The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

by Steven Sherrill

  “Okay,” he says again.

  The Minotaur puts his pants on. Holly picked them. She must have been there. He looks at the bench where she must have sat. Sees what she left. Must have. Drags a finger slowly through her. Puts the finger in his mouth. Again.

  The husk of a beast is piled at his feet. The Minotaur toes it gently to make sure she’s not still there, swathed and hidden. The Minotaur picks up the plastic Minotaur. The living Minotaur is not a thief. He pockets the toy anyway. Devmani will love it. He thinks of her full black eyes. The Minotaur is not a thief. He shoves the Picasso puppet into his other pocket. Anyway. Sweet time.

  He goes to pay for the pants. At the register something in the $1.00 Each bin catches his eye. It’s a cap, a gray Confederate soldier’s cap. A costume version likely purchased in the Old Scald Village Gift Shoppe. The Minotaur takes the hat, and fortune blesses him again. There’s a toy pistol at the bottom of the bin. A pistol with a black wooden dowel for a barrel.

  “Th-these, too,” he says to the clerk. Tookus will like these.

  She bags his purchases. She eyes him up and down. The Minotaur can’t tell what she thinks, what she wants. Things have changed.

  The Minotaur steps out into what is left of the Ag-Fest afternoon. Yes, things have changed. Not the crowd. The crowd is boisterous still. Nor the ridge line in the distance. The windmills are still there making languid loop-the-loops. But change has come. Surely. The Minotaur doesn’t see Holly or Tookus. He does see a young girl in a taffeta dress with a yellow ribbon draped across her chest. Henceforth Joy Dairy Goat Award 3rd Prize. A retinue of underlings flocks about her with sno-cones and taffy apples in their little fists and envy in their little teeth. The Minotaur is happy for her.

  Where, then, is the change? How will it manifest?

  Through the bell of a horn. The Minotaur hears the unbridled blatt and turns and sees them. Sees Holly first and her eye patch second. Ocular? Not the change he expected. Sees next Tookus pounding away on a drum, the boy’s spastic motions at last put to good use.

  They’re on the stage, under the tent, both captives and captors. Roger is there. Jolly Roger, stomping along the front of the stage in tight leather pants with goat hooves and jingle bells sewn from the knees down along the outer seams. Several corseted women flank the stage (one very pregnant), heads high, arms back, boobs up and out. Titties, the Minotaur thinks. I’m a tit man, he thinks. No. Things have changed. They’re nice enough, for sure, and meant to be seen. But the Minotaur has other fish to fry.

  The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir.

  It says so on the yolk-colored poster, right below the grinning skull and crossbones with its blood-red bandana covered in white hearts. Says, too, All You Have To Be Is Loud.

  And loud they are. Roger has delegated the sousaphone to a skinny boy with more enthusiasm than talent. One man, black clad and tall, churns at a steel-bodied guitar, the metal so bright it catches and reflects all the day’s light. There are three, at least, men in full pirate regalia (storied media-rendered versions of pirate regalia, anyway). One pumps away at a squeezebox. Another kicks and scratches at a drumlike contraption made from a washtub, his right hand in a thimble-tipped glove raking and slapping a washboard bolted to an ax handle (which is bolted to the tub). The third pirate just sings, but Lord is he loud! Too, he never takes his eyes off the boobs. All in all there are probably fifteen people onstage (though they sound legion), belting it out. It’s a spectacle, for sure. Just this side of cataclysm. And though the modest audience is largely indifferent, gumming away at their plates of fried things, everybody in The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir is having a blast. Including Holly and Tookus.

  “What shall we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning!” Roger wails.

  His choir rallies, an ocean of noise swelling and crashing down over all. “Hoo-ray and up she rises! Hoo-ray and up she rises, early in the morning!”

  Roger says something about shanties.

  “They’re the work songs and party songs of seafarers,” he says.

  “They’re all call and response,” he says. “Sing along if you’ve got the balls!”

  Roger takes a felt tricorn hat from one of the singers and puts it on Tookus. The boy beams. Holly, deep in the groove of the beat, sways and rocks her hips, keeping time with a tambourine. Things have changed.

  Roger spots the Minotaur at the back of the rows of picnic tables and raises his hand high.

  “Yo!” he says.

  Everybody looks.

  “Yo, sarge! Get your shanty panties on and get up here!”

  So he does.

  What’s this world coming to?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING.

  The Minotaur moves before self-consciousness can hobble him (as it has so many times). Tips his big head forward and lets the weight of his horns and snout carry him right through the crowd and up onto the stage. If anyone gets trampled along the way it’s their fault. There, his presence, a half-bull half-man in Confederate soldier dress, is no more or less out of place than the rest.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Roger says. “Boys and girls! Friends, enemies, and the rest of you scurvy-ridden dogs! The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir is proud to present . . .”

  Roger whips them all into a frenzy. Holly lifts her eye patch, grins big, jiggles her tambourine in the Minotaur’s direction. Jiggles. Tookus thumps away at the drum in perfect time.

  “ . . . the horniest pirate in town!”

  Somebody hands him a shaker egg, and the Minotaur does his best.

  “Look at you go,” Holly says.

  “Horns and all,” Holly says.

  It might be the weirdest moment of his life.

  Up there on the stage, as much as possible off to one side, bodies in motion, tits galore, the Minotaur shakes his little egg. Hears how the impossibly small clicks—Chhkk-chhkk-chhkk, chhkk-chhkk-chhkk—weave in and out of the larger sounds. The Minotaur is not smooth or graceful under scrutiny, is not fluid or rhythmic. Turns out that it doesn’t matter. At all.

  They sing another shanty. Something called “Whup Jamboree,” with the lyric “Jenny, keep your hoecakes warm” driving the song harder and harder. The festival goers, weary after a full day of agrarian revelry, are underwhelmed, but it doesn’t matter. The Minotaur does his best, with his little egg, to stay out of the way. He moves his lips, works his tongue. When the choir is at its loudest the Minotaur lets sound escape.

  “We’re gonna do one more for ya,” Roger says into the mic. He gives the Minotaur a slap on the ass, and a squeeze as well. “It’s a long-drag shanty,” he says. “A purty one.”

  “Hanging Johnny” starts out slow and never gains speed. The song is glacial in its movement, meant for the long tedious task of raising an anchor from the seafloor. It is hypnotic and stunningly beautiful in its torpor.

  “Well, they call me hanging Johnnyyyyyyyy.”

  “Away, boys, awayyyyyyyyy . . .”

  By the end of the song the whole damn crew is shoulder to shoulder, spanning the width of the stage, swaying back and forth. Even the Minotaur. Even the Minotaur.

  “Sooooo it’s hannnng, boyyyyyyys, hannnnnnnnnnnng!”

  The final note becomes a drone, pulsing and throbbing, harmonies colliding in discord.

  Then it’s over. The Minotaur’s shanty choir debut has run its course.

  “We are The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir!” Roger says. “We’re available for weddings, funerals, birthdays, bar and bat mitzvahs, flea dips, prosecutions, persecutions, uprisings, and outbreaks of all kinds. Look for us on YouTube!”

  There is a smattering of applause, but nobody onstage pays attention. It doesn’t matter.

  Tookus keeps thumping the drum until its owner has to claim it. Tookus wants to stay with the drum, with the beat, in the music. The Minotaur, too, though he wouldn’t say as much.

  Tookus is getting agitated; he holds tight to the shoulder strap a
nd will not let go. Holly looks anxious. Things with Tookus can turn quickly bad.

  Roger comes to the rescue with another shaker egg.

  “This one’s yours to keep, hotshot,” he says to Tookus. “Practice, practice, practice.”

  Tookus hesitates, then Roger does a little dance and shakes the egg. The boy grins and swaps.

  “Chhka chhka chhka,” Tookus says. “Chhka chhka chhka.”

  Turns out, you really can buy “Shanty Panties” at The Allegheny Bilge Rats merchandise table, on display between the Bilge Rats kazoos and the Bilge Rats CDs.

  Holly holds a pair up to her hips. “What do you think?” she asks.

  She asks the Minotaur.

  “Unngh,” he says, quaking in his boots.

  She buys two.

  Roger gives them each a kazoo.

  Roger tries to talk them into staying.

  “Let’s go to my house,” he says. “Most of the crew is coming. You can stay the night. We’ll sing some more.”

  The Minotaur is willing. Things have changed.

  “This was a blast,” Holly says, “but . . .”

  All the way to the Odyssey, Holly gushes.

  “So much fun,” she says.

  “So fucking weird,” she says. “The perfect thing for Took’s last . . .”

  “Maybe I should go to music school,” she says. “What do you do with a music degree?”

  “Maybe you should come with us to Pittsburgh,” she says. “All the way.”

  “Unngh, what?”

  “Pittsburgh,” she says. “Come with us. Come with me.”

  Everybody is leaving the Ag-Fest at the same time. The parking lot is gridlocked. The Minotaur’s tongue is gridlocked. Always has been. He’d like to say things. To ask things. But words clot against his thick teeth.

  “Buckle up, Took,” Holly says, but they’re not moving for a while.

  “Chhka chhka chhka,” Tookus says, shaking his egg. “Chhka chhka chhka.”

  “Take that out of your mouth, Took,” Holly says. The boy is chewing on his varnished cow chip.

  “Chhka chhka chhka,” Tookus says.

  “Maybe you should pee before we get on the road, Took,” she says. “Do you have to pee?”

  “Chhka chhka chhka,” Tookus says.

  “What do you think?” Holly asks.

  The Minotaur thinks he would like to watch her dance again, hear her sing again, see her put those shanty panties on and take them off. He puts his fingertips to his nose. She doesn’t know why. He does.

  “What do you think, Tooky?” she asks. “We did okay out there, on that stage. On them high seas. Didn’t we?”

  “Drunken saillllllllor,” Tookus sings.

  The Odyssey, stalled in its progress, holds an unlikely trio. But the heart and the mind together are capable of untold alchemies. A crow alights above them, on the giant red K of the Kmart sign by the parking lot entrance. Sits as sentinel (the crow, maybe the sign, too), taking names. There, in the passenger seat, the Minotaur comes to conclusions. Hatches, even, a plan, albeit fetal. He will go with this redhead, this freckled and green-eyed redhead named Holly, will follow in the fiery tail of her cometlike presence, anywhere. He will go back to the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge and kiss Devmani Gupta right between her beautiful black eyes. He will thank Ramneek for all the gulab jamun, and Rambabu for everything else. Before he leaves the office the Minotaur will touch the Ganesh on its wrinkled brass trunk. It will take the Minotaur no time at all to pack up Room #3, his tools and sewing kit. He’ll cross Business 220, walk right into the midst of Danny Tanneyhill’s wooden menagerie, and bless the creatures one by one. The Minotaur will wriggle out from beneath the shadow of Scald Mountain, birthed into a brand-new self, and thus transmogrified will lift his bull horns and walk on his man legs through the covered bridge over Stink Creek, walk right into the heart of Old Scald Village, will stand in the door of the Blacksmith’s Shoppe and let the anvil’s ring wash over him. Will release Widow Fisk. The Minotaur will sever his ties and gather his wits, climb into the Odyssey, and leave behind this land of plaster Nephilim.

  The crow grows impatient on its perch. Caws, retches up a break in the traffic.

  “Are you ready, big boy?” Holly asks.

  Is she talking to him? The Minotaur chews mindlessly on his fingertip. What will he say? How will he answer?

  “Pussy,” he says. It’s the word closest to his lips “It’s called pussy.”

  Holly laughs.

  “Whoa, Nellie,” she says.

  “Give a girl some warning,” she says.

  The Minotaur didn’t mean to say it aloud. Didn’t intend to speak his mind. But having done so, he will accept the consequences. The Minotaur takes the Picasso puppet from his pocket, puts it on the horn closer to Holly.

  “Oooo,” Holly says in that same strange accent. “You do know how to satisfy Meester Pablo.”

  Tookus laughs, sings part of a line from a shanty. “Shave his bellllllyyyyyyy!”

  Holly grabs hold of the tune. “Shave his belly with a rusty razor!”

  The Minotaur takes the toy version of himself and sets it on the dashboard, facing the road. One of them is a charlatan, a huckster. He’ll gift the toy to Devmani. She’ll like it. The Minotaur takes the Confederate cap and the toy pistol from where he secreted them inside his jacket. Offers them back to Tookus.

  “Bang bang bang,” Tookus says, happily shooting at everything they pass.

  Holly sings. Tookus sings. They all sing. Even the Minotaur. Even the Minotaur.

  It is a joyous few miles. Bang bang bang.

  “Peeeeee!” Tookus says in the middle of a song.

  And as it happens the four staggered hearts of a Love’s Travel Stop & Country Store marquee are in sight. The crow may have some hand in the circumstance. The travel center sits at a crossroads in a basin of flat land poked and prodded by the Allegheny Mountains on all sides.

  “I told you,” she says, pulling the van up to the curb.

  The lot and the store throb with busyness, with coming and going. Even inside the Odyssey the Minotaur feels the crackling energy of people not quite where they want to be, not sure they want to go there anyway.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says, prepared to bless and comfort them all.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Holly says.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  OVER WITH.

  “Bang bang,” Tookus says, and cocks the Confederate cap high on his head.

  “Bang bang,” he says, taking aim at his sister and the Minotaur.

  “Bang bang,” he says, taking out an imaginary target.

  Tookus shoves the pistol into his waistband and heads for the door.

  “Wait up, Tookus,” Holly says, following her addle-brained brother.

  The Minotaur watches her walk. Sashay. Swoon, Minotaur. Anywhere.

  She waits by the entrance, asks the Minotaur to go in with Tookus.

  “Keep him out of trouble,” she says.

  Anywhere. Love’s Travel Stop & Country Store, for instance.

  The plaza swarms with travelers. And with the food court here, the restrooms there, and the convenience store over yonder, it’s ready to meet any need. Mark the hustle and bustle. Slow down, Minotaur. Bless them all.

  Most of the food-court tables and booths are occupied. Chitter chatter, chitter chatter. Just people being people. Bless them all. Bless the couples and the families. Bless those traveling alone. Bless the security guard hunched over and eating by himself in a corner booth. Bless the pouty teens and all their piercings. Swoon, Minotaur.

  A giant backlit map of the Keystone State spans the eight-foot wall between the men’s and women’s restrooms. Holly heads for Pittsburgh.

  “Be back in jiffy,” she says.

  “Meet you right here,” she says.

  “Don’t leave without me.”

  The Minotaur follows Tookus toward Philadelphia.

  The boy goes into a stall and lock
s it. “Drunkennnn sailllllor,” he says. “Shave his belllllyyyy.”

  The Minotaur goes into the open stall beside Tookus and sits down to wait. As long as it takes, he thinks. That’s the point. The Minotaur sits up straight because there isn’t room in the stall for him to do otherwise. The Love’s bathroom smells of disinfectant and is clean enough, though at the bottom of his stall door, written in Sharpie and upside down, is a little missive about what Minky wants to do to Pooter in no uncertain terms, and with an illustration.

  “Hoeeeeecakes warm!” Tookus says. Bellows, really.

  The boy is taking a long time. The Minotaur goes out to wait for Holly, for instructions, if necessary. It seems the right thing to do. As soon as the Minotaur steps into the food-court area, Tookus lets rip another lyric. Everybody looks up.

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

  The security guard cranes his neck to get a better view. The Keystone State map shines behind the Minotaur. His horns span hundreds of miles. Of course they do. He’s in the way. He’s blocking the door. The Minotaur steps clear, steps up to the low decorative fencing that delineates the dining area. Two fake plants flank and beautify the trash can. The Minotaur tries to find somewhere to look. Tries to be unobtrusive in his benevolence. Settles on an old man sitting alone at a table right by the trash receptacle. He’s ancient, as humans go. A colorless overcoat, colorless pants and shoes. His downcast eyes runny and yellowed. His skin, all his visible flesh, wizened and dappled with liver spots. He mumbles to himself and scribbles on a napkin. Balls it up, shoves it aside into a mound of other crumpled napkins. The ink bleeds through. Nothing is decipherable.

  Tookus sings.

  The old man looks up and into the Minotaur’s eyes. Looks into the Minotaur. The old man wipes his wet mouth on his sleeve, rakes a wormlike tongue across his teeth, rooting in the gums, hisses, and speaks. No, shouts.

  “ ’Bout goddamn time!”

  The old man gets up and shuffles toward the exit.

  The Minotaur is rattled. Should he bless this man? This moment? He doesn’t know. He turns to the map at his back. Maps make sense. This one, laced by color-coded roads and streets and highways, is almost a living thing. It’s like he is looking at the innards, the circulatory or nerve system, of an immovable leviathan. He leans close, listens for a heartbeat. The Minotaur locates himself, his companions, and Love’s in a perfect circle alongside a blue artery that splits, then parallels a ridge of the Allegheny Front.