“Hi, M. Hey, JoeJoe,” Jenna says, opening the back door of the kitchen. The black bow tie hangs loose around her neck. On the ticket book protruding from her apron pocket, a small heart-shaped sticker reads Kiss Me. The Minotaur remembers the bumper sticker on her car: Potters Do It On The Wheel.
“Mmnn,” the Minotaur says.
“Hey, baby,” JoeJoe says.
“Hernando wants you, M. I think it’s time to feed the waitrons.”
“Thanks,” the Minotaur stammers. With Jenna he is sometimes willing to make the effort to speak because she is genuinely kind to him, JoeJoe and everyone else in the kitchen and because she doesn’t use those irritating intercom speakers unless she absolutely has to.
An old gray mop head lies at the edge of the loading dock, at once limp and shapeless yet stiff, like a dead bird, the potential for fluid movement gone but still apparent. The Minotaur shoves the mop head with his toe. From beneath it a tight knot of roaches, surprised by the sudden light, scurries nervously for the safety of a crevice. One unfortunate insect chooses to run along the bottom edge of the upturned milk crate that JoeJoe sits on. JoeJoe, quick on the draw, aims the lit end of his almost-gone cigarette over the insect’s path. Just as the black-clad arthropod is about to escape into the narrow space between the loading dock and the rubber bumpers that protect it from careless trucks in reverse, JoeJoe makes a stab. The ember finds its mark. JoeJoe grinds his cigarette out on the back of the cockroach. It does not die without a struggle. Fast forward to the fuck scenes, the Minotaur thinks when Jenna closes the door. It’s what he thinks every time he talks to her, and every time it makes him feel small. He nudges the mop head again and it falls—like a dead bird—to the asphalt below.
The handfuls of breaded shrimp begin to spit and sizzle the instant they hit the oil. The Minotaur shakes the baskets so that nothing sticks to the mesh. He checks the warming oven for the pan of hushpuppies Hernando fried for him. Robert walks by with a flat rack full of clean silverware, wet and rattling. He’s talking excitedly to Kelly, talking about chrome and speed.
“Over a hundred miles an hour,” he says. Kelly seems bored but tolerant. She follows Robert into the wait station but turns, wonder of wonders, to catch the Minotaur’s eye before going through the door.
By the dish machine Margaret has the lamps from all the tables arranged on a large oval tray. With both hands and noticeable effort she balances a three-gallon plastic jug of clear fuel and fills each lamp slowly, cursing each time she tips the jug too much, causing it to suck air and splash the lamps, the tray and her with slick droplets of pine-scented oil.
“Why can’t the busboys do this shit?”
The Minotaur turns the baskets of fried shrimp out into a pan lined with paper towels. The wait staff gathers on the other side of the hot line; he can almost hear them gnashing their saliva-greased teeth. Cecie slides a pan of the slaw under the window and puts a slotted spoon beside it but then decides tongs will work better. Hernando turns off the radio but keeps whistling the tune as he finds a ladle for the cocktail sauce.
“Grub’ll be in about six-thirty,” David says, coming into the kitchen. “Hi, M. Hi, guys.”
“This look like a guy thing to you?” Cecie asks, pushing her chest out.
“And girls.”
The wait staff is ravenous; they fill their plates greedily.
“We’ve only got two orders of bread pudding left,” Hernando says. “Who’s going to sell them for me?”
“I will if you’ll cut the peanut butter pie for me,” Jenna offers.
“You got a deal, chiquita.”
David is getting nervous. He gets nervous every time Grub brings his family for dinner. Grub has brought his family in more times than the Minotaur can remember. David flits from the wait station to the kitchen to the dining room while keeping up a running monologue.
“Who’s supposed to cut lemons?”
“Brian, that four-top by the door has dirty glasses, and there’s a salad fork missing.”
“Listen, guys, try to push the Roditys tonight with the shrimp. We’ve got a whole case in the cooler.”
As far as the Minotaur can tell no one responds to any of David’s questions or comments, but it doesn’t slow him down.
“Hernando, would you ask JoeJoe to put some toilet paper in the women’s bathroom.”
“Has everyone finished their side work?”
“Shit! We’ve only got half a box of mints.”
The night begins smoothly despite David’s anxiety. Every table has at least one order for shrimp. The Minotaur is busy, but there are plenty of hushpuppies, and he prepped well, so everything goes okay. Nights like this he likes his job, orders coming in and going out like clockwork.
“Grub’s here,” David says. “I put them in your section, Kelly.”
The Minotaur puts two orders of oysters Rockefeller in the oven even before Kelly leaves the kitchen. She comes back through minutes later and turns in the order. Grub and his wife want the oysters. The two older kids are having chicken wings and fried mushrooms. By the time Kelly hauls out a booster seat and serves a Grub-tini, a sweet tea, two virgin daiquiris and an apple juice, the Minotaur has the appetizer order waiting in the window.
“Thanks for your help,” she says. “Serving the Big Guy makes me nervous.”
David holds the door for her, then carries the tray stand out and sets it up by Grub’s table.
When Leon the busboy comes from the dining room, the tray he carries on his shoulder—a large oval piled high with dinner plates and soup bowls, butter dishes and dessert plates, coffee cups, saucers, wine and water glasses, silverware caked with bits of food, stained napkins and tablecloths, ashtrays—blocks the view of his head, so that, seeing him from a distance, it appears that the tray is his head. It’s as if the service industry, in an attempt to economize, grafted the tray to the neck of some unfortunate dupe and created the ultimate busser. It all seems to balance on a miracle. The Minotaur can’t believe that Leon’s tiny outstretched arm and thin girlish body can support the weight bearing down on him. When Leon squats to rest the tray on the shelf by the dish machine and takes a minute to move a piece of parsley and pick a couple of uneaten shrimp from one of the plates to toss into his mouth, the Minotaur thinks he fully deserves them. David disagrees.
“Leon. If you do that again you’re going home.”
David has a crush on Leon. Everybody knows it.
“Order up,” Kelly says.
It’s for Grub. David takes the order and reads it out.
“Two popcorn shrimp, extra hushpuppies on both. One crepes imperial. And a kid’s chicken.”
“The pequeñito?” Hernando asks, wondering about Grub’s younger son.
“He’ll eat from their plates,” David says.
Hernando reaches into the cooler beneath the counter with his tongs, places a chicken breast on the grill. By the time Hernando flips it the first time the Minotaur is dusting the shrimp with flour. Hernando flips the chicken a second time, and the Minotaur dips the shrimp in the egg wash, scatters them in the pan of breading and shakes it back and forth. Just before dropping the two orders of popcorn shrimp into the FryDaddy, the Minotaur notices that the oil is a little dark. Once in the hot oil the tiny shrimp buck and spit. The Minotaur smells the burned breading that has settled to the bottom of the rectangular vat.
Leon comes and goes. While David is in the dining room attending to some small crisis, the Minotaur slips the hardworking busboy a few hot shrimp. Grub’s order goes up and out with no problems. And until the Minotaur notices Kelly and David huddled over a plate by the ice cream cooler talking in hushed voices, he assumes that everything is fine. David finds a fork and takes a bite of whatever is on the plate, and when he brings it over the Minotaur sees that it’s popcorn shrimp, from Grub’s order. It’s popcorn shrimp, so it is the Minotaur’s responsibility, but there is a hierarchy in the kitchen. David brings the plate to Hernando because he is the kitchen m
anager. Hernando uses his fingers to pick up and taste a shrimp.
“We’ve gotta change the oil in the FryDaddy, M,” he says.
“Unngh.”
The Minotaur hates the job. He had a feeling the oil was burned and should have changed it when he came in, when the oil was cold. As soon as Hernando makes the call the Minotaur shuts off the power to the FryDaddy. He gives the wire baskets to JoeJoe to clean. The Minotaur and Hernando decide that waiting for new oil to heat will take too long, half an hour or more, and they have orders for popcorn shrimp hanging. They’ll double-filter the oil from the vat and top it off with fresh. In a moment of blind stupidity—a familiar moment—and because it is the first thing that comes to mind, the Minotaur pulls one of the empty cleaned pickle buckets from the stack below the dishwasher.
The FryDaddy is a simple appliance. A rectangular well ten inches deep holds the oil. At the front, in the center of a shallow channel, a small round orifice is covered with sediment. The Minotaur fits the special filter into the perforated cone of the aluminum china cap and hangs it over the mouth of the pickle bucket. The entire front of the FryDaddy is hinged and metal. When the front is opened the stark inner workings of the machine are readily visible: the thin blue wing of the pilot light beating against its ceramic captor, the two-pronged burner that runs beneath the oil vat, now pinging as it cools, the brass valve for draining, the red lever and safety lock. The Minotaur screws a short drainspout into the valve. The bucket and the china cap fit perfectly under the drain.
Orders are still coming into the kitchen. Cecie helps Hernando as much as she can, handing him things from the cooler, turning steaks on the grill when he says it’s time. The Minotaur has changed the oil in the FryDaddy dozens of times. He flips the lever to open the drain, but nothing happens; a night’s worth of sediment is clogging the hole. An L-shaped piece of thick wire with a loop at the top for a handle hangs at the back of the FryDaddy. With it the Minotaur probes for the opening at the bottom of the dark grease.
“Hey, M,” Leon says, leaning under the heat lamps.
“Mmmm?” the Minotaur answers without looking up. The wire probe slips into the channel and pushes through the sediment. After several thick gobs of muck are spit out, the hot oil begins to flow freely, staining the paper filter as it fills the china cap and drains into the bucket.
“There’s a guy out here asking about the cocktail sauce,” Leon says.
“Hmmn?” The Minotaur stirs the oil in the filter to prevent the sediment from clogging. Bending over the bucket the Minotaur cocks his head to look at Leon.
“Behind you, M,” Hernando says, stepping close to open the oven door.
“He wants to know if there’s Tabasco sauce in it. He’s allergic.”
Kelly waits patiently, watching from the other side of the line.
Pain comes first as its acute absence. There is a flash of disbelief, microseconds in length, that renders one, for that blessed time, totally devoid of physical sensation. The Minotaur drains the hot oil into a thick plastic pickle bucket, the same kind of bucket he uses when changing cold oil. But the pickle bucket is not designed to hold hot oil. Because the Minotaur is leaning over the FryDaddy as it drains, and also looking up and talking to Leon, he doesn’t see the seam at the bottom of the bucket, just by his right foot, melt, warp and separate, doesn’t feel the oil spill out at 375 degrees and pour across his steel-toed work shoe until it washes over the leather upper and seeps to his flesh. The sock, like a black wick, draws the burning oil in deeper. Then the piercing disbelief.
Having lived for five thousand years, having begun in the convoluted belly of deceit and slept in the endless night of the Labyrinth, having eaten rock and bone and, ultimately, crow, the Minotaur is no stranger to pain. He recognizes that fraction of time for what it is. He welcomes it. He clings to the moment for as long as possible.
Although the Minotaur struggles with syntax and articulation when speaking, during times of physical or psychic turmoil, he cries out instinctively. Sometimes the cry is a mournful lowing, a lament. Other times, more rare, the cry is rattling and lusty, even angry. When the hot oil spills into his shoe, seeps into the flesh of his foot, blisters and peels away the first layer of skin and starts on the second, the Minotaur’s cry is so complete that it leaves the confines of sound. His black lips roll back to expose worn yellow teeth, bits of food caught between the flat planes. The tongue, thick as a sapling or a boy’s arm, falls out, saliva beading at its tip. And the mouth gapes. There is the pretense of sound. Air rattles in the cavernous space, clicks and pops. But that is all.
The Spanish bullfighters call horn wounds cornadas and wear their scars like proud badges. The more severe the wound the greater the glory. Even a blunt tip is capable of much damage. What the Minotaur does when he feels the skin of his foot burn and blister is, besides crying out, rear his head suddenly. Hernando, standing behind him, feels the tip of the horn pierce his apron and the fabric of his pants, penetrate deep into the tender flesh of his inner thigh and drive to the bone. The femur does not give way. Hernando’s cry is audible.
Chaos, once introduced, is pernicious. Despite Grub’s leaving his family at their dinner and coming into the kitchen to help with cleanup, then to help David, JoeJoe and Cecie cook and plate the remaining orders, the night never recovers. Leon, the most expendable, rushes Hernando, a handful of blood-soaked towels pressed to his wound, to the hospital.
“You should go, too,” Margaret says, pointing at the Minotaur’s burn. He sits with his bare foot, pale and bony, not at all hooflike, in a bucket of ice.
“I’ll take you, M,” Kelly offers.
“No,” he says, avoiding her eyes. Too proud. Too embarrassed.
“Can I look?” she asks.
“No,” he says. He won’t go to the hospital. He won’t let anyone look. At his trailer, in a green ceramic pot shaped like a buoy, an aloe plant thrives. No. He won’t go to the hospital.
There is a palpable discomfort in the air. They feed everyone and apologize for the wait. Grub closes the restaurant an hour early.
“How you doing, M?” Grub asks, untying his apron.
“Ung.”
Grub sits beside him. The Minotaur is worried.
“Listen.” Grub pauses before he speaks again. “I think, tomorrow, I’m going to have the bug guys come in and spray the whole place. We’ve gotten a couple complaints.”
The Minotaur thinks it’s a good idea, but he wonders what it has to do with anything. Grub peels the wrapper from a mint-flavored toothpick and begins to scrape the food from beneath his fingernails.
“There are no reservations in the book for tomorrow. I checked with David.”
“Mmnn.”
“I might as well close tomorrow night. Let the exterminators do a complete spray and give the place time to air out. We’ll see how Hernando’s leg is, and your foot, too.”
The Minotaur nods.
“I’d like for you to come have dinner at my house tomorrow night. Meet my kids, see my wife again. And I want to talk to you a little bit.”
The Minotaur says okay, he will. Grub tells him what time to come, and that he doesn’t need to bring anything.
The drive home is painful and slow. The Minotaur tends his burned foot well into the night.
CHAPTER 13
The morning air is sweet and cool. If not for his throbbing foot, smeared with aloe jelly and wrapped in gauze, the Minotaur would be content to lie in his narrow bed scratching himself. The Minotaur’s keen sense of smell finds the mingled scents of honeysuckle and burned diesel fuel, the latter still in the air from when the Crewses drove out before daylight. Honeysuckle and diesel—and blood. Metallic and sour. Elemental. It takes him awhile to determine the source of the smell. In his distress last evening the Minotaur neglected his ablutions. He did not bathe or groom his horns. On the tip of his right horn—which hangs forever just inside his field of vision precisely opposite the horn seen from the other eye, which togeth
er serve as a frame of reference that keeps him oriented in the world—there, staining a good three inches of the Minotaur’s polished horn, is a dark patina of blood. Hernando’s.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 11