The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break

by Steven Sherrill

  “I was coming over a ridge of pines fifteen minutes into the battle. Had to sit out the rest of the day.”

  “Terrible,” the Minotaur says. He sometimes wonders why simulating death is such a common pursuit among men. The two salmon fillets lie side by side. The Minotaur takes a pair of needle-nose pliers and, using his fingertip to locate them, pulls out the sharp transparent bones hidden in the red flesh.

  Hernando limps behind the hot line, whistling as he makes roux in a heavy pan.

  “Cajun napalm, they call it,” Hernando says.

  The roux, nothing but flour and butter, bubbling and popping as it cooks to a chocolaty brown, will be used in thickening the étouffée, tonight’s special. Hernando shows Maynard a scar from the last time he made this kind of roux: a pinkish and perfect circle the size of a nickel on the back of his hand. The Minotaur has heard Hernando tell the story of getting that particular scar at least a half-dozen times, all different.

  Cecie is making crepes. When her back is turned the Minotaur peels one of the thin pancakes from the stack, rolls it into a cigar shape and pretends to smoke it when she turns around.

  “I’m gonna fry your ass in this pan if you don’t leave my crepes alone,” Cecie teases. The Minotaur bites the crepe in half and offers the other half to Cecie. She takes it in her mouth with two quick bites, catching the edge of the Minotaur’s thumbnail in her teeth.

  When Grub comes in unannounced and unusually quiet, the mood in the kitchen dampens. Grub carries a bag from the hardware store. He smiles and nods to the Minotaur as he walks through to the dining rooms. A little later David comes into the kitchen with the bag, from which he pulls a quart of off-white paint and a small brush. He asks JoeJoe to touch up the employee bathroom. JoeJoe grumbles a little about not being paid to paint walls but then takes the can and brush into the bathroom and closes the door.

  Between the big Hobart mixer that sits on the floor at the end of the hot line and the reach-in coolers for the salad station, Grub has put a special table for prepping the cooked prime ribs. The tabletop is sloped; in the center a hole eight inches in diameter drops to a trash barrel standing below. A whole prime rib—the loin, ribs and seasoned fat cap—is roasted in a mesh of cotton string. Before going out to the beef cart the ribs are cut in half on the table, and the crackling fat cap is peeled away with the net and discarded through the hole. The Minotaur readies his beef cart for the night.

  “How’s your thumb?” Grub asks. It’s about four o’clock. The wait staff should start coming in any minute.

  “Okay,” the Minotaur says, showing him the thumb, bandaged and covered with a latex finger cot.

  When he’s caught up with his prep work the Minotaur goes out to the wait station to check the schedule, which he’s done three or four times already. He wants to make sure that Kelly is still on the shift list. She is; she’s closing tonight, so she won’t be in until six.

  The Minotaur helps Hernando peel crayfish tails for the étouffée. Gradually the kitchen grows busier. The waiters and waitresses attend to their side work responsibilities. Again the Minotaur leaves the kitchen, goes to the bar for a Coke. There he finds most of the wait staff.

  “Please, Eva,” Mike asks. “Just once. Do it this once.”

  They all stand around Eva, the new waitress, Shane’s replacement, who smiles nervously from within the close circle. Eva is young. Eva is a woman of incongruities. She is short with a thin trunk resting firmly on substantial hips. She has a pretty smile with a desperate edge. Her long jawbone gives way to lots of tiny teeth.

  “Maybe later,” she says. At least the Minotaur thinks that’s what she says, but her voice is so tiny that it’s all but contained within the ring of her audience.

  “Aw, come on,” Mike pleads. “These guys don’t believe me. They don’t believe you can do it.”

  Eva has that caught-in-a-trap look.

  “I’ve got to fold napkins,” Jenna says, and walks away. It looks like the audience is going to break up.

  “Oh, all right,” Eva says.

  People learn early how to deal with humiliation. Some learn that being embarrassed is sometimes preferable to being ignored. Standing there at the bar with Mike, George, Adrienne, Margaret, one of the busboys and the Minotaur, who is trying to appear disinterested at the ice machine, Eva balls her hand into a tight fist, thumb tucked under her fingers. She puts her fist to her mouth. Eva opens her mouth wide and, starting at the middle knuckles, begins to work her hand between her teeth.

  “Yes!” Mike says.

  “Jesus.”

  Somebody whistles.

  Eva’s thin lips stretch and contort, her cheeks make way and without too much effort her bony little fist disappears inside her mouth nearly to the wrist. She stands there like that, looking to Mike for approval.

  “I told you she could do it,” he says.

  Mike is excited.

  “She did it on the radio last week. I knew I recognized her name.”

  Mike is more excited than anyone else.

  “WROC, Sunrise with Stanky. It was funny as hell.”

  Disappointment and embarrassment—they both register to some degree in everyone there.

  The busboy makes a crude remark as he and George walk away.

  “Sick,” Adrienne says. She picks up a tray of lamps and leaves.

  Grub walks in and tells everybody to get back to work.

  Mike keeps talking about how funny the radio show was, but mostly to himself. He leaves, too. Only the Minotaur is left to watch Eva pull her fist from her mouth. It takes more concentrated work than putting it in, and when the fist comes out the Minotaur is surprised by how dry it is. Eva wipes the little bit of saliva on her pant leg; the wet spot shines on the polyester fabric. The Minotaur can’t move his cumbersome head fast enough, so Eva catches him looking at her. She smiles, but it takes effort.

  “Bathroom,” she says.

  “Urn hmm,” he responds.

  The Minotaur feels a freakish kinship with Eva. He hopes she finds other talents.

  At five-thirty the Minotaur wheels the beef cart into the main dining room and plugs it in. As with most things the moral dilemma of his current job diminishes each time he stands behind the cart of roasted meat. He’s almost gotten used to the way the chef’s hat feels draped over the top of his head. Grub has been in the office since the afternoon. David comes and goes from the dining room like a nervous bird.

  “Hey, M.”

  It’s Kelly. He didn’t see her come from the kitchen. She’s standing beside him tying her apron strings in a double-knotted bow.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Come here,” she says. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Business is slow; so far there are just three occupied tables in the restaurant, and only one of them has a prime rib order. The Minotaur follows Kelly to the closet behind the bar, where the wait staff stores coats, purses and the like.

  “Close your eyes,” she says.

  He does. In the blackness her smell takes hold. The Minotaur feels something go around his neck.

  “Okay,” Kelly says.

  It’s a white kerchief, rolled tight, the ends matched down the center of his chest. He wonders where she found one large enough to circle his bull neck.

  “This,” Kelly says. “I think you’ll like this.”

  Between her thumb and forefinger she holds a thick ring made of bone, yellowed and beautiful, through which she peers at the Minotaur.

  “It’s a piece of shank bone,” she says, and puts the ends of the kerchief through the hole. She pulls down on the cloth with one hand and with the other pushes the ring of bone snugly up to the base of the Minotaur’s neck. “I got a friend who works in a butcher shop.”

  This makes the Minotaur smile.

  “You look like a pro” she says, stepping back. Something on her lapel glints in the light. It’s a goldfish pin.

  “Thank you,” the Minotaur says, happy with the clarity of his wo
rds.

  The Minotaur looks at himself in the streaked and cloudy mirror of the employee bathroom. The toque, the kerchief with the shank-bone ring and the pristine chef’s coat look good, even if adorning a creature with the head of a bull. He ties an apron around his waist and returns to the beef cart. Cecie whistles at him as he walks through the kitchen.

  “Fancy,” Jenna says, bringing him an order. “Looks good, M.”

  David, George and almost all the wait staff compliment the Minotaur at some point during the night. Even some of the customers seem to notice. Only Mike says nothing, which is okay with the Minotaur. Mike has minded his p’s and q’s for the past few days, at least when Grub or David is around.

  The night is slow, steady and uneventful. After breaking down the beef cart and running everything through the dish machine the Minotaur goes to the bar, where the waiters and waitresses are figuring their tips. Eva seems to have gotten over her embarrassment. She sits in a booth with Margaret, and they’re both laughing about a table Eva served.

  “Did you see those nails?” Margaret asks.

  “How about the earrings?” Eva says.

  “I’m telling you, that was a man in drag,” Margaret says, and Eva almost squeals with delight at the very idea.

  The Minotaur takes heart in her ability to adapt. He scoops ice into a tall glass and begins to fill it from the soda gun. Mike is in midsentence when the hissing stops.

  “… already working,” he says. “Some hoity-toity seafood place out on the river.”

  He’s talking to Adrienne and Jenna, keeping his voice low. It takes the Minotaur a minute to figure out that they’re talking about Shane.

  “He says he’s making big bucks out there.”

  “I’d hate to come home smelling like fish every night,” Jenna says.

  “Like greasy meat smells any better?” Adrienne says. “I only made twenty-six dollars tonight, and that’s before I tip the bussers.”

  The Minotaur returns to the kitchen. As he walks by the open office door Grub calls him inside.

  “How was your night, M?”

  “Mmmn,” he says. “Slow.”

  “Listen,” Grub begins. “I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure this beef cart idea is going to work out with you.”

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s not you, but I’ve had a few customers complain.”

  Blood surges in the Minotaur’s ears. Grub talks a little more, but it’s difficult for the Minotaur to understand exactly what he’s saying—something about Maynard filling in while the Minotaur was out.

  “He did a great job,” Grub says.

  The Minotaur waits. He waits with roiling familiar gall. He waits for the inevitable change. He sits quietly in the employee bathroom. When he hears Kelly in the kitchen asking if anyone has seen him the Minotaur turns the lights off. Not until everyone has left does he make his way out to the empty parking lot. The clean Vega shines in the light of a gibbous moon. Beneath the windshield wiper a piece of paper lies flat against the glass. It’s a note from Kelly.

  “See you soon, I hope.”

  She has signed it with a smiley face.

  CHAPTER 26

  In the gall of sleep the Minotaur dreams his mother’s desire.

  She lies with the fishmonger. She lies in his fingers, slick

  and silver as kipper. She lies in the migrating eye of the halibut.

  The comb of the harlequin cock. She lies with the heifer and the ox.

  She lies with Lot’s daughters. She lies with the foreskins

  of a hundred Philistines. With the drum and with the drummer.

  She lies with the milk pail fresh from the udder.

  With cloven hoof she lies. She lies with crimson madder

  and cadmium yellow. She lies with tyger stripes. She lies

  on death death death death death row. She lies

  in the stropped shadow of crow’s beak.

  She lies quiet among clacking looms.

  She lies with cornbread and beans,

  and with two thieves, and in red clay.

  She lies alone.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Minotaur wakes to the taste of bile creeping up the back of his throat, wakes in the thick wet air of a predawn summer rain. He scratches at his chest with both hands, then along either side of the haired groove that runs down the center of his belly, then beneath the waistband of his pajamas, where he spends five solid minutes scratching his testicles with great pleasure. By the time he rises the sun is up and cooking the moisture out of Lucky-U Mobile Estates. Everything steams. When the Minotaur stands, the bile subsides, but the blood rushing to his limbs causes his injured thumb to throb. The Minotaur fingers the swollen area surrounding the cut on his thumb. It occurs to him that he perhaps should have waited and not pulled the stitches out himself last night. There is also an itching and residual ache deep in the burn-scarred foot.

  On the table by the bed sits the shank-bone ring. The Minotaur picks it up and rolls it in his fingers; he puts it up to one eye and then the other, squinting and looking around the room and out the window, then slips the ring on and off each finger as far down as it will fit. Only on his pinkie does the ring slide beyond the middle knuckle. If Grub takes him off the beef cart he’ll wear Kelly’s gift—the kerchief and the circle of bone—while working in the kitchen. The decision makes him feel just a little better.

  The Minotaur attends to himself in the bathroom, makes his coffee and sits at the table eating pieces of white bread from the plastic bag. He’s up early enough to see Hank and the Crews brothers leave. Sweeny’s truck isn’t in the drive. Nearing seven o’clock Mrs. Smith turns the volume up on her television.

  A couple of hours after that Jules and Marvin come outside. Jules, furtive and obvious, carries something in a brown paper bag behind his back; Marvin follows conspicuously close. Conjoined by their secret they move as one to the side of the trailer, where they lean against the underpinning and unroll the bag. Jules reaches in to pull out a small jelly jar, empty and clean. Then from deep in the front pocket of his short pants he takes a jackknife. He pinches a blade and strains to get it open. The blade is long and fatter than any two of his fingers.

  The Minotaur cocks his head to get a better view. There is one other thing in the paper bag: a brightly colored and flimsy cardboard box about four inches square. It contains shotgun shells, brass capped and thick as a man’s thumb. Marvin digs into the box with his little-boy hand and takes out all he can hold—six, seven, maybe eight shotgun shells. The boys talk, but the Minotaur can’t hear what they say. Jules goes behind the trailer, comes back with a scrap of plywood. Using it as a workspace the boys begin to cut open the shells with the jack-knife and to pour the gunpowder and the lead shot into the jelly jar.

  Again Jules disappears around the trailer. This time he returns with a nail and a piece of a brick. Taking instruction from Marvin he lays the lid from the jelly jar upside down on the plywood. He uses the brick as a hammer, and the nail easily punctures the thin metal lid—one hole, dead center.

  When all the shells have been cut open their contents nearly fill the jelly jar. Then it is Marvin who leaves the scene, but only for a few minutes, and when he runs from around the side of the trailer the excitement is palpable. Clutched in his hand is a tightly folded piece of cloth that turns out to be a pair of boy’s underwear, and tucked into the little nut pouch is the reason for all their fervor: a packet of firecrackers and a box of strike-anywhere matches. The wind shifts, and the Minotaur picks up the faint smells of sulfur and gunpowder.

  Some men are born to lead, to envision, to shape and mold the politics and opinions, the attitudes, the mores, the outcomes of their times, from individual to individual or on a world scale. Others take it upon themselves to intervene rather than to forge, to serve, to help, to intuitively recognize problems or the potential for problems and give whatever is necessary to prevent or at least rectify them. Still others merely exist. Trembling at the thought
of the horrible responsibilities that making a decision entails, and willing to let their lives—and, by association, the lives of others—unfold or collapse according to dumb luck, they seek out obscurity. They choose or arrive at insignificance and soon enough become willing to suffer the consequences. There was a time when the Minotaur and his ilk were important, creating and destroying worlds and the lives of mortals at every turn. No more. Now, most of the time, it is all the Minotaur can do to meet the day-to-day responsibilities of his own small world. Some days he can passively witness the things that go on around him. Other days he can’t stomach any of it. The Minotaur wants no part of what may happen to Jules and Marvin in the next few hours.

  The corn dog trailer glares like an aluminum behemoth out by the road, beckons in a quiet rectangular way. The Minotaur circles it. He kicks at one tire with the toe of his work shoe and realizes the ridiculousness of the action, but he can’t stop himself from kicking the other one. He decides to go for a drive despite the lack of a destination. Half a mile from the house the Minotaur meets Sweeny on the road, his truck unmistakable with its shattered grill. As they pass, Sweeny lifts two fingers on the hand that grips the top of the steering wheel. He nods, too; the Minotaur can’t see it, but he’s ridden with Sweeny often enough to know that a nod accompanies the wave. The Minotaur taps the Vega’s horn in response.

  He drives. And drives. And drives. By Grub’s house and the restaurant, by David’s, on the outskirts of town, then through its heart. He drives for an hour, two hours. Well into the third hour no one is more—or less—surprised than the Minotaur when he finds himself standing on Kelly’s front stoop looking through the screen door. He isn’t known for his boldness. She isn’t aware of his presence. Standing there watching Kelly the Minotaur reconsiders his decision. He never goes anywhere unannounced or uninvited. He makes up his mind to leave before she notices him.

  Kelly doesn’t see the Minotaur because she is preoccupied. She is kneeling, with her back to the door, in front of the aquarium. A five-gallon bucket stands beside her. Through the tight mesh of the screen it’s hard to see the clear plastic tubing that hangs over the side of the fishtank, so when Kelly turns in profile to the Minotaur and puts her hand to her face as if she is eating or smoking, but instead takes something between her lips and sucks hard, so hard that her cheeks cave in, the Minotaur is baffled. Kelly misjudges the power of her siphon, draws in a mouthful of water. The Minotaur sees the tube for the first time when she yanks it from her mouth and aims the stream of flowing water into the open bucket, leaning over it at the same time to spit out the contents of her mouth. When Kelly retches and heaves, clear frothy bile drips from her tongue, and the Minotaur winces. His horn raps against the door’s metal frame.