“Quite a setup, huh?” Grub says, walking in from the den to where the Minotaur stands transfixed by the ants working fervently at their tasks, climbing over and around the tiny green cutouts of tractors and barns and haystacks at the top of the sand, posturing as they greet one another in the plastic tubes, bearing their burdens as if they actually know why.
“Glad you could make it, M,” Grub says, then goes on to tell him about how the ants come frozen in a cardboard carton. “U.S. mail,” he explains.
They go into the kitchen, where Rachel stands at the stove. Before the Minotaur can protest she shoves a wooden spoon full of something into his mouth.
“Vegetarian chili,” she says.
“Mmmm,” he answers, and stands by the refrigerator crushing the grainy bulgur and beans against the roof of his mouth. Grub opens the door into the backyard, where the kids are playing. From outside comes the high-pitched whine of a model airplane engine, a single tiny piston whipping furiously in the cylinder.
“Be back in a minute,” Grub says. He leaves the door open behind him.
Taped to the refrigerator door is a crayon drawing of what must be a crow and a blood-red sun. The artist’s name, scrawled, is the biggest thing on the page: ROGER. Above the drawing a small calendar from the La Leche League is held in place by a magnet shaped like an old-fashioned milk bottle. Here-7PM is written in the circle around tomorrow’s date.
The Minotaur asks if he can help do anything. Rachel says no, so he goes outside to find Grub. Roger and Raylene sit on the picnic table watching Ricky, who is standing in the center of the deep treeless yard pivoting in a tight circle. Clenched in the boy’s hands is a red oval plastic handle, very like the handle for controlling a kite. But what is attached at the other end, to the two parallel wires extending out twenty-five feet or more from the top and bottom of the handle, is not a kite. It is a model airplane, a Japanese Zero, sputtering through the air in forced orbit.
Since it is useless to try speaking over the loud engine Grub signals for the boy to land the plane. Rick shrugs and continues his own tiny orbit. But within a few minutes the little engine spits and coughs, gasping for more of the white alcohol fuel, then stops. Rick glides the plane to a bumpy halt in the grass. Roger and Raylene run out even before the plane is completely still. The younger boy excitedly opens the hatch over the little plastic seats where the pilots would sit, and out jumps a frog. The frog, confused and dizzied by its experience, leaps again and again. And every time the frog lands it tips over on its back, then struggles frantically to right itself. Disruption of the equilibrium is a new thing to the animal. Roger and Raylene follow the frog, squatting and leaping in mimicry, laughing hysterically each time they and the frog upend.
“Time to wash up,” Grub says. Leaving the frog to its lopsided escape and the toy plane parked motionless in the grass, the children head for the door. Relieved of their distraction they all seem a little leery of the Minotaur. What was giddy energy just moments before becomes reticence tinged with fear. The children have never seen the Minotaur outside the kitchen of their father’s restaurant or dressed in anything other than dirty chef’s coats, and the difference is disconcerting.
“Come on! Come on! Come on!” Grub says. “We’ll die of starvation before you kids get to the table.”
Rachel has the dinner table set by the time they get back inside. The chili steams from a crock in the center. Small bowls of diced onion, tomato, grated cheddar cheese and sour cream surround the crock. Cornbread muffins shaped like little ears of corn poke up out of a cloth-lined basket. Wedges of iceberg lettuce are lined up in a straight row on a translucent blue platter in the shape of a fish.
“Have a seat, M. Anywhere,” Rachel says. “It’ll take a few minutes for the kids to get cleaned up.”
“You want a beer?” Grub asks.
“Mmmh.”
The Minotaur sits at the end of the table simply so his horns won’t be a problem. On a plate on the sideboard the assortment of donut holes surrounds a dish of halved strawberries. The children come into the dining room one at a time, Roger, then Raylene; the Minotaur can smell the Ivory soap on their skin. They sit squeezed in on one side of the Minotaur and have to work very hard to keep from looking at him.
“Let’s go, Rick,” Grub calls.
Rick finally arrives, concentrating and serious in manner. He pulls out his chair and sits with perfect posture, then speaks in his most grown-up voice. “What’s for dinner this evening, Mother? I’m feeling quite anthropophagous.”
“You are?” Rachel asks without skipping a beat. “Well, I’m sure we’ve got something that will cure that.”
Grub looks at the Minotaur, bemused, raises a brow and offers his palms. The Minotaur smiles back, more or less, unsure of what to do with the oddity of Rick’s word. Rachel serves everyone, fixing her own plate last before sitting beside the Minotaur. Rick shifts in his seat.
“If I don’t eat soon I may have to pandiculate,” he says.
“Not while company is here,” Grub answers. “Dig in, M, before the chili gets cold.”
The Minotaur shifts in his seat, trying to settle his buttocks in such a way that the chafed areas are separated. Everyone begins to eat.
“Good,” the Minotaur says to Rachel, and Grub agrees heartily.
“I dub you Queen of the Chili Pot,” he says, winking at his wife.
“Does that make you King of the Pot?” she asks.
“No, dear, I’m merely a knave at your beck and call.”
Rick shifts again in his seat. The Minotaur can’t be sure because he doesn’t want to stare, but he thinks the boy is checking notes under the table.
“I think the chili is missing something, but I’ll have to excogitate before I can decide what.”
“Rick,” Rachel says.
“Eat your dinner, son.”
Rick takes a few bites, then jumps up from the table, claiming he’s forgotten to wash his hands. When he leaves the room Grub explains to the Minotaur.
“Ricky did real good on his language tests at school. He’s convinced himself that he’s a genius. Now he’s trying to convince the rest of us.”
“He’s in his room thumbing through his dictionary,” Rachel says. “Making another list of words.”
The younger kids whisper back and forth, giggling occasionally. The Minotaur likes children. When he catches Raylene and Roger, heads together, peering sidelong at him through their mingled bangs, the Minotaur rolls his top lip up to cover his black nostrils, the thick yellow wedges of his teeth driven into bared gums. Raylene does her best to subdue squealing laughter; Roger does his best to roll his own top lip.
“I do apologize for being so fuliginous,” Rick says, returning to the table.
And the meal continues happily. Grub talks about the deck he wants to build out back. Rachel talks about the kids. The kids make faces with the Minotaur. Sometimes they all talk at once; the Minotaur finds contentment in the ruckus. He’s nervous; he can’t eat much, but he’s happy to be there.
“Tomorrow,” Rick begins during a lull in the conversation.
“Tomorrow at school …” Rick struggles to keep a straight face.
“…in science class …” His eyes are fired with mischief.
“Get to the point, Rick.”
“… fourth period … Mrs. Sink has asked me to demonstrate a sigmoidostomy.” It’s all Rick can do to get the word out before erupting, and the laughter is so consuming that it becomes spasmodic and almost without sound. Rick falls out of his chair, lies beneath the kitchen table laughing. Roger and Raylene laugh simply because laughter is infectious. Equally in the dark, Grub, Rachel and the Minotaur roll their eyes and smile at each other.
“Who’s ready for dessert?” Rachel asks. “Did you have enough chili, M?”
“Mmmm.”
“You don’t eat much for a big fella.”
“Mnnh.”
She passes the plate of donut holes and strawberries. From
the kitchen comes the smell and the sputtering gurgle of brewing coffee. Rick says he has to feed his hamster, Möbius Strip, and do his homework. Grub excuses him from the table. The younger kids seem content to sit and listen. When Rachel goes for the coffee Roger and Raylene huddle together and concoct some secret plan. They leave the table as their mother is returning with a tray of coffee mugs, each cup bearing a grainy, black-and-white, computer-generated photograph of the entire smiling family. When Grub pushes his chair back from the table to get comfortable the Minotaur does the same. After a little while Raylene comes back into the dining room and quietly takes her seat.
“Where’s your little brother?” Rachel asks.
Raylene points at the door, and when everyone turns to look the boy’s head darts out of sight. He returns within seconds, tentatively. Bit by bit Roger eases around the doorframe. His impossibly tiny sneaker comes first, followed by one skinny leg, then his hip and little cylinder of a trunk, his arm, his shoulder, then half of his thin face. And when Roger is standing fully in the doorway, his face beaming, Raylene snickering in the background, the Minotaur sees the horns. They’ve stapled together cardboard tubes from empty toilet paper rolls to form blunt tips, held in place by long strands of Scotch tape that crisscross the boy’s head and wrap around the paper tubes.
The Minotaur laughs aloud; a wet belch of a noise erupts from his cavernous throat. Roger takes his seat and reaches for a donut hole. The Minotaur knows the talk is coming, but he decides that sitting peacefully with this happy family, that talking, drinking coffee and eating with them, that the rare pleasantness of the moment are worth it, whatever the outcome of his conversation with Grub. As they get more confident at interacting with the Minotaur, Roger and Raylene inch closer and closer. When Raylene sneaks up behind him and impales a donut hole on the tip of his left horn, it seems the most natural thing in the world. Rachel scolds her halfheartedly.
It doesn’t take long before the excitement of the evening begins to wear the children down. Raylene yawns loudly. And as Grub describes to the Minotaur a boxing match he saw the night before on television, Roger, still wearing the horns made of cardboard tubes, leaves his chair, climbs into his mother’s lap, parts the dyed fabric of her blouse, reaches in to take out her breast, seeking to nurse.
“Not now, sweetie,” she says, removing the boy’s hopeful hand and closing her blouse. The Minotaur is left to imagine the teat, thick as a fingertip and proud, to imagine it smoldering like a dark ember cresting a swell of ivory flesh. The smell of milk, real as can be, metallic and bloody, storms the Minotaur’s nostrils.
“That Hispanic kid was so cute,” Rachel says, stroking Roger’s hair, “until he got his lip split in the fifth round.”
“I think it’s about bedtime for the Bonzos,” Grub says.
Raylene looks as if she’s about to protest.
“Say good night to M, Ray,” her mother says, cradling Roger as she stands from her chair. “It’s time to brush your teeth.”
“Night, M.”
“Mmm.”
Grub and the Minotaur sit quietly for a while after the others leave the room. Finally Grub speaks.
“I want to talk to you for a little bit, M. Let’s go into the den.” Grub stands, and the Minotaur follows him. “Would you like a beer?”
“Nnnn.”
“How’s your foot, by the way?”
“Ummn.”
“Rick calls this my sanctum sanctorum,” Grub says, reaching for the knob. When the door swings open the light that dribbles out is insipid, lifeless, unnatural. “Rachel’s name for the room isn’t so grand. It used to be the garage.”
The Minotaur follows Grub down two low steps into the room. Despite the dark veneer paneling on three walls, despite the painted brick of the fourth, despite the carpet that the Minotaur recognizes as a remnant from the restaurant, despite the leatherette sofa and ottoman sitting opposite a huge gunmetal gray desk, the windowless room retains much of its garage-ness. Along the far wall, standing on top of a squat bookshelf that is empty except for a golf trophy and two stacks of Restaurants & Institutions Magazine, is the source of the weak unnatural light. It’s a lava lamp, a luminous red mass contained in a narrow cone of glass endlessly dividing and rejoining like torpid and monstrous cells.
When Grub pulls the chain to turn on the twin swag lamps hanging over the desk, the Minotaur sits at one end of the couch. Beside him, on a table, a thing called The Perpetual Wave rocks back and forth, its tiny electric engine whirring and working too hard. Half a yard long, the thin plastic rectangle holds two liquids, one clear as water, the other a heavy viscous blue. Each time the container tips up, the blue substance spills and swirls in wavelike fashion downward. The incessant motion makes the Minotaur a little sick to his stomach.
“I talked to Hernando this morning,” Grub says.
“Hnnn?”
“It was a clean puncture, but they want him to stay off the leg for a few days.”
Grub just talks for a while, not really saying anything, and the Minotaur grows more and more apprehensive. Finally he broaches what the Minotaur knows is the subject.
“You seem …,” Grub begins. He is a tactful and compassionate man. “You seem to have trouble concentrating lately.”
“Mm.”
“I mean, Lord knows I understand a slump. Ups and downs.”
The Minotaur wishes he could unplug The Perpetual Wave. He looks away. On the walls around the room are photographs tracking the life of Grub’s Rib: opening night, employee picnics, Christmas parties, local celebrities. The Minotaur looks for his own horned figure among the pictures.
“It’s frustrating for me, as a businessman, to have to put the needs of my business first. Especially when I get so close to my employees. Jeez, you guys are as much like family as Rachel and the kids.”
The Minotaur rubs at a spot of mud on the heel of his polished shoe.
“You want another beer?” Grub asks, not waiting for an answer before going out the door.
“Unnh,” the Minotaur says to himself.
The Minotaur thumbs an untidy stack of papers on the table by The Perpetual Wave. When he realizes that they are tax papers for Grub’s employees the Minotaur looks closer. He feels an odd sense of power, holding all this information. He finds Kelly’s paper—full name, address and things he probably shouldn’t know. The Minotaur clumsily stuffs it in his shirt just as Grub comes back into the room.
“I want to try something new,” Grub says. “Just for a while.”
“Hnnh?”
“Well, you know how we run the prime rib special on Friday and Saturday nights. And how it always sells out.”
It’s true, the Minotaur knows these things well.
“When I was at the food show in Chicago I saw something that just might work down here.”
The Minotaur is curious. Grub tells him that he wants to run prime rib as a special every night, and maybe even take the T-bone off the menu. As sort of a permanent promotional gimmick Grub wants to rig up a beef station in the main dining room, a heated cart on wheels with a shallow well where whole cooked rib roasts will sit under a hinged dome of plastic, fat caps browned and glistening, the rare meat moist, vermilion, inviting. The beef cart will have a cutting board and a small heated vat of salty Au Jus. It will be wheeled from table to table, the prime rib cut to order for all to see.
“What do you think?” Grub asks.
“Mmm,” the Minotaur says, but still isn’t sure of his role in the plan.
“I want you to be the beef carver,” Grub says hopefully. “It’ll get you out of the kitchen for a while. We’ll get you a couple new chef’s coats and an extra-extra-large hat.”
“Hm.” The Minotaur tries to picture himself in a white cylindrical chef’s toque. The image is absurd. “Hernando?”
“I think you’re the better man for the job,” Grub says. “Let’s try it for a couple weeks and see what happens.”
“Not fired?” he asks.
“No, M, of course you’re not fired.” Grub puts his hand on the Minotaur’s shoulder. “Is that why you thought I asked you over?”
The Minotaur feels sweat trickling down his chest, feels the sharp edge of creased paper against his skin. Wishing he hadn’t taken the form, he plucks it from his shirt and shoves it between the pages halfway into the novel David gave him earlier.
“Good night,” Grub says.
The Minotaur drives back to Lucky-U Mobile Estates with the Vega’s windows rolled down. The night air buffets his huge tired head and roars in his ears. He sings. He sings the oldest songs he knows, moving from one to the next, sometimes in midnote. The Minotaur is glad that he still has a job, even if it means being on public display nightly, but the feeling that things are changing for the worse prevails. He sings to mask that feeling; the wavering pitch and the missed notes get lost among the sounds of his traveling.
Buddy’s body is still lying beside the road, its four legs pointing skyward. When the Minotaur pulls around the house Sweeny’s car sits in its usual place. The kitchen light shines through the window. The Crewses’ trailer is dark; the others are lit but silent. Not even the sound of Mrs. Smith’s television breaks the uneasy quiet. The Minotaur stands for a moment in the shadow of the mimosa trees, a ragged black hole in the wash of light from the buzzing street lamp. He contemplates knocking on Sweeny’s back door but has no idea what he would say.
The darkness of his own trailer welcomes him. When he switches on the anchor-shaped lamp his living space becomes immediately and impossibly tiny. As if his horns stretch from wall to wall. As if with the slightest movement he will gouge the wall, puncture the window screens, shatter the glass. As if. The Minotaur moves carefully through his trailer to the bedroom, where he removes the shoe from his injured foot. The blister has ruptured; the fluid has soaked through the bandage and stained his white sock. The raw wound stings in the open air. The Minotaur bathes, grooms his horns, treats and salves the skin at his division. He tends to his ablutions hoping that each act, each ritual, will bring peace of mind. But in the confines of his trailer the Minotaur grows more and more restless. In his pajamas he walks from one end of the mobile home to the other. Sleep is out of the question. Because he was nervous he didn’t eat much at Grub’s. The only substantial thing in the refrigerator is a hard-boiled egg. The Minotaur peels it under running water and stands hunched over the sink, clutching a salt shaker in the shape of a cowboy boot. The salt has taken some moisture and will not flow freely. He taps the shaker against the countertop before using it and eats the egg one small salted bite after the other to prolong the experience. In the morning, if he remembers, he’ll put a few grains of uncooked rice into the shaker.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 13