I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (20 page)

"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. Maybe 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."

A quick hustler's read of Hugo's face detected no obvious tell unless it was the openness Doc had never seen there before. "Well, all right then ..." Doc glanced over each shoulder. "So, you've got someone in trouble." That was interesting, mused Doc. The cop actually blushed!

"Well, uh, someone's in trouble, that's true enough, but you can help me, can't you, Doc? Folks around here say you're really good at ... what it is you do. I've asked around and everybody reckons that somebody, a girl, I mean, that was in trouble would be in good hands if she come to you for help, I mean, if that's what she needed." Now Hugo was searching Doc's face for answers.

"I may be able to help you," said Doc, "and your friend. I'd obviously have to examine her. Would you happen to know how far along ...?"

"Six weeks. Exactly."

Doc thought that there was something disconcerting about the cop's certainty. "Six? Well, that's good, then, the earlier, the better. Of course, there's the matter of my fee."

"Yeah." Hugo nodded. "I understand that the going rate is a yard. Your arrangement with me has always been fifty a week but I'm willing to suspend your payments until—"

Doc was already shaking his head. "No."

Hugo raised both hands, palms up, in genuine surprise. "I-I don't understand!"

"That'll be cash. Fifty now. Fifty on completion of the procedure. Same as anybody else."

"But—"

"But nothin'. Like I said, I quit shootin' dope so I don't need any more, uh, protection from your intrusions into my personal life. Yeah, you could plant something in my room but you won't because if I'm locked up I can't help you with your little problem, can I? As far as my professional activities are concerned I reckon that you're no longer in a position to be pointing any fingers. Let's face it, Hugo, your options are somewhat limited. If you were one of those Alamo Heights swells, then things might be different, but the truth is that when a regular everyday hard-working guy like yourself knocks up his little girlfriend, I'm the only game in town. After me, all you'll find out there is some butcher with a wire coat hanger or an enema bag full of lye. That being said, I'll be glad to help you and your lady friend out, but I'll sleep better sleep if we keep this transaction on a cash basis, from my hand to yours. That way nobody gets confused."

Hugo hung his head for an instant, then reached in his pocket, pulled out a small stack of bills, and counted out two twenties and a ten.

Doc raked them up and tucked them into his hatband. "Seven o'clock at the Yellow Rose. Bring the rest of the money."

Detective Ackerman stood up and walked out of the bar without a word. Manny and the other domino players migrated back to the table. Doc checked the bar clock and determined that there was enough time for at least a couple of hands before he had to punch in, but Graciela, he knew, liked a little warning before patients arrived. He surveyed the room for a likely courier. Not sticking every extra dime one made in one's arm afforded one luxuries.

"Precious!"

The skinny working girl spun on her barstool to face the domino table. "Yeah, Doc?"

"You reckon you could stick your head in the door up at the boarding house and let Marge and Graciela know that we got company coming at about seven?" He held up a neatly folded ten-dollar bill.

"I'd be glad to, Doc, and you just hang on to your money, hon. I pass right by there on my way home anyway."

"I'll be damned!" Doc muttered, shaking his head and pocketing the ten. Manny grunted. "Told you, Doc! Somethin' funny's goin' on around here."

Graciela ran through the list in her head, checking off some items in Spanish and some in English, as she knew no words in her native tongue for
hemostat
or even ...

"Stethoscope, stethoscope, stethoscope," she repeated under her breath in an attempt to maintain her concentration as Marge bellowed at her from below.

"Graciela! Where you at, girl!"

It was Marge's nature to act put out. She usually did whatever she was asked to do, within reason, but she reserved the right to bitch, at least to herself.

The stairs above rumbled softly and then bare feet slapped on the linoleum floor as a smiling Graciela stood catching her breath in the kitchen door. "Yes?"

Marge clucked and harrumphed and glanced over her shoulder. She still wasn't sure what to make of the Mexican girl and the strange goings-on that seemed to follow her around. "You're gonna mess around and break your fool neck, you keep flyin' down them stairs like that!" She pulled her apron off over her head and hung it on the nail in the wall by the stove. "I'm off to meet Dallas and I reckon we'll stop for a Mexican meal at Mi Tierra while we're downtown."

"Okay, Marge."

Normally Marge would have helped prepare for the arrival of a client, but tonight Doc and Graciela were on their own. Marge's gal, Dallas, was getting out of jail later that evening. She'd been picked up in a vice sweep on her way home from the store one night a month earlier, just swinging innocently down Presa Street with a bag of groceries on her hip. She couldn't help but attract attention, Marge reckoned. She just walked like that. As it turned out, Dallas had an outstanding warrant from a year and a half back. Given the choice between a fine plus six months' probation or thirty days in the Bexar County jail, Dallas had cheerfully opted to serve the time and walk away with a clean slate. Marge had shaken her head and spat on the ground and proclaimed, "Everybody's goin' crazy 'round here, I swear to God!"

But now that Dallas was getting out, Marge had scrubbed the floors and washed the windows and was fixing to catch the South Presa bus downtown and be waiting for her sweetie when she walked out the jailhouse door.

Graciela spoke English now with almost no accent, unless it was a hint of Doc's antebellum drawl.

"Kiss Dallas for me, Marge!"

The remark drew a sideways glance from Marge that Graciela never saw. The screen door slammed, and Graciela was alone.

Graciela relished the rare moments of solitude afforded by her life at the Yellow Rose. Doc, Marge, Dallas, and even Helen-Anne hovered over Graciela constantly, like hawks defending a fledgling. Manny was every bit as overprotective when he was around. But today she was alone. No boarders. No patients.

No pilgrims.

The word was out, and they had been coming for weeks, not in droves but alone for the most part and in twos or threes at most. They were mostly working girls with heroin habits. They came asking after a Mexican girl and then, later, asking for Graciela by name. They had heard that they might find hope for a new life if they really wanted it and none was turned away and no one left disappointed.

But on this day everything was quiet and Graciela reckoned that she had a couple of hours before Doc arrived to scrub for the procedure. She closed her eyes and breathed the silence in. When she breathed out again, the dust that she disturbed danced in a column of sunlight and she was reminded of lying on a blanket watching falling stars with her grandfather back home in Dolores. Long ago and far away. She sighed. Further still since her grandfather had died.

She had received no word from her family since she'd come to South Presa, nearly a year ago. She wasn't even certain that her mother was alive. But there was no doubt in her mind that her grandfather had passed away in April.

She had awakened in the middle of the night calling for him. When Doc woke up and asked, she told him that she was certain that her grandfather was dead. What she didn't say was that he had come to her, or at least his words had, in the mouth of a jaguar spirit. She didn't ask, but she knew that she would never again see him in his human form, in this world or any other. Now for all intents and purposes, Doc was all the family she had, and the Yellow Rose was home.

And for the moment she had her home to herself and there was no time to waste.

It was like a dance without rhythm, deliberate and slow. She moved from room to room tracing faint figure eights on the dusty floor. She scanned the shadows, sniffed the air, and listened without and within, searching for any weakness in her own handiwork, the defenses that she maintained around the house and all who entered there. She burned sage against malice and secreted cedar cuttings beneath beds to protect against nightmares. She lit candles in honor of saints and animal spirits alike. Her grandfather had said, "There are no evil spirits in this world, child, only people who aren't listening to what God is trying to tell them." Graciela prayed for people like that. She invoked spirits to protect them from themselves. Not just for Doc and Dallas and Manny. She certainly mentioned them still, but they needed her prayers less and less every day. She concentrated her intercessions on Marge and Helen-Anne and that boyfriend/pimp of hers, Wayman. She even said prayers for the souls of Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, and when she did the blood flowed freely from the wound on her wrist and the bandage soaked through.