A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  I was glad it was a slow day. I went to my office and poured two fingers of bourbon from the bottle I kept in the bottom drawer. I downed it in a single swallow. I looked at my framed degree from dental school hanging on the wall. I had counted on becoming wealthy here in Dodge. Now I was ruining it.

  When I heard the front door open, I hesitated going out. It was frightening not to be able to control your words. But I had to defeat this malady. I had to overcome it by sheer force of will. I forced myself into the anteroom.

  It was empty. I went into the drilling room and I found a familiar figure sitting in the chair. We played draw poker most nights over at the Forty-Niner Saloon. I wouldn’t say we were friends in the truest sense of the word, but I was the closest thing he had to a friend besides his brother.

  Wyatt Earp slouched in the chair, helping himself to my nitrous oxide.

  Wyatt giggled. “Got a toothache, Doc!”

  “Don’t overdue that sweet air, Wyatt,” I said. “I have to send all the way to Chicago for more.”

  The smile wavered off and on again. “You’ll be going to Chicago and staying there if you try anymore funny business with Miss Bonnie Porter.”

  I remembered then that Wyatt had been keeping company with the widow Porter lately.

  “I never touched her!”

  “But you said some lewd and obscene things that I’d jail you for if you weren’t a friend. She’s a fine example of young Kansas womanhood and should not be exposed to such behavior.”

  “She’s a tease waiting to blossom into a tart,” I said.

  Wyatt looked at me with a strange expression. He wanted to frown but the nitrous oxide wouldn’t let him.

  “I won’t have you speak that way about the daughter of a woman for whom I harbor deep feelings.”

  “You harbor deep feelings for the daughter and you don’t want anyone to get to Bonnie before you! And as for the widow Porter, your only deep feelings are for her bank account!”

  His half-smile finally disappeared. “Hey, now wait a minute, Doc. I really love that woman!”

  I laughed. “You must think I’m as stupid as you are!”

  (What was I saying? Wyatt had four inches and a good hundred pounds over me! I wanted to vomit!)

  “I think you might be a stupid dead man, Doc, if you don’t watch what you’re saying,” he said menacingly as he straightened up from the chair.

  I tried to stop myself but couldn’t. My mouth ran on.

  “Come on, Wyatt. You’re fleecing her.”

  “It’s true that I’m allowing her to invest in a couple of the mines that I own, but as a peace officer, I resent your implication that I’m involved in anything illegal.”

  “You’re a disgrace to the badge, Wyatt. People laugh at you—behind your back, of course, because they know if they get on your wrong side they’ll wind up in jail on some trumped-up charge, or backshot by your brother Virgil!”

  He was stepping toward me, his right hand balled into a fist. I broke out in cold sweat and felt my bladder try to empty. I probably could have stopped him there with a few rational words, or even a quick confession of abject fear. I actually felt the words forming in my mouth as he raised his arm to punch me—

  —and that was when the odor hit me.

  Standing helpless before him as he loomed over me, I listened in horror as my voice said:

  “God! You smell, too! Did it ever occur to you to take a bath before—?”

  When I woke up on the floor, Wyatt was gone. I staggered to my feet. My jaw ached and my upper lip was swelling. When the room stopped tilting back and forth, I stumbled into the waiting room.

  This was a nightmare! If I kept insulting everyone who came to my office, I’d have to close my practice. What would I do? I was already twenty-six and not good for much else besides gambling and shooting. I wasn’t a bad shot. Maybe I could take over Earp’s job when he left for Tombstone next year.

  An odd-looking figure entered then. A skinny old squaw with a hooked nose and dark, piercing eyes set in a face wrinkled like a raisin. That was all I could see of her. The rest of her was swathed in a dusty serape. There was a small red kerchief around her head.

  I knew her. Everybody in town knew her: Squaw Jones. She’d been married to an old white man, Aaron Jones, until he got drunk and trampled by a stagecoach a few years ago. Now she wandered in and out of town, selling charms and potions.

  “I see Dr. Holliday has bad times,” Squaw Jones said. “What is problem?”

  “That’s what I’m supposed to say!” I shouted. “I’m the doctor here!”

  “Is your words? You say what wish to hide inside?”

  I was shocked. “Yes! How did you know?”

  “Squaw smell bad medicine when she pass.”

  “Bad medicine?”

  “You have curse.”

  “I am well aware of that!”

  “Squaw Jones can help. Know of these things. You victim of curse of Untethered Tongue. Very bad medicine.”

  “You’re serious? You’re talking about a curse, like the evil eye or something like that?”

  “Much worse.”

  “I feel bad enough already. Don’t try to make me feel stupid, too!”

  “You will see, Dr. Holliday,” she said, reaching for the door handle. “You will see. And then you will come to Squaw Jones.”

  “I sincerely doubt it.”

  “Remember these words. When find man with missing piece, you find enemy.”

  “I haven’t got any enemies!”

  “It could be friend.”

  “I haven’t got any of those, either! At least not after this morning!”

  “Remember Squaw Jones,” she said as she shuffled out the door. “You will need her.”

  That’ll be the day, I thought. I didn’t need an Indian. I needed another drink.

  The next few days recapitulated the events of that morning: I insulted and alienated each member of a steadily dwindling flow of patients. But at least no one punched me.

  As I sat and looked out the front window of my empty waiting room, I noticed Mrs. Duluth waddling along the boardwalk. She turned into the doorway of the new dentist who had come into town a few months ago. Dr. James Elliot. He had been starving. Now he had Mrs. Duluth. Glumly, I wondered how many other patients I was driving to him.

  The waiting room door opened and there was Squaw Jones again.

  “Squaw can come in?”

  I motioned her forward. Why not? I had plenty of time on my hands.

  Squaw Jones looked the same as she had days ago—a stick figure swathed in a dirty serape. Her bright, beady eyes swept the barren waiting room. I thought I detected a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth, but it was hard to be sure amid all her wrinkles.

  “Curse of Untethered Tongue continue, yes?”

  “Its not a curse,” I said. “Just a little problem I have to resolve. I don’t believe in curses.”

  She looked me in the eye. There was no doubt about the smile now.

  “You could have sent squaw away,” she said. “But you chose to see her.”

  I knew right then I was dealing with a sly old squaw.

  “I’m a man of science,” I told her. “A dentist. What do you want from me?

  “Squaw wants only to help.”

  “For a price, I’m sure.”

  Her shrug was elaborate. “Must clothe this body. Must eat.”

  “This wouldn’t be blackmail, would it?”

  “Dr. Holliday!” she said, puffing herself up. “Squaw is like you. Have medicine to sell—like you. Have honor.”

  “That’s not the point. Even granting the existence of such a thing as a curse, I can’t imagine anyone who dislikes me enough—before this week, that is—to place a curse on me.”

  “Unhappy patient, maybe?”

  That was all too possible, what with all the gold fillings I’d yanked from people’s mouths while they were unconscious in the chair. But someone like that would
go to Wyatt first.

  “I can’t image what complaint a patient of mine could have.” (I almost choked on that one.)

  “Enemy?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Someone want to steal your medicine?”

  “You mean a competitor? Well, there is one of those. There seems to be an increasing flow of new dentists from the East.”

  “Who win from Dr. Holliday bad medicine?”

  “Well, Dr. Elliot is benefiting now, but . . .” I laughed. “No. It’s too absurd!”

  “May be him.”

  “Jim Elliot? Putting a curse on me so I’ll say things I don’t want to? Ridiculous!”

  “Curse of Untethered Tongue say what in heart. Perhaps Dr. Holliday not like his patients.”

  I said, “Look, I’m very busy right now—”

  “Bad medicine always help someone.”

  I felt the first twinges of uneasiness. This whole idea was absurd! And yet . . .

  I turned and found Squaw Jones grinning at me with crooked yellow teeth. She said, “Find man with missing piece.”

  “You could use a good dentist,” I said.

  Around supper time, I was at my usual table in the Forty-Niner, alone, nursing a whiskey, shuffling a deck of cards. I dared not play for fear that I would tell everyone what was in my hand at any moment. My fingers froze in mid-shuffle when Dr. Elliot walked in.

  I watched him for a few moments. As much as my mind rebelled against the concept of such a thing as a curse, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. Could this mild-looking fellow dentist have actually placed a curse on my practice? The more I thought about it here amid the smells and laughter of the cowhands, the stage drivers, the gamblers, and the plain old riffraff, the more laughable it became.

  I wandered over to where he stood. He had a round face made wider by bushy sideburns. He looked tired. Why not? He had been drilling the teeth of my former patients all day.

  I was about to say hello when I noticed that he was missing a part of his left fifth digit—the terminal phalanx was gone! As I gaped at the shiny pink dome of fresh scar tissue where his first knuckle should have been, I heard Squaw Jones’s voice in my head:

  . . . Find man with missing piece . . .

  I was too shocked for subtlety.

  “Your finger! What happened to it?”

  He jumped at the sound of my voice and his complexion faded a couple of shades as he looked at me.

  “Hello, John. My finger? Why . . . why nothing happened to it. Why do you ask?”

  “I never noticed that you had a . . . piece missing before now. When did it happen?”

  He smiled, regaining his composure. “Oh, that. An old accident when I was in school back east. An industrial accident, you might say. I caught it in a defective drilling machine.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes from that foreshortened digit. “The scar tissue doesn’t look that old.”

  “An old injury, do you hear?” He was becoming agitated. “Very old. Very, very old!”

  The obvious freshness of the scar and Dr. Elliot’s overwrought behavior sent a stream of ice water running through my arteries.

  . . . When find man with missing piece, you find enemy . . .

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Very old. Of course.”

  He thrust his hand into his pocket.

  I fled the saloon and ran to the stable. I saddled my horse and rode out to where Squaw Jones made her camp.

  “So, now Dr. Holliday believe in curse of Untethered Tongue,” she said, nodding and smiling with smug satisfaction.

  “Not completely,” I said. “Let’s just say I disbelieve in it less than I did this afternoon.”

  Her tent was dim, the air inside steamy and layered with reminders of past meals, strangely spiced.

  “But I just can’t believe,” I said, “that one of my colleagues, a fellow dental practitioner, would be so unethical as to use such scurrilous means to build his practice at my expense!”

  “You would never do such thing?”

  “Never! I am an ethical practitioner!”

  “And what is your wish, Dr. Holliday?”

  “To have the curse—if that’s what it is—lifted.”

  “By this squaw?”

  “Of course. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Want thirteen ounces gold for ending Untethered Tongue.”

  “Thirteen ounces?”

  “This squaw know it very small price for saving Dr. Holliday’s honor, but her heart is touched by his misfortune.” She cleared her throat. “Please pay in metal, not bills.”

  I’d hidden away significantly more than that amount of gold from the fillings I’d removed over the years. But thirteen ounces!

  “I’d want a guarantee.”

  “Nothing sure in magic, Dr. Holliday.”

  I rose from my seat and started for the door. “I’m sorry. I can’t allow myself to be made into a fool.” I was bluffing. I bluffed well in poker, even back then, and had little doubt I could get her to back down. But she kept quiet, waiting until my hand closed on the doorknob before she spoke. She did not, however, say the words I was hoping for.

  “For three more ounces, maybe this squaw can turn bad medicine back on one who start it.”

  As I said before: A sly old bird. I had taken the bait, now she set the hook. A gamble of sixteen ounces, but suddenly I didn’t care. I wanted to get even.

  I returned to my chair.

  “Can you really do that?”

  She nodded. “If Dr. Holliday make sacrifice.”

  “Sacrifice? Wait a second here. I—”

  “Must have no fear.”

  “I’ll have no fear as long as I have my revenge.”

  She smiled and rubbed her hands together. “This is good.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Dr. Holliday must give three things. First thing closely touches maker of Untethered Tongue. You know who he is?”

  “Dr. Elliot,” I said. “No doubt about it. But just how ‘closely’ must this thing touch?”

  “Very close. Underclothes. Pen.”

  I considered that for a moment. How on earth was I going to handle that? How was I going to get ahold of a pair of Elliot’s underwear. Maybe a sock would do.

  No matter. I’d find a way.

  “What else do you need?”

  “Need small amount of Dr. Holliday’s liquid.”

  “Liquid?” This was getting more clichéd by the minute. “You mean blood?”

  She shook her head. She seemed embarrassed. “Fluid that only man can give.

  “I don’t understand—” I began. And then I did. “What kind of magic is this?”

  “Very, very old.”

  “Really. And what if I were a woman?”

  “We wait for your time of month.”

  “I see.” I found it difficult to believe that I was sitting here having a serious conversation about this.

  She cleared her throat again. “The sample—you can give soon?”

  I squared my shoulders. “Of course. And the third thing?”

  “This squaw will tell you when you bring first two.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but I couldn’t turn back now. I had stepped over the edge and had left the safe and sane world behind; I was now adrift in the world of the magical and the irrational. Squaw Jones’s world. I had to trust her as a guide.

  Early the next morning I was at the hotel next to my office eating eggs and potatoes. I’ve never liked eggs and potatoes, but I was there because Elliot was there. I raged silently as I watched him storing up on his nourishment before a busy day of drilling the teeth of my patients.

  I was in a black mood. I had been by his rooming house earlier but had found none of his laundry around. I’d been tempted to break into his quarters but was afraid I’d get caught. I couldn’t risk that, not with Wyatt still mad at me.

  As I watched him, he stirred his coffee and licked the spoon dry
before placing it on the tablecloth. A neat man. A fastidious man. I felt like running over and wringing his—

  The spoon.

  I almost shouted out loud. That’s it! The spoon! It had been in his mouth! What contact could be more “close” than being in someone’s mouth?

  I waited until he finished his meal and departed, then hurried over to his table, just beating the serving girl to it. She gave me a strange look as I darted in front of her and grabbed his spoon off the tray, but I simply continued on my way without a backward glance, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

  The hard part was over. I headed across the street to the back rooms at the Forty-Niner. Miss Lily would be waking up just about now. For a nominal fee, she’d help me obtain the second ingredient. This was the easy part.

  “Now what?” I said as I held out the spoon and a small cup of cloudy liquid to Squaw Jones.

  She made no move to take them from me. “You have gold?”

  “Yes.” I pulled a leather pouch from my coat pocket. “Sixteen ounces, as agreed.”

  I held my breath as she loosened the draw string and looked inside. My larcenous heart had prevailed on me to cheat her of her payment. No gold for Squaw Jones. Instead I’d made nuggets of lead and coated them with the gold colored material I used for my fake gold fillings. They wouldn’t stand close inspection.

  She looked inside, gauged the weight of the bag in her hand, then nodded.

  “Is good.” The pouch disappeared inside her serape and then she took the two ingredients from me. “Now this squaw make mix. Dr. Holliday wait outside.”

  “What about the third ingredient?”

  She smiled. “Soon, Dr. Holliday. Must be patient.”

  I stepped outside her tent. It was difficult to be patient knowing that Dr. Elliot was busy in his office working on my patients while my office door was locked.

  After what seemed like hours, Squaw Jones called me back in. I found her sitting there with a cup of steaming liquid.

  “Now time for third ingredient. The sacrifice.”

  “What sort of sacrifice?” I didn’t like the sound of this one bit.

  “Small part of you. Something Dr. Holliday will not miss, but something that will not grow back.”