Lucky at Cards

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If it hadn’t been for the dentist, I would have headed on out of town. The guy had a two-room office in the old medical building on the main drag, and I saw him Monday and Wednesday and Friday of the first week I spent in town. It took him that long to cap a pair of incisors. It hurt like hell, but by the time he was through I was no longer afraid to smile in public.

“You look human again,” he said.

I arose from the chair and smiled at myself in the mirror above the sink. The teeth were as good as new. I turned and grinned at him.

“Now the girls won’t run away,” Sy Daniels said.

“You did a good job. They look great.”

In his reception room I stood smoking a cigarette while he used a pencil and paper to figure out how much I owed him.

Sy Daniels was somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with rounded features and bushy eyebrows and thick glasses. The most memorable thing about him was the taste of his fingers. He smoked more than most dentists I’d ever had anything to do with, and he smoked some special Turkish blend that tasted even worse than it smelled, and by the time I had gone to him three times I dreaded the taste of his fingers as much as the filling and capping.

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