THE GODDAMNED TOOTH FAIRY:

INTRODUCTION BY GORDON VAN GELDER

by Tina Kuzminski

Trying to select just one story for reprint is, it turns out, dreadfully hard for me. Even after picking two dozen stories for our forthcoming Best from F&SF anthology, I’ve still been waffling for months on this decision. Should I choose one of my many faves from my tenure as editor, like Lew Shiner’s “Primes,” Bill Spencer’s “The Essayist in the Wilderness,” or Claudia O’Keefe’s “Maze of Trees” (to name just three)?

Or should I reprint one of the stories that I remember most fondly from when I first started reading the magazine? Standouts in that list include Mike Reaves’s “Werewind,” Michael Shea’s “Polyphemus,” John Kessel’s “Another Orphan,” Damon Knight’s “Tarcan of the Hoboes,” and Phyllis Eisenstein’s “In the Western Tradition.” And Bob Leman’s “Feesters in the Lake.” And I still live by something I learned in Richard Cowper’s “Out There Where the Big Ships Go.”

And then there are the stories that have never been reprinted, the buried gems like Arthur Jean Cox’s “A Collector of Ambroses” or Brad Strickland’s “Oh Tin Man, Tin Man, There’s No Place Like Home” or Robert Abernathy’s “The Year 2000”—should I pick one of those? (Even now, almost a decade later, I’m still mad at myself for not reprinting that last one in our Jan. 2000 issue.)

I considered reprinting a science column from the Good Doctor. I thought about remembering departed friends like George Effinger and Damon Knight with “The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything” and “Watching Matthew.”

All right, all right. I know—if I like the magazine’s stories so much, I ought to buy the thing and print my favorites every month or two, right?

So anyway, when the time came to pick one, I kept thinking of this story. It ran in one of my favorite issues (Oct. 2000), it has never been reprinted, and I’ve always felt it’s one of those contemporary stories where the magic works—not just the fantastic element in the story, but the stuff you can’t explain, the special, undefinable something that settles inside you and doesn’t let go. The real magic.

Readers should know that the language is a bit coarse (as you might guess from the title), but it’s true to the characters.

Tina Kuzminski hasn’t published much since 2000—her best-known work, might be the chapter she contributed to the spoof novel, Atlanta Nights. However, she says she’s currently working on a fantasy series as well as a few shorter pieces.

In the course of swapping emails and doing some online searches, Tina and I both came across a post from March 2007 in which someone quoted a passage from “Tooth Fairy” and said she’d reflected on it a lot and it helped her decide to get her first tattoo. Tina said, “I was amazed that the story played a part in her decision to embrace her identity and embellish herself with something so meaningful to her.” I felt the same way; for me, knowing that this story connected with a reader in so meaningful a way matters more than all the Nebulas and Hugos and other trophies awarded to F&SF stories. Awards are nice, but the magic that passes between writer and reader, that’s what matters.

* * * *

The Goddamned Tooth Fairy by Tina Kuzminski

Callie’s got her hands in my face. Palms out, she’s making square frames. She squints at her compositions of my nose and mouth and eyes. I want to say, “Sweetheart, Daddy’s trying to look good for his first date since before you were born, so could you sit still and pretend you’re no trouble at all until I get the lady out the door?” Callie’s sitting on the kitchen table. Since I don’t mind when nobody’s here, I don’t say anything about that, either.

Iris is winding her purse tight on its long strap and letting it spin out the kinks, over and over, while she looks at Callie’s drawings taped on the fridge. Iris has real pretty brown hair, curly, but most of the time it’s covering up her face which is even prettier. Her purse bounces on a perfect calf, leading up stretchy, snug pants to a shirttail that doesn’t quite cover Iris’s round little ass.

“And you know what else we learned in Art today, Daddy? Daddy?”

Callie kicks me lightly in the knees. She always was a stickler about quality attention. Ma said I spoiled her, but I just said she was mine to spoil.

“What, honey?” I say. I’m probably taking a drubbing in the Devoted to Date category, but maybe I’ll pick up a few points on Is Kind to Children and Small Animals.

“Perspective.” Callie pronounces it carefully, proudly. She’s aware another pair of ears is listening, another potential member for a captive audience. “You put a dot in the middle of your paper. That’s where everything disappears. That’s where the horizon is and you draw these lines from the dot to the edge of your paper. You can make buildings and streets and trees and telephone poles and buses and clouds and people and they all get bigger and bigger and bigger the closer they get.”

I can tell she’s just getting warmed up.

“Sorry about this,” I say to Iris. “Can I get you a drink or something?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine,” Iris says.

Shawna’s late, which isn’t unusual, but I told her if she was late tonight I’d have her hide. Shawna takes care of Callie quite a bit on the weekend when Best offers as much as twelve bucks an hour.

Callie’s measuring tiny people, so small she can barely see them, with her fingers. Her straight blonde hair is sticking up in places like pampas grass. I smooth it down. She’s got Iris in the little box between thumbs and index fingers so she can watch Iris on the sly.

I met Iris at Best Telemarketing. Only place I could find quick work at last summer when I moved up here from Kentucky. Me and Callie left when she got out of second grade. More than a quarter century’s long enough to spend in one place, I think. Grew up in Powell County. Swore I’d never go back, but after my wife died, I took Callie and went home to Ma, stocked and bagged at her grocery store. At twenty-nine, I figured I was the oldest bag boy alive. I didn’t want to hit thirty, still working for Ma and living at home.

So I loaded everything we owned in my pickup and said I was going as far as it’d get me. Ma said I was wrecking Callie’s life. Ma had been saying that for years and Callie was the smartest child I’d ever seen, so I couldn’t see how I was that bad an influence. Give me a few more years ringing up groceries for every old woman in Slade saying, “I don’t want my bread on the bottom, now,” and I might be a right hindrance to myself and Callie.

The doorbell buzzes a couple minutes after I start grinding my teeth. I let Shawna in. She drops her backpack on the couch.

“Sorry, Mr. Blackburn, but Mom said if I didn’t wash the dishes now and then I wouldn’t be allowed to baby-sit no more for nobody and I got done with everything and she added these huge pots, but I hurried, Mr. Blackburn.”

What Shawna’s got to say depends on how much breath she has in her when she starts to say it. She’s fourteen and Callie loves her. She puts kitty and smiley and heart stickers on Callie’s shirts and lets Callie play with her makeup.

“That’s okay, Shawna,” I say. “Better late than never.”

She’s peeping around me to the kitchen, checking out Iris. Shawna’s eyes are opened wide behind her round, red frames.

“Your hair looks real nice today,” I say to Shawna.

Her hand immediately flies up to touch her hair, make sure it’s still there. “Thanks, Mr. Blackburn. Mom put relaxer in it for me last night. She says I got the stubbornest hair alive and no way is it gonna look like Loki Smoki.”

“You and your Ma did a great job,” I say.

I watch enough MTV to know what Loki Smoki looks like. Four big women, long black hair, sexy as hell. Me and Callie get cable for twenty-six dollars a month. That’s a lot on my budget, but we don’t get out much.

“Try and keep Callie out of trouble, Shawna. Me and Iris’ll be back around midnight and I’ll walk you home.”

Shawna just lives in the next apartment building over from us, but I always see to it she gets in her ma’s door if it’s after dark when I get back from Best.

Callie’s in the kitchen pestering Iris. Iris has on this belt that’s got a big shell for a buckle and Callie’s about to undress her to see the other side and make sure it’s real.

“Callie, leave Iris alone, for Pete’s sake.”

“What’d the tooth fairy leave for ya, Cal?” Shawna asks.

“Nothing!” Callie tattles on me.

I’d forgotten all about paying up last night. Told her the tooth fairy had to take time off from work like everybody else, that Callie must have hit one of the Fairy Holidays. I said if she tried it again tonight, she’d probably get overtime pay.

Iris is smiling. “It’s okay.”

She’s got her belt off and is showing it to Callie. The other side isn’t polished and that convinces Callie it’s a real shell. She’s impressed now with the polished side, a mixture of blues and greens and black.

“It’s called abalone,” Iris says.

“Ab ah loney,” Callie says, “and it really comes from the sea?”

“Well, I got it at the mall, but before that I’m sure it came from the sea.”

“Let Iris get dressed, honey. We’re gonna be late.”

Iris is driving. Her car’s parked on the street, taking two parking spots. It’s a gold LTD, about a ‘78. My pickup’s even older, a ‘72 Chevy, and it hasn’t give out yet, but I got so bored crossing Illinois and Iowa that I stopped in Omaha anyhow.

I wait till Iris puts on her seat belt to put mine on. If she didn’t wear one, I didn’t want to look like I was scared of her driving.

“You’ve never been to the track before?” she asks.

I’m pretty sure she asked me that earlier today when we got off work, but I’m no great shakes at conversation, either. “Nope, never have been. I’d never heard of racing dogs before I saw them one night on TV.”

“They play the results every night except Mondays on 42,” she says.

“You go a lot?”

Iris shakes her head and lodges some more hair over her face. I want to brush it back with my hand.

“No, not that much,” she says. “Thursdays, sometimes. That’s half-price night.”

April’s come in warm, sixty-four the high today, and Iris has on a T-shirt. She always wears long-sleeved shirts at work. Iris keeps her hands on the bottom half of the steering wheel. She’s got about a dozen bracelets on. Wood and brass and copper and shell ones. They clink and chime when she turns corners. While she’s preoccupied with driving and talking, I watch her mouth, full and creamy red with lipstick, the way it moves, which side goes up first when she smiles. That T-shirt looks damned fine on her—just shy of a 38, I’d say, and in good shape.

We’ve got the windows rolled down and a strong coffee smell floats in as we cross the Missouri into Council Bluffs. It’s the Butternut factory down the river, roasting beans. Always makes me think of Omaha as a good cup of black coffee.

“So how long’ve you worked for Best?” I ask Iris.

“Oh, two years or so. I’m taking night classes at Metro Tech in computer graphics. What about you?”

“Just since last July.”

“Are you taking classes anywhere?”

“Nah.”

I guess she wants to know if I’m going to be stuck at Best all my life. I have most of a B.A. in history which is about as useful as not having anything at all. But that’s from the days when I was with Callie’s mom. I don’t want to get into that right now.

Iris isn’t too happy with my answer, but I start talking about something else and she doesn’t hold grudges.

At Bluffs Run, I look back at the car as we walk away. About five foot of the tail is sticking out in the lane. I notice most of the license plates are Nebraska, with Iowa plates next, and then a handful of Kansas and Missouri. We walk into this open area that has a glass front facing the track. There’s a whole bunch of people standing around, as mixed a crowd as I’ve ever seen. Old black ladies with their reading glasses on, college boys with those spiky haircuts and hundred dollar running shoes, married couples in their forties knocking back a few beers, greasy-haired old geezers with steno pads and pencils stuck inside the earpiece of their glasses, tough cowboy types dressed more for a rodeo, and some scrawny kids that look underage.

Iris says she’ll get us a program we can share, so I go to a hot dog stand and buy a couple of beers.

A voice on the intercom says, “Ladies and gentlemen, the dogs are on the track for tonight’s third race. Please make your wagers early to avoid being shut out at the mutuel windows.” The man goes on to give each dog’s name and weight. There’s TV monitors everywhere you look, showing the dogs in their numbered jackets.

Iris thanks me for the beer, turns the program to the third race and hands it to me. “I’ll show you how it works. There’s eight dogs in each race, and you can bet on them in several different ways. Win, place, and show is first, second, and third, but that doesn’t pay anything.”

She takes a drink of beer and her bottom lip leaves a red crescent moon on the cup. “And the quiniela bet is where you pick two dogs to come in first and second, any order. Say you pick eight and one. It doesn’t matter which one comes in first or second as long as both come in. An exacta’s where you bet which order they’ll come in. For the trifecta, you choose the three dogs that finish first, but it’s really hard to get those. Shit, it’s hard to hit quinielas.”

“Then I’ll stick with those, how about?”

“Two minutes till post time. Better hurry if you want to bet this race.”

“I’ll wait and do the next one,” I say. “See how it’s done first.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll get in line. You can come with me if you like.”

She explains while we’re in line how to give the clerk your bet, first the amount, then the kind of bet you’re making, and the number of the dogs you’re betting on.

“Two-dollar quiniela, three and seven,” she says to the woman who punches it in and hands her a silver ticket. “That’s all there is to it,” Iris says.

We go outside to sit down and watch the race. There’s a strong wind chasing plastic cups and cigarette butts around the stands. It’s too strong even to set your beer down and it blows Iris’s hair up and out of her face. She’s so pretty I feel like the wind stole the next breath I had coming. The dogs are led to the starting gate and the young handlers run back. One of them’s a girl, and I hear some punks at the fence make loud comments about betting on a pair like that.

More lights get turned on. The electric rabbit starts squeaking its way around the rail. A guy behind me yells, “Here comes Rusty,” just before the announcer says, “Here comes Lucky,” the way Ed used to say, “Here’s Johnny.”

The dogs rip out of their stalls hell-bent on catching the sparking rabbit. A couple of them wipe out on the first turn. Seven’s in the lead, but three’s near the back. As they come around the bend, seven falls behind, and the number two dog passes him. Iris lets the wind grab her ticket and shrugs.

There’s groans and cheers but mainly groans. I wedge my beer between my knees and study the lineup for the fourth race. Bust A Gut, Some Fine Day, Macy’s Magic, PD’s Lizzy Longjohns, Who Dr. Who, Iowa Dawn, Ain’t Misbehaving, and Sweet So and So. I ignore the odds because I don’t feel like getting too precise about all this and pick out Who Dr. Who and Ain’t Misbehaving. Five and seven. Iris wants to follow the odds board a bit before placing her bet, so I drink my beer and watch the numbers change across the black screen behind the track. There’s a big coffee cup in the distance on a pole. Novelty billboard. Has the word Oasis on it in big block letters.

I get in line behind Iris. She bets one and five. I say “Who Dr. Who” before I remember the clerk wants the number, not the name. I look down at the program and say, “Uh, that’s five and seven.”

The silver ticket looks somehow fragile, easily altered. I hold it in the palm of my hand, not folding it. We stand at the fence this time. I’m surprised by how my heart pounds when the dogs come out of the gate and I’ve got a personal stake in who’s finishing first. My dogs are quick in the lead. I start yelling like everybody else.

Number four edges up as they’re heading to the finish line and finishes a nose in front of Who Dr. Who. I glance down at the program. It was Lizzy Longjohns. Iris’s number one dog, Bust A Gut, came in third.

We go to the bleachers to look over the next page in the program. What I really like is these dogs’ names. I’d like a job just thinking up names for all the new litters of pups. I like how the names are clever and mean something. I always thought a name should mean something, seeing as how I got named Ute. Once, I asked Ma what Ute meant and she said “You was named after Uncle Ute.” When I asked what his name meant, she said “He was named after Great Grandpappy Ute. What else you want to know?” I gave up on it. But me and Jenny named Callie after Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry. Soon as she discovered her lungs, though, I thought she took after the circus organ a whole lot more than some Greek goddess.

The fifth race has Cornflakesandmilk, Sassy Lass, Make Me An Offer, Just Sam, Uzifire, Shadowylady, PD’s Betty Bikini,and See See Rider.

I choose Cornflakesandmilk and See See Rider. Iris goes for the dogs with the best odds—Make Me An Offer at five and two and Just Sam, seven and two. Iris says she’ll walk the bets up this time if I’ll hold her beer. There’s about a swallow left in it, but I say sure.

She takes my two dollars. I drink the rest of my beer and set the cup on the concrete where the wind snatches it and rolls it around with all its buddies. A few early moths are cartwheeling around the spotlights.

An old man, with shrunken-in cheeks and a funny-looking chin jutting in front of his face, sits down next to me with a program and a green sheet in his hand. The green sheets are for sale in the front and predict which dogs are going to win.

“You want a tip?” he says.

“Sure,” I say.

“Marry that girl.”

I laugh. “I hardly know her.”

“Don’t matter. She’s the one for you.”

“How’s your luck on the dogs?” I ask him.

“Could be better, but it’s been worse. I got a feeling about the eighth. It’s a maiden race, so that’s about all you can go on. A feeling.” He kind of chews around with his jaw while he’s thinking.

The old man’s got on a Goodwill kind of tweed coat, too heavy despite the wind. He smells like an old man, a hint of piss and tobacco and dry rot. I wonder if I should follow Iris to ditch him but decide he’s harmless. This track’s probably the codger’s whole life.

“What’s your feeling tell you?” I say.

“That three dog’s a winner.”

I flip through the program and read the eighth-race lineup. Texmex Tornado, Peekaboo, Dark Iris, Macy’s Minefield, Snappy Heels, Dapper Danny, Bodhisattva, and Sleepytime Gal. I smile because number three is called Dark Iris. It’s a neat coincidence.

“What would you bet for the quiniela?”

“Don’t mess with ‘em,” he says. “I wheel a trifecta. Put me down for three, seven and eight. But, if you like them quinielas, you could box that instead.”

“What’s that?” I say. “This is about the first time I’ve done this.”

“You put your money on any of three dogs to finish first and second, see. You box it. Three, seven, and eight. Any combination. Six bucks.”

“Well, I just might do that, sir,” I tell him. “Thanks for the tip. Both of them.”

Iris comes back with another couple of beers and pours the last drink into her new cup. The man must’ve skedaddled when he saw her coming because he’s gone, and there’s a young couple beside us juggling popcorn containers and spilling beer on themselves.

“Thanks, Iris.”

“You’re welcome, Ute,” she says.

She uses my name like Callie says “perspective,” careful to get it right. She gives me a big smile when I try to sneak an arm around her shoulders by first stretching my arm out along the metal bleacher. The lights go up. Iris drops our tickets on the program in my lap. She does it so quick, I jump a little bit. Spooked by foil paper. I’m one smooth operator.

I finally get my arm around her solid and say, “Next time I’m going to bet on the rabbit. Seems like it’s the one that always wins.” The night wind is stealing what’s left of the day’s heat, and her arm is cool to the touch.

She laughs at my bad jokes even.

Make Me An Offer and Cornflakesandmilk come in first and second so between us we picked out the winners, but we didn’t have them both on the same ticket.

“I think I’ll sit a couple of races out. I got a plan,” I say. Actually, it’s the old man’s plan. “But I’ll take your bets up if you like.”

She smiles and does this pretty thing with her eyes, looking away, then looking back at me. I feel something akin to the dogs tearing loose from post position, like I got to get somewhere fast.

“Think I’ll just wait a few out, too,” Iris says. “I’m bad luck for the dogs I pick.”

“No way,” I tell her. “If you didn’t bet on them, they’d come in last instead of third and fourth.”

Iris rests her beer on my knee that’s propped up, and I play with a bracelet.

“You were real nice to let Callie see your belt,” I say. “She’s always been so curious. Sometimes she doesn’t know when to quit.”

“No, no. It was fun. I like her. She was being so sweet about it.”

“You got any kids?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“No husbands, either, I hope?”

She shakes her head fast and giggles. “I’m thirty-two, though. Mom thinks I’m over the hill. She doesn’t even ask me anymore if I’m seeing anybody.”

“Well, I will. Are you?”

She puts her face close to mine, nose almost touching my nose, and nods solemnly. She reminds me of Callie when Callie’s putting me on about something.

“Who?” I ask, knowing it’s a setup.

“You.”

She’s too close not to take a chance. I kiss her mouth lightly, and she kisses me back. We take a drink of beer just to have something to do.

Four minutes till post time in the eighth, I go up and stumble my way around asking the lady for a quiniela box on Dark Iris, Bodhisattva and Sleepytime Gal. I come back and Iris hands me my beer.

I show her the program. “Look, I put a bet on you. Dark Iris.”

She examines the dog’s previous race times. “Comes in sixth place a lot,” she says. “You’ll be lucky if she doesn’t fall down in the first stretch and take a nap.”

“I’ve got a feeling,” I say. Might as well steal somebody else’s lines.

We go to the fence and look down the track where the handlers are jogging toward us. People are getting louder as the night wears on. Several people yell when the rabbit swings around the loop and rattles past where the dogs are whining and scratching the gate. Number four gets an early lead and three is in the back. I holler some much needed encouragement to Dark Iris.

Several dogs collide in the first turn, and there’s Dark Iris, near the front on the back stretch.

I’m jumping up and down, sloshing beer on my shoes. “Come on Iris, you can do it. Come on three. Come on.”

Dark Iris hauls ass. She’s running so fast I don’t see her feet touch dirt. She tears by the finishing post and zooms on past. I was so intent on her that I forgot to see who came in second or third.

The numbers appear on the board. Three, eight, and five. Snappy Heels beat out Bodhisattva. The old man who gave me the tip probably lost this one. I look down at my ticket. Three, seven, and eight boxed quiniela.

“What did you bet?” Iris asks.

“I think I might have won,” I say.

She looks at my ticket and then back at the board and squeals. “You sure did. You won. Wait, there’s the figures—quiniela—sixty-eight dollars. You won sixty-eight dollars.”

We go up to turn my ticket in and watch a couple of races on the monitors. People brush by us to get to the windows. Iris hooks her right index finger in my back belt loop. I like the way it feels. Like I’m anchored.

Before the last races are run, we get a head start out of the parking lot. Bright yellow work horses are turned on their sides for barricades. They look like the A’s on Callie’s report cards out for a night on the town.

The Woodmen Tower’s a lit up marker for downtown Omaha, a totem of steel and electricity. Long as you’re getting closer to it, you know you’re heading the right way. Iris turns on the radio and a singer is saying he understands about indecision. The beat seems to time the white dashes as they slip past Iris’s gold LTD. I’ve always noticed that when you’ve got the radio on when you’re on the road, the world starts acting like it’s a movie for the music you’re playing. People drive by you, pedestrians cross in front of you, cows graze and horses run, all moving in time to a song they can’t hear.

Iris taps her fingers on the wheel.

I reach over and lightly caress the back of her hand. “I’d like to share my big winnings with you. Cheeseburger, fries, sound good to you?”

We pull up at the Thrill Grill, an all-night hangout full of college kids poking at the lava lamps on the tables. It’s a ‘60s theme, I guess. There’s wallpaper that looks like tie-dyed T-shirts and incense burners and psychedelic music playing. Can’t smell the incense for the greasy burgers, but it all adds up to an atmosphere the twenty-something and under set feel right at home with.

One kid with a half-shaved head has a chicken wire and leather jacket with a chain hanging down his hip that’s got to be rated heavy duty enough to swing a wrecking ball. A real pretty girl’s wearing a flimsy blouse with one button buttoned right in front of her breasts. She’s maybe seventeen. I know she didn’t walk out of the house tonight like that. I stick it in the back of my mind what can be done to an outfit after it’s passed parental inspection. As Callie gets older, I got to get smarter about those things.

I go through the cafeteria-style line while Iris scopes for a table. She finds one by the front window that’s got about a hundred spider plants hanging in it. I forget the plastic pillows of ketchup and mustard. I pick up straws and napkins on my way back to the table. This date thing’s got me rattled. But it sure has its good parts, too. Iris’s got her hand up examining a spider plant baby, a fat little rush of leaves tiptoeing through the air on a dozen white legs. By the deadening blanch of red and yellow track lights above the table, I see these wide puckered scars, not across her wrist but down, following the blue veins. I scuff my feet and throw the condiment packets on the table like I just got back. She drops her hand. Her bracelets settle evenly as slats on a venetian blind. I don’t know if she noticed that the scars showed.

I salt the fries and start eating my cheeseburger to keep from talking. I keep seeing those scars, thinking weird shit, like what they’d feel like to the tip of a tongue. I get this picture of Iris holding a butcher knife up B-movie slasher style. It makes me feel the same way I felt seeing Jenny in the morgue, only not nearly as strong, or my hamburger would have been moving in another direction. But I can’t concentrate on eating and keep up a conversation at the moment. I just hope Iris thinks I’m not much of one to talk when I eat. She’s quiet, too. Acts like she’s checking out the nightlife around us.

I look around. The chicken wire boy and his one-button girlfriend are next to us. In one of them strange switches Generation X has pulled, he’s wearing strappy sandals, she’s got on combat boots. Behind Iris is a balding guy. I can’t see his face, but I can tell he’s the oldest guy in the place. What’s more, if he wasn’t, me and Iris would be in dead heat for the part. I feel my heart harden toward her. She’s getting old in spite of herself. She wanted to quit. Tried to. She doesn’t look so good to me all of a sudden.

I finally realize Iris is repeating my name. “What?” I say.

“Asked if you liked, if you and Callie liked, going to the movies. Is there something wrong?”

“No, why?” I lie, letting the right amount of confusion and injury mix in my tone.

“Oh, I just thought, oh it’s nothing.” She puts down her half-eaten hamburger. “I’ll be right back. Pit stop.”

I sit there for ten or fifteen minutes watching the old man turn pages of a newspaper before my knee gets to jerking up and down. Some idiot’s been pumping the jukebox with his pocket change to keep the same damn song playing over and over. I get up to stretch, wondering if Iris climbed out the bathroom window.

The old man folds his newspaper and looks around at me. The geezer from the dog track. What the hell was he doing here? We’d left early. I’d taken him for a die-hard who’d stick around till the sweep-up crew shooed him out.

“Sit down, Ute,” he said, waving a palsied hand at a chair.

Had he overheard Iris talking to me? I glance back at the curtain of beads that leads to the bathrooms, don’t see Iris coming, and sit down. If she ducked out on me, maybe I won’t look like such a rube if I’m sitting with the old man for a while. He rolls up the newspaper and stares down the tube he’s made at the table. Whips it around on me like a gun scope. Then again, I think, if he’s apeshit as a sock puppet, I’m going to look stupid after all.

“Ute,” he says. “I’ve been reading about you.”

“What?” I say. “My girl’s got a problem or something in the ladies, I got to go see—”

“And you didn’t make the front page,” the old fart says, “hell, you didn’t even make the front section.”

His eyes are bloodshot, a nasty color of dull green, unblinking like a frog. He’s shaking the paper in front of my nose. I can see dirt under his thick, yellow fingernails that looks like it’s been there for years.

I get this numb feeling at the nape of my neck that spreads like a souped up version of gangrene.

“Best they could do to report on your little shattered world was page three of the Metro section,” he says and curls that bottom lip over his top.

I grab the paper he’s jabbing in my face and slap it down, check the date. That rotten sensation grips my whole body, nowhere tighter than in the groin. The date across the top is the day after Jenny was killed. There’d been a photo of a state official indicted for embezzlement on the front of the paper that day. I’m looking at a picture of the same fucker now. Everything had pointed to him siphoning off close to a hundred thou of tax dollars, but he never saw a day behind bars. In the dark months after Jenny was gone that seemed to sum up what I felt about the world. The bad don’t necessarily pay for what they do, the good pay and pay and some bastard robs the war chest when the money’s bloody enough.

The old man’s sitting there nodding his head. My mouth is open, but I can’t get words to come out of it.

“It’s all in your perspective,” he says and holds up thumb and forefinger of each hand and looks at me through the frame.

Just like Callie had done.

I’m shaking with fear or anger or, more like it, both. Is he some old pervert who’s been following Callie around, finding out everything about her he could? Is Callie okay with Shawna or had he killed the girls early on in the evening then come to torment me before I found out? I’m halfway out of my chair when his left arm snakes out and he grips my sleeve, that bottom jaw sawing back and forth.

“Sure, it’s a risk, Ute. Win, lose, or die,” he says, biting each word in a mean way, “it’s a chance you take. You might be throwing your money away. Or your heart. You might get buried yourself. But sometimes you get lucky for a few years. You get to live with your woman, raise a baby, spend them long nights fucking each other until your knees can hardly get you to the john. This Iris girl, you’re going to write her off without knowing a damned thing about what she’s been through. You think maybe there’s been women who looked in your eyes and saw hurt and death and decided they wanted nothing to do with you?”

I sit back down. So he was hanging around because of Iris. He could be her father for all I know. The whole family could be psycho. He’d just been snooping around the track to see how Iris’s date was going, then he followed us here. For the sixth or seventh time, the Doors are whining about riders in the storm, and I’m about to take apart the music machine or the asswipe operating it.

I glare over my shoulder. The chicken wire guy is laughing like a hyena, chomping into his hamburger, and yelling at a guy across the room with his mouth full. I feel grim as a sonofabitch, but I’ll play along with Iris and this old dude’s game for a few more minutes. Then I’m going to forget tonight ever happened.

“You know, Ute,” the old man says, “you haven’t got many more chances. Jenny wouldn’t want you to pass up one good as this.”

“You don’t know fuck about my dead wife,” I say. Playing along’s not the same as buying it.

“I can’t guarantee you a happy ending, you know. I don’t see into the future too far,” he says. “But I got a gut feeling you won’t get a better opportunity to make one happen.”

Chicken wire boy throws a fry at his buddy giving him the finger from over by the cash register. It hits one of those cheap bank calendars with just one scenic picture for every blessed month. Lands to the right of a ketch sailing past a sun bigger than life on the horizon.

“She was raped by her stepdaddy,” he says. “Right before she did that surgery on herself.”

“I don’t want to know,” I say.

“And it’ll be a long time before she’ll tell you her reasons. Don’t have to read tea leaves or innards to predict that.”

“You’re one messed up old fucker,” I say.

“But I’m telling you now. You got to trust the world again, Ute. Callie’s trying to help you. She wants more out of life than you hiding like a hermit crab in that dingy, half-buried so-called garden apartment.”

My heart jackknifes—he knows where I live, he’s been there—but he keeps on talking.

“I know I should mind my own business, and I do, day after day. But I get worn down now and then and have to point a few things out. Things that might get missed and when they’re such little things and might mean so much....” The old geezer coughs.

I haven’t got a clue what he’s going on about and I don’t give a shit. I’ve got that tired feeling I get sometimes, like I just want to lie down and sleep forever or until the world blows up, whichever comes first. The jukebox stops for the count of nine, then the lizard king is retelling the sob story about people dumb enough to pick up hitchhikers. My heart’s beating like murder. I yank around to see if I can spot the asshole monopolizing the airwaves. Nobody’s standing by the jukebox. Chicken-wire boy is still spewing out his hamburger—he’ll end up amusing himself to death when he chokes on it.

The one-button girl shifts her head and runs shiny red fingernails along her collarbone. The gesture reminds me of something. A strange feeling gets in the pit of my stomach. They don’t look around at me even though I’ve been staring at them for longer than’s socially acceptable. I’m breathing kind of heavy, watching them, ignoring the old man, waiting for something to happen but not knowing what the hell it could be.

When chicken-wire boy kicks back his chair to aim a fry, I look over at the cash register, at the guy holding his wallet in one hand, middle finger thrust up on the other. The fry flaps against paper, inch and a half from the ketch.

Not giving a shit what anybody thinks, I run to the calendar and see the oily smudge where the fry hit. I touch it and feel the grease between my fingers. Nobody’s looking at me. I walk around the tables like an idiot, and nobody looks up at me. I go to the table chicken-wire boy is sitting at and eat one of his fries. He’s rocking his chair on its back legs. I’m right in front of him, pawing in his fries for one salted just the way I like, and he’s staring through me.

I lift the basket of fries and dump them on the floor. The white paper lining the basket flutters after the scattered fries. Chicken-wire boy doesn’t notice. One-button girl brushes her hair back and looks bored.

I slump back in the chair by the old man and hold on to the edge of the table.

“Iris hasn’t been gone long as you think, see. But she feels bad as you figured on. She’s afraid you saw the scars. If she tells you about that, she’s worried sick what else she’ll have to tell you. And after you start talking about some of the ugliest shit in the world, people start sidling away from you.” The old man scratches his shiny forehead. “You think about it. I got to head on out.”

He’s almost to the door.

I shout, “Wait a minute. Hold on.”

He waits for me to cross the room.

“Who are you?” I say, although it’s not the only question I have or even the most important one.

“I’m the goddamned tooth fairy,” he says. But he says it gentle like. He sounds tired, too.

I don’t know how to answer him. I watch him leave. I’m standing right by the guy who flips chicken wire boy the bird. Chicken wire boy puts his hand where the basket of fries used to be and snaps a piece of pure air across the room. Nothing hits the calendar this time.

Nerves shot to hell, I go back to the table me and Iris had been sitting at. What else could I do? I didn’t want to try that door out of the Thrill Grill and find I couldn’t open it.

I count eight seconds of silence after the Doors finish their parable of roadkill.

Nine.

Grace Slick is singing about pills.

“Shit,” the chicken-wire guy says. “How’d I do that?”

He picks up the french fry basket, cursing.

I let out a long breath that I didn’t know I was holding in. I look over at the table where the old man had been. There’s no newspaper on it, but I don’t remember him taking it with him. I shiver.

Iris gets back and, holy fuck, I feel like blood’s running through my veins again. I make damned sure I talk to her. About anything. I think I rattle on about Callie’s fascination with some kids’ TV show for ten minutes or so, but Iris is smiling again.

She gets a serious, scared little look on her face and says, “Can I ask where Callie’s mom is?”

“Sure. She hasn’t moved around much lately.” I try to laugh. “She’s dead. Jenny died when Callie was just a few months old.” I know Iris is going to want to know more than that, so I launch into the short version.

“We were in our sophomore year at college when we met. Fell in love. Got married after we found out she was pregnant. Jenny said she’d sit out school until I had a good job and the baby was a few years old. We didn’t have much money and moved into a run-down apartment building with some weird characters living in it. One day some nut from next door broke in, and Jenny must have fought with him because the place was a wreck. He dragged her out on the street and beat her to death with a piece of copper pipe. There were witnesses. Nobody stepped in. Afraid, I guess.”

I stop and focus on the traffic light you can see from the glass front of the grill. It’s staining Dodge Street with the only three colors it knows. I watch it turn to yellow and take a deep breath.

“He just walked away after she stopped moving. Went to this bar down the street called Subby’s. I got back from class right after the ambulance left. Some old woman told me they’d said Jenny was dead. My Jenny, my girl of spitfire and sweetness.”

Iris’s eyes are bright, watching me. This time the traffic light paints the street with its palette twice before I can go on. Iris just waits. A willingness to allow some white space in a conversation is rare in a woman. Yellow. Red.

“The old lady described the guy with the pipe. When she mentioned this funny long scarf, I knew who it was. The guy wore that everywhere. Even in summer. His door was standing wide open, apartment empty. I took a chance he might be at that bar I’d seen him in a lot. Tried to wrap that scarf so tight around his neck he’d choke. He ran when a bunch of guys pulled me off, but the cops chased him down. I moved back home after that. Bagged groceries in this town that’s got one traffic light. And you know what? Shitty things happen there, too.”

I refill the sugar caddy that I hadn’t even realized I’d been emptying down to the last packet. I stack them back up again. Sugar in white on one side, something that promises it’s sweeter than sugar in a pink wrapper on the other. Finally I smile at Iris the best I can. It’s not a story I like to tell. But I’m glad it’s out of the way.

Iris doesn’t say anything even then for a minute. Then she says, “God, that’s awful, Ute.”

We finish up our meal talking about stuff that’s safe—kids, work, TV.

She pulls her car into the parking lot at my place, switches off the ignition, and slips her hands around the wheel like she’s still driving.

I want her to tell me about the scars on her arms. I don’t want to ask. Jenny was so full of life and she was killed. Iris, somewhere along the way, didn’t want to live. Nothing makes sense to me. The only peace I ever get is when I admit to myself nothing makes sense and from what I’d studied of history nothing ever has made sense. People keep living and dying in a world where the facts don’t add up to a Grand Unified Theory of jackshit.

When you get lucky, though, the facts are pretty, the way Dark Iris was pretty, partly because the old man told me about the dog, partly because Iris was with me, partly because Dark Iris accidentally came in first. But what kind of luck are you having when a jukebox gets stuck on the same song? A hamburger joint gets stuck on the same three minutes while some ugly old geezer dishes out advice you don’t want to hear?

“I’m so sorry,” Iris says.

“What?” I say.

“About Jenny.”

“Well, it was a long time ago,” I say. “I’m just thankful Callie was such a little baby that she didn’t remember anything.”

Iris jangles the keys in her hand and sighs. “Yeah, it’s funny how memory works. Your cells are supposed to completely change in seven years’ time, except for brain cells. So you’re carrying around memories of a body that doesn’t exist anymore. I read that somewhere.” She laughs. “I don’t remember where.”

A man out walking his dog goes by the car. The dog’s sniffing every spot of grass that’s been peed on this week and the man’s wearing a Walkman. The black cord hangs down his chest like a dropped leash.

“What I don’t get, if that’s true,” she says, “is why scars don’t disappear. If cells are gradually replaced, that is, with new ones.”

Taking the time to think on that for a minute, I crack my knuckles and then catch myself. Most women I’ve met would rather listen to their cat hack up a furball than hear a guy make his hands sound like they’re breaking. Iris doesn’t act like it bothered her. I get the feeling she’s this close to telling me about her dance with death if I don’t blow it.

I clear my throat. “Maybe the scars are replaced with cells that remember what it is to be scarred. New body, new person, but a history recorded in the skin,” I say. “The scars are like home movies, proof that it happened, embarrassing to have somebody else see, but not very important to what you are five, ten years later.”

Iris starts taking her bracelets off. “I shouldn’t do this. I should wait until I’m sure you like me—”

“I like you, Iris—”

“—before I tell you, but then I’ll just dread you finding out.”

Bracelets fill the dashboard, and she reaches over my head, flips on the courtesy light. She matches her wrists together, both with their old, wide scars.

“You meant business, huh?” I say.

Her wrists are so small they fit in the palm of my hand.

“I was seventeen and I was mad at the world. My mom had remarried this jerk, I didn’t have any friends I could talk to, and nothing looked like it’d ever work out. I did it one night when they went out to dinner, but Mom came back for theater tickets she’d forgotten and decided she had to pee before she left.”

“Saved by a full bladder,” I say.

Iris starts laughing and covers her mouth with a hand. I want to cover her mouth with mine.

She sobers up again. “Yeah, I guess I was. Saved. And you’re right about the home movie part—because this,” she turns her wrists out and up in a motion that’s graceful as a swan turning its head, “isn’t me anymore.”

She sifts through the bracelets on the dashboard until she finds one made out of that blue and black shell. “Give this to Callie for me, would you? Maybe I don’t need all these bracelets.”

I kiss her on her right ear. It’s warm from her hair falling over it, warm like the underneath of a bird’s wing. I want to hold her. I don’t know how to get from here to where I want to be. But I think Iris is patient. The old man said Iris was my best chance. He was right about Dark Iris crossing the finish line. The odds are better than even, me and Iris can find a way together. It’s all in your perspective. How hard can it be? Up close and far away, the little stick figures of the people you love and the people you’d like to kill, the boat and the big sun on the horizon, evil shit and good things, all mixed up on that same sheet of paper like a kid’s drawing of reality.

When I get back from walking Shawna home, there’s one thing left to do before calling it a night. In Callie’s bedroom of little girl frills, I sneak up to her pillow like a thief. Only I’m going to leave the big handful of change and the bracelet Iris gave me for Callie and steal nothing more than a kiss. I slide my hand over the cool sheet, blue in the dark, but white with pink flowers in the light, and lodge the bounty near her head.

Something colder than the fabric touches my palm and my fingers find it. Maybe Shawna hadn’t trusted the tooth fairy to do her job tonight and had left a trinket after Callie had fallen asleep.

I pull the thing out, a locket trailing a long chain.

A heart locket.

The street light edging its way around the lacy curtains glints on the silver. Every hair on my head prickles. I slip behind the curtain to see better, wedging the locket open with a thumbnail.

When I’d buried Jenny, she wore a locket like this around her neck. It was the only piece of jewelry I’d ever gotten her aside from her wedding band. She loved it, wore it all the time.

I get the locket open and breathe a sigh of relief—inside was a picture of me and Callie. Not the baby picture of Callie that had been in Jenny’s locket. A picture of Callie now. Asleep. A beautiful photo. The nightgown has a bow on it, a little worn, a little catty-cornered.

I know it before I lean over to check. I know it. Callie’s got on the gown that’s in the photo. I’ve never taken a picture of her in that nightie. I tilt the locket to see the photo of me—I’m in a plaid shirt. I usually am. A big smile. I never smile like that when I got a camera gunning me down. To the side of my head is the white curve of something. It takes me a minute to puzzle it out. Looks like a giant tea cup. The coffee cup billboard at Bluffs Run. My hand is shaking like I’ve just downed a whole pot of coffee. I manage to pry up an edge of the photo. A tiny inscription is on the back of the white heart—love, the goddamned tooth fairy.

For a long time I stand there with my forehead touching the glass of Callie’s window, watching nothing happen in the alley, holding that locket like a fat silver ticket.