NICOJI by M.Shayne Bell.
Scanned by Aristotle.
I got out of the shower and dressed while I was still wet so that maybe I'd cool off while I walked down to the company store. It was evening and quiet. The store was quiet.
But the ship from Earth had come in.
Vattani was opening a wooden crate with the back of a hammer, and Marcos and Fabio, Vattani's two little boys, were kicking through piles of white plastic packing around his counter. Vattani smiled at me and motioned proudly at his shelves: filled, some of them; restocked, as much as they would be till the next ship.
"Peanut butter!" I said. I grabbed a can of it from the display on the end of the counter. The can was bulged. The peanut butter had frozen in the un-heated hold on the way out. But the can felt full. "I'll take it," I said, not asking or caring about the price. Vattani looked at me doubtfully but put down his
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hammer and keyed in my purchase. I thought of- Morgan, was it?-who said if you had to ask the price you couldn't afford it. Well, I couldn't afford the peanut butter and I knew it so I didn't bother with the price. Besides, they had me. The company had me. What was another twenty or thirty dollars on my bill?
I put the can on the counter and went after the staples Sam and I needed. That's when I saw the company "boy" sitting in the shadows by an open window next to the racks of boots and underneath the hanging rows of inflatable rafts nobody bought because they'd get punctured and the three butterfly nets nobody wanted after the company quit bringing up naturalists. He tapped his gun against his leg and watched me pick up a five-pound sack of rice and a two-and-a-half pound sack of beans. He moved his chair so he could look at me when I went down another aisle to get a loaf of bread and a jar of vinegar that had an expiration date Vattani hadn't changed. He chuckled when I grabbed a bag of raisins Vattani's wife had dried from the native gagga fruit.
I held out the bag. "Want some?"
He laughed. "We've got apples and bananas in the company house, Jake."
I shoved some raisins in my mouth. "You don't know what you're missing."
"I tried 'em, once."
I thought of different replies to that, communicative things like shoving fistfuls of gagga raisins down his throat.
"How's the college application?" he asked.
My best friend and I had come up, one year out of high school, to earn money for college. I turned and
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walked back to the counter. "Trouble with shoplifting, Vattani?"
"Less of it. You got your nicoji frozen?" Vattani keyed in the prices of the food I'd picked up.
"Just got in. Sam and I'll eat first."
"Ship leaves in the morning-early. You'll work all night?"
"Sure, work all night."
Vattani stuffed my food in a plastic bag. "You'd better, you and Sam. You missed the last ship, and the price has gone down since then-five cents less per package, now."
"It's the only ship we missed this year. It came early."
"But you missed it, so I had to extend your credit, again. How are you going to pay me back?"
I just looked at him.
"You eat fast and get to work."
I put my right hand on the counter and stared at him. Marcos and Fabio quit kicking the shredded plastic and looked up at us. Vattani waved back the company boy and finally lit the tile under my hand to add forty-six dollars and twenty-three cents to my bill of credit. Then he handed me the groceries. I walked out and let the door slam, listened to the bells over it jangle while I walked down the dirt street.
But I had a can of peanut butter from home, from Earth.
And the sky ahead of me was red on the horizon where the sun was.
Manoel stopped me just down the street from the store. "Dente," he said in Portuguese, pointing to his teeth. He'd never learned much English. "Rai-mundo."
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"Anda j'aV I said. He took off down the alley that led to Raimundo's house. I followed.
The company had let Raimundo's teeth rot. Raimundo had asked Sam and me to come help him with his teeth just after we'd gotten in-he thought two Americans would know more about dentistry than the Brazi guys he'd come up with. We didn't. But he was in so much pain I took a pair of electrician's pliers and pulled out the incisor he pointed to. Since then, he'd asked only me to pull his teeth.
Raimundo was sitting on the one step up to his door, holding the right side of his swollen face. He had a pair of pliers tucked between his knees, and he'd set alcohol, aspirin, a scrap of clean cotton, and a pocket knife at his side. I put my sack of groceries on the step and looked at him. He handed me the pliers and pointed at the third bicuspid behind his upper canine; black, rotted out in the middle. It must have hurt for weeks. "How can you stand waiting so long?" I asked. But I knew. The company kept promising to bring out a dentist, and a dentist could save Raimundo's teeth if they were still in his mouth.
"Pull it, Jake," he said, his speech thick. He tried to talk out of only the left side of his mouth.
"Let me wash my hands and these pliers."
He grabbed my arm. "Just pull it. Now."
I knelt in front of him. "You take any aspirin?" I asked.
"Six," he said.
Which meant he was hurting bad. He'd generally throw up if he took more than four aspirin-his stomach couldn't handle it. But the company didn't stock any other kind of over-the-counter pain killer. I opened the thinnest blade on the pocketknife, stuck it in the alcohol, and laid it on the cotton. "That's all the cotton you've got?" I asked.
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"Manoel packed up the rest," Raimundo mumbled.
That surprised me. Evidently they had their raft packed and ready to go again, though they'd gotten in only a day before Sam and me. No sticking around town for them. "Lean back," I said. Raimundo leaned back against the door frame so he'd have something to push against when I started pulling. "Hold open his mouth," I told Manoel, mimicking what I wanted him to do. He stood left of Raimundo, stuck his fingers between Raimundo's teeth, and held the jaws wide apart. Raimundo grabbed the step with both hands and closed his eyes. I grabbed the tooth with the pliers and pulled hard and fast, to get it over with for Raimundo.
The tooth shattered. Raimundo tried to stand up, but I shoved him back down. Manoel growled Portuguese words I didn't understand-he'd gotten his fingers bitten-but he held on and opened up Raimundo's mouth again. I pulled out the parts of tooth. Only one root came. "I've got to get the other root," I said, and I used the knife to work the root loose enough to grab with the pliers. I pulled it out and laid it on the step with the other pieces of tooth. Blood spattered my arms. Manoel let go of Raimundo's mouth, and Raimundo started spitting blood. I tore off a chunk of cotton, shoved it up where the tooth had been, and had Raimundo bite down.
His hands were white, he'd held onto the step so hard. "You hurt me," he mumbled.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I did the best I could."
He looked at me. Manoel wiped the knife clean on the hem of his shirt.
I set the can of peanut butter on the table Sam had hammered together from crates Vattani threw away behind his store and listened to Sam whistle while
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he showered. I was shaking. I'll never pull another tooth, I told myself.
I opened the bathroom door and walked in. Sam stopped whistling. "That you, Jake?" he asked from behind the shower curtain.
"Yes," I said. He started whistling again.
I wiped steam off part of the broken mirror Sam and I had salvaged from the trash heap north of town and looked at all my teeth. They were fine, no cavities.
It was my turn to cook. I went back to the kitchen, dumped three handfuls of beans in a jar, washed them in tepid water from our distiller, and set them to soak on the counter for supper the next night. Then I dumped water and a handful of gagga raisins in a pan and let the raisins plump up while I took a clay bowl and walked out to the freeze-shack for some of the nicoji.
The freeze-shack smelled musty, sweet, like the nicoji. "Light on," I said. I heard a rustling in the shadows and flipped on the light. The help had all scurried under boxes or stacks of burlap sacks. Three help peeked out at me.
"Sorry, guys," I said. The help hate light, even the dim light Sam and I had strung in our freeze-shack.
"It's Jake," some of them whispered. "Jake."
I walked to the far wall where we hung our sacks of nicoji and lifted one down from its hook. It was wet and heavy. I set it carefully on the dirt floor and untied it. Nicoji were still crawling around inside. I put my hand in the sack, and a nicoji wrapped its eight spindly legs around my little finger. I lifted it up. It hung there, its beady eyes looking at me. I flicked it in the pan and picked out eight more nicoji that were still moving, since they'd be the freshest, set the pan on the floor and started to tie up the sack, thinking we shouldn't eat too many ourselves,
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not now, but then I thought why not? We'd had a good catch. Even Vattani would be proud of Sam and me.
Not that it mattered how well Sam and I did.
So I put four more nicoji in the pan, threw one or two nicoji in each corner of the freeze-shack, and hung the sack back on its hook. The help waited till I switched off the light to scramble out after the nicoji.
Sam was still in the shower. I banged on the door. "Supper, Sam!" I yelled. Whenever we first got back in town, he'd stay in the shower just letting the water run over him, trying to feel clean; then, after he'd taken all the water in the rooftop storage tank, if it hadn't rained, we had to go to the well half a mile away for cooking water and to the company bathhouse if we wanted a bath-five dollars each.
I dumped the water off the raisins, poured in a cup of vinegar, sprinkled sugar and a dash of salt over that, and turned on the heat underneath the pan. When the raisins started bubbling, I washed the thirteen nicoji, chopped off their heads and stiff little legs and tails, gutted them, rinsed the blood off the bodies, dumped them in with the raisins and vinegar, and set them to simmer. The photograph of Loryn, my girlfriend back home, had fallen out of the windowsill onto t...
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