“Finished,” the Minotaur says.
Ramneek comes to the counter. “I have something for you, Mister M,” she says, offering up a small plate covered in foil.
“Unngh, thanks,” the Minotaur says. She offers frequently; he always accepts, and rarely knows what it is he’s eating.
“It will be quite a hot one tomorrow, Mister M,” Rambabu says. “You must take liquids, before the dying.”
There in the Judy-Lou lobby, the Minotaur feels cared for. He also feels something at his feet. The Minotaur doesn’t have to look down to know that Devmani has snuck from behind the counter and now sits astraddle his boot, clinging to his calf. She did this the first time he ever came into the Judy-Lou, when his car broke down in the parking lot all those seasons ago. She was just crawling then. Though toddling now, the girl is no less excited. He knows, too, that she’s grinning. That she expects the Minotaur to pretend not to notice her presence. He knows that she’ll giggle all the way as he drags his foot, and her, from the counter to the door.
Barter this, barter that.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, working hard to make it sound like surprise. Devmani giggles.
Back in his room, #3, which shares a thin wall with the Guptas’ apartment, the Minotaur eats. The food is yellow. The food is delicious. Hunger comes and goes for the Minotaur. Sometimes he is indifferent. This time he licks the plate. It’s been an odd day. Something nags. Something gnaws.
What is there to say about Room #3? It houses the Minotaur well enough. The double bed takes up most of the space. If he lies in the center of the two thin pillows, both horns fit. Against the other wall, a low dresser with three drawers. The Minotaur uses only two of them. A fat old television set commands the far end of the dresser. Inside it the free HBO bubbles away unused. In the corner between the dresser and wall, an exposed shelf and hanger bar made of chromed tubing provide closet space. There are periods of time in the Minotaur’s life when he needs little, wants less. This is one of those times. A clock and a telephone are on the nightstand, and a lamp with a base made to look like a mountain lion fighting a buck. The lamp works. The Minotaur doesn’t know about the phone.
The Minotaur has turned the single wooden armchair with cracked vinyl cushions so that he can look out the window at Business 220, at the night or the day. Two cars were in the Judy-Lou parking lot when the Minotaur left for the battlefield early this morning. Now only one, at the far end. Probably Room #10, where the view of Scald Mountain is best. It is not yet high season for the kind of guest who chooses, or ends up at, the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge. Most, these days, prefer proximity to the turnpike and all that is promised by the more beaten path. The Guptas don’t seem to mind. Nor does the Minotaur. Beneath his sole window the rattling fan of the air conditioner can sound almost oceanlike if he pretends hard enough. He does.
Nobody is watching. The Minotaur licks the plate, then takes it into the cramped bathroom to rinse in the sink. The bathroom door is narrow, and the tiled walls are close on all sides. With practice the Minotaur knows just how much to turn his massive head, to dip his horns. Two vertical florescent bulbs flank a mirror over the sink. A few days after arriving the Minotaur fixed the constant drip from the hot-water tap. Then he checked the plumbing in all the other rooms. As for the lights, it takes several minutes for the old gasses in the tubes to warm up, to sputter to life, and when they are finally lit fully what is cast can barely pass for light. The silver backing is peeling away from the mirror’s edges, leaving a lacy pattern of black webs that refuses reflection. The Minotaur doesn’t need to see himself.
The Minotaur looks in the mirror anyway. The florescent bulbs pulse faintly, washing his incomplete reflection in surges of pinkish light. He’s there. He’s not. He’s there. The Minotaur unbuttons his coat at the top, reaches in to touch his scar. He’s there. He’s not.
“Unngh.”
The Minotaur fishes the square tin of Bag Balm from the jacket pocket, hangs the coat neatly on the bar just outside the bathroom door. He stills the coat in its sway, then returns to the mirror and uncaps the salve. The Minotaur likes best that brief moment just after he peels back the green lid with its wreath of red clovers and—he can’t not see—the cow, when the scent of lanolin fills his nostrils. His bullish nostrils. He uses the middle two fingers, circling the tips just once on the oily yellow surface. The Minotaur takes his time in attending to the scar. The rift. The balm does as promised.
Through the thin wall the Minotaur hears the Guptas talking. Listens as they stack their syllables higher and higher until toppling is inevitable. The Minotaur puts his hand to the cool tile, thinking to offer some kind of support. He cocks his head, lowering the snout. Finds a spot in the mirror that almost reflects. Looks at his bifurcation. Looks and looks. Out of the blue, out of the pink-hued flickering, he thinks of Widow Fisk. Her kind eyes magnified by the glasses and hidden by her bonnet. He thinks of Widow Fisk in her bonnet and in her apron. The Minotaur thinks of her out of her bonnet, her apron. Those bloomers billow in his mind. The Minotaur is about to keep thinking, about to imagine Widow Fisk doing things, when he hears an engine strain under load, then backfire. And though there is no clear need for stealth, he does his best to creep to the window, to pull back the Western-themed curtain, the crisp silhouettes of bucking horses and cacti losing their form, to part the venetian blinds slightly with lanolin-scented fingers, to look.
Dusk has fully claimed Scald Mountain, but the Minotaur knows it is there, thick with rhododendrons. What he can see is Danny Tanneyhill across the road. The man has backed his pickup truck to the front of the Pygmalia-Blades trailer. The rear of the truck sags under its payload. Its burden. Its burden is a tree trunk, as big around as . . . or bigger, the Minotaur can’t decide; metaphor is often out of his grasp. The fat end of the trunk pushes against the cab; its length spans the bed completely; the other end rests on the lip of the tailgate, where the trunk splits into two thick limbs, outstretched, reaching.
Danny Tanneyhill is a lean, sinewy man. Danny Tanneyhill climbs into the bed of the truck, slings a leg over the trunk like he’s going to ride it into submission. He loosens two fat straps. The Minotaur watches. There is moonlight now, and the scent of honeysuckle. The tree will not budge for either, despite Danny Tanneyhill’s efforts. He circles the truck, climbs over and around the trunk, wrapping his arms here, shouldering there. He grunts and curses. The tree, pronated or supinated, remains stoic in its bark. It is hard to tell how other wooden entities feel about the moment, the intrusion. But the Minotaur’s scar grows hot and throbs.
Just across Business 220, Danny Tanneyhill grapples with his burden, with potential, grapples and grapples. The Minotaur watches. Watches for a long long time.
CHAPTER SIX
NIGHT COMES, AND AS IT IS WONT TO DO, drags behind its entourage of demons and fools.
The Minotaur dreams of concession.
Dreams the concessionaire. A past life, maybe.
Everything orbits. Everything.
Dreams that past. Dreams plank and paraffin. Harness and hyacinth. The whetstone. The conch shell, blown. The sound itself. There is kudzu in summer, a deep green insistence. There is kudzu in winter, the gray leaves like paper, then dust. There is the belly of the ship. The hold. The bilge. The bulgine’s run. The hog-eyed man. There is stump and root. And riding the donkey. Stamp and go. The ravaged acre, pulp boiled and pressed. And every letter ever written. There is hubris: shape shifter and time traveler, in his holy robes. And the corndogs. The sno-cones. Elephant ears. Funnel cakes. Gigumundus pretzels. Affy Tapples. Paper mills. We all stink of sulfur. The chef ’s toque. “Soldier’s Joy.” “Black-eyed Suzie.” “Speed-the-Plow.” Pickett’s Charge. Bull Run. Appomattox. The absurdity of uppercase and flags and fifes.
The Minotaur followed the battlefields north.
The Minotaur is good at dying. Who’da thunk it?
A thing to do.
The spleen is always the spleen. Catechism or cat
awampus, it’s all the same. Everyone wants something. Everything gets egged on Halloween.
The Minotaur dreams it.
“It ain’t right,” somebody once said, pointing an angry finger at the Minotaur.
The Minotaur could not agree more.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MINOTAUR AVERTS HIS EYES. It is Sunday morning, and he is on his way to another death. He averts his eyes, unprepared for what he might see across Business 220. The Minotaur averts his eyes. It means turning his whole head. There is no other way. But it doesn’t matter. The Minotaur knows without seeing that the massive tree trunk is standing there in the Chili Willie’s parking lot, its two heavy arms reaching toward, what? Heaven. No. The Minotaur is not convinced.
He knows, too, that Danny Tanneyhill, that self-confessed demigod, sits, watching and waiting, inside the Pygmalia-Blades trailer. Just sits and looks. Chainsaws at the ready. The Minotaur feels caught in the blades.
The Minotaur hurries toward the morning’s death. The Guptas are quiet. It is Sunday. Warm already. Unseasonably. The April sunshine is rolling down the slopes of the Allegheny Mountains, pooling in the valleys. By midday everything will be musky. Everything will be hot. Bothered. The Minotaur hurries into the mad peal of church bells from Old Scald Village First Anabaptist, just down the road. The clatter, the sacred claptrap, snags in his horns.
Sunday morning, there is music in the church, often. Sunday morning, the soldiers come ready to die. Always. To kill. And the bleachers fill with spectators. Usually. The Minotaur crosses the bridge over Mill Run. The water is clear and ready. He cocks a bullish ear, finds only birdsong. He makes his way to the Welcome Center, keeping watch for anything wayward. The pillory is empty.
“Hey, there, sarge,” Widow Fisk says from her office when the Minotaur comes from the closet with his musket. “Is that thing cocked and loaded?”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
Widow Fisk teases. She’s often sassy, though on Sunday morning her sassiness is restrained.
He steps into the cramped room. Cocked and loaded as he’ll ever be. The Minotaur catches the faint whiff of alcohol. Widow Fisk sits at the desk. Widow Fisk wears her bonnet and apron. The knots are crisp and tidy. Always. Even when she’s hung over. She comes in early. She leaves late. As far as the Minotaur knows she may actually never leave. The Minotaur likes her understated sass. She’s working on the poster for the upcoming reenactment weekend. The Encampment. He leans over her shoulder to read.
“You going to be here?” she asks.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. “Hope so.”
Widow Fisk forks something out of a little tin pan beside the computer monitor. A warm buttery scent fills the deep wells of the Minotaur’s nostrils.
“Mmmnn,” he says.
Once, a long time ago, Widow Fisk asked the Minotaur how long he thought he’d be staying. The question confounded him. Time being what it is. She asked him if he ever thought about settling down, and where, and with whom. Once, a long time ago, Widow Fisk reached out and touched his jowl.
“Maybe you’ll get a promotion,” she says from behind her desk, and from behind a faint cloud of whiskey scent. “Maybe they’ll make you general.”
The thought gives him pause. The Minotaur works up a faint smile. Maybe the coming weekend does hold something for the Minotaur. Maybe the signs, the cut-rate prophesies, the modest omens of the past few days, have pointed there.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says again.
General, of course, is out of the question. Any officer’s role, really. But change is in the air, for sure. Possibility, though, is hard for the Minotaur to conceive. He can barely think, with the smells of whatever it is Widow Fisk is eating filling the air. Delicious. Delicious. He’s eyeballing the tin pan. Anybody could see so.
“Butterscotch pie,” Widow Fisk says, and so deftly pokes a forkful into the Minotaur’s mouth that he can do nothing but let the heavenly dollop dissolve on his fat black tongue. The Minotaur’s knees all but buckle. He remembers. He remembers hunger. It has been a long long time. The butterscotch pie in his mouth might be the best thing the Minotaur has ever tasted. In his life. Widow Fisk. Widow Fisk.
“I made it last night,” she says. “Made the crust and the meringue, too. You like it?”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. “Much.”
Widow Fisk is facile with piecrust. Widow Fisk in her bonnet and her apron. She knows things. The Minotaur doesn’t mean for his mouth to hang open. But it does. Widow Fisk teases his black lips with another forkful of pie.
“You want this?” she asks, keeping it just out of reach. “You want this?”
The Minotaur smells butter and salt and flour on her skin. “Mmmnn,” he says. The Minotaur could take her entire hand into his mouth. He wonders if Widow Fisk knows this.
“What’ll you give for it?” she asks.
The Minotaur sees a tiny fleck of dried pudding on her bonnet. The Minotaur hadn’t imagined the bonnet when he thought of her in the kitchen.
“What do I get out of the trade?” she asks.
The door to the Gift Shoppe opens, to a prickly digital rendition of “Dixie.” Widow Fisk puts, lays, inserts the fork into the Minotaur’s mouth. He lingers before closing, then senses the barely there resistance at the surface of the peaked meringue, tastes that butter, the brown sugar, the vanilla, perfectly balanced. Flakes of crust stick to his teeth.
“Yep,” she says. “I bet they’re gonna make you a five-star general.”
“Unngh.”
“Get you all decked out in a gold sash and those epaulettes, get you two rows of brass buttons. You’ll be so damn sexy none of us can . . .”
Widow Fisk doesn’t finish her sentence. The Minotaur wishes she would. She looks up—her eyes magnified—blinks twice, then turns back to her work.
“Should I put this Confederate icon here?” she asks, clicking away with the mouse. “Or does it look better there?”
The Minotaur doesn’t have an opinion, but he leans close anyway. And when his horn, by happy accident, bumps gently against her bonneted head, Widow Fisk doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away. No. She leans back ever so slightly.
“Mmmnn, there,” the Minotaur says, pointing nowhere.
Widow Fisk straightens her bonnet. The Minotaur turns toward the battlefield.
“Maybe I’ll make you one,” she says without looking. “Maybe I’ll make you a pie. Maybe I’ll bring it by. Maybe tonight.”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, possibility once again confounding him.
As he leaves the Gift Shoppe, the Minotaur’s side knife snags in the barrel of whittled walking canes propping the door open. They rattle against the staves and almost tip over.
• • •
From the Gift Shoppe, there are two ways the Minotaur can go. The thirty-some cabins, barns, and sheds that make up Old Scald Village are laid out with intent. There is something algebraic about the pinched curves, the denial of horizon line. A forced perspective. You can’t see the Blacksmith’s Shoppe for the wattle and daub walls of the Dumpert House, where the candles are made. But the Minotaur knows it’s there, right across the narrow dirt road from the Old Jail, where, months ago, Smitty cajoled or coerced the Minotaur into one of the two damp cells and hung the Gossip placard on the door. Kept him locked in for the rest of the afternoon. Folks just assumed it was part of the show.
The Minotaur goes the other way around the loose figure eight. Passes the Old Round Schoolhouse, a striking anomaly in more than its architecture. Made round, they say, made without corners, to keep the spirits, the haints and ghosts, from getting trapped therein. The Minotaur knows that some spirits aren’t so easily duped. The Minotaur knows, too, that some of the soldiers like to get high in the schoolhouse before the battles. He smells the cannabis in passing. In passing, the Minotaur understands the impulse.
He passes Sprankle’s Tailor Shoppe. It’s been closed for a while. Its spindles and needles and thimbl
es, its bolts of muted fabric, shut away and padlocked. Some say that Sprankle got born again. The Minotaur has no reason to doubt. He passes.
Pauses, though, at the open window of a church. One of two. Used to be three, but an unexplained fire took the wattle-and-daub Presbyterian last summer. Biddle said there was talk of another church building coming in but had neither real proof nor details.
The Minotaur has made this pause before. He likes the moment—Sunday morning before the battle, at the church window, the service coming to an end—though it troubles him in other ways. The Minotaur’s horns are too wide for the old window, but he wouldn’t look in anyway. He doesn’t have to. He knows the bare walls—no tortured effigies, no gilded icons. He knows the cushionless pews, their upright and unforgiving backs. But it’s not those things he finds troublesome. Most of the time a girl is in the church. It’s the girl who makes candles in the candle shop, who dips the wicks over and over and smells of lanolin. Sunday mornings find her in her secondary role, up by the stark altar, chugging and banging away at a wheezy pump organ and singing at the top of her questionable lungs. “On Christ the solid rock I stand.” The congregants, if there are any, sing along: “All other ground is sinking sand.” The congregants, if any, may be paying visitors to the village, or they may be something other. A few of the Old Scald Village living historians reenact civilian lives. A mayor here, a drunkard there. Too, this early in the season, nearly everybody does double duty. Plays multiple roles. The Minotaur can never be sure who’s who or what’s what. But he knows the candle maker’s nasally song, part yowl, half caw. He leans his head against the plank wall and listens. A paean to discord, for sure, and though the Minotaur is moved by her sincerity, every time, it is the music that rankles. The music seems somehow hobbled. Fettered. As if the very notes are trapped, boxed in, as if they hurl themselves to bloody pulps, verse after verse.
The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Page 4
