Newborn Pink (Midland Tales Book 1) - Shawn Wayne Langhans

Newborn Pink (Midland Tales Book 1) - Shawn Wayne Langhans

Book excerpt

“Quap,” his temporomandibular joint said, quietly, while he accidentally gleeked his spittle on the dentist’s face shield.

“Okay, now hold that. Hold. Right there is perfect,” he said, ignoring the saliva sliding down the clear plastic separating Paulie Galamb and his dentist. Paulie tried hard to focus on the spit itself, and not the mole under the dentist’s left eye. It looked like a tiny inverted square tear or maybe the state of Indiana, painted freckle brown. He was not sure.

Thoughts of Indiana left his mind when the dentist poked something soft, something spongy. Something that was most certainly not made of tooth. Something certainly not wanting to be poked or prodded. Paulie made this clear by yelping under his breath and coughing the dentist’s hands from his mouth. For a moment, Paulie thought he heard the dentist whispering into his mouth, but he was not sure.

“Well, it’s not an infected pocket. In fact, there’s hardly a pocket at all. Mostly just the fresh regards of future scar tissue,” the dentist reassured him, placing one tool down and grabbing another. Paulie half-glanced at the metal tool in his hand and couldn’t help but imagine it as some kind of double-sided fishhook with a pen-sized metal rod between each stabbing implement. Was this the Gracey Curette or the Curved Sickle Scaler?

He only knew these names because before his visit he wanted something to distract him while this man fooled around in his mouth-hole or lack thereof. Earlier in the week he had borrowed a trivia book that only captured his attention when he flipped to a page about the various odd names of dental equipment. There he took it upon himself to learn the names of the tools of his mouth-hole doctor’s trade.

With one hand, the dentist stuffed the mouth mirror back in the deep-far-down area where his wisdom tooth used to sleep undisturbed for forty years before some unexpected pocket of pus formed and inflated and forced this man to pluck the sneaky bonus bones from his jaw. The infection had pushed on the slumbering wisdom tooth, which pushed on his molars, on his canines and incisors. For forty years, his teeth had been good enough for television, but after this muck-up, he was considering orthodontic assistance. Right now, he was considering pushing away the doctor, and leaving this place, but he knew the pain would only follow him home.

“However, I am also seeing no signs of scarring or tissue damage, which only concerns me,” he said, putting emphasis on the word ‘damage’ by poking him somewhere in the back half of his throat with the Curette or the Scaler, “because I am also not seeing any evidence that there ever was a wisdom tooth here.”

With his mouth once again dentist free, Paulie used it to form words with both consonants and vowels used in unison. “Well, that doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“You’re not wrong, Mr. Galamb. As I recall, I was the one that plucked that pesky poker out of you less than two weeks earlier.”

Paulie remembered. It had been less than two weeks. Nine days by his count. It was high on his list of his most painful experiences ever experienced in his forty-seven years of life. Worse than the double-clavicle break of sophomore year. Worse than his first and second hernia. Worse even, than his divorce five years earlier. For him anyway. He imagined Toni was doing just fine wherever she was in Central City at this point.

But the pain of having that damn tooth pulled nine days ago was not as bad as having his catheter being removed by his angry father when he was seventeen, after Paulie had drunkenly crashed his dad’s Volkswagen into his dad’s wood-working shop.

“Yeah, don’t remind me. After that, I called about the dry socket a few days later but that disappeared after four days. But then the swelling just never went down. I mean, how long does it usually take for this to heal?”

“Mr. Galamb, perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I am not seeing any signs that I pulled a tooth from your mouth. No scar tissue, no hole.”

“Then why am I feeling the same pressure still? I can feel it when I yawn, when I chew, when I swallow.”

Not that he had been chewing much lately. In nine days since he had his bastard wisdom tooth removed his diet had mostly consisted of blended meals. Swallowing had grown so painful that he had taken to eating like a duck, by staring up at a lightbulb while he poured the liquid meals down his gullet, trying to not choke and his spray his liquid food about while he did it.

It had been greatly affecting his work, his livelihood, as a food product tester.

Try to imagine testing a revolutionary new lab-grown meat product that had to be blended into a liquidy pulp just so you could judge it by its flavor and imagine the look on your boss’s face when he has to tell the lab-coats that the results were non-conclusive because you gagged on the slurry when you tried to swallow it. Sue Ellen, his supervisor, having to send him home because he couldn’t do his job.

Imagine the embarrassment you’d experience if your boss refused to allow you back to work until you saw a dentist again. Or a specialist. Whatever it would take to get those tastebuds back to tip-top shape.

Not that his pain affected his taste buds, no, he could still taste his pain.

The doctor put the back of his blue-gloved hand to Paulie’s forehead, “Well, you don’t seem to have a fever,” Do dentists use thermometers? “But I do believe the back of your jaw is quite swollen. I’m not sure if it’s your lymph nodes, no, too far back, or if maybe it’s a keloid. Most likely that,” he said without an air of certainty.

“What’s a keloid, doc?”

The doctor set his tools down on the tray, with Paulie being able to name the obvious Tartar Scraper next to the Dental Pick and Probe, next to the Mouth Mirror. Though he was still unsure whether that last one was a Gracey Curette or the Curved Sickle Scaler. The doctor turned his back on Paulie, took his face shield off, and changed his cloth mask underneath it.

“A keloid is, hm, essentially an angry piece of scar tissue. However, the lump over the area where your wisdom tooth had been pulled doesn’t look like your typical keloid. It’s, how do I say, larger than I am comfortable with. Normally I would expect to see a convex indentation or a slight divot. At the very least, I would expect to see the stitch marks.”

“But?”

“But here, I see nothing. And instead of convex, I am seeing concave. I see no evidence of stitches, no scars, just a mass,” said the dentist, grabbing a prescription pad and a pen from his pocket.

“A mass?” Paulie asked, while the dentist scrawled out something on the pad of paper.

“I believe it to be a tumor, Mr. Galamb. However I am afraid that this is not my area of expertise. An X-ray from me may confirm my suspicions, but beyond that I am of little help for you further. I am going to recommend you to a specialist, just to be sure.”

“What kind of specialist, Doctor?” Paulie asked, while staring at the freckle of Indiana under the dentist’s left eye.

“I think it best for you to see Dr. Fejes. He’s my wives’ oncologist. I think you should see him about this mass in your throat. Could be nothing. Could be benign. You never know until you get it checked out,” he said, handing Paulie a slip of paper. On the paper was the name, ‘Doctor Joseph Fejes, Oncologist’ followed by a phone number. Elsewhere on the paper was the phrase, ‘Medical Prescription Form’ and the letters ‘RX’ in the corner.

“Oncologist,” Paulie said solemnly. “That’s the cancer doctor right.”

The dentist used his foot to press the pedal on the dental engine, raising Paulie from the dead like some kind of ugly Frankenstein’s monster. “I’m afraid so. Now I don’t mean to worry you, Mr. Galamb, I just think you should see Dr. Fejes as a precaution. Could be nothing. Could just be a pesky keloid. Yes, I’m sure that’s all it is. I mean, I’m not sure. You should go see this man at your earliest convenience.”

When Paulie sat up, he felt and heard his stomach gurgle, which the dentist heard as well. Paulie tried to hide his discomfort, but it was wildly apparent. You can’t hide the Indiana birthmark any more than you can hide the fear in the face of a man who was just told “Maybe it’s cancer?” Nor can you hide the hunger of a growling belly from a man who just had his hands down your mouth.

In lieu of the gurgles heard, the dentist stuck his hand in his pocket and plucked out a tiny red lollipop. He held his hand out to Paulie who was busy putting his jacket on.

“No thank you, doc.”

“I insist. It’s a red one. Red ones are my very favorite flavor. It’ll cheer you up. Always works for me. I eat one of these every time I feel glum, and let me tell you in my line of work, that happens fairly often,” the dentist said, smiling. It seemed disingenuous. Paulie couldn’t help but appreciate how perfect this man’s teeth were, any more than he couldn’t help but glance at the freckled state of Indiana one last time before he left. Paulie reluctantly took the lollipop and made for the exit.

“Oh, one more thing, doctor,” Paulie said, wanting to ask the dentist why he found himself so sad so often, but he realized he had no place. Instead, he asked about the metal things the dentist had put in his mouth.

“Yes?”

“That last tool,” Paulie said, pointing at the small aluminum tray, “Was that a Gracey Curette or the Curved Sickle Scaler?”

The dentist gazed down at the tray of tools and used one gloved finger to stir them. As he swirled his finger around the sharp tools, moving them about in no particular order, he said “I really don’t know anymore, Mr. Galamb.”

Paulie quietly left without a farewell, while the dentist continued to move his single finger through the tray of metal dental tools, longingly. The dentist, he stared until he knew not what he was looking at. I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. Semantic satiation in the physical sense. When the door closed behind him, the dentist pulled out three red lollies, hastily unwrapped them, and bit down hard on the lot of them with his dentures.

***

Later that night the dentist would stop by the Ol’ Watering Hole for a drink or two or three with his good friend Tom. Tom Hedasky you probably knew from the ten o’clock news as Tornado Tom, a nickname earned by risking his life filming a twister back in his early days as a meteorologist. Together Tornado Tom and the dentist would probably not reflect on their dormitory days spent together nor the age difference between them nor would they talk about teeth or tornados.

Instead, they complained about their lives wasted, and their professions that most others hated. Nobody appreciated Tom for lying to them in front of a green screen, and nobody ever truly wanted to be lying in the dentist’s chair, while they lied about how much they flossed their teeth and gums.

Here, they sat together as old friends here in mutual understanding of one another’s self-loathing. These two men, they understood their roles in society. To be needed, but also that meant to be hated. Their professions were the crosses that they chose to bear.

The difference here was that the dentist was just getting off work, whereas the weatherman was due for work in an hour’s time. The dentist peered at his reflection in the amber beer mirror below him, looking past the State of Indiana, and thought of his last patient.

“Tom, today I worked on the ugliest man I ever saw again. A real doozy of a face. It’s haunting me right now.”

“Oh yeah? Tell me about him,” Tornado Tom said, looking at his own handsome face in his own amber beer. With the two of them staring at themselves, the dentist told the story of Paulie Galamb.

“He was a very honest man. That much can be said. He was among the very few to tell me he hasn’t flossed since college, and Tom, let me tell you, I believed him.” Thinking back to the stinking breath that no cloth mask or face shield could cover.

Somehow the dentist told details of this man that he had no right to know. Of where he lived, of how he lived, and that which lived inside him. Patiently the meteorologist listened while the dentist spun his yarn.

“You got a moment, Hedasky? Can I bend your ear for a moment?”

You got a moment, reader?