Virgil stared up at the tallest pine in his back yard. He couldn’t see the sky through the branches. Couldn’t see much of anything, really. Damn light was too bright. He should be inside by now. Not like he’d catch on fire, but he’d probably turn red as a boiled shrimp and peel like one, too, if he didn’t get out of the sun. Tricky thing, those urban legends. The truer they were, the worse they hurt.
“You’re up kinda early.” His neighbor, Lem Hankins, stopped at the property line and leaned on his walking stick.
Virgil peered at him through watery, stinging eyes. “Not early. Late.”
“Rough night?”
“Eh—” Virgil squinted back up the tree. “Blasted coon took off up there with my teeth.”
Lem’s face puckered, like words had bunched in his closed mouth and pushed against the back of his lips. He ducked his head and crossed into Virgil’s back yard with the shuffling, three-legged gait of a man with a cane. He joined Virgil under the tree, staring upward. “Now, how in the hell did that happen?”
Virgil pointed to a glass bowl on his deck’s picnic table, mostly empty, with a shallow pool of dirty water at the bottom. Puddles over the whole tabletop, drying into the weathered boards. “Got in last night and figured I’d soak off the Poligrip out here in the cool air, and that little bastard come across the rail and had his hands in it before I could turn around.”
Lem shot him a sideways look. “You must have been tired, letting a thing like that happen.”
“I must have been something.” Virgil braced a hand against the solid pine trunk and pushed. Nope. No give. No superhuman strength. Some urban legends were pure bullshit. “Now I’m just mad.”
“I got a twenty-two over at the house.”
Virgil dusted pine bark off his hands. “And what if he stuck my teeth in between two of them little branches up there? You might shoot the coon down but I doubt he’ll bring my upper plate with him.”
Pivoting on his walking stick, Lem turned to study Virgil with one eye closed, like he was sighting in a rifle. “What’s that look like, anyway—without your teeth?”
“Like gums, you dumbass-sss.” As hard as he tried, Virgil couldn’t stop the whistle. Always there when he didn’t have his teeth in, but those double-s endings made him sound like a piccolo.
Lem scratched his bald head. “How you gonna eat?”
“Same way I ate before that dentist set up down there at the free clinic. Not like I gotta chew, you know. I just get me one of them grilling forks and it works fine. ‘Bout the right size apart. Good and sharp on the ends.”
“I got one of them over at the house, too.”
“Is it stainless-sss?” That damn whistle again—too bad it wouldn’t bring a raccoon running like those little silent deals could bring a dog.
“Naw. I got it down at the Dollar General. Hell, for all I know it’s plastic.”
“It might work. I’ll let you know.”
“Well, I won’t want it back.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
“That’s all right, neighbor.” Lem flapped a hand dismissively. “You’d do the same for me.”
Silence as they watched for signs of movement in the tree.
“So what d’you do, when you use a grilling fork? Just—” With the hand not balancing him on the walking stick, Lem made a closed-fisted jabbing motion. “You, know…like that?”
Hopefully not. Hopefully he had at least a little more style about it. God help him if he looked that damn stupid. “Yeah,” Virgil said. “Like that.”
The one-eyed rifle-sighting was back. Lem added a grimace to the overall effect. “Oh. Okay.” He stared back up the tree for a few seconds, then straightened as if he’d snapped out of a trance. “Well, I’ll let you get back to it, then. Just holler if you need anything.”
“Will do.” Virgil watched his neighbor hobble back across the property line to finish his morning walk.
A trance. Now wouldn’t that be something. Too bad he couldn’t put some kind of hoodoo on that coon and make it trot right back down the tree with his goddamned dentures.
He’d gone to the dentist once. Years ago, after too much snacking on diabetics turned his sweet tooth black. Rather than pull it, the dentist decided to fill the cavity. With silver. That didn’t work out too well, for Virgil or the dentist.
Shit. This was damn inconvenient. Virgil glanced around, thankful for the dense hedges on the other side of the yard that blocked every neighbor’s view but Lem’s. He shucked his pants and unbuttoned his shirt, peeled off his socks and stepped out of his boxers. He’d tried this in a bathrobe once. Didn’t go as planned. He just ended up flopping and flapping around underneath it when all that terry cloth hit the floor on top of him.
He rose from the porch without a sound, borne on a faint updraft he hadn’t noticed until now, spread his leathery wings and beat them against the air. It responded by supporting his weight, buoying him up until he alighted on a branch just a few feet away from the raccoon. And there were his teeth, right there in the little bastard’s prehensile hands, as the coon gnawed away on one of the fangs.
Goddamned little insurgent. Virgil had half a mind to—oh, wait. He’d need bigger feet if he wanted to settle this with a boot to the ass.
So he did the next best thing. He lofted off the branch in a flurry of chitters and chirps, dive-bombed the raccoon with precision only radar could lend. The coon swatted and swiped, dropped the dentures, and scrambled to keep his fat ass on that limb instead of tumbling down through all the other branches. Virgil zeroed in on his teeth, pelted by raining pine needles and shards of bark clawed loose by the scrabbling raccoon. He zigzagged downward with them as they bounced off everything in their path, then dropped in a freefall toward the ground. Radar pingbacks told him impact was three...two…pull up! Deflect the teeth! Just one flap should do it—they tumbled harmlessly into a bed of pine straw and rolled to a stop.
Virgil landed on his ass. Always on his ass. First time on a pinecone, though. Holy mother of cockroaches. That damn thing was almost as bad as the cactus he straddled back in oh-five. He climbed gingerly to his feet and rubbed the sting from one buttock. Overhead, the coon chattered loudly, shaking branches as it hopped from one to the other. Virgil tossed a scowl in its direction and kept walking. Picked up his teeth and blew the dirt off. Grabbed his clothes from the porch and stomped downstairs to the basement, with its blessed darkness and cozy bed with a lid.
