“I don’t think I could work in a place like this,” Kelly says.
“Did you ever take any classes at Piedmont?” Kelly asks.
“I don’t want to be a waitress forever,” Kelly says.
Forever, the Minotaur thinks, and strives to communicate a sense of his own dreams. “Someday,” he begins, but a doctor interrupts him.
“You have a cut that needs attending?”
Kelly is allowed into the triage room. She winces each time the hooked needle pierces the Minotaur’s flesh and the thread is pulled snug. Ten stitches close the wound.
Back in the car Kelly seems thoughtful. After several miles of silence she speaks.
“My step-daddy, he’s a … He’s black.”
The Minotaur doesn’t know why she is telling him this, but it seems important.
“Mmm.”
“I just wanted you to know.”
The Minotaur thinks about this for the rest of the trip back to Grub’s. He still can’t figure out why she told him.
The Vega is the only vehicle in the parking lot. When Kelly pulls up beside it she turns the ignition in her own car off. Neither of them speaks. The Minotaur’s breathing is the loudest thing in the car, and it only seems louder when he tries to control it. He sits holding his injured hand with the other. The local anesthetic is wearing off, and regular jolts of pain shoot from his thumb to his elbow.
“Thank you,” he says after a while. Kelly turns and smiles. She pats his biceps once but doesn’t say anything. Neither does she start the engine.
The Minotaur takes several deep breaths. This should not be so hard for him.
“M-M-Monday,” he finally stutters.
“Monday?”
“Off.”
“Me, too.” Kelly smiles again, a genuine smile.
But the Minotaur doesn’t know what to do next. They might still be sitting there, except that Kelly reaches into the dash, takes out her waitress’s apron and from its pocket gets a pen and an order pad on which to write her address. The Minotaur doesn’t dare tell her that he already knows it.
CHAPTER 20
Sweeny doesn’t mention the black spot that was Buddy when he and the Minotaur pull out of the driveway the next morning. In fact Sweeny doesn’t say much of anything for several miles, and then it’s just, “Gonna be a hot one.” But the silence is fine with the Minotaur; it gives him time to play last night’s conversations with Kelly over again and again in his mind. He was tempted, so tempted, to bring along the piece of paper on which she wrote her address, to look at it throughout the day. But it occurred to the Minotaur that he might lose the address, so he hid it beneath the lasso-shaped lamp on the nightstand by his bed.
Besides, the Minotaur has known Sweeny long enough that his fits of quiet aren’t surprising; sometimes he’s just a slow starter. So they drive in silence. Florida. The Panhandle. All the Minotaur knows is that Sweeny’s cousin’s ex-wife has a boyfriend who wants to sell some sort of mobile concession stand, cheap.
After an hour or so Sweeny starts talking, mostly about being hungry and wanting an egg and liver mush sandwich, on a hamburger bun with mustard.
“Ain’t nothing better,” Sweeny says.
The Minotaur is in no position to disagree.
Finding such a sandwich isn’t hard. Less than five miles after Sweeny’s proclamation he pulls the truck to a stop at a roadside shanty with a hand-painted plywood sign advertising its services: Beer, Breakfast, Fish Bait, No Gas. The Minotaur sits in the truck. Sweeny is back in just a few minutes, carrying a brown paper bag with oily stains spreading from the bottom upward.
“I got a couple extra,” Sweeny says. “Help yourself.”
The Minotaur declines. Sweeny eats noisily; each time he unwraps a new sandwich the truck swerves off the road. It seems all Sweeny needed was food to get him talking. He tells a couple jokes, including one about an umbrella stand and a pretty girl with a big ass, which the Minotaur doesn’t understand. He grunts anyway, out of respect and because he didn’t take the sandwiches Sweeny offered.
“How come your thumb’s all wrapped up?” Sweeny asks.
The Minotaur gives him a condensed version of the story.
“Wasn’t that you hobbling around just last week with a gimp leg?”
“Foot,” the Minotaur says.
“Shit, boy, that restaurant’s gonna kill you. You might ought to get yourself another line of work.”
Sweeny talks about Florida and asks if the Minotaur has ever been to the Panhandle. The Minotaur says no simply to avoid having to explain that, in his lifetime, he’s been everywhere at least once.
“Good people down there,” Sweeny says, and the Minotaur admires, maybe even envies, his faith as expressed in the generalization.
It’s a nine-hour drive, maybe a little more because, like the Minotaur, Sweeny avoids the interstates. Grub gave the Minotaur the night off, so there is no rush. Halfway into the trip the Minotaur takes over the wheel. They stop twice for gas and the bathroom, another time for more sandwiches. The Minotaur chooses egg salad. The only other time they stop is when Sweeny makes the Minotaur do a three-point road turn and go back and look at a stand of crape myrtles, high knotty bushes blooming in soft purples and reds along someone’s driveway.
“The wife loved a myrtle,” he says.
The Minotaur thinks Sweeny may cry, but he doesn’t.
“Let’s go,” he says.
Sweeny talks for the next ten miles about all the flowers and bushes his wife used to tend.
“We never had no kids,” he says. “She give them damn flowers everything.”
The rolling Piedmont of North Carolina gives way slowly to the low stagnant swampland of its sister state. Farther south the pines and red clay of Georgia acquiesce to the brackish influence of the Gulf of Mexico. Palm trees and mangroves and monkey grass and high tropical weeds appear more frequently as the Minotaur drives.
After the fifth armadillo dead on the side of the road Sweeny brings up the subject of Buddy. It seems the trip is rife with emotion.
“He was a damn sight, that dog.”
And that’s all he says. He doesn’t ask the Minotaur what happened. Nor does he give a rationale for leaving the dog to rot, then burning it with gasoline. But the Minotaur knows that contained within that clipped sentence is a significant feeling of loss.
Because Sweeny’s cousin is acting as the intermediary for the whole deal, his place is the first stop. Sweeny has never been to his cousin’s house, but despite the absence of a map or any written directions they arrive a little after three. As promised, Golden Gator Retirement Village is impossible to miss for several reasons, not the least of which are the two once-living nowbronzed alligators held by U-bolts to the big wooden sign at the entrance. The village is also notable for its size; a precise grid of narrow, paved, unlined roads with 7½ mile-per-hour speed-limit signs posted at every turn mark out the plots for what must be hundreds of mobile homes, all well groomed in the distinctively Floridian style—tiki lights, twiggy citrus trees with irregular rings of rotting fruit at their bases. Small dirt-colored lizards are everywhere, bobbing their heads up and down in the hot afternoon sun.
Sweeny whistles when they pull into the trailer park. The cab of the truck reeks with envy; the Minotaur can smell it as sure as he smells the salt air from the Gulf, even though they’re at least fifteen miles inland.
“Ain’t this some spread?” Sweeny says reverently. He asks the Minotaur to drive around the place before they begin looking for his cousin’s. The Minotaur drives, and all the while Sweeny mutters, mostly to himself, about what he’d do if this were his place; occasionally he notes ideas he would like to take home and implement at Lucky-U Mobile Estates. Sweeny is rapt, and the Minotaur is willing to drive as long as necessary.
After two trips around, and a good half-hour, they make a right turn past a long row of triple-stacked rural-route mailboxes and into the driveway that is their destination.
&n
bsp; Sweeny speaks to the decidedly familial (same jaw line and large ears) man who comes out to greet them.
“Hey, Tommy.”
“Hey, Sweeny.”
Then they both look at the Minotaur, so he says, “Unnh,” which seems to satisfy everybody, and they all go inside.
Tommy pours three tall plastic cups full of candy-sweet iced tea, and they sit around a cramped table while he and Sweeny converse in that choppy misfiring way peculiar to adult relatives who rarely see one another.
“How you making out?”
“Good as can be expected.”
“Good.”
“How’s work?”
“Going good. You?”
“Can’t complain.”
And on and on for a while, circling back sometimes to already-covered ground. Eventually Sweeny asks about the concession trailer they have come to look at.
“Her boyfriend, huh?”
“Yep. She met him at the county fair. He had a regular site there. In spite of it all he ain’t a bad fellow.”
“How come he’s selling?” Sweeny asks.
“Accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“You’ll see.”
A few minutes later they’re all squeezed into the cab of Sweeny’s truck and driving toward the Gulf, the Minotaur at the open passenger window with his head turned, one horn out in the wind. Tommy’s ex-wife lives with the man who is selling the concession trailer, in a flat-roofed house surrounded by orange groves and reached by a meandering road of rutted sand.
When Sweeny, Tommy and the Minotaur pull up in front of the house the first thing they see is an unfinished ramp of plywood and two-by-fours rising at an impossibly steep angle toward the front door. The second thing they see is an upturned johnboat resting on sawhorses, and this only because of the two little kids of indeterminate gender and age who sit in the rectangle of shade lighting firecrackers and tossing them out into the yard, where a Barbie doll and a GI Joe cower behind a fortress of overripe oranges.
Tommy goes to the door. He waves Sweeny and the Minotaur in.
The Minotaur doesn’t expect the wheelchair that sits in the middle of the living room. Even more troubling is that, of the man and woman sitting on the bedsheet-draped couch, the Minotaur can’t tell who needs the chair more. Both sit, deep and leaden, unmoving but for their eyes and some amalgam of greeting and grimace that crosses their faces when Sweeny and the Minotaur come in. The eyes—both the man’s and the woman’s, ringed in deep blue-black, glazed and heavy lidded—betray profound fatigue, an insurmountable weariness.
“You remember Sweeny, don’t you, Nat?” Tommy says, and that is all the introduction made.
“Hey,” the woman says.
For a few minutes nobody speaks. The Minotaur, trying not to stare, looks instead around the house. Even with the shades pulled it’s not hard to see that the house is in a condition of total neglect, a state of dirtiness reached by degrees, as if every day, if not every hour, another chore is added to the list of the impossible-to-do.
“The trailer’s out back,” the man says with effort. His name is Harold.
“Y’all got to put him in that chair,” Nat says. “I can’t do it again today. Not yet, anyway.”
Nat gestures weakly in the direction of the wheelchair. Harold remains motionless. Harold has become a quadriplegic only recently, so he hasn’t fully comprehended the state of utter helplessness in which he exists. When the Minotaur and Tommy lean close to heave him into the wheelchair, Harold’s eyes roll with barely contained terror. It subsides.
They have to lift the chair with Harold in it out the back door of the house and down three concrete-block steps and onto a small patio. Because neither of them has any experience at this sort of thing, Harold’s useless limbs flop embarrassingly.
There’s no denying it, the concession trailer is an impressive thing. It is twenty feet long. A single axle with leveling jacks keeps it steady at each corner. An iron frame welded to the tongue and hitch holds a generator and two pressure tanks for the propane. At the back end a narrow door provides access, and beside it is a shuttered window. The service window, covered by an awning that is pitched when the trailer is in use, takes up the whole of one side.
Tommy pushes Harold over the sparsely grassed lawn while Sweeny and the Minotaur stand back and take in the big picture. On all sides of the trailer bannerlike signs painted in carnival colors advertise the bill of fare. Some—like the yellow ear of corn with a smiling dachshund’s head, clutching a ketchup bottle in its very human hands—are cartoon representations. Sweeny reads them aloud.
“Corn dogs. Sno-cones. Gigamundous pretzels. French fries. Elephant ears—Big & Sweet! Affy Tapples. Cotton candy. And More.”
Pointing with his head, Harold tells Tommy to remove the padlock hanging open on the door clasp. Tommy opens the door and from the floor of the trailer removes the poles that hold the awning in place. It takes the Minotaur and Sweeny only a couple of minutes to put it up. From a compartment near the base of the trailer Tommy stretches a long power cord across the yard to the back of the house; weaving through patches of long-bladed grass, the orange cord looks like a split in the earth, as if the earth has cracked open and the molten material just beneath the surface threatens to erupt.
“She’s a moneymaker,” Harold says.
“I bet,” Sweeny says. “I’m just not sure I can sell it.”
“Always draws, no matter the event. Tell you the truth, I hate giving her up.”
It’s not hard to tell that Harold hates much about his new situation.
“No way around it?” Sweeny asks.
“Nat’s good, but she can’t work it by herself.”
Harold pauses. All the nervous energy that would normally go into shifting in place or fidgeting with something in his hands is concentrated in the suddenly overburdened muscles and nerves of his neck and head. Beads of sweat from his scalp and forehead trickle down to his ever-dampening collar.
“I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. But I sure can’t work this trailer.”
Sweeny asks the Minotaur to look the trailer over for him. It’s why he came along in the first place. Before going inside, the Minotaur lies beneath it to check out the springs and axle and the undercarriage. Lying there with his head under the corn dog trailer the Minotaur hears only snippets of the conversation. He’s not sure how the subject comes up, but by the time he crawls out and begins dusting himself off Harold is talking about the accident.
“Oddities of the Natural World,” Harold says, and goes on at great length about setting up his concession stand at the Po County Fair, just by the entrance to the dirt track motor speedway and adjacent to a tent displaying, for a mere three dollars per person, what promised to be a life-changing experience, and proof-positive evidence of several things. Most likely Oddities of the Natural World was conceived and created by a taxidermist with a bent for the absurd.
“Y’all wouldn’t believe some of the things he had,” Harold says.
He is wrong. In fact the Minotaur doesn’t doubt him for a second when Harold describes the various glass cases and their contents: a ferret with two heads and two sets of front paws but no tails or back legs, mounted in a permanent tug of war on a pine log; some pointy-faced nocturnal animal shaped around a perfect sphere the size of a bowling ball, tiny limbs splayed far apart and useless; a diorama featuring a blue jay with the paws of an orange tabby cat in place of its own claws, sitting beside a fake pool of water while a field mouse perched on a branch overhead looms from the full height of a crow’s legs and black claws. Harold’s catalog of memory contains fish things, and nightmarish combinations of animal and mechanical. Harold talks like he’s been waiting to tell this story for a long time, making full use of his neck and head for gesticulation.
Harold tells them that the fair wasn’t even open to the public yet, that, driven by curiosity, he’d parked the corn dog trailer at his reserved site and left Nat to
set the leveling jacks while he went into the Oddities of the Natural World tent.
“Nobody was there,” he says. “I ought to have turned around and left right then.”
Sweeny gets a couple of lawn chairs from the patio; he and Tommy sit.
The Minotaur steps inside the trailer. It’s a small space, but it’s well arranged for convenience and a smooth flow of work. A closeable vat of oil for frying the corn dogs and elephant ears, warming boxes, a small griddle and a sink are spaced along the back wall. Overhead are storage cabinets covered with advertisements. At the service window are a counter top, an outdated cash register, napkin holders and plastic bins for the condiments. Beneath it refrigeration units stand empty. By and large the trailer is clean, but the smell of cooked grease is permanent.
The Minotaur switches the equipment on and off, opens the cabinets, doors and drawers. Most hold what he expects—a disorganized mix of sundries and supplies. But in a small utility drawer under the cash register, empty but for a pad of paper with scribbled notes, a state map and laminated copies of the health department’s certification and a vendor’s license, the Minotaur finds something he doesn’t expect. From inside the pad of paper, one cerulean corner peeking out, the Minotaur pulls a membership card for the Sacred Heart Auto League. It is a trifold thing about the size of a credit card. On the cover, against a blue sky, Christ looms protectively, gigantically, serenely over a miniature crowded highway. His heart, wearing a garland of thorns, beams out like a sun from his chest. Inside the card is the members’ pledge:
• I pledge to drive prayerfully and carefully in an effort to insure my own safety as well as the safety of others;
• I further pledge to offer my travel time in a spirit of reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus;
• In so pledging I confidently beseech the special blessing of the Sacred Heart as a promise of divine graces and favors.
And so members will know what they get from the transaction, there is a description of the Spiritual Advantages: “As a member of the Sacred Heart Auto League you share in a special Holy Mass offered each morning for all League Members, living and deceased. The Sacred Heart Auto League has Episcopal approval and its members have been favored with the Apostolic Blessings of Pope Pius XII, Pope John, Pope Paul VI, and Pope John Paul II.”
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 18
