The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break

by Steven Sherrill

  “Y’all got Heinz 57?’ the Minotaur hears the old man ask.

  The Minotaur takes a cigarette break. He needs it, needs to feel the smoke bite inside his lungs. On his way to the back dock the Minotaur overhears Maynard telling Cecie about his last job, at Gig’s Alley, a seafood house out on the river that specializes in frog legs.

  “I crossed them,” Maynard says.

  “You crossed what?” Cecie asks.

  “Every damn frog leg that got fried,” Maynard says. “If you don’t cross the legs before frying them they come out of the deep fat all splayed out and too ugly to eat.”

  Cecie winks at the Minotaur as he walks by.

  “I seen a lot of legs all splayed out and too ugly to eat,” she says. “But they weren’t fried.”

  This makes Maynard laugh. The Minotaur thinks that later, when things slow down, he’ll apologize to Maynard for pushing by him in the bathroom.

  Just before going out the back door the Minotaur sees Mike and Shane coming out of the walk-in; Shane is gigging strangely, as before. The Minotaur didn’t know Mike was working tonight, and the new knowledge churns bile into the back of his throat. Mike must be closing tonight; that would explain why he came in late. Despite the Minotaur’s hasty attempt to turn away, his cumbersome head proves sluggish; he and Mike make eye contact. They hold that eye contact long enough for Mike to raise his eyebrows twice, suggestively, and blow a kiss.

  Smoking on the back steps, the Minotaur waffles between anger and shame. His hands shake, so getting the lit cigarette between his black lips is a challenge. What exactly did Mike mean?

  “I need a beef carver.”

  It’s Kelly; the Minotaur recognizes her voice even through the distortion of the intercom speakers. He flicks the smoking butt toward the trees and underbrush, but it lands short and sends a spray of tiny embers over the pavement.

  Grub stands in front of the line, expediting the orders.

  “How many imperials you got, Cecie?”

  “Three all day,” Cecie answers, after scanning the row of tickets hanging across the window.

  “Do you have enough crepes?” Grub asks.

  “Yep.”

  Just before the Minotaur goes into the dining room Grub calls out to him. “You’re looking sharp out there, M. Keep it up.”

  Kelly is in her section crumbing a four-top with a small brass-plated tool the size of a pen. All the waiters and waitresses carry the crumbers, and periodically David schedules mandatory preshift workshops to make sure everyone knows how to scrape the tables clean without disturbing the customers.

  “Hi, M,” she says, making a final sweeping S-curve between half-full wineglasses before raking the crumbs off the edge of the table and into a small tray. “Two Queen Cuts, medium-rare, and a well-done Page, please.”

  Sometimes, more than anything, the Minotaur wishes he had a facility for idle chatter. As it is he cuts Kelly’s order quietly, smiling as best he can when she looks at him. Robert walks up as he’s about to wheel away.

  “Hey, Kelly, eighty-six peanut butter pie.”

  “Thanks, Rob,” Kelly says. “Thanks, M.”

  “I need you at table twenty-three, M,” Robert says, and the Minotaur follows him through the dining room.

  The next couple of hours pass without incident. The Minotaur tries to stay busy even when there are no orders to fill. He’s found it best to keep his mind occupied because, like everyone else, mythological character or no, the Minotaur leads a life fraught with incongruity and contradiction. Like everyone else—like most, anyway—he can do little but overlook these issues or displace awareness of them with the trickery of a busy mind. The cannibalistic nature of his new job cannot be denied. It competes for attention in his mind with the growing feeling that things are about to change for the worse. So when the Minotaur has a few minutes free he cuts orange slices, washes parsley for garnish, trims the fat from the ribs, wipes the beef cart clean again and again with diluted bleach, stays busy. He’s standing at the sink shucking oysters for Maynard when Jenna walks in from the dining room.

  “Arghhh!” she says to no one and everyone.

  “What do you need, Jenna?” Grub asks.

  “I’m completely in the weeds, and this jerk at table twelve says his Black Forest cake is stale, and there are no Black Forest cakes cut, and …”

  “Slow down, babe. We’ll take care of it. M, will you …?”

  “Mmmm.”

  Hernando is gone; he left half an hour ago, after he was sure things were set for the night. Hernando usually cuts the cakes, but the Minotaur can do it in a pinch. Jenna brings over a stack of dessert plates. The Minotaur washes the grit and sand from his hands and fills a small bucket with hot water. He marks the cake by rocking the knife lightly over the top—halves, quarters, eighths—wiping the white icing from the blade each time. Before every cut he dips the blade into the hot water and wipes it clean. Shane and Mike walk up behind Jenna, holding dessert plates. When Mike whispers something to Shane and they both giggle like little boys the Minotaur doesn’t acknowledge them.

  Grub has left the kitchen; the evening rush is over, so he’s probably doing paperwork in the office. David is making a fresh pot of decaffeinated coffee and trying not to pay attention to Shane and Mike. Jenna is attempting to make four pieces of cake, four cups of coffee with saucers and two snifters of liqueur fit onto one tray. Just as Jenna gets everything situated Shane, nudged by Mike, kneels in front of the Minotaur and pulls a wilted mangy rose from his apron pocket, an unwanted flower scavenged, no doubt, from the concrete median at the intersection in front of the restaurant, where every day from seven in the morning until six at night a sleepy-eyed man sits in a folding lawn chair, taped to the back and arms of which are hand-scrawled For Sell signs, sits beneath a RAM Golf Equipment umbrella with two broken ribs, sits hunched over a five-gallon bucket of plastic-wrapped long-stem roses. Every day he abandons those too wilted or damaged to sell. On his knees Shane pulls the flower from his pocket and offers it to the Minotaur.

  “I’m pledging my troth,” Shane says with exaggerated emotion. “Here and now.”

  The Minotaur isn’t sure how to respond.

  “The very idea of you with another man breaks my heart.”

  Shane barely gets the words out before laughter overcomes him. Both he and Mike seem to think it is the funniest thing in the whole world.

  “Why do you guys have to be such assholes all the time?” Jenna asks. It’s a rhetorical question.

  “You have a table, Shane,” David says, coming through the door. “What are you guys doing back here, anyway?”

  “Ohh! Him!” Shane says, placing the back of his hand across his forehead. This causes Mike to laugh so hard that he falls to the dirty tile floor.

  A wave of scarlet climbs the collar of David’s shirt and flows up and across his face. “Get out of the kitchen now!”

  They go.

  David goes.

  The Minotaur cleans up the cake crumbs.

  A caul of embarrassment drapes the rest of the evening, distorts time and space. The Minotaur can’t seem to see anything clearly. Twice he has to recut orders of prime rib to get the right weight. Mike and Shane hover on the periphery, becoming more and more obnoxious as the night passes.

  “Ooh, ooh,” Shane says under his breath every time he and the Minotaur cross paths. “Do me, big boy.”

  Mike giggles, then whistles some song that the Minotaur can’t name. Grub overhears this. The rush is over, so he tells David to close both their sections and give them extra side work, which they bitch about but begin doing.

  When Elizabeth comes out of the walk-in cooler carrying three orders of pecan pie and complaining that all the cans of whipped topping are empty, and that her customers don’t want the pie without topping, Grub is standing right there.

  “There’s half a case in there, Liz. Six cans.”

  “I tried them all,” Elizabeth says. “Nothing comes out.”

>   She follows Grub into the cooler. He’s carrying one of the cans when they reemerge. When Shane enters with a bus tub full of dirty glasses and the parts from the iced tea machine that go through the dishwasher each night, the Minotaur may be the only one who hears him say, “Oh, shit.”

  The Minotaur would like nothing more than to stay in the kitchen and watch whatever is about to happen. If it weren’t Kelly asking for a beef carver he would probably make them wait. But for Kelly he goes immediately.

  There are just a few tables remaining to be served. Kelly has a six-top at the round table by the door to the kitchen. She’s picking up the salad plates when he rolls up.

  “Hi, M. I need a Queen Cut, as rare as you’ve got, then two medium Kings. I’ll be back in a sec with the plates.”

  “Mmmn,” he says, and forks the largest rib onto the cutting board.

  The customers talk among themselves, about the beauty of the meat, the skill of the carver. Rarely do they talk directly to the Minotaur. Sometimes they’ll ask a question through the waiter or waitress.

  “Does he ever …?”

  “Will he …?”

  The Minotaur has the three orders cut and stacked by the time Kelly gets back. She arranges the warm plates on her serving tray.

  “The next is a Queen Cut, and he’d like it in three thin slices, if you can.”

  That presents no problem. The Minotaur cuts an eight-ounce slice and lays it flat on the cutting board.

  David walks up before the Minotaur begins cutting. “They’ll be lucky if Grub doesn’t fire them,” he says quietly to Kelly and the Minotaur.

  “Who?” Kelly asks.

  “Mike and Shane.”

  Holding the meat in place with the tips of the fork, the Minotaur easily cuts one thin slice.

  “Why?” Kelly says, as if there aren’t dozens of reasons.

  “The idiots inhaled all the nitrous oxide from the whipped cream cans.”

  “How does he know they did it?”

  “Who cares?”

  The Minotaur cocks his head to determine where to place the blade. The second slice will require almost surgical precision.

  Shane and Mike come from the kitchen with clean ashtrays and a bottle of oil for the lamps. Grub walks out behind them, angry but in control. “You’re not going to get another warning,” he says quietly.

  Mike seems to take Grub seriously, but Shane smirks as he approaches the empty table beside Kelly’s six-top. The Minotaur moves out of nervousness, trying to get out of the way but instead stepping directly into Shane’s path.

  “Move!”

  When the Minotaur moves it is once again into Shane’s way.

  “Move, faggot!” Shane says. “Goddamn circus freak.”

  By this time the customers at Kelly’s table have stopped talking and eating.

  “That’s it, boy,” Grub says. “Go! You go now. You’ll get your check when you bring the uniform back.”

  Shane turns to face Grub. “You want your fucking uniform back?” he asks, emphasizing the curse word. He unties the apron, wads it into a ball and throws it at Grub’s feet, followed by the bow tie. He’s made his point. A rational man would stop here. Shane doesn’t.

  The Minotaur tries to remain focused on the task at hand: an eight-ounce Queen Cut in three thin slices. He guides the blade slowly through one stroke.

  Shane takes the crumber from his pocket and flicks it like a knife at David across the room. David ducks. The thin aluminum tool rattles off the mirrored wall.

  “I’ll give you your fucking uniform,” Shane says.

  Even Grub seems taken aback when the ruffled tuxedo shirt lands at his feet. Shane stands enraged and shirtless in the weak light of the candles and the sconces on the dining-room walls. He breathes deeply and noisily through his nostrils, his pale muscled chest marked by a cross of dark hairs that defines the channel of his sternum and stretches out around both nipples—nipples, the Minotaur can’t help thinking, that look exactly like pencil erasers.

  Even most irrational men would stop here.

  “Here’s your uni-fucking-form, you fat bastard.”

  It’s not too surprising, when Shane unfastens the slacks and drops them to the floor, to see that he doesn’t have on any underwear. It’s not surprising to the Minotaur, anyway. Kelly’s table must be surprised; everyone gasps, and one lady spills her Old Fashioned on the floor. Rationality has taken leave. Utter shock fills the void. Grub, Kelly, the few customers and the rest of the wait staff watch in disbelief.

  “You happy, Grub?” Shane asks. “You happy now?”

  Shane is angry and nervous; beads of sweat trickle from his armpits, ride his ribs and hipbones down to where they are caught and glisten in his pubic hair. His testicles have drawn high and tight against his body, and the head of his shriveled penis peeks out of the dark thatch like an absurd little snout. The Minotaur can smell him.

  Anyone who has worked in a kitchen knows that a dull blade is a dangerous blade. The Minotaur should have taken the time to hone the knife’s edge on the sharpening steel before trying such a thin cut. But even with a sharp blade what happens next would distract almost anyone.

  “I got your prime rib right here,” Shane says to Grub, to the Minotaur, to everybody in the room, hoisting his genitals in one hand and shaking them up and down.

  In his lifetime the Minotaur has witnessed the human body in almost every conceivable circumstance, and little shocks him. But context makes a big difference. When Shane stands naked in the middle of Grub’s Rib, sweaty, white haunched, so angry and male as to reek of it, the stink is so out of context that the Minotaur forgets he is carving a piece of roast beef with a very big knife. He ponders, for just a second, why he is privy to so much of the messy machinations of the human body, thinks about it until the knife blade angles up through the cooked meat and, uncontrolled, slams edge-first against the longest bone in the Minotaur’s thumb on the hand gripping the meat fork.

  “Arrruuunnh!”

  The flesh gapes; an inch or more of chalk-white bone is visible.

  Shane’s last act is to spit a huge phlegmy glob of mucus, drawn from deep within the throat and nasal cavities, onto the floor beside the crumpled uniform. He is out the door before anyone moves. Kelly’s six-top walks out moments later. Grub doesn’t even try to stop them. The Minotaur clutches a towel to his bleeding wound and snorts with each breath.

  “Let me see that,” Kelly says.

  This time, unlike the kitchen accident, the Minotaur does.

  “You need some stitches,” Grub says.

  “There’s an emergency clinic over on Sixty-ninth,” Kelly offers. “I’ll drive.”

  Two injuries in as many weeks.

  Grub goes to call the police.

  As Kelly and the Minotaur leave the restaurant, JoeJoe, Maynard and the busboys argue about who is going to clean up the mess. In the car the Minotaur’s black nostrils welcome Kelly’s smells: roasted meat, cigarettes, scented oil.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “I can’t believe he did that.”

  “Unnh.”

  If he were alone he would sing. The cut throbs, and the towel is soaked with blood, but as wounds go the Minotaur has had much worse. To be truthful, if he’d known that Kelly would offer to drive him to the hospital, he may have cut his finger earlier.

  Kelly talks a lot.

  “You did a really good job tonight, M. Even in the face of, you know.”

  “Thanks,” he says with great effort.

  “I wanted to tell you before that I’m sorry about your accident with Hernando.”

  He wishes he could think of something to say, and that he could say it clearly. Kelly willingly fills his silence.

  “I don’t know what makes people like Shane act like that. Meanness, I guess.”

  Kelly has the bad habit of driving the car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, of speeding up and slowing down erratically, and it’s more pronounced when she talks. If it w
eren’t Kelly this would really annoy the Minotaur.

  “They’re like birds of prey, almost. They find a weak spot and then peck and peck at it.”

  Despite the late hour the emergency clinic is busy. Or maybe it’s because of the late hour. It could be that people are more prone to hurting each other in the uncertainty of night. The sterile fluorescent lights and the palpable tension in the room make even the uninjured seem like they’re in pain.

  They stand while Kelly fills out the forms for the Minotaur; much of the information asked for seems ludicrous. Neither the Minotaur nor Kelly takes notice of the young man who comes alone through the door wearing bicycling shoes with cleats in the soles. But when he begins his clattering walk across the tile floor they turn to look. His black Lycra shorts enhance the musculature of his legs and hips and provide a sharp color contrast to the scraped left knee that bleeds all the way down into his shoe. His left elbow and forearm, and even the knuckles of his left hand, with which he covers that same side of his face—the injured side—bleed freely. Kelly and the Minotaur move away from the reception window to give the man room. He stands quietly at the window, and the nurse does not look up from her paperwork until he reaches his right hand out and with his fingernails scratches softly on the countertop.

  “Can I help you?” she asks, without conviction.

  With one hand still covering the side of his face, the man opens his mouth and, using the thumb and index finger of the other hand, plucks his own eyeball from the protective bed of his tongue and offers it, like a delicate candy, to the nurse.

  She tells the Minotaur and Kelly to sit until a doctor is free.

  There are four rows of plastic chairs in the waiting room, two of which are back to back in the center. The chairs are fixed permanently to steel frames. The different-colored plastic in the seat offers only the suggestion of padding. Kelly sits. The Minotaur sits opposite. Chained to a metal shelf high on the corner wall, a television plays without sound. It may be the nightly news, but the screen rolls too often to tell. Every time the picture begins to flip Kelly talks. When it stops she stops.

  “Does it hurt?” Kelly asks.