“Look, PawPaw, I lost a tooth!” exclaimed my grandson, Jakey, as soon as he came in the door. He pulled back his lips in a grimace to display the gap.
“So you did,” I replied. “A maxillary incisor, if I remember correctly. Did the Tooth Fairy visit you?”
“She gave me a quarter! Here it is!” He pulled it out of a pocket and showed it to me proudly.
I looked over at his mother, my daughter Caroline. “Just a quarter?” I asked. “Don’t kids get more than that these days?”
“Maybe, but that’s ridiculous,” she said. “Besides, a nice shiny metal quarter makes more of an impact than a piece of paper to a little kid.”
“Show me your teeth, PawPaw!” said Jakey. This was a ritual. We did it every time he visited. I pushed my dentures out with my tongue and showed them to him.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Dad,” Caroline said. “It’s disgusting.”
“Why don’t your teeth grow back like mine do?” Jakey asked.
“Once you reach a certain age,” I said, “teeth don’t grow back.”
“That’s not fair,” complained Jakey. But he didn’t ponder the unfairness of tooth regeneration for long. He ran off to look at my books. He found them fascinating because he couldn’t read them. He couldn’t read them because they are in Russian.
He came back carrying a book. “I can read this letter,” he said, pointing. “It’s an A.”
“That’s right. That letter is the same in Russian and in English.”
“And this is a P.”
“No, in Russian, that’s an R.”
He made a face. “That’s silly,” he said.
I shrugged. “The Russian alphabet came from Greek and ours came from Latin,” I said. Before I retired, I had taught Russian language and history at the university.
When it was time for him to go to bed, we couldn’t find him right away. Then Caroline caught him sneaking out of my bedroom.
“You’re not supposed to go into PawPaw’s bedroom,” she scolded him.
“I had to do something,” he said evasively.
“Go brush your teeth,” she told him. “You don’t want to end up like PawPaw with no teeth, do you?”
The next morning, when I went to put in my dentures, they wouldn’t go in. Baffled, I looked at my gums in the mirror. To my astonishment, I discovered that the thing blocking my dentures was a tooth! A brand-new tooth, growing out of my gums!
I showed my new tooth to Caroline and Jakey at breakfast. Jakey looked satisfied. “I knew it would work,” he said.
“What would work?”
“Well, if the Tooth Fairy gives you a quarter for a tooth, what happens if someone puts that quarter under their pillow for the Tooth Fairy? Won’t she give you a tooth back? So last night I put my quarter under your pillow, so the Tooth Fairy would bring you a tooth.”
We all went into my bedroom and looked under my pillow. No quarter was there.
“See?” said Jakey. “The Tooth Fairy took it.”
I didn’t put much stock in this theory of Jakey’s, but all the same I put a quarter of my own under my pillow. The next morning I had no new teeth and the quarter was still there. I told Jakey about this experiment.
“It didn’t work because it wasn’t Tooth Fairy money,” he asserted. “It only works if you use money from the Tooth Fairy.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s put this to a test. When you go back to school tomorrow, tell the kids that if they get money from the Tooth Fairy, you’ll pay double for the actual money given to them by the Tooth Fairy. Make ‘em show you the gap where the tooth used to be, so they don’t scam you.”
“Okay!”
Meanwhile, I had to visit my dentist to get new dentures, since my old ones didn’t fit anymore. He was astounded by my new tooth. He even x-rayed it. “Well, I’ll have to check the literature, see if I can find anyone else who grew a new tooth at an advanced age. Do you want me to pull it?”
“Hell, no!” I exclaimed. “I want new dentures.”
“And you say it just appeared overnight?”
“Yep.”
“That makes no sense.”
At Jakey’s next visit, he proudly presented me with his haul of Tooth Fairy money: a quarter, three one dollar bills, a five dollar bill and a ten dollar bill. “I hope you’re planning to reimburse me,” Caroline said. “This ridiculous experiment of yours is getting expensive.”
We all marched into my bedroom, and Jakey put the money under my pillow.
The next morning, I had five new teeth. I should have had six, but one of the kids must have scammed Jakey. We looked under my pillow, and all the money was gone except for the five dollar bill. Jakey scowled. “I got that one from Declan,” he said darkly.
“Keep bringing me Tooth Fairy money,” I said to Jakey. “Maybe by the time the year is over, I’ll have all my teeth back!”
“PawPaw? What does she look like, the Tooth Fairy?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep all night, and I never saw her.” I pondered, trying to remember something that had caught my attention when I woke up. Then I remembered. “I could smell onions when I woke up this morning.”
“Onions!” exclaimed Caroline. “Why onions?”
“I have no idea.”
I became obsessed with the idea of actually seeing the Tooth Fairy.
The next time Jakey brought me Tooth Fairy money, I skipped taking my melatonin supplement before bedtime.
I awoke abruptly in the middle of the night, feeling big, dirty, onion-flavored fingers in my mouth. I grabbed the wrist. “Bozhe moi!” exclaimed a man’s voice, and the entity instantly vanished, leaving nothing behind but the smell of onions.
Still, I had gotten four more teeth.
I told Jakey, “I didn’t see the Tooth Fairy. But she sounds like a man and she speaks Russian.”
“Dad, stop that,” Caroline said. “You know how he adores you. He believes everything you say.”
“I’m not lying,” I protested.
I called on an old friend of mine, a folklore professor from the university. We agreed to meet for lunch.
“So,” I asked her. “How do you catch a fairy?”
“I don’t catch fairies, you goof. They’re not real.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me rephrase that. In the folk literature, how does someone catch a fairy?”
“The usual method is to catch them in a noose of human hair.”
“Hmmm, that’s a problem,” I said, rubbing my head. “I’m bald.”
She gave me a look. “Well, then, I guess our local fairies have nothing to worry about.”
It was easy enough to buy a human-hair wig. It was much trickier to figure out how to weave that into a rope. But finally I had something that I could make into a noose without it falling apart. Still, if the Tooth Fairy wanted to get away, she have no trouble breaking the rope, unless it really did have magical qualities.
After I received another batch of Tooth Fairy money from Jakey, I went to bed with my noose bunched up in my hand, and dozed off waiting for the Tooth Fairy to arrive.
As before, I was awakened by the feeling of big, dirty, onion-flavored fingers in my mouth. I flung the noose over the barely-visible figure and turned on my lamp. The Tooth Fairy stood frozen, glowering at me. He was a man, a huge man with ridiculously tiny wings fluttering on his shoulders. I was speechless with astonishment, because I knew this man. I knew who he was. He was Tsar Peter I, a.k.a Peter the Great!
“After all I have done for you, filling your rotten old mouth with teeth, this is how you thank me?” he growled, in Russian. “Release me, you anus-born spawn of a porcine whore!” And this was just the beginning of a rant containing a run of colorful invective that strained even my knowledge of Russian.
When he finally paused, I cut in and said, “Your Imperial Majesty, would you like a beer?”
He blinked a few times, trying to change gear. “Yes,” he said.
Unfortunately, all I had was some Coors Light left behind by Caroline. I brought one for each of us. I half expected to find him gone, but he was still there when I returned. I handed him a can.
“What metal is this?” he asked, squinting at the can.
“Aluminum.” I showed him how to open the can.
“A metal of great rarity,” he remarked.
“Not anymore.”
He emptied the can into his mouth in one great swallow. “Your metal is remarkable, but your beer is swill.”
“So tell me, please, your Imperial Majesty, why you are employed as the Tooth Fairy.”
He bristled at this, but then seemed to shrink in on himself. “It is my penance,” he finally said. “During my life, I collected teeth. I extracted them from servants and noblemen alike, even though they were reluctant to give them up to me. I kept bags of teeth in my palace, and took great pride in them. But in doing so, I harmed a great many people. Before I may enter Heaven, I must return as many teeth as I stole during my lifetime. I thought it would be but a brief penance, but except for you, no one has asked me to give them teeth.”
“That’s because I’m the only one who figured out how to ask,” I told him. “I will release you, of course, but first may I ask you some questions? You see, I am a scholar of Russian history, and I am particularly interested in your life and times..”
He reared up, towering over me, all six feet, eight inches of him. “I will answer any questions you like, under one condition,” he growled, glaring down at me. “You must tell the world how to ask me for teeth.”
He wanted me to prostelytize for the Tooth Fairy. He wanted me to advertise to the world how to get the Tooth Fairy to restore teeth. And in return for my reputation and any claim to sanity that I might currently possess, he would provide me with information about his life and times that had been lost forever. Information that I could never publish or make known to the world. After all, who would I cite in any articles I might write? The Tooth Fairy? Peter the Great, personal communication?
I agreed to his terms without hesitation.