The Minotaur has no small skill with needle and thread. He is well versed in thimble. But those skills he keeps secret at Old Scald Village. He avoids the Tailor Shoppe and its cheerful signage:
A stitch in time saves nine
Dyed in the wool
Sewing mends the Soul
Make do and mend
At the moment, there is no tailor in the village. Some say that Sprankle up and died in the parking lot of Adult World, in Joy, PA, two towns over. The Minotaur also heard that Sprankle moved to Joy and opened a lawnmower repair shop. Either way the Minotaur keeps his sewing kit out of sight.
It’s hot. Unseasonably so. The sun is high and unforgiving. The Gift Shoppe will likely deplete its stock of paper parasols and straw hats. The Minotaur likes the heat.
He heads to the Broom Shack. The Broom Shack is little more than that. A single story of vertical planks. A cedar shake roof. The paint on the exterior a faded and chipped eggy yellow. A tattered old broom is propped by the front door. It’s an inside joke. It means the broom squire is looking for a wife. There is no porch, only a rough stone stoop. The floorboards creak when the Minotaur steps inside.
The broom maker cuts loose right away. “Hey, hey, M! It’s hotter than a popcorn fart out there, isn’t it?”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, unwilling to commit to either yes or no.
“Not much cooler inside,” she says.
Then the broom maker just keeps talking, but the Minotaur doesn’t listen. He leans against a high workbench, steadies himself against the surge of her words. The Minotaur waits to hear what she wants. It’s dry in the small building despite the warm Pennsylvania day. All that broom straw sucks the moisture from the air. The Minotaur’s skin begins to itch, especially at the seam. He can’t reach into his coat to rub at it. Not in public. The purplish ridge of flesh tightens, cinches the Minotaur’s chest.
“Unngh,” he says.
“I know,” the broom maker says. “I told the son of a bitch he’d better quit while he was ahead.”
The Broom Shack has two windows, one by the front door, the other on the opposite wall, looking out at an unused part of Old Scald Village. Looking out over the marshy ditch at the back of the property, through the drooping cattails with their fat brown stamens to some unnamable detritus stacked along a chain-link fence. If you look, if you pay attention, you can see the trout. It’s massive, big as an old sedan, and made of plaster. A pale green motionless leviathan abandoned, propped pinkish belly up, mouth agape, against the fence. The Minotaur refuses to look into that black hole. No good could come of it. On a far hill, on the other side—and there is always an other side—a Jesus Is Lord billboard faces God knows where, aims at God knows who.
“ . . . thicker than banjo players in hell,” the broom maker says.
“Unngh.”
The Minotaur likes the shop’s efficiency. The winder and the iron vise are where they ought to be. The foot treadle and the rack of knives with hammered blades, too. The Minotaur respects order. And the broom maker knows her way around. Besoms, she calls her brooms, because that’s what they’re called. When an audience is present, of any size, any makeup, the girl is all business in her role as living historian. She never breaks her version of character. But if it’s just her and the Minotaur (or any other village employee or volunteer) in the cabin, the broom maker—plump, filling up her floor-length calico (sometimes red, sometimes green) dress—gabbles and jabbers without ceasing. She’ll talk her way through round brooms and flat brooms. The Turkey Wing. The Cobweb Chaser. She talks and works. Her fingers are deft, quick, and sure.
“Howdy!” she says to a soggy-eyed couple in matching American flag T-shirts. “Welcome to the Broom Shack.”
In most of the Old Scald Village shops and buildings visitors are confined to a narrow patch of floor just inside the doorway, from which they watch and ask questions. Sometimes they’re corralled by a strand or two of dusty hemp rope. In the Broom Shack a low rail fence demarks the space. Separates worker from watcher. The Minotaur hasn’t yet crossed over, and now the old couple is in the way. He tries to blend in, somehow, with his horns and his Confederate uniform.
“Oh,” the wife says to the Minotaur. Or at the Minotaur. She forces a smile and moves behind her husband, who makes do with a scowling nod.
The Minotaur picks up a ball of stitching twine and pretends to do something with it. They’ll stay for bit (out of genuine interest or heat-driven indifference), and the broom maker will bandy about terms—head spray and binding and suitable tail.
“Can’t forget the spick,” she’ll say, “or the head will just twist right off.”
They seem the type, so the broom maker tells them the joke. “Don’t be a besom,” she says, winking at the wife, then explains that besom means broom but can also mean disagreeable woman. “Don’t be a besom, always sweeping up dust.”
Sometimes they laugh. This couple doesn’t. But before leaving the wife buys one of the broom maker’s little Guardian Angels, splintery talismans made of husk and straw and jute twine.
“Won’t it look nice on the Christmas tree?” the wife says.
The Guardian Angels always sell.
“Hey, big boy,” the broom maker says when the coast is clear. “Bring those horns over here and put them to some good use.”
The Minotaur isn’t sure what she wants.
The broom maker sees his confusion. “Can you help me move the shave horse?”
“Umm?” the Minotaur says. He heard her the first time but wants to hear those words again from her mouth: the shave horse. It’s a foot-operated vise.
“I want to look out the window,” she says.
The shave horse is heavy, its narrow bench made from a split log planed smooth.
“I asked Biddle to help yesterday. Fucker came in and started telling me about a website called ‘Ass—”
“Booooring,” a voice interrupts. The voice is followed by, drags in, perhaps, the head of a boy, eight, nine, ten years old. He pokes his noggin through the Broom Shack’s door, cocks his crisp new Rebel cap back on his head, and repeats his charge: “Booooring.”
“Bender!” a mother shrieks. “Get over here!”
The boy waggles an Indian spear—its rubber head flopping back and forth—at the Minotaur, then retreats.
“—hole Worship, ’” the Broom Maker says. “‘Asshole Worship’?
What the fuck?”
You have to straddle the shave horse. To make it work. Straddle it.
“‘Asshole Worship.’ Tried to show me pictures.”
“Mmmnn.”
“Of assholes! And—”
“Bender!” the woman yells, somewhere out of sight. “Take that out of your mouth right now!”
“Ready, set, go,” the broom maker says, and they lift together.
“Unngh,” she says.
“Unngh,” he says. The Minotaur had never noticed the broom maker’s freckles. He’s always noticed the splinters in her fingers and palms.
“Yeah, baby,” she says after giving the shave horse one final shove. She pulls aside the burlap curtain and looks out. The Minotaur wonders what she sees. “You know what I think, M?”
“Mmmnn?”
“Men are stupid. That’s what I think.”
The Minotaur agrees, mostly. Sometimes, in those rare moments of clarity, the Minotaur understands that people usually do the best they can in any given moment. But the standard, the bar, the broomstick over which people must jump, is low. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur lows. He laments.
The broom maker’s face is dotted with freckles, nut brown against her pale flesh. She talks and talks and talks, and the freckles move. They swirl—oceanlike, constellation-like—over her cheeks. The Minotaur wants to look at that face. Wants more than anything, there in the Broom Shack, to find the monsters and the heroes (even the lesser beasts) among those stars. But you have to straddle th
e shave horse, so the broom maker does. Sits with her back to the Minotaur.
“Hand me a stick,” she says.
The Minotaur rattles around in a bin of cut birch saplings, does as he is told.
“Sit yourself down,” she says. “All them horny horns make me nervous.”
The only option is a low three-legged stool roughly crafted from a split tree trunk and some thick branches. The Minotaur does as he is told. The stool wobbles beneath him. The broom maker, astraddle the shave horse, presses the treadle with both feet, clamping the stick tight in the vise’s wooden jaws. She leans, stretches, reaches onto the workbench for her draw knife.
“My mama always told me . . . ,” she says.
The Minotaur doesn’t hear the advice. He’s too preoccupied with the broom maker’s movement.
“Did your mama ever . . . ?”
The broom maker bends forward over the shave horse, steadies the draw knife in two hands, and begins scraping the bark away in thin curlicues. Back and forth, draw and scrape.
“You ever stick anybody with one of them . . . ?”
And every time the broom maker bends forward, the two heavy mounds of her backside flex, rise, and divide, big as upturned bushel baskets inside her gingham dress. And when she pulls the knife, little tongues of wood, tiny flightless birds, drop at her feet. And her fat ass settles back into place.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“Speaking of asshole worship,” she says, “did you see Sarge out there today?”
“Mmmnn.”
The Minotaur is not above his animal self, or his man self. The broom maker doesn’t seem to need his responses.
“You know what I heard?” she says, reaching back without looking to tug the fabric of her dress from the cleft of her behind. She gives a wiggle. “I heard he’s hoping to take it to the next level.”
“Unngh.”
“They say he’s working on shitting himself, every time he dies out there on the battlefield. Can you believe such a thing?”
Yes. The Minotaur can. Human behavior never really surprises him.
No. The Minotaur cannot imagine himself into the fully human moment.
Moments. All of them, human and otherwise, ushered in under escort, flanked on either side by liminal space. There is always room for chaos to blossom. The broom maker yaps away and scrapes the bark from the birch stick. Body. Not body. The Minotaur can smell her. He can’t not. Outside the Broom Shack it is spring. Dying season. Rut season, too. He thinks he hears Smitty pounding at the anvil. Thinks he hears the dragonflies winging over the pond, the pump-organ bellows gasping for breath.
“Hunky-dory,” the broom maker says, rising, releasing the newly shaved broomstick from the vise and sighting down it as if it were a gun barrel.
“Bang,” she says. “Bang bang bang.”
The Minotaur knows his limits. Knows his own leanings. Allows himself from time to time to clamber over the wall of guilt and wallow in nonsense. The Minotaur knows his limits. This doesn’t mean he is in control. The broom maker chooses, with some care, a whisk broom from among others hanging on the wall over the workbench. She squats and begins sweeping the birch shavings into a neat pile. The Minotaur knows. Knows his limits. He wants to see. Just the tattoo. In Loving Memory, it says. The Minotaur wants to know who the wall-eyed boy was. That’s all. The broom maker squats, her back to the Minotaur. Close enough. The Minotaur leans forward on the low three-legged stool. Reaches for the hem of her gingham skirt. The transgression ever so slight in his bull brain.
She squats. She sweeps.
“Hey, M,” she says. “What do you get when you cross a broom maker with a—”
That’s when the stool topples.
There are places the Minotaur and his big old horns cannot fit.
That’s when the stool topples.
There are places where the Minotaur and those horns should not fit.
Then the stool topples. Then the stars of outrageous fortune align. Then the Minotaur falls forward and in doing so drives his thick snout all the way up the broom maker’s dress, shoving hard against her crotch, shoving her bodily beneath the table and scattering bobbins of stitching twine hither and yon.
It doesn’t surprise the Minotaur that the broom maker isn’t wearing panties. There’s no time for guilt. No time for thoughts of Widow Fisk, or the Guptas’ returning daughter. The broom maker wears no panties. Nor do her damp earthy scents surprise. Not at all. But that hair. What horns its way most insistently into his state of mind is the thatch of hair between the broom maker’s legs. And how it tickles the deep black wells of his nostrils. The Minotaur sneezes instantly. A full-on, wet, rubbery-lipped sneeze. Right between the broom maker’s legs.
They are both profoundly surprised. The Minotaur tries to scramble backward, to extract himself from the unmeant cave. No, more muzzle than cave. Scrambles backward nonetheless. The broom maker begins to scream. No. More auctioneer’s cry. More, still, a glossolalia. A sacred, albeit loud, utterance. No words. Pure syllables. A train wreck of tongue against teeth. The broom maker, wailing, upends the table. The Minotaur shakes his big head. The broom maker, wailing, picks up a broomstick, begins to hit the Minotaur. The Minotaur tries halfheartedly to defend himself. The broom maker, wailing, tires of hitting the Minotaur. She runs out the door, wailing. By the time he rights himself and stands, the Minotaur can barely hear her cry.
“Mmmnn, no,” he says.
• • •
The Minotaur skulks out into the madding crowd. Dumbstruck. No. There is no crowd. Only the gawking handful of stragglers trying to wring every last second of experience out of their Old Scald Village admission fee. Only the others employed by the village or merely volunteering, the Minotaur’s fellow living historians, costumed reenactors, historical interpreters. Call them what you will, they all gawk.
The candle maker stands on her listing porch, mouth agape, twining a wick tightly around her finger; the tinsmith, too, is there, ball-peen hammer in hand, his punch still, on the bench, awaiting the strike; a mother ushers her children into the Old Jail when the Minotaur passes, their faces clotting the open window. It is spring. Advent and blasphemy.
“Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says. But the bits of broom straw he trails are a grave incrimination.
The Minotaur pretends not to see any of them. The Minotaur, feeling fully his monster, keeps his big head low, one thick horn gouging a rut in the well-trod earth. Walks watching each step, as if his small very human feet belong to someone else. The Minotaur, a graft gone horribly awry, wonders where they’ll take him, those feet.
Advent and blasphemy. It is spring. The gods snigger as they play. O nasty happenstance! The Minotaur pretends not to see any of it. Pretends most not to see the face of Widow Fisk. Widow Fisk, her kind face, her buttered fingers. Widow Fisk, who fed him pie. Who said they’d make him a general. Who stands in the doorway of the Welcome Center clutching a handful of ticket stubs. He pretends not to notice her look of utter betrayal. The Minotaur wonders if his feet will lead him to her. Widow Fisk retreats into the Welcome Center and hangs the Closed sign on the door handle.
The Minotaur drags his musket through the grass, down the drive, and over the planks of the covered bridge. The Minotaur pretends that the water in Stink Creek isn’t running red. A deep rust red.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TRAFFIC ON THE TURNPIKE, high above on Scald Mountain, is heavy with people rushing toward or away from other kinds of worlds and lives. And all that sound—of metal, plastic, and rubber in motion on pavement, the noise of come and go—it all tumbles down the mountainside, surges over the more languid Business 220, drenches its travelers and dwellers, and slams against the dam that is the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge, with its brick walls and closed doors.
“Mister M,” Rambabu Gupta says when the Minotaur hurries into the motel office, “you are looking not so good today. Was the dying unsatisfactory?”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur replies. “No
t so . . .”
There is more to say. Much. It is late on Sunday afternoon. The Minotaur has much more to say.
“Mmmnn.”
Just across Business 220, at the edge of the Chili Willie’s parking lot, the overlord of Pygmalia-Blades yanks the pull cord, and the chainsaw engine revs furiously. The Minotaur shivers. Rambabu Gupta looks at him long and hard.
“Please, Mister M, sit down.”
Rambabu goes into the Guptas’ apartment. The Minotaur sits in a tattered armchair to gather his wits. Coming up the road, the Minotaur saw Danny Tanneyhill out of the corner of his bull eye. The man was standing at the newly procured tree trunk, gesturing, making imaginary cuts. Rambabu and Ramneek Gupta speak somewhere out of sight. The Minotaur can barely discern between the Hindi and the rattle of pots and pans. He leans his horns back against the wall—papered with a repeated print of a stag, a doe, a fawn, in a glade, all monochrome ocher—and eases the curtain aside. Wonders what nascent beast Danny Tanneyhill is after in that massive trunk.
The Minotaur fingers the bumps on his head from the broom maker’s stick, a futile and haphazard phrenology. Back in the Guptas’ kitchen, something chops away. A grinding mechanical sound. The air is suddenly sweet.
Rambabu Gupta returns with a glass of cloudy yellowish liquid. “Assimilation, Mr. M,” Rambabu says, handing the Minotaur the glass. “It is a dubious enterprise. Dubious. Drink up, Mr. M. Ganne ka ras. Cane juice. It soothes.”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. Guzzles half the glass. Nearly swoons over the purity of the viscous juice. He will sip the rest. The Minotaur has much to say. About the broom maker. About what happened in her shack. About assimilation. About Widow Fisk and what she saw. Or what she thinks she saw. Pilloried as he is by his past, the Minotaur says nothing.
“Just another day, maybe two, Mister M,” Rambabu says. “Then our Ba . . . our Becky will be with us. We will celebrate. You will join in.”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says at last.
That’s when Devmani bursts into the room. The Guptas’ granddaughter has escaped from the bath. She is naked, dripping wet, giggling and glorious in her tiny body. She has a bright yellow tub crayon clutched in her little fist.
The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Page 6