overstatement, but I reckon I’ll live.”
The big man glanced over his shoulder, moved around to the side of the bed, and bent over Doc, lowering his voice as if he were about to impart some sensitive piece of information.
“I asked around, Doc,” he began, a puzzled expression on his face. “All my regular customers. Nobody else fell out. I cut that stuff myself. It was just my usual—”
“I know that, Manny,” Doc interrupted, struggling to sit up. Graciela hurried to his assistance, propping him up with a couple of extra pillows. “Are you cold?” she asked, noticing that Doc groped for the covers as they slipped down. He nodded and she tucked the thin blanket up under his chin. “I’ll get another blanket.” On her way out the door she collected a couple of washcloths in the basin. “I’ll be right back,” she assured Doc.
Alone with Manny, Doc did his best to assuage the big man’s guilt.
“It’s not your fault. I had an extra bag lying around and I … well, I was just stupid. I mean, it’s Pharmacology 101. Increasingly higher doses of morphine, or anything else for that matter, result in an exponential increase in tolerance over time. That same theory applies to decreasing doses, though I must admit that I have no practical experience in that area. But, hell, Manny, I knew better. It’s not your fault. Just put that out of your mind.” A peculiar look spread over Doc’s face; he stumbled over the words as if they were being issued from someone else’s mouth: “Anyway, the thing is, I don’t know but I … well, I think I might be done.”
Manny nodded. “You thinkin’ about kickin’?”
Doc blanched and threw back the covers. “Well, technically, I think I already am.”
Supported by Manny, Doc only just made it down the hall before the next spasm racked him like a toothpaste tube squeezed in the middle, the contents issuing simultaneously from both ends. He rocked back and forth on the toilet vomiting violently in a galvanized mop bucket that Marge kept under the chronically leaking sink. Christmas dinner had long since been purged but that didn’t stop the relentless rhythmic contractions and Doc half expected to look down in the bucket and identify fragments of various vital organs. In fact, nothing was coming up anymore and wave after wave of dry heaves shook him to his marrow. At some point in the ordeal Doc looked up through watering eyes and he could just make out Graciela standing in the doorway. He was mortified.
“For chrissake, Manny, I’m fucking indisposed here!”
Manny, who was fully occupied keeping Doc on the toilet and the bucket in position, managed to swat at the door with one giant pawlike hand, and it slammed shut with a loud bang in Graciela’s face.
The room darkened, not a complete blackout that could be explained away by the flip of a switch or a blown fuse, but a subtle graying, a pall descending over everything. Doc didn’t even have to open his eyes to name the beast.
“Feelin’ poorly, are you, Doc?”
“Ah, there you are, Hank, you lousy cocksucker. Stands to reason you’d come around to kick me when I’m down.”
Manny thought Doc was talking to him. “You don’t have to talk ugly like that, Doc. I’m just tryin’ to help, that’s all.”
Doc can’t make out what Manny’s saying but there’s a voice inside his head, maybe it’s Hank’s or maybe it’s his own, hissing, “Just roll up your sleeve, Doc! That’s all you got to do!”
“Yeah, and then what?” Doc answers. “Then I have to start all over again.”
“Start what? Who you tryin’ to kid, Doc?”
Definitely Hank. And he’s right. The puking and shitting is the easy part.
Doc grabbed Manny by his lapels and pulled himself up off the toilet; the big man stumbled backward but Doc held on tight, like a desperate animal.
“You’ve got to help me, Manny!” He gasped.
Hank’s still there, just above and behind the big Mexican, and he’s egging Doc on.
“Yeah, that’s the way, buddy! You know what to do! Ain’t but one thing gonna cure what ails you.”
Doc finally threw in the towel but not because of any ghost. It was the darkness that lurked inside him that brought Doc to his knees as soon as Graciela was out of the room. “Come on, Manny, I know you’ve got something on you! Just a taste. That’s all I need. Just a taste, to get straight!”
Manny was repulsed and perhaps a little disappointed although not surprised by Doc’s sudden about-face, but he never had a chance to reply.
Doc’s first instinct was that it might be a raid and the police were breaking down the bathroom door. Then the hook-and-eye latch tore out of the doorjamb and whistled past his ear like a ricocheting bullet. The door swung wide open and a fiercely determined Graciela stood in the breach.
***
Both Hank and the darkness give ground.
Stunned and embarrassed, Doc released Manny from the death grip, and the big man stepped aside.
Hank spits like a terrified cat and evaporates as the room begins to spin and Doc fal
ls face-down on the cold tile floor.
Later Doc would only vaguely remember Manny’s picking him up and carrying him to bed and then retreating before Graciela, backing out of the room like a captivity-addled circus elephant.
Graciela wedged a chair against the door and lit more candles and fetched the basin from the table, and now there was the aroma of steeping herbs that Doc had come to identify with healing rising up from the warm water. All of Doc’s senses seemed to be intensified and he could smell fresh blood on her bandage as she placed the washrag on his forehead, and at that exact moment the horror that had gripped him so suddenly miraculously vanished into thin air.
Miraculously. Miraculous. Miracle.
But it was a miracle. There was no other word for it it.
That night, he ran the gauntlet—pain, nausea, diarrhea, and respiratory distress—fully cognizant that these were passing physical symptoms that he would certainly survive if he could only overcome his own fear. As a physician, he was well aware that no one ever died of withdrawal from morphine. Alcohol? Sometimes. Barbiturates? Often. But never from morphine in any of its forms, including heroin. It was truly only fear itself that stood between him and freedom.
And when Graciela touched Doc, he was never afraid.
The next day passed in vignettes, ragged shards of consciousness that segued suddenly from nightmare to fitful wakefulness and back again. When Doc occasionally opened his eyes, he was never certain into which realm he had drifted, but Graciela was always there and she smiled and whispered reassuringly and he’d take a deep breath and re-immerse himself in the stream.
Then, sometime deep in the third night, Doc sat bolt upright and wild-eyed to find that he had outrun some unnamed denizen of his dreams only to awaken in palpable agony in the world of light. Pain the likes of which he had imagined in only the most twisted of his medical-school horror fantasies assailed him, as if his spinal cord had been neatly but not necessarily painlessly removed, leaving him raw and empty for an instant before the hollow was filled with alternating layers of fire and ice that froze him and burned him, and he writhed and thrashed until the sheets hung damp and twisted from the bedposts. But in an incongruous moment of clarity, Doc perceived that this was indeed the penultimate penance and that he need only buck up and stay the course and it would all soon be over. The pain fell on him in waves now, one after another, and there was no time to recover before the next one came crashing down. Another epiphany: Graciela indeed possessed the power to spare him all this, but she only watched and waited, crouching sphinxlike on her knees and elbows at the foot of the bed. The physical agony was somehow amplified by Doc’s complete lack of fear. There was no shivering or shaking anymore, no mercifully mind-numbing shock. Then, just when Doc was certain that he could bear no more but before he could open his mouth to scream, Graciela uncoiled herself and slowly crawled toward him on all fours. She was naked, and her hair was ringed in light, a halo one instant, a circle of fire the next, and in the constantly moving candlelight, her skin ranged in hue from something between honey and caramel on her shoulders to deep sienna along the shadows on her inner thighs where they lay alongside Doc’s hips. He was, at once, intensely aroused and deeply ashamed, his erection hard and painful, and when Graciela grasped his wrists to guide his hands to their perfect places on either side of her tiny waist and lowered herself down on him he gasped out loud. She arched her back and then fell on him again, her mouth closing on his, breathing in precisely as he breathed out. Succubus! Doc had heard the word back home. It referred to a she-demon who came to men in their sleep and sucked their spirits from their bodies. Spirits. Demons. Saints. In New Orleans, as in Dolores Hidalgo, these words were synonyms, and the very concept of good and evil was far more ambiguous than in the civilized places of the world. Perhaps it was Doc’s immortal soul that Graciela was devouring, but the physician knew disease when he tasted it and he couldn’t help but believe that he was better shed of it. He climaxed almost immediately and the pain was unmitigated, but there was release and he screamed, and when he stopped the silence was profound.
Doc slept the rest of that night and half of the next day, his head resting in Graciela’s lap as she kept watch over him in both wakefulness and dreams.
XI
Hank’s standing in the middle of South Presa Street and it’s dark and dirty and deserted.
Not like the highway. The highway’s lonesome too, but at least it’s clean, and once a body gets going he can keep right on going even if it doesn’t really take him anywhere.
What the hell happened, anyway? Hank had finally had Doc right where he wanted him, out in the open with no skirt to hide behind, and then something went terribly wrong. Doc was there one second and then, just like that, he was gone, and to add insult to injury, he had somehow managed to drag Hank back to this godforsaken place with him. Makes a body wonder who’s haunting who around here.
Hank scans the boarding-house windows up above and finds a rumor of light behind one; faint, flickering amber casting shapes that dance like fairies, or at least butterflies, fluttering behind the colorless curtains. He takes a step closer, hoping for a better look, but the shadows converge and form a single shape, human and feminine, darkening and growing until it fills the entire window. When the curtains open, the girl stands there, framed in the glow of a hundred unseen candles. Hank recoils but he can’t look away because she is achingly beautiful and wearing nothing except a bloodstained bandage around one wrist; she folds her hands as if in prayer and looks out through black eyes that cut through the night like beacons and find Hank and she sees him. She sees him, and in that instant he realizes that she has always seen him, and there is no fear or awe in those eyes to give him any power over her whatsoever, and when she draws the curtains Hank is left alone in the dark.
XII
The voice was female, neither young nor old, appropriately anonymous.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been fourteen years since my last confession.”
The priest would have been shocked or at the very least surprised if he weren’t hearing the third confession of a long-term apostate in as many days.
“Go on then, child,” he encouraged her. The priest’s accent had moderated little in the ten years since he’d arrived in America fresh from an Irish seminary, and the woman continued, encouraged as much by the music in the disembodied voice as the kindly words.
“Well, I don’t know exactly where to start, Father. The beginnin’, I guess. When I was eleven—”
“Perhaps,” the priest interrupted, “we need only concern ourselves with the sins that you have committed since your last confession.”
“Oh, okay. Let’s see then … Well, to begin with, I’ve taken the Lord’s name in vain about a million times; well, maybe not a million, Father, but you know what I mean. I guess you hear that all the time, don’t you, but it is a sin, ain’t it?”
“Yes, child,” the priest agreed. “It is indeed a sin and as good a place to start as any.”
“Well then, I’ve taken the Lord’s name in vain many times, Father,” the woman reiterated, and as she continued, the overtone of anxiety in her voice gradually gave way to relief, and the priest settled back in the narrow wooden seat for what the experience of the past few weeks had taught him would be the better part of an hour.
“Well, I’ve lied a lot, that’s for sure, sometimes when there wasn’t even nothin’ to be lyin’ about. Just to stay in practice, I reckon …”
He had known that something was afoot as early as February; unfamiliar voices on the other side of the screen, new faces in the nave at Mass. He had originally dismissed it as an anomaly, an unusually enthusiastic observance of Lent by well-meaning chronic backsliders, perhaps. But now it was the Saturday before Holy Week and they were still coming.
” … and I guess I don’t have to tell you, Padre, that I stole my share of anything that wasn’t tied down, I mean, well, I do have to tell you, so I’m tellin’ you
: I used to steal. From perfect strangers on the street. From so-called friends of mine. It didn’t matter. As soon as their backs were turned I stole ‘em all blind. I even stole from my own mama and now she won’t even allow me in her house no more …”
They were easy to spot, these newcomers. At first, they sat in the back of the little church in little knots of two or three. By mid-March they occupied the last four rows and it was hard to ignore the gulf of empty pews that separated them from the regular congregation. After Mass one day, the priest asked an elderly parishioner why this was, and he was taken by surprise when she spat on the ground and hissed, “¡Putas!”—whores—indicating a small group of the strangers who were making their way across the little plaza before the church. “They do not belong here.”
” … of course I drank a little, well, more than a little, I guess, but that was before I got on that dope, and then, well, I just couldn’t get enough of that shit—oh! Pardon me, Father!—but, well, anyway I was only seventeen and I didn’t have no job or nothin’ and there’s only so much a girl can steal and it was just a matter of time before I figured out that there’s only one way that a poor girl like me can make that kind of money if you know what I mean …”
The priest knew of course that a semi-notorious red-light district thrived a little over a mile away from his church, but until recently he had never given it much, if any, thought. He had been elevated to pastor only a year earlier, at the rather precocious age of thirty-six, upon the sudden death of his predecessor, Father Cantu. Since then he’d had his hands full winning the hearts and minds of the mission’s all-Hispanic, mostly female, middle-aged-to-elderly congregation. Some, he sensed, still saw him as the fresh-faced curate who had served at their longtime padre’s side for nearly a decade. In truth, he had been loath to squander the hard-earned goodwill of the faithful on a handful of heathen hoping to mitigate a lifetime of sin by putting in an appearance on alternate Christmases and Easters, but in the end his calling won out over parish politics. He had vowed to minister to all comers. Young and old, rich and poor. The wretched as well as the righteous. Of course he would hear the confession of this sinner, just as he heard all the other newcomers’. That was his job.
