Raleigh, N.C. ? Downwind from the cotton candy, the caramel apples and the deep-fried Oreos, carnival worker Robert Weaver stepped into a mobile dentist’s office on the state fair midway to pay the price for his love of sweets: three pulled teeth.

For carnies like Weaver, who runs a saltwater taffy concession, the long hours, low pay and sugary temptations of the carnival life can produce a mouthful of misery.

So every year, volunteer dentists come to the North Carolina State Fair in a bus, offering free care to any fair worker with the time — and the courage — to walk in.

“It hurt all day and all night,” said Weaver, whose stubbly beard did little to hide the bulge in his cheek. While bad teeth run in his family, he admitted that his taste for taffy, chocolate-covered bananas and deep-fried Twinkies didn’t help.

“I love my junk food,” the 35-year-old Norris, S.C., man with no health insurance said through a gapped grin. “I want to sample everything.”

Parked not far from the livestock pavilion, where the odor of manure mingles with that of fryer grease and sugar, the dental bus is a sparkling clean, antiseptic oasis next door to the spinning Tornado.

Equipped with two operating rooms, a mobile X-ray lab and its own water supply, it treats about 40 carnival workers every year.

On a recent bustling weekday, 14 were lined up for what was, for many, their first chance at dental care in years.

“We go from show to show, 10 hours a day, 10-day spots,” said Chico Alves, a midway games operator who spends the few months he is at home in Providence, R.I. “If you do see a dentist and they give you an appointment, and it’s a couple of days down the road, I’m in another state.”

Dr. Sue Fowler, left, shows 42-year-old carnival worker Chico Alves his pulled wisdom tooth, which was removed Thursday in the mobile dental bus stopped at the North Carolina State Fair in Raleigh, N.C. Every year, volunteer dentists come to the state fair offering free care to any fair worker with the time to walk in.

Shirlowe Powell, a retired trucker who has been driving the dental bus for the North Carolina Baptist Men for about seven years, said about 60 percent of the people coming in ended up getting teeth pulled.

“These carnies, they don’t come till it starts hurting,” she said. “Really, the sad story is that their teeth have been bad for so long, about the onliest thing you can do most of the time is extract them.”

That was the case with Alves, who took time away from his basketball hoop concession because of the throbbing pain that radiated from his jaw to his temple. An X-ray revealed an abscessed wisdom tooth.

“It’s got gross decay and it’s into the nerve chamber — so it needs to come out,” said white-haired, bespectacled Dr. Sue Fowler, who is more accustomed to working with children.

“Take that home and throw darts at it at the next fair,” Fowler said, laying the bloody brown tooth on the paper bib covering Alves’ chest.

A few minutes later, Alves, mouth filled with gauze, was back at his booth, where two out of two swishes wins a basketball.