The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

by Steven Sherrill

  “Unngh, yes,” he says.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Tomorrow,” he says.

  “Mmm,” she says. Nothing more. There’s been enough talking.

  Holly starts to sing. Softly. The Minotaur doesn’t recognize the song. No matter. The Minotaur lied. He has sung before, in a different life, in another salvage yard. The Minotaur finished his task awhile ago but wants to stay in the presence of her song. Each note a raindrop in the endless desert of his eternity. The Minotaur wants to drown in those notes. No. Each note a white-hot pinprick in the abject black of his always. The blind Minotaur takes his time. Wallows in it. Sweet time. Sweet time.

  “What do you like most?” Holly asks.

  “Mmmnn?”

  “About the reenacting business. What do you like most?”

  “Mmmnn, the dying,” the Minotaur says.

  “Oh,” Holly says.

  “Okay,” he says at last. “Done.”

  The Minotaur pulls himself from beneath the Odyssey, gets to his knees. Holly stands. The umbrella, lively in a sudden gust, almost pulls her off balance. The Minotaur almost reaches for her. Holly grabs hold of the Minotaur.

  “I like these horns,” she says.

  “It’s too bad . . . ,” she says, and leaves the statement incomplete.

  Just as they’re about to go back into the office Holly asks the Minotaur not to tell Danny about Tookus about the finality of the trip.

  “I’m making the best decision, aren’t I?” she asks. “The right choice?”

  “Mmmnn,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  Holly opens the door in the middle of Danny’s story.

  “Her daddy was a state trooper,” Danny says. “I was thirteen. She was fifteen.”

  “Hey, there,” Roger says, eyeing the Minotaur’s handful of auto parts. The sousaphone hasn’t moved. “Find everything all right?”

  Danny drums his fingers on the countertop. The room smells like pot smoke.

  “The very first time we ever got hot and heavy was in the front seat of her daddy’s patrol car. I stuck my finger inside, and she started kicking. Kicked on the blue lights, kicked on the siren. I was still inside her when he busted out the window with his gun.”

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  “Hey,” Roger says, gesturing at the woodcarver. “I was telling dick-for-brains here that my shanty choir has a gig at Ag-Fest this coming weekend. You should come!”

  “What’s an Ag-Fest?” Holly asks. “Sounds rancid.”

  “We celebrate our glorious agrarian culture,” Roger says. “There’s all kinds of funky music and food and stuff. We’ll be spreading the shanty love at noon. Come see us. Hell’s bells, come sing with us! Our motto is, ‘All you have to be is loud. ’”

  “Unngh.”

  “I don’t do loud,” Holly says. “Right now, anyway. How much do I owe you?” She looks back and forth between Roger and the Minotaur.

  “You’re all set,” Roger says, giving the football helmet a solid thump.

  “You are the prince of pirates, Roger,” the woodcarver says.

  They head for the door. Jolly Roger licks his lips and fingers the valves.

  “So, when are you going to give up that sexy necklace?” Roger asks.

  “This thing?” Danny Tanneyhill asks, pulling the saw blade from inside his shirt.

  It glints even in the fluorescent light. The Minotaur sees it reflected in Holly’s eyes.

  “This little old thing, you’ll never get your hands on, brother. It’s the source of all my secret powers.”

  Roger is blowing long and hard on the sousaphone when they exit.

  “We’ll take the turnpike,” Danny says. “Be home in no time.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE PENNSYLVANIA TURNPIKE is three hundred and sixty miles long, beginning to end.

  But who would do such a thing? The Minotaur would. Beginning to end. End.

  The pickup truck hurtling through this midday, this midweek, mid-storm, holds an odd trinity.

  But who would do such a thing? The Minotaur hunkers in the bed. There is no other way.

  Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale.

  An obbligato of rain and roaring traffic attends the journey.

  The Allegheny Front is one hundred and eighty miles long. Roughly.

  This valley is drenched. The Minotaur is drenched.

  There were seven tunnels on the turnpike. Now there are four. Where do old tunnels go?

  There is the migratory bird flyway. Thermals—lift and loft. The sun’s ransom.

  A tale of a fateful trip. The ecclesiastic earth. Grounded gods.

  “I like these horns,” she said. The Minotaur will not kowtow to hope.

  The internal combustion engine is easy to understand. The carburetor sucks fuel, fires the plugs. Too, there are five lug nuts per wheel. The truck and gravity are one. Orbit this. Orbit that.

  There is a moon (lug nut) up there, behind the storm clouds, more or less, two hundred thirty-eight thousand nine hundred miles away. The sun, farther flung. The rest of the celestial menagerie, too.

  The Minotaur sits with exactly two horns in the back of the truck. Soaked. Sopping. Head down, gyres of rainwater spiraling from his horn tips. Okay.

  The Minotaur has a thick snout. The Minotaur has two eyes, two lungs, one heart.

  The Minotaur is at the mercy of gravity, too. Believe it or not. Makes no difference.

  Holly has a heart.

  It is not made of pine.

  Of Holly’s heart, this much can be said: “I like these horns.”

  “The dying,” he said.

  “I like these horns.”

  The veins and vessels that carry her blood might just measure seventy-five thousand miles. If you laid them out end to end. But who’d do such a thing? In the face of desire it is all meaningless. A drop in the bucket of want.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE MINOTAUR LIFTS HIS WATERLOGGED noggin when the truck slows in the long sweeping curve before the tollbooth. He wipes his eyes, but it does little good. He is rain drenched. Saturated.

  The truck swerves when Danny reaches into his pockets for money.

  “Be careful,” Holly says. The Minotaur hears it clearly.

  Looking backward, he sees the four lanes of turnpike traffic (two each eastbound and westbound) flare too quickly into and out of the wide bank of tollbooths. Cash Only. E-ZPass. Watches the drivers in the opposite lanes fight for position as they funnel down into one unforgiving pair of lanes. Watches, too, the swell of vehicles slowing and piling up behind him. Them.

  “You still back there?” Holly asks.

  The Minotaur shudders. It is not the hiss of air brakes on the semis rattling up on either side that disturbs him, despite the gritty spray of rainwater from the massive wheels. Nor the innocuous couple in the innocuous sedan just to his right, the woman pretending to sleep on the man’s lap. It’s not even the rust-pocked camo-painted compact SUV riding up on the truck’s rear bumper, revving and revving its piteous little four-cylinder engine, the driver clearly glaring at the Minotaur as if the bottleneck of traffic is somehow his fault. No. None of this perturbs the soggy Minotaur. What bothers him, hunched there in the back of the truck in the April rain, what gripes his craw is the easy laughter he hears from the cab of the truck.

  “You still back there?”

  The truck lurches forward. The Minotaur doesn’t answer.

  The SUV nearly rear-ends the truck. It skids, stalls, the engine sputtering to an uncertain stop. Rain steams away on the hot hood. The Minotaur sees the feathered arrow shaft jammed into the hole where a radio antenna ought to be. Danny Tanneyhill inches ahead, unaware. The driver of the SUV gets out, in his Walmart security guard uniform, and opens his hood, whacks hard at something with a screwdriver. The Minotaur could be of some help here. If asked. The driver goes back, turns the ignition, and after several weak gyrations the engine catches and spits back
to life. He does not need the Minotaur’s help. Does not want it. Would not accept it. The driver comes back to slam the hood, turns to the Minotaur with one hand at the ready on the pepper spray at his belt, aims the other hand, middle finger up high, then pointed pistol-like.

  “Bang,” the man says.

  Someone behind him blows a horn.

  There is more than hatred in his eyes. No. Eye. One good eye. The other is covered by a milky blue caul. It’s like a tiny planet is orbiting in his eye socket. But the good eye rages.

  “Bang bang.”

  “How are you holding up?” Holly asks through the screen. Breaking the spell.

  The exchange at the booth is quick enough, but as they pull away the Minotaur catches a glimpse of himself reflected—refracted, maybe—in the pair of bi-fold glass windows hissing shut. For one infernal instant his big head is bifurcated and multiplied, erupting from and spreading out on both sides of the toll collector’s massive afro.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says. The Guptas have warned him more than once about Ravana, the demon king.

  The Minotaur tucks his snout and waits. He’s in a pickle. A pickle of his own making. Tomorrow he’s agreed to take the redhead and her brother to Old Scald Village. To watch him fight and die.

  Tomorrow is too far away to worry about. Soon enough they’re back on Business 220, coming from the far side of Joy. The SUV and its angry driver are on their tail briefly, roaring around them. Good riddance, the Minotaur thinks. But the driver whips off the road without signaling and skids to a stop on a steep dirt path into dark woods. Danny has to slam the brakes hard.

  The Minotaur sees them on the rear of the SUV, three bumper stickers:

  There’s a Place for All God’s Creatures, Right Next to the Potatoes & Gravy

  Gun Control Activists Taste Like Chicken

  Poach This, Bitch!

  Good riddance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE JUDY-LOU MOTOR LODGE looks good in the rain.

  The concrete goose, headless still, sits dressed in a yellow rain slicker by the office door. Gifted there by Tookus, most likely.

  “What shall we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning!” Danny Tanneyhill sings at the top of his lungs, and not half bad.

  “What?” Holly says, getting out of the truck.

  “Shave his belly with a rusty razor!”

  “You’re scaring me,” Holly jokes.

  “Put him in the scuppers with a hose pipe on him!”

  The Minotaur doesn’t want to hear Danny sing anymore. He rattles the Odyssey parts more than necessary over the tailgate. Rambabu Gupta comes out of the office, his black eyes full of welcome, and beckons them inside. Holly and the Minotaur. They watch Danny go to the Pygmalia-Blades trailer, open the rolling door, and enter. Singing all the way.

  “Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter!”

  The soft chittering of the office door bells soothes the Minotaur, though Holly seems a little startled.

  “Goooooooo laaaaaaaab,” Tookus says from the back room. He says it again, and more excitedly, when he sees Holly. “Goooooooo laaaaaaaab jaaaaaaa muuuuuuun.”

  Devmani Gupta jumps down from the couch with one of the honey-soaked dumplings raised high. The syrup trickles down her little-girl fingers and pools in her palm before she sticks the cake into the Minotaur’s mouth.

  “Gulab jamun,” she says with pride, then licks at her hand.

  Tookus seems content. Well cared for, if a bit sticky. He sits, as much as he is capable of sitting, watching cartoons. Devmani is amused by his spastic motions. Her presence, calming. The bandages are gone from his hands, a few Band-Aids in their place. On the counter in the office, Rambabu has lined up five ice buckets. Each one is filled with coins in tight paper rolls. Gratitude overwhelms. Holly cries but tries to hide it. They let her.

  “Guess what, Tooky,” she says. She sidles up to her little brother and whispers in his ear.

  Tookus grins, giggles, tries to grab her breast, then sticks his tongue out at the Minotaur. Devmani copies him.

  “Tomorrow,” Holly says to Tookus.

  It is late afternoon. The rain has plans for the rest of the day. The Minotaur and Holly stand on the sidewalk and look across Business 220. The Minotaur tells Holly he’ll fix the Odyssey tomorrow. After? Before? He wonders what Holly will do until then. Wonders what he has to offer. Danny Tanneyhill has several chainsaws lined up. He lubes the blades. Everything smells like honey and sawdust and oil.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” Holly says. “I’m going to get Tooky cleaned up and give him his medicine.”

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. He feels rainwater dripping down his spine.

  Holly takes something from her back pocket. The thing from the Yoder’s bulletin board. It’s soggy, and the ink has smeared.

  “Fuck,” she mutters. Holly crumples the paper and tosses it to the ground.

  The Minotaur forgives her trespass. He’ll pick up the litter eventually.

  “So,” Holly says, “tomorrow, first thing?”

  She’s talking about the Honda, right?

  “Unngh.”

  Danny is still singing. The rain is still falling. The highway steams.

  “I wonder if he sleeps in that thing,” Holly says.

  She collects Tookus, thanks the Guptas again and again.

  In passing, the boy takes hold of the Minotaur. “Hornssssss,” Tookus says. “Horny horn horn.”

  Holly smiles, loosens her brother’s grip.

  In passing, the redhead takes hold of the Minotaur. No. She only speaks. “I know, Took,” she says. “I like them, too. I reckon we all do.”

  The Minotaur stands alone on the sidewalk, looking across Business 220, looking up the steep side of Scald Mountain to where it disappears in the soupy gray cloud. Trucks roar by on the invisible turnpike. He picks up the scrap of paper, thinking maybe he’ll decipher it later and bring the news to Holly.

  The Minotaur goes into Room #3, closes the door, closes the curtain. He flattens the wet paper on the dresser. He thumbs at the thermostat, and the heater fires to life. The Minotaur is rain soaked to his core. He hasn’t been this wet in a long time. He turns the light off. He strips down. Naked. He lies on the narrow bed atop the rough blanket. Everything smells like sawdust and motor oil and honey. The Minotaur settles his horns into the lumpy pillows and waits for things to dry. He’ll wait as long as it takes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HERE LIES THE MINOTAUR. Horned for his entire life. Hemmed in by errant desire. His tongue fat as a mattock blade. Hear him chop at speech. Silence, then. There is gristle in the creature’s teeth older than everything around him. Except maybe the Allegheny Mountains. In the plat books the world gets hacked to bits. It’s the wholly human need to parse out all, to make sense of, to control. The gridded planet. Find your place. Know your place. The Minotaur knows where he falls, and falls short. Knows, too, his strong suit. It’s his hands. They are capable hands. Adept with tools. Daedal, even. One time, lifetimes ago, there was a bird carved from an apple. The brilliant white flesh and the deep red peel. A girl touched his hand. Chop chop. One time the Minotaur saw an old man in purple short-short overalls and no shirt set fire to a calico cat. It was at a party. Everybody but the Minotaur was human. The Minotaur did not ask to see any of this. The Minotaur did not ask for the pitch black of his first stone prison, nor for the blinding thread that led him into eternity. He sees too much now. Time stops and starts, folds and unfolds, loops and undulates. The Minotaur believes in no gods. But he is sustained nonetheless.

  The Minotaur is not one to get his hopes up. Not one to count chickens, cross bridges, etc. Not often, anyway. When the moon finally broadaxes its way through the night’s cloud cover, the Minotaur hears a door open and close. Goes, then, to his own door, waits. If it is Holly. If she knocks. If he answers, naked. If she enters. If and if and if.

  Maybe he’ll fess up. Maybe he’ll tell the truth. Maybe. Anyth
ing she wants.

  Parts the blinds, just enough. It is Holly, there in the muted gaze of April moonlight. There by the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge sign. Standing still. Thinking, maybe. She plucks a little American flag from the planter, waves it at the selfsame moon halfheartedly, the moonlight trying as hard as it can to out-pale, out-beauty the white flesh of her bare legs. Loses, the moon. The Minotaur sees it all. The moonlight, the T-shirt, the flag, the wave, the legs, the pause. What is she waiting for? The Minotaur eases the door’s chain bolt from its slot ever so quietly, just in case.

  Holly, in motion, goes back to her own Judy-Lou door. Does not enter but listens, one ear pressed just below the brass room number. Stays until something (or more likely nothing) satisfies her, then heads down the sidewalk. Holly has made a decision. Holly has made a choice.

  The Minotaur’s heart is as capable as any other. Century after century of pumping the mixed blood has taken its toll on the old organ, but still it beats harder when Holly approaches. Keeps beating hard when she walks right past Room #3 and on across Business 220.

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. Parts the blinds still more. Watches Holly tap at the Pygmalia-Blades trailer door. Watches it gobble her whole in one bite.

  The Minotaur snorts. Grunts. Everything stinks of honey and moonlight and sawdust. There is nothing he can do about it. The Minotaur bears witness. Has for centuries. Millennia. Forever he is conscripted to watch the actions of humans. And a thing once seen cannot be unseen. He steps outside, good sense be damned. Stands dead center of the parking space allocated for Room #3.

  “Unngh,” he says in the direction of Pygmalia-Blades.

  It’s been a long time since the Minotaur was naked in the open air. The trailer door closed behind her. Holly is inside. He saw it happen. A car approaches from way down Business 220, the splay of its headlights swelling. The Minotaur will not be moved. But he covers himself. Lays a very human hand over his very average cock, as if that’s what passersby would notice. The car speeds by without slowing. The Minotaur ventures closer. And closer still. Maybe she was drugged. Maybe hypnotized. Some black magic at work. The Minotaur has never trusted the woodcarver’s dark arts. That tongue of his, the woodcarver’s, a chisel, an adze, a rasp.