The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

by Steven Sherrill

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

  Danny Tanneyhill lines his pie makers up on the table.

  “So,” Holly says, shifting everybody’s focus to the Minotaur, “how come a guy like you knows about making aloo gobi mountain pies?”

  Tookus perseverates. “Aloooooo alooooooo alooooooo gobi.”

  They’ve talked about the other scars. It is, for better or worse, time to talk about his scar. His seam. His division. The Minotaur wants to say something meaningful. He could say things about dying. He wants to tell Holly something important. But what? Can he tell her about dying on the Old Scald Village battlefield, of lying so still there he can feel the earth’s staggering orbit? Can he tell her of pressing his back to the stone foundations at Joy Furnace, of the heat from the ancient fires perpetually warming his spine? Maybe the Minotaur can talk to Holly about the smells of fresh thyme and the sizzle of butter in a hot pan. Or he can reach all the way back and tell of other stone walls. Of how he was feared. Of the mounds of crushed bones, the vats of virgins’ blood. The Minotaur readies his tongue.

  “Mmmnn, baaaa . . . ball joint,” he says.

  Holly looks perplexed, then smiles. Danny Tanneyhill laughs outright.

  “Hey, G. I. Joe,” the carver says, “why don’t you tell her about your girlfriend? The one who brings you pies.”

  It takes the Minotaur a minute to understand that Danny is talking about Widow Fisk, about Gwen. Then memory, as it is wont to do, horns in, and a haphazard montage flashes through the Minotaur’s mind. Here, Biddle choking in the muck, and the fat plaster trout. There, the shave horse and ice chips and all that black musky hair. Now, the face of Widow Fisk. The face of betrayal.

  “Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says. In his heyday, in his glory days, the Minotaur would have trampled, then eaten such a human as Danny Tanneyhill. These are not those days.

  “Girlfriend, huh?” Holly says, putting her thumb on the center button of the Minotaur’s Confederate soldier’s jacket. She is about to do more when Tookus walks into the middle of Business 220.

  “Get out of the road, Tooky,” Holly says. But it’s so late, so quiet, there’s no urgency in her request.

  The boy stands still, then points down the road into the darkness.

  “Tookus! Get your ass over here,” Holly says.

  It is very late. The witching hour. Maybe past. The laws of physics, the rules of law, perceptions of all sorts, get a little fuzzy around the edges. Tookus is first, and it would be hard to say who hears it, who feels it, next.

  “What the hell?” Danny Tanneyhill says.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  Holly goes to the middle of the road to get her brother. She gets stuck there, looking with him into the distance. Distance. It suggests something measurable, but whatever it is coming up Business 220 from Homer’s Gap way surely will not be bound by yardsticks or quantifiers. The earth quakes before anything is seen. The tiny American flags jitter nervously beneath the Judy-Lou marquee. The whole of the Pygmalia-Blades bestiary fidgets and twitters. Then the flashing lights come into view.

  “What the fuck?” Danny Tanneyhill asks.

  “Are we being invaded?” Holly asks.

  Tookus shoulders an imaginary rifle. “Bang bang bang bang bang bang,” he says.

  It comes onward, impervious to his defense, but comes incredibly slowly, and gets louder with each gained inch. Louder and louder. Brighter and brighter. As if hell itself is being dragged up the road and is fighting every increment. Tookus starts to cry. Holly takes him over to the safety of the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge. Holds the boy. The Minotaur sees her singing into his ear. Danny Tanneyhill can’t figure out which statue to rescue first. The Minotaur lowers his bullish head and surveys the scene. He will not be moved.

  And though the approaching beast is horrible, is horrifying—its girth spanning the two-lane road from side ditch to side ditch, its ugly head rearing nearly above the tree line (they’re not imagining this; the monster is well lit), its growl throaty and methodical, hissing, stinking of dust and, sure enough, hydraulic fluid—the trio finds it hard to sustain their terror.

  “Why is the son of a bitch moving so goddamn slow?” Holly yells.

  So they wait. And watch. And what is eventually born out of the black hole of unknowing is a little disappointing. The mystery revealed is a thing equal parts annoyance and nightmare. It’s a building. A whole building, in transit, on a trailer. A lead car heralds the news with flashing yellow lights on its roof and a Wide Load warning lashed to its bumper. The insipid beams break and shatter in the dense trees by the roadside. Behind the lead car, a big rig, an eighteen-wheeler with lighted outriggers spread wide, strains and labors against its burden. The clatter of the diesel engine is deafening. The trailer it pulls straddles the middle of Business 220, and on that flatbed, a church. An old white clapboard church. Steeple and all. Shored up. Strapped tight. The whole thing.

  Dingus Historic Hauls is emblazoned on the semi’s doors.

  “Mmmnn, okay,” the Minotaur says.

  He understands what’s happening. The load is too big to transport in any but the leanest hours. Too delicate for haste. The old boards creak and squeal, pulling at their glued joints, straining against their pegs. And up on top the shutters flap against the squat belfry. Higher still, the priapic spire waggles toward the heavens, as if. There is no cross, only its splintered remnant. The Minotaur imagines the steeplejacks (he knows their breed) champing at the bit, rattling their scaffolds, ready to get at it, the work of restoration. The Dingus truck slogs along the macadam. The Minotaur looks into the mawing windows, imagines there the pews tumbling willy-nilly. The Minotaur imagines the hymnals, dumb and flightless birds flapping their red wings across the plank floor. Their mute squawks. The Minotaur does not imagine the driver of the truck. He watches the man pick his nose as he passes, digging deep, and looking at a cell phone. Not looking at the Minotaur or at anything that isn’t on the straight and narrow path ahead. Picking his nose, tapping at the cell phone with the very same finger, and paying no attention to the sedan that’s trying to get around the wide load, swerving back and forth, looking for an opportunity to pass (and likely has been for miles and miles). The driver of the car, whose path is blocked by the church, curses and swerves and honks, then repeats it all again. The parking lot of the closed Chili Willie’s would be perfect if not for the Odyssey perched on its jack. The sedan skids in, barely misses the van, skids out. Danny Tanneyhill throws a chunk of wood, barely missing the sedan. And when the car whips around the wide load’s other side, as if there may actually be enough room between the brick Judy-Lou planter and (either) the semi’s trailer or the motel office, Holly gasps loud enough for all to hear. The Minotaur readies himself for catastrophe. None comes. The car glides to a quiet and respectable stop in the check-in lane. And while the old white church lumbers and chugs out of sight, if not out of mind, the Minotaur, the redhead and her brother, and the woodcarver watch the driver of the now-parked sedan fumble and fuss with his seatbelt.

  Danny Tanneyhill crosses Business 220, holding another chunk of wood, ready. He joins Holly and Tookus, then the Minotaur.

  “Is he drunk?” Danny asks.

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, concerned more with the Guptas now, feeling protective.

  It takes the driver an inordinately long time, but when he finally emerges from the sedan, it’s clear why the struggle. He is immense. Not merely rotund. Obese. A behemoth of a man in a business suit who, once standing (and nearly as wide as he is tall), defies belief that he ever fit in the car in the first place. They hear him grunt. Hear the wheeze of his breath.

  “Is he drunk?” Danny asks again. But that’s not the real question on their lips.

  “Are those . . . ?” Holly starts. “Are they . . . ?”

  She wants to know if they’re real, the donkey ears atop the fat man’s head. Donkey ears. Long and furred, soft points at the high tips, curling inward along the edges li
ke leaves. Donkey ears.

  “Are they real?” she asks, and looks to the Minotaur for his answer. As if he would know. Scald Mountain bites its rocky black tongue. Says nothing.

  The Minotaur wants to talk about his scar. It was his turn, by the fire. Things are unresolved. Inconclusive. The Minotaur feels it. There is much more to be said. But it is late. The church has passed on its slow truck, and the fat man checks into the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge without incident.

  Tookus brays loudly. “Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”

  “I gotta go to bed,” Holly says.

  Wait. There is more to tell. More to show. The Minotaur wants to tell her things. To show her things.

  Want to see how I die? he thinks to say. This is what it feels like to . . .

  But it’s hard to stop momentum. A thing in motion (even an idea or a state of mind) likes to stay that way. Danny Tanneyhill sees it. He takes his pine log back across the road. Holly may or may not have mumbled a good-night to the Minotaur.

  “Wait,” the Minotaur says. “Wait.”

  But he’s the only one left in the parking lot.

  Wait.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WAIT. THE MINOTAUR WANTS ANOTHER MOMENT. Silly, that, and knowing so he moseys back into Room #3. His mind reeling. The Minotaur decides to polish his musket. For no better reason than he needs the distraction. Though being prepared for whatever happens next is important to him. The Minotaur hears the chainsaw roar to life across Business 220. The Minotaur douses a swab of cloth with acrid solvent, tucks it into the bore, and rams it home. He’ll stave off the puckish night. Top to bottom. He’ll stand his ground. Stand guard. Against whom? The donkey? The man? Against butterscotch and broom straw. Sawdust. Starlight. The Minotaur pledges allegiance. He’ll take it on the chin. He’ll take it in stride. Take it as it comes. Come one, come all. Come the ticky-tacky night and its petty demands. Hostage taker par excellence. Tick tock, tick tock. The Minotaur’s devotion will not be ransomed. The Minotaur considers the stave. Considers bottled breath and the squeaky prosthesis. The Minotaur considers his options. Considers first the hammer. The ball-peen, maybe. Not the sledge. No, certainly not the sledge. There is the beetle and the claw hammer. The cross-peen and the maul. Too, the mallet has a stake in the claim. The Minotaur considers, briefly, the scutch. The rip, the pile, the tilt. Comes back again and again to the ball-peen. Peen. What it means is this: to draw, to bend, to flatten. Knock knock. Who’s there? Night draws. Night bends. Night flattens into still more night. And the goddamn knocking won’t stop.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  KNOCK KNOCK.

  Knock knock.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur grunts, and knocks the musket over. His big head jerks, hooks the lampshade.

  Knock knock.

  The clock reads one two three. He’s been asleep. And the goddamn knocking won’t stop. The goddamn knocking has hammered him right out of his Minotaur dream. Busted his thick skull wide. And now pounds away on the door to Room #3.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says, and hurries to the door with the scents of butterscotch and smoke in his nostrils. Both. Both. He hurries to the door with stars in his eyes, and hurries to the door with his bullish heart pounding hopefully.

  It’s the fat man. His suit is rumpled.

  “You got a screwdriver?” he asks. The donkey ears bob and sway gently.

  “Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says, rubbing his eyes.

  Up close the man is all jowls. The Minotaur can’t find his eyes.

  “You got a pipe wrench?” he asks.

  “Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says.

  The man’s teeth are big. Yellow as the moon.

  “You got a . . . ? Oh, never mind,” the fat man says. “What good are ya?”

  The fat man waddles back down the sidewalk and closes the door to his room. In other circumstances the Minotaur would have worked harder to help. Endeavored to be of use. Other circumstances.

  The clock still reads one two three. The clock is broken. The Minotaur remembers it now. The night sky will unhinge itself soon enough. The Minotaur stands in the doorway clutching his musket by the barrel. He looks out across the road. Danny Tanneyhill’s pickup truck is gone. He looks up and down the span of the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge. On the sidewalk, right in front of the redhead’s door, stands a knee-high carving of a man-in-the-moon crescent, his smooth arc and the cuts of his fat lips and wide eyes fresh and glaring. The Minotaur shoulders his gun, takes aim. Thinks to say Bang, but it’s not a sound that works well in his mouth.

  Holly opens her door. Steps into the line of fire.

  “Whoa!” she says.

  The Minotaur drops his weapon, searches his brain for an explanation. But immediately it’s clear that Holly is responding to the man in the moon. She walks right into it.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she says, trying for quiet, biting her bottom lip, that mussed hair a red conflagration, holding the bare toes of one slender foot, sort of jumping up and down on the other (slender foot), the pale blue boxer shorts laying loose claim to her behind and her legs (white as apple flesh), leaning her shoulder against the doorjamb, reaching for (grappling at, really) the black-frame glasses that hang from the neckline of her T-shirt (a loose, ocher-colored thing with a faded Mighty Mouse printed on the front), that bounce every time she jumps, right between her small (but unencumbered) breasts. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she says, then sits on the stoop.

  The Minotaur is sorry Holly got hurt. But he is more grateful still for the sight of her there. The Minotaur tries to nudge his musket out of sight, then goes to help.

  “Ouch,” Holly says, poking the glasses into place on the bridge of her nose.

  “Hey,” she says, seeing first the kicked moon, then the Minotaur.

  “What the hell?” she says about the statue. Or maybe about him. The Minotaur can’t tell. Her eyes are red, puffy, her nose snotty. It’s clear to the Minotaur that Holly was crying long before kicking the man in the moon. She is stunning in her misery.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says, moving the heavy carving out of the doorway. He offers his hand.

  “Thanks,” Holly says, pulling herself up, almost grabbing his horn for balance. Almost. She closes the door gently. “Tooky is still asleep.”

  The Minotaur fumbles with the brass buttons on his jacket. He can’t think of anything else to do. No reason to stay there with her. Near her.

  Holly steps off the sidewalk, pinches one nostril shut with a fingertip, blows a glob of yellowy mucus onto the asphalt, repeats on the other side, wipes a glistening streak down her forearm, then smiles at the Minotaur.

  “Did you ever see such a sexy sight in your life?” Holly asks.

  The Minotaur has an answer for the question.

  “Sorry,” she says. “It’s been a hard night. For years . . .”

  The Minotaur notices the thick gauze of morning fog. Everything up the mountain has gone missing. The absence is beautiful. “Look,” he says. Gestures with his horns.

  Holly rubs her eyes. She likes what she sees. “Mmm, nice.” she says. “Listen, can we talk about the van?”

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

  “I mean . . . ,” she says, and clearly wants to say more. “Me and Tooky . . . we are . . . I have to . . .”

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

  “I’m taking him . . . We only have a few days.”

  “Tools,” the Minotaur says, and is surprised when Holly follows him back to Room #3. Follows him all the way inside.

  “Please don’t say anything to . . . ,” Holly says, and hooks her thumb in the direction of Pygmalia-Blades.

  “Okay,” the Minotaur says.

  Then something catches Holly’s eye. “Whoa, what’s this?”

  Holly picks up the musket like she’s handled guns before. Room #3 constricts. The austerity of his present moment squeezes tight. The Minotaur is hemmed in by the past and its mountain of bones and by numbing eternity. The very walls press in on the Minotau
r and his unexpected guest.

  “Unngh, tools,” he repeats, kneeling to reach under the bed for his toolbox, to change the subject.

  His snout burrows into the bedspread, and the smell of industrial-strength detergent chokes him. Holly steps closer, weapon in hand, just as the Minotaur turns his head and coughs. Turns his big cumbersome head and coughs. Turns, and the tip of his horn slips beneath the hem of her shorts, traces in its slow rise the shallow furrow made by her thigh muscle.

  “Unngh,” he says. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

  He doesn’t mean it, this accidental exposure, this swath of pale flesh, and in trying to right his wrong the Minotaur pulls away. But the half-man half-bull is in too deep. His burrowed horn tugs at the fabric, tugs at the redhead, who topples onto the bed. The gun clatters to the floor.

  What next? The Minotaur prepares himself for the worst.

  Holly’s laugh is the thing he’s least prepared for.

  “I hope that thing’s not loaded,” she says, standing, in no big hurry.

  “I’m such a klutz,” she says, wriggling in the blue boxer shorts to make sure enough of her body is contained.

  “Are you okay?” she says, picking a piece of blue thread from the horn tip of the kneeling Minotaur.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “My fault,” she says, then reaches for his gun again. “Do you collect these things or something?”

  “Mmmnn, no,” he says, picking a piece of lint from his horn.

  “Are you some kind of time-traveling secret agent, maybe?”

  The Minotaur thinks long and hard about this one, wishing he could say yes.

  “I mean . . . ,” she says, pinching at the hem of her shorts. “I mean you’re obviously not from around here.”

  She looks so beautiful sitting at the edge of his bed in Room #3, the musket on her lap. The Minotaur has to turn away.

  “Yes,” he says. “No.”

  The Minotaur is not one to get frantic, but his mind races in this moment. There is no easy answer. He opens the drawer of the squat nightstand. There, between the Bhagavad Gita and the yellow pages, is a tattered piece of paper.