The jolt knocks him back to Becky’s bed. The whole of the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge goes black.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“Unngh,” he says again, more embarrassed than in danger.
It takes a full hour to get all the fuses replaced and the Judy-Lou’s Vacancy sign flashing again. By the time the Guptas return, their plastic shopping bags stuffed full, the Minotaur is pretending to be asleep in Room #3. He peeks through the parted curtains to watch Rambabu carry his sleeping granddaughter from the car.
CHAPTER THREE
SATURDAY. THE DEAD, THEY RISE, always, to join the march toward Old Scald Village. The village welcomes all the conscripts home with equal fanfare. Zero. Everybody—the bloodied and the bloodless, the valiant and the cowardly, the victorious, the defeated, too—meanders down the hundred yards of gravel road, past the wooden ticket booth that’s used only in high season, toward the parking lot. Old Scald Village promises living history. Promises to “bring the past to the present.” The Minotaur slogs along almost hopefully. He likes best the moments of silence, when nobody talks, when the gravel crunching beneath the shuffling brogans and ankle boots is all the song they need.
“Pretty good one today, huh, M?” Biddle says.
The Minotaur would be hard pressed to tell the difference between any of the battles. Any of the days.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
Biddle is the cooper. When he’s not cannon fodder, Biddle makes barrels two doors down from the Tin Punch Cottage. Biddle is pink and sweaty. Too fat for the gray wool uniform he wears. But he wears it with gusto. Biddle offers the Minotaur a drink from a wooden canteen. The Minotaur shakes his big head no.
They’re halfway to the Welcome Center. A gaggle of battlefield nurses walks ahead, their satchels full of wound-dressing supplies, laughing loudly about something. Behind them, the drummer keeps an uneven rhythm with the trumpeter’s human beat-box routine.
Biddle looks nervously up and down the line of returning soldiers. He fishes in the leather cartridge box on his belt, takes out a cell phone, and taps at the screen. High above, the turnpike traverses Scald Mountain. Few heed the Falling Rock signs.
“Look at this one,” Biddle says, handing the phone to the Minotaur.
The Minotaur holds the phone up to one eye, then the other, turns it this way and that, but in the midday sun, and with his ocular challenges, it’s hard to tell exactly what he’s looking at. Biddle snaps and unsnaps the cartridge box. Snaps and unsnaps. Sweat trickles down both temples.
The Minotaur can make out the breasts—incredibly large breasts—but not much else.
“That one’s so sweet she probably poops Milk Duds,” Biddle says, sucking air between his teeth.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. What else can he say?
Old Scald Village promises to preserve the past. Promises battles and craft exhibitions, Christmas festivals and murder-mystery evenings and more. And more. The Minotaur likes Biddle, flawed as he is. The Minotaur sees in Biddle kinship. The Minotaur respects the fat man’s willingness to be fully himself. Transgressions and all. Out of kindness, he looks again, trying to see what Biddle wants him to see on the cell-phone screen. The breasts, yes. In motion. A fleshy rump. The Minotaur squints, cocks his head. A crow gets caught in the angle delineated by his horn tips. The Minotaur tries to focus. Is focusing. Then he feels the pinch on his backside.
“Tssss!”
It’s Smitty.
First the pinch, then the accompanying hiss, meant to be a sizzle. Meant to be the sound of burning flesh. His flesh. A brand on the Minotaur’s human haunch. A hot stink fills the air.
“Tssss!”
The pinch and hiss. The burn. The stench.
All of the moments that unfold in a life—any life, human, animal, mongrel—almost never arrive ready made with predetermined outcomes. Each moment that wriggles and shrugs down the birth canal of time does so under the burden of every single other moment that’s come before it. And at the instant of unfolding, of awakening, of awareness, that moment—every one—is at the immediate and perfect whim of mindless happenstance. There are always other choices, other possible outcomes. Better or worse is always in the eye of the beholder.
“Tssss!”
Smitty, the blacksmith, his callused fingers a make-do branding iron, pinches the Minotaur. As if the Minotaur’s past means nothing. As if.
The Minotaur throws back his bullish head. Bellows. The roar fierce, the rage so primal it blackens the sun. Shrivels the moon. Lightning sears the sky. The river boils its fishes. Rank and file—the soldiers, the nurses—faint dead away, not wanting to bear witness. The horned beast roars, and the brass buttons of his jacket give way, pop and hiss in the air as they fly. The Minotaur, ravening, thrashes his heavy head. The horns whip the sky into froth. Smitty, beneath the smudges of black ash, weeps. Wets himself. Begs for mercy. None comes. The Minotaur looms over all. Smitty flees. Runs, as if he could actually escape his self-made fate. The Minotaur stomps his booted foot on the graveled earth, and all the pines drop their needles and, sapless, wither where they stand. Smitty runs and runs, weaving among the picnic tables, through the river’s mucky bed, runs up the steep bank, through the black trunks of the dead pines, runs looking backward, runs hoping for escape, runs right into the barbed-wire fence surrounding Old Scald Village, the blacksmith’s tender neck flesh succumbing without protest, a hot wing of blood fluttering to the ground, steaming for the briefest of moments.
No.
“Tssss!”
The pinch and hiss. It could happen just so. It doesn’t.
When Smitty, the blacksmith, pinches the preoccupied Minotaur and hisses in his ear, the bullish soldier startles and drops the cell phone to the gravel.
“Don’t look like standard issue to me,” Smitty says, then spits on the road by the phone.
Smitty is hardcore. Smitty is a stitch counter, in constant pursuit of a past perfected. Smitty is a living historian, and committed to the role. Devoted, even. Every detail of his uniform, his Blacksmith’s Shoppe and the tools there, his behavior—everything about Smitty is perfectly re-created. Accurate. There are a handful of hardcores at Old Scald Village, looking down their period-correct noses at the mere pretenders. The Minotaur finds it all both intimidating and mildly amusing.
“Tssss!”
Smitty takes ingots of raw pig iron and transforms them. Smitty makes hinges and horseshoes. Plowshares and bullet molds. Smitty makes trouble for anyone who isn’t period correct. Smitty makes trouble for the Minotaur. But the Minotaur knows this man, this kind of man. Knows what his forge is capable of. The Minotaur has withstood such petty brandings countless times over the long span of his life. Knows he will surely endure more.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
The Minotaur lets the moment pass, releases the potential for rage. Release serves him well. The Minotaur takes his time.
Biddle scrambles for the cell phone, blows the dust off the screen. The nurses and other soldiers go about their business. When the trio of young musicians walks by rapping some vaguely obscene lyric, Smitty follows and thumps the fife player on the ear.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“Here,” Biddle says, handing the Minotaur the phone once again. “These are my babies.”
The Minotaur has been here before. The Minotaur has been here a long time.
The Minotaur positions the phone just so. This time, he can clearly see Biddle sitting on a couch, a big goofy grin, three bug-eyed pug dogs clutched in his arms.
Old Scald Village promises much. The price of admission is sometimes high.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MINOTAUR HEARS THE ANVIL RING three times. Smitty, in the Blacksmith’s Shoppe at the far end of the lopsided figure eight that defines Old Scald Village, is driving out the devil. The Minotaur stands at the Welcome Center door and listens for all three hammer strikes. With each, the redwing blackbirds lift off from the cattails circl
ing the manmade pond; they flit, then settle. Flit, then settle. Flit. Settle. The Minotaur waits for the metallic hum to die away.
Biddle is headed toward the Cooper’s Shack. He’s trying to get one of the nurses to look at something on his phone. The girl ignores him, flicks at a cricket climbing up between the faux bloodstains on her apron. He tries again.
“Aren’t you married or something, Biddle?” she asks.
“Something,” Biddle mumbles.
He gives up and skulks over to the Minotaur. “You know she lives on the island of Lesbos, don’t you,” Biddle says to the Minotaur. It’s not really a question. “Her and that basket maker.”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
“The dark-haired girl, the one with the nose ring and all the Band-Aids on her fingers.”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. It’s a quiet day. He hears a semi Jake-braking on the steep turnpike descent. “Mmmnn.”
“They caught ’em one time in the church, up in the choir loft. She had her—”
“Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says. No. He’s not interested. Besides, he has vague memories of being there, on the island of Lesbos.
“Suit yourself,” Biddle says. “See you tomorrow.”
Three times the ball-peen hammer strikes the anvil’s face. Legend has it that Satan himself was duped by a clever blacksmith. That the smithy hammered the devil into a pair of shoes so tight and painful. Legend says so, or maybe it is rumor. What the Minotaur knows for sure is that when the anvil rings three times it means that the Old Scald Village blacksmith is deep in the heart of his shop, cranking the bellows, stoking the forge, its fiery eye pulsing. Smitty will be there for a while. The Minotaur can go about his own business unmolested.
The Minotaur watches some of the other soldiers who aren’t working in the village shops that afternoon load gear into their cars at the far edge of the parking lot. It is Saturday, early in the dying season. The Minotaur doesn’t like to carry his rifle or side knife on the walk home. It’s hard enough to lug the horns through his days. The manager of the Gift Shoppe lets him tuck the weapons behind the mops and brooms in the closet near the cash register.
“Hey, M,” she says when he triggers the electronic bell. “How’d it go out there today?”
She always asks the same questions. She might be middle aged, whatever that means in human terms. She looks up from beneath the deep brim of a crisp white bonnet, and the big round rims of her glasses magnify the green eyes, and the kindness therein.
“Did you die good?”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
Her name is Widow Fisk. That’s what they all call her, anyway. That’s what the Minotaur knows her as. Middle aged, maybe. Content in the body she carries. The Old Scald Village Gift Shoppe is her domain. The Minotaur admires her commitment to the role. Always has. She rules, with beneficence, the cadres of elementary-school kids who, left to their own, would crumple all the Declaration of Independence scrolls, pocket without paying for all the authentic Civil War bullets, dump the wicker basket of handmade doilies, likely even try to eat the cakes of artisan soaps, made three doors away. The peppermint, the honey, the vanilla especially.
“Ain’t nobody going to pay that much for a bar of soap,” Widow Fisk sometimes says to the Minotaur. “I don’t care how many pretty leaves and colors inside it.”
She was here in the shop way back when the Minotaur came in looking for work. She didn’t flinch at his horns, his snout. Registered, even, something akin to kindness when she looked at him that first time. Widow Fisk made a joke about her bloomers; they were white and silky and draped across the drying rack in the cramped office. She winked at the Minotaur and pointed to a narrow staircase. Told him to see Mitch in Personnel. Told him to visit again on his way out, all those years ago.
This Saturday, after the day’s dying is finished, Widow Fisk closes her eyes and sniffs at one of the soaps. She offers it to the Minotaur, holds the fragrant bar close to his snout. Widow Fisk is his touchstone, of sorts. His go-to for gossip and guidance. The Minotaur trusts her.
Occasionally, the Minotaur sees a fully human face and knows something. He makes judgments accordingly. In Widow Fisk’s soft open eyes, the fine web of wrinkled flesh around them, in the fullness of her bottom lip and the two crooked teeth betrayed by every smile (all of them), the Minotaur sees the whole spectrum of life experience. Sees both want and resignation. This Widow Fisk has known misery and pain. But this Widow Fisk is not afraid of joy.
She smiles, and the tiny fleck of tomato peel stuck to her bottom tooth glows like a beautiful ruby.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
In the far corner of the Gift Shoppe, two boys tussle over a coonskin cap and a wooden pistol.
“It’s mine!”
“Boys,” Widow Fisk says, and that’s all it takes.
Widow Fisk. She is the one human in Old Scald Village the Minotaur can imagine himself talking to. Even more than sweet fat Biddle. The Minotaur could tell her things. She is the only person there who he’s told anything about his journey, about his coming to the village. How he left behind kitchens and concessions, a different life, below the Mason-Dixon line. How he found himself in uniform and followed the battles north. Dying and dying again. He didn’t tell her everything. He didn’t have to.
Widow Fisk. The Minotaur can imagine telling her other things. Telling her what he knows. A clear plastic jar sits by the cash register. It’s half full of souvenir key chains, all of them cast-resin anvils. The Minotaur knows a thing or two about anvils. He could tell Widow Fisk these things. The Minotaur could mark the weight. Nearly four hundred pounds of steel. The Minotaur could name the parts, one by one. The bick. The table. The face. The shoulder. The throat. The hardy hole. The pritchel hole. The hanging end.
The Minotaur will not tell Widow Fisk everything. He will not tell her that sometimes he imagines her into his darkness. That gingham dress pulled up high. Dreams the Minotaur, Widow Fisk at her most animal.
“Mmmnn, I did,” he says. “Die good.”
The Minotaur would get very quiet and almost whisper the anvil’s last part, the horn, and Widow Fisk would understand why. She is the only person the Minotaur makes the effort with.
“Stay away from the Tavern,” she says.
“Mmmnn?”
“That old hussy behind the counter is on a rant,” Widow Fisk says. “She cornered me this morning, talked for ten solid minutes about her diarrhea.”
The Minotaur grunts something like a chuckle.
“Grab a piece of horehound on the way out, hon,” Widow Fisk says.
She’s already plucked a couple pieces of the hard candy from the little tin bucket on the counter and is reaching them toward the Minotaur. When he takes them (and he always does), her fingertips graze his palm (they always do). The Minotaur occasionally sees the fully human in a face. Sometimes, though, he can detect the animal. Widow Fisk winks when she gives him the candy. Maybe. With her enormous glasses and his own struggles with seeing clearly, the Minotaur can’t be certain.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, and is poking one of the bittersweet lozenges deep into his mouth when he opens the Gift Shoppe door.
“Hey!”
The Minotaur looks up.
“Hey!”
Up and into the eyes of the little unicorn girl, her beautiful hazel eyes. The same girl from the battlefield, from yesterday. She’s in the pillory. Her family has come back to see the dying two days in a row. It’s not uncommon. She’s in the pillory, the stocks, perched tiptoe on a stepstool. The girl cranes the scrawny neck and wiggles the birdlike arms jutting through the pillory’s three rough holes. A boy, probably a brother, chops at her feet with a rubber-bladed tomahawk from the Gift Shoppe. The lights in her magic shoes blink madly with each whack.
“Hey!”
She’s speaking to the Minotaur. A woman, probably her mother, sits—exhausted or bored—on a wooden bench between the Chickens and Roosters bathroom
doors. The woman barely looks up from the cell-phone screen she’s tapping at. The unicorn girl’s father, struggling to focus his own cell phone on the squirming kids, looks fully at the Minotaur. His paternal hackles rise instantly.
“Hey!” he says.
The pillory. Medieval. Simple. Little more than planks and chains and humiliation. There are three, maybe four pillories in Old Scald Village, and always lines at every one. Always someone shrieking, “My turn!” or “You next!” And the ceaseless photographs. The Minotaur is perplexed by humans’ obsession with, love of, punishment. The Minotaur knows, too, that nothing in Old Scald Village could hold that tiny beast against her will. Not really.
“Hey!” she says.
And the whole gathered throng looks at the Minotaur.
The Minotaur is stunned by her presence, by her reappearance. Not exactly spooked, but so surprised that he gasps. He gasps and sucks the horehound lozenge deep into his throat. There it plugs his windpipe tight, seals it, guards against any breath, out or in.
A choking Minotaur is a sight to behold. Or maybe not. The Minotaur isn’t quite sure what to make of the airless moment. Thinking back over the millennia, he’s surely been in this situation before. But for the life of him the Minotaur can’t recall. He scuttles backward into the Gift Shoppe, mostly to get away from the scrutinizing eyes. In his haste, trying to dislodge the candy, the Minotaur dips his head low, and his horn tip plows through a bin of sock puppets. George Washington. Betsy Ross. Ulysses S. Grant. When the Minotaur rears his head Abe Lincoln dangles, impaled on the horn.
The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Page 2