The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (29 page)

“Hey!” somebody says.

It’s Biddle, at the table, with a wobbly little barrel between his feet and a ball-peen hammer clutched in his fat hand.

“M! Over here! It’s Biddle.”

Of course it is.

“Oh,” Holly says. “Your friends are here.”

And before the Minotaur can protest Holly heads to the Old Scald Village table, to Biddle, to Smitty. Biddle sits with his bucket and hammer, grinning, staring at Holly’s chest. Smitty stands, rattling a pair of blacksmith’s pincers open and closed, open and closed.

“Tssss,” Smitty says, scowling at the Minotaur.

Something singes. Burns.

Biddle gives a slobbery wolf whistle. Holly is more amused than annoyed.

“It ain’t been the same since you left, M,” Biddle says. “When you coming back?”

“Tssss,” Smitty says again. He won’t look at Holly.

Neither of them mentions the uniform. The Minotaur is (still) dressed as a soldier. Still ready for dying. Still.

Holly picks up a hand mandrel, a heavy cone-shaped tool from Smitty’s forge. It’s fitted with a handle and meant for making and stretching iron rings.

“Goodness gracious,” Holly says, wagging the thing at the Minotaur. “This is my kind of tool.”

Holly laughs.

Smitty doesn’t.

“Them ain’t toys,” he says, looking at the Minotaur.

Tookus steps between the blacksmith and the Minotaur. Faces the man. Grins.

“Bang bang,” he says. “Bang bang.”

Then the boy rushes away. It’s a blessing in disguise. A saving grace. Holly has to follow. Too, the Minotaur. Biddle yammers something as they disappear into the Fruits & Vegetables Competition.

Table after table, in neat orderly rows, what the earth has yielded up lies in obscene display, already judged and ranked. Blue ribbons, red ribbons, Runners-up. The carrot and its promiscuous dangling. The lascivious purple of the eggplant. The cucumber’s knobby flesh. The halved cabbage and its furls. The tomato’s red cleft. Everything offered up by the clumps of basil. The onion, after all.

“Damn,” Holly says.

She takes a closer look at the first-place cucumber. Fingers its blue ribbon.

“Abbigail Zeek,” she reads. “Grade 9, Foot-of-Ten High School.”

Holly looks at the Minotaur, then past him. Smiles.

“Go, Abby, go,” she says.

Holly picks up the prize-winning cucumber. Tookus is at an opposite table looking at jars of honey. The Minotaur can smell everything. The crowd is, more or less, occupied elsewhere. Holly holds the cucumber batonlike, as if she’s going to pass it to him any minute now. Her thumb rides along its ridges and over the bumpy flesh. Then she smiles again. Then she takes a very deliberate, very delicate bite from the tip. The give and take of her bottom lip against the waxy green flesh is unbearable.

“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. Trespass. Trouble. He looks around.

Holly giggles, pleased with her rebellion, and returns the champion cucumis (minus half an inch) to its place of honor. She winks, still chewing, at the Minotaur, and her breath plows him deeply, takes root.

“Wait up, Tookus,” she says.

“Where to now?” she says.

“Let’s go over there,” she says.

Holly gestures up and over the crowd to a banner that reads,
4-H Animal Husbandry Exhibit
.

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. Anywhere. That’s the point.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE MINOTAUR IS ETERNALLY
at the mercy of nonsense: his own and humans’. Sometimes happily so. Other times not. Were he more clearheaded, the Minotaur might balk at the prospect of the 4-H Animal Husbandry Exhibit. But the world is topsy-turvy of late, his thoughts pell-mell, and so it happens.

“This way,” Holly says.

“Going to the chapel,” she says, giddy with criminality, “and we’re gonna get ma-a-arried.”

The 4-H-ers are giddy, too. And why shouldn’t they be? Head, Heart, Hands, Health. The youth, bright eyed and compliant, buzz about admiring each other’s projects, or stand beaming pridefully by their own. There, a banana nut bread fairly radiates wholesome deliciousness. Here, a mechanical apple peeler has littered the floor with beautiful red coils. The maker, the boy in charge, invites Tookus to crank the handle.

They believe, the 4-H-ers. They command a vast roofless room at the Joy Ag-Fest. There are demo chicken coops, an array of rainwater collectors, and a BB gun shooting booth (which Holly steers her brother clear of). Happily steers him here and there.

“I wish we could stay here forever.”

She said it aloud. The Minotaur heard it.

Holly put the prizewinner right into her mouth and bit the tip off. The Minotaur saw it. Saw it all.

“Butter butt butt butt butterrrrrrr,” Tookus says.

And sure enough, the roomful of butter sculptures is worthy of praise and awe. It’s a cold room, locked tight, and the floor-to-ceiling glass walls keep the oglers at bay.

Tookus is drawn immediately to the odalisque, life sized, scantily clad, lying demurely on her yellow slab. And why not?

The bust of a soldier, saluting.

The cow jumping over the moon, both grinning.

A tableful of small vignettes, pastoral and idyllic, though one lass skipping with a basket seems to have lost her head. The Minotaur leans in. There, he sees it, her tiny yellow head. Upside down by the perfect yellow porch steps.

“Look,” Holly says. She points across the exhibit hall to the Science of Farming display. “I saw one of those when I was a kid.”

What?
the Minotaur wonders, but will follow the redhead with or without an answer.

It’s a cow. A living, breathing, cud-chewing cow with a porthole in its side. A window into its gut. Holly reads the information poster.

“Cannulated,” she says, and looks deep. “It’s called cannulated.”

The Minotaur doesn’t care. There is an explanation of
how
and
why
. The Minotaur doesn’t care.

He is jostled and displaced by a troop of Boy Scouts clamoring to see inside the cow.

Two booths over, a line has formed. Tookus steps up, Holly behind him, the Minotaur behind her.

“What is it?” she asks.

There is lots of giggling and eww-ing. The line moves in fits and starts. But soon enough it’s visible. The 4-H-ers have set up a calving simulator. Veterinary-school quality. Lifelike. The heifer’s four hooves are bolted to a plank base. The heifer’s backside is aimed at the gathered crowd, her black vulva all slick and on display, loose and floppy. There is a box of rubber gloves, arm-length and hospital blue. There is a bucket of lube. A rack of pamphlets from Allegheny Community College describes its exciting new vocational diploma in veterinary technologies. There is a line of people (not unlike the lines for the pillories at Old Scald Village) ahead of them and behind—kids and adults waiting to glove up and reach inside the fake cow’s vagina.

The Minotaur is not faint of heart. Is not squeamish. But this apparatus strikes close to home. Strikes an ancient chord. The Minotaur closes his eyes, can’t escape the field of hyacinth, the craftsman’s relentless hammer, his own dubious conception. The Minotaur didn’t ask for any of this.

He opens his eyes to see a tattooed boy showing off for his tattooed girlfriend. The boy snaps his glove on with aplomb, strikes a come-hither pose, and lunges in up to his shoulder. A chittering, a chuckling, pulses through the onlookers. The girlfriend isn’t sure what to do. The Minotaur either.

“Dumbass,” Holly whispers, but she’s just as curious as the rest. And when the boy’s eyes widen and the look of surprise, or maybe shock, takes over his face, Holly leans in like everybody else.

“Hey!” the guy says. “Hey! Let go!”

He jerks, is jerked, deeper into the heifer’s backside.

“Tommy!” his girl says. “Tommy!”

There’s a struggle deep inside the fake cow. It’s not clear if Tommy is going to win. He looks fierce but worried.

“Mandy!” he says. “Mandy!”

She wants to help, but how? Mandy looks frantic.

“Tommy!”

Tommy is contorting and wrenching his arm. The lube-slathered latex sputters and farts in the struggle.

“Mandy!” he says.

“Mandy!”

And one final time, when it seems as if Tommy is about to lose the battle and be sucked in fully and forever.

“Mandy,” he says, yanking his arm free, raising it high in victory, kneeling before the weeping girl, opening his hand, where sits a ring box.

“Mandy,” he says, “will you marry me?”

“Good God,” Holly says.

Applause. Applause.

A sweet sleight of hand? Farmyard tomfoolery? Who is the Minotaur to judge?

The Minotaur is undone. Flummoxed. Though he’d blame what happens next on more jostling Scouts, the Minotaur steps back without looking. His pant leg snags on something. Maybe a rough edge on a stanchion post; maybe a sharp screw tip overrun by some zealous 4-H-er; maybe even the tooth or claw of a less common beast. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that the gray wool of the Minotaur’s Confederate trousers is no match for what snags them. They rip from knee to hip, and Holly hears it.

“Oops,” she says, kneeling and poking her finger right inside the tear. Breech and probe. Her fingertip there, where thigh meets calf. A fully human place.

It might as well be a branding iron. Tssss! The Minotaur smells burning flesh. No. The Minotaur’s mouth waters; he can’t help it. She kneels there, red hair parted over her face, red hair hanging down, framing the milk-white tableaux of her breasts. The shirt gapes, reveals the most sacred diptych, reveals the true Eucharist. The shirt gapes, and the Minotaur falls into the abyss. The Minotaur can’t help looking. The Minotaur is man enough. The Minotaur is beast enough. The bellows of his lungs fill, and the Minotaur’s horns rise toward the heavens.

“Are you looking at my tits?” she says, cracking his moment of rapture wide open. It is not an accusation. There is levity in her claim.

“Come on,” Holly says. “We’ve got to get you fixed.”

Anywhere. That’s the point.

Holly has a plan. Holly is quick on her feet. Holly parks Tookus at the gates of hell. No. It’s just an arcade game.

“We’ll be right back,” she says, feeding half a dozen coins into the slot, then giving him an entire roll of quarters. “Don’t you go anywhere.”

“
You’ve opened the gates of hell!
”

Tookus purrs with contentment.

“You stay right there, Tooky,” she says.

Anywhere. The Minotaur will follow the redhead. Though he has to stoop, bend to one side, and hold his torn pants closed in order to do so. It is late April. Tick tock, tick tock. Time clicks its boot heels and marches on. It is dying season somewhere. But the Minotaur is not dying today.

The redhead takes the bull-man by the hand. By the hand. Takes him, by the hand, out of the Kmart cum Ag-Fest building right down the sidewalk and into the Goodwill next door. (There is a new commotion on the stage, the Sacred Harp having unstrung and departed. The Minotaur hears, he thinks, a feral horn. But the Minotaur has other things on his mind.) The Minotaur goes, but not without trepidation. He is conflicted. About leaving Tookus and moving through the Ag-Fest crowd specifically. About thrift stores in general. The items always seem sticky with the residue of the lives they’ve passed through.

But Holly is on a mission. Holly, with the Minotaur in tow, charges into the Goodwill, straight past shelf after shelf of porcelain figurines—some animal, some human, some mongrel, most smiling beatifically—past stopped clocks, themed salt and pepper shakers, pots and pans, past all the smells of countless suppers, of closets and cabinets, past generations of tchotchkes come to rest after some final death in the family. She charges ahead, tugging him through rows and rows of orphaned shoes, a line of wheezing neckties, racks and racks of used clothing parsed out by gender (by generation?), then (roughly) size, right to the men’s section, as if she’s been there and done that before. The Goodwill employee, a creature of indeterminate age and sex clad in an ill-fitting smock, clad in a universe of woe, mumbles something as they pass. Beyond that nobody pays them much attention.

“You stay here,” she says, parking the Minotaur at the end of an aisle on one of those low shoe-store benches that require something of a straddle. “No, wait a minute. Stand up.”

He does.

She looks him over. Up and down.

“Turn around,” she says.

He does.

“Not bad,” she says.

“I’m thinking thirty-two, maybe thirty-four inseam,” she says.

“Sit down,” she says.

He does.

He watches her disappear behind the rows. She hums “What Wondrous Love Is This.” He sits. He waits. The aisles are narrow, the racks of clothing full. Try as he might the Minotaur can’t keep his horns from slipping into the line of shirts at his back. He can feel the ghosts crowding him.

“Kenny!” somebody calls from across the store, rupturing the moment. “Kenny! Goddamn it, boy, where are you?”

Holly returns with a pair of blue pants draped over her arm.

“They’re not gray,” she says.

“I think it’s time for a change,” she says.

“Kenny! I’m gonna whip your little ass when I find you!”

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.

“Hold these,” Holly says. “I’ll be back.”

The Minotaur believes it more than he’s believed anything in a long time.

“Kenny!” the voice rages behind him.

The Minotaur is about to stand up, to see what’s happening, when he hears the cry. A soft tiny weeping. Maybe human, maybe not. Hearing isn’t the Minotaur’s strong suit. He tries to find the source of the cry.

“These, too,” Holly says, returning from her sortie to drop more trousers into his lap.

They’re all shades of blue. The Minotaur doesn’t care.

“One more run. Hold tight.”

The Minotaur holds tight, straddling the low bench, throwing caution to the wind, letting his torn pants gape. When he hears the cry again it’s right behind him. Human, most certainly. Coming from beneath the densely packed row of women’s pantsuits, sizes thirty-six to fifty-two. The Minotaur angles his head so low that the horns nearly scrape the linoleum flooring. He sees the feet. The Minotaur parts the hangers, and there the boy stands, four, maybe five years old, tears rolling down his cheeks. A thick clump of his curly brown hair is snagged in a zipper. The boy was playing, swaddled in the secrets of the old clothes, then became trapped, and is now being held prisoner by a pair of tweed extra-large pants.