The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break

by Steven Sherrill

  JoeJoe is shucking oysters at the sink, lining them up neatly in a tub of crushed ice. JoeJoe wears a steel-mesh glove on his left hand to protect him from slips of the oyster knife. Almost everyone in the kitchen has a scar in one palm or the other.

  “Hey, M, got a smoke?” JoeJoe asks.

  The Minotaur nods in the direction of the dock. His prep work is done, and the orders are caught up for the moment. JoeJoe peels off the glove and follows him outside. JoeJoe pulls a blue plastic lighter from his pants pocket, holds it up to the sun and squints. He shakes it vigorously, then rolls his thumb across the strike wheel one, two, three, four, five, ten, fifteen or more times in quick succession before a low tentative flame allows him to light the cigarette. He shields the lighter with one hand and offers to light the Minotaur’s cigarette as well. The smell of flint fills the Minotaur suddenly and inexplicably with nostalgia. He almost feels like crying. JoeJoe puts the lighter back into his pocket.

  “How about that new one? Kelly? That her name?” JoeJoe asks, holding both hands in front of his chest, indicating breasts.

  “Unnh,” the Minotaur answers, noncommittal.

  “I’m an ass man myself,” JoeJoe says. “Convicted. But she’s got one proud set.”

  “Mmm.”

  The Minotaur likes JoeJoe, a fluid ropy man who seems to be dancing even when he’s washing dishes. Likes his unabashed youth. Likes the way he can just say these things. There was a time when the Minotaur acted and reacted in pure base instinct, and people feared him for it. But time has worn him down. Now, among cocky boys and arrogant men, he is reserved and hesitant, unsure. He has in fact noticed the new waitress, but not her breasts. JoeJoe and the Minotaur smoke and talk, about Kelly, about the other waitresses, until David comes out with the Rolaids, three chalk-white tablets in his upturned hand.

  “Hernando needs you,” David says. “And I want to ask you something later.”

  “Unnh,” the Minotaur says, and follows David inside. Cecie is bent over a five-gallon bucket of mayonnaise, trying but unable to take off the lid. Her thin and high haunches press against the checked fabric of her taut uniform—a little lean for the Minotaur’s taste but inviting nonetheless. Pretending to need something from over her head the Minotaur steps behind Cecie just close enough so that they touch, her skinny buttocks on his thighs. She’s making bleu cheese dressing for the salad bar. The Original Salad Bar, it says on the billboards along the highway, 50 Items. Next to the melt-in-your-mouth prime rib, it’s Grub’s most touted claim. They say it was the first in the area. Fifty items. The Minotaur isn’t good with numbers. Even the simplest calculations get lost in the twists and turns of his thinking, but he’s sure that fifty is an exaggeration.

  “Hey, now!” Cecie says, butting him with her backside. “Don’t start something you can’t finish.”

  “Mmmnnh.”

  “Here, stud-boy. Get this lid off for me.”

  The Minotaur helps Cecie with the lid, then holds the bucket at an angle so she can spoon mayonnaise into a mixing bowl. With a long stainless-steel whip Cecie stirs the dressing to the right consistency. She dips her middle finger in to the second knuckle and offers it to the Minotaur’s mouth. He takes her finger between black rubbery lips, holds it pinched gently in his wide and worn teeth, tasting the musty bleu cheese on his tongue.

  “Unnh,” he grunts.

  “More salt?” Cecie asks.

  “Order up,” Kelly says.

  Kelly. She has watched the whole thing; the Minotaur can tell by the look on her face.

  “Un,” the Minotaur says with Cecie’s finger still in his mouth.

  “I have a chicken divan,” Kelly says, looking away. “And some appetizers.”

  The Minotaur feels the blood in his face and is thankful for thick black skin.

  The night’s business comes in waves: a rush here, a lull there. During the busy times they work in well-rehearsed routines, using only the most necessary words.

  “Fire, table thirty-one.”

  “Can I get a setup for a shrimp cocktail?”

  “Need a peach melba, one flan and a plain cheesecake.”

  Tonight, like busy nights during prom season and the holidays, Grub himself comes in to expedite. A roundish man with hooded eyes and a pronounced dewlap, a man with an obvious passion for food, he fills the role well. He takes the orders from the wait staff, calls them back in perfectly orchestrated sequence, loads the heavy trays for pick up. Grub has a thing about sending out cold food and often calls to the carpet the unfortunate waiter or waitress who is tardy in picking up a ready order. Everyone minds their p’s and q’s when Grub is in the kitchen.

  For all of Grub’s bluster and snorting the Minotaur knows him as a man with heart and compassion. When the Minotaur pulled up to the back of Grub’s Rib not quite a year ago, for no better reason than the clear directions on the highway billboards, when he got out of his car dressed in uniform—the altered white chef’s coat, the salt-and-pepper-checked pants, the thick-soled steel-toed shoes—when he rang the delivery bell at the back door clutching the canvas wrap that held his knives, sharpening steel, vegetable peeler, melon bailer and other tools of his trade, it was Grub who answered the door.

  “Work?” the Minotaur asked, struggling for clarity.

  It was the day before Thanksgiving. Grub opened the door wearing a blood-spattered apron and holding a boning knife in his hand. He looked the Minotaur over. Without speaking he opened the screen door wider for the Minotaur to pass. Just inside was a long worktable, and on it were a cutting board and a case of whole turkeys, each snug inside a Kryovac plastic wrapping. In a hotel pan to one side several birds lay opened and deboned, exposed and drying in the kitchen air. Bits of fat and viscera littered the cutting board, the table and the floor, where, beside the table, three more cases of turkeys were stacked. Grub pointed at the turkeys and raised his heavy brows to the Minotaur. The Minotaur unwrapped his tools, selected the thin-bladed flexible boning knife, stroked it quickly back and forth across the sharpening steel to hone its edge, then set to work on one of the birds.

  The Minotaur is generally good with tools and has a dexterity to his hands despite limited extension in the fingers and knuckles, despite the thin and almost unnoticeable webs of flesh between the first joints of his index and middle and his ring and pinkie fingers, despite the thickish black-edged nails. He is deft with knives. It is one of the reasons he came to cooking so long ago. Cooking was a timeless craft that he could master.

  Under Grub’s scrutiny the Minotaur boned the turkey with an expert precision. He set it on its end and cut forcefully down either side of the spine; traced the tip of the knife along the fibulae and down the metatarsals, cutting away the sinew around each joint with minute flicks of the blade; peeled the thick flesh of the breasts away from the ribs; used a fingertip to gently separate the long arrowhead-shaped cartilage at the base of the breastbone from the meat. Completely boneless except for the wings, tips removed because of their tendency to burn, splayed limply on the cutting board, the turkey was ready to be stuffed, trussed and roasted.

  “Six days a week, dinner shift. You get Mondays off. That okay?”

  “Unnhh,” the Minotaur answered gratefully.

  Grub gave the Minotaur an apron, showed him where to change in the closet-sized room that led into the employee bathroom, where the Minotaur dinged his horn against a paint-spattered speaker hanging on the wall. Grub agreed to pay him cash under-the-table.

  That was nearly a year ago, and Grub has given him fairly regular raises despite the Minotaur’s fairly regular catastrophes, such as spilling the clarified butter. Two or three of these accidents bring about the occasional “talk” in the office with the door closed. “Think about it, M,” Grub likes to say. “Take the time to think about the thing at hand.”

  “How you doing, M?” Grub asks tonight from opposite the hot line. The Minotaur cocks his head to see under the stacks of plates and monkey dishes lined up across the
top of the heat lamps.

  “Unnnh,” he says.

  “Good,” Grub says. “Good.”

  With Grub as expediter, there is little or no direct communication between the kitchen crew and the wait staff. Grub calls all the orders. The waiters come and go in nervous self-conscious silence. And David more or less handles any problems on the floor. Hernando, the Minotaur, Cecie and JoeJoe function—no, the Minotaur likes to think, they play—like a winning team. The Minotaur feels a part of it.

  At about nine o’clock things start to slow down. Grub leaves the kitchen for the bar. He’ll down two, maybe three Grub-tinies before David closes out the registers for the night. Orders come now every fifteen or twenty minutes, and Hernando likes the crew to use the time to catch up on the cleaning.

  The Minotaur is breaking down the bus tubs for JoeJoe, separating the glasses into plastic racks, putting the silver in to soak, when David walks in.

  “Hey, M, can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Mmm,” the Minotaur says, and dries his hands on a towel hanging from his apron string. He sits on the low freezer by the coffee machines while David pours the last of a pot into his personal Grub’s mug.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” David asks.

  “Unnh unn.” Tomorrow is Monday; the Minotaur has no plans.

  “I was wondering if you could help me move. I have to be out by Tuesday, and I moved almost all that would fit in my car. I figured if we opened your hatchback I could get the last few things.”

  The Minotaur agrees to meet David at his apartment around lunchtime. David starts to draw him a map even though the Minotaur had been there before, has given him a ride home several times. In black ink David makes what looks like three overlapping staggered crosses and is about to write down street names when from the dining room comes the clatter and crash of falling silverware and glass. Then the door from the dining room slams open. Where there should be the din of people eating and talking there is a pronounced silence. Timothy, one of the waiters, rushes into the kitchen wide eyed and anxious.

  “Something’s wrong with Kelly!” he says, almost shouting.

  “What?” David asks.

  “Kelly. She’s having some kind of fit.”

  David rushes into the hushed dining room. The Minotaur wants desperately to see what’s happening but is not able to step out into the room, so he presses the coal-black disk of his eye to the round window in the door.

  Kelly lies in the wide aisle between the salad bar and a row of occupied four-tops along the mirrored wall, her body in spasms. One of the customers, an old black man sitting at a deuce near the door, gets up, turns Kelly on her side and puts his coat under her head. The Minotaur sees his mouth move, and David hurries to the front of the restaurant. The other customers seem unsure whether they want to continue eating or to watch. Most crane their necks for a softened view in the gilt-edged mirrors.

  Crisis often brings about bonding, or at least the perception of it. By the time the ambulance arrives Kelly is okay, sitting up in the office, embarrassed and ashen. Reluctantly she agrees to go with the ambulance crew. The guests leave the restaurant earlier than usual this night. The waiters and waitresses do their side work, splitting Kelly’s responsibilities without bickering. David turns off the intercom. Even the kitchen cleanup is finished ahead of schedule. When the Minotaur walks out of the kitchen at ten-thirty, through the main wait station and into the dining rooms, the restaurant is empty and quiet. Grub has followed Kelly to the emergency room and plans to give her a ride home later. The wait staff sits at the bar figuring tips and talking in hushed tones about the incident. The Minotaur makes himself a Coke; he stands a little closer than usual, listening to the talk.

  “God, how humiliating,” Adrienne says. “I would die if that happened to me.”

  “My mom used to have seizures,” a tall birdlike waiter named Robert says.

  “I thought David was going to shit his panties.”

  “Well, she fell out right in my section. My tips are totally fucked.”

  Mike and Shane, the two waiters who mocked David earlier.

  “Unnhhh,” the Minotaur says, just loud enough to be heard. He wants to be part of the conversation. But when all the waiters and waitresses stop talking to each other and look at him, he doesn’t really know what to do next. More than anything he wants them to know that he saw what they saw, that he felt what they felt.

  “What’s that, M?” Robert asks. “Did you say something?”

  Somewhere in the kitchen the Minotaur hears a cooling fan cycle on. In the wait station the time clock moves solidly into the hour. The Minotaur can hear the ice in his glass melting, caving in on itself. The waiters and waitresses look expectantly at him, and their expectation is excoriating.

  “Kelly,” he says, the ls thick and clunky in his mouth, and someone laughs at his effort. “Kelly,” he says, shaking his heavy head from side to side, hoping that he won’t have to say more, hoping the gesture will suffice. Someone draws deeply on a cigarette; each threadlike strand of tobacco roars as it burns; the exhalation storms his eardrums with gale force. Someone, out of disinterest or pity, works decisively at a calculator, fingertips slamming at the keys, fingernails clicking against the plastic. The Minotaur can hear the current charging through the circuitry.

  “Jesus Christ, M, what the hell are you talking about?” Adrienne asks, not really wanting an answer. But the Minotaur can’t answer anyway. He doesn’t really know what he means, only that he means no harm to Kelly. The silence spills out of the bar where the wait staff sits and the Minotaur stands. It rises from the floor over his thin calves, up the walls, above his waist, into his mouth and lungs, fills the restaurant. It is all the Minotaur can do to move his body through it, out the door and into the night.

  CHAPTER 4

  Out of Chaos, out of Eros, out of Earth’s prolific and indiscriminate womb begot.

  The Minotaur dreams of bloodlines:

  CHAPTER 5

  In the mornings before putting on the briki to boil coffee, before the cool shower and the talcum afterward, before even rising from bed, the Minotaur likes to lie awhile beneath the window, the sun—if the sun is out—swathing him intermittently as the curtains rise and fall in the breeze—if a breeze happens to blow—or in the damp still air of a cloudy day; whatever the weather the Minotaur likes to lie there in bed in the morning and scratch himself. The Minotaur sleeps shirtless. Over the years he found that no matter how much he altered the necks and shoulders of his pajamas, the garments were binding. Sleep is fitful enough without the encumbrance of fabric, so the Minotaur sleeps shirtless.

  The Minotaur scratches the fog of last night’s sleep from his face with both hands, rakes the jowly muzzle and the bony expanse of his snout with his nails. He presses hard with his fingertips at the base of his horns. He lows involuntarily, scratching beneath his chin and at his dewlap, lows even louder while stroking the massive neck, its geometry of overlapping muscles and cablelike tendons. The Minotaur scratches until the skin beneath the charcoal-gray fur that covers his meaty shoulders burns, then he scratches still more. He scratches softly at the transitional skin, gray and flaky, where he goes from bull to man or man to bull, depending on the point of origin. It is a scarlike place across his chest, a purplish score dipping beneath his sternum, underlining a man’s pectorals from which black rubbery bull’s nipples sprout. On the Minotaur’s back the transition is less decisive, nothing more than a discoloration of the skin from deep black to gray to pale moon-white human skin. Sometimes this place, this division, throbs, swells, deepens, becomes a chasm within the Minotaur that he will never span, though he will spend eternity trying, becomes a separation between two distinct parts. But sometimes he is able to forget it, to believe for an isolated moment that he is a singular and whole being.

  The Minotaur scratches and scratches, his man’s belly, the thin—almost womanly—waist with visible hipbones, the wiry thighs. At first appearance there
is an incongruity to his body; the lumbering bulk of his bovine head, neck and shoulders is verily grafted onto an if not scrawny then simply adequate trunk and legs. He seems always about to topple. But watching the Minotaur move through his day, it’s possible to detect a hard-won harmony: the wide stance, feet planted apart; the subtleties of balance; the mechanics of muscle, ligament and bone working synergistically to keep this unlikely being upright.

  After his shower and two cups of stout coffee he takes the coffee grounds, still steaming, out to the plot of young tomato plants by his front door—three spindly plants tied with baling twine to short stakes made from broom handles. The Minotaur tests the heft of the few green fruits with his fingertips. He is spreading the coffee grounds into the mulch when he hears Sweeny behind him.

  “Read the paper today, M?”

  “Unnnhh.”

  Sweeny knows the Minotaur doesn’t care much for day-today news. The Minotaur knows Sweeny likes to tell bad jokes.

  “Seems like one of the matrons of our fine town got herself arrested at the beach last weekend.”

  “Unnh.”

  “Indecent exposure.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Yep, indecent exposure. She got caught pissing in the ocean. Was hanging her fat ass right off the side of the boat. When they asked her why she was pissing in the ocean the old woman told them that her drunken bastard of a husband had just fell out of the boat into the water and that he was drowning. She figured every little bit would help.” Sweeny barely gets the punch line out before he is overcome with wheezing laughter.