Chapter 20

Mary's fingers slipped against the bright red blood seeping from Lou's lips. She wanted to hold his already swelling lips out of her way. Instead, she kept loosing her grip, so instead of pounding her rock against his teeth, Lou's lips were being mashed to a messy pulp. She couldn't keep the teeth exposed and level a solid blow at the same time. She simply couldn't break them loose from his jawbone. Mary was at a loss.

"This isn't working, Lucifer," she complained. Mary had thought her task would be easy and done quickly. Instead, it seemed impossible.

"Get another rock," he directed her. "A long, thin one. Put that one, the long one, against the base of the tooth and use the other rock to smash it out."

Nodding her head, Mary rose stiffly from her knees and went outside in search of a suitable rock. Since the canyon wall was continually sloughing off slabs of stone, it took very little effort to find exactly what she needed, a piece of rock that tapered to a point. To make certain it was solid enough to work, Mary pounded experimentally against the canyon wall. Her rock held without crumbling.

Passing the woodpile on her return to the shack, Mary noticed the hatchet, its blade jammed into the upended log Lou had been using as a chopping block. That will work even more handsomely, she thought. Working the hatchet's blade back and forth, she finally pried the sharp edge loose from its mooring.

As Mary settled back down at his head, Lou's eyes fluttered open. Seeing the hatchet in one hand and the spear shaped rock in her other, his eyes widened to show stark white surrounding the blue of his irises. Not wanting to hear recriminations, pleas, or screams of pain, Mary hoisted the skillet with both hands and brought it firmly down against his head once again. With a hollow sounding thud, the blow knocked him out.

Once again Mary leaned over the unconscious body of her lover. With the delicately arched fingers of one hand she held his upper lip back. She studied his upper teeth for a moment or two, then placed her rock against the base of the chosen tooth. Elbows sticking out from her sides, her own lower lip pinched between her teeth, Mary determined her next move. The hatchet head smashed down against the top of her makeshift chisel. Setting hatchet and rock aside, she examined the results of her new method. As best as she could tell, the tooth had broken off below the gum line, but above the roots. It would do. In quick succession, she gouged out four more teeth from Lou's upper jaw. Sticking her fore finger inside the man's bleeding mouth, she pulled out all the broken pieces of enamel she could see. She even crooked her finger and ran it along the inside bottom of his jaw to get any pieces of tooth that may have wandered down into the crevices. It would not do to leave a mess in Lou's mouth.

As Mary began working on extracting the teeth toward the rear of his mouth, she could no longer see where to place her chisel. Blood flowed everywhere. Ragged and torn gums were already swelling into grotesquely enlarged masses of flesh. Consequently, her blows were losing the precision she had worked for on Lou's front teeth. Undaunted by the turn of events, Mary searched for and found an answer. She turned Lou onto his side. Now, the abundant blood which had been running to the back of his throat and threatening to drown him, ran out onto the dirt floor at Mary's knees. Unable to absorb it, the hard pack pooled the bright blood on its surface. Mary, however, didn't notice. She was busily back at her task, having solved two problems.

Like a master at her craft, Mary gave her entire attention to her work. Repeating the process of hatchet against chisel against tooth, Mary drove each and every tooth from Lou's head, one by one. On two occasions Lou's eyes drifted open. She didn't even hesitate, simply grabbed up the skillet. Both times, she calmly hit him with the cast iron and put him under again.

Periodically through the course of her work Mary stopped to pick pieces of shattered tooth from Lou's mouth. Lucifer kept a constant watch from inside her. "Be sure to get all those little pieces," he told her. "It only takes missing one to have him choke and die. You mess up and you're back to where you were before he showed up. That'd be a damn waste. You need him, so be careful."

Mary did not need encouragement in that regard. "Oh my Heavens, yes. It would be simply dreadful if he died."

Finally, Mary had Lou's mouth purged of its last tooth. Sweeping across his tongue with the first joint of her finger, she then reached into the corners of his mouth and ran her fingertip one last time along his gums as well. She'd either gotten it all, or she hadn't. Finished with her chore, Mary absentmindedly wiped the blood from her hands onto the skirt of her duster.

"We made a mess Lucifer," she commented, suddenly realizing that small pieces of gore, chips of tooth and great splotches of blood were smeared on her dress, the floor, and even Lou's blanket wrap.

Mary's duster was covered in red that had changed to a dark brown where it had started to dry. Where she had knelt on her knees pressing against the hard pack floor, a cherry-brown stain had been ground into the fabric. Her face skewed up in a twist of distaste. Taking it by the hem, she pulled the indecently soiled duster over her head.