The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Read online

  In the rearview mirror, as he pulls out of the parking lot, the Minotaur sees the waiters and waitresses coming out. He watches David lock the door. He watches them as they take off their short aprons, their bow ties, watches them pocket their wine tools, count their money, laugh. The Minotaur cocks his head to see the road before him, opens the window and sucks in the stifling night air.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Minotaur wakes without an alarm clock and always has; he wakes in the dead center of his narrow bed. He lives in a mobile home haphazardly furnished by the long-dead wife of his landlord, one dilapidated trailer among five laid out end to end, horseshoe fashion, around a small plot of crab grass, mimosas and dogwoods, also left over from the wife. Lucky-U Mobile Estates lies on the outskirts of the city, beyond most zoning laws, which are lax anyway. Sweeny, the landlord, lives in a brick house at the head of the washed-out gravel drive. During the evenings, on a small deck listing to one side at his back door, he frequently sits in his underwear, one pale bony leg draped over the other, drinking beer from a can, belching and overlooking his domain.

  The trailer is old and cramped, not designed for the likes of the Minotaur. He lies in the center of his bed vaguely remembering a time of more space, a time even before beds. But, those memories are fleeting, nebulous. They fill him by turns with melancholy and a vague terror. Summer heat, undaunted by night, overpowers the oscillating fan on his chest of drawers. The air is so humid it’s almost visible; the topsail of the boat in the framed photograph on his wall seems to flutter. The sheets and the Minotaur’s pajama pants are damp from sweat. A baby-blue chenille bedspread lies bunched on the floor, kicked away during sleep. A dog barks outside his window.

  “Buddy! Shut up!” Sweeny yells from somewhere inside his house. Buddy, a wheezing piebald English bulldog, does in fact stop barking. Without looking the Minotaur knows Buddy is pacing back and forth on the concrete floor of his narrow chain-link run. Without doubt he knows that Buddy will start barking again in a few minutes. The dog run is small. The low wooden shelf offers little shade from the sun. Buddy’s only distraction is half of a chewed basketball. The Minotaur understands completely Buddy’s need to bark.

  “Unnnhh,” the Minotaur grunts as he rises. In the galleylike kitchen of the trailer he puts the briki—the small brass pot that is his oldest possession—on to boil. Greek coffee is his one extravagance. Dark as pitch and oily, with lots of sugar. The Minotaur once knew people who read fortunes from the coffee grounds, who would flip an empty cup upside down, spin it three times and from the lay of the dark bitter grounds make predictions.

  He has errands today: the solenoid switch and the lock for his car door. Errands give the Minotaur purpose. Sitting at the kitchen table, sipping hot coffee from a chipped but favorite demitasse, he plans his day. He has errands, but he cannot predict their outcome. First a shower, then he’ll drive out to the salvage yard to find a lock for his door. They know him at the salvage yard; he’s a familiar face who will be allowed to wander among the rows and rows of junked cars, to wander freely with his tools looking for a Vega with an intact driver’s side door. On the way home he’ll stop at the parts store for a new solenoid. They’re fairly inexpensive. After installing both the lock and the solenoid, assuming all goes well, he should have time for another shower before work, time to apply the various salves that keep his skin, particularly the transitional skin, in good condition. Maybe there will be time to sand and polish his horns. The Minotaur always plans his day.

  As the Minotaur walks to his car Buddy charges the fence, snorting, slobbering and barking maniacally. The Minotaur is no longer afraid of Buddy, and he knows the dog means no real harm. But they have an unspoken understanding. Each of them has a history; each clings to an image, however diminished, of himself and his place in the world.

  Before turning the key in the Vega’s ignition the Minotaur gets his tool ready. Like the night before there is one solid click and nothing else.

  As the Minotaur opens the hood Sweeny comes out his back door with a tin pie plate full of table scraps for the dog. “That damn solenoid again?” Sweeny asks, stopping to poke his balding head under the hood and scowl at the dirty four-cylinder engine.

  “Mmnuh,” the Minotaur answers, meaning Yes and Good morning.

  “You ought to get yourself a real vehicle,” Sweeny says, then winks at the Minotaur and points with his thumb toward the front yard, where, as always, there are several cars and pickups parked at an angle along the road with hand-painted For Sale signs propped in their windows. Most of the cars Sweeny gets cheap from people down on their luck or ignorant of their vehicle’s value. He then makes the necessary repairs or improvements and sells at a nice profit. The Minotaur admires Sweeny’s entrepreneur ship, his business savvy. In fact it was Sweeny’s front-yard car lot that led the Minotaur to a mobile home in his backyard.

  The Minotaur is a nomad in the largest sense of the word. He finds it necessary, given the transient nature of everything around him, to relocate on occasion. He does not move with the seasons. Nor does he follow herds or rivers or constellations. His moves are with the centuries, more or less. Often, while driving, he takes time to think, to ruminate on the conditions of his life. As it happened some year and a half ago, the Minotaur was driving his Vega filled to overflowing with his essential possessions—his tools, a canvas roll for his knives, his uniforms, a few clothes, various grooming items, other sundry articles—driving through the southern United States chewing on the notion that, despite constant attention to frugality, he owned too much stuff. While pondering his two options—to abandon the least essential box of goods and further trim his already spare inventory or to succumb and in some way increase his storage space—the countryside passed him by. The Minotaur habitually avoids the interstate highway system. Time is important to him but has to be kept in perspective. He feels that the few minutes saved by using the interstates are irrelevant and come at the cost of impersonality, of sameness, of lifelessness. He was driving, then, through the rain on the back roads of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, on curvy irregular tarmac threads that seemed to drift and wind according to no plan among stands of pine and oak trees, along and across creeks and shallow rivers, sometimes over, sometimes around rolling hills that often dissolved into low-hanging, heavy, gray clouds. There was an old and tired quality to the landscape that brought comfort to the Minotaur.

  The cresting of one such hill coincided with a break in the clouds. The Minotaur’s take on the symbolic has changed over the years. He has become less demanding and more open-minded of what life presents him. The road fell away before him, stretched out between a newly plowed field and what he at first thought was the parking lot of a small store. Upon getting closer he saw that it was not a store or a parking lot but three cars, a couple of pickup trucks and a riding mower lined up for sale on the front lawn of a brick house. The Minotaur passed slowly. There, glinting wetly in the momentary sun, a dull red station wagon caught his eye—some sort of Ford, Taurus probably. Nearly a year and a half ago the Minotaur turned his car around, pulled off the road, got out and stood in the damp crab grass to look over Sweeny’s cars.

  “She runs like a top,” the man said as he walked up, scratching the entire time the little hollow centered beneath his lower lip, scratching with the dirty nail of his index finger. A sagging but lean man in slate-gray work pants and a T-shirt, he stopped long enough to clear his throat and spit on the grass.

  “Unnhhh,” the Minotaur answered, almost to himself.

  “I’m asking three, but I’ll let you have her for twenty-five hundred.”

  The Minotaur circled the station wagon slowly, stopping occasionally to think, hands in his pockets, mindlessly scratching at the ground with one toe.

  “Name’s Sweeny,” the old man said, circling opposite the Minotaur, using the hem of his shirt to polish random spots on the car.

  “Mmmm.”

  The Minotaur knelt behind the car and cocked
his head to peer into the exhaust, looking for telltale signs of oil. Then, while down on one damp knee, he heard the dog, a rapid, raspy, strained bark coming closer and closer. The Minotaur stood up. Dogs make him nervous.

  “Buddy! Here, boy!” Sweeny said, then contorted his lips and gave a piercing whistle.

  Squat and broad, almost as wide across the chest as he was tall, the dog rounded the corner of the house at top speed. However, bowlegged and musclebound, more jowl than haunch, the bulldog at top speed was neither a graceful nor an impressive thing. The Minotaur took the opportunity to position himself on the other side of the car. Just to be safe he reached out for the door handle, ready.

  “Uuunnnh,” he said, and the tone was anxious.

  Sweeny stood between the charging dog and the car behind which the Minotaur hid. Sweeny didn’t seem anxious. To the contrary he seemed expectant. The old man whistled again and stomped the ground with a booted foot. The Minotaur, unsure of what the dog would do, tasted fear in the back of his throat, the taste of cut grass. He felt the muscles and sinews of his heavy neck grow taut. He lowed softly.

  The dog came closer and closer, heading straight for Sweeny, the car and the Minotaur, and it was obvious to the Minotaur that the dog had something specific in mind. But much to the Minotaur’s relieved surprise the bulldog did not veer around Sweeny at the last minute, did not, as the Minotaur feared, circle the Ford wagon with his teeth bared and the Minotaur in mind. Instead the dog charged directly at Sweeny, who stood—one foot planted forward, fists clenched, grinning—in its path.

  “Get it, boy!” Sweeny said, and Buddy the bulldog leapt the short distance onto the man’s extended leg—mounted his leg as if it were a bull bitch in heat and began to hump.

  “Get it!” Sweeny said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “Get it, Buddy! Get it! Get it, boy!” Sweeny said between fits of choking laughter, bouncing the leg up and down on the ball of his foot, Buddy clinging tightly, short forelimbs wrapped just beneath Sweeny’s knee, eyes rolling about madly as he humped at the boot. The Minotaur watched. It was an unsettling show, but he’d seen worse.

  After a minute or so Sweeny tired of the game. “Get off me!” he shouted. He kicked his leg out and sent Buddy sprawling with a yelp. The dog walked slowly and stiffly around the corner of the house without looking back.

  It took several minutes for Sweeny to catch his breath enough to speak. “He’s a damn sight, ain’t he?”

  “Mmmuh,” the Minotaur said, opening the driver’s door of the Ford to look at the odometer.

  “Them’s all highway miles,” Sweeny said. “You want to take her for a spin?”

  The Minotaur did want to drive the car. He couldn’t afford it, not even for twenty-five hundred, but he wanted to pretend for a little while that he could. He climbed into the driver’s seat but kept the door open and one foot on the ground. The car smelled of stale tobacco and sour milk. Its faded dashboard was beginning to crack. On the floor a trampled pacifier lay with its rubber teat pointing upward. Scrawled on the underside of the passenger’s visor, in purple crayon, was the word poop. And protruding from the heat vent over the AM radio was what looked like half of a cookie. It would be a fine car, the Minotaur thought. He closed his eyes and imagined driving it for years and years, getting to know it as intimately as he knew the Vega. When Sweeny jangled the keys inches from his ear the Minotaur startled. His head pitched back and the tip of his right horn pierced and dug into the headliner, ripping the fabric and the foam padding for several inches.

  “Shit fire, boy. You’re awful jumpy.”

  “Unnnhh!”

  As with his possessions and actions there is a conscious economy to the Minotaur’s speech. The mechanics of word making in his mouth do not differ so much from those of men. There are the larynx, the soft velum, the glottal structure. There are the folds of flesh that trap and manipulate the wind passing through his throat. More important, the codes of language exist in the Minotaur’s mind. His thought, his subvocal speech, is complex. He wants to say, I am tired of these horns and all that they mean. Not brilliant, but certainly not the sentiment of a complete fool. The problems lie in articulation and enunciation. No matter how sweetly worded or wise the Minotaur’s ideas may be, when he puts them to tongue, terrible things happen. In the clear field of his mind things are precise. But when filtered through the deep resonating chamber of his nostrils, pushed up the cavernous expanse of his throat and across the thick bovine tongue, his words come out tortured and mutilated—deep, nasal, almost whining. The Minotaur is painfully self-conscious of how he speaks. Over the years he’s come to depend on contextual grunts, which suffice most of the time.

  “Unnnhh,” he said, eyeing the ripped headliner.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sweeny answered.

  But the Minotaur was prone to worrying. For a long time he has suffered under the weight of his past life, the rumors and the all-too-true. He struggles now to live without trouble or conflict. Reputation has to be attended moment by moment.

  Sweeny didn’t seem to care about the torn headliner, but when the Minotaur opened the Vega’s hatchback and took out his toolbox and from it a fabric repair kit, the old man was impressed. They talked—Sweeny mostly—while the Minotaur repaired the rip, and when the Minotaur made it clear that he was traveling, looking for a place to settle, Sweeny genuinely wanted to help.

  The Minotaur spent the rest of that afternoon at Sweeny’s. They walked from car to car. A wheel well here, rusting out, needed sanding and Bondo. The Dodge truck could use a carburetor kit, maybe points and plugs. There would be a steady flow of cars coming and going, and the repairs would be endless. Sweeny walked him to the back of his house, where Lucky-U Mobile Estates made up the perimeter of his property. Sweeny showed the Minotaur the two vacant trailers. One, a dull white rectangle of corrugated aluminum, sat on a brick foundation at the mouth of the drive. It was the cleanest of all the trailers. The second, at the back of the lot, perched on cinder blocks and facing the back of Sweeny’s house, with a clear view of the dog run, was smaller and much older. It was painted a dull nautical green and had a cabin-esque bay window at one end and a squat, boxy, windowless appendage rising from the roof at the opposite end, which gave it a desperately boatlike appearance. From inside, through a smudged window, the Minotaur could see Sweeny’s back door and deck. In the shadows beneath the plank floor Buddy lay panting.

  A year and a half ago the Minotaur and Sweeny came to an agreement. He would do all the repairs on the cars that Sweeny picked up for resale. In exchange the Minotaur would live rent free in the boat-shaped trailer, and Sweeny would give him spending cash for groceries and whatever else he needed. If and when a job came along the Minotaur could cut back on some of the repair work and begin paying a rent that they both agreed was fair.

  The Minotaur had to think about the arrangement. Hasty decisions get him into trouble, an eons-old pattern that renders every choice, every decision, troublesome. Not until the bad in any flawed decision comes to bear is the Minotaur able to see his error.

  He left Sweeny’s with his Vega full of possessions and drove around for most of the afternoon grunting quietly to himself before giving in to his elementary version of faith. Just before nightfall he crested that hill again. He was asleep in the narrow bed by ten o’clock, the few boxes holding all that he owned crowded with him in the bedroom.

  Little has changed at Lucky-U Mobile Estates since then. The Minotaur is working now, at Grub’s Rib across from a condemned Holiday Inn out on the highway, but he still fixes cars for Sweeny. He’s yet to buy one.

  The Vega starts after being thumped with the chisel. As he drives out, the Minotaur nods to Sweeny.

  The day goes as planned. In the salvage yard he finds a junked Vega quickly, and aside from the wasps nesting in the open dash that he has to swat continually, he gets the lock out of the door with ease. Nor is there a problem with the solenoid. Under the watchful e
yes of the piebald dog the Minotaur works on his Vega—the hood, the hatchback and both doors gaping, beneath the sweet pink flowers of the mimosa tree in the center of the trailer park. He even has time to bathe before work.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Minotaur meets David the hostess coming through the wait station. It’s barely six o’clock, and David already looks tired, like he’s about to cry. Two of the busboys called in sick. Years ago David taught history, junior high then high school. He’s still prone to slipping esoteric facts and utterly useless trivia into conversations. Occasionally rumors circulate, all variations of the same, as to why he stopped teaching. The Minotaur doesn’t care; David is a kind man who treats him with respect. David carries a small round tray, its cork surface nearly covered by dirty glasses. Lipstick and grease stains smear the rims. The Minotaur hates it when people drop their cigarette butts in the melting ice. A wet rag hangs across David’s forearm; the smell of ammonia stings the Minotaur’s eyes.

  Two waiters stand by the ice machine cutting lemons—Mike and Shane, but the Minotaur has trouble remembering which is which.

  “I smell hist’ry,” one of them says mincingly.

  They both snicker.

  David ignores them, but the Minotaur tastes bile in the back of his throat.

  “Rolaids?” he asks David, heavy on the R. They share the symptoms of a nervous stomach, so the Minotaur knows that David has several large bottles in the office.

  “Sure thing, sugar. I’ll bring them back.”

  “Unnnhh,” the Minotaur says as David goes through the swinging door into the dining room.

  “Fag, fag, fag-a-la,” one of the waiters singsongs, and the Minotaur can hear them laughing even as the door to the kitchen swings shut.

  The strata of restaurant workers are complicated and overlapping. As with most things there are hierarchies. Management, of course, is the elite, operating at a remove. And the wait staff is superior to anyone in the kitchen. Within each group there are subgroups. Among the waiters and waitresses, a cliquish bunch by nature, there are unspoken divisions: the eager careerists, often thin and obsequious; the resigned, who, after years of eliminating other choices one by one through bad decisions or, worse, indecision, have nothing else to do; and the largest group, impudent and transitory, the college students. Piedmont Community College provides Grub’s with a yearly crop of workers. Most have a mocking disdain for the job. The Minotaur often thinks, I don’t want to be like any of them. But in his own clunky half-baked way the Minotaur also thinks, If it weren’t for my thick tongue, the bovine speech, if it weren’t for my vision, oblique as it is, I could be one of them.