The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break

by Steven Sherrill

  The Minotaur knows better than to reach out, knows without a doubt that his act would be misconstrued. It all happens quickly. The Minotaur steps back just as the short dumpy man who is the boy’s father rounds the corner.

  “Sorry,” the man says to the Minotaur. On his very kind face the surprise is almost imperceptible.

  “I’ve asked you not to play in the store, Henry. Can you say you’re sorry?”

  The man’s hands are full. He carries a bag of throat lozenges, a roll of masking tape and a heating pad in an orange box with which he tries to conceal a muscle magazine, but the taut rippling pectorals and milk-jug-sized biceps, bronzed and glaring on the cover, are impossible to miss. When he puts everything down to help the boy stand the masking tape rolls out of sight beneath a shelf.

  The little boy’s fear subsides in his father’s presence, but he is still reticent. “Sorry,” he mumbles, peeking out from behind the man’s legs. The man smiles at the Minotaur.

  “Mmm,” the Minotaur says, and nods.

  Just before he turns to leave the boy speaks again. “What’s wrong with him, Papa?”

  “Don’t be rude, Henry.” The man smiles again, gives an apologetic shrug, then gathers his merchandise and leads his son up the aisle.

  The Minotaur can’t help but overhear them talking in the next aisle.

  “Why is he like that, then?”

  “For lots of reasons,” the man says after a pause. “Tell you what, when we get home, we’ll look him up in the encyclopedia and see what we can find.”

  The Minotaur stops to look at the selection of antiseptic creams; he hears no more of their conversation. The Minotaur isn’t insulted by the child’s questions. To the contrary, it’s what he likes most about children, their unabashed honesty. To an almost visceral degree the Minotaur would like nothing more than to follow the man and his son home, to sit with them on the floor of the boy’s bedroom—he struggles but can’t imagine what the room would look like—and examine a book to find out why he is like he is. If it were only so simple.

  Following them home isn’t possible. And even if it were, disappointment is what he would find. No one book can fully explain the whys and whats of the Minotaur’s existence. Most of the time the Minotaur is able to forget that his history has been duly chronicled for anyone to see. It has been a long time since his life had any relevance outside his immediate circumstances, and as time passes fewer and fewer people seem to know or care who he is, so he feels cloaked in a tenuous veil of complicated anonymity. Granted, a creature half man and half bull doesn’t go unnoticed doing his laundry, buying groceries or going about the business of living. But there seem to be degrees of difference in the world. If most people knew the truth about his life and the things he has done—no matter that he didn’t have a choice—his life in the here and now would be much more difficult. Thankfully most people don’t know, and while they often replace the truths of his life with rumors and lies, any story they fabricate is okay with the Minotaur. A steady diet of blood and human flesh in the dry black corridors of the labyrinth so long ago thickened his skin. Too, the Minotaur himself is blessed with poor memory.

  The man and his son are leaving when the Minotaur comes to check out. There are two security monitors over the clerk’s head. On one screen the Minotaur watches the man and the boy walk across the parking lot of the strip mall, get in their car and drive away. On the other he watches himself pay for his merchandise. In his rare moments of personal clarity the Minotaur has some ideas about why he is as he is. He hopes that the man with the kind face tells his son something like the truth—that the Minotaur exists out of necessity, his own and the world’s.

  The Minotaur is so busy thinking this over that he doesn’t remember whether or not he has pumped the Vega’s gas pedal the requisite four times before turning the ignition, so he pumps it again. When the four-cylinder engine backfires loudly, then turns over and over without cranking, and the smell of gasoline fills the interior, he knows the engine has flooded. Waiting for a few minutes is the only thing that works. The Minotaur fishes half of a cigarette from the ashtray and pushes in the lighter.

  He moves to the passenger seat. As he sits, smoking, the door open and his feet out on the pavement, kicking a bottle cap back and forth with the toes of his heavy black shoes, the Minotaur watches a crow fly out of the afternoon haze, sweep over the parked cars and land on a weathered picnic table chained at one end to a No Parking sign on the sidewalk in front of the drugstore. The bird proclaims its arrival with a guttural caw that seems to erupt out of its very blackness, then begins to strut, somewhat suspiciously, around a box of Kleenex abandoned on the tabletop. One sad and nearly leafless tree rising from a littered patch of dirt offers no shade. The crow’s shadow mimics its master. Out on the road a squad car drives by the strip mall. The police car does a U-turn in the parking lot of a boarded-up Sugar Daddy’s Dairy Hut, then pulls into the entrance of the mall. Again the Minotaur turns the key, and again the backfire rattles the storefronts and echoes through the parking lot. The car refuses to start.

  The Minotaur is leaning under the open hood loosening the wing nut to remove the air filter when the police car pulls into the empty parking space beside him. He hears the squawking radio before actually seeing the officers.

  “Afternoon,” the policeman driving the car says with more contempt than conviction.

  “Mmm,” the Minotaur says, and stands where they can see the air filter, as if it will provide some answers. He can feel cool air spilling from the car.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Flooded,” the Minotaur says with as much clarity as he can muster.

  The policeman nods but doesn’t reply. Suspicion hangs so heavily in the air that the stifling afternoon breeze has to work around and over it to clog the Minotaur’s breath. The Minotaur is filled with guilt when he goes to the back of the Vega to get a screwdriver from his toolbox. Guilt by association. Guilt by default. He knows the policemen are talking to each other.

  Using the shaft of the screwdriver to wedge the carburetor’s butterfly open, the Minotaur climbs into the driver’s seat, pushes the gas pedal to the floor and turns the key. Sucking air and gasoline, the engine begins to sputter and cough. As soon as it catches and reaches an unsteady idle he takes the screwdriver out. He stays beneath the hood operating the throttle mechanism by hand until the car idles smoothly.

  “You might want to think about a tune-up,” the policeman says as the electric window closes. The cruiser drives away.

  After closing the hood and putting away his tools the Minotaur notices that the crow—still on the picnic table, black as ever, so black that it seems wet—is hard at work pulling the tissues from the box one after another. Each time the bird pinches a thin sheet in its clicking beak and tugs it out with a side-to-side yank of the head, a new tissue appears. And each time the crow responds with renewed determination. The sidewalk is littered with windblown tissues. Tissues hang in the branches of the leafless tree. One thin rectangle catches a gust of wind and boils through the air until snagging on the Vega’s antenna. The Minotaur watches the crow pull tissues out of the box until there are no more. Then the bird flies away.

  Driving back to Lucky-U Mobile Estates the Minotaur keeps looking in his rear view mirror. He’s imagining the corn dog trailer being towed along behind. Only once does it occur to him that he can’t afford the trailer, and it doesn’t occur to him at all that the Vega might not be up to the challenge.

  CHAPTER 23

  Hey, M,” Kelly says. “I’m glad you came.”

  “Mmm,” the Minotaur says. The candy is jammed under the front seat of the Vega, where it will stay for the time being, but here he stands in Kelly’s door with his shirt stitched and his shoes shined. Not two hours ago he was in the corn dog trailer with a tape measure, checking and rechecking widths and heights. For what, he isn’t exactly sure, but it seemed important. Not two hours ago he still couldn’t say for certain whethe
r or not he would go to Kelly’s. But here he stands.

  “Come on in,” she says.

  The Minotaur has never seen Kelly in anything other than her ruffled tuxedo shirt and black pants, usually with her hair back in a ponytail or up in a bun and a short apron tied around her waist. It takes him a minute to adjust to her dark hair falling over her shoulders, her running shorts and comfortably frayed flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. The shirt is missing some buttons: two at the top and one at the bottom. The gray-plaid fabric does much to emphasize the full sweep of her breasts. The Minotaur tries not to stare.

  In the daylight the Minotaur can see that Kelly lives in the smaller half of a clapboard duplex, in a neighborhood of peeling clapboard duplexes, in the shadow of the hoppers, conveyor belts and machinery of the Purina Chow factory. The air is still and everything smells like warm dog food. The Minotaur follows her inside. A canister vacuum cleaner sits in the center of an oval rug made of woven rags. The two rooms visible from where the Minotaur stands—the living room and an eat-in kitchen—are immaculate. He has no doubt that the rest of the house is as clean, and that it stays that way.

  “How’s your thumb?” Kelly asks.

  “Mmm,” the Minotaur says, showing her the bandage.

  “Want a Coke?” Kelly asks. “Or some tea?”

  “Water,” he answers.

  “Okey-dokey,” she says, and does a quick turn on the balls of her bare feet. Her hair sweeps the air like a cloak, and the scent of sweat lingers where she stood. The Minotaur takes it in.

  There are two places to sit in the small living room. The white wicker chair looks a bit unsteady for the Minotaur, and the arc of its wing back is probably too tight for his horns. He sits on a futon with a black lacquered frame and a vaguely Oriental cover. Because the room is small, and because the futon faces it, the Minotaur sits and watches the five—no, six—fish move about the aquarium that all but covers the top of an old buffet on the opposite wall. Thirty gallons at least, the Minotaur thinks; he’s usually good with capacities. The fish are beautiful. Big as fists, they swim through the crystal-clear water effortlessly, and their grand tails and fins bring a wonderful air of pomp and circumstance to their movements.

  Kelly has lots of books. The only other expanse of wall is taken up by a low full bookshelf. From where he sits the Minotaur can’t see the titles, but he can tell that the books are arranged carefully. Nothing is out of place. To be honest the books intimidate him. The Minotaur walks over to the fish tank, cocks his head and leans close to get a better look.

  “Those are my babies,” Kelly says, handing him a glass of ice water. She stands right beside the Minotaur and tells him about the fish. Goldfish. They’re all different types of fancy goldfish. Kelly talks about each one as if it were her child, as if one strange spring morning she pulled down her panties, raised her skirt, waded into a reedy algae-covered pond, wiggled her hips and released the eggs into water teeming with fish sperm. The results were these well-loved beautiful goldfish swimming back and forth in the Minotaur’s field of vision. But the word goldfish can be misleading, as can beautiful. Most of the fish have very little gold in their coloring. And the characteristics enhanced by breeding and eagerly sought by aquarists could just as easily fall on the other side of that tenuous aesthetic line and into the domain of the horrific.

  “That’s a Lionhead,” Kelly says of the mottled fish that swims up to greet the finger she presses to the glass. “A calico Lionhead.”

  The severely humped back and the lack of a dorsal fin seem merely odd next to the craggy raspberry-like growth that crowns the fish’s head so fully that it must impair its vision. It is a beautiful fish.

  “Mmm,” the Minotaur says.

  There is a velvety Moor, a black fish with telescopic eyes that she named Othello because it’s the only Shakespeare she remembers from high school. The goldest fish is the Celestial, whose eyes seemed to have been attached as afterthoughts, and haphazardly. They hang on the sides of the fish’s face and point straight up; the Celestial’s eyes are locked on the heavens, and it has difficulty seeing food or anything else below it. There are others. Kelly talks about her fish as if each of their individual deformities of shape and color is the most amazing thing in the world, and the Minotaur takes it all in.

  After Kelly says all that can be said about the goldfish there is an awkward silence, helped only slightly by the steady bubbling of the aquarium filter and by the muted sounds of television cartoons seeping through the wall from the adjoining apartment. The Minotaur asks for another glass of water and drinks it too quickly.

  “Mmm,” he says, giving a sweep of his hand to indicate the house, meaning that he likes it.

  “Thanks. I’ve been here for about a year now. The landlord is a jerk, but he never comes around. That’s his niece over there,” Kelly says, pointing at the wall. “All she ever does is watch cartoons.”

  The Minotaur asks where the bathroom is. A short hallway just big enough for a narrow closet and the heating unit leads to a tiny bathroom and the bedroom. Something about the lemon-yellow paint on the walls, the sky-blue porcelain of the tub, toilet and sink and the yellow and black tile on the floor of the bathroom is dizzying. The Minotaur has to close his eyes for a few seconds. He is embarrassed by the force of his urine stream. Hoping to mask the sound the Minotaur reaches to turn on the faucet, but he accidentally knocks over a plastic medicine bottle and what he thinks was a pearl earring, which falls into the drain. Empty, the bottle rattles loudly against the porcelain sink. The Minotaur reads the label before moving it out of the way to look for the earring. Dilantin, for seizures. He can’t see the earring.

  “Let’s go out somewhere,” Kelly says when he comes back.

  “Yes.”

  Kelly goes to change her clothes. The Minotaur hears a closet door slide open and shut, then a dresser drawer. He hears the rustle of fabric moving over skin, hears snaps and clinking metal. Kelly comes out wearing faded denim overalls and a red crew-neck pullover. The Minotaur doesn’t know what the cloth is called, only that the Crews brothers call it long Johns. There is no doubt, though, that it is much more appealing on Kelly. She straddles a low covered ottoman to buckle her sandals over bare feet.

  “Ready?” she says, smiling at the Minotaur.

  He nods and stands. Kelly leans close to the aquarium.

  “Bye, guys. I’ll be back later.”

  Just before they walk out the door Kelly remembers something. “Just a sec,” she says. On top of the bookshelf is an aqua-colored ceramic bowl with a lid, the handle of which is shaped like a leaping goldfish. Kelly removes the lid, reaches into the bowl and pulls out some money. She counts off a few bills, then puts the rest back and replaces the lid. She folds the bills exactly in half and slips them into her back pocket.

  “Now we’re ready.”

  The Minotaur drives. It’s assumed that he will. As they pass the Purina warehouses Kelly says she sometimes wishes she lived somewhere else.

  “Another town, maybe even another state. You ever feel that way?” She thinks about her question for a minute. “I guess you have, though,” Kelly says. “Lived other places, I mean.”

  The Minotaur is glad that Kelly likes to talk. He lets her lead the conversation. Neither of them has mentioned where they might be going, so he just drives roads that are familiar. When they drive past the closed Dairy Shack, Kelly becomes obsessed with a strawberry milk shake.

  “I want one with that chemically fast-food aftertaste.”

  The Minotaur isn’t sure about that particular aftertaste, but there is an Arby’s in the next block. Before he even gets his window rolled down at the drive-up menu, the tinny speaker squawks at them. When the Minotaur pauses, not sure that he can make himself understood, doubting both his enunciation and the dubious intercom system, Kelly leans over him and shouts the order.

  “Two strawberry milk shakes, please.”

  Kelly has to brace herself by holding his
forearm.

  The Minotaur works the plastic straw between his black lips and thick teeth. Kelly slurps unabashedly. He drives through the waning sunlight on the periphery of the city. When they end up at Honeycutt’s Putt-Putt, Kelly seems excited.

  “I’ll warn you now,” she says. “I was the Queen of Putt-Putt in middle school.”

  The Minotaur follows her through the gate and up to a shack not much bigger than a phone booth, painted bright yellow and open halfway down on three sides, where a surly kid with a bad case of acne on his forehead and buck teeth that push his lips out into a beautiful and permanent pout hunches over a guitar magazine. He is obviously annoyed that Kelly and the Minotaur want to rent balls and clubs.

  “How many?” the kid asks, despite the fact that only Kelly and the Minotaur are standing in front of him.

  There are many odd things about Honeycutt’s Putt-Putt, not the least of which is its location adjacent to the Fox Triple-X Drive-In. It’s common knowledge that Honeycutt set up the miniature-golf course to give his do-less son-in-law something like a job. It’s a well-established rumor that the boy impregnated Honeycutt’s daughter on the roof of the low concrete building from which the films are projected and where concessions are sold, during the second run of a movie called Insatiable. Giving the boy a job managing the miniature-golf course keeps him in Honeycutt’s sight and ostensibly out of trouble.

  “How many?” the kid asks again when Kelly doesn’t respond immediately.

  “Two.”

  On half of the counter all the putters are arranged by shaft size, from the longest to the shortest, the heads hanging over the front edge. Six recessed wells filled with colored balls—red, yellow, white, green, blue, orange—make up the other half of the counter. Hanging on the wall of the shack behind the boy, two hand-painted signs lay out the rules of the game according to Honeycutt.