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

banks in search of her children's souls. The tale was told so convincingly that there was no doubt in Graciela's mind that her mother believed every word was true.
    So Graciela went to Armando, bursting into tears as she told him the news. He only shrugged and allowed that he might know a guy who knew a guy who could take care of her "little problem" and that he would foot the bill on the condition that she keep her mouth shut.
    She was heartbroken. Not that she loved Armando, but she had assumed that he would do the right thing like her cousin Rosa's husband had done. Diego and Rosa were never in love but they both worked hard and they had three children now and seemed happy enough.
    Armando only laughed and informed her in no uncertain terms that when it came time for him to settle down he would find a good girl from his own barrio, a Tejana who would make him fat flour tortillas like his mama made instead of thin, coarse corn.
    Now he had abandoned her here in this awful place with this old gringo, and she knew he would never be back.
    She awoke several times during the night to find the gringo there beside her, cooling her with a wet rag or gently lifting her head so that she could sip water from a thick, bone-colored coffee cup. Once she thought for a moment that her mother had found her and forgiven her of her great sin, but then the gringo spoke to her in a soft, low rumble and she was disappointed but she wasn't afraid. There was something oddly familiar about this perfect stranger. An appearance of calmness she'd witnessed before.
    Her grandfather had chosen to stay behind in Dolores, where he'd buried his wife and two of his sons. He was kinder and infinitely more patient than her father and the other men in the prime of their lives that she had known. He wasted no motion but he was by no means feeble and he still gathered firewood to sell every day. He hauled his wares to the market on the back of an ancient burro called El Piedro, whom he drove with constant flicks of a creosote switch. There and back he bypassed the cantinas and the domino parlor and he was always home before dark bearing the fruits of his labor, a bundle containing an assortment of unrecognizable roots and oddly scented herbs and a stalk of sugar cane for each of his seven grandchildren.
    But the girl shared some special connection with the old man and for as long as she could remember she had followed him wherever she could. Her brothers and sisters grew to know that their father's father was a man who commanded no small amount of respect in their barrio. Everyone in Dolores called him Don Tomas, and it was whispered that he was a
curandero,
a healer, and even her mother, who spent half of her life in church and crossed herself when anyone appeared at her door inquiring after the old man, overcame her trepidation when one of her children fell ill.
    But Graciela alone had actually witnessed her grandfather's handiwork, breathed in the aroma of the manzanilla and agave leaves steeping in the cauldron, seen the steam rising in waves and fashioning itself into shapes that moved and changed. Perhaps this gringo wasn't talking to himself after all. Perhaps he invoked something older and darker on her behalf. Something akin to the spirits her grandfather sometimes enlisted in his battles against disease and malaise. Was there something cat-shaped there in the corner? Perhaps her new benefactor had summoned it to watch over her while she slept? She only knew that for some reason beyond her understanding she felt safer in the care of a stranger in a forgotten part of a foreign city than in all the time since she'd left Mexico.
    She had always admired her grandfather's constancy, which she perceived as the badge of wisdom and strength gleaned from years of experience. To her eye this gringo was cut from the same solid fabric. He moved slowly and deliberately, as if he could make time stand still and had no more pressing business than to watch over her