The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (15 page)
“I didn’t care about the people or their houses or cars. I was there to clear the damage, and when there was no damage I had nothing to do.”
The chainsaw carver seems sincere in his reflective moment, but the Minotaur has heard it all before, from one mouth or another. Danny Tanneyhill tells about the last time he was out with his crew, the night of the accident. A tornado, glorious in its rage, had danced out of the dark heavens and laid waste to most of a small mill town in one of the Carolinas. Danny tells the story well, touching his scar the whole time. The Minotaur watches as Holly falls prey to the narrative.
“I died,” Danny Tanneyhill says. “I died. I was dead. I was dead for five solid minutes.”
“Fuck,” Holly whispers.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, not impressed.
“I was cutting like a madman, in the wind and the driving rain. Ripping the limbs from a massive poplar that was blocking the road. And there, in the branches, a little pink Barbie Jeep—you know, kid sized, battery operated. And the girl. Just . . . just there.”
Holly sucks air through her teeth.
“I let go of my saw,” Danny Tanneyhill says, “and the blade kicked back.” He makes a quick jerking gesture, re-creating the cut with his fingertips and a hiss. “And I died. And I was reborn. And here I am.” The overlord of Pygmalia-Blades opens his arms.
“Fuck,” Holly says. Again.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. Again.
There is probably more to the story. Danny Tanneyhill has most likely rehearsed the denouement. But Tookus upstages the moment when he emerges from the trailer pointing a lit Roman candle.
“Look who found my stash,” Danny Tanneyhill says.
Holly is less than amused. She jumps into action, but not before one fiery red star whistles up over the roof of the Judy-Lou and explodes. The boy squeals, or maybe it’s a scream. Holly yanks the firework from his hands. The second projectile, blue, bounces down Business 220. Whistles. Explodes. She stabs the lit end deep into a thick mound of sawdust at the base of an uncut tree trunk and holds tight until the candle is spent.
Danny Tanneyhill shrugs, baffled by Holly’s reaction.
“Don’t ask,” she says.
The Minotaur sees Tookus, back in the trailer, slip something into his pants.
“Tooky! Come sit with us.”
Her brother resists, but Holly goes after him. Takes the boy by the hand and sings softly as she leads him back to her stump. Sings. Stump. Sings. Doesn’t matter that the Minotaur can’t make out the words. Sings. The song, a tithing of breath on an altar of sound. The throat a chapel. No. Cathedral. The glottis, the folds, the tongue. Hymn book.
Holly sits and turns back in the picture album. “And just how much do you get for these nasty things?” she asks.
Danny may or may not answer. Where did that song go? The momentum has shifted, though.
Holly closes the book. She reaches out and lays a palm on the huge unfinished trunk, Danny’s newest acquisition. “What’s this going to be?”
The Minotaur is standing right there, his horn practically touching one of the outstretched limbs. Shoed feet are taking shape at the base of the trunk, and legs (human enough) rise up its length. Beyond that, beyond the implied waistline, shape and form are nebulous. Undetermined.
“Haven’t decided,” Danny says.
But the way he looks from the tree trunk to the Minotaur and back, no one believes him. The Minotaur is not surprised that the carver doesn’t mention nearly being killed by the very same tree mere hours ago, or that the Minotaur was the one to rescue him.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
Danny Tanneyhill lines his pie makers up on the table.
“So,” Holly says, shifting everybody’s focus to the Minotaur, “how come a guy like you knows about making
aloo gobi
mountain pies?”
Tookus perseverates. “
Aloooooo alooooooo alooooooo gobi.
”
They’ve talked about the other scars. It is, for better or worse, time to talk about his scar. His seam. His division. The Minotaur wants to say something meaningful. He could say things about dying. He wants to tell Holly something important. But what? Can he tell her about dying on the Old Scald Village battlefield, of lying so still there he can feel the earth’s staggering orbit? Can he tell her of pressing his back to the stone foundations at Joy Furnace, of the heat from the ancient fires perpetually warming his spine? Maybe the Minotaur can talk to Holly about the smells of fresh thyme and the sizzle of butter in a hot pan. Or he can reach all the way back and tell of other stone walls. Of how he was feared. Of the mounds of crushed bones, the vats of virgins’ blood. The Minotaur readies his tongue.
“Mmmnn, baaaa . . . ball joint,” he says.
Holly looks perplexed, then smiles. Danny Tanneyhill laughs outright.
“Hey, G. I. Joe,” the carver says, “why don’t you tell her about your girlfriend? The one who brings you pies.”
It takes the Minotaur a minute to understand that Danny is talking about Widow Fisk, about Gwen. Then memory, as it is wont to do, horns in, and a haphazard montage flashes through the Minotaur’s mind. Here, Biddle choking in the muck, and the fat plaster trout. There, the shave horse and ice chips and all that black musky hair. Now, the face of Widow Fisk. The face of betrayal.
“Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says. In his heyday, in his glory days, the Minotaur would have trampled, then eaten such a human as Danny Tanneyhill. These are not those days.
“Girlfriend, huh?” Holly says, putting her thumb on the center button of the Minotaur’s Confederate soldier’s jacket. She is about to do more when Tookus walks into the middle of Business 220.
“Get out of the road, Tooky,” Holly says. But it’s so late, so quiet, there’s no urgency in her request.
The boy stands still, then points down the road into the darkness.
“Tookus! Get your ass over here,” Holly says.
It is very late. The witching hour. Maybe past. The laws of physics, the rules of law, perceptions of all sorts, get a little fuzzy around the edges. Tookus is first, and it would be hard to say who hears it, who feels it, next.
“What the hell?” Danny Tanneyhill says.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
Holly goes to the middle of the road to get her brother. She gets stuck there, looking with him into the distance. Distance. It suggests something measurable, but whatever it is coming up Business 220 from Homer’s Gap way surely will not be bound by yardsticks or quantifiers. The earth quakes before anything is seen. The tiny American flags jitter nervously beneath the Judy-Lou marquee. The whole of the Pygmalia-Blades bestiary fidgets and twitters. Then the flashing lights come into view.
“What the fuck?” Danny Tanneyhill asks.
“Are we being invaded?” Holly asks.
Tookus shoulders an imaginary rifle. “Bang bang bang bang bang bang,” he says.
It comes onward, impervious to his defense, but comes incredibly slowly, and gets louder with each gained inch. Louder and louder. Brighter and brighter. As if hell itself is being dragged up the road and is fighting every increment. Tookus starts to cry. Holly takes him over to the safety of the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge. Holds the boy. The Minotaur sees her singing into his ear. Danny Tanneyhill can’t figure out which statue to rescue first. The Minotaur lowers his bullish head and surveys the scene. He will not be moved.
And though the approaching beast is horrible, is horrifying—its girth spanning the two-lane road from side ditch to side ditch, its ugly head rearing nearly above the tree line (they’re not imagining this; the monster is well lit), its growl throaty and methodical, hissing, stinking of dust and, sure enough, hydraulic fluid—the trio finds it hard to sustain their terror.
“Why is the son of a bitch moving so goddamn slow?” Holly yells.
So they wait. And watch. And what is eventually born out of the black hole of unknowing is a little disappointing. The mystery revealed is a thing equal parts annoyance and nightmare. It’s a building. A whole building, in transit, on a trailer. A lead car heralds the news with flashing yellow lights on its roof and a
Wide Load
warning lashed to its bumper. The insipid beams break and shatter in the dense trees by the roadside. Behind the lead car, a big rig, an eighteen-wheeler with lighted outriggers spread wide, strains and labors against its burden. The clatter of the diesel engine is deafening. The trailer it pulls straddles the middle of Business 220, and on that flatbed, a church. An old white clapboard church. Steeple and all. Shored up. Strapped tight. The whole thing.
Dingus Historic Hauls
is emblazoned on the semi’s doors.
“Mmmnn, okay,” the Minotaur says.
He understands what’s happening. The load is too big to transport in any but the leanest hours. Too delicate for haste. The old boards creak and squeal, pulling at their glued joints, straining against their pegs. And up on top the shutters flap against the squat belfry. Higher still, the priapic spire waggles toward the heavens, as if. There is no cross, only its splintered remnant. The Minotaur imagines the steeplejacks (he knows their breed) champing at the bit, rattling their scaffolds, ready to get at it, the work of restoration. The Dingus truck slogs along the macadam. The Minotaur looks into the mawing windows, imagines there the pews tumbling willy-nilly. The Minotaur imagines the hymnals, dumb and flightless birds flapping their red wings across the plank floor. Their mute squawks. The Minotaur does not imagine the driver of the truck. He watches the man pick his nose as he passes, digging deep, and looking at a cell phone. Not looking at the Minotaur or at anything that isn’t on the straight and narrow path ahead. Picking his nose, tapping at the cell phone with the very same finger, and paying no attention to the sedan that’s trying to get around the wide load, swerving back and forth, looking for an opportunity to pass (and likely has been for miles and miles). The driver of the car, whose path is blocked by the church, curses and swerves and honks, then repeats it all again. The parking lot of the closed Chili Willie’s would be perfect if not for the Odyssey perched on its jack. The sedan skids in, barely misses the van, skids out. Danny Tanneyhill throws a chunk of wood, barely missing the sedan. And when the car whips around the wide load’s other side, as if there may actually be enough room between the brick Judy-Lou planter and (either) the semi’s trailer or the motel office, Holly gasps loud enough for all to hear. The Minotaur readies himself for catastrophe. None comes. The car glides to a quiet and respectable stop in the check-in lane. And while the old white church lumbers and chugs out of sight, if not out of mind, the Minotaur, the redhead and her brother, and the woodcarver watch the driver of the now-parked sedan fumble and fuss with his seatbelt.
Danny Tanneyhill crosses Business 220, holding another chunk of wood, ready. He joins Holly and Tookus, then the Minotaur.
“Is he drunk?” Danny asks.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, concerned more with the Guptas now, feeling protective.
It takes the driver an inordinately long time, but when he finally emerges from the sedan, it’s clear why the struggle. He is immense. Not merely rotund. Obese. A behemoth of a man in a business suit who, once standing (and nearly as wide as he is tall), defies belief that he ever fit in the car in the first place. They hear him grunt. Hear the wheeze of his breath.
“Is he drunk?” Danny asks again. But that’s not the real question on their lips.
“Are those . . . ?” Holly starts. “Are they . . . ?”
She wants to know if they’re real, the donkey ears atop the fat man’s head. Donkey ears. Long and furred, soft points at the high tips, curling inward along the edges like leaves. Donkey ears.
“Are they real?” she asks, and looks to the Minotaur for his answer. As if he would know. Scald Mountain bites its rocky black tongue. Says nothing.
The Minotaur wants to talk about his scar. It was his turn, by the fire. Things are unresolved. Inconclusive. The Minotaur feels it. There is much more to be said. But it is late. The church has passed on its slow truck, and the fat man checks into the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge without incident.
Tookus brays loudly. “Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”
“I gotta go to bed,” Holly says.
Wait. There is more to tell. More to show. The Minotaur wants to tell her things. To show her things.
Want to see how I die?
he thinks to say.
This is what it feels like to
. .
.
But it’s hard to stop momentum. A thing in motion (even an idea or a state of mind) likes to stay that way. Danny Tanneyhill sees it. He takes his pine log back across the road. Holly may or may not have mumbled a good-night to the Minotaur.
“Wait,” the Minotaur says. “Wait.”
But he’s the only one left in the parking lot.
Wait.
WAIT. THE MINOTAUR WANTS ANOTHER MOMENT.
Silly, that, and knowing so he moseys back into Room #3. His mind reeling. The Minotaur decides to polish his musket. For no better reason than he needs the distraction. Though being prepared for whatever happens next is important to him. The Minotaur hears the chainsaw roar to life across Business 220. The Minotaur douses a swab of cloth with acrid solvent, tucks it into the bore, and rams it home. He’ll stave off the puckish night. Top to bottom. He’ll stand his ground. Stand guard. Against whom? The donkey? The man? Against butterscotch and broom straw. Sawdust. Starlight. The Minotaur pledges allegiance. He’ll take it on the chin. He’ll take it in stride. Take it as it comes. Come one, come all. Come the ticky-tacky night and its petty demands. Hostage taker par excellence. Tick tock, tick tock. The Minotaur’s devotion will not be ransomed. The Minotaur considers the stave. Considers bottled breath and the squeaky prosthesis. The Minotaur considers his options. Considers first the hammer. The ball-peen, maybe. Not the sledge. No, certainly not the sledge. There is the beetle and the claw hammer. The cross-peen and the maul. Too, the mallet has a stake in the claim. The Minotaur considers, briefly, the scutch. The rip, the pile, the tilt. Comes back again and again to the ball-peen. Peen. What it means is this: to draw, to bend, to flatten. Knock knock. Who’s there? Night draws. Night bends. Night flattens into still more night. And the goddamn knocking won’t stop.
