“Dohiti!” Ramneek says, coming into the motel lobby with a towel outstretched. “Come back here right away.” Ramneek is smiling. She chooses her words—“You scoundrel, you scalawag”—for their deliciousness.
Devmani Gupta rounds the counter, laughing, and jumps up into the Minotaur’s lap. Laughing. He has no choice but to catch her. Devmani Gupta cocks her tiny face and leans close, eyeball to eyeball with the Minotaur. She giggles. She lays the tiniest of hands under his jowly chin, lifts his head. Devmani Gupta reaches up with her bright yellow crayon and makes two long marks on the Minotaur’s wide and bony forehead. Right between his eyes. And just before Ramneek plucks her away, wrapped and giddy in the towel, Devmani plants her damp little lips on the Minotaur’s snout, that sullied snout, and kisses.
“Hooligan,” Ramneek says. “Upadravi.”
Ramneek carries the wiggling girl into the apartment. The Minotaur hears the laughing. Sees the damp geometry on his trousers, left by her wet bottom and legs. “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
And there is more to come, but it is interrupted by the bells dangling on the door, by the entry of a skinny man with exceptionally close-set eyes and his companion, a skinny woman with an exceptionally wide mouth.
“Y’all got any rooms?” the man says.
The Minotaur recognizes the twang, a Southern thing. The Minotaur recognizes the flash of disdain in the man’s eyes, directed at both the Guptas and at him.
“Welcome to the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge,” Rambabu says. “We are pleased to offer free Wi-Fi—”
“Get them bags honey,” the man says.
The Minotaur, deciding he’s seen enough, holds the door for her on the way out. She smells like hairspray. And beer. She pauses a long time before accepting the Minotaur’s courtesy, but passes closer than necessary when she finally does. Time stands still for an instant—the Minotaur trying to hold on to Devmani Gupta’s joyous puerility, the mouthy woman trying to hold tight to the battered pair of matching Samsonite suitcases (and all they contain)—until Danny Tanneyhill (guru, top dog) rips the moment apart with his chainsaw. The Minotaur looks across Business 220. Sees Danny Tanneyhill drive the tip of the blade into the flesh of the tree trunk, woodchips filling the air around him.
The Minotaur closes the door to Room #3 and wriggles the safety chain into place. The new guests enter the room at the far end of the Judy-Lou. The Minotaur watches the woman lug the heavy suitcases inside. The door slams but opens again almost immediately. The man drags a chair out and shoves it against the brick wall, in the little chunk of space between the doorframe and the wide and clattering air conditioner that sits beneath the shaded window and dribbles constantly onto the sidewalk. The man sits. Looking out. Or not looking at all. It’s hard to say. The Minotaur waits for the woman to appear in the doorway, or for the door to close. Neither happens.
The Minotaur’s head hurts; the mountain range of lumps and bumps on his noggin throbs. Trouble storms the horizon. The Minotaur isn’t afraid of Danny Tanneyhill. Not exactly. Rather, it is the thing that Danny Tanneyhill is pulling out of the fat trunk that bothers the Minotaur. Troubles the Minotaur. Haunts. The Minotaur watches, through parted blinds, to see what will be revealed. Watches. Could it be that this rough-hewn man is hacking loose, is setting free, the change that has haunted the Minotaur’s past few days?
The carver, the artist, cuts, steps back, cuts some more. The man is not happy, the Minotaur can tell. Danny Tanneyhill cocks his human head one way, then the other. Sits down to study his work. Legs are emerging at the base of the tree, that much is clear. But higher up, where the two fat branches reach out, the creation is unformed, ill formed, as if the tree itself is resisting.
The Minotaur understands struggle and disappointment. The Minotaur removes his uniform coat. He gets the Bag Balm from the bathroom, returns to the window, and stands, rubbing the salve into his throbbing seam. Thinks back to the Broom Shack and what happened there. He didn’t mean it. The Minotaur’s nostrils twitch at the memory. He sniffs and finds her still present at the tip of his snout. The scents of her body, what it makes, what it eliminates. The Minotaur licks at the spot until she is gone.
Widow Fisk saw the broom maker run. The smell of lanolin will not go away. Widow Fisk saw the broom maker run screaming, saw the Minotaur exit the Broom Shack. Widow Fisk came to some conclusions. The Minotaur wishes things had gone differently. Butterscotch.
He is about to abandon the window, thinking that maybe Danny Tanneyhill has given up for the day, but there is a commotion at Pygmalia-Blades. It’s a customer. A green pickup truck skids to a stop in the gravel. A customer. Sometimes people want what Danny Tanneyhill has to offer.
Two blond kids stay in the cab of the truck. Their bald daddy steps up and starts manhandling a chunky Bigfoot carving. The statue is painted brown, is scowling, is hunched as if in midstep. The man tilts it this way and that. Looking. Assessing. Imagining possibilities. The statue comes up to the man’s weak chin. He seems about to drop it at every turn. Danny emerges from the trailer. They haggle; the Minotaur can tell by the gestures. The man turns his attention to a carving of the Ten Commandments, Moses’s two slabs hewn from a fat cedar trunk turned on its side. The man struggles with the choice. The Minotaur understands conundrum, is at home in quandary. The man seems less so. His kids sit so still in the truck, the Minotaur isn’t sure they’re real.
Eventually the man and the artist reach an impasse, and the man leaves. The Minotaur thinks ahead, but only to the weekend, only to the coming Encampment, to what might be his big chance. The Minotaur imagines himself in general’s garb. He tries to imagine Widow Fisk into the equation. Her there and proud of his accomplishment. The Minotaur reaches to finger the brass medals that might hang at his breast pocket. Touches only his bull flesh. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.
An hour later the truck returns, and the Minotaur watches Danny Tanneyhill help the man load both Bigfoot and the Ten Commandments into its bed. The trio of bungee cords, stretched obscenely tight across the weighty pair like rogue overworked ligaments, seems inadequate for the task of keeping it all from toppling to the road, but the Minotaur isn’t willing to go out and say so. Not wanting to witness the almost certain catastrophe, he turns from the window as the truck drives away, spitting and churning the gravel.
The day wanes. The sun has already dropped over Homer’s Gap and will not return from there no matter how hard the shadows pull. The coming evening drags with it the sulfuric stink of the paper mill. It is familiar—comforting, even. Danny Tanneyhill has droplights strung around the Pygmalia-Blades tent. He works into the night, sawing and cursing by turns. The Minotaur pushes his bed against the far wall. Puts a pillow over his aching head. Makes no difference. Doors slam all night long. All night long the chainsaw whines. No. Succumbs. It is the hatchet, biting all night long into wood. And the cursing. All night long. The Minotaur’s stomach turns. And turns. And turns.
CHAPTER NINE
NIGHT. THAT NIGGLER EXTRAORDINAIRE.
Night comes nonetheless, an apparition in slinky black. The Minotaur is on the run. Run.
The Minotaur traces and retraces his steps. Looking for what? Butterscotch?
The Minotaur is at Bull Run. The Minotaur is at Manassas, at Appomattox, at Antietam, at Shiloh. The Minotaur at square one, and at the pearly gates. The Minotaur strikes up the band, pays the piper. The Minotaur keeps his nose to the grindstone. The Minotaur lets sleeping dogs lie. At the eleventh hour the Minotaur burns the midnight oil. The Minotaur has an ace in the hole but cries over spilt milk. The Minotaur beats around the bush, beats a dead horse. The Minotaur knuckles down.
North, south, east, west. The topsy-turvy earth. The Minotaur swaps one life for another.
After the cock-and-bull story the Minotaur hangs up his fiddle. The Minotaur gets down to brass tacks, hits the nail on the head. The Minotaur knows the ropes and knocks on wood. The Minotaur makes no bones about it. In the china shop t
here is no rule of thumb. The Minotaur bears his cross, leads the blind, has the devil to pay. The Minotaur tastes the salt of the earth but not the laudable pus.
The Minotaur cuts his eyeteeth, chews the fat, clams up. The Minotaur guards his tongue, is down in the mouth, is long in the tooth. The Minotaur on shank’s mare. The Minotaur and his monkeyshines under siege. The bonnyclabber. The catawampus. The windbag. Nearly fifty-one thousand humans died at Gettysburg alone. Three thousand horses. It’s all Greek to the Minotaur. In the bulrushes. In the breadbasket. The Minotaur gags, retches, and the banjo falls from his gullet. The banjo, spumy, bilious, radiant, cantankerous as hell, rears its scrawny neck and heads for the hills.
CHAPTER TEN
MORNING HACKS THE CURTAINS WIDE, and the Minotaur opens his eyes. Morning. The Minotaur doesn’t know what to expect. He puts on his best costumed interpreter face and opens the door of Room #3. Is the sun up there where it’s supposed to be, bearing down hard on Scald Mountain and the turnpike? Yes. Are the rhododendrons holding tight to that steep slope, offering their obscene blossoms to any and all? Yes. Does Business 220 still thread Homer’s Gap somewhere down the road? And just up the road does Old Scald Village march drearily in place? And do the Minotaur’s horns barely clear the lintel, his Confederate soldier’s woolen trousers itch incessantly? Yes, and yes, and yes. What, then, is different about this day?
The Minotaur sees it. The Minotaur is no sleuth. He can’t tell what happened, who went where and when, though clues abound. Danny Tanneyhill’s truck is gone. The tree trunk he’d labored over all day, laid waste. Chopped to splintery bits. Woodchips and sawdust litter the parking lot, clot around the bases of the other statuary. And in the blanket of sawdust, footprints. Multiple. Coming and going across Business 220, back and forth between Pygmalia-Blades and the room at the far end of the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge, where the guests checked in yesterday. On the sidewalk, by the door, a paper bucket has tipped and spilled its grisly contents. Enough gnawed chicken bones to feed a small army. Beer cans, crushed and not, the cardboard case, crumpled napkins, other unnamable detritus, all form a haphazard shrine to some elusive god, right outside the door. The world of the fully human regularly confounds the Minotaur, but nothing here surprises him.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
He should clean up the mess before the Guptas stir. It is Monday morning. Ramneek will be sweeping the sidewalks first thing. It is Monday morning. Rambabu will sit with his granddaughter while she watches cartoons. It is Monday morning. The Minotaur’s work in the village will be menial, tedious, soothing. There will be no dying. He looks again at the footprints in the sawdust, at the litter—an aftermath of sorts, the scene of something crimelike—and the Minotaur can’t face it.
“Sorry,” he says aloud, intending it for the sleeping Guptas.
He wishes things were different. He wishes Danny Tanneyhill would pack up his trailer and his monsters and drive away. He wishes the skinny woman at the opposite end of the Judy-Lou didn’t have to drag so much around in her Samsonite suitcases. He wishes he’d gone to the secret place last night. He wishes he hadn’t been up the broom maker’s dress, accidentally or otherwise. And he wishes Widow Fisk hadn’t witnessed any of it. He pockets the Bag Balm—used or not, he’ll return it. Slip it unnoticed back in her drawer.
The Minotaur cannot face the trash at the opposite end of the motor lodge, nor its makers. Hangdog, then, he trudges down the road. At the mouth of Old Scald Village, the giant plaster soldier takes him to task. Clucks his lifeless tongue. Chides. The Minotaur looks for the crow, finds nothing. The Minotaur musters just enough gumption to throw a rock at the plaster head. Misses by a mile. Maybe more. The Minotaur galumphs over the planks of the covered bridge and, as promised in the brochure, steps back in time. But not enough to make a bit of difference. Not nearly.
He’s not the first. Biddle is there. In the pond. Hip deep.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. “What?”
“Goddamn teenagers,” Biddle says. The brim of his leather cap casts a shadow on his face. “Doped-up little shit-pinchers.”
Biddle’s leather apron, his cooper’s costume, lies in a heap on the bank, a shape-shifter asleep, waiting. Biddle wears rubber waders that barely contain his girth, the straps stretched so taut over his shoulders and rotund gut that the Minotaur can almost hear the threads popping.
“They threw a picnic table in, and one of the pillories,” Biddle says.
It happens often enough. On weekends, spring or summer, in the tumult of night, in the torrent of rut, rowdy teens from the KOA campground across the river (or maybe even local kids from Joy township, just through the gap) sneak, giddy and heroic in their vandal boots, into Old Scald Village and toss things in the pond.
“Ought to shoot the little fuckers,” Biddle says. “Get me some night vision and a thirty-ought-six, do a stakeout in the church tower, pick the fuckers off one at a time.” Biddle, increasingly wet from the hole in the toe of his wader, and hungover as usual, is more envious than outraged. “Give me a hand,” he says.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, and heads to the small shed behind the Welcome Center. It’s where the lawnmowers and leaf blowers hide. Weedeaters, too. Anything that smacks of the here and now. The Come Again sign guards the front door of the building. He can’t tell if Widow Fisk is inside or not. The Minotaur takes the long way around; the grass lanes and gravel paths that weave through the village are empty, still, quiet.
The shed door stands ajar. The Minotaur finds the wading boots hanging on a peg against the far wall. The Minotaur takes a long moment to breathe in the smells of gasoline and motor oil. They comfort. When he steps out of the shed, back fully into Old Scald Village, the Minotaur is deafened by the roar of the bellows stoking the forge in the Blacksmith’s Shoppe. The massive leather lung sucks in, blows out, breath after furious breath. And already Smitty is pounding away at the anvil. The Minotaur has never heard him strike with such determination.
“Let’s get the pillory first,” Biddle says. “It’s lighter. Closer to the bank.”
The Minotaur looks across the pond. No sky is reflected on its surface. The forge rages beyond the opposite bank; the spume of hot air from its chimney stakes its small claim, rankling and refracting the morning sunlight. The Minotaur slogs into the murk, his muddy trail rising up from the lake bed.
“Remember when they found that dead kid?” Biddle says. “Floating in here with his pants down?” Biddle giggles like it’s a really funny joke.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“Remember when that dog—”
The Minotaur interrupts. “Unngh.”
They lay the pillory on the bank; mud sloughs from its plank base. They go back for the picnic table. It rests on its side, one wide bench jutting from the water. Righting the table is easy enough, but when the Minotaur and Biddle go to lift it they come up against a truth.
“Gooooddamm it. This son of a bitch is heavy.”
“Unnnnnngh.”
The big man cannot walk backward. The Minotaur and Biddle switch sides, sloshing the pond water into a brown soup in their slow circumnavigation. They grunt into the task. Biddle, overweight, unfit, bearing even a portion of such a burden, can move through the water only a few paces at a time.
“Let me . . . catch . . . my breath,” he says.
The Minotaur can wait forever. Biddle babbles nonstop. Talks about nothing. So far he hasn’t mentioned the previous day. The Minotaur wonders if luck is on his side. Maybe so. Maybe not. Sweat drips from beneath Biddle’s brim. Two cars slow on Business 220 and enter the village. It’s time for the rest of the employees and volunteers to arrive. Maybe everybody will pretend nothing happened.
“Did you hear?” Biddle asks. “Did you hear about Gwen?”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
“Gwen?” Biddle says again, straining against the table’s bulk. They’ve moved it less than halfway to the bank.
“Who?”
The Minotaur gets the word out.
“Gwen,” Biddle says. “The old bat who runs the Gift Shoppe.”
“Unngh?” the Minotaur says, then works hard for the rest. “Ff . . . isk. Widow Fisk?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Biddle says. “That’s her. Gwen.”
The half-bull’s imagination goes to a fully human place. He sees Widow Fisk dead in a handful of scenarios, each bloodier than the last.
“Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says.
“Yes it is, dumbass. Her name’s Gwen. Gwen Harschberger, or something like that. Widow Fisk is her character. She plays Widow Fisk. Did you really think—”
“No,” the Minotaur says as decisively as possible, but is clearly embarrassed by his stupidity.
“She got busted last night,” Biddle says. He takes his cap off, fans his face. “Got busted for DUI. They say she was so drunk she couldn’t even get out of the car.”
“Who?” the Minotaur asks.
“Everybody,” Biddle says. “They say she spent the night in jail.”
The Minotaur lifts his end of the table and pulls. Biddle nearly topples.
“Whoa, big boy!” Biddle braces himself and laughs. “First I heard she was buck naked in the car. Then somebody said she had on that goddamn costume. But everybody said she fought tooth and nail till they dragged her ass to the station.”
Biddle yammers away. The Minotaur’s mind reels. At the far end of the village the weathervane on top of the barn cants downward and refuses to pivot. The Minotaur had planned to repair it later in the week. The barn, a small timber frame thing with a gabled tin roof, holds a meager herd: a couple of goats, a bony and swaybacked heifer, and (inexplicably) a llama. Half a dozen chickens peck around in the dirt pen. Once, just after the Minotaur arrived at Old Scald Village, they asked him to strip off his shirt and join—mingle with—the livestock. To act like an actual bull, a whole bull. It was a mistake. He took care to position himself so that only his horned head and fat snout were visible. He wasn’t afraid of bloat or black leg or foot rot. The Minotaur was unconcerned about lumpy jaw or wooden tongue. Pride is a tiny little human worry. And dignity is present even in the thick, the heart, of the muck. As for the cow, the Minotaur imagined her bovine consciousness and his place in it. Then the kids saw more than his snout and horns and, spooked, ran to their mamas. It was a short-lived experiment. In fact it was Widow Fisk who came and told him to get dressed, to come up out of the stable. She brought him a pan of warm water and a towel.
The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Page 7
