I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (8 page)

The crowd chattered excitedly, with the exception of a small group of students who pushed and shoved toward the front, shouting slogans and carrying signs emblazoned with cryptic political messages that even Doc didn't fully understand.

Manny wondered, "Where's Vietnam at, Doc?"

"Close to China. A long fucking way from here." Doc made no attempt to conceal his contempt for the demonstrators.

When the steps were rolled into place and the door of the big blue-and-white jet swung open, the band struck up ruffles and flourishes and then "Hail to the Chief," and the crowd, as one, pressed against the fence for a better view. The youthful president emerged and stood alone in the door of the plane for an instant, blinking in the blazing Texas sunlight, waving with one hand while pushing back a windblown shock of auburn hair with the other.

One of the housewives in the front of the crowd spotted her first. "There she is! There's Jackie!" and pandemonium ensued. A high-pitched shriek challenged the big jet engines out on the tarmac, rising to a shrill crescendo and sustaining the same piercing frequency as if an unseen hand held the throttle all the way back:
Jack-e-e-e-e-e!

Maybe, mused Doc, it wasn't just a Mexican thing after all.

It was impressive. Even Marge had to admit it. "Geez Louise!" she shouted over the racket. "You'd think he was Frank Sinatra or somebody!"

"Well, he
is
very handsome," Dallas gushed, and Marge's newfound enthusiasm deflated like a tire with a sixteen-penny nail in it.

But Graciela had eyes only for Jackie. Doc, paralyzed by the crush of the crowd, could only watch helplessly as she ducked beneath his arm and slipped through the crowd and, by virtue of tenacity and her diminutive stature, reached the fence. The First Lady, dressed in an immaculately tailored powder blue suit, smiled and waved the perfect parade wave to the crowd: elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist ... Graciela waved back as best she could, squeezing one of her tiny hands through one of the ragged diamond-shaped links in the galvanized fence.

"
Yah-kee! Hola, Yah-kee!
" she shrilled, not even noticing that she had scraped her wrist badly on the rough fencing as she'd forced her hand through. Tiny drops of blood flecked her dress; she paid no attention. It was worth it. Jackie was so beautiful, the most beautiful woman that Graciela had ever seen. Even at a great distance she radiated warmth and grace and charm. While the president greeted one dignitary after another, the First Lady continued to engage the crowd, smiling and waving until she and the president reached the waiting motorcade lined up along the taxiway. There was even a moment there when Graciela could have sworn that their eyes met and Jackie smiled at her.

And she was right. All of the other women in the crowd witnessed it and each and every one believed that it was intended for her, and all their hearts melted into one. Even Marge and Maria sensed a common bond with the glamorous Jackie as she regally accompanied her husband down the receiving line, a half step behind, as protocol in the man's world of politics dictated. But in fact, Jackie was smiling at Graciela and Graciela alone, and only Graciela saw the sadness in her eyes and that sadness became her own. Her grandfather had a name for such moments, the instant in which people like himself and Graciela saw what others could not see. He called it
la luz.
The light. Something sacred passed between them, from Jackie to Graciela and from Graciela to Jackie.

And then she was gone. She ducked out of sight, and the massive presidential limousine pulled away, preceded by a brace of police motorcycles and followed by another black limo, and then another, and then two more, and then a final pair of motorcycles for good measure. The din of the crowd died down to a clamor and then a murmur, and then they began to disperse, returning to their cars and their everyday lives. Doc finally managed to make his way up front and found Graciela still sitting on the hard concrete watching in the direction that the motorcade had traveled. He knelt down and as he gently helped her to her feet, Graciela winced a little, and he noticed her wrist.

"What have you done to yourself, child?"

She absently nodded toward the fence but she wasn't the least bit distressed about the injury.

"
No, es nada.
"

"
Nada,
my foot. That's a nasty little abrasion you've got there. If I had the serum I'd give you a tetanus shot, just to be on the safe side. At the very least that wrist could do with a good cleaning and a proper dressing. Let's get you home and then we'll see what we can do."

The drive home was a lot quieter than the outward journey. Santo and Maria compared notes quietly in Spanish, and Marge snored loudly, her head resting on Dallas's shoulder. Teresa uttered not a single word the entire ride home, though she was wide awake in wonder at her encounter with royalty. Manny had a question or two.

"How much you reckon a limo costs, Doc?"

"I don't know, Manny, four or five thousand, I reckon. A lot more for that big Lincoln that the president was riding in. It's a custom job, bulletproof, you know."

Manny's eyes widened but never left the road.

"No shit? Bulletproof?"

"That's what they say."

"Well, I'll be damned."

All day long, Hank prowls the South Presa Strip from the beer joint to the railroad tracks, covering the distance each way in the space of single malignant thought. Pedestrians he encounters notice only an incongruous chill, it being a typical sunny South Texas November morning, but they shake it off and go on about their business. There are those lost souls with one foot already in the grave who perceive a shadow falling across their paths, but they shrug it off as too much of this or too little of that and stumble along to their doom. Hank can see them, all right, and worse, he can hear them, whining and crying like babies about nothing, but he can't make them hear him no matter how hard he tries. Only Doc can hear Hank, and Doc's nowhere to be found.

Hank's having one hell of a time keeping up with Doc since he's taken to pretending that he doesn't hear him when he calls. Laying off the dope some too, not that he's taken the cure. He's a hophead to the bone, Doc, but lately he's not hitting the old medicine like he used to do. Just dibs and dabs to keep sickness away. Hank knows that the higher Doc gets, the better he listens, and more than anything else, the dead want to be heard.

So Hank just keeps searching, up and down the street, eaten from the inside out with rage; not the white-hot, short-lived kind that exorcises lesser demons and affords a body some kind of relief, but the slow-burning, festering strain that neither time nor distance can ever heal. He checks all of the traps, over and over again. Doc's not in his room or at his usual table or anywhere in between. When Hank comes to the railroad track and tries to cross over, he discovers, to his horror, that without Doc to hitch on to, the other side's closed to him now.

That's the last straw. Doc's given Hank the slip and gone off somewhere he can't follow. Hank throws back his head and he opens his mouth. And nothing comes out. Nothing at all.

That night Marge, Dallas, Doc, and Graciela gathered around the TV in the boarding-house parlor and watched the coverage of the day's events on the ten o'clock news.

"I thought I saw you for a second there, Marge!" insisted Dallas. "You was way in the back and there was some kind of a shadow across your face but I'd swear it was you. I'd know that big ol' head of yours anywhere!" Marge snorted and Doc chuckled and excused himself.

"I reckon I'll turn in early tonight. We've all had a big day and I could do with a good night's sleep."

It wasn't to be.

Just after midnight somebody banged on his door.

"Who is it?" Doc called. From the other side a female voice answered, soft and hoarse, obviously in distress. "It's me, Doc! Helen-Anne!"

"Coming!" Doc said, but Graciela, whose cot was a step closer to the door, got there first.

When she opened the door, a statuesque redhead stood there. She was speaking, the words interspersed with sniffs and sobs, but Graciela understood only the tears. One arm around the taller woman's waist, she guided her to a chair and offered a handful of tissue, which was gratefully accepted.

Helen-Anne said she was in trouble again and that there was just no way she could have another baby. Her elderly parents were already raising her little boy and they were barely getting by on her daddy's disability and whatever she could manage to wire home. Like most of the girls on South Presa, Helen-Anne had two habits to support, her own and her boyfriend's, but she had managed to scrape together all but about twenty dollars of Doc's fee, which she offered to let him take out in trade. Doc declined and told her not to worry about it.

"You got any dope, honey?"

"Yeah, Doc, I had a pretty good weekend so I bought a
quarta
last night; how much you need?"

"It's not for me!" Doc chuckled. "I'm fine, but you're going to need a good lick. But not too much, now. I don't want you going out on me. Uh, you best get out of that nice dress first. You got a nightgown or something you can put on?"

"I'm sure I can scare up somethin', Doc," offered Dallas, who had suddenly materialized in the open door blinking and yawning, with Marge right behind her looking more than a little put out.

"I'd appreciate that, hon, and while you're up you think you could take Graciela along and bed her down in your room for the night?"

Graciela didn't understand all the words but it was obvious that she got the gist, and Doc, recognizing a now-familiar glint in her eye, nipped the argument in the bud. "No! You don't need to see this, child.
¡Ahora vaya, muchacha!
" Graciela grudgingly complied and followed Dallas out of the room.

Doc kept Helen-Anne talking while he prepped for the procedure, taking care to keep his instruments out of sight and his patter light and impersonal. Helen-Anne fired up a bag of dope and then lay back on Doc's bed. As she drifted there on the edge of consciousness, her features softened somewhat, and she suddenly appeared years younger. Doc suspected that Helen-Anne was showing her actual age rather than the mileage she had accrued on the street. Doc didn't know any more about Helen-Anne than any of the other girls on South Presa, but he reckoned that she couldn't have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four. She more than likely came from good enough people. Poor, honest, hard-working folks that never got ahead but did all right as long as they kept their heads down and didn't study too much on what they didn't have.

That's probably what happened to Helen-Anne: one day she'd looked up and she caught a glimmer of something shiny just beyond her reach. It could have been anything—a fast car, a fancy dress, a pair of high-heeled shoes. It wouldn't have taken much, just enough of a glimpse of another kind of life to awaken a hunger inside her for something that she had never tasted. Now, as she lay there helpless, her life in Doc's hands, the lines in her face vanished as if hard times and bad luck were soluble in morphine.

The way Doc saw things, it was a crapshoot. Where you were born, who your people were—that's all that mattered. Law and morality had nothing to do with it, let alone anything like justice.

It wasn't like good girls from good families didn't get abortions. Doc used to see them all the time back in New Orleans. The family doctor would register the patient under an assumed name and write her up as a D & C, that is, dilation and curettage, an obstetric housekeeping procedure that consisted of scraping the wall of the uterus with a long, thin surgical instrument, resulting in the expulsion of any material contained therein. If there happened to be a fetus present, then it was an abortion by any other name.

That's what pissed Doc off the most. The duplicity. The way that the rules were bent or even broken for the daughters of doctors, lawyers, and bankers because they had so much to look forward to. College, marriage, summers in Europe. A waste and a shame, the patricians would whisper, to lose all that to the impetuousness of youth. So they looked the other way.

But when the child of a carpenter or a truck driver sought the same service, she had no one to turn to but criminals. Criminals like Doc with some semblance of a medical background, if she was lucky. Shady doctors, ex-doctors, nurses, even dentists and vets, but a girl like Helen-Anne could do worse on the street. Much worse.

By the time Helen-Anne had recovered sufficiently to move down the hall to her own bed, it was nearly three o'clock in the morning. Doc stripped the bloody sheets from his bed and collapsed fully clothed on the bare mattress.

He was awakened by the midmorning sun but he pretended that he was still asleep and watched through nearly closed eyes as Graciela came in from Dallas's room and stood before the mirror brushing and plaiting her blue-black hair into one perfect waist-length braid. The sunlight sifted through her cotton nightgown, forming luminous pools the color of butter about her feet, along the way silhouetting her tiny but graceful form: smallish breasts, gently curving waist, and rounded hips. The smell of coffee brewing and the first pangs of withdrawal urged Doc to haul himself up out of bed but he dared not move for fear that the vision before him would evaporate, so he feigned unconsciousness for well over an hour.

Finally satisfied with her hair, Graciela crossed her arms and pulled the nightgown over her head in one motion, then walked naked to the washbasin against the back wall. As she bathed, she occasionally shivered; the ice-cold water that she squeezed from the washcloth ran down her back and across her spine in one glistening rivulet after another. Doc was deeply ashamed that he continued to watch her, but he could not bring himself to close his eyes. He told himself that his years of practicing medicine afforded him at least a semblance of detachment. His feelings toward Graciela had certainly deepened but remained, at least in practice, patently paternal. He knew, after all, that she venerated him as an elder and a healer, and he held that trust sacred. As long as she was a patient under his care, he told himself, he and she were more or less safe from any intrusion of his baser instincts.