The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break

by Steven Sherrill

  At night the whole family gathers in the front yard, where Hank, having removed the screen from the trailer’s front window, has positioned the television so it can be seen from outside. They sit on the cracked concrete slab that is the front porch, around a table, a large upended wooden spool made for heavy cable that Hank stole from a previous job, in folding lawn chairs and washed in the light that flickers from the picture tube.

  Hank and Josie think it sufficient, when they’re actually paying attention, to shriek their parental decrees at eight-year-old Jules and Marvin, who turns seven in a week, from their separate stations, so the entire trailer park knows when it’s time for the boys to bathe or eat, and what Jules should stop doing to Marvin, and the consequences of not stopping. Left to their own devices the boys have spent most of the summer months disassembling an abandoned washing machine at the back of the Lucky-U property, Jules ultimately convincing Marvin to climb into the perforated drum for a ride. Compared to their parents the boys are quiet, and seem to talk only to each other. Twice now, hushed and conspiratorial, they have let Buddy out of his run without permission.

  The empty mobile home on the opposite side of the Minotaur from Mrs. Smith is under renovation. Sort of. Sweeny has decided to go upscale on this property, maybe charge a little higher rent and attract a different class of tenant, for the sake of balance, of course. It is the only air-conditioned trailer. Sweeny got a mammoth window unit, circa 1975, Property of Piedmont College stenciled on the side, as partial payment for a conversion van he sold awhile back. The old air conditioner was far too big for any of the windows in the trailer, so Sweeny spent an entire morning with a Sawz-All cutting a hole through the back wall near the roof. It took the rest of the afternoon for him to build a two-by-four scaffold to hold the air conditioner in place, and he had to wait around until some of the tenants came home to help him hoist it up. When he plugged it in and threw the switch the lights in the rest of Lucky-U dimmed, and the noise from the compressor was nearly deafening. That effort dissuaded him from making other structural changes in the trailer; he decided the rest of his remodeling would be of a more cosmetic nature. He took the old UPS panel truck he’d bought a few years ago to the flea market that operates every other weekend in the parking lot of the Fox Triple-X Drive-In. He knew a guy there who set up shop alongside the cinder-block concession stand, a guy who sold some pretty high-class furniture. Sweeny got a whole truckload of furnishings—a double reclining settee, an oak-veneer wall unit with mirrored doors, a brass-plated floor lamp, matching swags and more—for less than a thousand dollars. Outside the trailer Sweeny wanted some sense of delineation. He marked out the property lines with planters made out of truck tires turned inside out, pinked with a sawtooth pattern around the top edge and painted stark white; he’s still looking for something to plant in them. He placed lawn statuary of unpainted concrete on either side of the front door and scattered other pieces in the yard: a squat Buddha, a family of absurdly cute deer, a robed caryatid deftly baring one breast and supporting a large urn. A horseshoe pit was already laid out in the side yard; Sweeny set a park bench for spectators and players under a struggling dogwood tree. He’s been advertising on one of the late-night cable stations and has put some fliers up at the grocery store. And there is always word of mouth. Community. On good days the Minotaur feels it.

  It was D. W. Crews who helped Sweeny lift the air conditioner. D. W. lives with his two brothers in the remaining occupied trailer, which sits at a right angle to Sweeny’s house at the far end of the horseshoe. Sweeny allowed the brothers to scrape out a section of the field behind their trailer and pour a load of gravel, so they would have a place to park the stake-bed truck with the hydraulic boom crane and the calipered claw behind the cab, along with the long flatbed on which they haul the calf-dozer, the chain saws and their other tools. On the doors of both mud-spattered trucks is Crews Bros. Logging & Pulpwood Co., hand-painted by J. C, the oldest brother. They don’t own any other vehicles, so when they have errands or shopping to do they drive one of the big trucks, all three of them squeezed into the cab.

  The Minotaur met the brothers—D. W., J. C. and A. J.—shortly after moving in at Lucky-U. The brothers, who like to play horseshoes, have rigged a couple of droplights to nearby clothesline poles so that they can play at night. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons A. J. ties Buddy to the bumper of one of the trucks with a short rope, then sits on the ground picking bloated gray ticks off the dog as it lies passively between his knees. A. J. drops the parasites into an inch or so of gasoline in the bottom of a mason jar, where they die instantly. On the Minotaur’s first Sunday at Lucky-U he was changing the oil in his car while D. W. and J. C. drank beer and pitched horseshoes. The men and the Minotaur looked one another over for a while as inconspicuously as possible, pretending to be focused on the task or game at hand, and when eye contact accidentally occurred each gave a curt and manly nod of the head.

  There are very few men who are not drawn to, seduced by, challenged by, even beguiled by things revealed, by the display of things that, as a rule or by design or in the name of decorum, are kept hidden from view. For some men this can be the maze of circuitry and the snug clusters of multicolored resistors in the back of any television set or computer. For others it is the joints, the ligaments and tendons, the organs of living things. Still others are taken in by the impalpable workings of the mind and the emotions, confessed or coerced. And then there are men who are drawn to the open hood of a car, any car. The Crews brothers fall readily into this category.

  “She acting up?” D. W. asked that Sunday morning as the Minotaur contorted to get the thin band of the oil filter wrench in place low at the back of the engine.

  “Oil change,” the Minotaur answered.

  “Hmm,” J. C. said, craning his neck to get a look beneath the hood.

  Close up the first thing the Minotaur noticed were the mosquito bites. Both the men standing over him had bad bites, swollen red welts ringed with yellow, on their faces, foreheads and arms. Both men, however, seemed oblivious to any itching. A. J., the youngest Crews and decidedly the least mosquito-bitten, then walked up, and the four of them talked about car maintenance, then truck upkeep, then finally about the various requirements of chain saw engines. J. C. and A. J. argued about how to best sharpen the loops of the metal teeth. The Minotaur learned a lot about the pulpwood business—how they bought the access rights to rural wooded properties, then went in with their trucks and equipment and cut all the salable trees and saplings. A. J. had the fewest bites because he spent most of his time hauling truckloads of logs from the various work sites to the Cherokee Paper Mill up in the mountains. When he came home he stank of sulfur.

  Again, community. Having just arrived in the area the Minotaur had not found a job yet. He spent the mornings and evenings doing repairs for Sweeny and had watched or heard the logging trucks leave just before sunrise and return near supper time for several days. That Sunday morning D. W. asked the Minotaur if he wanted to ride along the next day to see if he liked logging work, and the Minotaur said yes. At six-thirty the next morning he was sitting in the filthy cab of the crane truck with A. J., who talked nonstop about breeding white mice. He’d heard that science classes at the college bought white mice for lab experiments and that there was always a market for mice as food for pet snakes and such.

  “Know what they call them?” he asked the Minotaur just as they pulled off a winding blacktop road on to a rutted treacherous-looking dirt path that cut an all-but-invisible notch out of the high kudzu-draped pines lining the side of the road. In the half-light of dawn the Minotaur didn’t even notice the opening. “Know what they call the baby mice?”

  “Unnh?”

  “Pinkies. They call the little hairless fuckers pinkies. Feed them to the little snakes.” All he had to do was convince D. W. and J. C. to let him build the cages along one wall of his bedroom.

  The dense green kudzu covered the ground at the base of the trees, climbed
the trunks, filled the branches and spread from treetop to treetop, forming an impenetrable cloak between the road and what lay beyond the trees. The Minotaur has seen much in his life, much of what men were capable of doing to each other and to the earth. Little surprises him. But when they pulled through the notch in the thick choking weeds and into the rising sun, the Minotaur was unprepared for what he saw—acres and acres of ravaged earth, hill after mud-red hill, rutted, stripped of all but the thinnest and weakest trees. Nothing green remained. The undergrowth was trampled and torn; some of the tree stumps were jagged and toothlike, others cut clean at ground level, their ringed faces like giant misshapen coins littering the landscape.

  “This field is almost finished,” A. J. said, then bragged about how they could strip ten acres in a day.

  The Minotaur spent the morning helping to steady the logs as they were lifted from the ground onto the bed of the truck, struggling with the heavy iron chain that held them in place. In the brief moments of silence, when the engines were stopped and the chain saw was cooling off, the Minotaur was aware of the absence of other sounds. No birds. No squirrels. No insects except for the incessant mosquitoes. At lunch, while the Crewses sat in the cabs of the trucks, each of them eating three cans of Vienna sausages with saltine crackers and turning the empty cans up to drink the congealed meat-flavored jelly in the bottoms, the Minotaur sat alone, eating an onion in the shade of one of the trucks. He leaned against a back tire and picked at a splinter in his palm. When the snake dropped on him from somewhere overhead his first reaction was to bite its head off. Not until his teeth were halfway through its neck did he realize the snake was made of rubber and had been dropped on him by A. J., who crouched in the back of the truck grinning, his laughter tamed a little by the Minotaur’s reaction. The Minotaur spat the rubber snake’s head out and forced a smile. He liked a practical joke as well as any man. The Minotaur did not like the pulp-wood business, though. He stayed with the Crews brothers for the rest of that week, then decided to look for kitchen work.

  The day has been interminable. The Minotaur is tired from helping David move, weary and still on edge from the rage and embarrassment he felt at the swimming pool. Day to day the Minotaur’s existence is tiresome. When he pulls his car to a stop in front of his boat-shaped mobile home and Sweeny belches at him, the Minotaur is glad to be there. It’s almost dark. Jules and Marvin have devised some sort of war game with the agitator from the old washing machine and are playing loudly around the trailers. The Minotaur can hear the solid clink of iron against iron, horseshoe against stake, sounding over the roof of the empty trailer, and the loud talk of the Crews brothers.

  As Sweeny walks up, the Minotaur hears the rapid scritch scritch of Buddy’s claws against the aluminum storm door as he tries to get out of the house, then the squeal of stretching springs as the door swings open.

  “Buddy!” Sweeny shouts. “Goddammit, Buddy! Come here, boy!”

  Sweeny, as he has dozens of times before, offers a leg to the charging bulldog, bounces on the ball of his foot until the animal leaps up and begins to hump, its jowls frothing, snorting and sucking air, eyes rolling wildly.

  “Get off me!” Sweeny says, bringing the display to its familiar halt. Buddy gives only a slight yelp in protest, then limps almost proudly beneath the back porch.

  “I love that damn dog,” Sweeny says. “Listen, M, that old Belair I picked up last week, I think the universal joint is going bad. Can you look at it one day this week? Maybe go to Bunyan’s and get a replacement?”

  The Minotaur agrees. He says good night. Inside the trailer he opens all his windows as wide as the cranks will allow so that the sounds of his neighbors’ lives will filter in.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Minotaur taught himself to sew. Years ago, too far back to remember, the Minotaur resolved to cover his nakedness, resigned himself to the continuous struggle of repair and upkeep. Robes and togas were easy to wear. Then, when fashion changed, finding pants and shoes to fit wasn’t a problem, but the breadth of his shoulders and the circumference of his bullish neck meant that shirts and coats had to be radically altered to fit him. Often it meant buying two garments and cannibalizing one for the sake of the other.

  The Minotaur is comfortable with shears, thimbles and needles. He knows all the important stitches. Sometimes the Minotaur doesn’t sleep. Sometimes the dreams are too much to face. This happens most often after a trying day, when the weight of his years and the weight of his difference seem to rest fully on the wide plane between his horns, to spread along the slope of his neck and across his muscled shoulders, to press down on the weakest and most human part of him, threatening to crush his legs. When the Minotaur can’t sleep he finds something to mend. Sometimes he sews until morning.

  Closing the trailer door, opening the windows to allow the presence of Sweeny, the Crewses and the others in Lucky-U into his night, the Minotaur knows he will not sleep. It’s hot in the trailer; the rectangular design with narrow windows placed high in metal walls resists ventilation. But the Minotaur is eager for the sounds of his neighbors, so he doesn’t turn on the fans. From a table squeezed into the space between the couch and the slender bar where the Minotaur sits to drink his morning coffee, a lamp made from a liquor bottle shaped like an anchor propped in a coil of thick rope casts more shadow than light. Even in his own home the Minotaur is most at ease in low light. In the bedroom’s darkness he undresses. He takes his shirt off, and standing by the window in the faint blue-gray wash from the street lamp that Sweeny got from a disgruntled city worker—the street lamp that stands not quite plumb just above the mimosa trees in the center island of the Lucky-U drive, its commitment to illumination sporadic at best—the Minotaur worms a fingertip through the hole in the fabric, inspecting the damage done by David’s sword. The Minotaur lays the shirt out on the bed.

  In his pants pocket he finds the list, written this morning, now crumpled. The Minotaur draws the list twice across the edge of his chest of drawers, smoothing the wrinkled paper as best he can. At the foot of the bed the Minotaur places his steel-toed shoes side by side. Naked, he is ready for the bath.

  Because the Minotaur’s horns and shoulders are broad and the tub is cramped and narrow, with a low shower head, he brings a plastic milk crate into the tub so he can sit sideways, so he isn’t forever banging his horns against the fiberglass wall. Because it was a hot day and the heat lingers in the airless trailer far into the night, the Minotaur sits under a cold shower. Because of the day, and because the Minotaur is who he is, he sits on the plastic milk crate sideways in his tub under the cold spray of water for a very long time.

  The Minotaur’s ablutions are simple and well rehearsed. He doesn’t need light to perform them. After toweling himself dry, still naked, the Minotaur sits at the edge of the tub. With a small oval currycomb held to his palm by a worn leather band, he strokes the furred bovine parts of his body. He pulls the metal teeth of the comb over the swells of muscle and ridges of bone—the skull, the long jaw, chin, dewlap, neck, shoulders—gently at first, barely rippling the dense black hair, then deeper, digging all the way to the pigmented skin. The Minotaur draws his fingertips through an open tin of conditioning oil that he buys in bulk from a veterinarian, works the soothing emollient beneath the fur and into the skin, his fingers pressing in tight perfect circles. The Minotaur’s skin, raked by the currycomb and stinging, welcomes the cooling oil. His many crevices and folds of flesh are prone to drying and cracking; the Minotaur is slow and thorough. At the place of transition where the Minotaur becomes man, beneath the breastbone where the ribs begin to drop away, he uses a medicinal balm. Over the years, despite his willingness to try new creams and curatives, the line remains tender, painful at times. The temperature of the scarlike ribbon and the flesh around it, bullish gray on one side, milky, translucent and human on the other, always seems a few degrees hotter than anywhere else on the Minotaur’s body, as if the fusion is still in process.

  The Minota
ur’s horns require special care as well. From time to time someone, either churlish or simply inquisitive, will ask, “Why don’t you just saw the damn things off?” Sometimes he wishes he could. But it’s not that simple. Like all horned ungulates the Minotaur needs his horns, no longer as weapons in his case, but rather for visual orientation. The wide-set tips loom like twin guideposts on the perimeter of his field of vision, framing his immediate world and keeping things in perspective. After a bath his horns are easier to groom. With his pocketknife he pares away the splinters on the curved shafts. He shaves and trims the cuticular skin at the base of each. Then, steadying one horn at a time with his free hand and using course-grained sandpaper in a twisting motion, he readies the horns for finishing. To complete the ritual the Minotaur employs emery cloth to polish each horn to a marble smoothness. Once every couple of months he uses a clear nail hardener, shoplifted out of shame from the cosmetics counter at the drugstore. He uses almost a whole bottle each time, and the lingering smell gives him a headache for days.

  The Minotaur finds clean pajamas folded neatly in the bottom dresser drawer. He tends to chafe in the heat, so before slipping the pajamas on he dusts his groin and backside with talcum powder. From the top drawer he pulls a shoebox small enough for a woman’s shoes, its top and edges reinforced with duct tape. The Minotaur takes the shoebox and his shirt into the kitchen and sits at the table. When he lifts the lid, the pincushion—shaped like an apple, with a thin stem and one green leaf—rests amid spools of thread, almost pulsing in its redness. He wets a white strand of thread with one rolling swipe across his fat tongue, pulls it to a point between pliant lips. The Minotaur cocks his head sharply, threads the needle on the first try, pushes the thimble on to his index finger and, with a slip stitch, begins to suture the rip in his shirt.