The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (11 page)

“Unngh,” he said that day, and sat down.

“Unngh,” he says this day, and sits down. Presses his back against the mortared stone. Lets his horns touch there, too. A few generations ago, humans stoked the fires overhead; two thousand degrees stormed and raged, belching black smoke high into the sky, vomiting chalky white lime onto the earth. Men and animals labored and died in the process. Lifetimes. A drop in the bucket of what the Minotaur knows.

The fire is gone. The stone was stone before chisel, before hammer, and after. Mortar is only wishful thinking. The stone walls keep all the secrets. The Minotaur cut his eyeteeth amid stone. He knows well its loyalty. The Minotaur comes to Joy Furnace when he wants to remember nothing. To foresee nothing.

This day, his life in pending upheaval, Old Scald Village and all its people likely behind him, the Minotaur wants nothing. Nothingness. For the moment. The Minotaur sits, his bull head at rest in the ruinous kiln, this mouth of rock, and lets the torrential silence overtake him.

Sits. And sits.

The day does as days do. And in passing leaves the Minotaur alone.

Alone, that is, except for the stinkbug that lumbers over his pant leg as if it were a veritable mountain. Alone, that is, except for the hive of busy wasps coming and going from a hole in the far wall, perfect in their industry. Alone, except for the king snake and the copperhead staking out territories in the kiln’s nooks and crannies, waiting for the field mouse, waiting for the fledgling robin to topple out of its nest on an overhead ledge, not quite sure what flying means yet, is yet—could flight be the mouth of this reptile, its binding hold? Alone, but for the shadows that slice the blue circle of day overhead from time to time. Here a titmouse, there a hawk, a buzzard. Alone. Except for the beast that crawls up out of the noonhour.

The Minotaur hears it first. A creature on approach, coming from the highway. What rough beast is this, slouching up the sloped path to Joy Furnace? A labored grunt, then a squeaking and creaking; the thud of something not quite foot; breath heavy, shallow, constricted; some dragged thing, then a pause.

The Minotaur is not afraid. The grunt, the rattle, the thud, the wheeze—everything gets louder as the creature draws nigh. But drawing nigh takes its toll on the clock, in the universe of near-silence inside the abandoned kiln. The Minotaur listens long into the day. A small-scale clamor and clang. A manageable din. The Minotaur refuses to speculate. Clunk and scrape. Crank, wait. The Minotaur is not afraid. Really. The Minotaur is, however, human enough. Man enough. He looks, after all.

It is hard to peek, what with those horns, that snout. But the Minotaur tries. He cocks his head along the arch of the kiln’s portal. The horn tips emerge first; there’s no other way. Whatever makes the sound, whatever comes, is close.

Is close. Is closer. Is—can it be?—something of a man. The Minotaur sees him. The man (manlike) doesn’t see the Minotaur. The man is too busy struggling up onto the low slab of stone at the mouth of the far kiln. He struggles because of the prosthetic leg, a booted apparatus that telescopes from beneath his pant leg just below the knee. He struggles because of the absent arm, the uniform sleeve pinned at the shoulder. That arm, that missing arm, flails in its immense void. The man, the soldier, struggles. The fat cylinder of oxygen weighing down his backpack. And the face, the remnants of face. All this, though, merely glimpsed. The manlike creature enters the far kiln. The Minotaur hears him settle in against the stone wall. The Minotaur listens as the soldier’s breath slows, eases into peace. The Minotaur breathes his own breath. The Minotaur and the man sit together, apart, and breathe long into the night. They share a rancorous kinship. The worn-out scapegoat of an ancient tale and this modern-day myth. The hero-soldier left to rot after his duty is done. The furnace stones bear these manifest burdens stoically.

At some point the Minotaur looks up. The moon is making its rocky and yellow sally across the black circle of night sky. The Minotaur hopes the man is looking up.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IT IS DAWN WHEN THE MINOTAUR
comes back down Business 220. His woolen pants and jacket—those telltale signs of his status as a living-history reinterpreter—are dew damp. Cold and scratchy. The other soldier, the damaged man, may have left Joy Furnace earlier. Or he may still be there. It’s not the Minotaur’s place to question. To pass judgment. To grant salvation. It is not the Minotaur’s place. It is not the Minotaur.

He walks the quiet roadway. The mountain comes to life slowly above him, shouldering up the sun, tucking in and rolling out the shadows. He is in no hurry. It is only Tuesday, and the rest of his murky existence lies ahead. Just beyond a bend in the road the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge comes into view. Its pitched metal roof, painted a leafy green, beckons.
Come home.

The Minotaur will slip into Room #3, will close the curtain, the blinds, will strip out of his damp uniform, will make whatever contortions necessary to fit into the cramped tub. It is only Tuesday. He will soak for as long as it takes. The Minotaur focuses. He will not be distracted. He will not look across the macadam. He will not look over the Chili Willie’s parking lot at Pygmalia-Blades, at Danny Tanneyhill’s pickup truck and the gargantuan tree trunk (so much larger than the last) that seems to have toppled from the truck bed and cants precariously, looming overtop the wooden bestiary. He will not look.

“Hey.”

“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, not in answer. Rather as a deflection. He will not hear.

“Hey.”

Slightly louder. No matter. The Minotaur will not hear. He stoops to pick up some litter from the mouth of the Judy-Lou’s drive. The blackest crow in existence takes wing from a hemlock bough high on Scald Mountain, hurtles down the slope, pulling the rest of the sun up over the ridge line. The crow lights on the peak of the Pygmalia-Blades tent. Caws its nasty caw. The Minotaur has no choice.

“Unngh,” he says, and crosses the road.

The Minotaur approaches the truck with caution.

“Hey,” the voice says, “can you help a brother out?”

It’s Danny Tanneyhill. He’s pinned between the massive log and the truck’s tailgate.

The Minotaur can be decisive when necessary. He decided to leave behind what he left behind back in Joy Furnace. Here in the Chili Willie’s parking lot, the suffering is more acute. It is not in the Minotaur’s nature to overthink. He decides, for the moment, not to leave the man trapped beneath the tree. In the night the chainsaw artist had returned with an oak too big for his own good. He had grappled with its girth and lost. The tree is limbless. The fresh cuts where the branches were removed glare like pale little suns frozen in orbit around the trunk. Everything stinks of sawdust and motor oil. Smells, too, like trespass. Like ill-gotten gain. This pinning may very well be an act of revenge. But there is no visible blood.

“Yo,” Danny Tanneyhill says, “there’s a pry bar over behind my G. I. Joe.”

It takes the Minotaur a minute to understand, but he finds the thick iron rod easily enough. The carved army man offers no resistance.

The rudiments of physics come easily to the Minotaur, and his strength is what it is. He eyes the situation, drags a low stump into place to serve as fulcrum, wedges the pry bar between the stump and the fat oak trunk at just the right spot, and heaves.

“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

The oak rises, enough. The bare-chested chainsaw artist slithers out, as if he were simply resting.

“Damn,” Danny Tanneyhill says, shaking his booted foot.

Something around his neck rattles. The Minotaur can’t help looking. Doesn’t try not to look. It’s a chainsaw blade, polished up, worn as a necklace. Behind the teeth, a long scar swoops down along the ridge of Danny Tanneyhill’s ribcage.

“Damn,” Danny Tanneyhill says again. “That was close. Thanks, man. I owe you one.”

One what?
the Minotaur wonders. “Mmmnn,” he says.

“You want a beer?” Danny asks, fishing in a cooler.

“Mmmnn, no.”

Danny Tanneyhill takes a small pot from an unlit camp stove, reaches toward the Minotaur. “Hot dog?”

Half a dozen weenies bob beneath the water’s surface, here and there nosing through a scrim of congealed fat. The Minotaur takes one. “Thanks,” he says. He takes a bite. It is not a tentative bite.

The Minotaur starts to leave, but Danny Tanneyhill asks for more. “Could you give me a hand?” he says, already straining into the oak. “I want to stand this son of a bitch up.”

The Minotaur helps. On the third try, they stand the son of a bitch up and prop it against the bed of the truck.

“Hold tight,” Danny says, and leaves the Minotaur in a balancing act.

As Danny walks up the short ramp of the Pygmalia-Blades trailer, the Minotaur sees his bare back, sees the maze of pocks and dents in the man’s flesh from lying in the gravel all night.

Danny returns with a coil of fat hemp rope and begins tying a knot.

“Let me just . . . ,” he says.

Danny Tanneyhill loops and knots the rope, talking all the while.

“Got to get it . . . ,” he says.

Talking all the while, and eyeballing the Minotaur standing right next to the giant tree trunk. As if . . .

“A few more . . . ,” he says.

“Somebody was banging on your door last night,” he says.

The Minotaur pricks up his ears.

“Couldn’t see who,” he says. “I was stuck under this fucking tree.”

The Minotaur thinks,
Hurry
.

“They pounded for a long time. I’m surprised Neti-pot didn’t come out, guns a-blazin’.”

The Minotaur leaves before the last knot is cinched tight.

“I owe you one!” Danny Tanneyhill calls out again.

“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. He doesn’t want it. He turns to tip his horns ever so slightly. And it might be the horrible potential he sees inside the towering oak trunk, the monstrosity teeming just beneath the bark, or it may be the glare, the sunlight captured and reflected from the saw blade hanging around Danny Tanneyhill’s neck. Whatever the case the Minotaur walks right across Business 220 without looking.

It is hard to miss a half-man half-bull. Fortunately the driver of the vintage pristinely restored AMC Matador is paying attention. The car skids and swerves. The Minotaur jumps.

The driver hollers loud enough for all to hear, “Watch where you’re going, asshole!”

The Minotaur watches the man’s arm and hand and middle finger wave furiously all the way down Business 220.

Even before he gets to the door of Room #3, the Minotaur sees evidence of the night’s visitor. It’s a little round pan covered in foil, sitting on the sidewalk directly in front of his door. If he’d been just slightly more rattled by the near-miss on the road, the Minotaur could’ve easily stepped right over, or more likely right into, the offering.

The Minotaur catches his breath, stoops to look. It’s a pie pan. The Minotaur sniffs the air. He doesn’t want to get his hopes up. He holds that breath of his until the door to Room #3 is closed and the safety chain is fully engaged. Until the gift sits safely on the narrow desktop. Then, with the care of a jeweler, of a sapper, even, in the act of defusing, the Minotaur lifts an edge of the foil.

The meringue is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Its swirls are perfect. Its peaks are browned perfectly. The Minotaur does not have to dig into the eggy surface to know what lies beneath. He can smell the butterscotch. He can feel Widow Fisk’s fingertips in his mouth. No. Her name is Gwen. He will not make the mistake again. The Minotaur thinks her face to mind. It is called disappointment. He wonders about the gift. What if he had been at the door to accept it? What then?

Somewhere beneath the scent of butterscotch the Minotaur catches a whiff of sulfur. The paper mill’s morning stink. He knows if he opens his door, if he listens carefully, he might hear Smitty’s hammer ringing on the anvil. What if he just goes back to Old Scald Village anyway? Just shows up as if nothing happened? Just waltzes right back into the Gift Shoppe? He’d thank her for the pie. It’s very possible, given what the Minotaur understands about humans, that he could simply step into denial, go back to work, take full part in the big weekend coming up. He could sit around the campfires where they boil up their hominy and hardtack, where the fatback burns to a crisp in the cast-iron skillets, where the flaps of the old canvas dog tents splay open to reveal the Domino’s Pizza boxes gaping on top of the period-correct canvas cots, where droning fiddle tunes weave the night air. He could stay with the soldiers, the officers, the women, almost welcome, until they all break camp and go back to their accounting firms and custodial jobs, their kenneled Peekapoos and busted sump pumps. Then the Minotaur remembers the
Closed
sign on the Welcome Center’s door. Remembers the scratchy intimacy between the broom maker’s legs. It is also very likely that his return to the village would have other outcomes. The Minotaur knows this about humans, too. Besides, Minotaurs do not waltz.

He hears the Guptas come to life next door. The Minotaur thinks about the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge, the comforting regularity of laundry washing and folding, washing and folding, endless white sheets and pillowcases, thinks about maintenance, a plumbing job here, spackle and paint there. Every fall the gutters dredged of leaves and evergreen needles. Every spring some other necessary task. Staying here would be easy enough, thinks the Minotaur. The memories of Old Scald Village would soon be lost to the labyrinth of mind.

He picks up the butterscotch pie. It’ll be his gift to the Guptas. His pledge. He won’t take a single piece. Not even a bite. And though he couldn’t pinpoint the reason why, the Minotaur opens the door to Room #3 cautiously. Snout first, cradling the pie, he eases back into the day.

But as soon as the Minotaur enters the office he knows something is amiss.

Rambabu Gupta rages into the telephone, his Urdu curses piling up on the floor. The Minotaur can understand nothing but the daughter’s name: Bavishya! The Minotaur understands enough. Ramneek weeps, sitting stiff and upright in a lobby chair. She will not look at the Minotaur. In the back rooms the lights are off, but the regular flicker and the artificial laughter say enough.