Death Rattle (10 page)

Bass leaned back against the counter noisily, sensing for the first time just how thick his tongue had grown. “Naw. Need to get my ball puller so I can be a tooth puller, s’all.”

“Thought you was sneaking off—”

Lunging out, Bass seized Craig by the front of his greasy cloth shirt with his right hand. “You figger me for being feared of pulling my own tooth, don’cha?”

“Dunno if you are or not—”

Shaking the younger trapper, Bass growled, “How
’bout we let you start this here fandango by yanking out one of your own goddamn teeth.”

Seizing Bass’s wrist in both his hands, Craig attempted to wrench the older man’s grip from his shirt. “Y-you gone stupid on whiskey!”

“Don’t you ever again let me hear you say to my face or behind my back that you think I’m feared of something,” Scratch bellowed inches from Craig’s face. “Maybeso, you was a braver man than me a few years ago when we was cornered inside Robidoux’s post by Thompson’s bunch.”

The trapper ruminated on that a moment, then released his hold on Bass’s wrist. “Yeah, I remember. You talked down them Yutas had us surrounded.” With a sigh, Craig grudgingly admitted, “Likely you saved our hair that day.”

Dropping his hand from Craig’s shirt, Titus mumbled, “You really ain’t a bad sort, Billy. Only want you to stay away from my damn mouth.”

Mitchell and Marechal shuffled back in the door, the cool of the rain-cleansed morning wafting into the trading room with them.

“Bill’s gonna be sleeping for some time to come,” Mitchell announced.

Pulling the cup of whiskey from his lips, Bass slurred, “He ain’t drowned, is he?”

“Not by rain, he ain’t,” Mitchell replied. “But he’s been damn near drowned with whiskey that he ain’t gonna be here to watch you pull your tooth neither.” The younger man yanked up the flap to his shooting pouch and pulled out the small tool. “Here you go, Scratch. Have at your tooth.”

“When you’re ready,” Sinclair prodded, sliding a round mirror in a heavy oak frame across the top of the counter planks.

Scratch reached up and pulled off his hat, flopping it on the counter. “Gimme that ball puller.”

“What ’bout the blood, Prewett?” Mitchell asked as he handed Bass the tool.

Titus swallowed hard. “W-what blood?”

Craig said, “You’re gonna have a big hole in your jaw where that tooth come out. Maybe ’bout the size of a lead ball.”

Nodding, Mitchell assured, “I bit down on a piece of leather till the bleeding stopped. Your jaw looks more swolled up than mine was—so I reckon you’re gonna bleed some—”

“Nawww, I heal fast,” Bass boasted, then turned to gaze into the mirror Sinclair was raising to eye level.

For a moment he stopped and did nothing more than stare at his image, unmoving. Gazing first at the swollen jaw, then at all the gray in his beard and mustache, amazed at just how gray had become all that hair emerging from the bottom of the faded black bandanna. Even his eyebrows were turning a stark white against the oak-brown of his skin. Since the last time he had looked in a mirror, Bass had seen his reflection only in the placid surface of a high-country pond, maybe the dark, shimmering reflection staring back at him from a cup of coffee. Nothing as clear as this … inspecting all the little lines and tiny wrinkles, the deep furrows between his eyes and those carved from the outside of his nose down to the corners of his mouth. A face that was damn well marked with most everything in his life, for good or for bad.

“Awright,” he relented. “Let’s pull this goddamned tooth.”

Slowly opening his jaw, wider and wider still, Titus was surprised at how little that stretching of his hide and muscles hurt now. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. No matter how tender that whole jaw was. Yet it continued to throb, despite the whiskey that had effectively numbed everything else from the shoulders up.

Prying apart the handles of the small tool so that he widened the two small jaws just so, Titus turned his head to the side slightly and inserted the ball puller inside his mouth. Sliding it back across his tongue toward the tooth that had a blackened crown, he took a slow, deep breath … then let it out.

While he positioned the tool’s jaws on either side of
the offending tooth. He had no more than gently closed the jaws on it than it immediately felt as if the tooth had become his whole head—completely empty and hollow, filled only with an unbelievably hot pain.

Yanking the tool from his mouth, he gasped and gasped again, struggling to catch his breath, hoping to somehow put an end to the throbbing heat in his head. His hand trembling, he dropped the tool and swept up the whiskey cup between both of them, bringing it unsteadily to his lips. Slowly he guzzled everything left in the cup, then let out a moist sigh as the pain slowly became bearable once more.

“God-damn”
he murmured with his thick tongue. “I got bullet holes in me, and scars where red niggers poked me with arrers. But never have I hurt like that afore!”

“Ever you broke a bone?” Craig asked.

“Nary a one, this child ain’t,” Bass confided.

“You gonna try again?” Mitchell inquired, staring at Scratch’s mouth.

He brooded on it, then said, “Maybeso that last drink of whiskey has done it, boys.”

Clanking the tin cup onto the narrow counter, Scratch swept up the ball puller as Sinclair repositioned the mirror. Again he slowly opened the tender jaw and once more he inched the tool toward the rotten tooth. Sucking in a breath, Bass opened the metal jaws and did his best to position them on either side of the inflamed tooth. The instant the tool brushed its surface, with no more than a whisper of contact—it was as if a small charge of powder went off in that jaw.

He flung the tool down. As it skidded across the counter and tumbled onto the clay floor, Scratch spun round and round trying his best to cup that excruciating side of his face, an elbow knocking the mirror out of Sinclair’s hands. It clattered onto the counter where the trader managed to keep it from tumbling to the floor.

“C-can’t do it,” Scratch rasped in the midst of the fading pain.

“Lemme have a look,” Mitchell requested.

He shrunk back from the trapper, hollering, “No!”

“I ain’t gonna touch your goddamned tooth,” Mitchell protested. “Lookee here, I’ll keep my hands down, see? Just open your mouth so I can look at it.”

His eyes widening with suspicion, Scratch slowly opened his jaws as Mitchell rocked up on his toes and peered closely into the older man’s mouth.

“Damn,” Levin Mitchell muttered as he rocked back again. “That tooth looks wuss’n mine did.”

“Wager it hurts wuss’n yours did too!” Bass grumbled.

Mitchell turned to Sinclair and Craig. “That jaw of his—the whole thing is swolled up. He’s got it bad.”

“What could happen if’n that tooth don’t come out?” Craig asked the others.

With a shrug, Sinclair declared, “Maybe the poison in his jaw crawl up to his brain and kill ’im.”

All of them turned as one and gazed at the older trapper. By now there were more than a half dozen of them crowding into the trading cabin.

“You think we oughtta?” Mitchell asked the others with a devilish look in his eye.

“Oughtta wha?” Bass echoed, his eyes squinting in alarm.

“No other way,” Craig said with a shrug of his shoulders.

The trader nodded, “Best thing we can do for the man.”

At that moment, Scratch had a foggy notion of what they were fixing to do to him. Whirling on his heel clumsily, he almost went down as he attempted to throw a shoulder into one of the younger men, spilling him backward.

“Grab ’im, boys!” Sinclair bellowed behind the counter.

Suddenly the others converged on him, grabbing arms and legs as Bass let out a high-pitched, unearthly howl.

“Grab his head! Grab his head!” Mitchell ordered.

One of the strongest of the young men clamped his beefy arm squarely around Bass’s forehead and pinned the older trapper into the crook of his shoulder.

The pressure on his face, indeed his whole head, was
suddenly unbearable. Lashing out with both feet, Titus slammed into two of the others, catching one of them dead center in the groin, sending the young man hobbling backward for the doorway, doubled over and yipping in breathless pain like a scalded coyote pup.

His hands stiffened into claws, his arms flailing like the wings of some doomed bird of prey, Titus struggled against his young attackers, now unmindful of the pain in his jaw as he twisted this way and that to free his head.

Within moments they collapsed to the floor together. Sinclair was shouting orders, Craig and Mitchell too. In seconds they had seven men on him, with the trader commanding the others to raise Bass to the counter. With a heave they hoisted him into the air, his arms and legs flailing again, then plopped the older trapper onto the planks with a hollow thud. They had him pinned and helpless again.

Sinclair’s face appeared right above Bass’s, inches away. “We’re doing this for your own good, Scratch. You don’t get that tooth out, you’ll likely die of poison gone to your brain. Leastways, you won’t be worth a tinker’s dam for the horse raid.”

“G-god-d-damn you,” he muttered between his teeth clenched shut with all the strength he could muster so they couldn’t get to his tooth.

“Go to work, Mitchell,” Sinclair growled, rocking up on his toes to get better leverage, bracing the heels of both hands against Bass’s hairy, whiskey-soaked chin to slowly force the mouth open.

Already the waves of pain were making his eyes water, so hot, stinging. He started gasping for air as he watched Mitchell approach from the corner of his eye.

“Turn his head this way some,” Mitchell ordered the big youth who imprisoned Scratch’s head.

Fight as he did, Bass realized he was powerless to stop what was about to happen. So he went limp, his head pounding, his hot, empty belly rumbling with the sloshing whiskey, wondering if he was about to be sick. Most of all he tried to tell himself it wasn’t going to hurt near as bad as leaving the tooth in … that he’d get through
the pain and to the other side of this agony … that the pain was something small compared to all he’d been through—

Then those metal jaws clamped onto his tooth and it felt as if Mitchell was trying to tear his jaw right out of his mouth. When the tool started rocking back and forth, Scratch began screaming in the back of his throat—a sickly, feral sound—no more than a despairing gurgle now that his jaws were pried open and only his tongue was free to move.

An explosion of black powder ignited inside his head, blowing off the top of his skull. Icy-hot shards of pain splintered out from his mouth, slashing into his brain, down his throat, making it difficult to swallow, impossible to breathe.

“I got it!” a voice roared in victory.

Of a sudden the cool blessedness of a black syrup poured over him, releasing him from the heat. Causing him to tumble down, down, down—

He snaked the tip of his tongue through that gap between his back teeth. There at the bottom of the left side of his jaw a second tooth was gone now.

In the week since Mitchell pried out the first, its gaping hole had knitted up quite nicely, what with the way Scratch swished whiskey or salt water around in his mouth several times a day. But this second hole hadn’t closed yet, being fairly new the way it was.

For a few days there, his swollen, inflamed jaw began to feel better. Then the whole packed up and lit out from Sinclair’s Fort Davy Crockett. By that second morning on the tramp, Scratch woke up in almost as much pain as he had suffered before. This time he understood what had to be done, especially when Levin Mitchell came over to inspect his jaw in the gray light of that miserable, rainy dawn. The trapper tapped his finger against the side of another tooth in Bass’s head, and Titus groaned in agony. Not only with the heat of that immediate pain, but grumpy with the anticipation of what was to come. The only thing that had ever come close to that sort of torture had been when the Arapaho ripped off his topknot.

Bill Williams headed off to his packs to dig out a small canteen of whiskey while Bass dug for his ball puller in a gray-tinged resignation.

“Hol’ me down, fellas,” he begged the rest. “I know what’s coming and I’m gonna be kicking like a three-legged mule here when Mitchell grabs hol’t of that tooth.”

He did, for sure too.

But for some reason, that extraction didn’t hurt quite as much as the first had. And although he continued to bleed throughout the rest of that day on the trail, his jaw nonetheless felt better than it had for a long time. Maybe two of them, side by side, had gone bad together, he thought. Better to be shet of them both and start healing the poison that had swollen the whole side of his head.

Titus swatted at the tiny buffalo gnats swirling around his sweaty face now and pulled the hat brim down lower to shade his eyes from the midday sun as they plodded southwest down the Green River for Robidoux’s post. Five days gone from Brown’s Hole and Sinclair’s fort already, which by his reckoning should put them close to rendezvousing with Peg-Leg Smith, what with the way this bunch had been licking over the ground.