The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break

by Steven Sherrill

  The realization nauseates him not because his horn has never been wetted with blood before, even the blood of those he loves. In fact it is precisely that his horns have wreaked havoc on flesh so many times throughout his life that causes the Minotaur gastric stress. The Minotaur does not bear guilt simply because it would be impossible to carry the burden that is certain to accrue over the span of such a long life, even if that life belonged to someone less monstrous. He exists, day to day, year to year, century to century, in a state of indifference, sometimes blessed, sometimes cursed. What makes the Minotaur’s stomach seize is that over the years he has come to recognize cycles within his life. The Minotaur moves from place to place and time to time. He settles in, tries to be as innocuous as possible for someone with the body of a man and the head of a bull. And for a while there is stasis. A decade. Two. Sometimes a half-century. He cooks, he takes care of his body, he minds his business and tries not to mind the business of others. But then things begin to go wrong. More often than not someone gets hurt, and the Minotaur has to move again. He dreads the coming evening, the dinner at Grub’s.

  The Minotaur has lain in bed later than usual this morning. Cars pass at irregular intervals out on the road, people going about the business of their lives. It’s almost eight o’clock. Mrs. Smith’s television is on, and someone is winning big. As soon as he swings his feet off the bed and sits up the blood surges to his wound, pounds at the pinkish watery dome of flesh that begins at his instep and sweeps up across his knobby talus. The Minotaur winces and stands.

  Through the window the Minotaur watches Sweeny step out of his back door carrying some table scraps in a pie pan for the dog. Buddy comes from beneath the deck, stretches and follows Sweeny into the dog run. As the Minotaur sits on the toilet, unwrapping the gauze from his foot, he hears Sweeny close the gate, then get in his car and drive away. He uses soap and warm water to clean the blood from his horn; he hopes Hernando is okay. The Minotaur limps into his kitchen to make coffee, hoping that the bitter brew will overcome the taste of bile in his mouth.

  “Marvin!” Josie screams. “You want eggs or Cocoa Puffs?”

  Marvin wants eggs and Cocoa Puffs. The Minotaur sits with his coffee and watches the boys play. They have retrieved several beer cans from the wading pool, a green turtle-shaped thing full of beer cans in their backyard. After filling them with sand the boys take turns throwing the cans against the big pine trees at the edge of the driveway. It’s a game, but the Minotaur can’t tell who’s winning because Marvin and Jules get equally excited by the cans that survive being slammed against a tree and the ones that rupture on impact and send a spray of sand into the air. Buddy the bulldog runs back and forth in his pen barking at each thrown can, working himself into a fevered pitch.

  The coffee doesn’t settle the Minotaur’s stomach. From the refrigerator he takes an open box of baking soda, stirs a heaping teaspoonful into a half glass of tap water and chugs it. The Minotaur belches through closed lips. A few minutes later Josie comes on to the porch with a spatula clutched in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt, thin and white, that says I’m With Stoopid in ironed-on red letters and has an arrow pointing to the right. The T-shirt hangs to just below Josie’s crotch. The Minotaur convinces himself that it’s all she’s wearing. He shifts in his seat.

  “Eggs is about ready, boys,” she says, waving the spatula in the air. The Minotaur watches bits of yellow egg fall around her feet. Josie doesn’t wait for Marvin and Jules to respond. Because the Minotaur is watching the outline of Josie’s body move under the fabric as she turns on the porch and walks back into her trailer, he doesn’t see exactly what happens next. By the time he looks again Jules and Marvin have stopped their throwing game and left bent and torn aluminum cans scattered all over the yard and driveway.

  It’s not uncommon, on this straight downhill stretch of road defined by curves at both ends, in this hot fly-bitten part of the world, during this time of year, in this particular decade, to hear the pop and rattling sputter of a truck or car decelerating as it nears one curve or the other, the rapid-fire thrrrraapppt thrrrraapppt thrrrraapppt thrrrraapppt thrrrraapppt of a combustion engine decompressing, of spent energy pounding its way down the pipes. It’s a sound the Minotaur enjoys, more or less, a sound he doesn’t usually associate with apprehension.

  “Goddammit, Jules! Get away from that dog!” Josie shouts, but it’s too late.

  Jules clings lizardlike to the dog run’s chain-link gate while Marvin swings it back and forth. All the Minotaur can see of Buddy is his piebald behind rounding the corner of Sweeny’s house.

  Sweeny is a good man, willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, not at all prone to fits of rage or irrational actions. But Sweeny loves that dog.

  Time, however abstract the concept, has its own inherent sense of the absurd. The passing of a moment, its coming and going in one’s life, holds infinite possibilities. It can be as brief and meaningless as the firing of a single synapse that starts the involuntary twitch of an upper lip. Or it can contain the decimation of whole worlds. The Minotaur cannot entirely follow what happens next. It seems that some glitch in the interaction between time and space has rendered the Minotaur, Josie, Marvin, Jules and everything for miles around Lucky-U Mobile Estates immovable but aware. Everything, that is, except for Buddy and the souped-up Ford Pinto squealing around the curve at the top of the hill.

  It comes first as sound. Neither the Minotaur nor Josie nor the boys can see the car, but everyone stops dead in their tracks and listens to its approach. Everyone and everything freezes, is unable to move. The Minotaur knows the Pinto by its sound, knows it belongs to a neighbor’s son who seems to do little else with his time but modify the four-cylinder engine and drive train and test-drive the car up and down the stretch of road in front of Sweeny’s house. So when the unseen driver throttles the unseen car, its wide rubber slicks barking against the pavement, its throaty intake manifold sucking air directly through a hole cut in the hood, sucking it deep into a cavernous four-barrel carburetor, where it generates a fury that manifests itself in pistons, valves, cams and camshafts, clutch and gears, the Minotaur has a picture in his mind. Enter the piebald bulldog into the picture.

  Buddy at full tilt is a ridiculous sight. He’s crossing the yard at an angle, heading toward the road. Buddy’s short parentheses-shaped limbs swing wildly and seem independent of one another. Despite this fact the dog makes determined progress over the gravel driveway, through the Johnson grass, down into and up out of the side ditch. By the time he reaches the crumbling edge of the asphalt the Pinto is in sight, and everyone witnessing the event knows with unshakable certainty that the two moving bodies will intersect.

  They do.

  Simultaneously Mrs. Smith drops something inside her trailer and wails; through the window the Minotaur bellows at the top of his lungs; Josie, on her porch, grimaces and so desperately holds back a scream that she farts loudly; the boys, Marvin and Jules, usually overcome by uncontrollable laughter at even the most innocuous instance of parental gas, can only cry where they stand. Buddy doesn’t make a sound. Not the impact of his body low on the Pinto’s front quarter panel near the bumper, where metal-flake orange flames sprout and begin to weave back to the door. Not his abbreviated but gymnastically impressive flight through the dewy morning air. Not his bouncing halt, belly up. There is no bark, no yelp, no noise at all. In death Buddy looks bemused.

  Only after Buddy lies still at the edge of the road do the inhabitants of Lucky-U reanimate, released from their stasis. Forgetting his wound the Minotaur rushes barefoot into the yard. Once there he’s not sure what to do, so he just stands looking. Marvin and Jules crawl under their front porch and huddle together, whimpering. Mrs. Smith turns the volume way up. Josie tries to light a cigarette, but her hands shake too much.

  The Minotaur limps up, steps onto her porch, realizes he is shirtless and tries nonchalantly folding his arms across his chest. Josi
e looks at the dead dog. The Minotaur smells eggs burning in the pan, and the remnants of Josie’s fart. Something about the crisis makes him think to kiss her, but he doesn’t dare. He looks down at his feet jutting from the faded pajamas. His injured foot throbs. The blister has ruptured. Already the flies swarm at the pinkish liquid pooling beside his foot.

  “Unng,” the Minotaur says.

  “Unnhuuh,” Josie replies.

  CHAPTER 14

  Buddy lies dead by the side of the road. The hot rod Pinto doesn’t stop, and in its wake a pall is cast over Lucky-U Mobile Estates. In the sky the sun fades, its brilliance diminished. The unfortunate birds within the boundaries of the trailer park grow lethargic and mute; those flying over struggle mightily until they break through on the other side. All the colors, painted or natural, even the green of the leaves and grasses, seem duller. Josie and the Minotaur stand looking out at the road and the dog’s carcass. They stand in silence, the Minotaur shifting in place to keep the slow-moving flies from biting. Josie smokes eagerly, desperately, not letting a single breath into her lungs without its first passing through the smoldering tobacco and tight cotton filter of the cigarette clamped between her lips. The spatula, still clutched in her hand, hangs at the end of a limp arm and rests against her thigh; a drop of grease the color of corn trickles down the swell of muscle. The boys, huddled and whimpering, visible in the narrow sunlit strips between the planks, refuse to come out from under the porch.

  The Minotaur sweats when he is nervous, particularly his groin and the hirsute channel between his buttocks. It’s a problem that has plagued him since he began wearing clothes. He tends to gall. The Minotaur is embarrassed by the frequency with which he buys medicated powders, sometimes passing up the nearest stores for fear of being recognized. Standing there on the porch with Josie in her too-thin I’m With Stoopid shirt, the day after goring his friend and coworker, having just witnessed Buddy’s untimely demise, sweat beading inside his pajama bottoms, welling up and trickling down the delicate skin of the insides of his thighs in fiery stinging rivulets, the Minotaur remembers that he didn’t bathe last night.

  By this time the sound of the eggs burning in the pan is almost electric. The sizzle nearly fills the unnatural silence accompanying Josie’s and the Minotaur’s mutual disbelief. His stomach growls, rolls over, and the wet audible belch that follows carries with it the taste of baking soda and coffee. The Minotaur widens his stance just a little, hoping to lessen the burn of the heat rash. Josie, too, shifts her weight. The Minotaur can’t help noticing how her buttocks grow taut beneath the fabric, lifting it slightly, clinching. But the sound of her flatulence will not be so easily contained. After a while, in the absence of words, the sounds of the functioning of the two anxious bodies become painful. Josie, without saying anything, goes back inside.

  The Minotaur stands there alone for a few minutes more, then begins a slow bowlegged limp back to his own trailer. Exactly why they leave Buddy lying in the ditch the Minotaur can’t say. It isn’t a decision per se, arrived at or settled upon. In fact, throughout the morning, as the Minotaur goes about his business, washing the briki, cleaning himself and bandaging his wound, as they wait for Sweeny to come home, he occasionally looks out the window and thinks about moving the animal, moving him into the yard under a shade tree or wrapping him in a blanket to lie in state on Sweeny’s back porch or anywhere out of sight. But as the day passes, minute by minute and hour by hour, it gets harder to take action.

  The Minotaur feels the herd mentality settling in. Even though Mrs. Smith never leaves her trailer, and though neither Josie nor the Minotaur speaks a word about the accident, he knows that they all are hurtling toward denial. It is the path of least resistance. If they pretend hard enough that he wasn’t killed beneath a speeding car, maybe Buddy will resurrect. Perhaps he’ll come swaggering around the corner of the house with a white dove perched on his shoulder, making proclamations about truth and the afterlife.

  Hank comes home. He stops the van in the middle of the road and hangs out the window to look at the dead dog. He stomps on the parking brake, and the sound echoes through the trailer park. Hank leaves the door standing open, the van dangerously close to the centerline. The lever-and-cam, pulley-and-hinge quality of Hank’s exercised body is apparent even clothed in the filthy teal jumpsuit. He approaches Buddy cautiously, and even from his window the Minotaur can sense the domed muscles of Hank’s shoulders and arms and the long muscles of his legs. Hank nudges the dead dog with his toe. He gets back into the van.

  Whether there are telltale signs or not, Hank must know that Jules and Marvin had a role in whatever happened because he’s yelling even before the van rolls to a stop on the bare patch of dirt in front of their trailer.

  “Josie!”

  “Marvin!”

  “Jules!”

  Josie comes from inside, having tucked the tail of her shirt into a pair of lavender corduroy shorts cut on both sides up to the waistband. Marvin appears from the far side of the porch, and Jules struggles up out of the thin opening between two steps. Like good soldiers falling in for inspection they line up. Despite leaning closer to his open window the Minotaur can’t make sense of what Hank says, but the tone is clear in his gesticulation. Within moments Jules and Marvin are pointing at each other. Josie adds nothing to the conversation. She stays on the porch when Hank herds the boys inside. The Minotaur knows the sound of a belt against flesh.

  Half an hour later, after the boys have stopped crying, the Minotaur sits at the kitchen table cleaning the grease from his shoes and watching Hank throw the heavy barbell up and down and up and down and up. The Minotaur is a little dizzy from the fumes rising from the squat round tin of black shoe polish open on the table. Using an old toothbrush dipped in degreaser he scrubs the seams where the thick rubber soles are stitched to the uppers. The Minotaur cocks his head, snout up, seeking less noxious air. Through the window he sees Hank walking toward him, chest bare, the shirt half of the jumpsuit stripped off and bunched at the elastic waistband. Chest bare and slick with sweat, Hank comes hesitantly.

  With each step Hank slows his approach, until he stops in the middle of the drive in front of the boat-shaped trailer. Rocking on the balls of his feet he looks first at the Minotaur’s front door, then at Buddy lying stiff legged, already beginning to bloat in the afternoon sun, beside the road. Again he looks back and forth, unable to make a decision.

  The Minotaur continues cleaning his shoes. Hank turns and walks away.

  It’s three o’clock and Sweeny hasn’t come home. Abandoned is any idea of moving the dead pet for fear of being caught in the act. In a few hours the Minotaur is supposed to be at Grub’s house for dinner. He spends the time polishing the steel-toed shoes to an absurd shine and going through his closet, as if by looking again and again at the several pairs of hound’s tooth work pants, two pairs of blue jeans, half a dozen chef’s coats and three radically altered and undeniably frayed oxford shirts, he will come upon some combination of clothing that won’t embarrass him.

  There is still no sign of Sweeny at five-thirty. When the Minotaur drives out of Lucky-U Mobile Estates—wearing clean but faded denim pants, well-shined shoes and a cream-colored button-down shirt with permanent, however faint, sweat stains in the armpits, a shirt that will not button around his massive neck—he averts his eyes to avoid the dog.

  The Minotaur is already imagining the flush of shame he’ll feel at Grub’s front door. Grub wants to have a little talk. That was his exact word. The Minotaur is afraid of the outcome. Over the years the Minotaur has learned some things about social protocol. He knows not to show up as a dinner guest without some small gift for the hostess or a contribution to the meal. On the way to Grub’s he stops at the MiniMart for a bag of assorted donut holes.

  Rachel, Grub’s wife, answers the door.

  “Hey, M,” she says. “Good to see you again. How’s your foot?”

  Rachel, her voice like clover honey trickling over apple
s, maternal Rachel with the body of a woman, full and settled into living, Rachel with translucent, pale, ocher skin and ink-black hair, Rachel in purple batik and wooden clogs—Rachel stands in sharp contrast to Grub, a sweet but genuinely unattractive man.

  “Umm.”

  She reaches to shake the Minotaur’s hand and seems about to lean forward to kiss him but doesn’t really know where on that long expanse of jowl to place her lips, so she stops. Between trying to decide whether to offer his own hand and positioning his head in case she does kiss him, the Minotaur gets confused and drops the bag of donut holes. Fortunately it doesn’t rupture.

  “Let me take those,” Rachel says. “Thank you so much for bringing them. Come on in. Grub is in the den.”

  The Minotaur limps behind her. He has been to the house before, but not inside. However, nothing about the sixties split-level surprises him—not the concrete duck wearing a plaid raincoat in the foyer, not the sunken living room and the wall covered in photographs, a framed, matted, specious documentary of the family’s lives, not the sign with the neon lips and tongue flashing EAT EAT EAT over the kitchen door, not even the elaborate ant farm sprawling over the coffee table, three plastic dwellings thin as paperback novels but tall and wide, full of white sand, a labyrinthine path weaving through each, all interconnected by clear snaking tubes. None of this surprises the Minotaur. It is a house inhabited by children; the Minotaur would know it even if he hadn’t met Rick and Raylene, both in that vague place between seven and ten years old. He’s seen pictures of the little one, Roger, four years old and the spitting image of Grub.