“Yeah, thought so,” Richard announced while still peering into John’s mouth. “Start of a cavity that could go nasty there.”
All John could do was mutter a strangled “Damn it.”
“I can take care of that nice and quick,” Richard continued, sitting back up and rubbing his hands on his apron. Gone were the days of latex gloves and masks, the few in the town’s supply reserved for major surgeries only. “Drill that sucker out in five minutes and pack a filling into it.”
John looked at him wide eyed.
“Compromise with ya, John. Let me fill that before it goes bad, and you get off free until tomorrow with the bad one. Otherwise, I go to Makala, and she lays some mandatory treatment order on you as the public health official.”
John glared angrily at Richard for pulling that trump card and finally nodded a reluctant agreement.
Richard smiled, and whistling, he went over to the boiling pot, tossed in the instrument he had been using to probe John, and pulled out several others with tongs. John tried to look the other way as Richard pushed the foot-powered drill up alongside the chair and clamped a drill bit in.
It was yet another reason why, before the Day, John would shake his head when folks waxed too enthusiastically about the alleged beauty of living in the nineteenth century. They never thought about medicine and sanitation, let alone dentistry.
Richard pulled out a rubberized bag from under a counter. It looked like an oversized balloon with a nozzle on the end.
“I’ll open the tap on this,” Richard said with a grin. “You take a good deep breath in. Nitrous will chill you out for a few minutes.”
Richard stuck the nozzle into John’s mouth and then opened the valve.
“Go for it,” Richard said, and he did have a bit of a maniacal grin as John breathed in deeply.
Within seconds, it hit, and John actually did feel mellowed out, even giddy, as Richard closed the valve, put the bag down, swung the old-fashioned drill around in front of John, and started to pedal furiously. There was a low humming as the oiled cables spun in their sprockets, the drill bit spinning. Richard moved quickly, prying John’s mouth open and pushing the drill bit down on to the cavity.
John felt like his entire head was vibrating, the sound of the drill bit flashing him back to early childhood, a dreaded dentist who had yet to go high tech and used an old-fashioned cable-driven drill, but at least that one was electrically powered.
For the first minute or so, it really didn’t bother him; in fact, he was tempted to crack a joke. There was pain within seconds, but for a blessed moment, he really didn’t care. It was strange how nitrous allowed one to feel pain but not care about it.
And then it hit. The gulp of nitrous was wearing off, the treadle-powered drill was setting up an awful racket, he felt like his mouth was vibrating apart, and the pain was building.
He started to gasp, waving his arm for Richard to stop.
“Hang in there, John, just another minute—almost got it all.”
Gone was the electrical-powered suction tube. John’s mouth was filling up with saliva and drilled-out bits of tooth, and it smelled like something was burning. He began to gag, waving frantically for Richard to back off.
Richard pulled the drill out and held up an old-fashioned spittoon, John gagging, spitting, and cursing.
“Think I got it all,” Richard stated.
“Think you got it all?” John cried.
“Well, you were putting on such a show there.”
“You’re damn right. I swear you’re a sadist, Richard.”
Richard grinned. “I’ll pack it with a filling, and we’re done.”
There was no argument; John couldn’t very well walk out with a hole in his tooth on top of the other one that was throbbing away.
Richard opened a drawer in the old-fashioned, white-enamel-topped table behind him, drew out a tissue-thin sheet of gold, clipped off a small piece, gingerly rolled it up, and then worked it with a miniature-sized jeweler’s hammer, turning it over and over. He finally picked it up with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a petri dish filled with moonshine that served as an antiseptic wash.
“Now rinse good. Make sure the stuff gets into that tooth, and it’s okay to swallow.”
Richard handed him a mason jar of clear white lightning, and John did as ordered, nearly yelping with pain as the high-test moonshine swirled around his aching tooth as well as the one that Richard had drilled. He so wanted to swallow, but thoughts of the town meeting to come caused him to spit it out into the bucket, though Richard was not above a quick swig for himself before getting back to work, fishing the gold filling out of its antiseptic wash. After another agonizing minute, he had it firmly worked into the drilled-out hole.
“There. All done,” Richard announced proudly. “Don’t chew on that for a few days. If it starts to get infected, get in here, and I definitely expect you back in here in another day so I can get that rotting tooth out of you before it really goes bad. We can’t fool around with those things the way we used to. Remember old man Parker died last month from a tooth infection.”
John could only nod. Now both sides of his mouth hurt.
“How much do I owe you?” he muttered, standing up.
“Let’s see, one drilling, one filling with gold foil… make that a buck in silver; that covers the cost of the gold more than anything else. We’ll say a buck in silver or twenty rounds of ammo—prefer .22.”
John fished into his pocket and pulled out a well-worn Barber quarter and two Mercury dimes. Over the previous year, silver money, hoarded by more than a few before the Day, had started to slip back into circulation as money that was accepted by nearly all.
“All I got on me. Can I pay you the rest tomorrow?”
“Yup, but that tooth pull, that’ll be an extra fifty cents,” Richard said with a smile. “Only twenty-five cents if you want to skip the ether.”
“Yeah, right.” John sighed. “I’ll be back tomorrow and pay you the rest then, along with the extra two bits for ether when you pull the tooth out. Okay?”
Richard smiled and nodded. “You’d definitely better be back in, John. It’s no joking matter, and you know that better than most. Stupid to die because of a lousy tooth after all you’ve been through.”
John all but fled the office and then turned to walk up Cherry Street, pausing to look in nostalgically at the used bookstore, a favorite haunt before the Day. The owner had died in the battle with the Posse. It had been turned into a borrowing library by his friend’s widow—bring a book in to trade for one taken out—and it thus continued to flourish, but he missed his old friend, the games of chess over coffee, a world where he did not face the situation waiting just around the corner. A sign hung on the door: “Closed for the town meeting. Chess tournament later tonight.”
Nearly half a thousand had shown up in the town square for the hastily called gathering to find out the news about John’s visit to the new federal administrator. The pig roast lent a slightly festive air to the occasion; it wasn’t every day—or even week or month—when an open meal was offered to the town without requirement of ration cards, and more than a few showed for the roasted pork and then wandered off if their families were not directly affected by the draft.
Phil, a favorite in the town where everyone still spoke nostalgically of his legendary barbecue restaurant, had presided over the roasting. He complained that he should have been given a week or so to properly prepare the wild boar, but John had left word with him to do his best and have it ready by six for the sake of all, which he faithfully did. The fire pit had been burning all day, Phil butchering off hunks of meat from the wild boar and just roasting them over the fire, muttering throughout the hot day that if given the time, he could have made the six-hundred-pound boar into a real feast. The meat was tough but at least edible, and any meat, especially in midspring, was welcome after the long, lean days of winter.