Red in Tooth

by Joseph Hirsch

                    Who trusted God was love indeed
                          And love Creation's final law—
                          Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
                    With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—
                                --Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 56

Dr. Howard Gorse left his office at the Sourire Dental Clinic at seven thirty p.m., a little later than usual. He still wore his white lab coat, and in his right hand he carried a heavy old-fashioned black Gladstone bag.

The night was cool, the breeze soft and making the palms flutter. In the distance a white cruise ship tiered like a giant wedding cake was slowly pulling into Port Labadee.

The doctor shifted the Gladstone bag from his right hand to left, extracted the key fob from his right pants pocket, then pressed the button. A chirp sounded and the lights on his car—a champagne-colored Lexus coupe—emerged from their hideaway compartments, flickering on. He smiled; the car was a gift to self, a splurge to reward him after all he’d been through. A little flashier than his old Volvo, maybe, but he was trying to catch the eyes of the ladies around the resort town, and the Lexus would help.

After setting the Gladstone bag on the passenger seat, he settled himself behind the wheel. Adjusting the rearview mirror, he spotted the man in the black ski mask in the backseat too late. Something leather and shaped like a beavertail came for him and slapped the crown of his skull. It stung for a fraction of a second, and then there was nothing.

James Parkworth stood over the man tied fast to the heavy wooden chair. The detached garage was cramped, the walls made of thick coral. But the room provided all the space needed for his tools, some of which sat near-at-hand on a pushcart, others on the workbench.

“Ugh…” The dentist was coming to, blinking, wincing from the soreness. He struggled to lift his arms, found them bound fast with nylon rope. His eyes strayed to his big black bag—whoever’d conked him had brought it in from the car—then to the man standing over him.

James moved forward, almost straddling the dentist. The dentist didn’t like it—this reversal of the position between doctor and patient—and he squirmed some more.

“Howard Gorse?” James shook his head and sneered.

“Who are you?”   

James ignored the question. “You know, the detective I hired to find you told me people tended to keep the same initials even when assuming a new identity. I didn’t expect someone as smart as you to make that mistake, though. Especially considering all the other steps you took to cover your tracks. But I guess you’re not as smart as either of us thought you were. Huh, Herb?”

Herbert Goss, DDS, sighed. “What do you want?”

“Truthfully, I’m not sure. Answers to questions I haven’t even yet formulated, answers to questions I’m afraid to ask you. Obviously, I’ve fantasized a lot about torturing you for the last few years. Killing you, too, it should go without saying.”

Goss’s eyes strayed from his captor to the tools before fixing on the door.  

James stepped aside to let him get a better look. Let him see the exit, his potential salvation, his rescue so close yet so far away. “You can scream all you want. My son Nathan is next door in the rental house, playing his videogames at max volume.” James grew silent, cupped his hand to his ear, a mariner harkening to his beloved surf. Through the thick coral walls, faint sounds could be heard. Steel drum from the distant beach, bass blasting from speakers at an outdoor cabana bar a little further away, shouts for assistance between doubles playing volleyball. And nearer and louder, the barely audible echo of automatic gunfire passing between boys killing each other and respawning in an endless cycle on the virtual battlefield.  

“I’ve waited almost ten years for this, and nothing is going to interrupt us.”

Goss shook his head, winced again, blood leaking from his skull and soaking into his lab coat. “I don’t know what the hell you people want from me. I paid my debt to society.”

“Your debt?” James gritted his teeth so the enamel began to making cracking noises, threatening to scrape off.

Dr. Goss winced. “You really shouldn’t grit your teeth like that. It’s bad for the—”

James punched him in the nose. After a cartilaginous pop, a trickle of blood flowed, but nothing seemed broken yet.

“You did forty-five days in county jail after taking an Alford Plea. That’s it. And even then, you couldn’t admit what you did. You call that paying a debt?”

Dr. Goss opened his mouth, took a deep breath, lowered his head. Something theatric entered his bearing as he tried for the beatified mien of a persecuted saint.

James watched him, sure he was about to rehash the non-apology he’d given his victims in court. To proclaim once again that someone had set him up, that he was a victim of a conspiracy. He had performed this song and dance so often that it had become a pat routine, only the minor details varying from telling to telling. In the letter to the local fishwrap, he’d claimed to have been wronged by a dental hygienist whose romantic advances he’d spurned. In a letter to the Dental Board, he’d claimed to have been laid low by another dentist jealous of a whitening formula he’d patented. Somehow this hygienist / other dentist / etc. in all these tales always got ahold of his semen from a fertility clinic and squeezed it onto Dr. Goss’s patients. In their eyes, their ears, along their gumlines and between their teeth, in and upon sundry other parts of the body, all while the doctor wasn’t looking. Curing it dry and wiping off the excess to keep the patients from realizing what had happened when they woke up. Though of course some of the women had eventually figured it out…

James punched him in the nose again. This punch produced more of a stale bread crunch than a fibrous, wet pop. The nose had definitely broken this time, and it looked like a compound break, bits of white bone peeking through the red wetness.  

“It’s too bad,” James said, “that my wife Alaine isn’t here with me. She could certainly use a vacation. Neither is my older son Scotty. Would you like to hear what became of them, though?”

Dr. Goss tried to breathe through his nose, but his collapsed septum stopped him, a strange whistle wailing through the fissured bone. He took a gulp of air through his mouth, grimaced on an involuntary swallow of coppery blood, and said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re complaining about. I had two million dollars’ worth of insurance, and you were all well-compensated for your troubles.”

“Two million splits a lot of ways among thirty women, Herb, and therapy is expensive. So is eye surgery.”

Goss cocked his head, panic abating, replaced now by confusion, bloody brow furrowing. “Eye surgery?”

“It turns out that injecting semen into a woman’s eyes is a good way to cause non-age-related macular degeneration,” James said. “It’s not exactly hygienic and doesn’t mix well with the vitreous fluid. It took a couple years for what you did to finish doing damage, and once or twice it looked like the ophthalmologist was going to save her sight. But now Alaine is legally blind. Not only that, but toothless. What you did to her traumatized her so bad she can’t even bring herself to brush her teeth, let alone visit a dentist. She was so full of life and joy, so confident, and you couldn’t stand it. You made her a shut-in, who’s been in an assisted living facility for the last five years. I’m surprised she was even able to carry Nathan to term. As for Scotty… kids didn’t all have cellphones back then, and the internet wasn’t everywhere, but word got around anyway, especially after the trial started. And the playground taunts got started soon after that. ‘Scotty Splooge.’ ‘Hey, Scotty, is it true that stuff works as a leave-in conditioner to give your mom’s hair its special volume and bounce?’ ‘Mind if I add my DNA to the dentist’s?’”

James paused, clamped jaw loosening now to form an unexpected albeit fleeting smile. “But Scotty’s doing better these days. He wants to be a dentist if you can believe that, to undo the damage caused by scumbags like you. Maybe even help his mother get fitted for dentures. If she ever lets anyone near her mouth again!”

This time when James swung, Goss was ready and turned his head, catching this shot on his jaw. He saw a white flash, followed by blackness, and when he next awoke a new game was afoot.

In his hand, James held a pair of pliers so rusted they looked to have been salvaged from a shipwreck, maybe in nearby Port-au-Prince. He flicked the grooves of the teeth on the thing, gritty bits of rust sneaking beneath his fingernails. He twirled the tongs around slowly so the doctor could admire them. “Do you know what this is?”

The doctor shook his head, eyes fastened on the rusted teeth catching light from the garage’s single unshaded bulb.

“The Romans called it a Rhizagra. This is course only a replica but still an antique model. I’ve become something of a student of dentistry and its history over the last few years.”

James reached forward, patting the doctor’s trembling shoulder to stop his shaking, succeeding only in making him flinch. “My hand’s a bit unsteady since I haven’t had a drink yet today. I suppose you can guess why I’ve become a bit of a boozehound over the last few years.”

The broken nose left Goss no choice but to breathe through his mouth, and James easily jammed the tool down the man’s throat, pushing until he thumped the uvula with the rusted cutters and the doctor gagged.

After readjusting the pliers until they rested on the tongue, James spread the handles wide to force the man’s jaws apart, almost like a mouth brace. He had his pick of teeth, and selected one near the very back. “Do you know why they call them wisdom teeth, Doctor?”  

“Mmm. Nagh!”

“It’s because they arrive later in life, like wisdom. Of course, some of us go through life without acquiring any knowledge. Just using people for our own pleasure rather than learning what they have to teach us.”

“Mm-hmm, Ugh-gug.”  

James seized the tooth with the pliers, not yet pressing down with full force. It reminded him of having a walnut in the cracker, on the threshold of clamping the handles together to shatter the hull and expose the nutmeat within.

He squeezed, eyes closed as he pressed, meeting resistance but refusing to yield, muscles burning, near fatigue.

A crunch echoed through the room, the first break in the hard enamel, the seam growing into a larger fissure running clear through the crown.

The doctor released a scream higher in pitch than a newborn baby’s first upon entering the world.

Another, louder break sounded, and the Rhizagra slipped from James’s grasp. Immediately a blast of powdered enamel floated up toward the ceiling, the ivory-colored motes resembling a thousand tiny white gnats.

Goss let out another scream, this one so loud James wasn’t sure the thick coral walls or blaring videogame would be enough to muffle it.

Then the screams tapered into gurgles, and a spurt of warm blood flew from Goss’s mouth, hitting the floor in a spuming red freshet.   

“Hmm,” James said, a little embarrassed. “I wanted to extract the tooth, not crush it.”

He pulled the pliers free of the socket, their metal grooves trailing something long, thin, and red. It was a tangled and squamous line, dangling like a calamari tentacle, its other end still rooted inside the mouth.

Doctor Goss stared at the red filament of nerve tissue unwinding from his mouth. He blinked rapidly, eyes unbelieving and wide. The more James tugged on the nerve, the more Goss squealed and squirmed.

“Curious,” James said, still tugging the line repeatedly with a clinical detachment. “One end doesn’t seem to want to come out of the mouth, and the other’s stuck to my pliers.”

James tugged a final time, and the string snapped. The release of tension sent him sprawling so that he knocked over the doctor’s Gladstone bag, while the uprooted nerve flew across the room. It hit the far coral wall with a splat, then began sliding down to the floor, where it remained coiled on itself, a slimy red umbilicus.

Goss’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, leaving only whites in the sockets. His feet tapped the concrete rapidly, body overloaded by the pain signals flooding the brain and trying to discharge them. When the eyes returned to their sockets, they stared at a large syringe, almost like a turkey baster. Its clear plastic body contained some inscrutable sludge, blackish and slick, a swarm of leeches coiled around each other as if to mate. Their bodies were banded with jungle-green stripes interrupted by black eyespots, a psychedelic pattern suggesting Mother Nature had been under the influence of ayahuasca when fashioning them.

“These are Hirudo Hungarian leeches,” James said. “They come highly recommended on the website where I bought them.”

Dr. Goss closed his lips, tried shutting his mouth but screamed when one of his remaining wisdom teeth touched down on the mangled socket. James pushed the barrel of the syringe into the doctor’s shrieking mouth, blocking the noise. Depressing the plunger, James spoke while the leeches squirmed free of the clear plastic tube: “The natural analgesic should help with the soreness. They only feed twice a year, though, so don’t begrudge them if they overindulge a bit. I’ve heard they can actually swell to eight times their original size in a single session, so it might get crowded in there. If they get to be a bit too much, just go ahead and swallow one, and that should free up some room.”   

Dr. Goss gagged, spit, coughed, forcing a leech from either corner of his mouth and onto his cheeks. They slid toward the broken nose, dragged themselves and left behind trails of mucilage as they moved toward the oasis of gore puddled at the fracture site.

James set the empty syringe down on the cart next to the empty leech jar. “Now, where did I put that drill…”

He leaned over and began searching the shelves. Crouching down to check the bottom shelf, he noticed the little book that had fallen free of the Gladstone bag.

It was bound in black grosgrain, a ribbon-like, jet funeral crepe for a bookmark nestled inside, its pages edged in gold gilt, like a fancy Bible.

James took the book in hand and stood. “What’s this?”

He opened the book’s brass snaps and thumbed through pages.

The margins of every line were crowded end to end with symbols written in black ballpoint pen, impressions near heavy enough to tear the paper. The inscrutable sigils clogged up not just the college-ruled lines, but the formerly white margins. “I asked you what the hell this is,” James said, waving the open book in the doctor’s face.

The doctor, despite his considerable agonies, could only smile.

The doctor coughed, then spat again, sending out a mouthful of blood. His spit missed the book, overshooting it only to smack James in the forehead.

A moment ago it would have driven James into a rage. But he couldn’t afford rage now. He needed the man.

“What is this?” James asked again, still waving the book before the doctor, ignoring the smear of blood on his face.

Goss laughed, which made him cough more, and he winced from the pain.  

James thumbed through the pages, one after another, nothing there but nominally sensical glyphs. He recognized the asterisks and exclamation points, but the other symbols might as well have been part of some spell in an esoteric rite. The dark and eyelike one he found especially disconcerting, almost satanic.

“What is this?” James asked, again, louder this time.

The doctor, after finishing his coughing spell, said, “You were telling the truth…” His voice was fainter now; it might have been due to blood loss, or maybe it was the sacred nature of the book making him whisper in hushed, almost reverent tones.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t just want revenge. You want information.”

“You’re goddamn right!” James screamed. “So go ahead and tell me. Statute of Limitations has expired, and even if it hasn’t, what are you afraid of? Getting another forty-five days in jail? I’m sure you can island hop, get another fake passport, bribe another ministry to give you a fresh license to practice. Maybe start over in the Bahamas this time.”

Doctor Goss shook his head. “We both know I’m not leaving this room alive.”

“Then tell me so we can stop all this.” James pointed at the tools on the cart. “I’ll make it quick. You have my word. I swear on the lives of my sons.”

A twitch pulled the right side of the doctor’s face, and James thought he might be suppressing a smile. Which was odd, considering the man had been quite content to laugh openly in his face until now.  

“Please,” James said. He tried to pick leeches away from the doctor’s smashed nose, but it was hard work. Their teeth were sunk deep, glued fast by blood and slime. He gave up on the effort, said, “I’ll overdose you on insulin. I brought more than enough for myself, and I’ve already studied how to administer it painlessly. For Alaine.”

The doctor dropped his head, exhaled, grew still.

“Doctor Goss?” James asked. The bastard couldn’t be dead, not yet.

The doctor lifted his head, eyes lit by a newfound resolve as he fixed his stare on James. “Hold the book up.”

James lifted the book a little higher, moving it until it was fully spotlit by the lightbulb.

“Turn the page.”

James did.

“Next page.” The doctor licked his lips, eyes fluttering left to right, speedreading now.

James kept turning, and the doctor’s eyes kept scanning, tongue repeatedly darting out to lick his blood-spattered lips, perhaps reliving the memory of each sweet violation.  

That had to be it, James was convinced. The unbreakable cipher must have listed the history of each woman’s session with Goss. Not just the violations, but probably more granular details about the time leading up to the defilement: small talk about the weather; boasts by the women about how well their kids were doing in school; details about their dental histories and confessions about their sweet tooths and occasional failures to floss. And then, after the women had undergone sedation, a list of the spots where the doctor had discreetly placed his seed.

Goss had likely hidden the book, buried it or snugged it in some safety deposit box to keep it from ever being entered into evidence at trial. It was probably everything to him, a crazy kind of curriculum vitae-cum-diary. Maybe there were even newer entries near the back, fresh ones from the Sourire Clinic. After all, men like him didn’t quit until someone made them. Killed them or imprisoned them forever.

“Stop,” Dr. Goss said.

James ceased to turn the pages.

“That’s it. I think that’s her. Alaine Pritchard-Parkworth?”

“Yes!” James had forgotten she sometimes used a hyphenated version of her name in professional settings.

“Brown hair,” the doctor continued. “Chestnut, streaked blonde probably from the sunlight, as it says here it was a hot summer when I met her.”

“Yes…”

 The brown was long-gone from her hair now, the natural blonde streaks also no more. These days her hair was a stark white from shock, an ill-tended pile sitting canted and disheveled on her head.

 “She came in for porcelain veneers,” the doctor said. “Showed chromogenic staining from a liking for red wine.”

“Mourvèdre,” James said, practically moaning the name of her preferred vintage, a pathetic lament like bovine lowing.

“It’s all coming back to me…” Dr. Goss said, laughing again.

“What?” James asked, gritting his teeth despite the doctor’s previous admonition not to.

“Milk teeth,” the doctor said, gloating now.

“Milk teeth,” James said. “What is that? What are you on about, you degenerate scumbag?”

The insult had no effect on Goss, his smile so wide now his eyeteeth showed, dyed pink with blood. “You know, they believed that babies got their first teeth from their mother’s milk. That’s why they called them milk teeth.”

The doctor’s eyes roved toward the door, less to seek escape than to look in the direction of the video game noises and their source, the aforementioned son. “You see, I didn’t just use the hypo on Number Eight’s hair or her gums. And I didn’t just use the needle on Number Eight’s eye.”

“Number Eight?! You mean my wife?!” James shouted. Referring to her by number rather than name must have been Goss’s way of depersonalizing his acts, turning the woman into an object, simply another lot in his catalogue. He likely considered himself not just a doctor, but an artist.

“Your son out there had some of my DNA mixed in with his breastmilk. Yes, I fixed the needle on the syringe and injected a bit of my seed into your lovely wife’s mammary gland.” The doctor squinted at another notation on the page. “She was a D cup according to my notes here. I detected a touch of silicon in the teat, which I hadn’t expected to find going in.” He looked at James now. “Were the implants her idea or yours?”  

James closed the book, tossed it to the ground. But the doctor went on despite the lack of a reference to guide him in the recitation. Perhaps he had the details committed to memory, or maybe he was just making it up now to simply torment James. But that James could never know for sure—no matter how much he tortured the man—meant the agony was now his to share with the doctor. Or maybe his to suffer alone.

 “You should feel honored,” Goss said. “For Number Eight was the only one to receive the ultimate gift.”

 James stood there, staked to the bloody floor, unable to speak.

“You see, after I injected her tit, I removed the needle again and went back to just using the hypo. I basted her womb, coating its walls, careful to make sure none remained on the mons Venus or pubic hair after I finished. Oh, she may have felt a little wetness down there when I was done. But like I said, it was a hot summer and the AC in my office wasn’t the best.” He shot James a wink. “Of course, things always get steamy after Dr. Goss sends the lovely ladies off to Lalaland.”

James clenched his fist, then forced his hand to release, remembering his promise to the doctor. That he had given his word, sworn on the lives of his sons.

His sons.

The doctor’s expression changed, smile gone, a plea entering his eyes. “Let me see him just once before I die. Please?”

“No,” James said, stunned, cold, this apparently the information he had wanted the whole time, having simply hidden that knowledge from himself until now…

Something alien, something other, had always been in Nathan’s eyes. That is, on the occasions when Nathan’s eyes were accessible. Those times were rare, as he stayed zonked out on videogames most of the time. But in his occasional nonvegetative states when nominal father and son did lock eyes, James had sensed it. The hint of another man’s thoughts, the taint of his alien seed.

It wasn’t the boy’s fault, but so much of life’s stain was unchosen, and this stain had to be cleaned.

“You can’t see him,” James said, tone softening as he turned, heading for the door, intent on getting the insulin from the medicine cabinet in the guesthouse bathroom. “I will, however, make you this one concession.”

The doctor sat there, waiting, tears forming in his eyes now, beautiful and crescent-shaped.

“I will bury you two together, side-by-side, in the same hole.”