“Grub told me,” David says. “About the beef cart. You want to come in?”
The Minotaur nods and follows David back to the lighted room.
“There’s a battle this coming weekend. A reenactment. I’m just cleaning my Springfield.”
“Mmm,” the Minotaur says, and looks for a place to sit. The room is large, large enough for the pumpkin-colored sofa and the low coffee table at the opposite end to seem miles away, sitting beneath the open window that looks out over the alley. Old newspapers spread across the tabletop protect it from the oily parts of the disassembled rifle neatly arranged over the covered surface. At one end of the table a thin metal can of gun oil leans against a gym sock with a blackened toe. The Minotaur tries to sit across from the sofa on an upholstered chair with a high curving back, but the arc of the chair back is too tight for his horns. David gets a straight chair from the next room and sets it opposite the couch.
“What am I thinking?” David says when the Minotaur tries to sit in the wooden chair. “You take the sofa.”
“Unnh.”
“It’s been awhile since I’ve had guests,” David says. He picks up the sock and pulls it down over his right hand, then begins to buff the blued breech and trigger mechanism of the gun. David talks about each piece as he polishes it.
The Minotaur doesn’t talk about his landlord’s dead dog or the accident with Hernando. He doesn’t talk about what he saw on the television less than an hour ago. Instead the Minotaur asks David about the upcoming battle, about what role he’ll play in it.
David, with boyish enthusiasm, explains it all. David shows him the battle plan and the roster. He reassembles the musket as if it were a performance. David, on his knees, lugs a heavy box of photographs from deep in a closet. He sits beside the Minotaur on the couch and opens the leather-bound album with care bordering on reverence.
Understand this: in his lifetime the Minotaur has had lovers, and they have run the gamut in species, gender and degree of consent and reciprocity. He has known both eager maenads and resistant victims. And the very nature of his existence, the facts and rumors surrounding his progenitors, render him nothing if not open-minded in the area of sexuality. But those lovers were all long ago, so distant, in fact, that the Minotaur cannot remember the last time he was touched by a hand motivated by desire. These days intimacy of any kind is difficult, perhaps impossible. As for the various sexual acts people engage in, the Minotaur has long since stopped entertaining those notions. So when David sits proudly beside him on the couch to show his battle pictures—battalions of men in uniform charging amid billowing gun smoke or writhing in mock death—the Minotaur doesn’t withdraw. When David opens the book and his hand comes to rest, accidentally, on his friend’s thigh, the Minotaur doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t flinch when David closes the book and leaves his thin nervous hand where it rests, or even when David, sometime later, walks self-consciously across the room to what the Minotaur thinks is a closet and pulls down a Murphy bed made up with the pro wrestling sheets. Even then the Minotaur does not balk.
This type of transition is more difficult for the human than for the Minotaur. While the Minotaur is willing to follow nearly any path that opens up before him, he doesn’t often forge ahead and take decisive action on his own.
David sits on the edge of the bed and, with little more than a nervous glance, gestures for the Minotaur to do the same. His hands, however tentative, are welcome on the Minotaur’s tired shoulders and down his spine. The closeness of his face is accepted. But although David may have notions, quiet hopes even, about the things their bodies can do together, once he and the Minotaur lie on the bed together nothing really happens. Once David fits his body snug against the Minotaur’s, his head nestled in the sweeping arc that begins as the Minotaur’s neck and ends at his horn, once there David seems content, or at least unable to go any farther. They lie all night on the Murphy bed with its sheets tightly tucked, the Minotaur dozing only for moments, if at all. Each time the Minotaur moves—be it an involuntary twitch, a repositioning of his arm, anything, no matter how slight—David’s body stiffens. So the Minotaur concentrates on stilling himself.
In the morning it is David who feigns sleep as the Minotaur quietly leaves; the Minotaur can tell by his breathing, which is too deep, too regular. Sitting in the Vega with the door open, on the quiet street, the Minotaur taps the gas pedal with a practiced rhythm until the sputtering engine warms up enough to idle on its own. Just as he is about to pull away from the curb a cinnamon-colored BMW motorcycle pulls out of the parking lot of the apartment building across the street. The shield on the rider’s helmet is dark. The motorcycle stops briefly beside the Minotaur’s car. When the cyclist revs the engine, pops the clutch and wheelies down the street, the black acidic pit of the Minotaur’s stomach roils and torques.
But for the lingering odor of gun oil that refuses to dissipate even with the car windows rolled down—a heavy permeating scent that will stay with the Minotaur until he bathes—he could almost forget the previous evening as he drives home.
Buddy is still dead, still lying belly up by the side of the road in front of Sweeny’s house. If the Minotaur were just a little bolder he would take the dog’s carcass late in the night and put it in one of the dozens of gunnysacks Sweeny keeps in a bucket in the unlocked shed, sacks he uses in the fall to store and dry all the peanuts growing in the half-acre lot behind Lucky-U’s only unoccupied trailer; the Minotaur, if he were even the merest hint of his former self, would take the dead dog way out in the country and throw it in Bunyan’s Slough. Instead he looks the other way when turning in the driveway.
CHAPTER 18
By the afternoon the carcass has begun to bloat. The chemical processes of decay taking place inside the dead dog’s body demand more and more space. By the following afternoon the body splits open in several places, like an overripe fruit, and swarms of flies suck at the stinking nectar. Stirring momentarily when cars go by, they hover in dark and frantic little clouds, then settle again. As the days pass, the presence of death at work by the roadside, malodorous but quiet, seems less and less an anomaly. To come home and find Buddy’s shrinking remains lying by the driveway, a cairn of bones and hide, seems as normal as anything else in the Minotaur’s world.
Sweeny acts as if nothing has happened, coming and going as usual, selling cars from his yard and buying others to replace them. The only part of his routine that has changed is that he no longer stands out on his listing back porch in his underwear calling the dog or makes the daily trip to the dog run with the pie pan full of table scraps.
One day the Minotaur is pulling away from his trailer to go to work when he hears Sweeny whistle. Sweeny’s whistle is unmistakable. He rolls his loose fleshy lips to manipulate the gale generated from way down in a small but pronounced potbelly, then forces the wind past where a wedge-shaped piece of tooth is missing from one of his lower incisors; this combination allows for a whistle so powerful it can be deafening. The Minotaur stops the car as soon as he hears Sweeny. He prepares himself for confrontation, or at least for denial. But when the Minotaur makes the effort to turn his cumbersome head in the confines of the driver’s seat, Sweeny just smiles and gives a big wave from where he sits. The Minotaur waves back and drives off.
“I ain’t seen them boys since that dog was killed,” D. W. Crews says to the Minotaur. It’s early morning, almost sunup, and several days since the accident.
“You?” D. W. asks.
“No,” the Minotaur says with a clarity that surprises him. In fact he hasn’t seen Hank or Josie either. He thought that maybe this morning, up early because Sweeny wants him to rebuild a carburetor in a VW bus and carburetors always give him trouble, he might see Hank leave for work, but Hank’s van was gone by the time the Minotaur came outside. Only two of the Crews brothers stir, readying for work in the pinkish phlegmy light of dawn.
“What happened to your foot?” D. W. asks the Minotaur after noticing his limp.
“Hurt.”
“Hmmm,” D. W. says.
“I’ll sure enough miss him “A. J. says. He sits on the mud-crusted bumper of the logging truck scratching around and around a sore the size of a quarter beneath his right ear. D. W. climbs into the cab.
“Uhhn?” the Minotaur asks.
“That dog,” A. J. answers.
The Minotaur nods but says nothing.
D. W. cranks the truck, and the barely muffled engine sputters and backfires before finding a regular idle. A. J. takes a grease gun from a small metal box welded to the center of the bumper and climbs up between the high metal posts onto the flat bed of the truck. Against the cab an oily cylinder rises out of the center of the bed, and atop it a hydraulic piston and the messy apparatus of a crane stretch toward the back of the truck. A. J., too short to see, reaches along the top of the boom until his fingers find the zerk, the grease fitting, and using both hands he guides the coupler onto the blackened nipple. He pumps the trigger of the grease gun twice, then begins feeling for another zerk. D. W. gives several brief taps on the truck’s horn.
After A. J. locks the grease gun back into the box he gets into the truck with his brother. For several minutes the Minotaur watches the two men sit in the idling truck and stare out the windows. A sudden wave of impatience washes over D. W; he scowls and pounds the horn. When the trailer door opens the Minotaur expects to see J. C. come out, as he does every morning, wearing dirty blue coveralls and carrying his lunch in a brown paper bag and a milk jug full of sweet tea. J. C. is in fact standing at the door, but the Minotaur can’t tell what he is wearing or if he is carrying anything. The Minotaur’s view is blocked by the woman who comes out of the trailer door in front of J. C. Stern faced but not unpleasantly so, older than any of the Crewses, she has small pursed lips, almost cartoonlike in their precise redness, that offset the teased ash-colored hair, which smells to the Minotaur of aerosol spray net. Looking as if she just walked from behind the reference desk of the local library, holding the only correct answer to the question, the woman nods deliberately at the Minotaur and the men in the truck and marches down the center of the driveway and into the morning. The sound of gravel crunching beneath her sensible pumps grows fainter and fainter. J. C. climbs into the truck, and the Minotaur hears D. W.’s curses as they drive away.
By the time the Minotaur gets the VW carburetor disassembled the sun is full in the sky and heating things up. He lays the parts out in order of removal on an old army blanket: butterfly, jets, bowl and float. The gasket he has to scrape away from the surface. As the Minotaur leans into the rear of the Vega’s open hatch, reaching for the carburetor rebuild kit, he hears the door of one of the trailers open.
It’s Josie. Mingling with the odors of putrefaction, the Minotaur smells the bacon grease in the cast-iron frying pan she struggles to balance in front of her, holding tight with both hands, trying not to spill the grease on her bare feet as she walks. The thin T-shirt she wears over her black two-piece bathing suit is the whitest thing in sight. The trailer door stands wide open, and Jules and Marvin peer out from inside. Josie is nervous. The Minotaur can tell it from a distance. Through the windshield he can see her look anxiously toward the back door of Sweeny’s house. All she has to do is reach the side yard and the shallow ditch lined with chokeberry bushes, where she will pour her unwanted bacon grease, then hurry back to the safety of her trailer. It’s an easy task, except that Josie isn’t paying attention to where she walks. When she stubs her toe on an exposed root Josie’s first instinct is to curse loudly.
“Fuck!”
Her second instinct is to let go of the heavy pan.
Her third is to protect herself from both the falling pan and its hot contents. In a feat of rare athletic prowess Josie simultaneously throws her arms back winglike and leaps several inches off the ground and backwards. The frying pan thuds to the ground, and hot grease sloshes over the sides and congeals almost instantly in the red dirt, but none hits Josie. The problem arises when Josie herself lands. With her feet together and extended behind, Josie is off balance and top heavy. Her thin bare feet planted on the earth act as a pivot, and gravity draws her home.
When Josie falls face down on the ground the Minotaur, forgetting that he has his head inside the narrow hatchback of the car, starts. He remembers where he is the second his horn gouges a hole in the vinyl headliner.
“Fuck!” Josie says, sitting up on her knees. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Once out of the Vega the Minotaur doesn’t really know what he should do, so he does nothing. It’s not until Josie reaches around with both hands to pull the shirt over her head that the Minotaur realizes the smear of greasy red mud sweeping in a ragged irregular crescent from her clavicle down between her breasts to her hipbone is in the vague shape of the Greek mainland and islands. Crete marks her right nipple.
Jules and Marvin laugh. Even before Marvin yanks on the curtain over the door, the curtain printed with overlapping rodeo scenes and matching the rug and toilet-seat cover in the trailer’s only bathroom, even before the door slams shut, the Minotaur senses mischief.
He doesn’t know what it is about little boys that makes them take pleasure in watching others—even, or especially, loved ones—suffer. He does know that the inclination follows many of these boys into manhood. Jules and Marvin laugh; the Minotaur hears them even through the closed door. Josie leaves the frying pan where it dropped; she bunches the shirt in her hand and wipes away the grease that soaked through to her skin. The half-moons of fabric over her breasts and the wedge covering her pubis are the blackest things in sight.
At his core the Minotaur is a voyeur. His humanity ebbs and flows in a cycle all its own and refuses to be called upon, refuses to be predictable. When he is at his most human the Minotaur is often overcome with shame from the number of times in his tediously long life that he has stood idly by and watched an event unfold, though he is less and less able, as time passes, to influence outcomes. Sometime in the future he’ll wish that he had offered Josie help.
Josie flinches when the door to her trailer slams shut. A perceptible spasm shoots through her entire body. When her children laugh, anger and embarrassment jockey for position on her face. Josie heads for the trailer, not exactly running but definitely not walking. Out of the context of her lawn chair turned to the sun in the backyard, Josie looks awkward and uncomfortable pounding on the locked door in her bathing suit and her deep even tan.
“Open this door right now, goddammit!”
The madder Josie gets the louder and more hysterical the laughter of Jules and Marvin becomes. When Josie circles the trailer prying at the windows, looking for an unlocked one, the Minotaur hears the boys running back and forth inside. By the time she reappears from behind the mobile home Josie is raging. The Minotaur, having had some experience with fury in his life, stands behind the car and watches as she curses and rails. When she begins to hurl sticks and the small abundant quartzite rocks at the sides of the trailer, the Minotaur hunkers down, fearing ricochets.
Then Josie just stops. She stops swearing and stops throwing things. The Minotaur can’t tell if she stops out of defeat or if she is simply gathering her forces for another charge. She stands in front of the trailer with her arms crossed over her chest, breathing deeply, audibly through her nose.
Feeling that danger has passed, the Minotaur stands from his crouch. In standing he bumps the tray of sockets—arranged first according to the size of the drive, then by dimension, metric on one side, standard on the other, divided by the polished ratchets—balanced carelessly on the lid of the closed toolbox. They spill, a brief hailstorm of steel. The squat cylinders scatter in the grass, catching the sun as they roll and tumble.
The Minotaur is still on his knees gathering up the spilled sockets when Josie walks up. He stands, and just as he is cocking his head to hear her speak the trailer door opens wide and bangs against the outer wall. That’s when Josie slaps him. Her tiny furious hand gets lost in
the black expanse of his cheek; the intent stings more than the blow. Josie closes the door behind her; the Minotaur goes back to collecting his sockets.
Things have quieted down by the time the Minotaur stops for lunch. Sitting at his table by the window, dipping a whole onion into a saucer of salt, eating white bread after each bite of onion, listening to the occasional car speeding by on the road, the Minotaur can see the dark little clump that was Buddy, and he realizes that the stench of the rotting dog has become almost pleasant. Subdued, the odor has a flowery undertone, as if a tropic wind from a distant orchard of some exotic fruit has been borne across oceans and continents and delivered to the noses of the inhabitants of Lucky-U Mobile Estates.
No sooner does this notion occur to the Minotaur than Sweeny comes from the back door of his house. The Minotaur hears the keys jangling before he actually sees Sweeny; when he does come into view he’s swinging the key ring around and around on his gnarled sticklike forefinger.
It’s not unusual to see Sweeny squatting to open the padlocked plywood door to the muddy crawlspace beneath his house. Nor is the Minotaur surprised when Sweeny hauls the push mower out into the yard, then reaches in again, half of his body disappearing into the black square mouth, to get the gallon can of gasoline with the yellow spout like a beak. What does seem unusual is that Sweeny puts the lawn mower back under the house and keeps the gas can out. The Minotaur watches him fish in his pockets for something. Not finding it, Sweeny leaves the gasoline on the steps and goes back inside the house; he is absent only a moment. He hooks two fingers beneath the handle on the can and walks around the house and down the driveway.
The Minotaur shoves the last piece of onion into his mouth, folds a piece of bread into fourths and pushes it in as well. He’s still chewing when he gets out to the car, where he can get a clear view as Sweeny douses Buddy’s rotten carcass with the contents of the can. Half a gallon of gasoline, turning copper in the sunlight, spills back and forth across the body. Sweeny steps back out of the way—too far, in fact. He flicks a lit match, but it is extinguished before it lands; a scant thread of smoke is all it produces. The same thing happens with the second match. Sweeny steps closer, thinks for a moment and takes another step forward.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 15