Hunting Ground by Gary Earl Ross

Dr. Dylan Harrington removes the tubed mask from the nose and mouth of Kieu Nguyen—or Katie, as she calls herself on social media pages he’s visited. After shutting off the delivery machine, he gazes at her for several heartbeats. Her blue eyebrow stud matches the stone in each earlobe. Short black hair, upturned nose, bow-shaped mouth, unblemished skin with just enough color to make her exotic. She looks delicious without the thick black glasses now on the counter, atop her Animal Farm paperback. The faint slant of her closed eyes testifies to her mixed parentage. At last the uninsured high schooler reclines in his chair, under general anesthesia. She will stir in ninety minutes, jaw throbbing, wisdom teeth gone, a stitch or two in place, and dental cotton packed around four extraction sites. But before she wakes…

Harrington lowers his mask and catches his bottom lip between his teeth.

One has a faint crack but Katie’s wisdom teeth aren’t fully impacted. Her parents, watching TV in the empty waiting room this Saturday afternoon, don’t know that. They never even asked why no other staffers are present. They’re just grateful Dr. Harrington scheduled surgery today, to allow himself extra time to work on her. After his dire diagnosis last week Monday and explanation of the later problems the girl could face, they have no idea extraction will take only thirty minutes.

The Nguyens—a rangy fiftyish Vietnamese man and a spiky-haired white woman two inches shorter and maybe a few years younger—are relieved the cost will be four hundred, not the two grand quoted by other practices. But for a sallow-faced dishwasher at a seafood restaurant who speaks only in short sentences and appears not to understand fully what is happening around him and a dark-eyed Price Rite cashier who wears too much lipstick, even the payment plan will hurt.

He wonders how these two got together, this shambling Asian man and this working class woman who could be Italian or Polish or Greek. Did Maggie belong to a church that opened its doors to incoming Vietnamese in the late Seventies? Had she watched Dai grow into a teenager different from other boys? Was she the flat-chested girl who always had trouble attracting boys and found in an awkward refugee kid a shard of the romance she craved? Was she desperate enough to take the lead the first time they had sex? Were his hands as rough then as they look now? Were hers?

It doesn’t matter, Harrington decides. They are like many parents in the west side immigrant community served by his children’s dental clinic. Having fled godawful places and shattered lives, couples on the slow road to citizenship and others who share poverty with hapless American-born spouses have few options for their children’s basic health care, let alone their teeth. This dentist is a godsend. Four years ago he set up shop at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place.

For exactly the wrong reason.

This community—fractured by cultural and linguistic discord, fear, uncertainty and insufficiency—is his hunting ground.

A certified dentist anesthesiologist, each year he fully sedates fewer than forty children. But necessary precautions limit to six or seven the number of girls who’ll have no memory of his kissing them, touching them, cleaning their stomachs. Penetration he saves for his wife—his second wife, thirty years his junior and an immigrant herself, her spirit broken by the absence of choices in her life. Most nights she lies still as his hands wander over her small body. Afterward, he thumbs away the tears on her cheeks.

Harrington folds his paper gown over his rolling dental stool and pushes it aside. Then he peels off his nitrile gloves and runs his right thumb over Katie’s perfect lips. Before he finishes with her this afternoon… He kisses her lightly, lifts her gown, eases up her tee. Her stomach is flat, like that of last year’s cheerleader. “You are so beautiful,” he whispers, right hand inching beneath her sports bra, left undoing his zipper.

Just then the door bangs open, the bolt snapping and flying across the operatory. What the hell! He whirls as the Nguyens step inside.

“You can’t—” Then he sees everything, the badge case in Dai Nguyen’s hand, the gun in Maggie’s, the darkness about to envelop him.

“Dylan Harrington, you’re under arrest,” Maggie says. “You have the right to remain silent…”

Pocketing his badge, Dai Nguyen handcuffs him and thrusts him aside. “Move over, so Detective Spina can pull down Officer Chau’s shirt.”

Harrington blinks. “You’re all cops? She looks so young, and her wisdom teeth—”

“She’s having them out next week but they made this sting possible,” Spina says. “God knows how many girls you won’t get to touch because of her.”

Shaking, Harrington tries to pull his stool over with his foot but Nguyen stops him.

“You won’t get close to comfortable again until you’re in a cell.”

“Not even then,” Spina says.

“We’ve been investigating you a long time,” Nguyen says. “We saw everything today on cell phones. I’m Peter Kim, from the DA’s office. Jennifer Spina here is from the Sex Offense Squad. Officer Elle Chau is fresh out of the academy and asleep for her first arrest.”

Spina chuckles. “She’ll see it, Pete. The earrings, the glasses. She positioned all the spy cams perfectly. Five bucks says she’ll be pissed she can’t post the video before we take down her fake Instagram account.”

“Do I look stupid enough to take that bet?” Kim drops the paper gown back on the stool. “But after he’s booked and she wakes up, I will pay for dinner. It’s the least I can do before we break up our happy home. The Rack Shack has the best beef ribs in town, and on Saturday night families get a free pitcher of beer.”

“Fine,” Spina says, “if we pick up my wife on the way.”

Gary Earl Ross

Image by Rubén González from Pixabay – Dentist’s chair with tray of instruments