Tooth

And tonight what was there for him to sample from the feast of knowledge?—if only his tooth weren’t killing him. You never knew. Step into a classroom, scan the blackboard, and there it is: a bit of sociology here: maybe a graph of the divorce rate (Heaven help us, a miracle any two people could live together in this day and age); the structure of the atom there, a marvel to behold. Every year a new particle, you could bank on it. Physicists splitting their brains all the way to infinity. … Or Miss Jinero’s Spanish lesson: a loving tongue—te amo, te amo. Some day he was going to make it to Mexico. … He had dreams of a warm climate, flashing wings of exotic birds, colors in the air. As soon as he reached the border, he’d dive right into the lingo: “¿Como está usted, amigo?” Drawings of cells. Three sexes for the paramecium. Who’d have thought? He bet it was still not known to the general public. And poetry—he was a lover of poetry: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” Ah, Claudius. With what he’d gleaned over the years, he could probably recite volumes.

Shenbel entered the classroom where Whitney held forth during the day—Great Books of the Western World. Before he moved the desks and swept the floor, he read the blackboard, as usual. Right now he needed a piece of learning powerful enough to take up his whole mind. A revelation. To carry him beyond the toothache that seemed to lift his eyeballs with its throbbing. He’d looked in the mirror the day before, surveying the line of damaged teeth he’d lived with over the years. Trouble again from an old grief to the upper jaw from the only fight in his life that had ever come to blows. Sometimes when it was very cold those teeth were like struck cymbals. Now he’d wait, as he’d done before, for the pain to subside: he was terrified of dentists, though he’d worked up his courage to go a few times since that night years ago when, more dead than alive, his mouth full of blood and at least one chip of tooth, he lay defeated on the floor of Worley’s Saloon. But this new trouble, if only it wouldn’t last, seemed to come from the root. Before he came to work, he’d tried to quell it with a rag soaked in whiskey and would have been glad to sit back in his ancient red velvet chair and soak himself as well. Three or four shots and tooth and brain would meet in mutual numbness, consciousness dropping away like eyesight. But they’d fire him—old Koontz, the engaging old weasel in the business office was just waiting to clap him on the back and say, “Rudy, boy, don’t you think it’s time to call it quits? Things have got to move forward, you know.” He didn’t dare give him an excuse.