I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (7 page)

"That's aerospace medicine. He's coming to dedicate some new buildings at the Brooks Aerospace Medical Center. It's a place where they study the effects of space flight on the human body, I suppose. A research facility. It's out at Brooks Field."

Manny finally dropped the paper. "Brooks Field? That's right down the road, Doc. Maybe five, six miles at the most."

"So what."

"Think about it, Doc.
Yah-kee!
Right here on the south side!"

Doc lost it. "
Yah-kee, Yah-kee, Yah-kee!
I swear to God if one more fool so much as mentions the name Yah-kee, I'll go screamin' down the road to the state hospital and turn myself in ... and would you listen to me? Now I'm startin' to say it! It's Jackie, goddamn it.
Jacqueline!
Christ! Graciela can't talk about anything else and just exactly what is it that you people find so fucking fascinating about the First Lady? The president's coming. The president of the United fucking States of America. He's a war hero, a great man, and all you people want to talk about is his wife. I mean, she's a lovely woman and all but, well, what the hell is that, anyway? Some kind of Mexican thing?"

"It's a Catholic thing," suggested Teresa, the barmaid, as she made her way across the room, sweeping and setting down chairs as she came.

"A wh-what?" Doc stammered, taken by surprise.

"He's a Catholic, this president. A Catholic man. He may think he runs the world but men ain't nothin' without women. Animals. Beasts."

"Now wait just a goddamn minute!" began Doc. "There's no need to—"

"Oh, no offense, Doc. I know you don't mean no harm. You can't help it. God made you that way. You got to get dirty, to root around in the dirt like pigs. Oh, you go to Mass and give confession when you're children, but once you're grown you go to work and then you don't never set a filthy foot inside a church again unless it's for a wedding or a christening or a funeral Mass and then ... maybe. But that's okay. Praying is a woman's work. Men would only mess it up. It is a woman's job to keep the shrines and light the candles and pray for the soul of her man so that he can do what a man's got to do in this fucked-up world. Maybe it will be different in the next one, maybe it'll all begin and end with men up there, but here, it's women who give 'em life and it's women who clean up the shit and the blood. Rich man. Poor man. President. Priest. No matter. The bigger the man, the bigger the mess. She's a saint, our Yah-kee."

Doc was speechless. In eight years of his seeing Teresa every day, no more than a mouthful of words had ever passed between them. Suddenly, freed from her fixed position behind the bar, the usually placid matron was not only formidable but downright intimidating. Doc looked to Manny for moral support but found that none was forthcoming. The big man only squirmed in his chair, and his downcast eyes suggested to Doc that he didn't disagree.

In a feeble defense of his gender, Doc asked Teresa, "Just for the record, hon, how long's it been since you've been to church?"

Teresa stood five foot four at best but Doc was seated, and, standing less than a foot away, she seemed to loom over him.

"I have no man to pray for."

Only when Teresa had withdrawn to her usual place behind the bar did the men feel it was safe to resume their conversation, in quieter tones.

"I'm going," resolved Manny.

"Going where?"

"To Brooks Field. To see Yah-kee."

"Oh, for chrissake, Manny, Brooks is an air force base. A military installation. You can't just walk in there, especially when the president of the United States is in town. It'll be open to military personnel and invited guests only, the working press and the like. Hell, they ain't about to let a couple of broke dicks like us get anywhere near that place, president or no president."

Manny frowned for an instant, but he recovered quickly and began rustling through the paper once again. "It says right here that ‘hundreds are expected to be on hand when the president's plane arrives at San Antonio International Airport.' What about the airport? They can't keep us out of the airport, can they, Doc? That's a public place, ain't it?"

Teresa re-approached the table slowly and deliberately, wiping her hands on her apron, and Doc could have sworn that she and Manny wore precisely the same determined expression.

Doc could see it coming now but it was too late. It was like witnessing a train wreck. He sat paralyzed as two powerful forces completely and totally out of his control converged on a course destined for certain catastrophe before his very eyes; there was nothing he could do, but being no stranger to hopeless causes, he had to try.

"Now see here, Manny, do you even know where the airport is? It's a long damn way up there—"

"I got a car," volunteered Manny.

Teresa suggested that if they got an early start, "say, seven thirty or eight, we can get a good spot right up front where we can see."

"But it's on the north side, Manny," Doc pleaded. "Have either of you two ever even been up to the north side? You don't see many Mexicans up there, not unless they're diggin' a ditch or cleanin' somebody's house. Cops on the north side pull over carloads of Mexicans just because they're Mexicans. Aw, hell, go ahead then. Haul your asses up there and make fools of yourselves and see if I care. But I'm not going. No sirree. Not me. I'm staying right here on the raggedy-ass end of South Presa where I belong."

Doc snatched up his bag, intent on a dramatic exit, but before he could reach the door it suddenly opened and Graciela stood in his path bathed in intense yellow sunlight, a tiny avenging angel, still brandishing her newspaper like a tablet of Scripture. Before Graciela could rejoin her assault on Doc, Teresa enthused, "Graciela! We are going to see Yah-kee!"

"Oh, ferchrissake," grumbled Doc.

By the next morning, the South Presa delegation to the United States had swollen to six in number due to the addition of Marge and Dallas. Dallas had overheard Doc's last-ditch effort to dissuade Graciela and simply invited herself. Marge didn't give a damn about the Kennedys one way or the other and found it more than a little irritating that Graciela had the whole house jumping through hoops, but she wasn't about to let Dallas out of her sight.

Word had reached the pawnshop around a quarter to nine, just as old Santo arrived to open up for the day, and he phoned Maria and told her to drop whatever she was doing and get her
culo grande
down to Marge's. Normally, such a dictatorial tone would have cost Santo another trip up to Doc's makeshift surgery for a dozen or so fresh stitches, but he had only to invoke the magical name Yah-kee, and Maria was dressed in her Sunday best and out the door.

And then they were eight.

Manny was behind the wheel, Teresa in the middle, and Doc rode shotgun. In the back, Marge and Dallas barely managed to squeeze into the third of the seat that wasn't already occupied by Santo and Maria. By the time Graciela came running down the back stairs, Manny's old Ford was fairly groaning under the load, and the only seat available was in Doc's lap. She climbed in without hesitating, twisting Manny's rearview mirror around to blot her lipstick on a scrap of toilet paper.

Doc marveled at how tiny Graciela was. She seemed to weigh next to nothing, but when the big V-8 lurched forward, the press of her body against his was profound. Her hair whispered of chamomile and Ivory soap, and Doc shuddered when she leaned across him to roll the passenger-side window up.

He was reminded, against his will, of another young girl a long time ago, back in New Orleans. A beautiful girl from a good family whose expensive, store-bought perfume made promises she had no intention of keeping. Her name was Cynthia. Not Cindy; he had made that mistake once and she had corrected him in a cultured drawl as icy as the first week of February. Other voices out of his carefully suppressed past intruded now, like his mother's, thick and sweet as cane syrup, cooing her assurance of his superior bloodline and upbringing, ever reminding him of who he was and what was expected of him ... in sharp contrast to his father's insistence that he would never amount to anything at all.

Maybe it was the change of scenery that awakened those ghosts as Doc and the delegates rolled out Broadway and past Brackenridge Park; warm yellow light filtered through the lush canopy of live oak and pecan trees that shaded the neat rows of stately Victorian houses they passed on their way uptown. Quiet, orderly streets, not unlike the one Doc grew up on. Nothing like the bleached-out monochrome of South Presa. Years of living in the back alleys of Louisiana and Texas, not to mention a boatload of dope, had hardened Doc against most memories: the disappointments, the betrayals, the humiliations of his youth. He had cultivated his heartbreaks in the shadows, nurturing them with anger and remorse until they crystallized into a seemingly impervious shield around him. Now, as Manny's Ford dragged him out into the light, he didn't kick or scream but he wanted to and he could feel his carefully crafted veneer beginning to crack; he felt naked and vulnerable.

The delegates watched the big houses go by and oohed and aahed like sightseers on a guided tour of polite society. They had only a vague idea of Doc's past but they reckoned that he was infinitely more familiar than they with the alien landscape that unfolded before them, and they bombarded him with an endless barrage of questions. Manny had dabbled in burglary in his youth, and though he'd often heard tales of big scores in fat houses uptown, he always stuck to the south side, knowing that stealing from his own would attract little or no attention from the police. He marveled at how the old Ford glided along on the smoothly paved north-side streets. Santo intimated that he had been to the park for birthday parties when he was a small boy. His father would hang the piñata from a low-hanging limb of a great pecan tree, and his mother would bake the cake, and the family would sing "Las Mañanitas" and feast on homemade tamales around a concrete picnic table. Though he was within sight of the entrance to the world-famous zoo, Santo had never been inside to see what sorts of exotic beasts made all of the strange noises that emanated from beyond the stone gates. The price of admission for a family of nine was simply beyond his father's means. Marge and Dallas hadn't always been whores but they had always been white trash and the north side was every bit as foreign to them as it was to the Mexicans. When she was younger, Dallas had been a telephone girl who worked the high-dollar johns: doctors, lawyers, even a city councilman or two. Some of them probably lived in big white houses like these, but she always met them in rooms rented by the hour in downtown hotels. Marge whistled long and low when they passed one antebellum structure so opulent that Graciela mistook it for a cathedral. Doc gently corrected her. "That's not a church, child. It's a house.
Está la casa.
Somebody lives there. Somebody very rich.
El ricos.
" Teresa just wanted to know how they kept everything so neat and clean and green.

Doc did his best to answer all their questions with a minimum of condescendence. He alone had been inside houses like these, and he fully understood the level of contempt in which he and his
compadres
were held by the kind of people who lived in them.

The big houses petered out as they turned northeast across Wetmore Road, and then, suddenly, the grand tour was over and Broadway abruptly ended, dumping the South Presa contingent out at the main entrance of the San Antonio International Airport. As Doc had predicted, there were cops everywhere: city cops, highway patrol, even Texas Rangers in their telltale silverbelly Stetsons and shiny black cowboy boots. It was enough to make Doc wish he'd put a little extra something in the spoon that morning just in case he had to spend the night in jail. Even Manny, the founder of the expedition, wasn't all that crazy about the situation now that they were actually there, but he put on his game face as they rolled up to the checkpoint that the cops had set up at the gate.

"You all right, Doc?"

"Hell, no, I'm not all right! In point of fact I'm about to break out in little assholes and shit all over myself but there's fuck-all I can do about it now that we're here. Manny, I want you to swear on your mother and the Blessed Virgin of Guada-fuckin'-lupe that this car is clean."

Maria crossed herself to ward off any ill effects of Doc's blasphemy. Even Graciela understood well enough to punch him in the arm, hard, raising a good-size knot.

"Clean as a whistle, Doc. Don't you worry 'bout that none."

As it turned out, all of Doc's anxiety was for nothing because the cop at the checkpoint only asked to see Manny's driver's license and then waved him through to the visitors' parking lot.

"I must say, Manny, I'm impressed. You may be the only person of my recent acquaintance who holds a valid license."

Manny shrugged. "I'm a businessman, Doc. Driving around with a glove box full of dope without a license is bad business."

The parking lot was filling up fast. There were all kinds of people there, spilling out of their cars and filing happily if a little chaotically through the aisles toward the terminal building. Most were Anglos, but there were plenty of Mexicans, and a smattering of blacks. Some wore work clothes, khakis and coveralls and hospital whites, and some business suits of varying quality and style. There were soldiers from Fort Sam and airmen from Lackland, Kelly, and Randolph air bases, officers and enlisted men in dress blues and greens and fatigues. The women outnumbered the men two to one. Well-heeled Alamo Heights matrons in pillbox hats clutching their pocketbooks in two-handed death grips rubbed shoulders with middle-class housewives with school-age children in tow. It was a weekday, but they had been kept home from school especially for the occasion, their hair neatly combed and their little faces scrubbed pink. "You're going to see the president," they were told, "and you can't go looking like heathen!"

The crowd was funneled into the breezeway adjoining the terminal building where they could watch through a chainlink fence from a distance of about a hundred yards as Air Force One taxied to a stop in the center of the tarmac. The U.S. Air Force Band of the West stood at parade rest behind the mayor, a contingent of local dignitaries, and military brass from the local bases.