The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (23 page)

“Some sort of top-secret mission?” Danny asks. “You’d have to kill me after telling?”

“I might kill you anyway,” Holly says, then looks in the rearview. “How’re you doing back there?”

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

Danny Tanneyhill has his arm out of the window. He bangs a steady rhythm on the door with his thumb.

“The convent,” the redhead says. “I’m joining God’s army.”

“Are ya, now?”

“Yep. This time next week I’ll be on the battlefield for my Lord.”

“Huh,” Danny says, and pokes his thumb toward the backseat. “What about . . . ?”

“Tooky’s going to be an altar boy, a career man.”

“Right,” Danny says.

“Go right at the fork,” Danny says.

“That’s Dumb Hundred Road,” Danny says.

The Odyssey’s engine stutters, catches, and the van lurches ahead. The Minotaur reaches out both hands, steadies himself.

“I’m serious,” Danny Tanneyhill says. “Where’re you headed? What’s the hurry?”

Holly ponders her answer. “School,” she says finally.

This might be true. The Minotaur pricks up his ears.

“Culinary school. Classes start Monday.”

“What about . . . ?” Danny searches for the best words. “What about Mister Giggles?” He gestures with his head and thumb at Tookus.

Holly sucks her teeth. “Tooky . . . Took’s going home. Sort of.”

“Like a group home? Or a hosp—”

Holly stomps the brakes briefly, but it’s enough to shut the woodcarver up. The Minotaur is braced enough. Tookus surges against his seatbelt. Begins to perseverate.

“Titty titty titty titty pinnnnnnnnch!”

There is rage in Holly’s eyes. She pulls the van to the shoulder by a boggy swath of land at the road’s edge. Dozens of dead trees jut straight up out of tannin-black water. She turns to soothe her brother.

“Sorry,” Danny Tanneyhill says. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

“It’s okay,” Holly says. “I overreacted.”

“I got to pee,” the woodcarver says, hopping out of the Odyssey. “Be right back.”

Tookus calms quickly, goes back into the world of
Hogan’s Heroes
.

“Can we talk?” Holly asks the Minotaur quietly.

The Minotaur has many answers. Has much to say. But his old tongue won’t play ball. And Danny is back quickly.

“You could stay around these parts awhile,” Danny says. “You could start school next term.”

The Minotaur grunts. Holly sucks her teeth more vehemently.

“How much farther?” Holly asks.

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. The woodcarver clucks his tongue. Holly winces again, uncomfort able in her seat. The Minotaur remembers the scratch from his horn. Thinks infection. Hopes not.

“Look,” Holly says, pointing out the window at the bog, all those limbless trunks bleached white as bone. Rank and file. Morass and mire. Like an army marching out of death.

“Look,” she says to the woodcarver. “They’re coming after you.”

“Can we talk?” she said.

What will he say? How will he explain?

Here the Minotaur backslides. Lapses into fantasy. He is not above this sort of dalliance. Here the old bull gives in. And Holly. The redhead. In this version of the future the Minotaur swings wide the door of Sojourner’s Tavern. The church bells and their mad clappers fill the blue blue sky with glorious noise. Herds and gaggles of schoolkids dash hither and yon, dipping candle wicks at the Dumpert House, pecking out butterfly and heart shapes in the Tin Punch Cottage. Scald Mountain, the namesake of the village, whistles a piney tune high overhead. The Minotaur swings wide the door, hears the happy pop of muskets, gunfire on the distant battlefield. The Minotaur is not there, dead or about to die. The Minotaur is in Sojourner’s Tavern. Open for business. The scabbard and cartridge box swapped for an apron and a pair of kitchen tongs. The church bells beat the silence to a bloody pulp. On the porch opposite the tavern, Doc wields a rubber femur. Waves it, grinning, at the Minotaur. The air is dry as husk, as broom straw. Or maybe it’s not church bells. Maybe it is the anvil, hammered. The Minotaur shudders, dismisses the thought, goes into the tavern, into the kitchen, to his helpmeet. A redhead stands at the wood stove. She’s checking a batch of hand pies, ground lamb and a vegetarian option. She wears a gingham dress. A white apron. They fit her well. Maybe it is the anvil and the hot stinking eye of the forge. There’s powder on her nose. The Minotaur leans close, blows gently. She nuzzles his thick neck. The piecrusts are perfect. The church bells. If only the church bells would still their goddamn clappers. Ding dong ding dong ding dong.

“Ding dong,” says Tookus, then again and again. “Ding dong ding dong ding dong.”

The Minotaur comes back to the moment, back to his seat in the Odyssey.

Holly gets out of the driver’s seat. She’s left the key in the ignition. The warning bell insists on it. Ding dong. Ding dong. Holly opens the sliding door. Daylight floods the space. A flat white April daylight. The Minotaur squints, follows Tookus out of the Odyssey. They all stand in a line, looking at the high fence and the tattered banner draped across the weathered signs.

“
Closed for the Season
,” Holly says. “This is it? This is your special place? And it’s closed for the season?”

The woodcarver had hoped for more enthusiasm. Much more. He’d hoped that Ghoul’s Farm, with its ten-acre corn maze, bungee pumpkin launch, petting zoo, and zombie barn would, even closed, woo the redhead, in a roundabout sort of way.

“I thought the boy would like it,” Danny says.

“You’re a regular Einstein, aren’t you?” Holly says. “That brain of yours just won’t quit.”

Holly takes her brother by the hand and walks to the locked gate.

“What do you think, M?” she calls over her shoulder.

The Minotaur steps up to the
Ghoul’s Farm
plywood sign. The weathered board is the same flaky gray as his bull skin. The Minotaur looks into the cartoon zombie faces, the rotting wounds, lips and gums peeled back to reveal bits of gnawed gore in the chipped and missing teeth, looks at the eyes, into their wormy sockets. The Minotaur looks closely. What does he think? These are not the dead that one should fear. But there’s no way his fat tongue can voice this thought.

“Unngh,” he says.

The woodcarver grabs hold of the padlock and chain at the gate. Rattles them. The lock pops opens easily. Danny Tanneyhill holds the chain aloft, touting his dubious victory. He kicks the gate. The gate swings wide. Tookus takes off running full bore, disappears into the corn maze.

“Goddamn it!” Holly says, mostly at Danny. “Do something!”

“What am I supposed to do?” he asks.

Holly runs after her brother.

The woodcarver shrugs his shoulders at the Minotaur. “Women,” he says. “Can’t live without ’em, can’t kill ’em.”

The Minotaur refuses to take part.

She runs after her brother. Danny, giving in, follows, taking his handful of chain along, tripping on his way past the now-gutless scarecrow tied to the stile and the several outstretched mannequin arms reaching from among the bales of stacked hay forming the entry walls.

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

The Minotaur wants to help.

The Minotaur wants to help. He does.

The dirt path turns just inside the hay bales. Left and right. A high screen of dry and yellow cornstalks latticed with chicken wire and posts blocks the way. The entire maze is constructed thus. Ten acres of crisscrossing bare earth walkways hemmed by cornstalk fencing, dead ends galore, one entrance and one exit. Through maze walls that are rife with breaches, ruptures, gaps—kicked in by rowdy teens or surrendering to rot—Tookus disappears immediately. He could be anywhere. The Minotaur wants to help.

The Minotaur stands at the mouth of the maze. The mouth of the maze whispers. Both secrets and lies. Tells stories. Makes lists. Everything the Minotaur has ever done, right or wrong. In the name of love. The Minotaur hears the redhead calling for her brother. Hears, too, the boy whooping and shrieking. It might be terror. It might not. The Minotaur wants to help. The humans, the fully humans, are deep in the maze. The Minotaur can forgive them their exclusion. They know not what they do. Bullshit. The Minotaur is not without insight, his own blunt wisdom. He has little to offer the girl. He understands the woodcarver’s appeal—the fire in his eyes, that saw blade around his neck, that scar. The Minotaur knows about scar tissue. He slips a fingertip inside his shirt, scratches mindlessly at his own. More seam, really, than scar. There was no transplant. No aberrant puzzle making. No. The graft that made the Minotaur took place at the core of desire, where the very cells are gargantuan. Desire. Take heed, the whip. Desire is not the heart’s mollycoddler. Desire rides a wrecking ball, leaves havoc in its wake. Take heed.

Desire, both wrecking ball and prison. Of prisons the Minotaur knows much, having dragged his own stone labyrinth behind him forever. Stacking and restacking. O mortar! O brickbat! Sometimes the slog is so arduous that the yoke of his history bears down on his haunches, shreds the ligaments, plucks a discordant hymn on the tendons, grinds into the shoulders, the clavicles crackling under the strain. Sometimes, though, it’s back there hurtling and buoyant. Sometimes the Minotaur forgets, for whole eons, that the labyrinth is nipping at his heels. Then, sometimes—say, late April in the Allegheny Mountains, at the cusp of an already weary millennium—the Minotaur stops short, too short, and the stone walls topple toward him. Move.

The Minotaur wants to help. The mouth of the maze beckons, chides. He wants to help. To enter. The span of his horns, the anatomy of all that is bullish about him, heaves into the desire. The Minotaur steps up to the gateway, crosses the threshold into the maze, into the labyrinth, and five thousand years squash him flat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

DREAMS THE MINOTAUR OF CONSTELLATION
and curse. Word. Word.

Of milk money. Of pig iron and steam engine.

Dreams the flock of grackles. The field of narcissus.

The apple’s flesh and the swan, redeemed.

The Minotaur dreams the chambered pit. The planks and bones. Reflection, that uppity gasbag.

Dreams perfect attendance, the ritual bath, some kind of trophy with the head broken off.

Blessed be the Cub Scouts and the leaky oak gall.

First aid and second aid and third aid and fourth aid and fifth aid and sixth aid.

On the seventh day they rested. The Minotaur dreams of bloodlines.

The moment of cramped ecstasy. One longs for hooves. One hoofs for length.

Dreams the Minotaur of blueprints. Bluebells. Blue balls.

Of bunk and flapdoodle. Hocus-pocus and prattle.

Butter churn and backslider. The evangelical twat.

Dreams the Minotaur of refraction, that babbling whore.

Everybody says so.

The Minotaur dreams a chicken-scratch manifesto and amendments out the yin-yang.

The solipsistic acre and Mercator’s comforting hacksaw.

The yolk stalk and roasting ear.

Dreams the proclamatory titmouse and a congregation of dither fish.

Dreams the precursor to loft and drag. As abominations go it is first-rate. Blessed be the bloody stumps that built the bunkhouse. Blessed the balm and the broomstick.

Dreams, too, the dervish in us all. Whirligig and geegaw.

And now let us praise the crow. Prince of the glottal stop. Stop.

Praise the crow, his chortle, his chutzpah.

Praise the crow. The begetting crow who lies with cloven hooves.

Who lies quiet among clacking looms.

Who begat the whole black shebang. Who?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“HEY.”

The Minotaur falls dead to the Pennsylvania ground. Belly up. Rots.

“Hey, are you okay?”

What? No. Not dead. Not rotting. The Minotaur opens his eyes.

“Are you all right?”

He is not. He is not on the Old Scald Village battlefield. It is no longer dying season for him. He lies, back to earth, looking up at the boy, Tookus, who stands between his horns dropping corn kernels one at a time onto the Minotaur’s wide and bony forehead.

“Stop it, Tookus,” Holly says. She’s kneeling at the Minotaur’s side. Cornstalks rise halolike over her head. Beauty. “Are you okay? Are you all right?”

She speaks so quietly. The wind, though slight, rustling in all that goddamn dead corn makes it almost impossible to hear anything.

“What happened?” she asks.

The Minotaur doesn’t hear how he answers her questions.

“Bully bully bully bully bullyyyyyyy,” Tookus says.

The Minotaur stands, wobbles, and takes the boy’s arm.

Holly grabs on to the Minotaur. “Let’s get you to the van,” she says.

No. Not all right. Not dead. Never. There at the mouth of the maze the Minotaur stumbled over his eternity. The full bore of his forever crashing down on his horned head. He speaks. No. He bleeds. No. He sits against a fence post.

“Hey,” Danny Tanneyhill says, emerging from the Ghoul’s Farm zombie barn. “I found the pumpkin launcher!”

Tookus, the boy with the deep pock in his forehead, kneels in front of the Minotaur. Tookus, the damaged boy, weaves his head back and forth slowly, looks directly into the half-bull’s bullish eyes.

“Shhh,” Tookus says. “Shhh. Everything is going to be all right.”

The boy is present for that instant. The Minotaur sees him.

Holly sits down beside the Minotaur; Tookus sits on his other side and tries to tickle the bull-man’s ear with a piece of corn shuck.

“What happened?” Holly asks.

“N-Nothing,” the Minotaur says. It’s more true than she could ever understand. “Nothing.”

The woodcarver stirs up the dust around them. “Let’s go launch some pumpkins,” he says.

“Shut up, Danny,” the redhead says. “Can’t you see we’re . . .” She doesn’t finish the sentence.

The woodcarver drags a hay bale over and sits close. “Yo, chop steak,” he says to the Minotaur. “I met a friend of yours yesterday.”

The Minotaur isn’t interested. He leans against the post, collecting himself.