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

don't," Doc parries.
    "
Maybe, sometimes I drink a lot. It ain't like I got nothin' goin' on in my life that wouldn't drive a man to drink, Doc.
"
    "
You can't drink, Hank. And you've got no life because you're dead, goddamn it!
"
    Hank continues to whine. "People buzzin' all around like skeeters on a hog!
"
    Doc sidesteps to the dresser, uncaps the bottle of pure grain alcohol there, pours two fingers into a dusty tumbler, and slams it down on the table next to Hank.
    "
Here you go, Hank.
"
    The spirit begins to quiver, or maybe
shimmer
is a better word. Doc persists.
    "
What you waitin' for?
"
    The ghost recoils into the corner, flattening into two dimensions, twisting and writhing like a ribbon in the wind.
    "
Go on, Hank, have a goddamn drink!" Doc barks, and he empties the contents of the glass in the phantasm's face, but both the alcohol and the ghost instantly vaporize, leaving a sickly-sweet fume hanging in the air.
    ***
    "Asshole." Doc exhaled.
    When he opened his eyes the Mexican girl was sitting straight up in bed watching him, wide-eyed but surprisingly calm. He hurriedly scooped up his paraphernalia and hid it away in his coat pocket and then dragged the rickety chair to the side of the bed.
    "Shh! There, now," he whispered. "I must have scared you to death."
    Up close, her eyes were darker and even sadder.
    "Christ, child. How old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?"

    She was eighteen, but her last birthday had passed nearly unobserved while her family crossed the border as cargo in the back of a twelve-foot-box-back truck. Her father had spent his life shuttling back and forth from Mexico in search of a better living than he could hammer out making tin boxes for the tourists in tiny Dolores Hidalgo. She carried only the vaguest memory of him, and it grew dimmer with every day, like a fading photograph. For most of her life the only connections between them were her mother's assurance that he would return one day soon and a pasteboard box containing every gift he had ever brought back from his wanderings in the north: cheap plastic dolls with slightly off-kilter red lips, and games that she couldn't comprehend. The box and its contents were long gone now, culled and jettisoned as nonessential when the family followed him to San Antonio.
    Her father had finally found a more or less permanent job with an outfit contracted to build housing on the military bases that encircled the city. He saved enough money to pay the coyote to bring his family north, and then less than a year later he suffered a massive heart attack, collapsed on the job site, and died.
    Now her mother and her older sisters had to ride the bus up to the north side to clean rich gringos' houses; she was left at home with the younger children, and her days were long and hot and humid and punctuated by lapses into longing for the cool high-desert nights of her home in Mexico.
    She had never met anyone like Armando before. He was a second-generation Tejano, dark and dangerous and sure of himself in this strange land, and she was lonely and homesick and easy prey. She barely remembered giving herself to him in the back seat of his car; he had fed her sloe gin mixed with 7-Up, and the encounter was brief. More vividly she recalled that he'd slapped her so hard that her ears rang for an hour because she threw up on his new black-and-white tuck-and-roll upholstery.
    She was sick to her stomach again six weeks later, and again the next morning, and then, for the second month, her period failed to arrive.
    She couldn't bear to face her mother. Her mother was a pious woman hardened by misfortune who had assured her children that if they didn't behave, La Llorona would come and carry them away. According to legend, the Weeping Woman was the spirit of a young widow who had drowned her three children in hopes of enhancing her eligibility to marry a rich nobleman. When her horrified suitor turned her away, she threw herself in the river after them. Now she wandered the