I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive Read Free Page A

the stairs to his room.
    Normally Doc had no compunction about performing the procedure that had long been his stock-in-trade and the primary means of supporting his habit, and he wasn't sure why he was having trouble with this one. Maybe it was the girl herself. Doc didn't need more than one look to know she didn't belong there. She was Mexican and obviously only recently arrived on this side of the border and therefore undoubtedly Catholic. She was also not much more than a child. Doc knew that to someone like her, the very idea of terminating a pregnancy had to be at once deeply shameful and utterly terrifying. Doc had performed well over a hundred abortions since setting up shop on the South Presa Strip, but not a single Mexican girl had sought his services until now. They sat out their pregnancies and then, against Doc's advice, went straight back to work, some taking turns caring for one another's children in shifts. It was the gringo girls, the lost daughters of Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, who came to Doc when they were in trouble. After taking into account the complete lack of character exhibited by the father of the Mexican girl's baby, Doc finally succeeded in convincing himself that it was all for the best.
    Marge was a big-boned, snuff-dipping, fifty-something redhead who ran the Yellow Rose Guest Home with an iron hand. Doc knew that if Marge's door was closed before dark, then Dallas, the blonde who ostensibly rented the room next to his, was in there with her, so he didn't knock.
    Marge had lived in the ground-floor apartment all of her life, having inherited the property and little else when her father died, when she was barely out of her teens. She understood the secret language of every creaking board in the place and she knew all of her tenants by their footfalls, so when she heard Doc mount the staircase, taking the steps two at a time, she hollered through the closed door like a field hand, her usual mode of communication.
    "Doc, you all right up there? Anything I can do?"
    Doc was already cooking up the dime bag of dope. "Well, if you ain't too busy you could boil some water for me and ... you hadn't got any more old towels that you were going to get rid of, do you, hon?"
    Downstairs, the bedroom door opened and Marge emerged holding her battered terry-cloth robe together with one hand.
    "Oh, hell, who's knocked up?"
    "Nobody you know. Just a kid. A civilian."
    "Civilian? Now wait just a minute, Doc. I don't need no pain-in-the-ass regular citizen down here looking for his slut-of-a-knocked-up-cheerleader daughter!"
    "She ain't that kind of civilian, Marge. This one's a Mexican girl. Wetback, fresh up from the interior. Hell, she's just a baby herself. She'll be along directly, her and a sawed-off little west-side punk. Holler before you send them up. And try not to scare the hell out of her, if you don't mind."
    Marge got a smile out of that one but she took full advantage of the fact that Doc couldn't see it.
    "Scare her? Well, I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Doc."
    Dallas emerged from the door behind Marge brushing her long platinum-blond-shot-with-silver hair; it cascaded over one shoulder in a shimmering curtain.
    "You know, Marge. Like that little colored gal that Harelip Jimmy brought around. She probably kept runnin' down the river to the Gulf of Mexico you scared her so bad!"
    "Well, that's different. She was a nigger and Jimmy should have known better than to bring her up in my house without he gets permission first. Besides, they scare easy when they ain't travelin' in a crowd, niggers do, everybody knows that. Dallas, darlin', if you could put the water on I'll just run out to the laundry room and see about those towels. Scare her! The very goddamn idea!"
    Manny had charged the
pachuco
twenty dollars for a dime bag, that is, ten dollars' worth of dope in a red balloon. The one-hundred-percent markup was his usual premium for selling to someone that he didn't know based on