The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (21 page)
“What?” Holly says, getting out of the truck.
“Shave his belly with a rusty razor!”
“You’re scaring me,” Holly jokes.
“Put him in the scuppers with a hose pipe on him!”
The Minotaur doesn’t want to hear Danny sing anymore. He rattles the Odyssey parts more than necessary over the tailgate. Rambabu Gupta comes out of the office, his black eyes full of welcome, and beckons them inside. Holly and the Minotaur. They watch Danny go to the Pygmalia-Blades trailer, open the rolling door, and enter. Singing all the way.
“Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter!”
The soft chittering of the office door bells soothes the Minotaur, though Holly seems a little startled.
“
Goooooooo laaaaaaaab
,” Tookus says from the back room. He says it again, and more excitedly, when he sees Holly. “
Goooooooo laaaaaaaab jaaaaaaa muuuuuuun
.”
Devmani Gupta jumps down from the couch with one of the honey-soaked dumplings raised high. The syrup trickles down her little-girl fingers and pools in her palm before she sticks the cake into the Minotaur’s mouth.
“
Gulab jamun
,” she says with pride, then licks at her hand.
Tookus seems content. Well cared for, if a bit sticky. He sits, as much as he is capable of sitting, watching cartoons. Devmani is amused by his spastic motions. Her presence, calming. The bandages are gone from his hands, a few Band-Aids in their place. On the counter in the office, Rambabu has lined up five ice buckets. Each one is filled with coins in tight paper rolls. Gratitude overwhelms. Holly cries but tries to hide it. They let her.
“Guess what, Tooky,” she says. She sidles up to her little brother and whispers in his ear.
Tookus grins, giggles, tries to grab her breast, then sticks his tongue out at the Minotaur. Devmani copies him.
“Tomorrow,” Holly says to Tookus.
It is late afternoon. The rain has plans for the rest of the day. The Minotaur and Holly stand on the sidewalk and look across Business 220. The Minotaur tells Holly he’ll fix the Odyssey tomorrow. After? Before? He wonders what Holly will do until then. Wonders what he has to offer. Danny Tanneyhill has several chainsaws lined up. He lubes the blades. Everything smells like honey and sawdust and oil.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Holly says. “I’m going to get Tooky cleaned up and give him his medicine.”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. He feels rainwater dripping down his spine.
Holly takes something from her back pocket. The thing from the Yoder’s bulletin board. It’s soggy, and the ink has smeared.
“Fuck,” she mutters. Holly crumples the paper and tosses it to the ground.
The Minotaur forgives her trespass. He’ll pick up the litter eventually.
“So,” Holly says, “tomorrow, first thing?”
She’s talking about the Honda, right?
“Unngh.”
Danny is still singing. The rain is still falling. The highway steams.
“I wonder if he sleeps in that thing,” Holly says.
She collects Tookus, thanks the Guptas again and again.
In passing, the boy takes hold of the Minotaur. “Hornssssss,” Tookus says. “Horny horn horn.”
Holly smiles, loosens her brother’s grip.
In passing, the redhead takes hold of the Minotaur. No. She only speaks. “I know, Took,” she says. “I like them, too. I reckon we all do.”
The Minotaur stands alone on the sidewalk, looking across Business 220, looking up the steep side of Scald Mountain to where it disappears in the soupy gray cloud. Trucks roar by on the invisible turnpike. He picks up the scrap of paper, thinking maybe he’ll decipher it later and bring the news to Holly.
The Minotaur goes into Room #3, closes the door, closes the curtain. He flattens the wet paper on the dresser. He thumbs at the thermostat, and the heater fires to life. The Minotaur is rain soaked to his core. He hasn’t been this wet in a long time. He turns the light off. He strips down. Naked. He lies on the narrow bed atop the rough blanket. Everything smells like sawdust and motor oil and honey. The Minotaur settles his horns into the lumpy pillows and waits for things to dry. He’ll wait as long as it takes.
HERE LIES THE MINOTAUR.
Horned for his entire life. Hemmed in by errant desire. His tongue fat as a mattock blade. Hear him chop at speech. Silence, then. There is gristle in the creature’s teeth older than everything around him. Except maybe the Allegheny Mountains. In the plat books the world gets hacked to bits. It’s the wholly human need to parse out all, to make sense of, to control. The gridded planet. Find your place. Know your place. The Minotaur knows where he falls, and falls short. Knows, too, his strong suit. It’s his hands. They are capable hands. Adept with tools. Daedal, even. One time, lifetimes ago, there was a bird carved from an apple. The brilliant white flesh and the deep red peel. A girl touched his hand. Chop chop. One time the Minotaur saw an old man in purple short-short overalls and no shirt set fire to a calico cat. It was at a party. Everybody but the Minotaur was human. The Minotaur did not ask to see any of this. The Minotaur did not ask for the pitch black of his first stone prison, nor for the blinding thread that led him into eternity. He sees too much now. Time stops and starts, folds and unfolds, loops and undulates. The Minotaur believes in no gods. But he is sustained nonetheless.
The Minotaur is not one to get his hopes up. Not one to count chickens, cross bridges, etc. Not often, anyway. When the moon finally broadaxes its way through the night’s cloud cover, the Minotaur hears a door open and close. Goes, then, to his own door, waits. If it is Holly. If she knocks. If he answers, naked. If she enters. If and if and if.
Maybe he’ll fess up. Maybe he’ll tell the truth. Maybe. Anything she wants.
Parts the blinds, just enough. It is Holly, there in the muted gaze of April moonlight. There by the
Judy-Lou Motor Lodge
sign. Standing still. Thinking, maybe. She plucks a little American flag from the planter, waves it at the selfsame moon halfheartedly, the moonlight trying as hard as it can to out-pale, out-beauty the white flesh of her bare legs. Loses, the moon. The Minotaur sees it all. The moonlight, the T-shirt, the flag, the wave, the legs, the pause. What is she waiting for? The Minotaur eases the door’s chain bolt from its slot ever so quietly, just in case.
Holly, in motion, goes back to her own Judy-Lou door. Does not enter but listens, one ear pressed just below the brass room number. Stays until something (or more likely nothing) satisfies her, then heads down the sidewalk. Holly has made a decision. Holly has made a choice.
The Minotaur’s heart is as capable as any other. Century after century of pumping the mixed blood has taken its toll on the old organ, but still it beats harder when Holly approaches. Keeps beating hard when she walks right past Room #3 and on across Business 220.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. Parts the blinds still more. Watches Holly tap at the Pygmalia-Blades trailer door. Watches it gobble her whole in one bite.
The Minotaur snorts. Grunts. Everything stinks of honey and moonlight and sawdust. There is nothing he can do about it. The Minotaur bears witness. Has for centuries. Millennia. Forever he is conscripted to watch the actions of humans. And a thing once seen cannot be unseen. He steps outside, good sense be damned. Stands dead center of the parking space allocated for Room #3.
“Unngh,” he says in the direction of Pygmalia-Blades.
It’s been a long time since the Minotaur was naked in the open air. The trailer door closed behind her. Holly is inside. He saw it happen. A car approaches from way down Business 220, the splay of its headlights swelling. The Minotaur will not be moved. But he covers himself. Lays a very human hand over his very average cock, as if that’s what passersby would notice. The car speeds by without slowing. The Minotaur ventures closer. And closer still. Maybe she was drugged. Maybe hypnotized. Some black magic at work. The Minotaur has never trusted the woodcarver’s dark arts. That tongue of his, the woodcarver’s, a chisel, an adze, a rasp.
The Minotaur stands naked in the middle of Business 220, looks up and down the road. His bull half and his man half cast one shadow. Faint. A little of the moonlight gets caught in his horns. The Minotaur tips his head, lets go of the light. Maybe they’re just talking in the trailer. Just.
He approaches. The Minotaur is not stealthy. There’s no way around that fact. But he makes it unscathed through the wooden beasts of Danny Tanneyhill’s menagerie. Just. He hears them breathing. The statues. No. The humans in the trailer. Throaty. Scald Mountain breathes, too. A cold wind, an accusing wind, unfurls down its slopes, chills the naked Minotaur.
He could yank the trailer door open. Could see. Could save Holly from the woodcarver’s clutches. It’s within the realm of possibility for the Minotaur to do so. Possible but not probable.
The Minotaur circles the trailer, listening. Maybe they’re just praying. Maybe they’re conjuring up a god or two, for the betterment of all. Maybe. An opossum, conjured out of the underbrush, shuffles by, lollygags, and in godlike fashion pays no mind to any of the shenanigans taking place in the Chili Willie’s parking lot. Maybe they’re singing in the trailer, though the possibility stings the Minotaur deeply. Maybe, in his upset, the Minotaur sits himself down on a rough stump, leans against the half-cut trunk he’d saved the woodcarver from earlier, and sitting there naked in the April night, the bark digging into his flesh, maybe he realizes that those carved legs and feet and the half-formed body hacked out of the trunk are meant to be him. Sees the nascent horns taking shape.
The realization sears. The Minotaur grunts. Or maybe it’s them grunting. And maybe the grunting is too much. Something about a straw and a camel’s back. Maybe the Minotaur stands up too quickly, his horn tip piercing the canopy. Maybe he recoils, stumbles, nearly falls.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t hear Tookus approach.
“Fffffuckerrrrrr. Ffuuuucking fucker. Fuckingggggggg fuckerrrr. Sissy!”
The Minotaur sees the boy, arms in constant motion, conducting an unseen orchestra, a symphony of anguish. The boy doesn’t see the Minotaur.
The Minotaur scuttles around the side of the trailer. And what with all the singing and praying inside the trailer, Holly and Danny Tanneyhill don’t hear the boy weep. The Minotaur hears it. Tookus cries on the other side of the Pygmalia-Blades trailer. Cries and cries. Wordless, finally, or pure babel towering, then toppling. Syllables scatter lifeless on the ground.
The Minotaur wishes he could help somehow. The singing and the praying reach a fevered pitch, boxed up as they are between the naked Minotaur and the weeping boy. The boy. Numbskull. Lamebrain. Bedlamite. Retard. Moonstruck. Dum-dum. Slaphappy. Touched. Brother.
Tookus quits his vigil and goes back to his room at the Judy-Lou, leaving the door ajar. The Minotaur follows, sort of. His bullish heart is conflicted. What to do? He hesitates, and in the moment of indecision everybody hears the explosion.
The explosion.
The explosion blows the door open wide. The flash strips away the night for the briefest instant. Sound, too. Everything rings. Tookus staggers out of the motel room shaking his head, holding his ears, blinking his eyes, mouth agape.
A firecracker
, the Minotaur thinks.
An M80
. He knows these things.
Tookus, staggering still, hurt, maybe, or maybe not, but shell shocked, circles in the parking lot. The Judy-Lou office door is flung open and Rambabu Gupta steps into the night. His knee-length silk kurta, iridescent gold, seems alive. The man’s eyes are wide and searching.
That’s when the Minotaur remembers his nakedness. He scurries, crouched, big head all a-wobble, behind the only other car in the Judy-Lou lot. Peers through the windows to watch Danny Tanneyhill yank up the trailer door and stand, not quite covered by his boxer shorts (red ones, with a fortune-cookies-and-chopsticks pattern), looking far too defiant. The saw-blade necklace keens in the moonlight. Holly rushes out past him, tugging up her own underwear.
“Move,” the Minotaur hears her say.
“Aw, come on!” Danny says, hands up. “We’re not done.”
The Minotaur watches Holly pause ever so briefly, pick up a stick, clench her jaw. Sees her release the urge, drop the stick, shuck off the bond of anger, and go toward Tookus.
Ramneek Gupta comes to the door. “Be careful,
pati
,” she says.
“Tooky,” Holly says, opening her arms, “are you okay? You should be sleeping. You were supposed to—”
“Unnnnngggggg,” Tookus says, squeezing his head tightly with both hands. “Fuckkkk. Pussy pussy tit lickerrrrr.”
“Shhh.”
Rambabu Gupta goes into the open room.
“What happened?” Holly asks.
Ramneek is the only one clearly present. She doesn’t answer.
The Minotaur squats naked behind a car at the far end of the lot. The doorknob of the nearest room jiggles, and the half-bull half-man scrambles. The Minotaur, haunches up, head down, trots on all fours around the building. There is no time for shame. He’s been here before. At the rear of the motel the Minotaur stands, tilts his head away from the brick wall, and hurries along the skinny patch of earth down to his own bathroom window, where, after some graceless and likely obscene contortions, he climbs through, dresses quickly, and goes, flustered, out the front door of Room #3.
• • •
The resolution is swift. Tookus had dropped a lit M80, stolen from Danny Tanneyhill, into the toilet of the Judy-Lou room. The ceramic bowl shattered, the tank cracked and fell apart, water gushed onto the tile floor, piss yellow and clotted with fecal matter. Humans at their most animal.
“This is very bad business, Mr. M,” Rambabu Gupta says. “Very bad. I do not understand what happened.”
The Minotaur steps in to close the valve. He will not be deterred by the human filth.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. No more.
Tookus sits on the edge of the bed fidgeting, confounded by his still-ringing ears. Holly kneels with a towel to mop up the water. The white towel tints pinkish where she touches. Holly looks at her hands. The Minotaur and Rambabu look at her hands and see there the lines of tiny crisscross cuts on each of her palms. The Minotaur helps Holly stand, leads her to the bed. He will clean the mess. Danny Tanneyhill stands in the trailer door, sweaty, indignant, strangely beautiful in his apathy. The Minotaur hears the trailer door slam shut. Or maybe it’s the chittering of the saw-blade necklace.
