Only the far voice of falling animals, the inconsequential distraction of merry fleas. His mouth worked, he let the backs of his trousers fan to the stove a moment, bent down once more and with blank face looked into the Indian’s pulsing gullet. A few quick movements and he had passed over the crushed strawberries on her breasts.
The elbow remained contracted, unbreakable and hard, tensed as with some nerve disorder, hooked in the invisible sling. He felt no tiredness in that passive arm hypnotically closed on the Indian’s head. It waited while the lively fingers of the other hand fished as into the mouth of a bottle and massaged. Once, twice, he pushed at the tooth, curiously, a squatted child pushing his finger into the ribs of a drowsing dog. With mathematical patience he tried its give: nothing, deep through the jaw. Then he stopped, cocked his ear toward her, suspicious, listening.
Emanations. With hovering hand this time interrupted, Leech became aware of the trick. The Indian, in a last bodily defense, slightly bulged some muscles, loosed others, and secreted from licentious scent spots and awakened nodes, a sensation of difference marvelous as anything he had ever seen. The captive, still watching him with unchanged eyes, generated like an octopus the ink of desire. He could see not even a garter, there were no words, not a gesture, but he knew his momentary pause was measured against some beating in her inward temples. A thorough discoloration, a pointed glowing of hidden skin for the old man, and it led him a few steps away, among the moistened ferns. She was waiting to see if he would strike.
“Ride for a fall, Finn,” outside there came a four footed whispering from the bronc stockade, “they’s burrs in that saddle!”
Cap Leech heard it. But he began.
He carried a face with the jaws clamped at his breast and against the weak spot, a freakish indentation, of his missing rib. The tooth crumbled. No bigger than the eye of a bird frozen to a twig, it splintered, broke apart, as he gauged with the tip of the instrument, worked with a strong twisting of the wrist. Leech applied a woodcarver’s rhythm to the crown and neck of the belated thirty-second tine. Now and then the metal, in its circular and steady thrust, touched her lip or knocked against her other teeth.
Often, out of earshot of lonely houses, he had picked miniature incisors from children with only the slightest bleeding, often he had lifted some powerless smooth stone from a senseless gum, but this was a tooth long since died crookedly, the snag shaped microscopic carrot nearly upside down. Behind him ash lumps rustled in the fire, amorphous gray flames walked with suction cups around the stove’s inward belly. From beyond the wagon came a sudden soprano quailing, a meaningless “yip, yip, yip,” the singing scream. But now, faced with the incomplete incision, having taken the liberty of nursing a flower of tubes from pubescent flesh, he longed only for extraction and the cautious, painful closing of her mouth.
He pulled and the lower half of the Mandan’s face followed the swing of his arm, then back again, elastic, cross-eyed, an abnormal craning of the skull to the will of its tormentor, stretched sightless over the shoulder with each plaguing timeless yawl. Leech pulled in waltz-like slow arcs, now breaking the pressures of motion to apply a series of lesser, sharp tugs which caused the Indian’s head to nod obstinately up and down and one knee, wide and soft, to fold slowly backward into the privy bronze stomach.
He pried between the overlapping rows with a firebrand. Small, impersonal fingers dipped in foraminous jelly. The ether can spilled into the girl’s lap, rolled on the wood. And Cap Leech, after the pincers slipped and marked a blood blister on the inside of her cheek, danced a few gnome-like steps, shuffled quickly, and held the stubborn bedeviled fragment up to the light.
“Outside.”