The Minotauress

by Edward Lee

  He got it down. Yeah. He tripped it Ice-T style just like a take-no-shit street player, just like a bro' in duh ‘hood. Indeed, and as clear as the proof of Newton's Third Law of Motion and his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Scotty Nash was the first ten-year-old white gangsta niggah to ever hip the hop down Rural Route 2 in DeSmet, South Dakota. Jivin', stepping it out. Bustin' moves.

  He didn't have pubic hair yet, but Scotty knew what happened when a grown-up cock busted a ‘ho's pussy. It squirted spunk into her. Of course, Scotty was too young to shoot spunk but he could sure come. He found that out at age four, the first time his Mom jerked his pee-pee off. By five he was doing it himself several times a day. It felt good but what felt better was sticking it in a real live girl, same way his Mom had let him when she was high on crank between tricks. Scotty couldn't wait till he got the dick hair and the juice. The Little Man would just have to wait a few more years till he was a Big Man. Then he'd be jammin'...

  "You bring yo' jive into my space, I'll'se bust a cap in yo' white face," his Walkman rapped.

  "Lick it!" Scotty yelled in his cracked pre-pubescent voice. He had his willy out in front of Dawnie Weller, a nine-year-old with a nougat-brown ponytail from Vista View Park. She'd been walking home from the QWIK-MART tonight when Scotty'd spied her in her little shorts and titless top, marching back to her 14' by 72' Silver Stream. Her bag of groceries fell apart when he'd yanked her behind the PROPOSED LAND-USE ACTION sign posted on the vacant lot between Paduana's Guitar Shop and Cooper's Adult Goods. Rats scattered from the pile of garbage he threw her on. He twisted her hair till she squealed like his baby brother Danny the time their step-daddy put a Marlboro out in his belly button. Dawnie's knees scuffed in garbage and dirt; she was crying. "Lick it, ‘ho," he repeated, but the excitement had already hardened him to his full three inches, and over his Walkman headset, he could hear the revered words of his hero Badd Blacque Busta Kapp: "Lick it, ‘ho! Then lick my crack! Once you go black, you never go back!"

  Sobbing, she began to lick the macadamia-nut-sized glans as snot glistened from her nose. Scotty's legs began to tremble with the music beating in his ears. His little grape-sized balls constricted.

  "Yo' momma's a ‘ho, yo' daddy slams, I'se fuck yo' li'l sister and start to jam!"

  But Scotty didn't want to have his dry orgasm just yet. He wanted to have it in her little bald pie. Next her legs were flailing as he pulled off her shorts. Shit fell out she was so scared... but shit didn't bother Scotty, considering how much time he'd spent sitting in it as a baby. Her bare legs were shiny with pee; it reminded him of the water fountain at school, the way the pee was looping from her gash.

  "Hey white bitch, you my ‘ho now," his headset rocked, "wanna be top dro', I'll'se show ya how!"

  Yeah, Scotty thought. Right now he was Badd Blacque Busta Kapp, and he was gonna show this nine-year-old white bitch just how it was done, get her turned, get her on the right track fo' the ‘hood. In fact, this was his destiny! Scotty was breaking in some fresh ‘ho, then she'd sell her ass on the street and she'd give him the money. He could be a pimp, just like Ice-T and Big Mistah K!

  He'd be Superfly!

  Dawnie began to upchuck now, wriggling in the dirt. Her upchuck smelled like Pop Tarts. Long as an adult's pinkie now, Scotty's dick throbbed hard. He was just about to drop his baggy pants and stick it in the bitch's pie when...

  From behind, hands smoothed slowly up his back. Scotty went rigid. Dah pigs! he thought. Dah poe-leece! Where my AK just like Dr. Dre?

  But that couldn't be right because the hands slid around his waist across his stomach. Then down.

  They were soft, hot hands, and suddenly there was a cooing in his ears. He pulled off the Walkman headset.

  "Honey? Honey?" a voice like a babbling brook issued behind him. "Let me."

  Scotty was lovingly turned around, his pre-pubescent dick sticking out like a flesh-colored piece of chalk. Behind him, little Dawnie Weller ran away, a trail of her pee following her.

  But Scotty was enraptured now. Every inch of his Little Gangsta Man skin felt electric, like the time his Mom had been high and stuck his finger into the light socket when he'd been bawling louder than a maternity ward—only this didn't hurt, this felt good.

  It felt even better when the soft, warm hands played with his little apricot-pit nuts. Scotty's eyes were squeezed shut, but then some minuscule sense of logic occurred to him: Who was doing this? Who was playing with his marbles?

  He opened his eyes.

  In the deep shadow of the LAND USE sign, he saw... a woman. A black woman but she wasn't black like an African American, she was... just... black.

  Black, he thought, eyes pried open.

  She was as black as the shadow thrown by the big sign. In fact, she was a shadow.

  That's what she was made of. Shadows.

  But she was full-grown, like his Mom.

  "Come here, baby." Her voice sounded like wind through the trees in autumn. "Let me make you feel good... "

  Scotty could say nothing as the shadow-woman took his little boner into her mouth. Back and forth, she sucked it, while her black fingers played with his tiny testicles, and after just a few back-and-forths, Scotty went up on his tip-toes and had his semenless orgasm.

  It was the best he'd ever had. Better than the little girls, better than jerking himself, and better than his Mom's hot, hairy pie.

  When he was done, the woman smiled. He couldn't see the smile because the smile was darker than the dark. But, somehow, he could feel it.

  "Did that feel good, baby?"

  "Yuh-yuh-yeah."

  "Come on, baby," her voice slithered. Her hand played with his slackened dick. "Come with me. I have a little boy just like you. Would you like to meet him?"

  "Yuh-yuh-yeah."

  "I knew you would."

  She was more than a woman. She was the mother he'd never really had, not a meth-whore but someone who loved him. She was his nurturing Night-Mother, his Angel of Shadows, and now she was leading him by the hand, as he hitched up his baggy gangsta pants, further into the darkness, and from the earphones draped at his neckline, he could hear Badd Blacque Busta Kapp rapping: "How bad you are, you just a clown. ‘Cos it gonna be a bitch who take the player down... "

  Darkness, darkness...

  ««—»»

  Aw, Jesus, Arianne thought. But she wasn't thinking long before she was fellating. Kermit Crole's penis was indeed the largest she'd seen in her life, and after so many years on the street, that was a lot of penises. Instantly, she was gagging as his callused hands guided her head, by grasps of hair, up and down in his lap in the front seat of his candy-apple red Ranchero.

  She wasn't blowing him, he was fucking her throat. Deep.

  Air raced through her nostrils. He grabbed her tremoring hand and placed it on his balls, things the size of Silly-Putty eggs. He humped her stretched mouth harder, then, just as Arianne thought she'd suffocate, he came copiously down her throat. When some of the semen slid into her epiglottis, she wheezed, jerked her mouth off, and involuntarily coughed a spatter of fresh sperm onto the inside of the broad windshield.

  "Ain't ya got no manners, whore?" He cracked his fist into her chin so hard her teeth rattled. "This ride cost me thirty grand, ya dirty spunk-bucket, and here you are spitting my cum on the glass." He punched her just as hard in the belly, and all her wind slipped out. Arianne couldn't breathe. "Shit, whore, I kin smell yer dirty pussy through yer shorts, damn! Smells worse than the bottom of the gut can at the slaughter house." Then his big paw hands grabbed her breasts and pinched like two pair of vice-grips. "Ya stupid whore. Spitting cum in my truck? I oughta twist these little tits rights off, and what're you gonna do about it? Tell the cops?" Kermit Crole's throat jacked laughter. He pinched her nipples so hard blood came out, then he popped the passenger door, and—

  WHACK!

  —literally punched her out of the truck.

  Arianne's head collided with the gr
avel-lined parking lot. Her scalp sliced. Then she rolled over to stare at the stars.

  Like bird-shot, more gravel sprayed against the side of her face as the Ranchero peeled off.

  There's got to be a better way to earn ten bucks than this, she thought.

  Then, for the briefest moment, as her gaze remained stuck on the cosmos, she thought she saw, somewhere in Orion's Belt, a glittering facsimile of the face of the only man she'd ever loved.

  Dean Lohan.

  Why did you leave me, Dean? she wondered as tears formed. Why?

  She dragged herself up, sharp stones cutting her knees, and remnant seed falling from her lips. Not much else she could do except shuffle back into Gortyn's Woodland Tavern and try to tag another trick.

  She was dizzy, she was sick. Nevertheless, her feet shuffled back toward the door, and that's when she heard the high braying sound of police sirens off toward Main Street.

  ««—»»

  The night watchman's body wasn't even cold before DeSmet Police Sergeant A.T. Lass was called out yet again. This one was worse. This was a kid.

  "Christ, A.T.," his blanched partner, Hoiter, quailed. "It's Scotty Nash from down the Route. Shit, we must'a busted his mother a hundred times."

  Fuck, Lass thought. He didn't give a shit about the kid, just the fact that it was a kid. Can't have kids gettin' killed in DeSmet! Makes me look bad!

  Where young Scotty's abdominal wall should have been was now simply a gnawed evacuation of flesh. The boy's innards had been removed, and with not much finesse; his belly looked roto-tilled. What could do something like that? But an even more logical question struck Lass as he stood in the flashlight-painted darkness behind the old Stoddard Mill.

  "What happened to the punk's insides?" he mouthed aloud.

  "Must'a been some kind of animal attack," Hoiter suggested. "A wolf or a coyote."

  "Yeah, must'a been."

  The kid's baggy pants hung around his ankles, his NIGGUZS ROOL 4 U T-shirt bunched up. One of those dumbass Walkman things hung around his neck by a wire connected to a set of earphones. Hoiter picked it up, switched it on.

  "I gots the motherfuckin' herpes, I don't give a shit! Need a bottle'a fuckin' Mickey's, yo white bitch!"

  "Turn that crap off," Lass griped.

  "Oh, wow, it's Badd Blacque," his partner remarked. "It's good stuff."

  "It's a bunch of ghetto home-boy horse-shit, sounds worse than a busted chainsaw. Christ, the idiots just pick any word that rhymes."

  "To the contrary, A.T. Rap and Hip-Hop is the Shakespeare of the modern African-American culture. It's the poetry of their times, their language of art. Listen."

  Hoiter switched it back on. "Zippadee motherfuckin' doo-dah, zippadee motherfuckin' yay. My oh my what a motherfuckin' wonderful day—yo white bitch!"

  Lass snatched the Walkman away, shut it off. "Quit fuckin' around! What's that on the punk's chest? Gunshot wounds?"

  Hoiter leaned over with the flashlight and pulled up the decedent's T-shirt past his nipples. Indeed, two marks were present, two holes spaced a foot apart.

  "See? What the fuck is that?" Lass questioned. "Somebody shoot the punk with a couple of deer-slugs?"

  "I know what it is," Hoiter replied in a darkened tone. "Ain't no deer-slugs, A.T. This boy's been gored."

  "Gored?"

  "That's right, boss. Gored. As in by a bull."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The scream shrilled through the house, but not a scream of horror or pain. A scream of outrage. Then the voice cracked and boomed like cannon-fire. "DEAN! GET YOUR ASS IN HERE NOW!"

  Dean climbed off the couch, where'd he'd slept instead of the bed, and headed for the bedroom, scratching his balls through his shorts. "What?" he said.

  Daphne, having just placed her Samsonites on the bed, twirled. Her face was beet-red. "That's TOBACCO JUICE on the floor, isn't it?"

  Dean glanced at the long shit-colored stain in the beige carpet. "Yeah," he said. "That's tobacco juice, all right."

  "You reckless inconsiderate REDNECK!" Daphne wailed in her smart Givenchy off-shoulder organdy dress. "You SPIT on the floor!"

  "Yup."

  "That's it! The more I try, the worse you get! I want a divorce!"

  "You got it," Dean agreed, still scratching his balls. "How about a quick blow-job before we sign the papers?"

  Enraged, she picked up her carry-on bag and threw it at him. Dean ducked, and it sailed overhead.

  "That was a mistake," he calmly informed her.

  He broke the bedside lamp over her head, wrapped its cord around her neck and, by the cord, dragged her out of the room. Her ass thunked down the stairs. She gagged, kicking as he dragged her further into the dining room. The dining room was perfect—the big bay window. Then he grabbed her not by the hair but by the face, and propped her up in front of the multiple panes.

  "Have your lawyer give me a call," he suggested and punched her in the face so hard she flew back as if jerked by a towline. The bay window exploded and out Daphne went, landing on her back in the front yard amongst flecks of broken glass.

  Dean scratched his balls again, and loped for the kitchen—

  —and shifted and jigged and jagged and—

  "Oh no," Dean croaked.

  There he stood, in the bedroom, as Daphne, in the same Givenchy off-shoulder organdy, railed at the all-too-obvious evidence of tobacco juice on the carpet.

  Her face burned at him, a rigid mask of contempt. "I KNOW what that is on the floor! And you WILL clean it up!" Daphne's bellow threatened to beat plaster-dust from the ceiling. "You'll shampoo this rug, TODAY!"

  "But-but-but, honey? It's Sunday. There's no place open where I can rent a carpet cleaner—"

  "You'll do it by HAND, on your KNEES!" came her next bellow. "Jesus CHRIST, Dean! The harder I work, the lazier you get! That convention in Vegas was HARD work! And for the whole time you're sitting here on your ass drinking with that dingleberry Ajax and SPITTING on the FLOOR!"

  "Honey, please—"

  "Shut up, you redneck slob. Christ, all I've done for you, and this is how you repay me? You're not back at the ranch anymore, shoveling cow shit and hosing down the stalls! We're in the CITY now, we're CITY PEOPLE! And you better start acting like it!"

  Dean stood slack as a Gumby doll. "I'm sorry, honey. I don't know what came over me. I—"

  "Shut up!" she repeated. "Get out of my sight! And start getting this SHIT-HOLE cleaned up! Oh, and you were supposed to roll up that GODDAMN hose in the front yard a fucking WEEK ago! So roll it up so I don't have to TRIP over it anymore!"

  "Yes, honey, I'm sorry, honey," Dean blathered and backed out of the bedroom. He wasn't scratching his balls now; in fact, at this precise moment, he felt like he didn't have any balls at all. Daphne might as well have been wearing them for earrings.

  What the hell happened? he thought in the utmost distress. His brain felt like overcooked meatloaf. Did I really spit chaw on the rug?

  Yes. He remembered that much, at least. Last night Ajax had come over. They'd gotten ‘faced. Ajax had taken the late 194 home, leaving Dean to chug whiskey and pass out on the couch.

  But I didn't really spit on the rug, did I?

  The answer was plain, unless Santa Claus had been in here last night six months early with a lip full of Skoal.

  Oh, man. What's happening to me?

  All too suddenly, Ajax' unconvincing psycho-babble didn't sound quite so unconvincing any more.

  Maybe he's right. Maybe I'm really two people, divided between my ideals. Maybe I really do have a genuine split personality...

  "And get the fucking newspaper!" Daphne shouted down from upstairs. "It's been sitting out in the middle of the GODDAMN driveway all morning!"

  "Yes, sweetheart!" he raised his voice back. "I was just about to do that."

  Dean pulled on his jeans, which were strewn across the coffee table. He stumbled out the front door, into raving sunlight, then stumbled again and tripped over a coil of unrolle
d garden hose that lay stretched across the sidewalk like a trip-wire.

  Dean fell flat on his chin.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Within a week, six more DeSmet children where found dead within proximity to the long-closed Stoddard's Mill. All were found in the same disrepair: gastro-intestinal organs evacuated through a ragged aperture. All appeared to have been gored in the chest.

  As if by a bull.

  Sergeant A.T. Lass was sufficiently apeshit, and so were the residents of DeSmet.

  "My baby boy got killed! Where were you!" shrieked Janice Stumore when Lass went to pick up his "pad." Janice lived at the Callisto-Brownsroad Trailer Court with her common-law hubby Leonard. Leonard had a masters in organic chemistry from M.I.T.; he was also a meth-head who'd gravitated to DeSmet after escaping the correctional custody of the Massachusetts State Police Narcotics Unit. Here, Leonard ran the biggest ice lab in the county, and in order to continue to operate, certain payments needed to be made to certain constables of the law. One day, Lass knew, this trailer and a third of the park would go up in a minor mushroom cloud when Leonard fired up a pipe too close to the solvent.

  "Here ya go, Adam-12," Leonard said through his Fu Manchu beard. Greasy hair hung like black worms. "Always a pleasure." Then he slapped five century notes into Lass' fat paw. Janice's mad bellowing ripped through the paper-thin walls.