Joe’s drink and coffee cup remain empty no matter how hard he stares at them, as empty as his booth at Zula’s. He knows Jody isn’t coming. He didn’t really expect her to show.
For two weeks, he only left his apartment to go the liquor store. He ate meals only when he wasn’t drinking, and the meals consisted of slices of American cheese, cold hot dogs, dry cereal, pretzel sticks. He removed all of the curtains and shades from his windows, and at night, turned on all the lights. He drank himself into unconsciousness, and then didn’t wake until late afternoon. He lay on the couch or on the floor and wouldn’t sleep in his bedroom, convinced he’d find the little boy sitting at the foot of his bed, and the boy wouldn’t say anything and wouldn’t look at Joe, but he also wouldn’t leave, not this time. He kept the tinfoil. He called Jody when he was awake past midnight. She didn’t answer and didn’t return his calls.
Joe leaves the booth and the restaurant, and walks to her apartment. This night is hotter than all the previous nights, and Joe sweats through his white T-shirt. Her door isn’t locked and he lets himself in without knocking. Inside, the apartment is dark and a disaster of clothes and food and trash. It’s as though the spotless apartment he saw two weeks ago never existed, or maybe the duration between visits was longer than those arbitrary and government-assigned weeks, time enough for the apartment to fall into such an advanced state of decay, maybe a collection of years, lost years, had passed, or epochs only measurable by fossilized bodies, bones, and teeth.
“What are you doing here?” Jody’s voice is frayed, an exposed wire, quick with its electricity but weak enough that it’ll break or flame out at any moment.
Joe steps over the rubble of her apartment. The place smells of sweat and burnt chemicals. Joe walks inside the study. Jody sits on the floor, cross-legged, huddled next to a small fire, a mini-pyre set up on the hardwood floor stained black. Mounds of papers, books, and photographs surround her and the fire. She wears a white bra and black underwear along with black marks that are either bruises or smudged ash. She’s too thin. Her bones are a story written in Braille, but the story is too big and horrible to be contained by her skin. Joe puts a hand into his pocket, touches the tinfoil, and he knows how she spent their time apart, and he knows this is all his fault.
Jody’s eyes can’t focus, and they roll around the room. Her breaths are fast and irregular as are her twitchy movements. She says, “You still have it, don’t you, Joe. You still have it . . . ” Her voice trails into whispers, and the words come too fast, fumbling over each other, letters placed inside of letters, making new sounds.
He says, “I do.”
“You didn’t forget to give the tooth back, you kept it on purpose, you made it all up, that story you told me is bullshit, all bullshit, you kept it on purpose. You didn’t forget, no way, no way you forgot.”
“I did forget, Jody.”
She laughs. Then says, “Look at this. Another note. Misery is manifold, Joe. It’s true. Steve wrote that on this letter over here, and stuck it in my English Lit book, it’s right over here. There. You wanna read it?” Jody picks up a slip of paper and drops it into the fire. Jody turns toward him, and her hair is frayed thread. She smiles, shows her meth mouth, her teeth, blackened and decayed, pieces missing, an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, jagged and eroded canyon boulders, each tooth or what was a tooth is a bombed and burnt-out building that cannot be repaired.
“You know what? A tooth fell out last night, Joe. It was cracked and loose, and I played with it, wiggled it around with my tongue and fingers, like we did when we were kids, I wiggled it, pulled on it, and it hurt a little but not much, nothing I couldn’t take, nothing I couldn’t deal with, and it just kinda popped out. Do you wanna see it, Joe? I saved it for you because you’re collecting teeth now, right?”
Joe needs to do something, say something, anything that will close her terrible mouth. “I don’t know why I kept the tooth. I don’t know why I do what I do, anymore.”
“You’re a junkie, just like me.” She smiles again, flashes her intimate, private devastation. “Like me, Joe. See? Get that fuckin’ tooth out of your pocket, you fucking junkie, the worst kind, the one who won’t ever admit there’s a problem even when the signs, the signs, the signs are there, big as fucking billboards, billboards in your pocket, fuck billboards, a headstone, headstone in your pocket, Joe, you have a headstone in your pocket, Joe. Joe, fucking, Joe, take it out, tell me what is says, what does it say? I know what it says but I want you to tell me, I want you to tell me tell me tell me tell me . . . ”
Joe says, “I’m sorry, Jody. I didn’t mean to do this to you, to us. I’d forgotten about him. Really, I did.”
He isn’t strong enough to tell her that he forgot on purpose and that he worked at it and that he was good at it, better than she was, and it’s why she’s like she is now and it’s why he’s like he is now. He wants to run out of her apartment, to run away, as he’s always been running away even if he never left home, where there’s still room enough to hide, there’s an all-encompassing desert in which to hide.
At the southwest edge of Nogales, there was a stretch of desert near the border—and at the time, almost twenty years ago, a generally unsupervised border—where local teens would ride their dirt bikes and mountain bikes during the day and then later reconvene at night to light fires and bottle rockets and drink cheap six-packs. Joe and Jody were only eight and not allowed to go to there, but they went anyway. They told each set of parents they were riding to the playground for the afternoon and then would ride their bikes to the edge of the desert.
It was late afternoon, the sun low and lazy in the west, a half-shut eye, and they were knee deep in their summer routine; climbing on rocks, turning over smaller stones looking for scorpions and small lizards, filling small burrows with sand and dried grass. Two high school-aged kids on dirt bikes showed up in their desert, kicking up dirt and filling the air with their engines’ whine. Jody pulled Joe behind a rock, their roles shifting from desert explorers to spies, skulking around and hiding behind boulders and saguaro cactus.
The dirt bikes were chipped-paint and dented metal. The riders didn’t wear helmets. One kid was white, short and pudgy, wore a sleeveless black T-shirt with a bald eagle that was all talons and beak, and he had a mop of unkempt, dark hair, like a dead tarantula on his head. The other teen was a blond beanpole with a crew cut, wearing a baggy white T-shirt with large, slashing letters and baggier shorts that hung down to his shins when he stood up on his pegs. The teens rode up a ridge that was one hundred yards or so away, a ridge that may or may not have been a part of Mexico, and then back down.
Joe and Jody didn’t say anything or do anything, afraid of the teens, but both secretly wished for the thrill of being caught, of having to jump on their bikes and then somehow outrun the dirt bikes, cutting through yards and short cuts that only they knew. They moved carefully, exchanging cactus for boulder, and crept closer to the ridge.
While tearing through another run, the chubby kid grabbed his left shoulder like it’d been stung, then swerved, and jumped off his bike, which landed on its side and slid halfway down the ridge. Three Mexican boys popped up from behind a boulder at the ridge’s crest; two kids threw rocks and a third pointed and shouted something, then they all took off running down the other side of the ridge. The blond sped over and helped get his friend’s bike back on its wheels. Their conversation was animated and brief. The bikes’ engines were too loud for Jody and Joe to hear anything.
The teens went over the ridge. Jody pulled Joe from out of their hiding spot and said, “Come on!” She ran ahead, and he followed her up the ridge. They stopped at the top and could see everything below.
The three boys alternated fleeing with throwing their small stones at the circling dirt bikes. The teens swore and shouted epithets from the top of their mechanical steeds, and they both cradled a rock in the crook of one arm. The smallest and presumably the youngest trailed far behind the other two retreating
boys. The teens focused on the straggler, tightening their circle, revving their engines and spraying dirt on the boy with their spinning, angry tires. The boy was trapped and crying, and scrambled onto a large, jagged boulder. He shouted to his friends, cupping his hands over his small mouth, but they hadn’t stopped running, were too far ahead to hear his pleas. The chubby kid, the one with the eagle T-shirt, threw his rock and hit the boy in the back of his thigh. There wasn’t much behind the throw, but the boy lost his balance, windmilled his arms, and fell off, behind the craggy rock, out of view of Jody and Joe.
The teens didn’t stop to investigate. They tightened their formation, parallel to each other, shared an awkward high-five, and rode triumphantly back up the ridge. Joe and Jody crouched, praying they wouldn’t be seen, or they’d be next, chased down the ridge, into Mexico, and then knocked off a boulder, but the teens didn’t see them and didn’t stop. They sped away, out of the sand, and onto the main drag and out of sight.
Silence, the voice of the desert, replaced the screaming boys and dirt bikes. Joe and Jody listened and watched for a sign from the boy who fell and there was none. They waited. The sun drooped lower in the west. The other two boys did not come back for their friend.
Jody and Joe climbed down the ridge. They crept behind the jagged boulder and found his body, lying adjacent to the flat rock upon which he landed. The boy looked like Joe and the boy looked like Jody, but only smaller, younger. The left side of his head was dented, caved-in, and was missing a flap of scalp. His left arm was held out stiffly and twitched, beating like one wing of a broken hummingbird. The lower half of his face had crumbled, ice cream melting over a cone. He was breathing, but irregularly. They crouched, hands over their mouths, but not over their eyes. His chest inflated sharply, then deflated slowly, a sagging balloon. The right side of his face was perfect, asleep. His left eye was swollen shut, or missing. It was hard to know for sure with the orbital socket broken, pushed in, along with the area around his temple. Everything leaked slowly. There were too many colors on his face. And his teeth, his teeth, they were baby teeth, as small as seeds, and they peppered the sand and dirt around his head, miniature headstones in the sand. Then there was one long sigh and the boy stopped breathing and his arm stopped moving.
His suspension is over but Joe does not report to the Tucson office in the morning. He manages to drive his Jeep into the Tohono-O’odham Reservation and into its desert despite his near total exhaustion, his being purposefully drunk, and the pain that fills his head. He deposits a mix of aspirin, ibuprofen, and little blue pills he took from Jody’s apartment into his dry, copper mouth, and grinds them up as best he can. It hurts to chew, but he won’t use his water yet; he needs to conserve it.
He stops the Jeep in approximately the same area where he helped rescue the Nicaraguan woman, but he didn’t save her. He knows he hasn’t saved anyone and can’t save anyone. This trip into the desert isn’t about saving anyone. He’s going to find Guillermo and give the man back his son’s tooth. Joe crawls out of his Jeep and walks, slowly, due south, toward the border. He doesn’t have a compass, but he thinks he knows where the border is.
Joe allows himself to remember that day in the desert. He remembers the slow walk back to their bikes, their pile of metal and chains, and the ride home. They didn’t tell anyone about what had happened, didn’t tell anyone about the boy. They were afraid of the teens, afraid people would think it was their fault, afraid because they were only eight and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t tell anyone about their desert silence.
The sun is only beginning its climb in the east, but it’s midday hot. Joe’s pulse throbs in his temples and inside his cheeks. His backpack of meager supplies already feels too heavy.
There was never any word or news about the little boy. They did not go back over the ridge and to that boulder. They didn’t talk about it, didn’t make up stories about coyotes dragging the boy away, didn’t fool themselves into believing he was alive, didn’t discuss the possibilities or probabilities of the police finding him or the teens coming back for the body or the boy’s friends and family laying belated claim and bringing him back to Mexico. They didn’t turn the boy into a legend for the neighborhood kids, didn’t tell anyone that the boy might still be there. They agreed to forget their secret, bury it inside themselves, beneath as much passed time as they could.
Despite the heat and his headache, which is a fire inside his brain, Joe walks for hours until the sun is directly above him and discerning direction becomes impossible. He finds a Desert Ironwood and sits under its thin canopy, desperate for shade. Half of his water supply is already gone. Joe takes off his small backpack, drinks, and again goes back to that day all those years ago in another part of the same desert. Joe remembers the urge to pick up the boy’s teeth, those headstones, and put them in his pocket, an urge as inexplicable now as it was then.
There are teeth in his pocket now; a small one lovingly wrapped in tinfoil, and another tooth, it’s adult and big and ugly with roots like talons, and that tooth is not wrapped in tinfoil or anything that would protect it. Neither tooth is his.
Joe fights waves of dizziness and nausea. His fistful of pills isn’t helping. His gums are still bleeding and his right bicuspid is loose. If he pushes on the tooth with enough force there’s a wet sucking sound inside his mouth. There are pliers in his backpack. Earlier this morning, the pain was too much. Unlike Jody, he couldn’t deal with the pain, to where it went, and he stopped pulling on the tooth. He’ll try the pliers again later, maybe when the sun goes down and when the pills kick in.
Joe falls in and out of sleep throughout the afternoon and the temperature begins to drop. Maybe a quarter of a mile beyond his tree is a ridge, and just beyond that ridge is Mexico, he’s sure of it, and despite everything, he’s sure he can make it over that ridge. And maybe he’ll be strong enough to make it through the desert, his desert, and give back the teeth.
About the Author
Paul Tremblay is the author of the novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland, the fiction collections In the Mean Time and Compositions for the Young and Old, and the novellas The Harlequin & The Train and City Pier: Above and Below.
His fiction has appeared in Razor Magazine, Last Pentacle of the Sun, and Best American Fantasy 3.
He has served as fiction editor of ChiZine, as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and as co-editor of the anthologies Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom.
Story Notes
To each his or her own nightmare.
The tooth in this story casts both Joe and Jody into personal nightmares. Might give you a nightmare or two as well.
On a completely different nightmare-note, S. Baring Gould, published a story in 1905 called “Dead Man’s Teeth.” The narrator, a quarryman, innocently comes across a skeleton. As he suffers from toothache and believes a dead man’s tooth will cure the pain, he takes a tooth. The tooth, however, gives the man—an upright, working class, teetotaler—three nights of terrifying nightmares. The first night he dreams he is wearing “a red coat, and galloping after the hounds”; the next dream involves drinking, swearing, and kissing a barmaid. In the final and most ghastly nightmare he finds himself voting Conservative. He gets rid of the tooth and is never again haunted by the “spirit of unrighteousness and drinking and Consarvatism [sic].”
THE COLDEST GIRL IN COLDTOWN
HOLLY BLACK
Matilda was drunk, but then she was always drunk anymore. Dizzy drunk. Stumbling drunk. Stupid drunk. Whatever kind of drunk she could get.
The man she stood with snaked his hand around her back, warm fingers digging into her side as he pulled her closer. He and his friend with the open-necked shirt grinned down at her like underage equaled dumb, and dumb equaled gullible enough to sleep with them.
She thought they might just be right.
“You want to have a party back at my place?” the man asked. He’d told her his name was Mark, but his friend kept slipping up an
d calling him by a name that started with a D. Maybe Dan or Dave. They had been smuggling her drinks from the bar whenever they went outside to smoke—drinks mixed sickly sweet that dripped down her throat like candy.
“Sure,” she said, grinding her cigarette against the brick wall. She missed the hot ash in her hand, but concentrated on the alcoholic numbness turning her limbs to lead. Smiled. “Can we pick up more beer?”
They exchanged an obnoxious glance she pretended not to notice. The friend—he called himself Ben—looked at her glassy eyes and her cold-flushed cheeks. Her sloppy hair. He probably made guesses about a troubled home life. She hoped so.
“You’re not going to get sick on us?” he asked. Just out of the hot bar, beads of sweat had collected in the hollow of his throat. The skin shimmered with each swallow.
She shook her head to stop staring. “I’m barely tipsy,” she lied.
“I’ve got plenty of stuff back at my place,” said MarkDanDave. Mardave, Matilda thought and giggled.
“Buy me a 40,” she said. She knew it was stupid to go with them, but it was even stupider if she sobered up. “One of those wine coolers. They have them at the bodega on the corner. Otherwise, no party.”
Both of the guys laughed. She tried to laugh with them even though she knew she wasn’t included in the joke. She was the joke. The trashy little slut. The girl who can be bought for a big fat wine cooler and three cranberry-and-vodkas.
“Okay, okay,” said Mardave.
They walked down the street and she found herself leaning easily into the heat of their bodies, inhaling the sweat and iron scent. It would be easy for her to close her eyes and pretend Mardave was someone else, someone she wanted to be touched by, but she wouldn’t let herself soil her memories of Julian.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 23