Markwildyr.com, Post #224
My short story this week is a bit different from those I usually write. Actually, it’s taken from a scene from a novel that was cut during an edit. Did I make a working short story of it? Let me know.
* * * *
“I about give you up. Boss said
to come get you and go pick up Mitch in town.” Mitch was the ranch owner’s son
and Billy’s best friend.
“What about my horse?”
Joe glanced to the pasture south
of the reservation schoolyard. “Ain’t he okay there?”
“I guess so, but I don’t want to
leave him after dark.”
He climbed in and watched Joe
manipulate the gears. Someday, he was going to learn to do that. When they
arrived at Milton Valley Junior High, Mitch stepped off the curb and gave Billy
a friendly punch on the shoulder as he hopped into the back seat.
“You’re taking this better’n I
expected.”
Billy’s spine went stiff. “What?
Taking what?”
“I ain’t told him yet.” Joe pulled
away from the curb.
“Told me what? Where are we
going?”
“Nowhere much,” Mitch answered.
“Just to the dentist, that’s all.”
Something cold ran right up his
backbone. “Where?”
“To dear old Doctor Gumbacher.”
“Who?”
Mitch grinned at him. “Doctor
Hans Grumbacher’s House of Pain.”
“Cut that out,” Joe said. “It
ain’t all that bad.”
“Unless he finds cavities, then he
bores a hole in your teeth with a drill. Buzz, buzz, buzz! First he sticks this
big needle in—”
“Paul!” the cowhand yelled. “This your first
visit to a dentist, Billy?”
“Uh… yeah.”
The cowpoke took a draw on his
cheroot and let a stream of smoke whip away in the wind. “What,
eleven-years-old and never been to one before? Guess that ain’t too bad. I was
fifteen, I think.”
When they arrived, the place
didn’t look that bad. Pictures on the walls of warplanes blasting away with
cannon and machine guns were neat. The horse-faced lady behind the desk greeted
Mitch by name before turning to quizz the new patient, asking all kinds of
questions—personal things—seeming startled that he lived on the nearby Apache
reservation.
After Mitch went in to see the
doctor, Billy picked up a magazine and started leafing through it, stopping to
read an article about Nazi medical experiments in concentration camps. He didn’t
understand all the big words, but he caught enough to know some of the bad guys
had escaped to South America or somewhere. He put down the magazine and started
worrying about what was going to happen in the doctor’s office. His mouth was
dry, and his legs made jerky movements by the time Miss Horse Teeth called his
name.
She put him in a padded chair
with spidery arms holding basins and hoses with pointy things. His armpits went
damp when he spotted a tray of knives and picks and other doodads.
“Let’s get some X-rays first.”
The woman covered his chest with a heavy bib and put a white thing in his
mouth. Then she pointed a ray gun at him and ordered him not to move.
That’s when it hit him. Hans
Gumbacher. German doctors and ray guns. Escaped Nazis with death rays. He was
in a nest of mad German scientists! He heard a click and a hum. They’d got him.
Would he just fall over, or would it kill him slowly? Feeling dizzy, he started
to scramble out of the chair.
“No, no, young man. You stay
right where you are.” She rushed in and aimed the death ray at his other jaw before
backing out of the room. “Don’t move a muscle.”
The ray must not have worked the
first time. Maybe it was a new weapon they were testing. He tore out of the
chair. Her feet came pounding again. He expected her to be angry, but she was
still smiling. They were sly, those Nazis.
“Young man, you simply have to
sit still.”
Billy surrendered to fate,
screwed his eyes shut, and waited for the ray to singe away his flesh. He was a
goner, anyway. Another click and a whirring sound. Could they take a picture of
his brain and read everything he’d ever thought? Finally, Miss Horse Teeth was
finished.
“There, that didn’t hurt, did it? Here are
pictures of your very own teeth.”
She laughed when he recoiled at the ghostly
image of teeth with no skin over them. He touched his mouth to check that
everything was still there.
“They aren’t too bad for a young
man who’s never seen a dentist before. See these little black spots? They are
cavities. The doctor will have to take care of those. There are only two, so it
won’t be a problem.”
Cavities? He bounced out of the
chair, but she caught him.
“You stay right here. The doctor
is almost finished with Mitch.”
As soon as she left him alone, he
started getting sleepy. Was he their zombie now? Then Dr. Gumbacher, a solid
man with gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses, loomed in the doorway. “How do,
Mr. Billy.” His voice was gruff, but his mouth and eyes smiled.
Billy’s heart almost stopped.
Gumbacher was a German! An escaped
mad doctor was about to experiment on him right in Milton Valley, and he was
helpless! His arms and legs began acting independently of his brain again.
“He’s a little nervous on his
first visit, Doctor,” Miss Horse Teeth said.
Was that code? Was she warning
Dr. Death he was onto them?
“No one’s going to hurt you.” The
German doctor’s words might have meant more if he hadn’t been holding a huge
needle up to the light. Some kind of secret Nazi poison dribbled out the end.
Billy squirmed so much the man had
trouble inserting the needle. The sting wasn’t bad, but poison shooting into
his flesh hurt like crazy. When the needle finally came out, the mad scientist
promptly stuck it in the other side of his mouth.
Then he was deserted again. Those
people had a way of vanishing in a hurry, but they were smart. There was no way
out except right through the middle of them. Or by the window. Miss Horse Teeth
came back with a handful of doodads, a cluster of evil-looking burrs that
looked like… drill bits! They were going to drill his head open.
As soon as the woman left, he
started dying in pieces. His nose itched. When he touched it, his hand told him
his nose was there, but his face said it wasn’t. His nose was dead! He felt his
upper lip. It was missing. The ray…it killed you in pieces.
His grandmother! Maybe her Eagle Power
could save him. He bolted from the chair and ran to the window. It wouldn’t
budge. He grabbed a small metal stool and drew back to sling it through the
glass. Just as he was about to let go, someone caught him by the belt.
“Whoa, pardner! Whadda you think
you’re doing’?” It was Joe. “They said you was acting up, but why’re you trying
to break the Doc’s window?”
“Joe! Leggo! I’m going dead!” His
voice sounded all slurry. “Can’t feel my face.”
“Ain’t supposed to, kid. That’s
what happens.”
“That’s right, young man. I ought
to have told you what to expect.” Dr. Death grasped him firmly by the arm and put
him back into the torture chair. “You are going to go all numb. You understand
numb? Goot! That medicine I put in your gums with the needle makes you lose
feeling in the mouth. So it won’t hurt when I take out the bad part of the
tooth, ja?”
He was outnumbered. The woman,
the doctor…even Joe. The evil doctor started drilling. It didn’t hurt, but the
grating noise rattled his head.
“There,” Dr. Death growled after
what seemed a long time. “Got one. Now, let’s see about the other side.”
The racket started again. When it
ended, they came at him with a strange metal band that looked like it was made
for squeezing things to pieces. It was—for squeezing teeth. They put two of
them in his mouth. Spit, absent a few minutes earlier, now flowed. The woman
plopped something else in his crowded mouth, and he heard a slurping noise. He
screwed his eyes closed and thought about Child-of-Water and all the dangers
he’d faced.
Finally, the doctor and nurse stepped
away and congratulated themselves on their work. But they weren’t finished with
him yet. The horsey lady scraped and picked around in his mouth and called it a
cleaning.
It seemed like hours before the
doctor presented him with a new toothbrush and said he could go. He bolted through
the office and climbed into the Jeep.
Mitch didn’t exactly laugh at him,
but it was obvious he wanted to. Nobody said much on the way to pick up his
horse at the schoolyard, except Joe told him not to come to work until tomorrow.
The cowboy also left a box of aspirin in case his teeth started aching.
His grandmother said nothing when
he entered the gowa, but he noticed her
watching his mouth. Had Eagle told her about the dentist, or was it because he
dribbled when he tried to eat? By the time he went to bed, his lips and tongue had
returned from wherever they’d been. His whole mouth ached a little, but he stayed
away from the little white pills. He’d survived the Nazi doctor once. He wasn’t
about to take any more chances.
* * * *
Did it work, or
not? I’m interested in your reaction. By the way, as a disclaimer, the
protagonist in the story is from a reservation simply because that’s the contest
of the novel it was lifted from. The child could have been Caucasian, Black,
Asian, Alien… or whatever.
Website and blog: markwildyr.com
Email:
markwildyr@aol.com
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/mark.wildyr
Twitter: @markwildyr
Now my
mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on writing.
You have something to say, so say it!
See you later.
No comments:
Post a Comment