The Minotauress

by Edward Lee

  "No it's not—"

  "Come on, you just told me you had a waking fantasy about being violent to Daphne. She's the common denominator in what's not working in your life. Face it, she treats you like shit—"

  "She does not treat me like shit," Dean had to rebel. "She—"

  "She walks all over you. She makes you clean the house, cook dinner, wash the dishes. Last year when you fell off the ladder and broke your arm, you had to drive yourself to the damn hospital because she refused to."

  "That's only because... she wasn't feeling well."

  "Christ almighty!" Ajax railed. "She won't even let you have a dog—"

  "Well, they do leave lots of hair on the carpet—"

  "At home, all she does is yell at you—"

  "Well, I'm kind of lazy, I need yelling at sometimes—"

  "—and I'll bet my ass she's cheating on you," Ajax finished his avalanche.

  Dean tempered himself. "She is not cheat—"

  Ajax shook his head right along with his words. "And all you do is keep making excuses for her. I'm telling you, man. The reason you're having these Jig-Jags, these waking dreams, is because of her. First you move here—drastic enough of a change—then you marry her. Too much change at once, too much shock-repression. She's turned you into something you're not, and now your psyche is rebelling. No offense, pal, but she's turned you into a pussy-whipped putz."

  "Thanks," Dean said through the frown.

  "Non-REM Imagery Syndrome is no joke, Dean," Ajax cautioned. He sipped his beer and winced. "Next step is Multiple-Personality Disorder. These Jig-Jags are telling you something, paisan. You better listen."

  Dean let the foam in the bottom of his glass slide into his mouth. "Fine, Mr. Freud. What are they telling me?"

  "Get back to your true nature. These fantasy images? It's the real you, the genuine primordial you, struggling to get away from what you've become since you got married."

  "The caveman, huh?"

  "That's right. It's your Id trying to bust out of the cement your wife has poured over you. Everything about your life now is the polar opposite of what your life was."

  Dean's eyes narrowed. "What my life was?"

  "Sure. Come on! You grew up in bumfuck South Dakota, on a ranch. You've told me all the stories. You were a rough and tumble rancher kicking ass in roadhouse bars, bird-dogging chicks and banging beaver. Shit, you were getting laid when you were twelve!"

  Dean's shoulders flinched at the volume of Ajax's last exclamation. "Tell the whole bar why don't you?"

  "Fuck the bar," Ajax came back. "Talk about black to white. No wonder you're hallucinating. Everything your psyche meant for you to be has been turned inside out. Do yourself a favor. Get back to your roots. Get back to being what you were: a tobacco-chewing, gash-busting, hard-knocking, give-a-shit son of a bitch."

  Dean didn't buy a word of Ajax's advice, but it was true—in the past, he'd been all those things and more. And getting laid at age twelve? True. "You don't understand anything," he said. "All those things I used to be—that's why I moved here, to get away from that."

  "Bullshit," Ajax put it bluntly. "Consciously you believe that, but this is your psyche screaming to get out." Ajax lit a cigarette, sucked smoke like it was syrup. "You used to be a hardcore redneck motherfucker. Look at you now."

  Hardcore, Dean thought.

  Ajax continued to enthuse, "Man, you used to artificially inseminate cows. You'd stick your arm all the way down the cow's cooze. Now that's hardcore."

  Dean thought about. Ajax had a point. Being married in Seattle was definitely different from what he'd been used to.

  "When the cattle got abscesses, you'd stick your hand right in their mouths and pop out the puss. That's hardcore."

  Back on the farm, Dean had discharged that duty too—watching the ranch dogs scuffle to eat the wads of pus—and now that he thought about it... It was kind of... fun...

  "Yes sir, a hardcore farmboy motherfucker," Ajax said. He drained the last of his beer, then winced.

  "Hey, Ajax," Dean asked. "How come you wince every time you take a sip of beer?"

  "Because the beer sucks. All this candyass Northwest microbrew bullshit?" Ajax waved a dismissive hand. "It's garbage, taste like fruit."

  "Then why do you drink it?"

  "'Cos it's all they got here."

  Dean shook his head. "All right, then if you don't like the beer, why do you come here?"

  "Are you kidding?" Ajax seemed dismayed. "I love looking at these tramp Goth waitresses. They put wood in my shorts." Then he raised his hand, signaled the girl who'd waited on them. "Hey, toots? When you get a chance?"

  She shuffled over like a corpse on tranquilizers. Her nose ring swung like a doorknocker. "My name's not toots," she informed him.

  "Aw, gee, I'm sorry," Ajax apologized. "Just a figure of speech, you know? So what is your name?"

  "Vermillia."

  Ajax bit his lip in order to stifle an outburst. "Another round, please... Vermillia."

  She shuffled away. The back of her PIERCE ME! T-shirt read I HAD MY CLIT SPLIT AT THE DEVIL DAN'S TATTOO AND PIERCING PARLOR!

  "Jeeeeesus Christ," Ajax murmured. "That fruitcake bitch? I'd stick my head all the way up her gash and suck her cervix."

  Dean shook his head.

  "Oh, and speaking of hardcore," Ajax tacked on. "What was that other thing you did back on the ranch, the thing you won the statewide championship for?"

  Did Dean's eyes actually sparkle for a moment?

  "Horn-cranking," he answered more to himself. "And I wasn't just the state champ. I was the best horn-cranker in the world... "

  CHAPTER TWO

  When most seventeen-year-olds were playing sandlot baseball, contemplating their futures, driving their first car, Dean Lohan was inserting his arm up cow "coozes" all the way to the shoulder, to properly place the frozen semen pellet. But actually it wasn't just one arm, it was both. His other arm, also to the shoulder, slid up the rectal tract, to dilate the spermatic inlet through the intestinal wall. This meant that young Dean's right cheek was firmly placed against the ungainly area of space that existed between the cow's anus and vagina. And Dean performed this less than eloquent procedure thousands of times.

  Pretty hardcore.

  And so too: When most fifteen-year-olds were delivering newspapers or mowing yards, Dean Lohan was, without an official work-permit, employed at the Johnson Meat-Packing Plant: gutting cattle summarily, often when they weren't quite dead; hauling out bovine innards like loops of rope and then squeezing out the grassy cream of excrement with his bare hands; and hosing out the rendering gutters flowing deep with offal, blood, and skin. Young Dean never so much as flinched. And when batches of ground beef went bad, it was Dean's job wash off the slime and then mix it with the good ground beef, which was later sold to local fast-food restaurants and retirement homes at a cut rate that provided a kick-back to the plant manager.

  And when most twelve-year-olds were watching Scooby Doo and playing with army men, Dean Lohan, was squirting his first seminal drops into the mouth of a rather precocious honey-haired girl named Marthie, who was two years his senior. Marthie, who had evidently learned well from a number of relatives including her father, swallowed without so much as a frown. Dean's young penis, too, delved deep the depths of Marthie's vaginal barrel on many an occasion.

  And little Marthie came like a fucking freight train each and every time.

  Even when he was too young to really know was sex was, Dean Lohan was a sex machine.

  He was also the school-yard bully, sending many a classmate home crying through black eyes. Why? For the hell of it.

  He'd partaken in his first "titty-fuck" at age thirteen, his first act of sodomy at fourteen (which had left a young lass with bloody stool for a week), and at sixteen he was copulating with two girls at a time, then three, then four.

  Handsome, endowed, and tough as the earth he'd stomped on his father's ranch, Dean Lohan became the man
every woman wanted in DeSmet, South Dakota, even before he was legally a man at all.

  Whatever it was that lit a fire under a girl's ass, Dean did it right. And there was something else he did right—something, in fact, he did better than anyone else not only in South Dakota but in the entire world.

  Dean Lohan could crank a horn out of a steer's head faster than other men could spit. And he performed this act—with no remorse and with no hesitation whatever—on not hundreds but on thousands of farm-raised steers.

  The strange sound was as familiar to him as the sound of summer rain to normal boys...

  kreeeee-CRUNCH!

  —and out that horn came, like pulling a sweet potato from moist earth.

  Dean didn't care. Not about the animal, not about the pain, not about the torment nor the objective cruelty of the act. He just did it. He cranked those horns out of those steer heads a mile a minute. It was his job, and Dean Lohan quailed at no task.

  He was a horn-cranker.

  Some towns had oyster-shucking contests, or pie eating contests, but DeSmet, South Dakota, had something far more unique. In 1988, at the age of eighteen, Dean entered the annual state horn-cranking contest, not only competing against the best in the land but against the very man who'd come in First Place in this esteemed competition for nine years in a row.

  His very own father.

  Muscles bulging, mind set, and torque-plier in hand, Dean had embarked on this gladiatorial event. The most horns cranked fully out of their seats within a one-minute time-limit would be declared the victor. The previous record was forty-three.

  That's a lot of horns to crank.

  The sun blazed and the crowd cheered, and the day was split open by the hellish howls of the steers being de-horned.

  Spittle-speckled and arms gorged with blood, the end of the day found Dean the easy winner. The coveted trophy—two genuine gold-plated horns—was passed to him by a teary-eyed woman in a red, white, and blue swimsuit and a MISS HORN-CRANKER banner as the audience went mad in their applause.

  Dean not only won this year's state contest, he also set a world record. In sixty seconds he had expertly divorced an even fifty horns from the steer-heads they'd naturally grown in.

  Hence, Dean would have his name in Guinness for some time to come—decades, in fact. His father, teary-eyed himself, embraced Dean after the match. "Boy," he sobbed. "Would you lookit that pile of horns? My God, you've made me the proudest father to ever walk the earth."

  Exuberance surged through Dean's chest. He shed a tear or two himself, seeing his father so happy, and when he turned to the crowd and waved, their applause threatened to rock the entire county.

  I'm the best horn-cranker... in the world, he realized.

  Later, he fucked the dog-shit out of MISS HORN-CRANKER. Indeed, he fucked her so hard she fully lost consciousness in the backseat of Dean's finely rebuilt '72 Mustang Fastback. Then he swigged a beer, pinched some Skoal, and fucked her again.

  For the hell of it.

  ««—»»

  "What the hell is this!"

  Dean grunted, then slowly opened his eyes. He'd fallen asleep on the couch, hadn't he? Yes, after a few shots of Johnny Black to mellow out. And now—

  "What the hell is this!"

  —his beautiful wife Daphne was screaming in his face.

  "What the hell is what?" he griped. "Christ your voice is louder than a truck horn."

  "This!" It was a disk she held between her fingers, the size of a hockey puck.

  A can of Skoal.

  "It was on the coffee table!" she continued to yell, "next to your whiskey!"

  Still groggy, Dean shrugged on the couch. "It's a can of dip. So what? What are you bitching about?"

  "So what? Is that what you said to me?" Rage pinkened her face, her eyes bulging like a cartoon. "Bitching?" She threw the can at him; it bounced off his chest. "You promised me that you'd never use that shit again! You promised me when we got married! It's filthy! It's dirty! Only rednecks and slobs use that stuff! It's—"

  "It's time for you to shaddap," Dean replied, and in a reflex like instinct, he—

  CRACK!

  —slammed his fist into the side of her face. Daphne flew backwards, turning, her Bally shoes flying off her feet. As the inertia transferred from fist to face, Dean saw her eyeballs criss-cross. She thumped to the floor, unconscious.

  Yadduh yadduh yadduh, Dean thought. That's all they do, run their mouths, bellyache, bitch. He poured another shot of Johnny B., slugged it back. That he'd just knocked his wife unconscious didn't faze him, nor did the potential assault and battery charges. "Fuck it. Women." He picked up his can of Skoal, put a pinch between his lip and gum.

  There it is! he thought.

  Nicotine rush abuzz, he looked down at his very unconscious wife. In her fall, she'd landed on her belly, her classy creped black skirt flipped up. Beneath the see-through pantyhose, her ass sat there like a pair of succulent dumplings.

  "Fuck it," Dean said to himself.

  Back in the old days, back on the ranch in DeSmet, Dean's far larger than average reproductive member had taken up residency in many a backdoor. But he'd never done "the anal thing" with Daphne. He'd never even broached the subject, knowing his wife regarded the act as unnatural and degrading.

  "Fuck it."

  He knelt, yanked the pantyhose right off like peeling a condom. Saliva tinted brown with high-grade nicotine dribbled from his mouth and fell precisely into the furrow of her creamy buttocks.

  Dean plugged The Captain right in, and plungered her "star" but good. Spitting in her ass-crack seemed sufficient foreplay—all any woman deserved—he just went to town for a quick one. After all, the bitch hadn't put out in two months!

  Dean's spooge drained in volume. He thought of squeezing the innards out of a fat lizard's mouth.

  "There's one for ya, sweetheart." He wiped his sullied cock off on the pantyhose, then leaned back against the coffee table and took another hit of the good Mr. Black. Eventually Daphne revived, raised her head sluggishly, and brought an errant hand back to her buttocks.

  "What... What did you do?" her words slipped out, incredulous.

  "You looked like you were running a fever," Dean replied, then ejected a thread-thin stream of tobacco juice between his teeth. The stream landed on the plush beige carpet. "So I took your temperature. With a big thermometer."

  Her words wheezed with her breath. "You-you-you—SODOMIZED me! How-how-how—COULD you?"

  "Easy. My dick was hard and your ass was on the floor."

  She began to crawl up, teary and outraged. "I'm-I'm-I'm gonna call my father, I'm gonna call the police, I'm gonna press charges—"

  Dean just calmly shook his head. Sometimes they just don't get it, do they?

  He grabbed her not by the hair but by the face, taking a handful of already bruised cheek, and lifted her to her feet. She squealed like a mouse in a vice the whole way up. "No," he said, "the only thing your gonna do is cook me some dinner. Now." He shoved her recklessly into the kitchen. "Something good, otherwise I'll have to get violent"—

  —and then it happened again, the cacophonous drone in his head like water pouring into a sewer inlet and his vision shifting through cloud-blossom blurs and his heart like a water balloon about to pop—

  —again—

  —again—

  —here they were.

  The Jig-Jags.

  "What the hell is this?"

  Dean was staring at her. He'd fallen asleep on the couch, waiting for Daphne to get home from her meeting, and he'd wakened when she entered. He was just staring at her. My God, he thought.

  "You promised me that you'd never use that shit again! You promised me when we got married! It's filthy! It's dirty! Only rednecks and slobs use that stuff! It's disgusting!"

  Dean sat in turmoil, his consciousness revolving like a ferris wheel on high-speed. I didn't buy that can of Skoal... did I?

  "How can you betray me like this!" Daphne's sopr
ano shriek continued to unwind. "How many other promises have you broken?"

  "Honey, I—"

  "Don't lie to me, you bastard!"

  "Honey, I—"

  "Christ in Heaven, I work my ass off day in and day out while you sit in here chewing tobacco like some common redneck! You're not in South Fucking Dakota anymore, Dean! The joyride's over! We agreed! I pull the weight around here, I make the money! We can't depend on your pissant salary! You're the one who's supposed to keep this place cleaned up."

  Dean's hands spread. "It's clean—"

  "It's a SHITHOLE!" Daphne cracked. "It's FILTHY. Ever heard of a vacuum cleaner? Ever heard of a mop?"

  "Sweetheart, I—"

  "Just shut up! My God, I'm doing everything I possibly can to make this pitiful marriage work!" Her voice raced around the room like a mad ferret. "It would really be nice if JUST ONCE, you'd help me out! But, no! You're too busy sleeping on the fucking couch and chewing that goddamn redneck tobacco!"