William Lashner - Falls The Shadow

“His mouth was a mess,” said Dr. Bob. “Worse than yours, if you can believe that. I speak Spanish fluently, and still I could barely understand a word he was saying.”

Maybe it was because your hands were in his mouth, I thought but didn’t say. First, I didn’t say it because his hands were in my mouth, and second, I didn’t say it because the extraction wasn’t going well at all and I was too terrified to speak. At the outset he had gripped my tooth with his pliers, prepared to start muscling it out of my jaw, and after the first hint of pressure, something came free. Boy, that was easy, I thought, remembering what I had heard about Dr. Bob’s gentle hands, and then it came again, the “Uhoh,” and a nervous giggle.

I proceeded to search the walls for diplomas.

“It’s fallen apart, Victor. Your tooth, it has come undone. The damage was worse than we thought. This makes it a little more inconvenient. Tilda, I’ll need the narrow forceps, please.”

And then the rocking began as Dr. Bob, hairy forearms flexing with effort, gripped the disparate parts of my shattered tooth with pointy-nosed pincers and pulled and yanked and heaved and hauled, all the time continuing with his story.

“It was a sad tale the father told, so sad that I could not stand by and do nothing. I had to do something. I felt obligated. I guess it’s just the way I am wired. And so, after I fixed up his teeth as best I could, I took a week of vacation and had him lead me to the lair of this drug lord.

“A day on a bus, a day on a mule cart to get back to his farm, a full day in the blinding heat to climb the mountain to the east, to descend the other side, and to hack our way through the jungle. It was a struggle for me, I am used to cold weather, but I soldiered on. At the edge of a clearing, we crawled as close as we dared. Through binoculars I could see a road and a wall and a gate and a château perched on the edge of a hill. There was a picnic with children going on behind the wall. Men with machine guns patrolled, fancy cars drove in and out. There were balloons, I seem to recall, and a plane. Aha.”

His hands jerked out of my mouth. In the teeth of his pliers was a bloodied sliver of bone and root.

“We’re making progress,” he said as he dropped the sliver into a metal tray with a clink, “though it’s hard to see with all the blood. Spit.”

I spat. Leaning over the no-longer-white sink, I took the opportunity to rub my tongue over the half-extracted tooth. Like Dresden after the bombing, shattered walls, narrow shards of chimneys rising above the smoking wreckage.

“Once more into the fray,” said Dr. Bob as he reached into my mouth. Tilda gripped my narrow shoulders with her massive hands. Dr. Bob placed his foot upon my chair for leverage. “Let me see, what next? Ah, yes.” I felt something clamp onto my mouth, my jaw shivered from the pressure.

“I was also at the time doing dental work in the American embassy,” said Dr. Bob. “The usual services for embassy personnel, you understand, scaling and filling, picking out bits of jalapeño. Foreign Service types tend to trust only Americans with their teeth, and it merely takes a few brisk walks in Bogotá to understand. After my visit with the farmer, I began sifting through my embassy clientele. You get a sense of a person when he or she is in the chair. Grip a tooth, I often say, and you get a grip on a soul. Steady now, yes.”

My head rose up under his pull, my neck strained to stay attached, and then my head snapped back into the headrest. Another sliver of bone, another clink.

“I knew what I was looking for. A certain nonchalance, a certain lack of evident responsibility, usage of last names only in hearty greetings, oversize laterals and cuspids. It didn’t take long to find him. A doughy-faced man with a rumpled suit and blasé gaze, who said, whenever he spied me, ‘Good to see you again, Pfeffer.’ We got to talking, the usual dentist-to-patient pleasantries, as we are doing now, Victor. Offhand conversation about the weather, the wine. And then I mentioned a trip I had recently taken, a hike and a climb, a chance to see the real Colombia. And a strange sight I had come upon, a clearing, a château heavily guarded, trucks rumbling in and out at all hours – yes, that part I added, a little color to keep up interest – and a plane. Let me tell you, Victor, his gaze wasn’t so blasé anymore. Brace yourself, boy.”

A grunt from me, a gasp of satisfaction from him. Clink.

“Open up, open up, we’re almost done. Yes. I see you.” He dug once again into my jaw. “When he left the office, his teeth were bright and shiny, and in his shirt pocket lay a map, complete with GPS coordinates. And so I had done all I could do. Nothing left but to hope. Hold tight. Ah, yes.”

Clink.

“We’re almost done. I see another shard. Hold on, this one’s deep. Just before I was about to leave Bogotá, the farmer came back to have his teeth inserted. He was very happy with his new mouth and happy that the prob lem with his daughter had been solved. Apparently there had been a secret military operation, bombs had been dropped – bombs, Victor, and napalm – the entire clearing had been turned to cinder. The drug lord’s reign of terror was over, and the farmer’s daughter was now engaged to a local butcher. To show his gratitude, the farmer brought me a sack of green coffee beans and a live chicken. Have you ever tasted chicken, Victor, cooked up just moments after it has been killed and cleaned? It tastes different, richer. A little like snake. Grab hold, Tilda, I need some help.”

It felt like a winch was raising my jaw. My eyes rolled, I almost blacked out before my head snapped back. Clink.

“I think we’re done. Open up once more and let me check. Yes. Yes. Clean. Done. And the blood is flowing nicely. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?”

I was about to answer with a spicy bit of invective when Dr. Bob said, “Spit.”

I spat.

“This is why I became a dentist. To be able to aid patients in need, to stop their suffering, to make their lives just a little bit better. I want you to know this, Victor, I need you to know this. All I ask for in the world is a chance to help. You’ll have to come back in a week.”

I tried to say something, but it came out like mush, and after a while I just stopped.

“Absolutely,” said Dr. Bob, as if he had understood every word. “Now, Victor, I need to warn you. The blood will clot over the hole. That is good. It protects the wound, it aids in the healing. Do nothing to disturb the clot, or the consequences can be dire. Do not prod it with a toothpick, do not worry it with your tongue. Cigarettes, alcohol, carbonated beverages like pop can all disturb the clot. Do you understand?”

I nodded, felt for the wound with my tongue.

“Good,” he said. “Tilda will finish up. See you in a week.”

He ripped off his bloodstained gloves, tossed them gallantly into the biohazard bin on his way out of the office.

Tilda, whose broad back was to me as she worked over a counter, spun around. In each hand, wielded like weapons, were little boxes covered in cellophane.

“Stop your whimpering and make a decision, ja ,” she said. “Which color for your toothbrush, green or blue?”

I was still licking my wound, literally, when the social worker assigned to my pro bono case, Isabel Chandler, pulled up in front of my office building in her jaunty yellow Volkswagen. She smiled brightly at me and said those sweet words all men are longing to hear.

“What happened to your face?”

“Let’s just go,” I said.

We were off to visit my four-year-old client, Daniel Rose, and his mother, Julia, to check out their living conditions, to ensure that Julia was taking proper care of her son, and to impress upon her the need to show up in court at the assigned times and to follow all recommendations of Children’s Services.