The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (31 page)
The Minotaur hears her sit on the opposite bench. Feels her still more. The space is cramped. Tight. The Minotaur’s eyes are closed. He does not see the fur coat fall open. Does not see her breasts fall into their softness, nor the nipples reach. He does not see her legs part.
“Don’t look,” Holly says. “They’ve got rules here.”
He feels one bare foot come to rest at his side, then the other bare foot at his other side. The Minotaur will not look at her spread legs. Spread. Him between. Heat and musk, between him and the girl. Her musk, her heat, just there, and everywhere. She presses the soles of her feet against the partition.
“Don’t look,” she says.
And the Minotaur will not see the wild red hair, the bush burning, swirling, glistening. Will not see her palm ride up the swell of her ribcage, lift and squeeze the breast.
“Ummh,” she says.
“Don’t look,” she says.
And she knows he will not. And he knows, without looking, what business the hands are about.
“Don’t look,” she says.
It becomes a mantra, a pacesetter. A syllabic coxswain.
“Don’t look,” she says slowly when the fingers trace the lips, part the folds.
The Minotaur knows this unseen thing. This sweet mutt. A thing both flora and fauna, there, out of sight, so close. He could name it if he had to.
“Don’t,” she says, “look,” when the fingers dip in, tips first, then fully, to find her most private flesh.
“Don’tlookdon’tlookdon’tlook,” she says when those two favorite and slick fingertips circle and circle and circle, now right above, now a little lower.
She stops. She stills. The Minotaur wonders if something is wrong, if she heard something, someone. No, she is in motion again.
“Don’t look,” she says.
The Minotaur hears her stickiness. Hears her inside herself. Holly inside of Holly. The Minotaur feels her fingers at his mouth before he smells, before he tastes. This is what the redhead tastes like. Root and stem, soil and stamen. She tastes of the plow and the rut. Of cloud. Sun and moon. Day and night. The redhead, her pussy, it tastes like the universe. Her fingers there, then gone. The tastes linger. Here, the pussy. Her pussy. There, the still more earthy backside. He knows this. Knows now the taste of her.
“Don’t look,” she says. “Don’t look. Don’t . . . don’t . . . don’t . . . look.”
The Minotaur feels the surge as the muscles in her legs contract and spasm. The bird takes flight, the fish breeches, the bull bucks and heaves, everything drips. The Minotaur is drowning. The Minotaur is man enough. He cannot help what rises between his pinioned legs. The redhead kicks at the fitting-room stall, her breath a staccato utterance, a hymn to flesh and blood and bone. Something falls to the floor. The Minotaur hears it roll away. The Magic 8 Ball. It rolls to a stop against a far wall. Aftershocks of her orgasm jolt her body and, through it, the Minotaur’s.
Holly sits splayed, recovering, until her breath comes to order. She leans into him, her forehead against the bony expanse between his closed eyes. She kisses the Minotaur lightly on the snout.
“Don’t look,” she says.
She pulls her legs from around him. The Minotaur listens to her breathe deeply, consciously.
“Don’t look,” she says, almost whispering.
She stands. The fur coat drops from her body. He listens. She gathers up her own clothing, returns to herself. No longer naked. The Minotaur listens. Every sound drips with her, what? He doesn’t know how to name it.
“Don’t look,” she says so softly that it contains almost no sound.
“Don’t look.”
The Minotaur hears the hinges protest just a little when the stall door opens, then shuts. The Minotaur sits with his eyes closed. He’s okay, there in the dark. He hasn’t been given permission to look. He’s content enough with the things he can smell and feel and taste. The sweat from her calves along his thighs. Her viscosity, her sweet filth, on his tongue, in the black wells of his nostrils. A pair of crows argues outside. The Minotaur doesn’t have to see. Doesn’t have to look. The fitting-room mirror bore witness. The Minotaur sits on the bench in his underwear, his modest cock still hopeful. Petulant, even. The Picasso puppet dangles from his horn tip. On the floor the mottled fur rests atop the nun’s habit. No longer Holly. A beast in its own right. Asleep or waiting. On the bench where she sat Holly left a puddle of herself. He doesn’t have to see it. The Minotaur wonders if he can open his eyes yet. The Magic 8 Ball, having rolled window up in the corner, has the answer bobbing plainly, clearly, in its murk.
THE MINOTAUR TAKES HIS TIME.
Sweet time.
When he steps back out into the day, the day has wreaked havoc on the earth. All is charred black. The gibbous moon, in a hissy fit, has upended and poured its moony gall over everything. The Minotaur runs naked—nay, gallops—through the smoldering ash and stump world. Bellowing.
No. That’s not it at all. Things have changed.
The Minotaur steps back into the day. The skirmish line. Route. Flank. Retreat. The Minotaur steps into the dog and pony show. The cock-a-doodle-doo swung round and round and round, the tarot deck, the chopping block. There is no difference between the prie-dieu and her scapula.
No. Too much. The Minotaur knows. This is too much.
The Minotaur knows the furnace, the smelter, the bellows.
The Minotaur knows Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater. The titty-twister.
The Minotaur knows the solipsistic eye of Copernicus. Knows pomp and circumstance.
The Minotaur knows the travesty of orbits and gravity, the muckrakers of the universe.
The Minotaur knows a girl made of fire. Of fire. Echo.
The Minotaur remembers that thing. She never did.
The Minotaur stands in the strum hollow. In the wash of the treble drone.
The Minotaur stands on the mountaintop.
The Minotaur always finds himself standing on the goddamn mountaintop.
One goddamnable mountaintop after another. The tide of histories (plural) roiling in the valleys below. Giddy. Giddy-up. The Minotaur stands on the mountain and, with his horn tips, stitches himself to the cloud-heavy sky. The running stitch. The hemming stitch. The basting stitch. The slip stitch. The catch stitch. The backstitch. The invisible stitch.
Maybe the heart is both. Vessel and whole note. Sintered, as he is, by her.
THE MINOTAUR TAKES HIS TIME,
there in the changing room stall of the Goodwill, a late April afternoon. The Minotaur lingers. In the Goodwill, in the goodwill of Holly’s tastes and smells. Her presence and absence. He sits in his underwear, his horn tips pressed against the wall panel. One ear twitches. He taps at his brass buttons. He reaches into the coat and rubs at his seam. It’s on the move now. Surely. He’s half convinced that she’ll be gone when he leaves the store. That she was, maybe, never even there.
“Closing!”
The voice breaks the Minotaur’s reverie. No matter. It is still his.
A door squeaks. Footsteps. The voice calls out again. “Closing!”
The Minotaur sees her shoes, the thick black soles worn lopsided from her unending drudgery.
“Mmmnn, okay,” he says.
He would like to tell her not to worry. He would like to step out of the changing-room stall and put his arms around the woman and hug. But the Minotaur hasn’t changed that much. The pants-less bull-man would surely terrify the Goodwill employee.
“Okay,” he says again.
The Minotaur puts his pants on. Holly picked them. She must have been there. He looks at the bench where she must have sat. Sees what she left. Must have. Drags a finger slowly through her. Puts the finger in his mouth. Again.
The husk of a beast is piled at his feet. The Minotaur toes it gently to make sure she’s not still there, swathed and hidden. The Minotaur picks up the plastic Minotaur. The living Minotaur is not a thief. He pockets the toy anyway. Devmani will love it. He thinks of her full black eyes. The Minotaur is not a thief. He shoves the Picasso puppet into his other pocket. Anyway. Sweet time.
He goes to pay for the pants. At the register something in the
$1.00 Each
bin catches his eye. It’s a cap, a gray Confederate soldier’s cap. A costume version likely purchased in the Old Scald Village Gift Shoppe. The Minotaur takes the hat, and fortune blesses him again. There’s a toy pistol at the bottom of the bin. A pistol with a black wooden dowel for a barrel.
“Th-these, too,” he says to the clerk. Tookus will like these.
She bags his purchases. She eyes him up and down. The Minotaur can’t tell what she thinks, what she wants. Things have changed.
The Minotaur steps out into what is left of the Ag-Fest afternoon. Yes, things have changed. Not the crowd. The crowd is boisterous still. Nor the ridge line in the distance. The windmills are still there making languid loop-the-loops. But change has come. Surely. The Minotaur doesn’t see Holly or Tookus. He does see a young girl in a taffeta dress with a yellow ribbon draped across her chest.
Henceforth Joy Dairy Goat Award 3rd Prize
. A retinue of underlings flocks about her with sno-cones and taffy apples in their little fists and envy in their little teeth. The Minotaur is happy for her.
Where, then, is the change? How will it manifest?
Through the bell of a horn. The Minotaur hears the unbridled blatt and turns and sees them. Sees Holly first and her eye patch second. Ocular? Not the change he expected. Sees next Tookus pounding away on a drum, the boy’s spastic motions at last put to good use.
They’re on the stage, under the tent, both captives and captors. Roger is there. Jolly Roger, stomping along the front of the stage in tight leather pants with goat hooves and jingle bells sewn from the knees down along the outer seams. Several corseted women flank the stage (one very pregnant), heads high, arms back, boobs up and out.
Titties
, the Minotaur thinks.
I’m a tit man
, he thinks. No. Things have changed. They’re nice enough, for sure, and meant to be seen. But the Minotaur has other fish to fry.
The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir.
It says so on the yolk-colored poster, right below the grinning skull and crossbones with its blood-red bandana covered in white hearts. Says, too,
All You Have To Be Is Loud
.
And loud they are. Roger has delegated the sousaphone to a skinny boy with more enthusiasm than talent. One man, black clad and tall, churns at a steel-bodied guitar, the metal so bright it catches and reflects all the day’s light. There are three, at least, men in full pirate regalia (storied media-rendered versions of pirate regalia, anyway). One pumps away at a squeezebox. Another kicks and scratches at a drumlike contraption made from a washtub, his right hand in a thimble-tipped glove raking and slapping a washboard bolted to an ax handle (which is bolted to the tub). The third pirate just sings, but Lord is he loud! Too, he never takes his eyes off the boobs. All in all there are probably fifteen people onstage (though they sound legion), belting it out. It’s a spectacle, for sure. Just this side of cataclysm. And though the modest audience is largely indifferent, gumming away at their plates of fried things, everybody in The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir is having a blast. Including Holly and Tookus.
“What shall we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning!” Roger wails.
His choir rallies, an ocean of noise swelling and crashing down over all. “Hoo-ray and up she rises! Hoo-ray and up she rises, early in the morning!”
Roger says something about shanties.
“They’re the work songs and party songs of seafarers,” he says.
“They’re all call and response,” he says. “Sing along if you’ve got the balls!”
Roger takes a felt tricorn hat from one of the singers and puts it on Tookus. The boy beams. Holly, deep in the groove of the beat, sways and rocks her hips, keeping time with a tambourine. Things have changed.
Roger spots the Minotaur at the back of the rows of picnic tables and raises his hand high.
“Yo!” he says.
Everybody looks.
“Yo, sarge! Get your shanty panties on and get up here!”
So he does.
What’s this world coming to?
IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING.
The Minotaur moves before self-consciousness can hobble him (as it has so many times). Tips his big head forward and lets the weight of his horns and snout carry him right through the crowd and up onto the stage. If anyone gets trampled along the way it’s their fault. There, his presence, a half-bull half-man in Confederate soldier dress, is no more or less out of place than the rest.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Roger says. “Boys and girls! Friends, enemies, and the rest of you scurvy-ridden dogs! The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir is proud to present . . .”
Roger whips them all into a frenzy. Holly lifts her eye patch, grins big, jiggles her tambourine in the Minotaur’s direction. Jiggles. Tookus thumps away at the drum in perfect time.
“ . . . the horniest pirate in town!”
Somebody hands him a shaker egg, and the Minotaur does his best.
“Look at you go,” Holly says.
“Horns and all,” Holly says.
It might be the weirdest moment of his life.
Up there on the stage, as much as possible off to one side, bodies in motion, tits galore, the Minotaur shakes his little egg. Hears how the impossibly small clicks—Chhkk-chhkk-chhkk, chhkk-chhkk-chhkk—weave in and out of the larger sounds. The Minotaur is not smooth or graceful under scrutiny, is not fluid or rhythmic. Turns out that it doesn’t matter. At all.
They sing another shanty. Something called “Whup Jamboree,” with the lyric “Jenny, keep your hoecakes warm” driving the song harder and harder. The festival goers, weary after a full day of agrarian revelry, are underwhelmed, but it doesn’t matter. The Minotaur does his best, with his little egg, to stay out of the way. He moves his lips, works his tongue. When the choir is at its loudest the Minotaur lets sound escape.
“We’re gonna do one more for ya,” Roger says into the mic. He gives the Minotaur a slap on the ass, and a squeeze as well. “It’s a long-drag shanty,” he says. “A purty one.”
