This time the lit match finds its target. There is more sound than light, a resonating breathy whoooom, as if, rather than being propelled outward, all sound is sucked into the explosion, is consumed in the flames along with the dried flesh and viscera, the fur and bones of the dead piebald bulldog. The blast knocks Sweeny back to where he first stood and takes his eyebrows as a toll. Other than that he is unharmed. Sweeny watches until he is sure the fire is well fueled, then picks up the gas can and starts toward the house.
The Minotaur busies himself in the engine compartment of the VW bus when he sees that Sweeny is walking his way.
“Unnh,” he says when Sweeny walks up.
Sweeny stands for a while without responding. “Them damn hippie wagons always need some kind of work, don’t they?” he finally says.
“Mmmm,” the Minotaur answers, leaning in and squinting to adjust the jets of the carburetor.
“Hurt your foot?” Sweeny asks.
“Mmm.”
“Listen, M,” Sweeny says. “Couple days, I want you to take a ride with me. Got a deal on something and I need to pick it up. I want you to check it over for me.”
The Minotaur agrees. Sweeny watches him work for a few minutes. He kicks around in the grass and finds a quarter-inch socket the Minotaur missed.
“Thanks,” the Minotaur says.
“He was a damn sight,” Sweeny says.
“Unnh?”
“That dog.”
“Mmm.”
Sweeny goes back into his house. The smell of burning carrion fills Lucky-U Mobile Estates. Out by the road a black tongue of smoke licks at the sky.
CHAPTER 19
I want to licksniff kellys big hairy asspussyhole—the Minotaur sees it as soon as he sits. It is written upside down but plain as day in red ink just above the baseboard in the employee toilet. Little more than a closet between the kitchen and the main wait station, barely wide enough to accommodate the Minotaur’s horns, the employee bathroom is designated for use by everyone who works at Grub’s but in reality is used mostly by the busboys and the kitchen crew; unless there is a party booked Grub pretends not to notice when the waiters and waitresses go up the back stairs to the rest rooms serving the windowless banquet room overhead. Who can blame them? Even for the least fastidious among the employees of Grub’s Rib the hot, cramped, smelly bathroom is unpleasant.
The Minotaur spits on the corner of a towel and rubs unsuccessfully at the graffiti with his fingertip. The ink doesn’t even smudge. There are dozens of the red pens throughout the kitchen and wait station. Hernando uses them to label things in the freezer. Cecie dates containers of cut vegetables and cheeses for the salad bar. The waiters and waitresses keep the pens around for their own reasons.
The ink is indelible; the message is permanent. It makes the Minotaur angry, inordinately so, for he is not above any of the layers of implication surrounding the obscenity: desire, impulse, action, juvenile prurience, etc. Nevertheless the message makes him angry, and anger chokes his bowels.
“Unnh,” he grunts, then stands and reties his apron strings.
The wire brush that he seeks has fallen behind the grill, and by the time the Minotaur gets back to the bathroom Maynard, a sullen teen with horrible acne and a profile very like a chicken’s—a boy hired just yesterday to take over the salad bar when Cecie moves up to the hot line—is going into the bathroom with an unlit cigarette pinched between his beaky lips.
“Outside!” the Minotaur says, and pushes past.
Maynard, of course, doesn’t argue.
The Minotaur closes the door behind him and kneels. A few swipes with the wire bristles and the obscene message is completely gone, along with a six-inch strip of paint. The act diminishes the Minotaur’s anger. He is fortunate in that way.
Coming out of the bathroom with the brush held truncheon-like he meets David. David, whom the Minotaur hasn’t seen since that night. David, whose pasty face cannot hide a blush, whose awkwardness and embarrassment are acute.
“Hey, M,” David says, a little too loudly for the circumstances. The ballpoint pen in his fingers leaves a blue thread of ink down the wall.
“Hmm,” the Minotaur answers, the manifestations of his own guilt—guilt more about being caught with the brush in an act of anger than about anything else—obscured by the dark fur covering his face.
David starts to back out of the narrow hallway so the Minotaur and his horns can get by. Walking backward without paying attention, he doesn’t see the laundry hamper overstuffed with stained uniforms and souring towels until his foot tangles in the neck loop of an apron that hangs from a split in the cloth bag, and he falls onto his seat on the floor. The Minotaur puts the wire brush handle into his back pocket and extends his hand to help David up, and David, avoiding eye contact, reaches up tentatively.
The instant their hands touch, the Minotaur knows that it is possible for he and David to never talk about the night in the apartment. Even after thousands of years the human capacity for avoidance, the ability to so completely cloak a moment in denial or shame or fear, to wrap it so tightly inside as to render it fictive, is confounding to the Minotaur. Time after time he has learned that it is quite possible to share the most intimate or horrific of experiences and the very next day have it denied outright. He knows that David will never mention what happened. He knows, too, that it doesn’t mean for certain that they will not spend another night together sometime in the future. Such is the way of human interaction. But for now, a precarious period of time—things said or done, unsaid or not done—will shape how their relationship plays out. Doors open and close in the house of ethos with a rhyme and reason all their own. Ultimately the Minotaur will allow David to decide what happens.
“Thanks,” David says, brushing off the seat of his pants. He struggles to make light of the situation. “I wondered where that apron went.”
The Minotaur works up a smile but doesn’t speak. David doesn’t know about the motorcyclist the Minotaur saw that morning. The Minotaur isn’t sure that it matters—hopes it doesn’t.
“Are you ready?” David asks.
Grub borrowed a pickup truck from one of the waiters the day before yesterday and went to a restaurant supply warehouse to buy the beef cart; he has everything ready for the Minotaur to make his debut in the dining room. It’s early afternoon, not quite three o’clock, and Grub wants to explain the setup and do a run-through.
“Mmn,” the Minotaur says. He doesn’t mention the graffiti to David. He doesn’t mention his apprehensions about the coming night. The Minotaur goes behind the line to make sure Cecie and JoeJoe know what prep work they’re supposed to be doing.
“Hey, M,” Grub says, coming in from the dining room. “Do you know where Hernando keeps the carving knife?”
“Mmm,” the Minotaur answers. From a low shelf beneath the steam table he pulls a flimsy red toolbox. A brass padlock hangs open on the bent clasp. All the good knives Hernando keeps here. Inside just under the lid is a shallow plastic tray that holds the small tools of the trade: the meat thermometer, its round eye marking increments from zero to two hundred and twenty degrees, several new vegetable peelers, a zester, paring knives, decorative tips for the pastry bags. The eighteen-inch serrated blade of the carving knife will fit in the toolbox only standing diagonally on edge. Hernando keeps it, along with the chef’s knife, in a plastic sleeve to protect their edges. The fish knife, especially flexible for following the curvature of fragile ribs, has its own leather sheath. A whetstone lies gray and oily at the bottom of the toolbox.
“Hhun,” the Minotaur says, turning the long knife handle-first to Grub.
“You hang on to it,” Grub says. “Bring it when you come out. And the sharpening steel, too.”
Before the Minotaur can say anything else the back door of the kitchen opens. He sees first one rubber-tipped crutch, then another, before Hernando, dressed in his hound’s-tooth work pants and chef’s coat, comes into full view.
“Qué
pasa, guys?” Hernando asks, his tripodal movement through the kitchen remarkably fluid.
“Yo.”
“What’s up, hombre?”
“Hernando! Como estás, my man?” Grub asks.
“I’m okay,” Hernando says.
The Minotaur nods, somewhat apologetic, and gives Hernando plenty of leeway.
“Hey, M,” Hernando says. “I hear you’re the star of the show tonight.”
“Hmm,” the Minotaur says, and rolls his big black eyes.
“You’ll do fine.”
They talk some more, Hernando and the Minotaur, until it is clear to them both that there are no hard feelings. Hernando asks about the Minotaur’s foot. David brings a stool from the bar and leaves it at the end of the hot line for Hernando, who plans to stick around until the rush is over, doing little but overseeing and making sure that JoeJoe and Cecie can handle their new stations.
Thinking it would be a good idea to promote the new table-side beef carver, Grub ran an ad in the newspaper and bought thirty-second spots during both the gospel hour and the broadcast of a high-school baseball game on a local radio station.
“Grub’s Rib. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to prime rib heaven.”
Despite Grub’s nervous and overly emphatic on-air delivery, by six o’clock this first night, his idea for advertising has proven to be a good call. The restaurant is packed, and there is a twenty-minute wait already.
“You look good, M,” Jenna says.
“Oooo, sexy,” Shane says.
But the Minotaur doesn’t feel good standing there behind the beef cart just inside the main dining room. It is tethered by a short orange cord to an electrical outlet; the Minotaur will have to squat in a precariously tight space and unplug the cord each time he’s beckoned to a table. The beef cart is a waist-high thing with a hinged lid of clear plastic that diffuses the light from the heat lamps fixed on a chrome bar hanging above it. The plastic dome all but magnifies the glistening rib roasts, halved and standing on end, their pink flesh unabashedly bared, lined side by side in the perforated pan recessed into the top of the cart. The salt-crusted fat caps and the stacks of curving rib bones have a blood-tinged sheen. The Minotaur doesn’t feel good standing there, his prodigious head looming beneath a cloth chef’s toque that is draped—absurdly, he thinks—over the flat plane between his horns, but he is grateful to Jenna for saying it. She has the first order of the evening. The Minotaur unplugs the beef cart and follows Jenna to a four-top near the salad bar. He has to roll the cart slowly so as not to slosh the Au Jus from its full and heated well.
It’s hard to say what the customers think about having the Minotaur as their table-side carver. For sure, it’s not what they expect. When the door opened and the first rush of the evening began there was one couple who walked out of the restaurant as soon as the Minotaur came from the kitchen and took his position behind the beef cart. For whatever reason they were not willing to tolerate a creature half man, half bull slicing their roast. Grub was momentarily worried that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, but no other customers have since walked out. Aside from the occasional gasp and the involuntary flinch when the Minotaur appears unexpectedly and suddenly in customers’ fields of vision, most are able to contain their surprise and to limit their reactions to gawking when they think the Minotaur is not aware. Those who can’t get beyond the shock and are unable to deal with the Minotaur simply order something else from the menu and avoid him altogether. Little by little, as the night progresses and as one table of customers sees another order the prime rib and sees that prime rib sliced at their table by the Minotaur, the air of tension gives way to something that is not quite acceptance but might be closer to sufferance. Gradually he is overlooked, becoming an unpleasant means to a tender and delicious end.
After Jenna’s order, Adrienne and Robert have a party of eight all wanting prime rib. Then Margaret. She’s waiting on Mr. Honeycutt, who has come alone every Wednesday night at six-thirty for the past five years, alone, wearing the same ill-fitting toupee and an increasingly gaudy selection of gold jewelry. Honeycutt, who comes in humble and lamblike, is as polite as can be until his fourth Wild Turkey, after which he begins grabbing at whatever waitress he currently has a crush on. This month it’s Margaret he asks for. Last week he told her that his penis is thirteen inches long. Mr. Honeycutt owns the Fox Triple-X Drive-In. The waitresses tolerate him because he tips better than anybody else.
The Minotaur sees Kelly. She’s in section two, over by the fountain that hangs by a plastic brass-colored chain from the ceiling, an ornate kiosk of sorts about the size of a small waste can, at the center of which a featureless nude heroine stands—or, more accurately, arabesques—while all around her beads of shimmering glycerol perpetually spiral down the thin clear threads that are the bars of her cage. Intermittently and with no discernible pattern, from somewhere inside the base of the fountain, some device attempts to recreate the sounds of trickling and gurgling water. Kelly is busy with drinks and appetizers. She smiled and said hi to the Minotaur earlier, which gave him a fleeting surge of hope, but so far she hasn’t needed his services as a carver. The Minotaur thinks for a minute about the obscene message on the bathroom wall, but his imagination proves ungainly, leaping quickly from wondering who wrote it to speculating about the act the graffiti described.
Even from the dining room he can smell the half-dozen prime ribs cooling in their roasting pans on the baker’s rack in the kitchen. Deciding how many ribs to cook was tricky. Too many would be a costly mistake, but the whole ribs take two hours at 375 degrees in the convection ovens, then half an hour or more on the cooling racks before they can even be served as rare; once they’re gone that’s it for the evening.
So far the night is progressing smoothly. The only problem is that Cecie forgot to pound the breasts for the chicken piccata. To do it on the kitchen worktables, where every pot and dish rattles with each strike, is impossible during business hours. From where he stands sentinel the Minotaur can barely hear muted thumping, and he knows that Hernando is inside the walk-in cooler with the door closed, standing over a cloth-draped table swinging a meat mallet down on the vaguely heart-shaped pieces of chicken flesh, pounding at them until they are thin as paper and almost translucent.
“Yo, tit man,” Shane says. “I need you in section three. The deuce with the cancerous-looking old fuck in a piss-yellow blazer.”
The Minotaur had hoped, unrealistically, to avoid Shane all night. He unplugs the beef cart and wheels it into the smaller dining room. The piss-yellow blazer is easy to spot.
When the Minotaur steps up to the table customers have three choices: King Cut, Queen Cut and the Page. Twelve ounces, eight ounces and two three-ounce pieces, respectively. Grub, if he gets enough requests, plans to add a sixteen-ounce Knight’s Choice to the menu.
“You got a end cut?” the old man squawks even before the Minotaur comes to a stop.
“Yes,” the Minotaur says slowly. Grub told him to speak slowly and clearly and to answer questions with words whenever he can.
“I’d like me a ten-ounce end cut, done extra well,” the man says. “What about you, Bunchy?”
The overdressed woman with him, Bunchy, says, “Me, too.”
Running the length of the beef cart is a thick plastic cutting board eight inches wide, held in place by small steel dowels at each end. A narrow channel with an imperceptible tilt marks the two long sides and one end of the cutting board. At the other end, on the right-hand side, a rectangular hole drops into the belly of the beef cart, where a small bucket catches the blood, juice and bits of fat and gristle that the Minotaur scrapes from the cutting board after carving each order. Unless the customer specifically asks for the meaty rib bones that remain as the Minotaur cuts away the eye of the roast, the Minotaur tosses them into a pan under the beef cart. They’ll be slathered with a sugary orange barbecue sauce and cooked for the employee meal.
“Me, too,” Bunchy says again, as
if things need repeating, the Minotaur being what he is. “I want a end cut well done.”
Shane comes from the kitchen, giggling maniacally. The hairs on the back of the Minotaur’s neck bristle. He doesn’t attempt to explain that there isn’t a ten-ounce selection on the menu, nor does Shane offer to clarify.
The Minotaur keeps the carving knife and the two-pronged meat fork crossed on the cutting board. After trying various ways of laying them—side by side at an angle, then straight, knife to the front, fork in back, then the other way—he decides that crossed is more professional looking. The Minotaur was ambidextrous for hundreds of years but has come to favor his right hand for precise work. The knife forms the right side of the X. Hanging from a small hook on the frame of the beef cart is the sharpening steel. Before every two or three cuts the Minotaur pulls the thin blade across the steel with a rapid back-and-forth motion, alternating sides with each swipe, not so much because the knife needs to be honed but because he likes the mechanical shhhick-shhhick shhhick-shhhick shhhick-shhhick sound of metal against metal, and because he thinks it impresses.
Bunchy seems duly impressed, maybe even a little afraid. She leans against the arm of the old man’s chair when the Minotaur stabs the fork into half a rib roast and lifts it onto the cutting board, turning it upside down en route. Because the knife is razor sharp and eighteen inches long, and because the Minotaur is good, two full strokes are all it takes before he uses the blade to lift a piece of meat onto the foil-wrapped platform of the small scale sitting in one corner of the pan. Ten ounces, dead on the nose. He gets another rib and does it again. After ladling out the salty Au Jus, Shane serves Bunchy and the old man.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 16
