Chattery Teeth
Looking into the display case was like looking through a dirty pane of glass into the middle third of his boyhood, those years from seven to fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like this. Hogan leaned closer, forgetting the rising whine of the wind outside and the gritty spick-spack sound of sand hitting the windows. The case was full of fabulous junk, most of it undoubtedly made in Taiwan and Korea, but there was no doubt at all about the pick of the litter.
They were the largest Chattery Teeth he’d ever seen. They were also the only ones he’d ever seen with feet — big orange cartoon shoes with white spats. A real scream.
Hogan looked up at the fat woman behind the counter. She was wearing a tee-shirt that said NEVADA IS GOD’S COUNTRY on top (the words swelling and receding across her enormous breasts) and about an acre of jeans on the bottom. She was selling a pack of cigarettes to a pallid young man whose long blonde hair had been tied back in a ponytail with a sneaker shoelace. The young man, who had the face of an intelligent lab-rat, was paying in small change, counting it laboriously out of a grimy hand.
‘Pardon me, ma’am?’ Hogan asked.
She looked at him briefly, and then the back door banged open. A skinny man wearing a bandanna over his mouth and nose came in. The wind swirled desert grit around him in a cyclone and rattled the pin-up cutie on the Valvoline calendar thumb-tacked to the wall. The newcomer was pulling a handcart. Three wire-mesh cages were stacked on it. There was a tarantula in the one on top.
In the cages below it were a pair of rattlesnakes. They were coiling rapidly back and forth and shaking their rattles in agitation.
‘Shut the damn door, Scooter, was you born in a barn?’ the woman behind the counter bawled.
He glanced at her briefly, eyes red and irritated from the blowing sand. ‘Gimme a chance, woman! Can’t you see I got my hands full here? Ain’t you got eyes? Christ!’ He reached over the dolly and slammed the door. The dancing sand fell dead to the floor and he pulled the dolly toward the storeroom at the back, still muttering.
‘That the last of em?’ the woman asked.
‘All but Wolf.’ He pronounced it Woof. ‘I’m gonna stick him in the lean-to back of the gas-pumps.’
‘You ain’t not!’ the big woman retorted. ‘Wolfs our star attraction, in case you forgot. You get him in here. Radio says this is gonna get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.’
‘Just who do you think you’re foolin?’ The skinny man (her husband, Hogan supposed) stood looking at her with a kind of weary truculence, his hands on his hips. ‘Damn thing ain’t nothin but a Minnesota coydog, as anyone who took more’n half a look could plainly see.’
The wind gusted, moaning along the eaves of Scooter’s Grocery & Roadside Zoo, throwing sheaves of dry sand against the windows. It was getting worse, and Hogan could only hope he would be able to drive out of it. He had promised Lita and Jack he’d be home by seven, eight at the latest, and he was a man who liked to keep his promises.
‘Just take care of him,’ the big woman said, and turned irritably back to the rat-faced boy.
‘Ma’am?’ Hogan said again.
‘Just a minute, hold your water,’ Mrs. Scooter said. She spoke with the air of one who is all but drowning in impatient customers, although Hogan and the rat-faced boy were in fact the only ones present.
‘You’re a dime short, Sunny Jim,’ she told the blonde kid after a quick glance at the coins on the counter-top.
The boy regarded her with wide, innocent eyes. ‘I don’t suppose you’d trust me for it?’
‘I doubt if the Pope of Rome smokes Merit 100’s, but if he did, I wouldn’t trust him for it.’
The look of wide-eyed innocence disappeared. The rat-faced boy looked at her with an expression of sullen dislike for a moment (this expression looked much more at home on the kid’s face, Hogan thought), and then slowly began to investigate his pockets again.
Just forget it and get out of here, Hogan thought. You’ll never make it to LA by eight if you don’t get moving, windstorm or no windstorm. This is one of those places that have only two speeds — slow and stop. You got your gas and paid for it, so just count yourself ahead of the game and get back on the road before the storm gets any worse.
He almost followed his left-brain’s good advice . . . and then he looked at the Chattery Teeth in the display case again, the Chattery Teeth standing there on those big orange cartoon shoes. And white spats! They were the real killer. Jack would love them, his right brain told him. And tell the truth, Bill, old buddy; if it turns out Jack doesn’t want them, you do. You may see another set of Jumbo Chattery Teeth at some point in your life, any thing’s possible, but ones that also walk on big orange feet? Huh-uh. I really doubt it.
It was the right brain he listened to that time . . . and everything else followed.
The kid with the ponytail was still going through his pockets; the sullen expression on his face deepened each time he came up dry. Hogan was no fan of smoking — his father, a two-pack-aday man, had died of lung cancer — but he had visions of still waiting to be waited on an hour from now. ‘Hey! Kid!’
The kid looked around and Hogan flipped him a quarter.
‘Hey! Thanks, m’man!’
‘Think nothing of it.’
The kid concluded his transaction with the beefy Mrs. Scooter, put the cigarettes in one pocket, and dropped the remaining fifteen cents in another. He made no offer of the change to Hogan, who hadn’t really expected it. Boys and girls like this were legion these days — they cluttered the highways from coast to coast, blowing along like tumbleweeds. Perhaps they had always been there, but to Hogan the current breed seemed both unpleasant and a little scary, like the rattlers Scooter was now storing in the back room.
The snakes in piss-ant little roadside menageries like this one couldn’t kill you; their venom was milked twice a week and sold to clinics that made drugs with it. You could count on that just as you could count on the winos to show up at the local plasma bank every Tuesday and Thursday. But the snakes could still give you one hell of a painful bite if you got too close and then made them mad. That. Hogan thought, was what the current breed of road-kids had in common with them.
Mrs. Scooter came drifting down the counter, the words on her tee-shirt drifting up and down and side to side as she did. ‘Whatcha need?’ she asked.-Her tone was still truculent. The West had a reputation for friendliness, and during the twenty years he had spent selling there Hogan had
come to feel the reputation was more often than not deserved, but this woman had all the charm of a Brooklyn shopkeeper who has been stuck up three times in the last two weeks. Hogan supposed that her kind was becoming as much a part of the scene in the New West as the road-kids. Sad but true.
‘How much are these?’ Hogan asked, pointing through the dirty glass at what the sign identified as JUMBO CHATTERY TEETH — THEY WALK! The case was filled with novelty items —
Chinese finger-pullers, Pepper Gum, Dr. Wacky’s Sneezing Powder, cigarette loads (A Laff Riot! according to the package — Hogan guessed they were more likely a great way to get your teeth knocked out), X-ray glasses, plastic vomit (So Realistic!), joy-buzzers.
‘I dunno,’ Mrs. Scooter said. ‘Where’s the box, I wonder?’
The teeth were the only item in the case that wasn’t packaged, but they certainly were jumbo, Hogan thought — super-jumbo, in fact, five times the size of the sets of wind-up teeth which had so amused him as a kid growing up in Maine. Take away the joke feet and they would look like the teeth of some fallen Biblical giant — the cuspids were big white blocks and the canine teeth looked like tentpegs sunk in the improbably red plastic gums. A key jutted from one gum. The teeth were held together in a clench by a thick rubber band.
Mrs. Scooter blew the dust from the Chattery Teeth, then turned them over, looking on the soles of the orange shoes for a price sticker. She didn’t find one. ‘I don’t know,’ she said crossly, eyeing Hogan as if he might have taken the sticker off himself. ‘Only Scooter’d buy a piece of trash like this here. Been around since Noah got off the boat. I’ll have to ask him.’