The Minotauress (49 page)

Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: The Minotauress

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"The topic is my nightmare," Dean frustratingly reminded. "My... dilemma."

"Not a dilemma. You're
way
past dilemma, pal. You're one egg-shell crunch away from a full-scale schizophrenic episode."

The barmaid returned, thunked Ajax' Redhook before him. "Here ya go, Meat Loaf." Then she leaned forward and glanced at the sufficient beer-belly occupying Ajax' lap. "Eat much? Or is that just the swollen liver from the chronic alcoholism?"

Ajax's mouth opened to make a comeback, but nothing managed to come out.

"Yours is on me... cutie," she said to Dean. Then she winked and sauntered off, her ass, like orbs of ripe fruit, riding up and down in her black cut-off shorts.

"Meat Loaf, huh?" Ajax simpered. "Gee, I wonder if she likes me?"

"What's the matter? Can't take it like you dish it out?"

"No," Ajax blustered. "Life ain't fair, I'll tell ya. You've got a drop-dead gorgeous wife
and
this big-tit Rob-Zombie bitch hot for you. You're gonna ask her out, right?"

"Hell, no," Dean testified. "I'm married, and I love my wife."

Ajax peered longingly at the barmaid who was now at the other end of the bar. "You should be gelded. I'm so horny I could spit on the floor and fuck the spit, and you've got this hot fuck-package winking at you. But you're not gonna go for it 'cos your
married?
Gimme a break, Bishop Lohan."

Dean sipped his beer with resolve. "Marriage is a sacrament, it's a contract of life-long love and fidelity."

"Yeah? And every time your wife goes out of town to some
work
convention
, she conveniently forgets her wedding ring, not to mention three times a week she's coming home late from
work meetings
because she's probably having affairs with her boss and every other guy at the office."

Dean didn't even need to think. Something took him over, something
possessed
him as effectively as a demon, and next thing he knew the entire bar fell silent as Dean had stood up, grabbed Ajax by the throat, and lifted him several inches off the ground.

"You know what?" Dean said. "I'm really getting tired of your implications."

Ajax's hands roved empty air. He was trying to talk but only gags came out. His face began to redden.

What am I doing!
a voice shouted in Dean's head. Immediately, he let Ajax down. "Shit, man! I'm sorry! I-I-I don't know what came over me."

Ajax wheezed to get his breath back, slumped back to his stool. "Man, you really are fucked up. You're a walking time-bomb."

"I'm sorry," Dean repeated. "Something... just—"

"Snapped?"

"Yeah, that's right," Dean admitted.

Ajax regained his composure, slugged on his beer. At the end of the bar, the barmaid was laughing. Several moments passed, then the tavern returned to its typical revelry. Dean felt foolish, bewildered.

"Right now? Right this instant?" Ajax continued, "I'm looking at
Good
Dean. But a minute ago when you were holding me off the ground by my throat—"

"That was...
Bad
Dean," Dean surmised.

"Uh-huh, and I'm telling you, it's getting worse every day. You're telling me you love your wife?"

"Well, yeah," Dean felt assured.

"And a few nights ago you...
what
were you calling your beloved wife?"

Dean felt walked on by an elephant. "A fussy prude, a fickle—"

"—
cunt,
" Ajax added all too quickly, "who you're sick of having sex with. In fact, when you
do
have sex with Daphne, you pretend she's—who?"

"Arianne," Dean's throat grated.

Ajax finished his beer, nodding. "And now this nightmare. Nightmares can be very revealing as to a person's true, deep-seated emotions... ." His discourse trailed off, then he waved his index finger at the barmaid. She waved her middle finger back.

"How do you like that insolent devil-tattooed cum-dumpster?" Ajax complained at the treatment. "Watch me. I'm ready for her this time."

The barmaid returned, thunked Ajax' beer down. "I didn't know Curly had kids."

"Where'd ya get all that extra tit, bitch? Some doctor lipo-suck your brain and pump it all into your bags?"

"No, they lipo-sucked point-one-one percent of your body fat. Thanks for the contribution." She drew her hands up her sides, then caressed the sumptuous breasts.

Ajax frowned. "How's the herpes? Does it hurt much?"

"I got it from riding your mother's bike, but, no, it just itches sometimes. Then I get a big dick to scratch it." Her face blankened at Ajax. "I guess that leaves you out, huh, Pinkie?" Next, she placed another beer before Dean. "Your money's no good while
I'm
working." The tip of her pierced tongue glided across her upper lip, and she slipped him a piece of paper with her phone number on it. "Call me soon. Baby, you can lock me in a cage, and I'll be your pet forever."

"You fuckin' pretty-boy stud," Ajax complained when the barmaid left. "Jesus Christ. Next she'll be offering you money. How can you say no to that walking brick shit-house?"

"Easy. The spiritual bonds of matrimony are far more important than blatant one-night stands."

Ajax gawped after her. "With me, it'd be a one-
century
stand. I'd suck the lentil seeds and Safeway sushi out of her death-metal asshole just to give her a big brown kiss."

"Probably ain't gonna happen, Ajax. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think she digs you."

"Yeah, well, fuck her. I'd slop my jizz right on her Marilyn Manson lipstick, and pee on her back for good measure. How do you like that whore talking to me like that?"

"Please," Dean urged. "Back to the point?"

"Yeah, the nightmare. Liquefied cattle waste." He gazed into his beer glass as if it were a crystal ball. "Tell me more about the details."

The details?
Dean wondered. "Well, when you work on a ranch, cattle die. Sometimes disease, sometimes natural causes, sometimes accidents—like that. And sometimes—wow—sometimes they'd die out in the grazelands, and we wouldn't know for several days. By the time we'd find them, they'd be bloated up like balloons."

"Balloons full of dead-cow gas."

"That's right. They'd balloon up in the sun to the size of VW's. And when the fork-lift'd scoop 'em up, they'd break wind. Man, it's the worse smell in the world."

"So what happened then?"

"Well, there are laws—state health department, Department of Agriculture, DNR. If you're a rancher and one of your cattle dies, you have to report it to the government, send in blood samples to check for anthrax and hoof and mouth, then you have to call a rendering company to take the carcass away for proper disposal. But the thing is, these rendering plants charge, like, ten cents a pound, and when you're talking about an animal that weighs up to a ton and a half, that can work out to a lot of money. So we had our ways of... lowering the pickup cost."

Ajax seemed fascinated. "Ways?"

"Well," Dean admitted, "we'd use our own fork lifts and tractors to bring 'em back to the ranch but, then we'd take 'em to a special warehouse loaded with racks and draining trays, and we'd let them sit for a few days after... scoring their sides with a knife... and letting them... drain."

Ajax made a face.

"We'd let 'em rot for a few more days, and a lot of their bilge would drain off. Then we'd take the carcasses back out to the field, dump 'em, and call the rendering plant. They'd send a crew out to pick the carcass up, but by then it would weigh—"

"A lot less," Ajax reasoned. "‘Cos all that—"

"—liquefied rot would drain out of the animal," Dean went on. "We'd save fifty to a hundred bucks per carcass doing it this way. Independent ranchers have it hard enough. If the government can cut legal spending corners by charging $600 for Pentagon toilet seats and $130,000 for custom leather couches on Air Force One so Bill Clinton can get comfortable blowjobs, hard-working ranchers can goddamn cut a few corners to stay afloat."

Ajax slapped the bar-top. "I like what I'm hearing! And all this time I thought you were a pinko lib!"

"Fuck Bill Clinton and his tax-and-spend democrat abortion," Dean declared. "It's the farmers and the ranchers that keep the United States the best-fed country in the world. The only President who didn't fuck us in the ass was Ronald Reagan."

"I
like
it!"

"Now we've got Bill Clinton and his clandestine regime urging U.S. farms and ranches to file bankruptcy so he can buy imported beef and farm goods from fucking Communist China in an under-the-table deal in exchange for political contributions to the Democratic National Committee."

Ajax stared bulge-eyed.

Dean waved a slack hand. "But that's all beside the point. We're not talking about Bill Clinton selling out his country. If it was a
Republican
president sexually exploiting a young White House employee and jerking off on her dress in the Oval Office library, the feminist movements would go apeshit and the press would bury him. But not Bill Clinton. He just made a simple
error in judgment,
so everything's okay. Never mind the ex-girlfriends who all wound up dead by ‘suicide.' Never mind the Tyson Food scams, and never mind that Paula Jones passed a battery of polygraphs. It's all okay because it's Bill. It's all okay because inflation is low."

Ajax
continued
to stare bulge-eyed. "I-I-I...
like
it!"

"And that's not even to mention Vince Foster, who had a documented affair with Clinton's wife, and who was found conveniently dead in Fort Marcy Park with a revolver in his right hand but he was
left-
handed. That's not to mention NBC news deliberately cutting out the interview clips of Susan McDougal admitting to a sexual relationship with Bill, nor to the same liberal news blackout of Roger Clinton admitting that he was Bill's major coke supplier, who later referred to him as a ‘Hoover vacuum' whenever cocaine arrived at the governor's mansion. But that's all beside the point, and so is Meña Airport and all the Arkansas State Troopers who passed repeated polygraph tests and Charlie Trie and Castle-Grande and the Lippo Group and no security clearances for Clinton's White House staff and Travel Gate and David Hale and 700 FBI files with Bill's fingerprints on them, and Whitewater records with Hillary's fingerprints on them, and all the other shit the press swept under the carpet. No, this isn't about any of that. This is about my nightmare."

Ajax was dumbstruck. "See? More of the
real
Dean coming out."

Dean pushed the notion back. "The dream, Ajax. The nightmare."

Ajax took another hefty sip of the beer, winced. Then— "This place you were talking about, where you drained the dead cows—"

"Well, not just cows. Steers and bulls too. Whatever died in the field."

"Fine, fine. So
where
was this place?"

"On the ranch. It was just a processing warehouse, like any other. But this one was... secret."