We're All in This Together (22 page)

Funt caught Pinet before he could fall. Kosskoff gave a yell of rage and shoved the other trapper out of the way to get at
the dentist. The big trapper's fist, like a giant mallet, was drawn behind his head, ready to slam down.

"I'm sorry," said Pinet, "I'm sorry, Jesus—the tooth—that happens once in a while—Jesus, I'm sor—"

The girl's laughter froze her husband's fist. He let it drop to his side.

"Look," she said, her voice garbled by the blood in her mouth. The three chips of the lateral tooth lay on her palm. She laughed
with her lips very wide, revealing the new bloody space. A couple of tears dribbled from her eyes.

Her laugh was rich and startling; it had a fine, tremulous quality; Pinet recalled his wedding reception, how his father-in-law
called for attention by tapping a silver fork against a crystal champagne flute.

The girl patted her pregnant belly. "Pretty soon, he have more teeth than me."

To celebrate the successful surgery, the trappers uncapped a jar of brown liquor, while Pinet worked quickly to prepare his
inhaler. "Excuse me," said the dentist, although no one asked. "It's for my asthma." From a plain medicine bottle he poured
three thimbles of clear liquid down the spout of the inhaler.

Kosskoff's wife mixed the liquor with maple syrup and snow, and finally garnished it with brown sugar. "Yes!" cried Kosskoff.
"Make it thick!" They started in with long wooden spoons and shared a single bowl.

Pinet cradled the inhaler in his left arm, and worked the small pump with his right. He sucked on the spout, taking deep but
carefully measured breaths. From the first inhalation, the sensation was one of pure release, of every weight being lifted
away.

When the dentist set the inhaler down, the laughter was already boiling at the top of his throat. He found that the others
were grinning at him; he grinned back.

One of the lamps sputtered out, dimming the room. The wind whistled through an invisible crack.

"So," Pinet started, and broke into cackles. Then they all began laughing. Funt rolled around like a happy dog, banging into
things.

Pinet told the girl about how he tried to urinate outside in the storm. She snorted and showed her bloody gums.

Kosskoff excitedly banged a pot with a spoon. "It's true," he said, "it's true."

"I thought it was gonna freeze clean off," said Funt, reaching over and slapping Pinet's knee.

"Then you could have sent it to my wife!"

Kosskoff whooped and drummed the pot.

The girl laughed, too; laughed and laughed. She also cried, because it made her mouth hurt even more to laugh.

For comfort she brought out her bag of chewing tobacco and took a pinch. It occurred to Pinet to warn her that it was bad
for her teeth, that it would surely aggravate the raw gums, but instead heard himself asking for some.

He had never chewed before, and the sickly sweet taste revolted him. He spat it out. "Shit," said the dentist, "that's shit."

The others laughed. Kosskoff beat the pot.

From his satchel the dentist retrieved his toothbrush and jar of paste. He briskly scraped his teeth until foam came from
the corners of his mouth. Some of it dripped over his chin.

It was not until he finished, rinsing his mouth clean with water and spitting it into a cup, that he realized that the two
trappers and the girl had been watching him, fixated.

"Does it hurt?" asked the girl. Her cheek bulged with tobacco.

"No. It cleans. It feels good."

The girl shook her head, and seemed to doubt him.

"I knew a whore, scraped her teeth all the time," lied Funt. "She had a whole collection of fancy tooth scrapers. It was something
to see."

For whatever reason, the spectacle of the tooth brushing quieted the group. The girl chewed her tobacco, seeming to think.
Funt and Kosskoff drank, and appeared to think of nothing. Kosskoff's beard was as big and wiry as an eagle's nest.

The dentist felt oddly embarrassed, as if he had done something wrong. He was reminded of the unfortunate episode with his
wife, the one that resulted in his ignominious dismissal as a spouse: Mrs. Pinet caught him with another woman, another widow,
as it hap pened, who suffered not only from a pained jaw but a generous nature. There was nothing Pinet could do for this
widow—she needed a surgeon, not a dentist—but she insisted on completing her end of the bargain anyway, although the agreed-upon
sexual act could only have exacerbated her condition. It was then that Mrs Pinet walked in.

"I ought to have insisted on going to her rooms," said the dentist. He made the announcement abruptly, and without any preamble.
He chuckled. No one had any idea of what he was talking about, nor did they appear to care.

"Who is going to deliver the damn child, anyway?" Pinet was suddenly offended at their lack of reaction. He hiccuped. "The
child?" he asked again. "Who will deliver the child?"

Opening his mouth wide—the dentist saw rows of crooked yellow-green teeth—Funt let loose a long, pungent belch. The small
trapper screeched with laughter.

Kosskoff hit the pot several times.

Fresh cups were poured all around.

The dentist made no further effort to speak. The drug was settling into his system; his mouth seemed to disappear; his eyeballs
felt as though they were hardening to stone in their sockets; a corona spread out from the wick of the remaining oil lamp
and Pinet stared into a winter sun ten years gone.

In college the dentist traveled west with his wife-to-be and her brother. They went by train, and it was difficult for the
dentist and his lover to find privacy, but they were imaginative and persistent. Once, they made love in the luggage compartment,
rolling around on top of bulky pieces of portage, handles and strap buckles jabbing them in their backs and buttocks. In the
frenzy the dentist kicked over a parrot cage, and the bird escaped. It smashed around the cabin for a few moments and then
began to screech for gravy.

"Where's m'gravy? Where's m'gravy, you old so-and-so?" The bird continued to howl for its garnish, but Pinet's future wife
held him fast, and told him not to dare stop.

Somewhere beyond the Rockies, at a desert pit stop, the lovers shared a bag of nitrous oxide. "For science," Pinet said, although
it was not, in fact, his first experiment. They staggered away from the train and took shade beneath the depot platform. They
lay in the sand and gazed up through the slats at the boots and shoes of their fellow travelers.

The dentist had a vision, but he sustained no memory of it. Later, his wife related it to him: "You said you saw a giant mouth
and that it was going to eat everything. 'It's eating the world!' you screamed, and then you started crying, and just a minute
or two later, you said, 'Oh, oh, I'm sorry! It's on our side. The mouth is on our side.'"

"You were crazy," said his wife, making eyes. Then, as she was telling him this a little time later, they had only recently
been married.

"Crazy. It's true. I was crazy." He grabbed her wrists.

"Was?" she asked, and opened her throat to him.

"I asked you about your wife," said Funt. "Is she ever coming back,
mon ami?"

Pinet stared at him. "Fuck you." He smirked. He fell asleep.

But the trapper was not insulted. He pondered a ragged hole in his long underwear, plucking the threads with a blackened finger.

The dentist opened his eyes to find himself propped between the other two men. Pinet heard his limp feet scrape across the
floor, and looked down at them. Yes, those were his feet. They laid him down on one of the beds.

He blinked up at the large faces of the two trappers: Kosskoff bristling with beard, Funt licking at his mustache. Then the
girl appeared. She bent over the dentist, until her lips brushed over his nose, chin, mouth. Pinet smelled the tobacco on
her breath. Fingers gently peeled back his lips. A tongue slowly licked across his teeth.

Pinet groaned.

Her bloody mouth stopped at the sore mark on his neck. She kissed it.

The earth shook below him. Pinet realized that the two beds were being pushed together. The dentist's limbs flopped about
him.

"Please," he said, croaking the word so thickly that only he could have translated the sound.

Somehow his long Johns were stripped away. The dentist supposed he had been skinned alive. One had to skin a fish before it
could be cooked. Mice did not require skinning. Mice could keep their skins. Mice could be frozen. Mice were best eaten cold.
"Please."

Kosskoff slid in beside him, and began to kiss his ear. The wires of the big trapper's beard tickled Pinet's ear.

The pregnant woman's belly pressed against the dentist's thigh. Her breath was near, but he could not find her mouth.

A hand reached between his legs, accompanied by a voice of perfect reason. "Here it is,
mon ami"
It was, Pinet realized, a doctor's voice. He also knew from the doctor's tone that the diagnosis was grave.

The doctor put a hand over Pinet's mouth.

"Will it hurt?" he asked into the palm, tasting the doctor's sweat. But no answer was necessary. When it came to pulling teeth,
no one was more aware than Pinet of the procedure's inherent discomfort.

In the morning he awoke alone in a single bed. Someone had shifted the dentist onto his side, perhaps to keep him from choking
if he vomited. Shafts of daylight stabbed through the gaps in the boards that covered the windows.

The dentist was naked and achy beneath the furs.

He stumbled to the bathroom closet. There was a bucket of cold water and he washed himself as best he could. He came out,
feeling no better, but thinking more clearly. There was no one else in the cabin. His clothes were folded on a chair.

After dressing, Pinet searched for a bottle of something to pick himself up. He came across the Hickum Brand cigar box; the
crow's cigar was enormous, disproportional. "The rest is for birds. Hickum's my brand, friend. Just stick one right in your
craw and see if you don't agree!"

The dentist put the box on the floor and stomped on it. He kicked the pieces under the bed.

There was no liquor and Pinet was forced to settle for some weak, icy tea left unfinished on a sideboard. For all he knew
it might have been days old. He considered his options and made the courageous determination to wait until he made it back
to the boardinghouse in Limestone to take a fresh lung.

The dentist gathered together his instruments and stuffed them into the satchel.

Half out the door, Pinet leaned against the frame and squinted at the vista of snow and light and line and sky. In the clarity
of day he saw the small distant shape of the pass they had walked through the previous evening; the cliffs were merely outcroppings.
Farther off, much farther, he saw the lake where the local children went to swim in the brief northern summers. The spire
of the town's Methodist church was visible through a copse of winter-stripped birch.

A little way off the ice-sheathed, clapboard carving shed puffed gray smoke from a stone chimney.

Pinet approached it, walking in their tracks.

He found them just inside, scraping down a mink skin. Funt and Kosskoff held the skin taut across a table, while the pregnant
girl dragged a blade, nicking off the bits of gristle and muscle. A fire burned in the chimney grate. The guts and body of
the mink were in a pail on the ground. Steam rose from the bucket.

Watching them, Pinet decided that he had imagined the previous evening entirely. He was an addict, he told himself, and the
mind of an addict was easily confused. The pregnant girl chewed on her lip as she worked the blade, inching it over the flesh
parchment. Her cheeks and forehead were fever red.

"I have to go," said Pinet.

Kosskoff glanced up, looked away. "We paid you."

"Tabernac,"
swore Funt as he strained to hold down his end of the skin.

The smell of the animal guts drifted to the dentist.

Mrs. Pinet, a careful shopper, had often bought tripe rather than the butcher's more expensive meats. Pinet never complained;
in fact, he liked it, liked the taste, the richness and the salt. Over dinner his wife giggled, and made a comment that when
the tripe was raw, it smelled to her like it did when they made love. Pinet had been confused. "Do I smell?" he had asked.
"No, Laurent, no," said his wife. "I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about—about the love we make together—I was just
saying—it's not a bad thing, that smell . . . " She pinched his cheek and kissed him. His wife had fed him chunks of the meat
with her fingers.

This occasion took place years before, in a previous life, and he was sorry to remember it.

"Why are you standing there?" asked Kosskoff.

"It smells like fucking out here," said Pinet, and gave a short screechy laugh, pointing to the bloody bucket. The dentist
slapped his hand down, but couldn't contain another giggle.

The girl spat something dark in the snow.

Wonders

Game 1

The best contact wasn't like contact at all; it was like swinging straight through, the baseball only an echo of the bat's
motion. The game was so hard, but that moment was so easy—the ball flew, Eckstein ran, and there was no chance they were going
to catch him. Much of the time, Eckstein felt out of sorts, rushed and uncertain; often, when it was time to go to sleep,
he could still feel the dull ache of the morning's alarm bell, a faint thrumming at the back of his neck. Playing was the
only part of his life that had ever felt completely natural. Except tonight. Tonight, even the notion of knocking a true one
and watching it fly didn't soothe him. He had made a real mess of matters and didn't want to so much as tighten his laces,
let alone take a swing.

Eckstein, the second baseman for the Coney Island Wonders, was sitting out that night's game against the Hoboken Gentlemen.
He told Gordy Wheelock, the manager, that he was sick, a sour gut.

Wheelock didn't like it. "You better invest in a couple of seltzers, kid. I ain't here to rub your tummy." But the manager
wasn't about to take any chances with a talent like Eckstein, the best hitter they had—the old bastard gave him the night
off.

So now Eckstein slumped on the bench, watching the game from under the bill of his cap. He tried not to think about what a
sorry human being he was, but it was hard to ignore the tiny steel teeth
grinding
his insides. And on top of it all, the heckler was at it again, giving an earful to Burnham, the Negro who played left field
for Coney Island.

Cleatus "Woodpecker" Burnham stood at his position with a placid expression. Between pitches he folded his arms, and rolled
a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. He might have been waiting in a line, or riding the subway. His bearing
seemed to be the very essence of patience, or maybe it was just resignation.

But only a deaf man could fail to hear the heckler's bray, which seemed to rattle endlessly around the ballpark, like a bumblebee
pinging off the walls of a sealed jar.

"You're horrible, Burnham! Not only do you look like you got struck by lightning, you play like it, too." The heckler was
a spindly creature with a patchy black fungus of beard. "A big damn wind oughtta blow you back to Africa. Not a typhoon,
a ty-coon."
There were a few guffaws, and the heckler bowed to the people around him. Eckstein wished the jerk would shut up; the screaming
hurt his ears.

When the Wonders trotted off the field for the bottom of the inning, the groundskeeper came on to rake around the base paths
and the pitcher's mound. It was time for the seventh-inning stretch, and the nightly Vaudeville Intermission; two attractions
from the freak show, the Backwards Man and Jenny Two Heads, clambered onto the field. They raced miniature tricycles around
the warning track while the organist played "Muskrat Ramble."

Woodpecker sat down next to Eckstein. The bench creaked. He was the oldest guy on the team, and pretty well past it. There
weren't any other Negroes in the Hudson League; it was against the rules, but Coney Island had an entertainment exemption
for special attractions. (The previous season they had used the exemption on a strongman dwarf called Udolfo the Unstoppable
Force, who resembled nothing so much as a single, enormous bicep, strutting about on stump legs and threatening to bite people's
balls off. "I going to gnaw off your berries from you!" he would scream at almost anyone who happened to block his path. He
drew a large number of base on balls, but Udolfo couldn't really field or run, and besides being a drunk, his Germanic accent—not
to mention the ball-biting threats—failed to endear him with either the team or the front office. Coney had finally traded
the dwarf, for future considerations, to a Utica sideshow that needed a chicken man.) Which was how this season, the Wonders
came to bring in Woodpecker Burnham, a Negro who could play baseball.

And, apparently, at one time Woodpecker had been a hell of a hitter. Sometimes he could still turn on a ball, and knock it
a good distance, but his average wasn't much. In the outfield, he was flatfooted and seemed to move through thick mud.

They called him Woodpecker because he was always chewing on a homemade toothpick. He had a pocketknife that he kept on his
person at all times, and used to chip shards from whatever was around. There were hundreds of gouges in the dugout bench,
like a beaver had gone at it.

A few of the guys liked to have some sport with him. For instance, Pelky, the third baseman, asked Woodpecker to autograph
a watermelon. The Negro had been decent about it, too, signed Woodpecker Burnham, real big and clear. Now Pelky displayed
it on the top shelf of his locker, a Wonders hat stuck on the dome and a toothpick poking out of a drawn-on mouth.

He was a different sort, Burnham was, but Eckstein liked him. For one thing, you could always have a talk with him about the
pictures. Almost any time Eckstein went to the Odeon, if he looked up to the balcony Woodpecker would be sitting in the front
row, hunched over the railing, toothpick dangling from his lower lip.

The second baseman watched as his teammate turned an old broken Louisville Slugger over a few times on his knee before selecting
a spot high up on the barrel, and with a flash of the knife blade cut away a neat toothpick. Woodpecker spit his old toothpick
on the ground and inserted the new.

In the outfield, beneath the flare of the light stanchions, the Backwards Man tumbled from his tricycle. He stood up, confused,
and ran in the opposite direction, away from the finish line. The freak handlers hurried to correct him, but it was difficult
to get the attention of the Backwards Man; his cross-eyed peanut of a head was set on his neck looking over his spine.

"You get a good one?" Eckstein asked him.

Woodpecker rolled the pick around in his mouth. "It ain't too fine."

"That son-of-a-bitch out in the bleachers never shuts up, does he?"

"I don't pay him no mind," said Woodpecker. He scratched his belly, rubbing his long dark fingers, their whitish tips, over
the soft bulge of flesh.

"You see anything good lately? At the Odeon?"

"I seen the new one. It's pretty good. Vampires."

"Much killing?"

"Some."

"Girls?"

"Just one. She don't show much," said Woodpecker, "Little leg. No thigh."

Woodpecker cut a pick from the Louisville Slugger and gave it to Eckstein. To the second baseman the pick tasted like dust,
but wanting to be polite, he chewed at it diligently.

When the seventh-inning stretch was over the freak handlers guided the Backwards Man and Jenny Two Heads off the field. One
of Jenny Two Heads' heads was asleep. This head, the bald one, was rarely awake, and never spoke, but the other head lewdly
wagged its tongue at the Backwards Man.

In the bottom half of the inning, Woodpecker slapped a hit in the right field gap, but was thrown out lumbering into second
base.

The heckler started howling before Woodpecker had even dusted himself off. "You fat bastard! Get the lead outta your ass!"

Woodpecker appeared not to notice him and jogged back to the dugout still nibbling on the pin of Louisville oak.

In the ninth Wheelock told Eckstein to "tie up his guts, put em in a bow," because he was pinch-hitting. Eckstein could see
that the pitcher was tired, the zip gone off his fast one, and nothing but spin left on his curve. He figured on banging one,
no problem. But as he swung, his feet slipped in the batter's box and the ball dribbled to the mound. The pitcher pounced.
A snap throw to the second baseman, and over to first. Double play.

"C'mon, Eckstein! C'mon!" Once, Eckstein had seen a racehorse break a leg at the Steeplechase, and watched as the jockey himself
in his tattered racing stripes stood over it, and used a pistol to put the creature out of its suffering. The clarity of the
gunshot came to him now. The heckler had a voice like a foghorn. "What is this, Eckstein, are you a nigger now, too?"

The crowd—families on holiday, boys in yarmulkes and short pants, men in shirtsleeves and boaters, girls in summer dresses,
a couple of nuns, the seven or eight Negroes standing outside with their fingers in the right field fencing—exhaled, and began
to file out, heading home, or back to the boardwalk. The scoreboard operator put up the final score: Hoboken Gentlemen 4,
Coney Island Wonders 3.

Eckstein returned to the dugout and dropped down onto the bench. The other players, Woodpecker included, departed. The scoreboard
operator replaced the digit placards for each inning with the advertisement boards for Red Giraffe Extra-Long Hot Dogs. There
was a series of cranking noises as one after another the switches were thrown on the three light pylons that towered over
the field. As the filaments cooled, the night filled in around the banks of lightbulbs, and turned the grass black.

After, Eckstein walked to the Odeon. Lillian scowled and let him in for free.

The movie was called
Black Mansion.
The prospect of it made Eckstein feel somewhat cheered. You couldn't do much better than a vampire picture.

Two hobos, Gooch and McMasters, are riding in a boxcar, making it for California, when they decide to jump off outside a little
town somewhere in Texas, and find something to eat. This part is funny, because Gooch is just a happy-go-lucky tramp, and
a real wetbrain. "If they ain't got some real chow here, Mac, heck, I might try an eat you," says Gooch, and at the same time,
he hallucinates a giant pork chop all dressed in McMasters's duds and wearing McMasters's hat.

Except, what's not so funny is the horde of vampires who haunt the little town and live in a mansion on the hill, surviving
on the blood of human sacrifices. It's to placate this enclave of bloodsuckers that the townspeople lure Gooch and McMasters
up to the mansion that night, promising them a big baked bean supper and a couple of warm beds. The only thing that the vampires
aren't counting on, though, is McMasters, the tough-as-nails ex-boxer who wears a crucifix from his uncle, a priest, and never
takes it off, even though he stopped believing in God when his kid sister died of polio. That's how McMasters manages to ward
off the vampires and somehow escapes. Meanwhile, Gooch is cornered, and the vampires are coming for him; we see things from
their point of view, and all of sudden it's a pork chop wearing Gooch's duds and Gooch's hat.

Lillian sat down beside Eckstein.

"The town's being run by vampires," whispered Eckstein. "One of the hobos got away."

"Trash," was all Lillian said in response.

McMasters tries to raise a posse to storm the mansion, but the people are all vampire bootlickers. The only one who will help
him is the mayor's daughter, Kelly-Anne. McMasters sneaks back into the mansion while Kelly-Anne sets up dynamite, and makes
her promise on his kid sister's soul that she'll set off the whole load in thirty minutes if he doesn't come out. Inside,
McMasters kills the king vampire, stabbing him in the heart with a chair leg. But he takes so long that Kelly-Anne has to
set off the dynamite. She's brokenhearted, because she realizes that she loved the lug, never mind all his tough talk. That's
just before he uses his crucifix to dig out of the rubble and the sun comes up on a new day.

Throughout the movie Lillian made small, sighing noises of dissatisfaction, but Eckstein hardly noticed. It was the sort of
picture a person could maybe see two or three times. His favorite scene was when McMasters pushed over the huge vampire throne
and trapped the screeching, squealing bloodsucker underneath. The hobo had torn off a throne leg—the foot shaped like a bear's
claw—and plunged it into the vampire's black heart.

While he waited for Lillian to close up, Eckstein paced the curb, kicking at pebbles. He was feeling guilty again. After what
he'd done, Eckstein figured he deserved the same fate as Gooch. He knew it was supposed to be funny—a joke on a joke—but the
part where the vampires looked at Gooch and he was a pork chop, that part made him sweaty, and brought back his nausea. He
remembered something his father had said to him once: "I do believe that life is going to make a meal out of you, boy."

He thought of how the vampires surrounded the hobo, moving in slowly, slowly, hunching over the man, and lifting their capes,
shrouding the cringing figure, seeming to melt down the wall, until they became one dark undulating mass, a living shadow.

"What's so funny about that?" Eckstein asked himself. He decided maybe he didn't like the movie so much, after all.

Down the arcade a barker was running a quarter pitching game against a brick wall. A beat cop stood by, collecting bets in
his Keystone cap. At the mouth of the alley across the street, a bum sat cross-legged and stirred a puddle with a stick. A
Model-T clattered over cobblestones. The big wheel at the top of Luna Park blinked green and white, green and white, green
and white.

Lillian came outside and started to draw down the steel shutter. He went to help her, but she told him to get out of the way.
The metal sheet clanked down, and she locked it. "I'm hungry," she said.

They walked without further discussion to the diner around the corner. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk. Lillian was a big
girl, heavy around the hips. She wore her hair in a fashionable wave that flipped with every step, and she always smelled
fresh, of talcum and lilacs. Tonight, however, they walked too far apart for Eckstein to catch even a whiff of sweetness,
and her perm appeared sodden.

Taking a booth in the back, Lillian let the waitress pour their coffee and then move away before she started in: "I know what
you want to ask and the answer is no. It didn't come. That's nine weeks, buddy boy."

She stared at him hard and he looked out the window.

That first night, back in April, she'd seen him at a game. Her face had been flushed when she leaned over the grandstand railing
and handed him a ticket for that night's show. The film turned out to be a love picture, about a beautiful girl with amnesia
and a millionaire playboy. Eckstein never did see how it turned out, though. "I'm bored," Lillian said into Eckstein's ear
as the playboy brought the beautiful amnesiac to consult with a fortune-teller. "Something awful happened to you," said the
fortune-teller. "I see a wicked stranger. I see him searching for you, even now." The girl gave a cry. "Now, now," said the
playboy. "That's quite enough of that."