We're All in This Together (21 page)

"Yes?" asked Kosskoff.

"We're not going to freeze, are we?" asked Pinet.

Kosskoff eyes narrowed.

"I don't want to freeze," said Pinet, "I just want a drink." He knew it was unreasonable, maybe even mad, but the memory of
the second mouse, curled up in a comma, fur stiff with ice, black eyes clouded white, seemed like a premonition.

"You'll live," said Kosskoff, "you'll have a drink. But only if you move your ass." He reached forward and gave the dentist
a firm push, square in the chest. Pinet staggered.

The big trapper turned and went forward. Funt let him get ahead, then followed.

Dragging his boots—one step and then another—Pinet started, too.

The snow thickened, and even Funt disappeared. The dentist concentrated on the cord. One step and another. It was like sleepwalking,
but he did not dream.

Over and across everything, the snow fell.

When he awoke, they were banging on the door for the girl to let them in, out of the storm.

Funt asked him if the mark on his neck was a love bite. They were in the cabin.

"No. My wife went away. Home. To her people." To suggest Mrs. Pinet's departure the dentist made a flapping gesture with his
hand.

When they came in, the girl had helped the men out of their frozen layers, and draped them in dry furs. Now they sat in their
long underwear on a bearskin in front of the stove.

The trapper's wife had busied herself cooking fish and the room was close with the smell. She was only a girl, and delicate
anyway, so that her great pregnant stomach seemed not so much a part of her, as her a part of it. Her features were smooth
and flattened, her complexion light. She glanced once at the dentist, but the look was almost perfectly blank, and conveyed
nothing . . . except, perhaps, that Pinet was not an especially notable presence, an evaluation with which he could not disagree.

Pinet sipped vodka from a tin cup. His head still throbbed, but this was not unusual. The sounds of scraping metal had receded,
and he was feeling optimistic. After the business at hand was resolved, he had promised to administer himself a double dose
as a reward for not freezing to death.

The cabin was a single room. The stove commanded the center of the space, while several shelves, haphazardly stacked with
jars and dented pans, lined the walls. Furs were piled on the beds. Two oil lamps hung from the main rafter.

Pinet could imagine Kosskoff humping the girl, and Funt in the next bed, watching, working at his mustache with darting flicks
of his black tongue.

Outside, the wind pounded at the walls and trembled the boarded windows.

"Reckon you must've learned your lesson, then," said Funt. He was still on the subject of the dentist's wife. "Stick to whores,
keep it business. I always approach a whore just the same. 'Whore,' I say, 'I got a small piece of business I'd like to transact
with you.' Keep it simple."

"I don't patronize brothels," said Pinet.

"Yeah, but you can still fuck em." When he smiled, the trapper's sparse mustache stretched like a caterpillar.

The dentist drank steadily, unconcerned about his ability to examine the woman's teeth.

Kosskoff's wife served them the fish on tin plates and stood watching them eat. She hadn't spoken, yet, and Pinet supposed
she wouldn't.

The food was blackened and tasteless, and even if the dentist had had an appetite, he doubted he could have eaten much. The
sound of Funt and Kosskoff, barbarically crunching the tiny bones, eating the creature whole, nauseated Pinet. He didn't want
to be sick. It embarrassed him to think of the way he'd behaved on the mountain. The dentist poured himself another cup.

When she was certain that he was finished poking at the food, the girl took his plate and went to sit on one of the beds.
She ate with her fingers.

When the plates were cleared Kosskoff decided it was time for the dentist to work. "Fix her mouth now," he said.

Pinet instructed the girl to sit in a high-backed chair. The dentist placed his satchel on the bed and removed the headrest
and his instrument case. He went behind the girl and locked the vise grips of the headrest onto the chair.

The leather cradle of the headrest was cracked and torn in places, and it conveyed a distinct odor. Pinet calculated that
in the course of his travels through the villages and encampments and lumber towns more than a thousand unwashed heads had
settled into it.

"Lean back," Pinet told the girl.

From his instrument case the dentist picked the single tool that lay on the worn velvet lining, along with a series of interchangeable
headpieces. The tool was two-pronged, with one prong slightly longer than the other, and the other prong hooked and sharp;
it looked something like a nutcracker.

"What's that?" asked Funt.

"Forceps," said Pinet.

Funt scratched his grizzled cheek.

"They're like pliers," said Pinet.

Funt grinned. Pliers were something he understood.

The dentist turned to his patient. The trappers gathered close behind him.

Face-to-face with her now, Pinet saw that the girl was not quite plain. She was dark, probably a full-blooded Pasamaquoddy,
and had striking blue eyes. Her nose, slightly crooked to the left, had been broken once and never set. It was pretty in a
way, the dentist thought, and he would have liked to touch it, to run his finger over the healed place where there was a tiny
bump.

"What seems to be the trouble?"

The girl blinked at him.

"She can't sleep. Her mouth hurts her all the time," said Kosskoff. "It hurts to eat."

Pinet nodded, sipped from the cup. He noticed a puffy swelling on the left side of her jaw, just below the mandible. "Open
wide," he said.

Her breath was bad; this didn't surprise or bother the dentist, who was, at this stage, well accustomed to the unhappy mouths
of rural folk. The girl's teeth were stained in the typical red and yellow tints of the chronic tobacco chewer. Pinet doubted
if she'd ever brushed her teeth in her life. The discoloration of the gums indicated the beginning stages of gum disease.
Jammed between the upper right cuspid and the upper right lateral Pinet noticed a tendril of meat.

He estimated ten years before Kosskoff's wife needed a full set of replacements, and maybe not that long. It was a shame,
thought the dentist. He could visualize the nice straight set of teeth that she might have enjoyed with proper dental treatment
and care. Pinet could see the yellowed, meat-jammed upper right cuspid as it ought to have been: a tiny pinnacle of glistening
enamel, blemished with just a speck of chocolate—before a sweet girlish tongue swabbed it clean. Pinet lifted the cup to his
lips; it was empty.

But her current predicament derived from a pair of caries, one of the lower left first molar and another of the lower left
lateral. The lateral wasn't as bad. He touched them with the dental pick at the end of the other prong: the telltale rotten
softness of each tooth gave a little with the press of the needle. The girl winced, but stayed still.

"Where do you hold your pouch?" asked the dentist.

The girl touched her mouth in the area of the infections.

"Well. You've got two caries." Pinet lightly prodded each tooth. "Here and here."

After making this diagnosis, the itinerant dentist straightened up and allowed a few seconds of silence to fill the single
room of the cabin. In the pale light of the two oil lamps, the thirty-seven-year-old man could have passed for sixty. He was
clothed in a grimly stained pair of long underwear that a widow had bartered him in exchange for lancing a sore on her tongue.
And if his ruined complexion and the dead man's gamy long Johns were not enough to convince an observer of the absolute dissolution
of his character, then Pinet would have cheerfully directed any interested party to the more conclusive evidence which could
be provided by his ruined marriage, his drug addiction, or even the tiny ghosts of his long dead pets. These things were undeniable;
he accepted them, and kept them close to his heart.

But, still, he was a professional—a graduate of Baltimore College, and the veteran of seventeen years of practice in the field.
Pinet was a real dentist, not some mountebank. So he let the few seconds of silence explain this authority to the mountain
people, let it tell them that he knew what he was doing.

Pinet put the situation forward succinctly. "A caries is a sickness of the tooth. It's a kind of rot, if you will. I would
hazard that these two caries are related to your diet—you eat too much meat—and likely from your tobacco use as well.

"The one in the back has to go. It's dead as well as infected. I can probably dig the other one out, fill it with a steel
bit, but in your case I wouldn't recommend it. The procedure is unpleasant and I don't believe that your lifestyle lends itself
to the necessary preservation techniques."

The girl blinked and gave a sniff.

"Pull them both," said Kosskoff.

"Very well," said the dentist. "Now, how far along are you?"

"Eight months," said Kosskoff.

Funt hooted. "That makes one month and thirteen years until I take the little critter down to Maisie's and treat him to the
whole house. Those girls'll work him until his pecker falls off."

"Be quiet," said Pinet.

"Is she too far?" Kosskoff sounded worried. "Is it safe?"

"Pardon, mon ami,"
said Funt.

"It'll probably be fine," said Pinet. "But I don't dare give her anything really strong for the pain. And, of course, there's
always a chance that something could happen with any procedure. But I don't—"

"Take them," said Kosskoff's wife. The girl gave an eager nod. "Just take them out."

Doing what he could to numb the tissue, Pinet dabbed vodka around the girl's gums. He also soaked his forceps in vodka. He
set out some strips of clean cloth and requisitioned a Hickum Brand cigar box for the pulled teeth. An illustration on the
side of the box showed a fat crow tatted up like an English dandy and puffing a huge stogie. "The rest is for birds," said
the caption. "Hickum's my brand, friend. Just stick one right in your craw and see if you don't agree!" The crow was snapping
his braces and twirling a cane.

Pinet told the two trappers not to stand so near behind him.

The girl's head was tilted back against the headrest for the surgery. She arranged her hands neatly and calmly across her
pregnant belly. To Pinet's eyes, the dark face, with its blue eyes and sweetly misshapen nose, registered nothing. She waited
with her mouth slightly agape, like a child expecting a candy drop. Pinet thought she would do very well.

The dentist was drunk, but not overly so. The metallic scraping sounds were regathering in his skull, but he could wait until
the surgery was completed. Pinet remained confident of his abilities under far more impaired conditions.

He went around the back of the chair and looked down at her. "Open wide."

When she did, he quickly found the first tooth, and fitted the forceps around it. To tighten his hold, Pinet turned the screw
at the crux of the instrument's handle; he kept turning the screw until it whined in its grooves, and then something cracked;
this was the sound of the rotten tooth fissuring from the vise pressure.

Some of the infection drooled over the girl's lip in a gray-red pus.

She flinched, but that was all.

"Stay still," said Pinet.

He hooked his arm around her neck, braced himself, and yanked: the tooth pulled loose cleanly. There was a pop, and the girl
gasped, and that was all.

"Good," said the dentist.

The bad tooth rattled into the cigar box.

Pinet reached into her mouth and with his bare fingers squeezed the infected gum area. More of the gray-red pus oozed out.
The girl clenched and unclenched her hands. He continued to press until the blood was clear. He disinfected the area with
vodka and gave her a strip of cloth to ball against the area of the wound.

"It was ready. You practically didn't need me at all."

She smiled to display the bloody new gap to her husband and Funt.

Kosskoff exhaled. Pinet noticed that a film of sweat lay on the big man's forehead and cheeks, and glistened in his beard.
"She's doing well," the dentist said to reassure him. In reponse, Kosskoff gazed at him blankly.

Funt tapped the dentist on the shoulder and handed him a fresh cup of vodka. "You're doing good, doc."

Pinet thanked him and took the cup. "One more." He resoaked the forceps. He took the piece of cotton from the girl and peered
at the empty socket.

"Okay," Pinet said. "Very good." He removed the forceps from the cup and took a healthy draught to ready himself.

Kosskoff had come up close again, scratching his beard and looking with something like amazement at his wife. Pinet ordered
him again to back up.

The girl opened her mouth, and the dentist proceeded as before, this time fitting the arms of his forceps around the girl's
lower left lateral tooth. He turned the screw. It was more difficult this time; there was living material still left in the
bone; he turned the screw again. The girl shivered. In his skull the dentist heard a thousand needles abruptly fall onto a
plane of steel, and then go skittering wildly, crying and screeching across the metal surface. His hand shook and his fingers
locked on the screw, turning it a quarter inch farther. There was a wet pop as the tooth splintered. Pinet staggered back.
The forceps slipped from his hand and spun through the air, cracked against the far wall and clattered onto the floor. A fine
spurt of blood shot from the girl's mouth, spilling down her chin; blood spattered the front of the dentist's long Johns.
The girl shrieked.