“A man needs to feel safe when he sleeps,” David says, laughing, a little embarrassed.
Again the Minotaur works for a sympathetic smile. They strip the sheets from the bed. David folds them neatly and puts them in one of the boxes in the living room. Together they stand the mattress on its side, along with the sheet of plywood for extra support and the box springs. David has to find a hammer to get the rails unhooked from the headboard.
“Bad back,” David says of the plywood.
“Unnh.”
By the time they move the disassembled bed into the front room it has stopped raining. At David’s direction the Minotaur begins loading boxes into the Vega’s open hatchback. David tapes a handwritten sign—Free—to the headboard and leans it against a tree. The mattress and box springs will not fit in the car; David hunts some twine so they can tie them to the roof. In less than half an hour the car is full, its aged suspension sagging under the weight.
“I’ll put the rest of the boxes in my car, then you can follow me over.”
“Unnh.”
David’s new apartment is only a few miles away, at the edge of a gentrified area where fifty years ago textile mills and mill houses sprawled and the stinking creeks ran the color of the day’s dye lot. Up a flight of tight narrow steps are his three rooms and a bath, one of two apartments over a storefront. The storefront window is draped with multicolored beads, and hanging in one corner is an old illuminated sign flickering its crowded message: Sister Obediah’s Psychic Readings—Karma, Past Lives, Tarot, Palms, Dreamwork, Predictions Forecast on Business Marriage Love Health, Astral Travel. Avbl. For Parties.
Past Lives. For a few blessed moments the Minotaur dreams of unburdening himself of his history. As for Predictions & Forecast he is less eager.
“She’s my neighbor,” David says, noticing the Minotaur’s careful study of Obediah’s supernatural bill of fare.
“Hunh?” the Minotaur responds, not wanting to seem too interested.
“Obediah. She lives in the other apartment, across the hall. I think she has her own stairway down into her store.”
“Mmmn.”
Getting the ponderous mattress up the staircase is a struggle. The Minotaur bears the brunt of its weight on his substantial shoulder while David backs up one step at a time. The rest of the stuff in the car they unload quickly, hindered only by David’s indecision as to where to put things.
“We ought to be able to get everything else this next trip,” David says. “I’ll just leave my car here.”
The Minotaur is hungry. It’s nearly five o’clock. There was a time when he ate only once every seven years. He gorged himself, ravenously devoured all that was given to him, then waited anxiously for the next distant feeding. That time is long gone, and the Minotaur cannot recall it. Now, in almost human fashion, hunger gnaws at him every four or five hours. Crawls up from his belly, clouds his thoughts and hammers incessantly at his occipital bone until he concedes to eat.
“Ummnh,” he says.
“Let’s just get the rest of my stuff, then I’ll buy you dinner. Okay?”
Back at the old apartment they strap the bookcase to the roof of the Vega; the ottoman and the rocking chair barely fit into the back, the hatch gaping wide and straining against the taut bungee cords. The Minotaur pulls the car keys from his pocket and opens the driver’s door.
“Give me a minute,” David says, hurrying back into the apartment.
The Minotaur watches him through the open door. David walks into the back room and comes out seconds later carrying a large box with something wrapped in plastic folded atop it. David hesitates, then looks around before setting the box on the damp porch to lock his door for the last time. He drops the key through the mail slot. As David carries the box to the car, walking carefully, the Minotaur gets out to open the door for him.
“Thanks, M,” David says, resting the box on the passenger seat. It’s some kind of uniform, the thing in plastic. Gray and woolen. The Minotaur does not recognize the insignia. David drapes the uniform flat over the ottoman in the back of the car.
The large box has its lids interfolded so that its contents—all except for what must be the tip and several inches of the blade of a bayonet protruding dangerously from one corner—are hidden. Despite the narrow bucket seat, despite the fact that the box presses against both the hand brake lever on the center hump and the passenger door handle, despite the precise maneuvering he has to do to ensure that the blade points back between the seats, sharp edge down, David clutches the box protectively on his lap.
“Sorry,” David says, eyeing the bayonet. “The handle is pretty fragile. It needs some work, and I don’t have a scabbard yet.”
The Minotaur is conscious of the blade between the seats as he drives. With his head cocked a little so he can see to drive, he has a pretty clear view of the box with his right eye. David notices him looking.
“It’s from the Civil War,” David says, momentarily assuming the Minotaur will know to which one he refers. “Eighteen sixty-one to 1865, the American Civil War. More than six hundred thousand Americans were killed—more than in all our other wars combined.”
“Mmmm,” the Minotaur says, genuinely curious.
“All this stuff, all these things are actual artifacts from different battlefields. Mostly Confederate.”
Sensing the Minotaur’s interest David eagerly tells him about the contents of the box as they drive. He waxes nostalgic, as if he were actually there some hundred and twenty-five years ago. Reverently, like a devotee or a docent, he displays his sacred loot: medals of valor and honor; documents, battle plans and blood-spattered personal missives; bullets whole and bullets misshapen from impact with bone, each shard a testament of aggression. The Minotaur didn’t know David as a teacher—doesn’t, in fact, have much experience with teachers of any kind. But listening to David talk passionately about his treasures, the Minotaur feels that the teacher’s role must have come naturally to him.
They arrive at the new apartment before David has a chance to show everything. Rather than carry the heavy chair, the ottoman and the bookcase from the parking lot in back of the building, the Minotaur decides to pull into the bus stop and turn the flashers on long enough for them to get David’s things to the sidewalk by the front door. The Minotaur cuts the twine with his pocketknife, and they lift the bookcase from the Vega’s roof. He and David set the furniture between the door to the apartments and the door to Obediah’s storefront. David waits, sitting on the edge of the rocking chair and clutching his box of memorabilia, while the Minotaur moves the car.
“Are you sure you can get that?” David asks when the Minotaur picks up the rocking chair by its arms and pulls it to his chest.
“Unnh.”
“Stud,” David teases. “I’ll follow you with this box, then we’ll take the bookcase up together.”
David holds the door for the Minotaur, then struggles to keep it open for himself while he bends to pick up the heavy box. The Minotaur moves slowly, up one step at a time, taking care not to scratch the walls with the rockers. David is close behind and patient. Just as the Minotaur nears the top of the flight of stairs the door to the adjacent apartment opens. It’s Obediah. It must be.
“Lordgodamighty!” the woman says, as if it is a single word, an incantation or a curse. It would stand to reason that someone so willing to look into the future would not be shocked by looking at the past. But the thin pale woman of indeterminate age, this mock-gypsy with the green silk scarf covering her skull, riding low across her forehead, pulled down to the edge of her manicured brows, her eyelashes so long, thick and black they could be mistaken for the limbs of some mutant insect, this woman who stands in the doorway of apartment number 2, the smell of fried fish wafting from within, who unwittingly looks into the cavernous huffing nostrils and the obsidian eyes of the Minotaur, his bull head looming over the back of the rocking chair as he comes up the steps—she is taken by surprise.
“Lordgodamighty!” she says aga
in, then slams the door.
The Minotaur startles, stumbles backwards. Before he can catch himself the tip of his right horn gouges several inches of the Sheetrock wall. David, too close for safety, refuses to relinquish the space he occupies with his sacred box. He will not willingly move from the path of the falling Minotaur and risk dropping his package. The only thing that prevents David from being crushed is the Minotaur’s innate ability to right himself under burden, an ability that holds true even when he’s lugging a chair up a narrow stairway. The Minotaur stumbles backward, and at the very instant his horn digs into the plaster the tip of David’s bayonet jutting out of the box presses against his scapula. The Minotaur feels the fabric of his shirt resist, then give, feels the edge of the blade ride up his back. According to David this weapon has known flesh before; it was unearthed at Manassas still in the skeletal hands of a Rebel soldier, and around him lay the remains of three Yanks. Today, however, on these stairs, the bayonet is more forgiving. The Minotaur feels it barely scratch the surface of his hide before he stabilizes himself.
It takes them only a few minutes to bring the rest of David’s stuff upstairs. David is apologetic to a fault; he insists on putting Merthiolate, a fire-orange antiseptic tincture, on the cut. The Minotaur protests that it’s barely a scratch but eventually submits so that David won’t feel even more guilty. He sits upright in a kitchen chair with the wide collar of his shirt unbuttoned and one shoulder exposed. The Minotaur winces from the medicine’s sting, more because it seems the right thing to do than out of real pain.
When David goes for sandwiches the Minotaur stays at the apartment. He wanders mindlessly in and out of the rooms and eventually out into the hall, where he stands before the neighbor’s door. Nothing about the exterior of that door—not its maroon paint chipped away in places to reveal the blue beneath, not its tiny peephole installed just off-center, not even the nameplate, 0. Johnson—suggests the power of the apartment’s occupant. The Minotaur considers knocking on the door, considers Obediah’s possible reactions. She could ignore him and not open the door at all. She could throw open the maroon door in rage. Or she could open the door armed with the knowledge of his future. The Minotaur has known his share of clairvoyants and soothsayers. But having outlived most of them by centuries he’s come to distrust their claims. Nevertheless, within himself, he feels a change coming—looming, familiar, inevitable change. What he would like from Obediah is validation of his current sense of the impending, a ratification of his fear. With that he might be more ready when change comes.
But instead of knocking the Minotaur slinks quietly down the steps to his car. From his toolbox he takes a half-full container of Spakle paste and a putty knife. He repairs the gouge in the stairwell wall with a little more noise than necessary, so Obediah won’t be surprised again. He scrapes the white paste flush with the wall and makes a mental note to sand it smooth the next time he comes over.
The Minotaur is curious at heart, but over the years he has learned to keep his curiosity in check, learned that most of the time wondering is far more satisfying and far less dangerous than knowing. Nevertheless, when David doesn’t come back right away, the Minotaur cannot stop himself from going back into the apartment and examining David’s possessions, working his way eventually to the box that sits on the kitchen table, the slightest patina of bipod gilding the edge of the blade protruding from its closed top.
What the Minotaur finds, what David didn’t tell him about earlier, are the photographs. Not the grainy blurred photos of maimed and bloated bodies taken in wartime; those he saw. These photographs, sheathed in plastic, are newer. Men charging away from or toward the camera, rifles flashing. At the bottom of the stack is a picture of a soldier posing alone, standing in full uniform, his weapon held at his chest. Looking closer, head cocked, the Minotaur notices an incongruity. The soldier poses by a rail fence in front of a leafless tree. But in the corner of the photograph, almost out of the frame, is the fender of a car. A Buick Electra, it looks like to the Minotaur, 1980 or thereabouts. Not until he digs further in the box and finds an artificially aged company roster of the First North Carolina State Troops does the Minotaur realize that he is looking at pictures of a younger David. His name is there, near the bottom of the list. He is a sergeant. Suddenly afraid of getting caught the Minotaur puts all the stuff back in the box and sits at the kitchen table waiting.
David returns with the food, and the Minotaur eats all he is given.
“Did you have enough?” David asks.
“Unnh,” the Minotaur says, lying.
“Thanks a lot for helping me out. I owe you.”
“Unnnh.”
David excuses himself and disappears down the hall toward the bathroom. The Minotaur wants to leave but decides he should wait for David to come back. In the meantime he mindlessly flips through an open box of musty-smelling yellowed novels and old history texts. The Minotaur thinks for a moment about pocketing a book.
“I didn’t know you were a reader,” David says, coming back into the room. The Minotaur feels caught in the act. Water gurgles in the apartment’s pipes.
“See anything you like?” David asks. “I’ve got some real classics.”
The Minotaur doesn’t respond, only shakes his head slightly.
“Here,” David says, moving the top two boxes, then reaching into a third to find the book he has in mind.
Candy. The book is called Candy.
“If this doesn’t put some levity in your soul, then nothing will.” David lays the book in the Minotaur’s hand. “Just don’t tell anybody where you got it,” he says.
When the Minotaur gets into his car the novel slips between the bucket seat and the cracked plastic console that houses an ashtray, two sticky cupholders and the hand brake. Within a half-mile he forgets the book is there.
CHAPTER 7
By the time the Minotaur returns to his home the day has worn him thin. It is nearly dusk. The Maverick is gone from Sweeny’s front yard, a rectangle of yellowed overgrown grass in its place. Over the rooftops of the house and the trailers chimney swifts by the dozens arc wildly through the fading sunlight, their sharp black silhouettes careening toward, then away from, the earth. Then again and again. It’s a hot night, and Sweeny is walking around the backyard in his boxer shorts. No one cares.
“Evening, M,” Sweeny says, and follows it with a deep wet belch.
Lucky-U Mobile Estates is a kind of haven. Although defining Sweeny’s tenants in terms of similarities is difficult, generally speaking they are all part of a diaspora of sorts. A nebulous group compromised by situation, by strings of bad decisions each perpetuating the next, or compromised simply by the circumstances of their births, these are settlers.
To settle. Settled. Settling. To fix or resolve definitely and conclusively; to agree upon (as in time or conditions). To place in a desired state or in order. To furnish with residents. To quiet, calm or bring to rest. To stop from annoying or opposing. To cause (dregs, sediment, etc.) to sink or be deposited. To dispose of finally; close up. To decide, arrange or agree. To come to rest, as from flight: The bird settled on a bough. To gather, collect or become fixed in a particular place, direction, etc. (Of a female animal) to become pregnant; conceive. To become established in some routine, especially upon marrying, after a period of independence or indecision. To apply oneself for serious work. To settle for; to be satisfied with: To settle for less.
All of which suggests an intent or a determined quality that is not manifest in their lives. A gritty resignation permeates Lucky-U and its inhabitants, the Minotaur included.
Of the five mobile homes, Sweeny usually has three or four occupied at any given time, using the vacancies to make the necessary—and only the necessary—repairs. Transient in nature, his people come and go, and return tenants are more than welcome. Sweeny almost expects it; he knows all too well the path of false starts and wrong choices and sees Lucky-U as a sort of halfway house or a steppingstone to bigger and bet
ter things. It is a hopeful point of view.
Tonight all but one of Sweeny’s trailers are being lived in, and quite a lot of that living spills out into the yards. Sweeny barters. Sweeny wheels and deals, with his tenants and almost everyone else. For Mrs. Smith, an aging Japanese woman who came to Lucky-U with her AMVET husband seventeen years ago and stayed behind when he left ten years later, who lives beside the Minotaur and holds the seniority title, Sweeny shops for groceries in exchange for a weekly plate of potstickers, the little fried dumplings he’d come to love in the war he had briefly taken part in so many years ago. She never comes out of her trailer, never leaves her bedroom as far as the Minotaur can tell, but spills out in the aural sense. Her bedroom is situated just beyond his kitchen window. All day long and way into the night, whenever the Minotaur is at home, the television plays either stock-car racing or one of the Christian channels.
Beside Mrs. Smith are the newest residents of Lucky-U, who are more often out of their trailer than in. A young couple and its two sons moved in at the beginning of the summer. The parents, seemingly little more than children themselves, chronically unemployed and always at home, seem far more devoted to their own private pursuits than to the raising of their children. Josie, their mother, tans. Every day, in sun or the mere promise of it, she makes the trek into the weedy backyard; portable radio, various tanning oils and a liter of generic cola in hand, she pitches camp at the webbed lounge chair in full recline, turning from belly to back, back to belly at precise intervals, getting up only to reposition the chair for optimal exposure.
The boys’ father, Hank, doesn’t tan. Not intentionally. But all the hours that Hank spends at his weight bench, a rickety thing of bent tubing and Naugahyde standing a little lopsided at the opposite end of the trailer from Josie’s chair, leaning to one side on the sloping yard in the dead center of a semicircle of packed red dirt where the previous tenants’ bluetick hound was chained, all that time in the sun keeps him sufficiently golden. And well sculpted, above the waist anyway. Hank never seems to exercise his legs; the Minotaur is acutely aware of disproportion.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 6
