The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break

by Steven Sherrill

  Jack Bunyan has been hauling in junked and wrecked cars for as long as he’s owned the property. He began by lining them up behind the garage building, then on the sides and out front. Before long he was spreading out in all directions. So, while there is no intentional order to the cars, generally the farther away from the garage you go the newer the cars get.

  The Minotaur wanders, singing, through the disarray of cars, paying little heed to the direction he’s going or how far he has walked. He knows that if he just keeps walking he’ll stumble upon a suitable Belair. It is about faith.

  The first one he finds has no universal joint. In fact the entire drive train is missing. The next Belair is missing not only its drive train but the rear wheels, seats, floorboard, roof, doors and trunk as well. Only the front half of the car, faded and weathered but relatively undamaged, is there. The Minotaur takes a few minutes to climb in and sit behind the steering wheel, trying hard to imagine traveling in such a vehicle. He can’t. The concept of having nothing behind him is impossible to comprehend. The sound of an air-powered wrench ratcheting against a lug nut echoes among the rocks and the rusted hulls of the junked cars.

  After almost an hour of looking the Minotaur finds what he seeks, and because the old Chevrolet is parked with its front end lying across the engine well of another car, he won’t even have to jack it up to be able to crawl underneath.

  He sets the toolbox in the weeds by the back wheels. Using both hands he pulls and pushes at the car, making sure the balance isn’t precarious. Before crawling under the car the Minotaur looks around, finds a long stick, kneels and sweeps the undercarriage, taking special care to probe behind and over the tops of the wheels. It’s not that he is afraid of snakes. In fact the Minotaur finds something provocative in their ancient simplicity. But he would rather not be surprised.

  Satisfied that nothing is lurking underneath the car, the Minotaur walks around the outside looking through the dirty windshield. The rear glass is shattered and sunken in. A jagged hole the size of an orange defines the center of the depression. On the floorboard of the Belair a carburetor, its four round mouths bone-dry and gaping, leans against a clotted air filter.

  Aside from the occasional blacksnake coiled in tight loops under a front seat and the copperhead sunning itself on a dented trunk, the most common companions the Minotaur has in the salvage yard are wasps. This morning is no exception. In the open glove compartment a gray papery nest hangs by a thin stem, suspended over a crumpled piece of a road map, a grade-school compass still holding its broken pencil and a white porcelain knob from a faucet: HOT. Whether the dozen or so wasps clinging to the nest, wings tucked like hard coats over their pinstriped articulated bodies, somber as pallbearers but for the nervous antennae, whether they protect this treasure or are oblivious to it is hard to tell. The Minotaur intends to leave them in peace.

  Once, when the Minotaur was looking for a throw-out bearing, one of Jack’s sons came into the yard with him to help find it. Without paying attention the man stuck his hand into the grill of an old Ford, looking for the hood latch. He stuck two fingers up to the second knuckles into a busy wasp nest. By the time he pulled his hand out it was coated with stinging wasps—a vindictive glove of sorts. Undaunted by the pain and his swollen hand the man went back to the garage and came out with a Mason jar full of gasoline. The Minotaur remembers vividly how the wasps died. Jack’s son sloshed the full pint over them, dousing the nest with the amber liquid, and the insects instantly arched, coiled in on themselves, relinquished their tenacious grasp on the nest and dropped to the chrome bumper and the ground below, dead.

  The Minotaur lies on his back on the hard-packed dirt, the earth itself smelling of oil and gasoline, and reaches under the Belair with both hands. Taking care not to snag his horns he grips the undercarriage and pulls himself beneath the car, where he jiggles the universal joint, testing for sloppiness. It seems fine—not too worn, able to bear more mileage. The Minotaur gauges by sight the socket that will fit the rusted nuts holding the shaft and the joint up. When he slips the socket in place the nuts will not budge, despite the considerable leverage he applies. From his toolbox he pulls a can of Liquid Wrench, made to eat away stubborn binding rust, and sprays the area well. In the distance the Minotaur hears a gearbox whine and struggle. The Chariot of Jesus must be leaving.

  While the Liquid Wrench works at dissolving years of oxidization, the Minotaur sits in the backseat of the Belair with the door open. He hums a little. He scratches. He lets his big bull’s head rest against the seat back and breathes in the stale musty air. Overhead two clearly defined footprints, pressed into and staining the headliner, flank the cracked interior light in the center of the roof. The right foot is missing its little toe. The Minotaur closes the door, and a momentary shiver stirs the wasps on their nest. He fingers the hinged lid of the ashtray in the door handle; it overflows with cigarette butts and will not close completely. Business cards scattered over the floorboard advertise the services of a bail bondsman.

  Into the Minotaur’s life there come occasional moments of clarity, moments, unpredictable and painfully brief, that arrive at times as a thunderclap and at others as sweetly as a yawn, moments when everything seems understandable, when the whole of his past makes sense to him, his present seems within his control and his future pops and sizzles with a wild dangerous hope. These moments are rare, and their aftermath lies somewhere between excitement and sheer terror.

  Sitting in the backseat of the old Chevrolet Belair deep within Bunyan’s Salvage, waiting for the rust to dissolve, a sudden and profound silence comes upon the Minotaur, a fragment of time in which the crows and jays close their beaks and hush their bickering. The wind rattles nothing. The wasps cease their shuffling. Everything living or inanimate and capable of sound refuses the charge. The Minotaur spooks, bristles with his most animal instinct. The hairs on the back of his neck rise. His purple scar grows suddenly raw. There is a quickening in his heart, and deeper, in his belly, some ancient knot tightens upon itself.

  Then the thunder of hooves on packed earth. Squeal and snort and the gnashing of tusks. Jack Bunyan’s wild pigs are running through the junkyard. The stampede is raucous, comes from behind the car. The pigs’ eyes roll madly; their mouths are flecked with fear. The herd is wide and without direction. As the porcine surge passes on both sides of the car and floods his field of vision, the Minotaur clings to the backseat door handle. The smells of dirt and swamp water fill the car. The Minotaur can almost feel the coarse and matted hides rub against him through the doors. It’s not the pigs that the Minotaur fears. Among animals he walks with human confidence, instills a little fear himself. But these pigs move in the company of something more complicated. Within seconds they are gone.

  In that instant before terror subsides, in pursuit of and closing in on the pigs, there comes another hoofed creature. The Minotaur smells it first; the stink of the rut, the stench of familiarity, clots in his throat. Wheezing breath, the clatter of hooves—two hooves—across the trunk of the car, over the roof and onto the hood. Because of the glare from the sun and the clouds of dust stirred by the pigs the Minotaur cannot see clearly. Because the creature pauses only long enough to look through the windshield at the Minotaur in the backseat, to furrow its brow and grunt, either scowling or grinning, then spit between its teeth before leaping to the ground and disappearing in the direction of the pigs, its testicles the size of hen eggs hanging low in their stretched wattlelike sack, nearly dragging the ground—because of the abbreviated nature of the encounter the Minotaur cannot be certain what it was. But he suddenly feels the weight of his five thousand years pressing down upon him. A horrible kinship. A fetid lineage.

  The Minotaur sits for a while in the backseat, thinking about what happened. Then, cautiously, he gets out of the car. Lying beneath it the Minotaur thinks he can feel minute vibrations in the earth as the pigs’ hooves strike the ground somewhere in the distance, and the subtler but far more resounding hoof
beats of their single pursuer.

  The Liquid Wrench has done its work, and he is able to remove the universal joint with manageable difficulty. He carries his toolbox in one hand and the part in the other and walks back to the garage. After laying the part on a section of newspaper, spread out to protect the carpet in the back of the Vega, he looks for Jack or one of the others to pay for what he has taken. They’re all standing out behind the garage. The hot lead and the ground from the Hobart welder are stretched out from inside and lie at their feet. A welder’s mask, gray and bulbous, its dark lens opaque but for the most insistent light, is perched high on the head of one of the men. His hands are sheathed in leather gloves, the fingers black and rigid.

  The men stand around a pair of dog irons, three-footed metal stands meant to hold logs in a fireplace; they are crafted from old crankshafts. The Minotaur gathers from their conversation that they intend to sell the dog irons at the flea market out on the highway. No one mentions the pigs or the stampede. As the Minotaur pulls away from the building he hears the Hobart’s diesel engine throttle up; in the rear view mirror he sees the arc struck, the brilliant white light bringing hard resistant edges together.

  A mile and a half, maybe less, from the gate of Bunyan’s Salvage, the Minotaur rounds a curve. Thinking still about what happened in the Belair he is unprepared for the vision before him. Strewn along the pothole-filled road, a dozen or so wild pigs lie dead or dying on the hot asphalt. The Minotaur can hear their squeals. The smell of burned rubber lingers in the air. A little farther along and off to one side, the rear end of The True Light Baptist Church Chariot of Jesus juts awkwardly from the high weeds and brush lining the road, its back door thrown wide. The front end of the Chariot of Jesus has sunk up to the quarter panels into Bunyan’s Slough. Just past the bus he sees old Christians milling about in the road, their mouths gaping in disbelief. Disbelief is his assumption. He counts at least three of the Baptists carrying their own oxygen bottles. Deacon Hinky kneels by the side ditch, as if he is trying to pray the bus out of the swamp. The Minotaur slows his car but does not stop.

  CHAPTER 12

  Grub is bringing his family in for dinner. He calls ahead and asks for popcorn shrimp to be on the special list. Popcorn shrimp—bay shrimp, tiny, pink and fetal, dredged in cornmeal breading, deep-fried and served with hushpuppies—always sell. The FryDaddy is in the Minotaur’s station, so it means a busy night. Hernando is making hushpuppy batter. Cecie seems caught up with her salad bar prep work, so the Minotaur asks if she’ll chop some pickles and onions for the tartar sauce.

  “I’ll chop your pickles anytime, big boy.”

  He gives her a halfhearted wink and lines up three yellow onions in front of the Buffalo chopper. Cecie has them peeled and quartered by the time he gets back with a jar of dill pickles. The Minotaur takes one of the thick onion wedges into his mouth, crushes it between his teeth. He loves the Janus-like quality of the onion: the cool translucent flesh that belies the burn of its juices. He purses his lips as best he can, as if to kiss Cecie, and she snaps him with a wet dishtowel. It’s early. The wait staff isn’t there yet.

  “How about some slaw, M?” Hernando asks.

  “Mmmn.”

  “Your recipe.” Hernando kisses his fingertips. “Qué bueno.”

  The Minotaur takes a couple heads of cabbage from the cooler, makes quick work of shredding them. In a wide stainless-steel bowl he dresses the slaw copiously with mayonnaise, then with cider vinegar to cut the heavy mayonnaise, then a palm full of sugar to counter the vinegar. The Minotaur finishes the slaw with salt, pepper, some dried scallions and a can of stewed tomatoes drained and chopped. Stirred in, the bits of tomato tend to rise to the top, like vibrant little hearts swimming in the viscous dressing. Hernando agrees that they may as well fry up some shrimp for the employee meal.

  A clipboard hangs on the wall in the wait station by the intercom. It’s where the staff keeps a running tally of the desserts throughout the shift, so that everyone knows how many orders of each item are left. There is also a list, compiled by the wait staff, of stock items that are running low: sugar packets, lemon skirts, Worcestershire sauce, other condiments, cleaning supplies. The Minotaur regularly checks the list against the supplies because the waiters and waitresses usually forget to update it, and if something runs out it’s the kitchen that catches the flak from Grub. Today the only item on the list is coffee filters, but the Minotaur knows that there is just one box of doilies left. Since he is standing at the clipboard the Minotaur takes the time to flip back a few pages to the wait staff work schedule. Jenna’s name had been written in for this evening. Jenna has worked three nights a week at Grub’s for eight years. During the day she teaches pottery at the high school. Seven years ago, at his company picnic, her new husband won second place in the chin-up contest, then walked out into the muddy man-made lake and drowned. Jenna always smells like clay. A few lines down on the chart Adrienne’s name has been furiously crossed out and replaced by Kelly’s. David hates it when they switch shifts without asking him, but the Minotaur is glad for the change.

  “You ready, M?” Hernando asks.

  “Mmmn,” the Minotaur answers, then sets up his breading station. An empty trash can is about the right height and fits in the space between the FryDaddy and the grill. He puts a sheet pan on top of it and arranges the shallow containers of flour, egg wash and cornmeal breadcrumb mixture in order of use. It’s four-fifteen, and he can hear talking out in the wait station and the buzz and hiss of the tea machine brewing.

  JoeJoe has crawled atop the double-stacked convection ovens so that he can reach the screen filters of the ventilation hoods that span the length of the cooking equipment, hanging low. JoeJoe hands a greasy filter to the Minotaur, who stacks it by the dish machine.

  “Somebody ought to fast-forward to the fuck scenes,” JoeJoe says, handing the Minotaur another filter. The Minotaur smiles. JoeJoe stands the filters upright in the plastic dish racks, three per, and runs them through the machine twice before putting them back in the hood. JoeJoe has done this once a week for the past five years.

  “Let’s go for a smoke, M,” JoeJoe says, pushing the levered door of the dish machine up. Oily steam billows around him. The Minotaur looks his station over. He checks with Hernando, then follows JoeJoe outside. They sit and smoke.

  A lemon box, empty but for three or four rotting fruits turning green in the bottom, sits on the dock, to be discarded later. JoeJoe reaches into the box, selects the least rotten lemon. He jumps from the dock to the pavement, winds up and throws the lemon over the trees toward the highway. They both doubt that it reaches, but neither of them hears it land. If the Minotaur were more articulate he would ask JoeJoe if he has ever seen The True Light Baptist Church Chariot of Jesus riding through town. It’s not something you would forget. If the Minotaur had confidence in his narrative abilities he would tell JoeJoe the story of Deacon Hinky and the swamp. JoeJoe would appreciate it. But even if the Minotaur were a skilled and practiced orator he would keep to himself the encounter he had in the backseat of the Belair, deep in the heart of Bunyan’s Salvage. He would not speak of the randy creature that glared at him through the dirty windshield, the hoof and snort of his kinsman.

  “Gonna get me some poon tonight, M,” JoeJoe says.

  The Minotaur finds a small stick—as he has done countless times—and begins to trace the tread patterns on the soles of his shoes, scraping out the inevitable bits of gristle, pieces of vegetables, dirt and other matter that collects there, as JoeJoe tells in explicit detail what he plans to do and with whom. The Minotaur listens only closely enough to know when to nod or give some utterance in response.

  “A Russian chick with a skinny ass, and you know what they like.”

  The Minotaur nods as if he actually does know. Whether or not JoeJoe’s tales of conquest are true doesn’t matter to him. He’s not bothered by what would be patently offensive to most. The Minotaur has always felt excluded from the allegianc
e of men, and this repartee, however coarse and one sided, approximates in his mind what he thinks he is missing.

  From time to time the Minotaur tries to fit in. Last summer a guy named Gene waited tables for a while at Grub’s. He was there when the Minotaur started. Gene, who had an easy grin and curly yellow hair, regularly claimed to be “born again,” but when he wasn’t handing out religious tracts with childlike line drawings of suffering nonbelievers, he was trying to sell the porn videos he kept in the trunk of his car. The Minotaur never fully understood what Gene meant by born again, but all the guys at Grub’s seemed to like him. One Tuesday night shortly after the Minotaur got the job, business was slow, and Grub let David close an hour early. Hernando had already left. Gene and Mike were the only waiters still there. The Minotaur was covering the pans of rice, vegetables and crepes imperial filling with plastic wrap when he heard the mechanical thunk of the time clock and saw, on the periphery, the door from the wait station swing open.

  “Party at my house, guys. Wanna come?” Gene said.

  Cecie ignored him, but JoeJoe was eager and with some difficulty convinced the Minotaur to give him a ride. The party was Gene, Mike, JoeJoe, the Minotaur and two other men he didn’t know. The Minotaur sat in a ladder-back chair between JoeJoe and one of the other men. He had to pass the bottles of Mogen David and the marijuana back and forth, even though he used neither. A bag of generic potato chips made its way around. They sat in a half circle in Gene’s stark cramped living room, a wide picture window devoid of curtains or blinds gaping into the night behind them; they sat leaning forward before the console television, the biggest thing in the room. On the screen grainy images provoked, alternately, rapt silence and affected enthusiasm. The Minotaur remembers one woman and two men. They took turns, the men, one inserting ping-pong balls into the woman’s vagina while the other knelt, impossibly far away, across the room. She lay on her back, knees bent, feet flat and legs wide apart. Each time the man pushed a ball inside of her the woman hoisted her bottom from the floor, took aim and ejected the white ball in a high slow arc into the waiting mouth of the second man some ten feet away. Then the men traded places. The Minotaur remembers this going on for a long time. Each time Gene and the other guys laughed or cheered for the woman on the television screen, the Minotaur tried to do the same, but he always missed the beat and was still trying to laugh after everyone else had stopped. Each time the room quieted in anticipation or envy or emptiness, the Minotaur searched inside himself for the same. The Minotaur remembers somebody wanting to “fast forward to the fuck scenes.” But Gene held tight to the remote control, and the line became a standing joke among them at Grub’s. He remembers somebody asking Gene about being born again. Gene said that, like everybody else, he was a situational heathen. A month later Grub fired Gene. He had come to work with a cardboard box full of bootleg copies of a video in which he claimed Jenna had a small role. “Nekkid,” he said. “Hot, nekkid and wide open.” Two months later Gene was in the minimum-security prison out on the county road. Sometimes Mike or JoeJoe or one of the other guys would ride by and blow his car horn at the prisoners milling around in the yard. In the Minotaur’s mind the allegiance of men is pathetic. Is terrifying. Is seductive. Is unattainable.