But the boy has already picked up one of the guns, an army green contraption made of half-inch PVC pipe, a tee, a couple of elbows, some straight pieces. Other colors (pink, camo, black, blue) are lined up on the table, other sizes, too, and some of the guns have brass nipples. Air power. A bowl of mini-marshmallows sits in the middle of the table. Mini-marshmallows litter the macadam around the booth and trail off in both directions, most of them squashed flat.
Tookus loads up, places his mouth around the blowpipe, and does in fact blow. “I shot your boooooooooob,” he says to his sister.
Holly laughs. “Okay, killer,” she says. “Put the weapon down.”
He does as he is told, then reconsiders. Then reconsiders. Picks up, reloads, fires at a woman galumphing by. She pushes a dilapidated stroller; the toddler is singing nonsense.
“Fatty fat fat ass,” Tookus says, dead on target.
The woman may or may not feel the blow. Holly doesn’t wait to find out. The Minotaur watches her drag Tookus to the edge of the crowd and scold him. No. The Minotaur watches her. All of her. The boy grins sheepishly the rest of the way up the row. The Minotaur watches Holly follow.
Once again they don’t get very far. Something smells familiar. Before the Minotaur can identify the scent Tookus takes him by the arm. Pulls him over to the Wee People booth. Wee People. Those little stuffed kids, faces buried in folded arms. Not real, no matter how convincing they look, leaning there in a knee-high line around the table, against the canopy’s guy wires, and in and out of the small cargo trailer parked in back. Not real.
“Goddamn,” Holly says. “These things creep me out. I’ll be over there.”
Not real. Over there. Not real. All that the little faces imply. All the, what, embarrassment? Shame? Sadness? Not real. The little dresses and little Mary Janes, the little overalls and boots, not real. There is no life inside the figures. None. Tookus kneels by the table’s edge and tugs on the Minotaur’s sleeve. Holly is over there. The Minotaur can’t tell what she’s looking at. Tookus wants the Minotaur to kneel with him. The vendor, maybe the Wee People maker, is trying to get something out of his teeth with a credit card. He’s paying no attention to the boy and the bull-man. What’s the point? He’s seen it all anyway. Tookus pulls.
“Mmmnn,” he says.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, getting down on one knee.
The boy folds his arms on the table, rests his forehead there, face hidden. Real. Not real.
“Mmmnn,” Tookus says, peering out just enough.
“Okay,” the Minotaur says, and (as best he can) hides his big bull face. The Minotaur wonders how long he’ll have to stay. He’ll stay as long as it takes. That’s the point.
Tookus begins to speak. Uninterrupted. “Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. Now I lay me . . .”
Tookus prays. Real. Not real. The Minotaur prays, too. No. Don’t be silly. There is no prayer for him.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. Then his non-prayer is answered.
“I hear music,” Holly says, putting a hand on each of their shoulders. “This way.”
This way. Anywhere. That’s the point. Something smells familiar. Other things reek of the new. Tented stages are at both ends of the crossbeam row that traverses the front of the strip mall. Vendors to the left; vendors to the right. Holly veers right, tows her brother past the tables of baubles and geegaws and tchotchkes, past the tables of good causes with their free handouts (and hefty tax on the conscience) and thematically chosen tithe plates. The Minotaur navigates the crowd deftly. Turning his horns this way and that. Following the redhead in her blue jeans and white shirt. He fits right in. No. Not really. The Minotaur steps, both seen and unseen, through it all. There is no mystery here. It’s how humans behave. It’s how humans have always behaved.
Holly follows the sound. It is music of sorts, to be sure, but struggling under the burden. The squawks and honks and drumbeats are just this side of rhythm. A herky-jerky siren song pulls them to one stub of the Joy Ag-Fest. But the stage is empty. Just beyond the canopy the Minotaur sees a young woman painting the Uncle Bubbles Pet & Hunting Supplies storefront window. Angel Sale. Today Only. Buy 1, Get 1 Free. Big looping letters.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, confounded by the bargain. He wouldn’t know what to do with even one angel. Then he sees the painted fins and the gills, the cartoonish grin and bright eyes. Angelfish, two for the price of one. Sees, too, something standing by the Uncle Bubbles front door, something not quite right, something even more disturbing than cut-rate angels.
But before the Minotaur can go investigate, Holly wrangles his attention. “Look,” she says.
He does, and when the Joy Junior High marching band makes its cacophonous way out of the Ag-Fest building and down through the crowd, toward the stage, she has to pull Tookus out of the way and hold him tight. What was it she said about her brother the night of the mountain pies and the church on the road? “This guy was a monster on the alto sax.” Tookus squirms. The Minotaur understands monster, but not saxophone. He does know, however, what it means to lose a part of one’s self. Tookus writhes. The Minotaur can’t tell if he is terrified or ready to join in. Let him go, the Minotaur thinks.
They are children, the entire rank and file of noisemakers, still on the cusp of humanness. Goggle eyed, gangly limbs akimbo. Embodying both galumph and scurry. So much more like ducklings, pups; like hatchlings, cubs, shoats; like whelps; like fingerlings. So much less like grown humans. And when the gawky glockenspiel player—the sweet poult, the cosset—trips over her flopping spats and nearly drops her instrument, catching the Minotaur’s eye the very instant shame boils up in beautiful florets on her cheeks, the Minotaur is overcome with, what? Is it love? Love for her nascence? Love for the (eternal) brevity of her blush?
They bottleneck and bumble to a halt, all trying to get up onto the small stage at the same time, bump their mangy blue hats, the mottled white plumes, together. The band teacher—a nervous little man with an uncooperative toupee, a man who looks like he stepped right out of an animated television show—flits around wagging his impotent baton. The Minotaur watches. The Minotaur wonders. Tookus is sputtering wetly through his loose fist, trying to sound saxophone-like. The Minotaur sees a tall, skinny boy (with bad posture) raise his trombone into place, sees the look in the boy’s eye (the one not covered by a sheaf of pink hair), knows that the boy wishes his instrument were a weapon, a machine gun, maybe, maybe even dreams it so, and each note he blows—raking the trombone’s tarnished bell back and forth at the crowd, at the backs of his bandmates—each note is a bullet, deadly and true.
Love. The Minotaur can’t be sure, but he wants something, something good, for (not from) each of these children, and for the spastic little conductor, too. They hurl themselves halfheartedly into what is probably supposed to be the national anthem, and it takes several bars before they trap the right key, the right pitch. The onlookers struggle to remove their caps and choose their right hands and locate their hearts. The Minotaur decides, then and there, that if they march off the stage he will join them. He will march, too, wherever they go.
“Let’s go,” Holly says, “before they find out I’m a pinko commie fag.”
She pulls the Minotaur and Tookus away. Tugs them over to Uncle Bubbles to escape the patriotic moment and its inherent dangers. Not quite ready to let go, the Minotaur watches the band from the rear. A motley blue hive twitching on the papery nest of youth, the cacophony hot and untamed. The Minotaur wants to stay.
“What the fuck?” Holly says. “Is that supposed to be you?”
The Minotaur has to look. Has to pull his attention away from the floundering band.
“Unngh,” he says.
“It is,” Holly says. “That son of a bitch.”
She reaches
out and touches the carved half-bull half-man all-oak statue propped by the Uncle Bubbles front door. It stands as tall as the Minotaur himself. But its two horns are misshapen and odd sized. One points up, the other straight out. The lopsided face (more dog than bull)
may be grinning or scowling, toothy and gape mouthed. The naked chest and arms are knotty and twisted, everything painted the color of mud. The Minotaur statue’s legs, however, the sawn trousers, are nearly normal and rise from almost believable boots.
“What a dick,” Holly says. “Can you believe it?”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. He can believe almost anything. Besides, there are far more painful things than mockery.
“Bully bullllllll bull,” Tookus says, and plucks at the couple of bungee cords keeping the statue vertical.
Holly bends to read the flier stapled to the faux-Minotaur’s midriff. “Pygmalia-Blades Ag-Fest Special ½ Price!”
Holly looks up and out at the crowd. She reaches for the bungee cords’ hooks.
“Take Tooky over there,” she says, pointing at a vendor’s table full of plants.
The Minotaur does as he is told, and looks back only when he hears the thud. The redhead has unleashed the ersatz Minotaur, the old mongrel’s clunky doppelganger, and all it could do was topple.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the redhead urges, laughing. “I think the head broke off.”
Change is inevitable.
They mix into the fray (sort of) just as the applause is dying out and the Joy Junior High marching band begins to disperse. All the white plumes jiggling at snout level make the Minotaur nervous. Holly, the redhead, makes the Minotaur nervous. She’s dangerous. And he’ll follow her anywhere.
“Oooo,” she says.
“Come over here,” she says.
“Smell,” she says, cupping a scarlet geranium’s full bloom in her open palm. The red petals bleed through her fingers.
“Smell,” she says, bringing that upturned palm to the Minotaur’s unprepared snout. “Smell,” she says, and the stolen scent bleeds into the deep black wells of his nostrils.
Drown, Minotaur. This smell in the redhead’s palm has come from the core of the earth. From the first garden. This redhead’s smell supplants all other sense. The blind Minotaur, the deaf Minotaur, the mute Minotaur, led by the girl. Hurtling through space. Or just to the next table, where Holly pinches off a twig of fresh thyme, rolls the tiny leaves in her fingertips.
“Smell this,” she says.
The Minotaur does as he is told. He knows the scent well, but the moment is foreign. The Minotaur almost takes her finger into his mouth. Almost. They crowd together at the table of potted herbs. The Minotaur and Holly.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
Tookus babbles somewhere within earshot.
More. The Minotaur wants more. There is a crowd, and they are part of it. The Minotaur wants more. That’s the point.
“This?” Holly says, reaching.
“Couldn’t you find a white boy?”
What?
The moment warps.
“What?” Holly says.
The Minotaur opens his eyes. Maybe they were never closed. He is here with the redhead and her damaged brother. Here. In the middle of Pennsylvania, at the edge of Joy. Toddling into another millennium. There is commerce. There is want and gratification, though the standards are low. What?
“You couldn’t find a white boy to do that with?” the man asks.
It doesn’t matter what he looks like.
One table over, the vendor’s tent is hung all around with wind chimes. Old padlocks and skeleton keys dangle, tarnished spoons and forks with tines curled obscenely, cut glass, too, but mostly beer bottles. These things hang, still, in the parcel of windless time.
What?
There is a table of Slinky toys, humped and waiting beside their boxes. Tookus is there poking at the google eyes of a Slinky serpent with a bright pink tongue.
“Nobody wants to watch you and that thing rub all over each other.”
It doesn’t matter what he looks like. His companions, a woman and two children, sneer from behind his legs, over his shoulder.
“Skank,” the man says. He’s eyeballing Holly. Won’t look at the Minotaur.
Holly is stunned. Holly shakes her head, comes back to herself. “That’s what you teach your kids?” she asks.
The Minotaur watches Holly. Rage blossoms, rises up from the freckled plane of her chest, over her clavicles, up the sinewy throat. Holly opens her mouth.
“Trash,” the man says.
It doesn’t matter what he looks like.
The Minotaur sees the pulse in Holly’s throat, a bird trapped forever there, beating its wings incessantly. Sees, too, her eyes, yellow-green coins of fire with hard black cinders at their core. Sees there the anger and the fear.
“You need a good white dick,” the man says, “to set you straight.”
The man stands in the middle of the passing crowd. The man stands with his companions. The man not so subtly traces a finger up and down his crotch. A good white dick.
Holly looks around. The Minotaur sees it. She looks for Tookus, or a weapon, maybe. An escape route.
Holly squares her shoulders, lifts her head, and faces the man. “Fuck you,” she says.
“What?”
The question is timeless. The question vexes. Plagues. Rankles and roils. Harangues. Galls. Flummoxes and befuddles. Hounds. Bedevils. Dogs. Dogs. Dogs.
Who says it?
“What?”
Tookus says it. Clear as a bell. He stands there holding a paper plate, three plastic forks, some napkins. On the plate, a wide slice of butterscotch pie with perfect meringue. On the boy’s face, in the boy’s eyes, cognizance.
“What?”
Sometimes love is enough. Sometimes understanding and tolerance and compassion—sometimes these are fierce enough. Sometimes, though, a Minotaur needs to step up. The bull-man does just that. The bull-man comes between the redhead and the fool. The bull-man steps back into his history, pulls his full savage lineage into the here and now. The Minotaur rallies the ghosts of every virgin and every warrior sacrificed to him in that black stone puzzle. The Minotaur grunts once.
“Unngh.”
And that is enough. The breath that billows from the Minotaur’s nostrils washes over the man and his family. The man’s good white dick shrivels, retreats. The man’s wife farts loudly, wetly. The man’s children fall to the ground, wailing. The wind chimes go mad. Clamor and clang. The Slinkys unfurl, quiver in their loose coils. Then the gods speak from on high.
“Judging for the Henceforth Joy Dairy Goat Award will begin momentarily.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“ALL COMPETITORS SHOULD REPORT to the judge’s table in Building 3.”
The gods are surprising in their message.
No. No gods, these. A speaker is mounted on a pole over the Ag-Fest banner. It is up to the living and breathing. It is up to the living. The breathing. The living.
“There,” the Minotaur says, and leads Holly and Tookus to a picnic table at the other arm of the cross, by the Goodwill and another tented stage.
They sit and share the pie, taking modest bites, one forkful at a time, each grateful in the ways that they can be. The Minotaur looks around. She’s here somewhere. Butterscotch and gunpowder.
They don’t talk about what just happened. They don’t need to. Or can’t.
Up on the low stage something else is about to happen. Up there a group gathers in a disorganized clump. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen people. Maybe more. It’s hard to tell who’s in charge. The people at the other picnic tables and the rest of the festival goers seem indifferent. Tookus licks at his teeth and gums. Butterscotch. Holly presses a fingertip into the bridge of her nose, squints hard.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, wishing he could say more. He wants to be a good soldier. A good confederate, even.
“Thanks,” Holly says. “For, you k
now . . .”
“Hippie dippie do,” Tookus says, pointing at a man with a long gray ponytail setting up an easel and a poster in front of the stage: Keystone Sacred Harp.
“Here comes Jesus,” Holly says.
They’ve taken a shape on the stage, organized themselves into a square. Four bodies wide on every side, two deep in most places. All facing in toward each other. No one looks out at the audience. They look inward, look nowhere, or at their own motley gaggle.
“A cult if I ever saw one,” Holly says, preparing for the worst.
The Minotaur has seen worse. The group onstage is mixed. A balance, precarious or not, of men and women, youthful and not, plump, pallid, lean, wholesome, etc. A swath of central Pennsylvania.
“I think that woman is looking at you,” Holly says to the Minotaur.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. Meaning, who?
What draws this odd lot together is unclear as of yet, but drawn together they are, face to face, squared. The hollow space they define crackles with nothingness, with potential.
“What’s it mean, Sacred Harp?” Holly asks. “There’s no harp.”
Then the Minotaur sees the books. Everybody on the stage, in the square, holds a book. Thick and too wide, with stiff carmine red covers. Maybe the group is bound to, or by, their books. It happens.
“She is,” Holly says. “She’s giving you the stink eye. That, or she wants to jump your bones.”
Then the Minotaur sees her. Gwen. Gone, the bonnet and gingham dress and apron, her Old Scald Village garb. She looks different. She stands with her book open. She looks up from the pages. Maybe she smiles. Maybe it’s some other reaction.
“Do you know her?” Holly asks.
Before the Minotaur can answer a man steps into the center of the hollow square. He is an Amish man. They all look alike. No, they don’t. He is a determined man, everything about him. Beard and all. Plain folk. Plain to see.
“Jesus,” Tookus says. “Jeeeeeeeeeesus.”
The man raises one hand to his waist, palm up, arm crooked at the elbow. They focus. They wait. The silence is brief and eternal.
“La so laaaaaa,” the man says, each note pitched higher than the next. Each note edgy and uncompromising. The man’s final la hangs, sustains, and the rest of the group grabs hold.
The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Page 21
