The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

by Steven Sherrill

  “You live in a weird fucking place,” Holly says.

  “We all do,” Danny Tanneyhill says. “One big world, baby.”

  “True enough,” Holly says.

  She offers the Minotaur her hand as he climbs out of the truck. He declines. He distributes the tools among his pants pockets. He wishes he’d brought the toolbox.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “WHAT THE HELL?” HOLLY SAYS. “What the hell is that god-awful noise?”

  God-awful. The Minotaur has known much god-awful in the long span of his horned life. Fact is, the bull-man was conceived in and born out of the god-awful. Like a lot of folks. But this noise, though not pretty, not soothing, not melodious, not even particularly or fully controlled by the creature that makes it—of this noise, the Minotaur would disagree with Holly’s word choice. He knows well the full spectrum of god-awful.

  The sound comes from inside the squat shack.

  “That is not an indigenous animal,” Danny says.

  “Something killing or being killed,” Holly says.

  The Minotaur grunts as he lifts the wooden football helmet over the side of the truck bed.

  Maybe it’s the sky rumbling.

  “Mmmnn, tuba,” he says, cradling the statue in one arm and tugging at the door with the other. But neither Holly nor Danny acknowledges him.

  “A duck fucking a chicken with a jackhammer,” the woodcarver offers.

  Enter, the door commands, so they do. They enter together, to an off-key but emphatic blatt. An avalanche of imprecise notes, blown wholeheartedly. The tuba player sits on a high stool behind a counter.

  “Tuba,” the Minotaur says again.

  Tuba. He knew it. Already the Minotaur likes this place. He is hopeful. Almost optimistic. He knows his way around junkyards. Maybe he can teach Danny Tanneyhill a thing or two. Maybe show Holly what’s what.

  The office of Jolly Roger’s U-Pull-It, where the tuba beast sits bellowing at them, is a utilitarian room. Austere. Ascetic. (Except for the goddamn earsplitting racket.) A room, a place, where woe comes easily and ecstasy, though possible, takes much more work. It’s little more than a rectangular box with one door in and one door out. No windows. Nothing on the walls. Two long rows of fluorescent lights on the low ceiling. It is an unforgiving light. They stand there, warts and all. Everything is ridiculously clean. The only things in the room are a waist-high counter with a computer monitor at one end and two stools—an empty one on their side and a high stool behind the counter, upon which sits a tuba man. A man half flesh and half brass. No. The Minotaur looks closer. It’s a sousaphone. And a man. A skinny man. His skin almost the color of the tarnished instrument encircling his body. He wears it well.

  The man puts his lips to the mouthpiece and blatts for all he’s worth, up and down a tortured scale, then winks.

  “You smell like pickle,” the salvage man says. He seems to be talking to all of them, but his eyes never leave the Minotaur.

  Danny Tanneyhill belches loudly. “You’re playing a tuba,” he says.

  “What?” the salvage man asks. He tugs at a thin yellow strand, pulls out a pair of earplugs that drape over and dangle from the serpentine valve tubes.

  “I didn’t know you play tuba,” Danny says.

  “I don’t,” the man answers. “And it’s a sousaphone.”

  They stand, Danny in the middle, and look at the man with the sousaphone on the stool. The Minotaur cannot suppress his small awe at the man’s ability to get the complicated loops of brass over his head. Nothing fits over the Minotaur’s head.

  What’s that noise? the Minotaur wonders.

  “Who’s your friend?” the salvage man asks, still looking right at the Minotaur.

  “Brothers and sisters, before you sits, in all his tubaphonic glory, the legendary Jolly Roger himself. Sultan of salvage. Imbiber of renown. And erstwhile shantyman.”

  Roger smiles. At the Minotaur. Roger perches on his stool between the door they came in and the door into the junkyard, at his back. Sits there like the gatekeeper of either heaven or hell. Sits, an indifferent Saint Peter, a benign Cerberus. His guests await judgment.

  The Minotaur hears the nonsense spill out of the man’s head and pool on the counter.

  “Roger, this is Sergeant Major Big Boy, chief mechanic and bottle washer.”

  “Is that a wrench in your pocket?” Roger asks.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  “And this lovely lady—,” Danny says, eyeing Holly up and down.

  Roger interrupts. “Do you remember those Amish kids who got shot a few years ago?”

  The Minotaur shudders. He looks back to see if the plaster Yoders are looking over his shoulder.

  “All girls,” Roger says.

  What’s that small small noise? the Minotaur wonders.

  “Fucker came into their school and shot ten little girls, killed five of them, then shot himself in the head.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Rog?” the woodcarver asks.

  Roger taps at a cell phone lying on the lower shelf. The small noise stops.

  “It’s a documentary,” he says. “On A&E. Do you know what the son of a bitch did for a living?”

  “What?” Danny Tanneyhill asks.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says. Earbuds, not earplugs. The noise he’d been hearing was the tiniest of voices. Spokesmen for the atrocity. Mongers of malfeasance.

  “Drove a milk truck,” Roger says. He pokes at the cell phone again, unpauses the tragedy, rendered in a few measurable pixels on a three-by-five-inch screen. “Sorry,” Roger says, stopping the action again. “Do you know what the community did? The mothers and fathers and neighbors of those dead and injured little Amish girls?”

  “What?” Danny asks.

  “Guess,” Rogers says. Demands, really. “Guess.”

  “Raised a barn?” Danny says. “Opened a roadside Pickled Dead Guy stand? What?”

  “They paid for his funeral expenses,” Roger says. “They paid for the burial of the monster who murdered their children.”

  Danny whistles with too much sincerity and takes the open stool.

  “What’s this world coming to?” he says.

  “Wonders never cease,” he says.

  “If they’re not stopped,” he says, “them Amish are liable to start a regular epidemic of love.”

  “What’s a shantyman?” Holly asks.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Roger says to the Minotaur. “Lots of times.”

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  “I’ve seen you lots of times,” Roger repeats. “Playing army man at Old Scald Village.”

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

  “What’s a shantyman?” Holly asks again.

  The Minotaur wants to get into the junkyard, where he belongs. It’s hard to breathe in this office, this holding pen, this purgatory. Plus, he can feel the urgency welling up in Holly. The Minotaur heaves the giant wooden football helmet up onto the countertop, where it lands with a thud.

  “Damn, dude,” Roger says. “You do know how to get a boy’s attention.”

  Danny Tanneyhill sits on one stool, Roger on the other. When the salvage man leans forward to touch the carving, the woodcarver slips his balled fist in and out of the horn’s gaping brass bell, grunting all the while.

  “Yo, man,” Roger says. “Get out of my horn hole. You don’t know me like that.”

  “Where’d you get this thing, anyway?” Danny asks.

  “Dude brought it in the other day,” Roger says. “I traded him a whole Chevy Vega for it.” Roger gives a slobbery little blow into the mouthpiece. “Or maybe it was a Ford Taurus,” he says, winking at the Minotaur. “I don’t remember.”

  “Please,” Holly says, “can we just . . . ?”

  Roger looks at Holly, at her shirt, and sings the Mighty Mouse ditty: “Here I come to save the day!”

  Holly gestures her frustration. Shrugs, palms up.

  “Sorry,”
Roger says. “Sometimes I forget my manners. What can I do for you?”

  “H-H-Honda,” the Minotaur says. He wants a stake in the claim. “Odyssey.”

  Roger squirms inside the sousaphone, situates himself at the computer. “What do you need?”

  The Minotaur tells him. He utters the few necessary words, and Roger taps away at the keyboard.

  “I’ve got three,” he says. “Right quadrant, Row 11.” Roger looks at the exit door, then back. “I’ve seen you before,” he says.

  The first thunderclap startles them all. In the windowless room the Minotaur had forgotten the approaching storm. The Minotaur’s flinch is barely perceptible, but Holly jumps and leans fully into him for the briefest moment. Rain pelts the roof in unseen fury.

  “Damn,” Danny Tanneyhill says.

  “Guess you’ll be riding the storm out with me,” Roger says. “You can help me rehearse. We’ve got a gig this weekend.”

  “No,” Holly mumbles.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Danny says in his best emcee voice. “Please put your hands together for Jolly Roger and The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shantyyyyy Choirrrrrrrrrrrr.”

  “Do you sing?” Roger asks the Minotaur. “Or play sousaphone? I bet you sing.”

  “No,” the Minotaur says, the room seeming more airless by the minute.

  “We’ll hook you up with an eye patch and a tambourine,” Roger says. “You’ll be our guest star.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Holly says. She means both the storm and the conversation.

  “I’m not going out in that rain,” Danny Tanneyhill says, wiggling into the stool.

  “I’m not asking you to go anywhere,” Holly says. She chews her bottom lip. There is rage in her green eyes.

  The Minotaur sees it. Sees worry, too.

  “I’ll go,” he says, moving toward the rear door.

  “Wait,” Roger says, contorting on the stool, inside the horn, to reach under the counter. He comes up with a big umbrella.

  “Me and the lovely lady will stay here and work out the terms,” Danny says.

  “I’m coming with you,” Holly says to the Minotaur.

  Danny Tanneyhill is still voicing his protest when the door closes behind them. Even in the deluge the Minotaur smells the rust and cracking plastic and decaying rubber and fluids seeping into bare earth. He sucks it all in. The Minotaur snorts his approval, and the rain lets up. It might be coincidence, or it might not. Holly opens the umbrella anyway. Two of its wire spines dangle uselessly.

  “Just in case,” she says.

  The Minotaur looks out over Jolly Roger’s U-Pull-It, looks at the lay of the land. Sometimes the taxonomy of a salvage yard is impossible to figure. Sometimes the junked and wrecked autos are dumped by nothing more planned than proximity. Sometimes, without rhyme or reason, the cars and trucks, partial or whole, are merely laid to rest where there’s space. Anybody looking for anything specific needs some luck.

  The Minotaur leads the way.

  Jolly Roger’s U-Pull-It is not that sort of salvage yard. The organization is clear—make and model, genus and species. The rows are neat and orderly. Almost too much so. Location numbers are posted on high poles. The Minotaur cannot help respecting the sousaphone player. But no, the Minotaur does not sing.

  “That dude really wants to blow your horn,” Holly says.

  The Minotaur likes being under the umbrella with her, though she can’t seem to get both of his horns and her own head covered.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  He takes the tools out one by one, gathering them in his hand. Right quadrant, Row 11 is easy enough to find, but the Minotaur takes the long way around.

  “Sorry,” Holly says the next time she hooks his horn tip in the umbrella’s ribbing.

  “Mmmnn, my fault,” he says, then leads the redhead through the densely packed rows of Dodges and Mercurys. Around the Nissan corner. Past three destroyed convertibles.

  “Close,” he mumbles.

  The Minotaur is thinking the words déjà vu, but there’s no way he can mouth them to her.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” she says.

  The Minotaur wants to explain to Holly the potential for the magical to happen in the junkyard. He knows it. He’s experienced it. Look, he’d say if he could. See how the cracked glass looks like a spider web. The hulking still bodies like giant crustaceans. Hear how the rain pings and plunks a different song everywhere you turn. He’d say, Listen. In the silence you can hear the rust creeping along. Hear the sun and moon and all their desperate shining. If the Minotaur could, if he knew how, he’d take Holly into this car, into that car. Sit here. Take the wheel. Close your eyes.

  “You know some of these people died,” Holly says. “You just know it.”

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. What he means is that not everything here comes from tragedy. Some things simply wear out, and there is beauty in that. Too, sometimes death is not unwelcomed.

  They find the Odysseys side by side, as promised. The minivan in the middle has no rear door. The Minotaur sees an empty bucket inside, upturns it for Holly to sit on.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “Do you think this will take long?” she asks.

  “Do you think this will cost much?” she asks.

  “No,” he says, laying his tools on the damp ground by the rear wheel well. “No.”

  “I hope not,” she says.

  “No,” the Minotaur says again.

  “The pirate dude likes a trade, but I’ve got nothing to give. I’d give him a tit flash, but—”

  “Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says, shaking his big head.

  “Well, he’s more interested in your horns than my hooters anyway,” Holly says, laughing and tapping both of the Minotaur’s horn tips with her fingertips.

  “Mmmnn, yes,” the Minotaur says.

  He goes to work right away. He knows exactly what to do, what he needs.

  Holly shields them from the sporadic rain and talks.

  “So, is it weird?” she asks. “Is it weird doing the reenactment thing as a . . . you being . . . you know?”

  The Minotaur knows what he needs. He feels for the ⅝-inch socket.

  “Not so much,” he says.

  “I think Took would really like it. The battle stuff, the costumes.”

  “Uniforms,” the Minotaur says. He’s surprised at the ease with which words fall out of his mouth in her presence. The Minotaur is on his back beneath the Odyssey, his snout nearly rubbing the undercarriage. His bottom half, his human self, Holly keeps dry.

  “Thank you so much for doing this,” she says. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you and dumbass in there.”

  The Minotaur hears bemusement in her voice. They both hear thunder rolling over the distant mountain. If he cocks his head just right he can see her legs, the wet hems of her jeans.

  “This trip,” she says. “This trip with Tookus is . . . It’s a hard one.”

  The Minotaur turns the ratchet just to hear it click.

  “He doesn’t really know where we’re going,” she says. “I promised him, I promised myself I’d give him one last adventure.”

  The Minotaur pulls the strut free from its bracket. He thinks about the places he’s seen and been during his time in Pennsylvania. Pigeon World. Peachy’s Miniature America. Squaw Caverns. Somewhere there’s a coal-mine fire that’s been burning underground for two decades. The Minotaur doesn’t remember the abandoned town’s name.

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

  “Pittsburgh,” she says. “We’re headed to Pittsburgh. I found a place . . .”

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, his utterance bouncing off the undercarriage.

  “I can’t,” she says. “I mean, I don’t always make the best decision, the right choice. Who does? But I can’t do it anymore by myself. I have to get on with my own life.”

  He reaches out and places the part by Holly’s bucket.

 
“And now all this mechanical nonsense,” Holly says.

  “No,” the Minotaur says. Not nonsense.

  “Why do you think he told us?” Holly says. “That Roger dude, I mean. Why’d he tell us about all them dead kids?”

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur grunts from beneath the junked van. His senses, his horns, all of him trapped happily there. It is futile to question almost anybody’s motivation for almost any action. But he’s willing to imagine some fraction of goodness into the junkman’s equation.

  “Fucking weirdo,” Holly says.

  “Fucking dead Amish kids,” Holly says.

  “Fucking killer, and fucking mothers and fathers and their fucking Amish forgiveness,” Holly says.

  The Minotaur breathes deeply.

  “Truth be told,” she says, “Tooky probably won’t know the difference. They’ll take good care of him. He won’t remember. He’ll forget me in a week.”

  There is always potential for magic in a salvage yard. Always. The pig stampede is right around the corner. Always.

  “He doesn’t remember our mom or dad. We have to be there on Monday. And the money in the jug, well . . . They’ll take good care of him. Won’t they?”

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  “I promised him,” she says. “One last adventure. And now . . .”

  “Unngh, soo . . . sorry,” the Minotaur says, or tries to.

  Holly mishears. “Hey!” she says. “You’re right! That’s it!”

  “Mmmnn?” the Minotaur says, but inflection is difficult for him. His old tongue swallows up nuance.

  “Old Scald,” she says. She puts her hand on his leg as she talks. Squeezes his calf. “You can take us! We’ll watch you fight. Maybe Took can wear a costu . . . a uniform!”

  In the salvage yard there is always the potential for magic. The Minotaur opens his mouth, and the clouds burst overhead. Hunkers down, since it’s time for the truth. The Minotaur opens his mouth again, and the rain retreats. The Minotaur searches for his tongue inside the moment. He should confess. He should tell Holly the truth about what happened at Old Scald Village, and why he can’t take them there. About his horns and what they do. About his shame.