With these girls, the minotaur will be shy. They are everything she is not: shining examples of soccer prowess, after-school activities, 4-H club, even an academic decathlete or two. Girls who love horses, the color pink, boyfriends with red cars, ice cream, getting into college. Your minotaur will ply them home with promises of community service credit, a note on their record about working with the developmentally disabled. In her room she will gawk at them, ask them to pet her, to love her. They will not understand, and will bring her a drink of water or ask her to work extra-hard on her multiplication tables, unable to comprehend her lectures on calculus and probability. When they hug her goodbye, the minotaur will be quite dizzy. Eventually, when one is too beautiful for her to bear, your minotaur will bite her. Perhaps on the shoulder, perhaps on the hand, or the knee. She will not bite hard, at first. The 4-H girl will recoil, but then remember her teacher’s advice not to be shocked at anti-social behavior from such a problematic child. The next time will be harder. Your daughter will know such a thrill when her teeth first touch flesh—something like what you felt the first time you tasted vanilla, ran a mile, held your first child, had an orgasm, all together and all at once. A terrible rightness will fill her blood. The tips of her fingers will tingle, like the first time she ate a book. She will try to cover up her act with a kiss, like the ones she gave the boys. Most of the girls will not understand. Maybe one, maybe two will kiss her back, ashamed but excited, and your minotaur will find other ways to taste those girls—but it will not be as good as biting, and she will know she is not like any other girl, even the girls who are not like other girls.
If you are a perceptive parent, or very well read, you will come to a decision. If you are not, well, you have my pity. You and your spouse will sit down to the kitchen table amid bank bills and health insurance policies and half a pork roast and say to each other: what else can we do? You will draw up plans: plumbing, ventilation, waste removal. The trouble is that, whatever her teachers think, your minotaur is clever, so very clever. It must be a maze, then, you will say to the new cabinets. So that she will not be able to find her way out. You will hollow out your basement, install track lighting, walls, steel doors. Tell the school administration you are sending her to a special institution in Switzerland. They will understand, of course, and clasp your hands with moist eyes. You will build her a bookshelf, its contents carefully rationed. Nothing on demolition, or architecture. A few Greek plays, because you have a sense of humor, after all. Her favorite toys. Her dolls. And the day you lock her in you will tell her you love her, that you only want to protect her. You will hug your child for the last time, and slide the bolt shut.
Years later, when guests come for cocktails and quiche, you will play loud music with a deep bass to drown out the thumping of her fists against the ceiling of her maze, the floor of your living room. You will play something with violin to cover her screaming. When folk ask: didn’t you used to have a daughter? You will say: I don’t know what you mean. We have two sons. That’s all we’ve ever had. Every year on her birthday you will put a cake on the landing. Maybe—I wouldn’t want to speculate—once in awhile, every seven years, say, you’ll send down a girl who loves horses, or a quarterback.
But I stand before you today—do not lose hope. My people are accustomed to this treatment. We do not blame you. I have forgiven my mother; I have forgiven my father. Your child will forgive you. Every minotaur must meet her labyrinth. It is inevitable, like oracles, or cancer. It is possible, just possible, that after you die quietly in bed, your grandchildren all around you, and only a few of them heavy-browed and dark, with glazed eyes and their hair too carefully arranged, as if to hide something, that realtors will come to assess your property. They will open all the doors and windows, air out the hallways. Of course they will discover the basement. They will marvel at the craftsmanship—what love, they will say, what love was put into this thing! And they will slide the steel bolt aside. With flashlights they will venture down the stairs, and one of them—maybe his name will be Thomason, maybe Thaddeus, maybe Theresa. He will realize quickly that he needs help, and unwind a long clew of measuring tape behind him as he ventures into the concentric circles you built for her, so long ago.
And he will find her, standing in the center of the place, near the boiler, naked, tall, her hair long and matted and greasy. She will still be young—the lifetimes of minotaurs are long. Her legs will be thin, but they will be legs. Her skin will be so pale, without the sun, but there will be no fur. Her horns, though, those will not have gone. She will need to wear hats for the rest of her life, like mine. She will be holding a book and reading it, the usual way, even in the dark. She will have met her labyrinth, and passed through it. And she will step forward, toward Thomason or Thaddeus or Theresa, and she will say very clearly and calmly, in a deep, sweet voice:
“I promise, if you take me with you, I will be a good girl.”
The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World
I don’t know much about the beginning, but in the end it was just the Wizard of Los Angeles and the Wizard of New York and the shoot out at the Burnt Corn Ranch. They walked off their paces; the moon seconded New York and the sun backed up Los Angeles and I saw how it all went down because I was there, hiding under the bar in the Gnaw Hollow Saloon with my fist between my teeth. Now you may call me a coward and I’ll have to wear that, but I’m a coward who lived, and that’s worth a drink if it’s worth two.
Now, as I recollect it, the Wizard of Los Angeles sold his name for a pair of Chinese pistols, a horse the color of a rung bell and a crate of scotch the likes of which, god willing and the dead don’t rise, you and I will never taste. I hear that scotch has no label. I hear it tastes like a burning heart. I hear it’s served at the Devil’s own table, distilled by Judas Iscariot and aged in a black bull’s skull.
The Wizard of New York traded her name for a train she could fit in her pocket, a horse with two hearts, a dress like the fall of Lucifer, and a satchel of tobacco combed out of Hades’ own fields, dried on a rack of giant’s bones. New York was always the better haggler, and that’s a deal you only get to make once.
You gotta do something about names, see. Gotta get rid of them, double fast. Can’t get too far in the game with a name someone could just call you, out in the open, like Robert or Pauline. People like that, you can find them on a map. You can book them tickets and put a tax on them. Robert and Pauline couldn’t of done what those two did. Robert and Pauline have a nice little spread out Montana way. Pauline’s butter is just the sweetest you ever had. Robert never breaks his word, that’s just the kind of guy he is.