I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  Father Killen’s patience was dissipating rapidly as well, but he knew it wouldn’t do to push. There was still much to learn, but sometimes it was all the priest could manage not to strangle the transvestite with his bare hands. He continued to rely on the breathing technique and prayer to control his revulsion and calm him whenever it became obvious that Tiff was holding out on him. Sometimes he found it necessary to dig even deeper into his boxing coach’s toolbox.

  Before coming to Maynooth Seminary to teach theology and coach the boxing team, Father Stephen Walsh had traveled extensively in Asia as a missionary. He had recognized in the young seminarian Padraig Killen a genuine athletic talent, as well as a dark and dangerous streak of anger that unchecked, he feared, might result in an unfortunate incident if not a tragedy in the ring. He taught the young man techniques that he had learned from a yogi in an ashram in Ceylon, touting them as a means to improve his pugilistic performance. “If you lose your temper like that out there, you’re at the mercy of your opponent, son. You’ve got to focus! Find your center and wait for the other man’s weaknesses to reveal themselves. Then you pick them apart, one by one.”

  “Well, all right,” the priest told Tiff now. “Tomorrow, then? A little earlier, say, three? I’ve catechism at six.”

  At the next meeting they picked up right where they’d left off, over a thermos of coffee that the priest had brought along with the customary twenty-dollar bill.

  “Big man’s name is Manny. Short for Man-u-el. Manuel Castro, like the Cuban. Peddles dope, they say, but I don’t fuck with that.”

  “And what’s his business at the boarding house? Who’s he see there?”

  Tiff shook his head. “Used to be Doc, for sure, but the street say Doc ain’t gettin’ high no more. But shee-it, I don’t believe that for a minute. He still on South Presa and folks still go to see him down to the Rose. Him and that hoodoo girl.”

  This time the priest asked. “Hoodoo?”

  “Hoodoo! Voodoo! Mumbo jumbo! Whatever you want to call it.” Tiff motioned for the priest to come closer and clucked. “Some say that girl got powers. Healin’ powers, you know, layin’ on hands and shit. Humph! She ain’t touchin’ me!”

  The priest’s pulse quickened again. This was it! This was what he’d been waiting for! This deviate stank of gin and worse and made his skin crawl, but he was so close now.

  In through your nose! Out through your mouth!

  “She’ll see!” Tiff rattled on. “Somethin’ bad’ll come of all of that carryin’ on! And Marge and Dallas—”

  “Marge and …?”

  “Dallas. They run the joint. But I reckon that Meskin girl’s got ‘em all hoodooed, and it’s her that calls the shots down to the Yellow Rose nowadays.”

  “And these healings that you speak of, you’ve witnessed them firsthand, then? Seen them with your own eyes?”

  “Witnessed?” Tiff weighed the word, framed as it was in a direct question. “I ain’t ‘witnessed’ shit. Like I told you, I don’t go near that joint.”

  “You’ve never been inside? Not once?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “Well, what have you heard, then? Surely you know someone—”

  “I know a lot of people that’s white that been down to the Yellow Rose for one reason or another …”

  Of course. It was a boarding house: no coloreds allowed.

  “… and they got all kinds of stories they tell about healin’s and haints and who knows what else and I don’t believe none of that but that don’t mean there ain’t nothin’ goin’ on down there!” Out of breath or bile or both, Tiff took a break long enough to fish a pack of Marlboros out of his bag and offer one to the priest, who shook his head but pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard. “I ain’t seen nothin’, but I’ll tell you what I know,” Tiff went on. “Folks go in there all tore up and then walk out again and heal up too soon to be natural! Nothin’ like that happened down here before that Meskin girl come along”—he took a quick look over each shoulder—“and I’ll tell you what else. Ever since she come, some girls go in that place and nobody ever hears from ‘em ever again!”

  The priest rolled his eyes and shifted impatiently in his seat. He’d heard that kind of wild innuendo from Big Tiffany before and he wasn’t interested. “Ah, Tiff. I told you, I’ve been watching the place for weeks now.”

  Tiff reared up and howled, “Just aks around! Aks if anybody seen Marylou lately! Or Fat Alice. And where the hell Lupe at, ‘cause that bitch owe me twenty dollars!” The lighter popped out with a muted ping and the priest handed it to Tiff with a shaking hand. Tiff captured the priest’s wrist, steadied it, and lit his smoke. He took a long deep drag, and his head disappeared momentarily in a cloud of thick gray smoke. When he reappeared, there were precisely two tears rolling down Tiff’s cheek and for a moment Father Killen thought the creature would break down and bawl. But he only sniffed, and the priest reached out and offered his handkerchief.

  “Here.”

  Tiff looked up and accepted it, wiped his makeup-smeared face, and then covered his nose with the freshly laundered cotton square and blew loudly.

  “Thank you,” Tiff fairly purred, offering to return the handkerchief to the priest. Father Killen shook his head and Tiff kept going. “You know how fucked up that is, Padre, pardon my Cherokee. Suckin’ girls in there like she do? Usin’ Doc as bait, that’s what she’s doin’ ‘cause he’s the onlyest place these girls got to go when they in trouble!”

  Father Killen choked on a mouthful of cold coffee. As he usually did when Tiff began to expound on his own theories about the Yellow Rose, the priest had tuned him out … but what exactly had the abomination meant by trouble?

  “Surely you don’t …?” Then the priest put it all together, and he named the beast. “Doc!”

  Tiff did a double take.

  “What? Naw! Don’t tell me you didn’t … Damn, Padre! I reckoned you’d figured that out by now, skulkin’ around the Rose the way you do!”

  The priest’s mind reeled. He had sat outside the boarding house, day after day, night after night, and watched the comings and goings of the damned. He’d known that Graciela was surrounded by serpents; by harlots, thieves, and deviants. But … an abortionist.

  Big Tiff watched as realization spread across the priest’s face. “Damn!” He complained, “See, now I feel stupid, Padre, ‘cause if you’da aksed me that question outright, that information woulda cost you at least another twenty-dollar bill!”

  Father Killen wasn’t listening anymore. He was preoccupied with chastising himself. How could he have been so stupid! He had sat there in his car night after night doing nothing while the greatest of all sins, atrocity of atrocities, unforgivable in the eyes of God, was committed over and over again beneath the very same roof that sheltered a living miracle. His miracle …

  “Hell, Padre! What did you think all those girls were doin’, in and out Doc’s place like that?”

  And this monster knew! He’d known all along! In through your nose! Out through your … Forgive me, Lord.

  A storm of fists and elbows fell on Tiff, the blows raining down in staccato flurries of four, one-two-three, hook-hook-hook, followed by a vicious uppercut. Just like Father Walsh had taught him. As big and strong as Tiff was, he had no chance whatsoever of defending himself. The terrified hustler’s head snapped backward and forward like a rag doll’s, rebounding off of the window again and again until the safety glass cracked, crystallizing into a spider-web-shaped halo. But the beast that had slept inside the priest for a couple of decades was not yet sated. Father Killen ratcheted the driver-side door open with a bleeding left hand and rounded the front of the car in a couple of steps. Tiff tumbled out backward as the passenger door was yanked open but the priest caught him before he hit the ground and dragged him around the corner of the cinder-block garage and stood him up against the wall.One-two-three-four, the onslaught continued for a quarter of an hour more and it was only the frequency of t
he blows that kept Tiff on his feet. Blood flooded both of his eyes and his nose, and he gulped air mixed with blood in through his mouth and expelled in a piteous wail, “Ma-a-a-m-m-a-a!” but another merciless blow shut him up and he realized that the priest intended to kill him, right there, right then.

  But he didn’t.

  The punishment suddenly stopped and there was the slightest delay before Tiff slid down the wall and folded into a heap at Father Killen’s feet. The priest stood there panting and sucking on his bleeding right hand for a moment, trying to reconcile the scene before him, but it was no use. He wished that he could tell himself that he had blacked out, but it simply wasn’t so. He had, in fact, been hyperconscious of his actions the entire time, relishing every blow that he had meted out to the deviate he despised, and luxuriating in the release of the pent-up rage of a lifetime. He scanned his prostrate victim for signs of life but made no move to offer any aid. When Big Tiff softly groaned and tried in vain to lift his head, Father Killen crossed himself and turned and ran to his car.

  XV

  Hank’s surprised. “So you’re talkin’ to me again?”

  Doc shrugs. “Well, technically, I’m not talking to anybody. If you’ll notice, my lips aren’t moving.”

  “Oh! So this is just another one of your crazy dreams.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. It just occurred to me that, being as nobody but me can hear you when you talk, maybe not everybody needs to hear me when I’m talkin’ to you … or something like that. Anyway, as far as I know, Hank, I’m wide awake and sitting on Marge’s front porch rockin’ up a storm, and you’re perched up there on the rail like a crow, just like always.”

  “Course I am, Doc. That’s what I do. I just follow you around like a goddamn dog. And now I’m a crow to boot!”

  “Or a cat.”

  Hank hops down off of the rail, both feet landing simultaneously on the porch without a sound. “A what?”

  “A cat. Graciela says you’re some kind of a cat. She sees you, you know.”

  Hank paces to the end of the porch, one, two, three, four long paces, turns on his heel, and instantly snaps back into his starting position. “She stares at me,” he whines. “Long and hard. I can feel it.” The ghost reaches out and buries a long thin finger deep in the solid oak door. “Almost.” He yanks his hand back, and, cradling it as if it’s newly injured, he’s pacing again, one, two, three, four, snap! “Well, if she can see me then how come she don’t talk? I’ve tried talkin’ to her but she don’t never say nothin’!”

  The physician taps a Camel out of the pack, lights it, and drags deep. “Maybe she can’t hear you, Hank. You know, she told me once that you’re only here for me.”

  “Huh! That so? How come she can see me then?”

  “I don’t know, Hank. Because she sees things … folks … entities like you …”

  “I ain’t no en-ti-whatchamacallit, and I ain’t no cat and I ain’t no crow! I’m Hank goddamn Williams, goddamn it! A great singer and songwriter and entertainer!” Pacing again, one, two, three, four, snap! One, two, three, four, snap!

  Doc nods in agreement. “Yeah, I know. Doesn’t make sense, does it? But then, neither does me sitting on the porch talking to you. She sees you all right and you can take my word for that. She sees everything.”

  Hank settles dejectedly back onto his perch on the rail. “Well, at least you’re talkin’ to me again.”

  Doc stands up and stretches, arms out, twisting at the waist, to the left and then the right. “Yeah, well, you’ve got Graciela to thank for that. She says you’re here for me and I’m here for you. Reckons we’re supposed to learn something from one another, something like that. What you say we take us a little walk and ‘learn’ what’s going on up at the beer joint?”

  Doc hollered, “Marge!” and the answer came from way back in the kitchen but loud and clear.

  “Yeah, Doc?”

  “Tell Graciela I’m up to the beer joint for a spell! Be back directly!”

  The game was draw dominoes, childlike in its simplicity: match the spots, or pips, on your tiles, or bones, to those of your opponent until one of you has no tiles left or until there’s no place left to play. But in the beer joint, it was played and watched by grown men in deadly earnest.

  Doc shook his head as he totaled up the score and then pushed his remaining bones back into the middle of the table.

  “Manny, my friend, another draw like that last one and I’m going to make you turn out your pockets!”

  Manny only grinned and grunted and offered two ham-size closed fists. Doc chose the right, and Manny opened his hand to reveal a white ivory tile divided in half by a line with three black spots on one end and four on the other. “Seven,” the big man acknowledged before clapping the remaining hand down hard on the table and then rolling it to one side to reveal a double-six. “Twelve, Doc. I guess it just ain’t your day.” Having earned the right to draw first, Manny shoved the tiles back to the center. Doc then shuffled them in a couple of halfhearted circular motions, and Manny drew his seven bones and stood them on their edges, his forehead pinched into several rows of deep furrows as he contemplated his hand.

  Doc was rapidly losing interest in the contest. He had seen Manny on a roll like this too many times to believe that anything, including cheating, could spare him the beating that he was taking at the hands of his bearlike opponent. Perhaps Doc would have stood a chance at one of the more sophisticated forms of dominoes, the bidding games like moon or forty-two. But Manny only played draw, and he played draw only for money.

  “You forgettin’ somethin’, Doc?”

  Doc winced as he drew his bones one by one, lifting each one up in the vain search for the high double necessary to begin the game.

  “I didn’t forget a goddamn thing, Manny. I guess I just reckoned that my credit was good around here and that we could settle up all at once, but now that I see how it is …” He leaned back, groaning and muttering under his breath to exaggerate the effort, and finally produced a wrinkled dollar bill, wadded it up in a ball, and rolled it across the table. “There you go, Amarillo Slim! Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “Thank you, Doc.” Manny chuckled, smoothing the bill out on the table’s edge. “You know, as bad as you play dominoes, it still don’t even come close to makin’ up for the dope you used to buy. But every little bit helps.” And then he led with a double-six.

  “How is business, Manny?”

  The big man’s smile faded. “Steady Eddie, Doc. Nine to five. Same poor fuckers come by every day until one day they don’t. If you ask around somebody’ll tell you why but I don’t ‘cause I don’t want to know. If they got busted they’ll do their stretch and they’ll line up the day they get out. If they … well, if somethin’ else happened then somebody else will take their place in the line.” The big man brightened a little. “Some of ‘em pull up. Get clean. You did, Doc. Some funny things goin’ on around here, Doc, that’s for sure.” Manny sighed. “But people still get high, Doc. Every day. All day long.”

  Doc squinted at the Pearl Beer clock behind the bar. “Now that you mention it, Manny, it is a little early for you to be sitting on your ass down here playin’ dominoes. Who’s watching the spot?”

  “Ramón.”

  Doc’s cigarette dangled from his lower lip as his jaw dropped. “Ramón? Junkie Ramón? Run-off-with-the-pack-and-bring-it-back-light your nephew Ramón?”

  “Yeah,” Manny admitted. “He’s been fuckin’ up. But he don’t take much. Not so far, anyway. And he’s family. To tell you the truth, Doc, I’m sick of sittin’ down there all day. Thinkin’ about givin’ it up.”

  Doc leaned back as if to get a better look at the big Mexican and came to the realization that he was indeed serious.

  “But what’ll you do, Manny? How’ll you live?”

  Manny shrugged. “I got a little money put by. Enough to keep Mama in beans and bingo cards for the rest of her life, and the house is paid for. Ma
ybe I’ll get a job.”

  Doc, as well as several bystanders, convulsed in belly laughs, long and loud and uncontrollable.

  “What’s so funny about that?” Manny fumed. “I got skills! Hey, I can drive. I could drive a eighteen-wheeler. Truck drivers make good money; I can get a commercial license, no problem. I ain’t got no felony record or nothin’.”

  As if on cue, the front door burst open and Teresa whistled, loud and piercing, two fingers of her right hand in her mouth, and hollered, “Hugo!” A handful of patrons bolted for the back door, a couple for the bathroom. Detective Hugo Ackerman ignored them all and headed straight for the table where Doc and Manny sat with their hands already raised.

  “Relax, relax. Put your hands down. I ain’t here on business, Doc.” He did a double take back to Manny. “Well, not my business, anyway. Manny, shouldn’t you be up the street peddlin’ that poison of yours? Why don’t you take a hike and let me have a word with Doc here.”

  Manny waited for Doc’s okay, a barely perceptible tilt of the head, before shoving back from the table and lumbering toward the door. The remaining bystanders cleared the area.

  Detective Ackerman dragged Manny’s chair around the table and planted it perpendicular to Doc’s. He pivoted it around backward, and the wooden chair groaned as he straddled the seat and rested his arms on the back. After checking to make sure that no one remained within eavesdropping range, he leaned forward until he was only inches from Doc’s ear and nearly whispered, “I need your help, Doc.”

  Doc squirmed in his chair and fiddled with the dominoes. “Well, I don’t know exactly how to say this, Detective, and I’m sure you won’t believe me, but I don’t shoot dope anymore, and I doubt very seriously if there’s anything I can tell you—”

  Hugo interrupted. “I heard that. I didn’t believe it, but now that I hear it from you … look at me, Doc.” Doc pivoted in his chair and the cop squinted, looking into Doc’s eyes, first one and then the other. “But that’s not what I meant, Doc. I don’t need you to tell me nothin’. What I need is … is your services.”