Cold, the Minotaur thinks.
On his way out the door the Minotaur pauses. Maybe if things were different in Kelly’s life she wouldn’t have these fits. Sitting in the Vega with the door open he hesitates again. Maybe their lives aren’t so dissimilar, his and Kelly’s. Maybe fate has stripped away her ability to control her body for a reason. Maybe like this—decimated, rendered helpless—she can start over and make different choices. The Minotaur’s thoughts confuse him, and out of his befuddlement arises a plan. He goes back inside. A small red can of fish food sits atop the aquarium. It occurs to him that Kelly probably won’t remember to feed them tonight. He twists off the top and scatters a fat pinch of the multicolored papery flakes over the surface of the water; the fish feed with a sudden and frightening voracity.
What the Minotaur does next he does with good intentions, but anyone seeing him reach into the blue bowl on the shelf, pull out a loose wad of bills and shove them in his pants pocket before hurrying out the door, anyone watching this act would have a hard time believing the argument.
CHAPTER 28
Pulling to a stop at the traffic light where Independence Boulevard goes from four narrow lanes to six narrow lanes, the Vega stalls, and the Minotaur has to pump the throttle to restart it. He hates this stretch of road. David, a font of useless knowledge, says it’s the busiest and most dangerous five miles of asphalt in the entire state. A year or so before the Minotaur started working at Grub’s one of the waiters was killed on Independence Boulevard. He’d left work one Friday night on his way to a party. They think the guy was changing his pants while driving and ran off the road. He hit a bus-stop bench made of concrete that advertised malt liquor on the back and an out-of-date bingo tournament on the front. If it weren’t the quickest and most direct way out of the city to Lucky-U the Minotaur would choose a different route.
He taps the gas pedal, anticipating the light change. The Vega sputters and backfires. On the corner nearest him is an orthopedic shoe store specializing in custom fits at discount prices. When the car backfires the woman going into the store turns, startled by the noise. It’s Obediah. The Minotaur recognizes her eyebrows and the silk scarf. He recognizes, too, the vague disquieting sensation of opportunity slipping away. The chance for some guidance. A morsel of insight. A glimpse of what lies ahead. The Minotaur’s chest tightens at the notion, and before he can even begin to formulate in his bullish mind the question he would ask her, Obediah is already inside the shoe store. Funny, the Minotaur hadn’t noticed her limp before.
The Minotaur sings softly as he drives. The farther he gets from Kelly’s house the more he begins to question, to doubt, the logic of his plan. But self-doubt is familiar company to the Minotaur. It’s an odd time of day, a time of indecision—not quite dusk, not quite daylight. The street lamps bicker with the coming night, pop and buzz before flickering on. It finally occurs to the Minotaur that maybe he shouldn’t have left Kelly alone. Thinking about what to do, he pulls into a convenience store. In the far corner of the parking lot is a phone booth.
There is a certain quality of light to be found only in midsummer in the South, as day, slipping into dusk, acquiesces to the filament, the bulb, the porch light; this seductive light is beautiful when it washes across dry cement, the sidewalk and stoop. The light spilling from the phone booth softens and cleanses all that it touches. It’s a forgiving and almost protective light. The Minotaur is drawn to it from across the parking lot. He fishes in his pockets for change, working around the thick wad of paper money.
Accessibility. Should the needs of the rare creature half man and half bull be of any concern in designing public space? When the Minotaur steps into the phone booth he’s too busy struggling with the folding door to notice that he’s facing the wrong way and that there isn’t enough room for him to turn around. When he finally gets in again and has the receiver in hand he realizes that he doesn’t know Kelly’s phone number. He doesn’t know any phone numbers. Dial 0 for operator, that much he knows.
“Operator,” she says.
The Minotaur doesn’t know how to respond.
“Operator,” she says again. “May I help you?”
“Kelly,” the Minotaur finally says.
“This is the operator, sir. How may I help you?” There is a tone of impatience in her voice.
“Kelly,” he says again.
“I’ll connect you to Information, sir,” she says, and she’s gone.
Within seconds another impatient voice is making demands of him. “Information. What city, please?”
The Minotaur mumbles something that satisfies.
Then she asks for a name.
“Kelly,” he says.
“What’s the first name?”
“Kelly,” he says. Her last name was on the discarded tax paper, but he doesn’t recall it.
“I’m sorry, sir. There are two pages of Kellys in the book. You’ll have to be more specific.”
On the floor of the phone booth a piece of paper lies almost concealed beneath the Minotaur’s foot. He moves. It’s a pamphlet, a tract, with a question: Are You Saved? Bright red letters divide the pamphlet in half. Above is a childlike drawing of three crosses on a hill; below is the devil himself.
“I need a name, please,” the operator says.
When he tries to stoop to pick up the tract the Minotaur gets his horns caught on the high narrow shelf above the empty phone-book cover that hangs from a cable. No matter how he angles his head it’s too big; the tract remains out of reach by a few inches. By the time he stands and puts the receiver to his ear the operator is gone. Only a recorded message is left, tirelessly repeating itself: “Please hang up and try your call again. Please hang up and try your call again. Please hang up …”
Driving back to Kelly’s house is out of the question—for now, anyway. He has set some things in motion, and whether from apathy, cowardice, faith or a mix of all three, he’ll have to wait and see how they play out. But for now, in the small manageable ways that he can, the Minotaur means to become proactive.
Opposite the convenience store, across Independence Boulevard, is a gas station. The Minotaur waits impatiently for a break in the traffic; the Vega’s tires bark pitifully when he pops the clutch. He debates for only a second before deciding to splurge: premium. While the gas is pumping the Minotaur goes into the station to gather his supplies: top-of-the-line spark plugs, gas and oil treatments, a new air filter. Enough? No. He gets Fix-A-Flat and a radiator hose, too. The Minotaur is annoyed that the fan belt he wants is out of stock.
Farther down the road the Minotaur pulls into a parking lot shared by a bowling alley and a self-service car wash. There are three stalls; one is blocked by an orange safety cone. He pulls into the center stall and cuts the engine, but when he gets out the Minotaur sees that the coin box has been hammered open and is useless. Spray-painted in huge silver letters on the brick wall is the legend Cooter Wuz Here. The smells of stale beer and soap mix in the back of the Minotaur’s throat, mix with the residual taste of Kelly.
He moves to the neighboring stall, rolls the windows up, feeds quarters into the coin slots. He throws frugality to the wind and buys the whole package: super-sudsing, wheel scour, hot wax and scented rinse. The Minotaur eases the water gun from its holster, pulls the tethering black hose into place and shoves the coin tray in. The pressure surprises him. Before the Minotaur gets control of the spray his legs are soaked from the knees down.
The Minotaur feeds the coin slot two more times before he is satisfied that the Vega is as clean as it will get. From a dispenser bolted to the brick wall he buys a foil-wrapped cloth impregnated with Armor-All.
Just before he goes to work on the Vega’s interior the Minotaur hears a car rumble to a stop in the next stall. He’s rubbing away at the cracked vinyl dashboard when that car backs up and pulls in behind the Vega.
The horn blows once, then again.
“Hey, dickhead!”
The Minotaur is working the clot
h up and down the steering column and along the driver’s door.
“Are you deaf, or just stupid?”
Two, at least. Boys. Then he hears a girl giggle. The Minotaur gets out of the Vega so that he can fold the seat down and climb into the back.
“Oh, Jesus, I should’ve known. A freak.”
More giggling. The Minotaur is right. Two boys, nineteen, maybe less, are in the front seat of a Nova; the girl they’re both trying to impress is in the back. The boys have identical haircuts, sheared flat on top and short at the sides but hanging long behind.
“Hey, moo-cow. How about doing that somewhere else?”
The Minotaur decides to ignore them. He climbs into the back and begins to wipe down the seats and side panels. Through the Vega’s hatchback window the Minotaur can see the boys debating what to do. The girl has gotten out of the Nova and sits on its hood. She wears a halter top, denim short-shorts and black canvas high-top sneakers. She smokes self-consciously.
While wiping the backs of the two front seats the Minotaur hears one of the boys pull the water gun out, hears the chunk of the coin box, hears the force of water against the Vega’s rear window. But not until the spray is directed at the open door does the Minotaur stop what he is doing and get out.
“I think you should stop, Derek,” the girl says.
But instead Derek comes closer with the water, the sudsy spray flecking the Minotaur’s work shoes and pants. The other boy laughs, too loud for it to be genuine. Derek is fed by the encouragement. He aims the water wand first at the Minotaur’s feet, then up to his knees.
The Minotaur tries to be patient. He knows too well the silliness of boys. He knows too well the consequences of succumbing to rage. It’s just water. But when Derek comes up his chest with the spray the Minotaur’s purple scar sears beneath the pressure. The soap stings his black nostrils, his black eyes.
He bellows—deep, guttural, more primal than anything these children have ever known. The Minotaur throws his head back, fills his chest with air and roars. The tongue lolls out; the eyes roll back; the howl consumes all other sound.
Derek drops the wand, and it begins to whip out of control off the brick walls, off the Vega. He retreats to the Nova. His friend is gone, running out of sight around the bowling alley. The girl has climbed completely onto the roof of the car. She clings there while Derek hastily backs the Nova clear, then barely gets down and inside the car before he turns and tears away.
Then it’s over. Since the water is running the Minotaur picks up the wand and uses the few minutes remaining on the timer. Still furious beneath the outward calm returning to him, he envisions himself charging Derek, horns low, envisions the boy running at full gallop across the field behind the car wash and into the woods, envisions his own momentum carrying him into the driver’s door of the Nova, the car heaving and rocking, his horn puncturing the thin sheet-metal door and ripping open the seat back, envisions the girl screaming and screaming and screaming. On one level he’d like to do just that. But he can’t muster the energy these days.
When the water wand cuts off, the Minotaur gets into the Vega and drives home. Sweeny’s truck isn’t in the driveway at Lucky-U. It’s dark, and the lights are on in all the other trailers.
Through the open window he watches Jules chase Marvin from the kitchen and into the bedrooms. Hank, the back of his head visible over the couch, shouts at the boys.
“Goddammit!”
It’s a good sign. At the side of the trailer, where the boys were conducting their demolitions experiment earlier, there is a fresh gouge in the earth. And up the white siding of the trailer there are what must be powder burns, black and vaguely head shaped, the silhouette of someone watching over the premises. Given the potential for disaster that the afternoon held, the Minotaur is relieved to find everything else intact in their household.
The Minotaur stands before his open refrigerator. He hasn’t eaten since morning. His head throbs. Nothing in the refrigerator appeals. On the back step a fat bunch of green onions from the garden—wilted after a day in the sun, roots caked with dry red dirt—lies propped in a clay flowerpot. Sweeny put the onions there. The Minotaur cuts off the roots, runs the handful of onions under cold water and eats them one at a time standing at his front door, looking out.
Even before he opens Sweeny’s toolshed the Minotaur knows the trailer hitch is there, hanging over one of the rafters at the back. Sweeny keeps the shed locked, but he gave the Minotaur a key not long after he moved in at Lucky-U. The lock is rusty. The Minotaur bangs it twice with his palm, hooks the open lock in the clasp and swings the door wide. A pale light from the street lamp in the center of the drive seeps to the back of the shed and illuminates the clunky U-shaped piece of welded steel tubing that is the trailer hitch. Climbing over the riding mower, the Minotaur reaches for the hitch. His horn knocks against a string of empty milk jugs Sweeny keeps tied to the roof of the shed. The hollow plastic rattling spooks him.
“Ummn.”
The droplight’s yellow cord snakes out of the Minotaur’s trailer at the bottom of the cracked screen door, cuts across the weedy patch of grass and the gravel drive and terminates where the bulb hangs burning in its protective cage from the Vega’s open hatchback. The Minotaur casts a busy shadow. He’s lying beneath the rear of the car and tightening the first of three bolts that hold the trailer hitch in place when he hears Sweeny drive up.
The Minotaur lies still beneath the car.
“M,” Sweeny says toward the door of the boat-shaped trailer.
The Minotaur can hear gravel crunching beneath Sweeny’s boots.
“M,” he says again, a little louder. “You there?”
Sweeny goes into his house. The Minotaur gives him a few minutes, then knocks on the back door.
“Yeah,” Sweeny says.
Twenty minutes later the deal is done. Sweeny has all of Kelly’s tip money separated by denomination, bound by rubber bands and locked away in the ancient safe in his bedroom closet. They have worked out the remaining payments.
“You gonna do real good with this thing, M,” Sweeny says, handing him the single key to the door. “I can feel it.”
Sweeny never asks where the money comes from, not with the Minotaur or any of his other customers.
As the Minotaur opens his dresser drawer looking for a pair of clean pajamas, he finds the Sacred Heart Auto Club card, still unsigned. It takes him a few minutes to locate a pen, and when he does the ink is dry and clogged. He carries the pen to the stove and waves the tip back and forth over a lit burner, then tests it on a paper towel. The pen leaves a faint blue line. Back in his bedroom the Minotaur makes a careful M on the signature line and returns the card to the drawer.
The Minotaur places his steel-toed shoes side by side at the foot of the bed and undresses for the bath. He arranges the plastic milk crate in the tub so that he can sit sideways, turns the water on cool and climbs in. Sitting there under the cold shower of water the Minotaur thinks about the trailer and about his future as an entrepreneur.
He’s still thinking about that future as he sits at the edge of the tub stroking the bullish fur with the oval currycomb and when he rubs conditioner into his skin. Not until the Minotaur is shaving the splinters from his horns does he realize that the corn dog trailer—his corn dog trailer—is still sitting out by the road with For Sale signs duct-taped on both sides.
The Minotaur is so anxious that he almost goes out naked to take care of the problem. But he calms down enough to put his pajama bottoms on. Walking all the way out to the road barefoot would be okay during the day, but he doesn’t want to take the chance of hurting himself at night. The Minotaur puts on his shoes without socks; the protective steel is cold against the skin of his feet. He takes his car keys, thinking maybe he should hook the trailer to the Vega and pull it back off the road, maybe leave it hitched overnight. But the noise would draw attention, so he decides against the idea.
The residents of Lucky-U Mobile Estate
s have settled in for the night. Moving quietly in the dark, the Minotaur is comforted by the seemingly unchanging lives of his neighbors. Someone prays loudly for the afflicted on Mrs. Smith’s television. Through their window the Minotaur can see Hank and Josie. Hank sits in a kitchen chair curling a heavy dumbbell with his right arm; Josie lies face up on the bed beneath the orange glow of a sunlamp. The Crewses are asleep, their trailer silent.
The Minotaur is spooked momentarily by a scraping noise coming from somewhere in the yard, until he figures out that it’s just an opossum or some other pointy-faced nocturnal animal trying to lick residual dog food from the pie pan that was Buddy’s dish. When he is halfway across Sweeny’s front yard a car rounds the curve out on the road. The Minotaur quickens his pace and squats behind a powder-blue Dodge Dart just as the car’s headlights sweep the lawn, the house and the vehicles lined up for sale.
The sound of the gummy gray tape ripping away from the trailer’s Lucite siding resonates far into the black night. The Minotaur takes a little more time peeling the other sign off. He puts them both in the back seat of the Dart and opens the door to his corn dog trailer. He can’t resist stepping inside.
There in the dark the Minotaur imagines his life as it might be. A county fair here. A carnival there. Stock-car races in the summer. Trade shows. Anywhere there are hungry people. He goes through the motions. He pretends. Someone wants a corn dog with mustard, along with a Coke. They smile when the Minotaur hands them the paper tray; the steaming-hot corn dog fills their palm. They smile again when the Minotaur takes their money.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 24
