He pretends even more. There in the dark confines of the trailer he steps aside so his imagined partner can reach under the shelf by his legs for a handful of pickle relish packets. Gripping them tightly she drops only one or two before reaching the plastic bucket by the register. She. Kelly. So real he can smell the sweat seeping through her logo-embossed T-shirt. So real he can hear the paper crinkle when she repositions the white canoe-shaped hat on her head. So real he can see her concentrate as she restocks all the condiments.
First thing tomorrow morning he’ll hitch the corn dog trailer to the Vega and drive over to Kelly’s house. She’ll see him pull up, and she’ll understand immediately what it’s all about. She’ll understand why he left her like that, why he took her money, everything. There in the dark, in his corn dog trailer parked in front of Sweeny’s house, he imagines Kelly opening her front door, the smile on her face growing as she comes down the sidewalk with a can of fish food in one hand. The Minotaur doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t have to. Kelly wraps her grateful arms around his big bull neck and kisses him deeply.
A ringing phone, a very real ringing phone, jars the Minotaur from his dream. It’s his phone, which hasn’t rung in months. By the time it registers in his mind, by the time he begins moving back through the dark toward his trailer, the ringing stops.
When he sleeps the Minotaur sleeps lightly. So he is awake even before the bottle shatters against his trailer just above the bedroom window. In fact he is awakened by the first car that pulls in, its headlights piercing his fitful slumber.
“It’s that one,” a voice says. “That boat-looking thing.”
There is more talking, then another car drives up. The Minotaur remains in bed. At first he thinks Hank and Josie have visitors; people sometimes come and go at odd hours there. But the voices have a familiar ring.
Then comes the sound of glass breaking against his trailer.
“Hey, asshole!” someone shouts.
Deep in his bull’s chest the Minotaur’s heart begins to thump furiously.
It’s Shane. The Minotaur sits up in his narrow bed but leans away from the window. A quiet belch brings back the taste of onions.
“I’m talking to you, freak. Get your ass out here now or we’re coming in after you.”
Even at his sharpest the Minotaur probably wouldn’t guess immediately what they want from him. But like this, caught by surprise and half dozing, his mind reels. The Minotaur reaches for the dirty shirt crumpled by his chest of drawers. He’s not going out, but he wants to be ready for what may happen. The Minotaur lowers himself to the floor and kneels by the window. He can’t see their faces and hears only fragments of what they say.
“She wasn’t even conscious.”
“… stuck his horn inside her.”
“Adrienne said so.”
“I told you a long time ago he was dangerous.”
These are horrible charges. Quaking, the Minotaur buttons the shirt, as if that will make a difference.
“Give me a rock,” Shane says, and within seconds the Minotaur cowers at the sound of a stone ricocheting off his trailer.
“I’m going to tell you one more time. Get your pathetic ass out here now!”
The Minotaur is afraid—not of death, obviously, but of something else. Ridicule. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Misunderstanding. Injustice. His own potential for tiny rages. Maybe that most of all. All these things can seem, in the moment, worse than dying, particularly if death isn’t an option.
“You coming with me, Mike?” Shane asks.
“Yep.”
“Wait.” It’s Adrienne’s voice. “I don’t think you should go empty-handed. If he did this to Kelly there’s no telling what he’s capable of.”
Under different circumstances this might make the Minotaur smile. Indeed they have no idea what he has been capable of. By curse or by birthright the Minotaur came into the world with a capacity for evil unmatched. But erosion—erosion of spirit, mind and body—has taken its toll. Hunched on the floor by the window, in a boat-shaped mobile home in the southern United States, is a being that is not malevolent, not any longer. Once capable of cataclysmic havoc he is now, at his most provoked, threatening only to children. Trembling there on his hands and knees, black horns catching the moonlight, is an exile, scarcely more than an invalid, detritus from the process of civilization.
“Take this,” Adrienne says. “It’s pepper spray.”
“I got a ball bat in my trunk.”
The Minotaur hears the unmistakable sound of a trunk lid slamming shut. He hears footsteps on the gravel drive. He hurries to put his shoes on, stands up. There is the familiar creak of his front step. The Minotaur never locks his door. Shane and Mike and anybody else can just walk right in. The plank step sags under the weight of a body; wood moans against nail. Several faint and rapid clicks mean that someone has their hand on the doorknob.
Before walking down the trailer’s short narrow hallway into the living room the Minotaur takes the shank-bone ring from the nightstand and puts it in his pocket. As he enters the room another set of headlights intrudes; a car rolls to a stop beside the others.
“Wait a minute,” Mike says.
It would be a mistake to assume that the Minotaur forever bemoans the bullish parts of himself. There are times, not infrequent, when he pines for the simplicity and the strength of four hooves, for days of ruminating the cud, for the spring rut. It would be equally grave to think that the Minotaur never imagines himself wholly man. But when he looks in the mirror at the black disks of his eyes, the long furry snout, the thick rubbery lips and the deep wells of his nostrils, he cannot find a man’s face even in his imagination. Which would serve him better now? Man or bull? The Minotaur wants nothing more than to leave, to drive away with the corn dog trailer hooked to the back of his Vega, the little four-cylinder struggling mightily at the hitch, to drive away and leave behind him the things they accuse him of doing as well as the things he’s done. A few hours ago he hoped for a companion. Now he doesn’t think that’s a realistic hope.
“What are you doing?” someone asks.
“We’re going to drag his bull ass out here and brand him! That’s what we’re doing.”
“I don’t think that’s the way to handle this.”
The Minotaur recognizes the voice. It sounds like Margaret.
“What are you doing here anyway, Shane? This is not your problem.”
“The fuck it isn’t. That bastard lives in my town, breathes my air, rips off my friends. She called Adrienne, and Adrienne had sense enough to call me and Mike. He’s gonna pay for what he did.”
“I’m not your friend.”
The Minotaur hears it as clearly as he’s ever heard anything. It’s quiet, weak even, but unmistakable. Kelly says it.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Shane says, and reaches for the door.
“No!” Kelly shouts.
But the Minotaur is already on his way out. Shane, taken by surprise, trips and falls backward against Mike. He regains his balance quickly and gathers himself as if to swing.
Garish are the beams of light that accuse the Minotaur from across the drive, garish and impenetrable. He cannot see the faces.
“Unngh!” he says, mostly to Kelly. She’s sitting on the hood of a car, wrapped in an army coat despite the summer heat. She looks tiny. Looks sick. Looks away from the Minotaur.
“Unnghh.”
“See,” Adrienne says to the Minotaur, walking over to put her arm around Kelly. “See what you did, you pathetic bastard.”
“Shut up, Adrienne,” Margaret says. “You don’t know what he did.”
Adrienne mumbles something to Mike.
“M,” Margaret says. “You didn’t come to work tonight. David had to run the beef cart.”
“And Grub’s tired of your shit,” Robert, the waiter who sold the motorcycle, says. “You’re probably fired anyway.”
“We’re not here to discuss his fucking work ethic,” Shane says. “We
know enough of what he did to Kelly to kick his ass. And there’s no telling what happened when she was having that fit.”
“I told you,” Adrienne says. “I told you Grub should never have hired him.”
Standing on the front porch in his old thin pajama bottoms and dirty shirt and steel-toed shoes, the Minotaur thinks she’s probably right. But the generosity of others is not his fault.
“We’re wasting time, boys. I say we brand him.”
Shane lights two cigarettes, hands one to Mike. The Minotaur tenses, keeps his head cocked to see. Having done its part the moon turns its back on the scene.
“Brand him, then beat the shit out of him.”
The Minotaur snorts, fills his chest; Mike and Shane step backward.
“M.”
Maybe to take this, to endure the punishment, the branding, the beating, whatever, to accept it here, before Kelly and everyone else, maybe that will be enough. Maybe tomorrow things can go back to the way they were and he can leave with his corn dog trailer.
“M,” Kelly says. “Where’s my money?” She stands and takes a step toward him. “Did you take my money?”
It would be easy enough, he thinks, to suffer their abuse if she just knew. He wants to tell her everything, to explain it to all of them, to take them out to the road and show them the concession trailer, to show how he and Kelly could work the orders. But he can’t. His tongue refuses to cooperate.
“M,” Kelly says, and takes another tentative step.
She should watch where she walks. Kelly is looking at the Minotaur, and even if she weren’t, the ⅝-inch socket lying on its side in the grass where she is about to step is so dirty that she probably wouldn’t see it anyway.
While the Minotaur isn’t without guilt, anyone who knows him well would deny malice on his part. Shortsightedness, yes. Stupidity, often. But not malice. If, for instance, the Crewses happened to be awake to watch Kelly step on the socket, they would know. But the Crewses are asleep and will likely stay that way. If Hank and Josie, who are probably awake, probably even listening, happened to be outside where they could see how Kelly steps on the socket, which sends her unprepared leg flying straight out and the rest of her body to the ground, they would know. Almost anybody seeing this would know that the Minotaur moves in her direction out of concern, out of a desire to help.
Kelly cries out when she lands.
The Minotaur moves toward her.
Shane, Mike and Robert come to stop him.
“Shane!” Adrienne shouts. “Watch him, Shane. Don’t let him touch her!”
It takes three men to hold the Minotaur down. Shane acts first, jumping on the Minotaur’s back and wrapping his arms around the bull neck. Mike, more hesitant, pauses before tackling the Minotaur at his knees. Once the Minotaur is down Robert helps hold his arms.
It takes the three of them. Sharp gravel presses through the thin fabric of the Minotaur’s pajamas and into the flesh of his legs, grinds against his back and heavy shoulders. No doubt the Minotaur has been reduced over the years. His strength and his image have been whittled away, leaving little more than a chipped and pocked facade. Nevertheless the three men hold the Minotaur to the ground so easily because he doesn’t resist.
“Be careful of the horns,” Adrienne says.
But the Minotaur’s head is still.
“M,” Kelly says, sitting up.
The Minotaur’s head is still because he, more than anyone there, knows what the horns can do.
“Take his pants off,” Shane commands.
Nobody moves.
“Take his fucking pants off!”
The deus ex machina is a thing of the Minotaur’s past. If he is to be saved, salvation will come from the present, from somewhere within the confines of Lucky-U Mobile Estates. However Adonis-like his body, Hank is not a god. But the Minotaur welcomes his presence.
“Get off him,” Hank says almost calmly.
The struggle stops, but no one moves. Hank wears only his underwear, an absurdly small pair of teal jockeys, the sculpture of his muscles defined by the street lamp.
“Get off him now.”
Robert, in the way that only frightened men can posture, rises, picks up the baseball bat, puts it to his shoulder and clears his throat. Josie steps onto the porch. The Minotaur can hear her feet squeaking in the rubber sandals. Hank steps up to Robert, reaches for the bat, which comes without any resistance. Then, as if he is disciplining one of his sons, Hank, with his middle finger, Hank, as if he is checking a melon at the grocery store, thumps Robert hard between the eyes. The sound resonates; Robert slinks away.
“Stay out of this, asshole,” Shane says. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“It does now,” Hank says. “Get up.”
It’s a fraternal thing, Hank’s unexpected move to protect the Minotaur. The Minotaur exists, however dubiously, within the parameters of Hank’s world. And Hank will defend what is his.
“Stop acting like little boys,” Margaret says.
“Where’s my money, M?”
Mike lets go of the Minotaur. Then Shane reluctantly stands. The Minotaur stays on the ground. From where he lies he can watch the bats circling in spastic orbits around the street lamp in search of moths and mosquitoes.
“Do you know what this freak did?” Shane asks Hank. “He stole her money. He stole her money and he raped her.”
“No,” Kelly says.
“Raped her while she was unconscious.”
“No!”
“Put those nasty fucking horns of his between her legs.”
“Goddammit, Shane,” Margaret says. “You don’t know that.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen, M,” Kelly says.
Because Hank is no god, and because at his core Shane is no demon, theirs is mostly a struggle of bravado, precisely the kind of stupidity that gets people hurt, sometimes killed.
“Hank,” Josie says from the porch.
“M,” Kelly says from where she sits on the ground.
“Mmmna,” says the Minotaur, rising.
Hank says nothing.
The trailer hitch on the rear of the Minotaur’s car, the polished steel ball, glints like a jewel in the headlights. Kelly cries softly; the Minotaur hears the watery sniffle. Eye to eye, Shane and Hank are locked in a private and silent struggle. The others wait to take their cues. Adrienne, despite her anger, shamelessly gawks at all that is contained by Hank’s teal underwear. It is that moment in a confrontation when no one knows what’s going to happen, when the outcome is up in the air, when the result depends as much on chance as anything else.
“Ungh,” the Minotaur says, and moves toward Kelly.
Margaret, still unsure, steps between them. Shane prepares to lunge. Hank draws back his fist. Kelly covers her eyes. Then Sweeny speaks.
“Quite a ruckus for three o’clock in the morning.”
Sweeny comes around from behind the cars. It is uncertain how long he’s been there. With the longest blade of a tiny penknife he cleans the spaces between his front teeth, making high-pitched sucking noises as he moves from one tooth to the next. Sweeny, in pinstriped overalls and bare feet, makes an observation.
“Some folks is trying to sleep,” he says.
“Mind your business, old man,” Shane says.
Sweeny looks at him, chuckles.
“You on my property, son. My business might be to have you arrested. Or it might be to shoot you.”
Everyone quiets.
“You okay, miss?” he asks Kelly.
“No, she’s not okay,” Adrienne answers before Kelly can speak. “Among other things this freak of nature stole all of her money.”
“Miss?” Sweeny says. “You okay?”
“Yes, sir. I think so.”
Sweeny takes Kelly’s hand, helps her stand up. He moves slowly.
“M,” he says. “Trailer hitch looks good. You did a good job.”
Everybody looks at the trailer hitch on the back of the
Vega, confused.
“What the fuck!” Shane says.
It’s funny how intuition sometimes arises from the most unlikely sources. It could be that Sweeny was listening to the encounter from the very beginning. Or it could be that the Minotaur mentioned Kelly’s name on their long drive to Florida for the corn dog trailer. Given that Sweeny, in his own way, is a romantic, it’s not hard to see where his insight comes from.
“This your little gal, M?” Sweeny asks.
“Mmm,” he says, wondering.
“Have you got a point to make, old man?” Shane asks, albeit with noticeably less command in his voice.
“I got a lot of points to make. But I’m gonna tell you this one time, son, and that’s it. You open your mouth and say another word, and I don’t care what it is, it’ll be the last thing you say for at least a month.”
Sweeny reaches into his back pocket, leaves his hand there. It’s a trick the Minotaur has seen him use before; there’s nothing in the pocket save maybe a pouch of chewing tobacco. But Sweeny speaks with such confidence that Shane backs down immediately.
Hank stands to the side, mindlessly scratching; Adrienne watches.
“That her?” Sweeny asks.
The Minotaur nods. Yes.
“Hmm,” Sweeny says, looking Kelly over with due care and kindness, as if she is a car to be bought or sold. “I think she’d make a fine business partner.”
Then he goes back into his house, where he sits in the window in full view, still working the penknife between his teeth.
“What the hell was that all about?” Adrienne asks.
It’s everybody’s question.
“M,” Kelly says. “What’s he talking about? What did he mean by business partner?”
Mankind creates the hybrid, the monster, out of manifold needs: to bear the burden of guilt; as a vehicle for innate meanness; as a reminder; for personal reasons, both vicarious and perverse. Problems arise when the monster is humanized.
It’s three o’clock in the morning at Lucky-U Mobile Estates. Moments earlier unchecked rage churned among the group of people gathered there. But anger is an opportunistic and fickle thing, almost as prone to dissipating suddenly and leaving behind a cloud of confusion as it is to running its reckless course, needing only a gentle prod, an offhand comment, a look to alter its direction, needing, in this instance, Sweeny. They stand around wondering what to do next.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 25
