The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (7 page)

Biddle can’t be trusted, even dead. Even hung over.

“Nurse!”

The Minotaur hears some acceptable fire from the Union army. He takes his gut shot and drops to the ground. He stays, content among the bugs. The taste of butterscotch pie is all but gone. What was it Widow Fisk said? “Maybe tonight.” The Minotaur lies content on the battlefield. Anemic volleys of make-believe gunfire pock the aural landscape. A jet plane tracks silently high above; its white tail striates the blue sky.

“Nurse!” Biddle cries.

“Fuck you, Biddle,” somebody says. It’s the broom maker. She hates playing field nurse. They make her do it anyway.

“Bite me, Biddle,” she says, stepping up to where the Minotaur lies. Her shadow covers him. Cools him. Soothes.

“You want a sliver of ice, M?” she asks, kneeling.

“Mmmnn,” he says, and listens as she fumbles with the satchel’s clasp.

The Minotaur can never remember the broom maker’s name. Makayla or Madison? Something like that. She slips the Minotaur an ice cube without hesitation. Her fingers smell of sorghum, taste of sorghum. Twice in as many hours he’s taken from a woman’s fingers. O blessed day! Widow Fisk and her fingers made the Minotaur yearn for complicated things. This girl, with her rough touch on his tongue, stirs something more animal in the Minotaur. He wishes he could remember her name. He remembers that she talks a blue streak. Talks up a storm. Talks a mile a minute. He remembers her chipped front tooth. Shawna? No. Bailey? No. The Minotaur gobbles her up.

“Destiny!” Biddle calls in a failed stage whisper. “Bring me some ice!”

“No!” the broom maker says loudly. Then whispers to the Minotaur, “The fucker can die, for all I care.”

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. He can’t see her face fully. Can’t turn over, this late in this death. He cranes his veiny neck just a bit. “Mmmnn.”

“Hey, M,” the broom maker says, snapping the satchel shut. “Can you come by the Broom Shack after lunch? I need some help moving the—”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, and the Minotaur doesn’t answer, the request stopped, truncated, amputated by cannon fire from the Union battlements and the expert dying of Sargent Haberstroh. Sarge dies better than anybody. He takes his hit loudly, with gusto; he contorts in death like a dancer, flings his scrawny arms wide, hurls his haversack willy-nilly; he calls out heroically, “For God and country, boys” or “Rally round the flag, boys” or “I’m coming home, Mama!”; then he falls and lies more still than stone, and for longer. He’s perfected the look of belly bloat, that gathering of gases in the body cavities of the dead; some say he even dabs his neck and behind his ears with the putrid drippings of road kill. They say. After a few well-timed leg spasms Sarge doesn’t move, doesn’t make a peep, until the bugler signals the battle’s end. And he does it all as close to the spectators and their cameras as possible.

The field nurses love tending Sarge’s death throes. So convincing are the man’s demises that the Minotaur is duped every time. Almost. Every time the Minotaur feels it, the bitter pang of envy. Everybody loves a good death.

“Got to go,” the broom maker says.

In her haste the hem of her full black skirt snags on the Minotaur’s horn, pulls at his head, turns his snout. And there it is. The Minotaur wouldn’t look up this dress uninvited, and even then. . . . He looks. It’s okay. She can’t tell that he looks, what with the pitch of his horns, the angle of his snout. He looks. And is so stunned by what he sees that he doesn’t know how to respond. He didn’t expect it, the tattoo. The blackand-white portrait. The walleyed portrait of a little boy smiling from within the razor stubble on the broom maker’s round calf muscle.
In Loving Memory
, it says over the top of the boy’s head. There is more beneath, but the broom maker moves too fast. The Minotaur misses the full view. She giggles and trots over toward Sargent Haberstroh. She giggles, for sure. But the Minotaur can’t say whether it is about, or for, him.

“Destiny!” Biddle calls out.

“Go fuck a barrel,” the broom maker says.

The crowd is sparse, and a sparse crowd makes the hardcores pissy. After the battle, after the pitiful applause, Smitty barely waits for the spectators to load onto the wagon before he starts in.

“I heard you running your mouth,” Smitty says to one of the soldiers.

“If I catch you smoking dope before we fight again . . . ,” to another.

He rarely completes an angry sentence. Fact is, Smitty has no authority outside his own imagined rank. The majority of folks just ignore him, but the Minotaur knows all too well that this is the most dangerous kind of man. He rants. He rails. And his charges are usually trumped up. Smitty never misses an opportunity to berate a fellow living historian.

He steps up to an unwitting victim and cuts loose. “You want to come out on my battlefield, you better strap them titties down better next time,” he says.

The girl flushes, instinctively clutches her breasts and presses inward.

“Ain’t nobody wants to see that mess,” he says.

The girl soldier—period correct in the whole fraudulent endeavor; brave young women even then fought amid the men—may be crying. The Minotaur can’t tell.

“Unngh,” he says.

“You got that right,” Biddle says, stepping up and leaning on the Minotaur for balance. He keeps talking, but the Minotaur pays no attention. He’s watching the girl and Smitty. He hopes to get out of the village unscathed, back to the Judy-Lou, and then to wait for Monday. Mondays are quiet in the village.

“I’m going to the Tavern,” Biddle says. “Need me some Diet Coke. To hell with barrels.”

“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

“You want to come?”

“No,” the Minotaur says.

“Suit yourself.”

Biddle slogs toward the parking lot without even trying to show any of the nurses porn on his cell phone. Only the Minotaur watches him go.

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says to no one in particular, then heads for the Welcome Center, half hoping to get another bite of pie.

Instead he gets mired in the seething herd of kids outside the Surgeon’s Cabin. Doc stands in the doorway, a bloody saw held aloft, over the young heads. He waves it back and forth until the Minotaur looks in his direction. Doc gives a knowing nod. Doc always gives the Minotaur a knowing nod, and the affinity, the allegiance, implied brings the bile up in the Minotaur’s throat.

Doc stands in the doorway, his apron bloodied. By the stoop, on a table made of sawhorses and planks, one of his patients lies draped in a wool blanket. The mustache is peeling away. One of the glass eyes has rolled far left. And the paint is chipping off the cheekbones. The mannequin has seen better days. But the kids don’t mind. They’re not paying any attention to it. Not to the mannequin outside the cabin, or the two even more battered and bedraggled specimens inside, by a wooden cask of vials with moldering or missing contents, by the tableful of rusting scalpels and horrifying probes, scopes, ligatures, and more—the gorget, the bistoury cache, the cranial drill, the catlin, the Roman director and spoon, the trephine, the bone chisel, the kidney dish. Doc could name each instrument, and fairly swoon while doing so. But the kids don’t care. What the kids like, every time, is the squat barrel full of rubber amputated limbs. Doc uses it to prop the door open, then has to spend much of his time on duty keeping the kids from beating each other with the floppy props.

The Minotaur likes the kids, their energetic presence. Their goofy bodies and giddy babble. Old Scald Village has much to offer them. And much of it the doing of the broom maker. She runs the Hands-On Program, bringing underprivileged youth in by the busload for the living-history experience. The broom maker does a good job of it. It’s a steady source of income for the village, and the administrators see her worth. They turn a blind eye to her other occasional unsavory proclivities.

But not Widow Fisk. More than once, in the Minotaur’s presence, Widow Fisk has badmouthed the broom maker.

“Slut,” she said.

“Trailer trash,” she said.

“Unngh,” the Minotaur says to the boy who jumps up to swat his horn with a plastic femur. Unscathed. The Minotaur wants to escape the village unscathed.

“Yo, M,” somebody says. It’s a girl. The Minotaur doesn’t know her name. She is in transition at the moment, half foot soldier, half tavern maid. “Destiny’s looking for you.”

“Mmmnn, who?”

“She needs help in the Broom Shack.”

The girl walks away, putting her black hair up in a bun. Her side knife bumps against her behind with each step.

“Oh,” the Minotaur says. “Okay.”

The Broom Shack sits tucked between Weinzerl’s Pottery and the Tailor Shoppe, an apt locale (though probably happenstance); the movement from clay to straw to cloth seems right in many ways. The Tailor Shoppe, Sprankle’s, has a full front porch and rocking chairs and a second story, where the smug tailor and his prickly wife are meant to sleep. But there’s nothing up there except two rope-slung beds shoved on either side of the chimney. So the Minotaur has been told. The brochure offered up in the Welcome Center numbers and describes all the buildings of Old Scald Village. Details the “turn-of-the-century” construction: log or stone or frame. The brochure identifies the structures that have been relocated to the site, as well as those re-created on the grounds. The brochure fails to mention that nearly all of the two-story buildings have perilously steep, walled-in staircases that are inaccessible to the handicapped, to the top heavy, to anyone with wide horns. Too, the brochure hasn’t been updated since a more recent century’s turn. The Minotaur tries not to think about it.

The Minotaur has no small skill with needle and thread. He is well versed in thimble. But those skills he keeps secret at Old Scald Village. He avoids the Tailor Shoppe and its cheerful signage:

        
A stitch in time saves nine

        
Dyed in the wool

        
Sewing mends the Soul

        
Make do and mend

At the moment, there is no tailor in the village. Some say that Sprankle up and died in the parking lot of Adult World, in Joy, PA, two towns over. The Minotaur also heard that Sprankle moved to Joy and opened a lawnmower repair shop. Either way the Minotaur keeps his sewing kit out of sight.

It’s hot. Unseasonably so. The sun is high and unforgiving. The Gift Shoppe will likely deplete its stock of paper parasols and straw hats. The Minotaur likes the heat.

He heads to the Broom Shack. The Broom Shack is little more than that. A single story of vertical planks. A cedar shake roof. The paint on the exterior a faded and chipped eggy yellow. A tattered old broom is propped by the front door. It’s an inside joke. It means the broom squire is looking for a wife. There is no porch, only a rough stone stoop. The floorboards creak when the Minotaur steps inside.

The broom maker cuts loose right away. “Hey, hey, M! It’s hotter than a popcorn fart out there, isn’t it?”

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, unwilling to commit to either yes or no.

“Not much cooler inside,” she says.

Then the broom maker just keeps talking, but the Minotaur doesn’t listen. He leans against a high workbench, steadies himself against the surge of her words. The Minotaur waits to hear what she wants. It’s dry in the small building despite the warm Pennsylvania day. All that broom straw sucks the moisture from the air. The Minotaur’s skin begins to itch, especially at the seam. He can’t reach into his coat to rub at it. Not in public. The purplish ridge of flesh tightens, cinches the Minotaur’s chest.

“Unngh,” he says.

“I know,” the broom maker says. “I told the son of a bitch he’d better quit while he was ahead.”

The Broom Shack has two windows, one by the front door, the other on the opposite wall, looking out at an unused part of Old Scald Village. Looking out over the marshy ditch at the back of the property, through the drooping cattails with their fat brown stamens to some unnamable detritus stacked along a chain-link fence. If you look, if you pay attention, you can see the trout. It’s massive, big as an old sedan, and made of plaster. A pale green motionless leviathan abandoned, propped pinkish belly up, mouth agape, against the fence. The Minotaur refuses to look into that black hole. No good could come of it. On a far hill, on the other side—and there is always an other side—a
Jesus Is Lord
billboard faces God knows where, aims at God knows who.

“ . . . thicker than banjo players in hell,” the broom maker says.

“Unngh.”

The Minotaur likes the shop’s efficiency. The winder and the iron vise are where they ought to be. The foot treadle and the rack of knives with hammered blades, too. The Minotaur respects order. And the broom maker knows her way around.
Besoms
, she calls her brooms, because that’s what they’re called. When an audience is present, of any size, any makeup, the girl is all business in her role as living historian. She never breaks her version of character. But if it’s just her and the Minotaur (or any other village employee or volunteer) in the cabin, the broom maker—plump, filling up her floor-length calico (sometimes red, sometimes green) dress—gabbles and jabbers without ceasing. She’ll talk her way through round brooms and flat brooms. The Turkey Wing. The Cobweb Chaser. She talks and works. Her fingers are deft, quick, and sure.

“Howdy!” she says to a soggy-eyed couple in matching American flag T-shirts. “Welcome to the Broom Shack.”

In most of the Old Scald Village shops and buildings visitors are confined to a narrow patch of floor just inside the doorway, from which they watch and ask questions. Sometimes they’re corralled by a strand or two of dusty hemp rope. In the Broom Shack a low rail fence demarks the space. Separates worker from watcher. The Minotaur hasn’t yet crossed over, and now the old couple is in the way. He tries to blend in, somehow, with his horns and his Confederate uniform.

“Oh,” the wife says to the Minotaur. Or at the Minotaur. She forces a smile and moves behind her husband, who makes do with a scowling nod.