The card defines Reparation and Reparation Driving. On the back are the Driver’s Prayer and a two-year calendar with half a dozen dates circled in red ink. The Minotaur folds the card open, then closed, then open again. Harold is still talking. Hanging over the tiny sink inside the trailer is a paper towel dispenser. In the chrome surface of its cover the Minotaur catches a glimpse of his reflection, a little blurred but somehow comforting. The membership card for the Sacred Heart Auto League is unsigned. Although he has no specific plans the idea of membership appeals to the Minotaur, as do the promises of guidance and protection. His persistent gullibility draws him to such things. He pockets the card, then goes outside.
“I should’ve,” Harold says. “I should’ve walked out of the tent then and there. But I didn’t. And now …”
Harold tells them about a display case the size of a coffin, draped in red satin and sitting on a low table at the back of the Oddities of the Natural World tent. A sign claimed that, for an extra dollar, you could see a living breathing monster, the only one of its kind in captivity.
“What was it?” Tommy asks.
“Hard to say, exactly,” Harold says. “I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, but when I pulled off that red blanket I couldn’t see anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
The Minotaur squats on his haunches between Tommy and Sweeny.
“I don’t know if it was motion sensitive or what, but the inside of that box was pitch-black until I leaned over and pressed my face to the glass, and then so much happened that I’m not sure what I saw. Somebody yelled, ‘Hey, asshole!’ from the front of the tent, and the box lit up inside. It might have been a woman. I think she was naked. Could’ve even been one of them hologram things. All I know is that when the light came on I was looking it in the eyes. There was snakes crawling all over the top of its head, and when it opened its nasty mouth and give the most god-awful screech at the exact same time as that fellow yelled at me from behind, it scared the living shit out of me.”
Harold tells how he ran out of the tent and right into a guy wire, which caught him at the neck and threw him flat on his back.
“Next thing I knew I was in the Po County Hospital and couldn’t even tell when I was pissing myself.”
“How’s she look, M?” Sweeny says after a respectful pause.
“Mmmn.”
“Let’s talk price,” Sweeny says to Harold.
The Minotaur doesn’t want to be part of the negotiations. He wanders around behind the concession trailer and eventually up to the back door of the house, where he finds a garden hose in a loose coil. One end is attached to a muddy spigot jutting from a hole in the house’s underpinning. The other is cut off at a jagged angle. The Minotaur picks up the loose end. In a wide-footed stance, his head bent, the Minotaur holds the end of the hose to his pursed lips and turns on the spigot. Nothing happens.
Hoping for nothing more than a glass of water, he knocks on the back door of the house. There is no response from inside.
“Go on in,” Harold says from across the yard. “She ain’t gonna come to the door.”
The transition from the glaring Florida sun to the darkened interior of the house is disconcerting. In momentary blindness the Minotaur stumbles over something plastic and pliable on the floor, almost falls. He picks it up. When his eyes adjust he finds it is the GI Joe doll, singed and shell-shocked, that he holds in his hands.
Nat is still sitting on the couch.
“Water?” the Minotaur asks.
“They’s a glass over the sink,” Nat answers.
Not until he is halfway around the bar that separates the kitchen from the dining room does the Minotaur see the two children sitting on the floor beside the couch. They barely register his presence, as if a creature of this sort walks through their house every day. A boy and a girl, so pale as to appear almost featureless, no more than eight years old, both skinny and in dire need of a bath. What strikes the Minotaur most is the absence of youth in both children. Their actions and abilities are those of children, but they function with the demeanor of adults: muted, burdened, resigned. The boy and girl play quietly with a broken carpenter’s rule, folding and unfolding, folding and unfolding. They eat from a nearly empty container of dry cereal.
There are no glasses over the sink. All the glasses, and what looks like all the plates and bowls and knives and forks and spoons, are stacked precariously in the two wells of the sink, dirty.
“I’m hungry, Mama,” the girl says.
Nat doesn’t respond.
The two children come from beside the couch. The boy opens one of the cabinet doors, stares into its emptiness, then does the same at the refrigerator. Eventually they both just stand and watch the Minotaur look for a glass.
It takes the Minotaur only a few minutes to wash all the dishes, even taking care to keep his bandaged thumb dry. Once the thin malleable knives and forks and the chipped plastic plates are clean, he looks through the refrigerator and finds little in the way of edible food—half a dozen eggs, a small wedge of hoop cheese from which he cuts the mold, an onion and four hot dogs wrapped in foil. The Minotaur doesn’t ask if he can cook for Nat and the children. He just does it. By the time he pulls the frying pan from under the broiler the girl and the boy are standing, side by side and visibly hopeful, next to the table. When the Minotaur slides the big open-faced omelet onto a plate, orange cheese bubbling over bits of frankfurter and translucent onion, they wait as if in disbelief or shock until he motions for them to sit and eat. There may or may not be enough left for Harold and Nat. The Minotaur doesn’t want to be part of the negotiations.
Sweeny, in fact, didn’t haggle much on the price of the corn dog trailer. He tells the Minotaur—as they ease on to the highway, the salty evening wind coming off the Gulf and rocking the trailer and the truck that pulls it—that since there was a considerable stock of dry goods and supplies, like the little paper trays for the corns dogs, napkins, packets of mustard, he gave Harold more than the asking price. He says he wouldn’t have felt right otherwise. While the Minotaur and Tommy struggled to get Harold back into the house, Sweeny slipped a hundred-dollar bill under a refrigerator magnet when he thought nobody was looking. Sweeny doesn’t tell the Minotaur that part; the Minotaur saw it.
It’s after dark. They’ve dropped Tommy off at Golden Gator and are heading home, the Minotaur driving. Because Sweeny can’t see well at night the Minotaur will probably drive the whole way. Somewhere in the bowels of Georgia he pulls into a Stuckey’s for gas and food and to stretch his tired legs.
They seem to be the only customers. There are no other cars in the parking lot or at the gas pumps. Looking through the wide glass windows, the Minotaur doesn’t see anyone, clerk or customer, moving around in the store. If not for all the lights and the 24 Hour sign flashing over the door, he’d think the Stuckey’s closed. Only the pump for the premium-grade gasoline is functioning. A note taped to the front says to pay before pumping, so Sweeny and the Minotaur go in together.
Inside, high open shelves containing assorted necessities—chips and cookies and candy, motor oil, brake and other fluids, antacids and analgesics, half a dozen different souvenirs made from corncobs, miniature Confederate flags and full-size Confederate hats, bread, mayonnaise, bottle rockets and smoke bombs, etceteras ad nauseam—fill the brightly lit store from front to back but do not disguise the fact that it’s empty of customers, and possibly clerks. The far wall is lined with reach-in coolers for beer, soft drinks, frozen burritos, milk and the like.
Battling with the bright fluorescent lights on the hierarchy of stimuli inside the store are unidentified sounds coming from somewhere out of sight—a sort of incessant blip, a digital gobble-gobble interspersed with assorted boings and gulping sounds. Sweeny chooses quickly, a bag of barbecue-flavored pork skins and a quart of chocolate milk, and stands at the counter with money in his hand. After deciding on a hard-boiled egg, a huge dill pickl
e and a package of saltine crackers, the Minotaur joins him.
Waiting at the register they are closer to the source of the noises. From where they stand Sweeny and the Minotaur can see directly into an open door marked Employees Only. Aside from a deep utility sink, a jug of bleach, a bright yellow mop bucket with CAUTION stenciled across it and a mop handle held together with duct tape leaning out of view, the room seems empty, and quiet. The electronic cacophony is coming from a smoky little alcove off the back wall, its entrance hidden by a large revolving cigarette display. There, between the men’s and women’s bathrooms, beside the pay phone and a knee-high canister ashtray that’s full to overflowing, the Stuckey’s clerk stands at a Ms. Pac-Man video game, stands rigid but for the right arm that works the joystick with practiced facility.
Sweeny rattles the pork skins in the bag. The clerk doesn’t turn around.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, hoping to be heard. But the clerk continues playing.
It’s impossible, standing at the counter so far away, for Sweeny and the Minotaur to tell how the clerk is faring in the game, but the blips and gulps continue at an ever-increasing pace, and the clerk’s right arm moves faster and faster, so they both get some sense of intensity. Nor can Sweeny and the Minotaur tell much about the clerk from the back, except that the dark hair falling just onto the shoulders of the brown Stuckey’s smock and the way the smock drapes the body suggest female.
“Miss,” Sweeny says, acting on the assumption. He has to say it twice before the clerk looks over her shoulder. From the Ms. Pac-Man game comes a sinking sound, and the clerk gives an annoyed audible huff. She jabs a cigarette into the ashtray and turns toward them. The Minotaur is counting the change from his pocket and isn’t paying attention to the approaching clerk until Sweeny nudges him.
“Hey,” Sweeny says. “She’s one of yours, ain’t she?”
The clerk walks slowly, with a stiff and almost wooden gait. She is out of breath by the time she reaches the counter. Her nametag reads Hi, My Name Is Laurel. Laurel has a skin condition. Her thin arms falling from the sleeves, her face—a face containing the ghost of beauty—and even her neck and the wide arrow of flesh dropping behind the buttoned front of the smock, all her visible skin and almost certainly all the skin hidden from view, is flaky, peeling, barklike in texture. Laurel appears to be leaving a trail of something—leaves. There is a ring of thin veiny leaves where she stood playing the video game; there are leaves scattered along the several steps to the cash register. Only when she stands directly in front of them does the Minotaur notice the thin branches woven tightly to her scalp throughout the dark hair and the narrow teardrop-shaped leaves that seem to wilt before their eyes. When Laurel looks at the Minotaur he thinks, he hopes, that it is a glimmer of recognition he sees crossing her face. But instead he sees only millennia of fatigue and a barely concealed need to get back to her video game.
“Will that be all?” she asks.
No, the Minotaur thinks. That day will never come. His sadness is sudden and complete. It is as if the Minotaur is looking into the past and the future simultaneously, and both are visions of desolation, of endless and murky emptiness.
“Gas,” the Minotaur says, and walks out the door.
Sweeny knows better than to ask the Minotaur about it once they’re back on the road. He talks. He tells a joke about a Jew and a DustBuster that makes him laugh for at least five miles.
“I don’t know who in the world I’m going to sell this thing to,” Sweeny says, speaking of the corn dog trailer weaving along behind them. “Shit, M, if you had any sense you’d buy it yourself.”
The thought had not occurred to the Minotaur.
The cab of the truck smells like pork skins for the rest of the trip home. Somewhere near the Georgia border the Minotaur hits an animal, an opossum or raccoon, maybe, something large enough to shatter part of the grill on Sweeny’s truck when it gets thrown into the air. Sweeny is only mildly irritated. The Minotaur and Sweeny get back to Lucky-U before sunrise. Sweeny gets out of the truck and directs the Minotaur with a flashlight and some loud whistling while he backs the trailer into place in the front yard. The whole time they’re unhitching it and setting the leveling jacks, the Minotaur thinks about what Sweeny said. Just before going to sleep for the couple hours left of the night, the Minotaur wonders what Kelly would think.
CHAPTER 21
The Minotaur dreams himself through the Roman alphabet—
Abattoir
Bovidae, Bull-roarer
Crab claws
Deacons bench, Dog typhus
Echo, Echoic, Echoism, Echolalia, Echopractic, Echo stop
Furred collar
Gabriel ratchet, Gutting scaffold
Hacksaw, Hamartia, Husbandry
Isthmus of the fauces
Jugs
Kernel smut
-lepsy
Maidenhead spoon, Miter box
Nimbostratus
Odd man out, Omphaloskepsis
Pamphleteer, Penitence, Prodigal
Quickie
Raddle, Roasting ear, Ruminant
Staggered, Scuppernong, Sump pump
Thicket, Tung oil
Ungulate
Valetudinarian, Vestigial
Wattle and daub
Xeno-
Yolk stalk
Zealotry
CHAPTER 22
Still the Minotaur is disconcerted by automatic doors. This might be taken as a portent for his perpetually diminishing ability to fit in, to function in a world rapidly growing dependent on technology. But he doesn’t think that far ahead. Rexall Drugs welcomes the Minotaur with a hydraulic hiss, and he startles. He pulls a list from his pocket:
shoe laces. black
styptic pencil
WD-40
mouthwash
book?
It’s the same list he made a week or so ago, to which he has added
1 spool light blue thread
gauze
candy?
Looking at the list it’s not hard to tell that the word candy has been labored over—marked through, erased at least once, then written again but fettered by a question mark.
The candy is for Kelly, if the Minotaur can convince himself that it isn’t presumptuous. Less directly the blue thread is for Kelly as well. Earlier today the Minotaur looked through his closet, and of the handful of radically altered shirts only the light blue one seemed new enough to wear if he goes to her house. The others were stained or already had several obvious repairs. When he took the blue shirt from the hanger and held it up the Minotaur noticed the seam unraveling over the right shoulder. He noticed, too, the faded ink stain beneath the pocket, but he figured it was the least of many flaws. Not until he got out the sewing box and was sitting at the table did he discover that there was no matching thread—only white, blood-red and black.
So, compelled by the most scant measure of vanity, the Minotaur walks the aisles of Rexall Drugs looking for, among other things, light blue thread. He carries Kelly’s address folded in his front pocket, not because he needs it to find her house but because she wrote it. It is proof, of something. The creases in the paper are worn nearly through from overwork. This should not suggest that the Minotaur will get in his Vega and drive to Kelly’s house without hesitation, or even that he will go at all. The Minotaur is just readying himself in case. On the way home from the drugstore he’ll fill the tank with gas and get a free car wash.
He carries a shopping basket. In it some unscented talcum powder keeps company with a bottle of store-brand mint-blue mouthwash. The Minotaur is distracted, standing at the end of an aisle holding a spool of thread up to the light to check the color, and doesn’t see the boy run around the corner. He does feel the little body strike him at the hip and bounce off. The Minotaur has come to expect certain things—reactions of fear, for example. For him the hardest part of functioning in society is going to a new place, encountering new people and situations, and the Minotaur
suspects that this would be true even if he didn’t have the head of a bull. He’s come to this conclusion by way of deduction. Often when people see him for the first time they are filled with terror. And/or disgust. And/or anger. And/or confusion. And/or …
When the Minotaur’s unmoving hip sends the boy sprawling across the floor he expects the worst. Clutched in the boy’s hand is a toy gun, a space-age weapon that emits a red beam of light and a lethal-sounding oscillating noise whenever the trigger is pulled. And pull the trigger he does, aiming the weapon directly between the black eyes of the Minotaur, who stands over him. But with each blast of the laser it becomes more apparent to the boy that the Minotaur will not die, will not, as expected, dissolve into a smoldering mass or disintegrate into oblivion, that either his weapon is insufficient or the enemy is immortal. Not for the first time the Minotaur witnesses the decimation of faith. In a matter of seconds fear consumes the child, renders him mute and cowering on the floor.
Pity them both.
Pity the child for his loss. He truly wanted his laser gun to kill the Minotaur, believed that it would, even. Each time an act of hope fails, the capacity for experiencing hope itself diminishes. The child will be lucky if he reaches adulthood with even a shred of faith intact.
Pity the Minotaur his plight. Sometimes when he is out in public and he sees a child with even the slightest animalistic trait—a canine sweep to the jaw, wide-set eyes and a broad forehead, something about the way the lips and the teeth work together—he wonders what a child of his might look like. He wonders about the structure of its tiny face, about the smell of its skin, about how it would call out to him. A precious few he has seen were so beautifully zoological that the Minotaur questioned their lineage. But like the mule and other hybrids created to carry out the unpleasant business of humans, the Minotaur is sterile. Any child of his will have to remain imagined. Regarding the Minotaur’s own childhood, he has no memory of such, only of darkness and the smell of dry stone. It may be that the Minotaur was brought into existence just as he is now, a horned cumbersome mongrel. So he looks at the trembling little boy lying at his feet not with any sense of threat or anger but with unseeable tenderness and envy.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 19