“You know, don’t you?” Biddle starts. “You know what we’re all wondering?”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
“We’re all wondering if you got a picture of Destiny’s butthole while you were up there.”
The Minotaur is slow to anger. Few things rattle him to the point of action. It wouldn’t take much to push Biddle over. But the Minotaur doesn’t get the chance.
Biddle screams. Biddle, a look of utter terror peeling his lips back from his gums, beats at the water by his thigh and screams. The Minotaur can make out a word or two, but mostly Biddle just shrieks and pounds.
“Arrhhhh . . . after me . . . oooooob . . .”
Biddle tries to run. Biddle, on dry flat land, would find running difficult. Biddle, in tight rubber waders, hip deep in a pond with a thick muddy bed, takes two steps and falls. When the fat man breaches, dirty water spews from his mouth. His hat floats away.
“It’s after me, M! Please help me! Please!”
With Biddle chopping up the water as he flops and flails to the bank, the Minotaur can’t see anything. The fat barrel maker is still caterwauling when he crawls out of the pond and onto the grass, and keeps it up as he quick-waddles, dripping, around the Tailor Shoppe and out of sight.
When the water stills the Minotaur sees something bobbing just beneath the surface, something bumping against the picnic table. He reaches in.
It’s the trout. The trout he’s seen propped against the fence. A secret part of the vandal’s endeavor, revealed by Biddle. The fish knocks its big plaster head against the underside of the picnic table, as if trying to get to the surface. A sonorous thud if there ever was one. The Minotaur wonders if they thought they were returning the big fish to its home. The Minotaur wonders if the fish knows the difference. It would not surprise him. The Minotaur hooks his arm through the caved-in eye socket and lifts. Muddy water gushes from everywhere. The black mouth gapes.
What now?
“Hey! Chopped steak!”
It’s Smitty. He stands on the bank, hammer in one hand and what is clearly a branding iron in the other. The very air pops and sizzles. It would not be hard to imagine the man spitting nails.
“Hey, T-bone! Mitch wants you in his office. Now!”
Smitty doesn’t wait around, though it seems like he wants to. The Minotaur gives the trout a shove toward deeper water, then sloshes out of the pond. He pauses at the bank, fishes the Bag Balm from his pocket, and tosses it underhanded at his own muddy wake. The can of salve doesn’t sink. The can of salve floats. The Minotaur considers, for the briefest moment, going back in after it.
Mitch runs Personnel. Whatever that means. The Minotaur has seen him maybe three times total since coming to the village. As far as the Minotaur can tell nobody sees him regularly. But everybody knows that Mitch’s office is upstairs in the Welcome Center, and he’s likely right behind the narrow rectangular two-way mirror near the ceiling in the center’s lobby (the one overlooking the ping-pong-table-sized scale model of what Old Scald Village would look like if money were easy and more people really cared).
The Minotaur knocks lightly.
Mitch hems. Mitch haws. His nametag is shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. Mitch fiddles with the tag the whole time he speaks. When Mitch eventually comes around to the point, it is that the Minotaur has to leave the village.
“Not forever,” Mitch says. But he won’t be any more specific.
The Minotaur sees the schedule for the upcoming Encampment Weekend spread out on Mitch’s desk. There are circles and red X’s everywhere. The Minotaur smells like pond water. Mitch smells like hot dogs. His office, his desk in particular, sits right over the Welcome Center’s concessions counter.
“I know Destiny is trouble,” Mitch says. “I know it for a fact. And between you and me, I don’t blame you for what you did, M.”
“Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says. No.
“I’ve been tempted myself,” Mitch says. And then he makes like he’s squeezing an ass with both hands.
The Minotaur offers to stay in the Old Jail. To spend his days in the pillory.
“Put yourself in my shoes, M,” Mitch says. “Destiny can mess things up for all of us.”
No, the Minotaur says, but says it to himself.
He walks back to the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge slowly. On the way he picks a strand of honeysuckle vine. If Devmani Gupta is done with her nap he’ll teach her how to pluck the threadlike stamens from the pale yellow flowers. He’ll show her the droplets of clear sweet nectar.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHAT TO DO? WHAT TO DO? The Minotaur is in something of a pickle. He has moved countless times through the centuries. Been booted right out of one era and grafted himself onto the next. Made do. Trudged along dragging a (less and less) blood-drenched history behind, pushing a tepid eternity before. The Minotaur is, after all, part draft animal. Part beast of burden. The Minotaur will lean into the yoke when necessary. Dray. Dray.
He didn’t mean the trespass with Destiny. Didn’t mean to put his snout up her dress, didn’t mean to have her broom maker’s scents on his face, her tastes on his bullish tongue. He didn’t mean to steal the Bag Balm. He didn’t mean to think Widow Fisk was really Widow Fisk. He is not prepared to go just yet. He was still grappling with her questions. Was almost considering possibilities. But the horn sometimes has a mind of its own. He was willing to spend day after day locked in the stocks, willing to accept the ribbing, the ridicule. But Mitch said no. The Minotaur needs a plan. The Minotaur likes plans. Even flawed plans. It’s one of his more human traits. He likes process and order. These things help him to navigate his eternity, to break down forever into tolerable bits. Tolerable.
The Minotaur keeps some things in a cardboard box under the double bed in Room #3 at the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge. Some things gathered over the years to help with transitions. The contents change over time—the container, too. For now the Jumbo Corndogs Bulk-Pack box holds a coiled orange extension cord, a crescent wrench, a pair of channel locks, screwdrivers. There’s a sewing kit in a small leather case. And a full set of kitchen knives in a canvas roll. The tools are clean. The knives are sharp. These things are remnants from recent pasts. They may be useful again. But he is not ready to make use. Nor, for the moment, can he bear the Guptas’ kindness.
Traffic is light on Business 220. The Minotaur clutches the honeysuckle vine and stands by the roadside, looking down an overgrown path. He knows where it leads. It is Monday morning, but that no longer matters. The Minotaur wishes it were night. In the free market of breath, the commerce of daytime can suffocate. It is sometimes easier to breathe, to wait, at night. The Minotaur envies the plaster trout, finally at home at the bottom of the murky pond. At night the Minotaur knows where to go. It is day. The Minotaur decides to go there anyway.
• • •
Joy Furnace. It says so on the information kiosk. It doesn’t matter to the Minotaur that there are hundreds of other abandoned limestone kilns in the state, each with its own red dot on the plastic map; Joy Furnace is the one he stumbled into those few years ago. It doesn’t matter that the furnaces fired all day and all night, cooking quarried limestone down to its powdery essence. Dozens of men huffed the toxic air all day, all night—mules, too, and horses.
Joy Furnace. Gone are the eight-story-high exhaust stacks, the steel cylinders lining the core of each furnace. Nothing is left of the narrow-gauge railroad track that ran along the skinny space carved out of the hillside overhead, where the hopper cars fed chunks of limestone into the fires. Nothing left. There may be some mule bones buried in the grass.
It’s not important to the Minotaur why he left the highway that day years ago. No official vine-covered Historic Site sign jutted up from the ditch. The rutted dirt road that led into the woods was blocked by a thick and sagging chain, from which hung the cautionary No Trespassing, PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
The Minotaur is nomadic by default. An intuitive va
gabond. He may have been drawn, he may have been compelled, or he may have simply stepped over the chain and wandered up the dirt path for no good reason at all. Nevertheless he did walk off the road, step over the chain, and wander up the dirt path to the remains of Joy Furnace—the stacked-stone foundations of five massive kilns in a row, perfectly aligned, each base twenty-plus feet wide, twenty-plus feet deep, each wall rising two full stories, the front and rear walls pierced by arched portals high enough, wide enough, for even a Minotaur to come and go with ease. It took the Minotaur’s breath. The tomblike beauty of the structures, each capped by crumbling brickwork, looking parapet-like from below. Or maybe they are plinths waiting patiently in the woods for whatever they’re meant to bear. Abandoned. All abandoned now. They took his breath.
The Minotaur stumbled on, those years ago, past the sole information placard mounted on waist-high posts in the grass. He did not see the faded photograph of the scale model of what Joy Furnace probably looked like in the industry’s heyday. Didn’t read the paragraph about Henceforth Joy, the namesake of the village that grew (just down the river) around the success of the business. Henceforth Joy did not survive the voyage across the ocean; her father never recovered from her death. But Joy Furnace thrived for decades, then in its ruined glory drew buffs and hobbyists for another ten years. The town itself struggles. The Minotaur missed, too, that last paragraph, the one staking the claims: “Lime is a key ingredient in other industries that touch our lives—making steel, paper, and glass, refining sugar, and tanning leather.” Though most of this text was obscured by a Sharpie drawing of an overly endowed stick figure and its own claim: “Tommi has the biggest dick of all.”
The Minotaur ignored it all and walked right through the arched doorway of the center kiln. Walked onto the cooling floor, where the quicklime was spread before being shoveled into wheelbarrows. The Minotaur looked around. What architectural black magic was this? The kiln’s foundation, from the outside, was square. Exactingly square. But inside, eight uniform walls surrounded the Minotaur. The octagon. The geometric dance between circle and square. The give-and-take between heaven and earth. Liminal and everlasting. That day the Minotaur stood in the center of the holy space, his heavy boots crunching on the black pellets of coke, the crumbled rock, and looked up. Eight uniform walls of stacked stone rose high over his horned noggin. Skinks and beetles scurried in the cracks. Weeds rooted in the crevices. Up the Minotaur looked to a perfectly round disk of blue sky.
“Unngh,” he said that day, and sat down.
• • •
“Unngh,” he says this day, and sits down. Presses his back against the mortared stone. Lets his horns touch there, too. A few generations ago, humans stoked the fires overhead; two thousand degrees stormed and raged, belching black smoke high into the sky, vomiting chalky white lime onto the earth. Men and animals labored and died in the process. Lifetimes. A drop in the bucket of what the Minotaur knows.
The fire is gone. The stone was stone before chisel, before hammer, and after. Mortar is only wishful thinking. The stone walls keep all the secrets. The Minotaur cut his eyeteeth amid stone. He knows well its loyalty. The Minotaur comes to Joy Furnace when he wants to remember nothing. To foresee nothing.
This day, his life in pending upheaval, Old Scald Village and all its people likely behind him, the Minotaur wants nothing. Nothingness. For the moment. The Minotaur sits, his bull head at rest in the ruinous kiln, this mouth of rock, and lets the torrential silence overtake him.
Sits. And sits.
The day does as days do. And in passing leaves the Minotaur alone.
• • •
Alone, that is, except for the stinkbug that lumbers over his pant leg as if it were a veritable mountain. Alone, that is, except for the hive of busy wasps coming and going from a hole in the far wall, perfect in their industry. Alone, except for the king snake and the copperhead staking out territories in the kiln’s nooks and crannies, waiting for the field mouse, waiting for the fledgling robin to topple out of its nest on an overhead ledge, not quite sure what flying means yet, is yet—could flight be the mouth of this reptile, its binding hold? Alone, but for the shadows that slice the blue circle of day overhead from time to time. Here a titmouse, there a hawk, a buzzard. Alone. Except for the beast that crawls up out of the noonhour.
The Minotaur hears it first. A creature on approach, coming from the highway. What rough beast is this, slouching up the sloped path to Joy Furnace? A labored grunt, then a squeaking and creaking; the thud of something not quite foot; breath heavy, shallow, constricted; some dragged thing, then a pause.
The Minotaur is not afraid. The grunt, the rattle, the thud, the wheeze—everything gets louder as the creature draws nigh. But drawing nigh takes its toll on the clock, in the universe of near-silence inside the abandoned kiln. The Minotaur listens long into the day. A small-scale clamor and clang. A manageable din. The Minotaur refuses to speculate. Clunk and scrape. Crank, wait. The Minotaur is not afraid. Really. The Minotaur is, however, human enough. Man enough. He looks, after all.
It is hard to peek, what with those horns, that snout. But the Minotaur tries. He cocks his head along the arch of the kiln’s portal. The horn tips emerge first; there’s no other way. Whatever makes the sound, whatever comes, is close.
Is close. Is closer. Is—can it be?—something of a man. The Minotaur sees him. The man (manlike) doesn’t see the Minotaur. The man is too busy struggling up onto the low slab of stone at the mouth of the far kiln. He struggles because of the prosthetic leg, a booted apparatus that telescopes from beneath his pant leg just below the knee. He struggles because of the absent arm, the uniform sleeve pinned at the shoulder. That arm, that missing arm, flails in its immense void. The man, the soldier, struggles. The fat cylinder of oxygen weighing down his backpack. And the face, the remnants of face. All this, though, merely glimpsed. The manlike creature enters the far kiln. The Minotaur hears him settle in against the stone wall. The Minotaur listens as the soldier’s breath slows, eases into peace. The Minotaur breathes his own breath. The Minotaur and the man sit together, apart, and breathe long into the night. They share a rancorous kinship. The worn-out scapegoat of an ancient tale and this modern-day myth. The hero-soldier left to rot after his duty is done. The furnace stones bear these manifest burdens stoically.
At some point the Minotaur looks up. The moon is making its rocky and yellow sally across the black circle of night sky. The Minotaur hopes the man is looking up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT IS DAWN WHEN THE MINOTAUR comes back down Business 220. His woolen pants and jacket—those telltale signs of his status as a living-history reinterpreter—are dew damp. Cold and scratchy. The other soldier, the damaged man, may have left Joy Furnace earlier. Or he may still be there. It’s not the Minotaur’s place to question. To pass judgment. To grant salvation. It is not the Minotaur’s place. It is not the Minotaur.
He walks the quiet roadway. The mountain comes to life slowly above him, shouldering up the sun, tucking in and rolling out the shadows. He is in no hurry. It is only Tuesday, and the rest of his murky existence lies ahead. Just beyond a bend in the road the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge comes into view. Its pitched metal roof, painted a leafy green, beckons. Come home.
The Minotaur will slip into Room #3, will close the curtain, the blinds, will strip out of his damp uniform, will make whatever contortions necessary to fit into the cramped tub. It is only Tuesday. He will soak for as long as it takes. The Minotaur focuses. He will not be distracted. He will not look across the macadam. He will not look over the Chili Willie’s parking lot at Pygmalia-Blades, at Danny Tanneyhill’s pickup truck and the gargantuan tree trunk (so much larger than the last) that seems to have toppled from the truck bed and cants precariously, looming overtop the wooden bestiary. He will not look.
“Hey.”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, not in answer. Rather as a deflection. He will not hear.
“Hey.”
S
lightly louder. No matter. The Minotaur will not hear. He stoops to pick up some litter from the mouth of the Judy-Lou’s drive. The blackest crow in existence takes wing from a hemlock bough high on Scald Mountain, hurtles down the slope, pulling the rest of the sun up over the ridge line. The crow lights on the peak of the Pygmalia-Blades tent. Caws its nasty caw. The Minotaur has no choice.
“Unngh,” he says, and crosses the road.
The Minotaur approaches the truck with caution.
“Hey,” the voice says, “can you help a brother out?”
It’s Danny Tanneyhill. He’s pinned between the massive log and the truck’s tailgate.
The Minotaur can be decisive when necessary. He decided to leave behind what he left behind back in Joy Furnace. Here in the Chili Willie’s parking lot, the suffering is more acute. It is not in the Minotaur’s nature to overthink. He decides, for the moment, not to leave the man trapped beneath the tree. In the night the chainsaw artist had returned with an oak too big for his own good. He had grappled with its girth and lost. The tree is limbless. The fresh cuts where the branches were removed glare like pale little suns frozen in orbit around the trunk. Everything stinks of sawdust and motor oil. Smells, too, like trespass. Like ill-gotten gain. This pinning may very well be an act of revenge. But there is no visible blood.
The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Page 8