The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

by Steven Sherrill

  You Are Here.

  The red heart says so. The Minotaur wants to believe.

  You Are Here.

  Here, at the junction of a north-south interstate and an east-west turnpike, at Love’s Travel Stop & Country Store. The Minotaur traces the spot. Locates Business 220. Sees without meaning to Joy Furnace, marked plain as day on the map. And called a Local Attraction. It’s more than that. Just ask the Minotaur. He decides, then and there, to take Holly and Tookus to see it. To take them into the high stone walls, to be inside of, to share, Joy Furnace with him.

  You Are Here.

  “Are ya lost, big boy?” somebody asks.

  Discombobulated by the old man, the Minotaur can’t answer. Off beam, out of joint, shaken, for the moment, anyway, the Minotaur looks into the face of his interrogator. No. False. Insist on the truth. The question was soft. Caring, even. The Minotaur comes about, looks. And finds that she is official. She wears the Love’s smock.

  “Can I help you find your way?” she asks. Eyes black. Nose thin, beakish.

  The Minotaur cannot tell how old she is. Even standing still she seems to flit back and forth. It’s hard to see her clearly. But there is no denying her smells. The molt. The twiggy nest’s filth. Keratin. The Minotaur is sure he hears the scritch and scratch of talons inside her boots. And is that a trail of blackish down settling around those boots?

  “Unngh, no,” the Minotaur says. “Thanks, but no.”

  The Love’s employee smiles, a very corvidae smile. “Okay, then,” she says.

  She swoops through the Employees Only door. As it closes behind her, the Minotaur hears a caw. He’d swear it.

  “Caw.”

  No. It’s Holly. She comes out of the bathroom, zipping her pants.

  “Hey,” she says, “is that boy still in there?”

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  It wouldn’t surprise him at all if Holly were to waltz right into the men’s restroom to retrieve her brother. Not at all. She looks about to do just that. Looks at the Minotaur, picks, deliberately, something from his coat, right over his brass button. It’s a tiny black feather. Holly holds it aloft on one fingertip. Blows gently. The feather lifts up and away. Holly winks at the Minotaur. ’Nuff said.

  “Hurry up, Took!” she calls into bathroom.

  “I’m going to get us some water,” she says. “And some Tic Tacs. You hold down the fort.”

  The Minotaur watches her walk away. It never gets old. Steady, big boy, you have a fort to hold down.

  A gangly kid in a Love’s smock rolls a trash can up to the old man’s table and sweeps all the crumpled napkins into it. The security guard stands, slurps the last bit of cola from an extra-large cup. No. The Minotaur sees the truth. Insist on it. The man is not a security guard. He’s a game warden. His uniform crisp and green. His shield radiant. His duties? Of and about the natural world. He’s pink cheeked. And if he has any hair at all the Minotaur can’t see it. See it. The Minotaur sees things in a new light. Everything happens for a reason. Or not. The game warden is there. Maybe he’s there for a reason. Maybe, sometimes, the peace and quiet of the outdoors get to the man. Maybe the natural world is too pure, too purely brutal. Maybe he longs for complication. Maybe he gets tired of bag limits and worrying about seven-inch trout. And those god-damn poachers. It’s too much sometimes. Sometimes he likes to come inside, maybe, to bathe in the pure artificial light of Love’s Travel Stop, to eat bad food and fret over his alopecia. To worry, amid the other worriers, about whether the baby in his wife’s belly will be retarded. They wouldn’t use that word, but the goddamn ultrasound showed some problems. Bless him. Bless the game warden. Maybe he just needs to think, maybe even to talk, to confess, to tell someone, anyone, about what he did down at the quarry with that Rite Aid cashier. Not because he doesn’t love his wife. Not at all. Bless the game warden, who is just scared and lonely, like everybody else. Who just wants someone to tell him everything is going to be okay. Maybe the Minotaur. Bless him.

  The Minotaur, undone by Love’s, meets the game warden halfway.

  “B-bless you,” the Minotaur says.

  “What?” the man says.

  “You are here,” the Minotaur says, amazed at the clarity of his claim.

  “What?” the game warden says.

  “Put him in the scuppers with a hose pipe on him!” Tookus roars from the toilet. And his clarity is magnificent as well.

  “What the hell?” Holly says. She’s back with a bottle of water in each hand. Practically saintlike.

  Then the gunshot rings out from the men’s room.

  “Fuck!” Holly says, drops the water. One bottle ruptures.

  No. It’s not a gunshot. It’s a firecracker. An M80. But people don’t know that. And though stunned and confused by the first explosion, at the second folks dive for cover under the food-court tables or run screaming into Love’s busy parking lot.

  “N-no,” the Minotaur says. It’s just a firecracker. It’s just Tookus.

  Holly heads into the bathroom, but she’s knocked to the ground by all the men rushing out. Bless her. Bless them and their ringing ears, their stinging eyes.

  “No,” the Minotaur says, reaching for Holly.

  “Move!” the game warden says, reaching for his weapon. Duty calls. “Move, now!”

  “No,” the Minotaur says. Everything is okay.

  “No,” Holly says, struggling to her feet. “It’s not . . . He’s not . . .”

  “What wondrous love is this!” Tookus sings from inside the bathroom.

  Comes out of the bathroom singing the next line. “O my soul! O my soul!”

  Comes out of the bathroom singing and pointing his toy pistol. “What wondrous love is this! What . . .”

  There is a little mouth in the middle of the game warden’s fat pink cheeks. It’s saying something. But the Minotaur can’t hear what. The game warden’s gun is pointed and cocked. Sometimes the game warden’s wife helps him polish the gun.

  It’s okay, the Minotaur says. No. Thinks. You Are Here. The Minotaur has been here before, right? He can’t remember. It’s called pussy. No. It’s more than that.

  Tookus staggers, wide eyed and giddy, singing, into the fray. His fray. He sees the other man in uniform, the game warden. Raises his toy pistol.

  “Bang bang,” Tookus says.

  Holly lunges for her brother, puts her fine body between the boy and the rest of the world.

  “Bang bang,” Tookus says, looking down the black wooden barrel.

  The Minotaur looks at the game warden and sees it in his eyes. The reason. He knows it. The game warden and the Minotaur both know. It is the dying season.

  “Bless you,” the Minotaur says, his heart pumping.

  And what pumps through those human veins is, no doubt, monstrous blood. And in the monster’s bloody core there is no denying humanity. Much humanity. Most try to pretend they’re different. It’s a tiresome chore. On good days the Minotaur knows a few things. Want. Hope. Need. Fear. Hunger. Hunger comes. Hunger goes. The Minotaur has learned that beyond hunger is just more hunger. He is learning to eat the emptiness.

  “What wondrous love is this!”

  There is an eternity between the pulling of the trigger and what happens next.

  You Are Here.

  “O my soul! O my soul!”

  You Are Here.

  There is a perfect little red heart on the Love’s Travel Stop map.

  Is that Tookus? Is he singing? Is the song perfectly sung?

  You Are Here.

  The little red heart says so.

  The Minotaur believes it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the following for their help (direct or indirect) in bringing this novel to life: Lee Peterson, wife o’ mine; the Peterson-Littenburg-Rich contingent in NYC; Michael Griffith for his reliable genius; Nicola Mason and all the folks at Cincinnati Review (in which an excerpt of the book appears); Yseult Ogilvie; Anna Jean Moriarty and
the folks at The Pigeonhole.com; Ian Staples, Jon Seagroatt, and Bobbie Seagroatt for the creation of Deathless; Ian Wilson for his operatic vision; and Penn State Altoona for its ongoing support of what happens in my noggin.