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tilation, 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
The End
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.
Robert and Pauline
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.
Come on. That ain’t how it runs. The Wizard of New York don’t churn her own cream.
Anyway, at least they both got horses out of it.
A Coupla Rules
You mighta heard it said that New York is where they make good magic and Los Angeles is where they make bad magic. Well, I don’t know about that. I never been to either place. What I want to say is there’s no one to root for here, okay? Those two chose to play the game. They didn’t have to. They couldof had babies and grown oranges or beets or whatever the hell people grow when they aren’t circling a scrap of black dirt in the middle of nowhere like they’ve got a clock for a heart, set two minutes til. You might be tempted to say well, New York is cold and hard and I don’t care for that in a woman, or you might say Los Angeles is all illusions and unreal bullshit, and I don’t care for that in anyone, but the Burnt Corn Ranch don’t care about your sniffing and side-choosing, and it don’t care about nobody else either. It’s always been there, and it’ll be there when whatever walking hamburger is left clears out.
There’s a coupla rules.
Everybody’s gotta have a second. That’s good sense—the kind of arsenal these kids bring with them is music for four and six hands, if you get me. They hafta agree on a judge, too. Cheating don’t come into it.
It’s not always New York and Los Angeles. This has been going on awhile. This bit here is just the endgame, where the board is mostly clear, and every piece who mighta hid you has got itself killed or sacrificed and every move comes naked and grave. I remember when the Witch of the Mississippi shot the Baron of Nebraska in the eye with a glass flintlock she got off the corpse of a drifter with a diamond in his tooth. Probably somebody’s second, poor fuck. When she fired the thing, it filled up full of hot green fire. Smelled like licorice. Weren’t even a year ago New York hunted down the Hag of Florida, cut her up with a bowie knife blessed by the Pope of the Hudson, baptized in gin and olives and christened What Did I Just Say.
Fed Florida to her alligator friends piece by piece. They cried, but they ate her anyway.
There’s different sorts of ways to get rank in this business. New York has to be born there, and Brooklyn and Queens don’t count, neither. If I remember it correct, she has to be born there, and her mother dead in childbirth, foot can’t have touched grass nor mud, hand can’t have sewn nothing nor cooked nothing, and she can’t ever have finished a novel, but she’s got to have started three. No more, no less. Los Angeles has to come from somewhere else. He’s gotta be in pictures, naturally, but never a lead, only in the background, at best maybe a line or two. His daddy’s got to have died while his momma was with child, he can’t everof et Old World fruit, can’tve been baptized nor shriven, foot can’t have touched the sea, hand can’t have touched the color red.
The rules look stupid on purpose. That’s how folklore works, on a fool’s own engine.
Still, sometimes there’s more than one bastard stumbled into the conditionals, and then there’s what you might call attractions to shuffle it down. New York wants to be a woman. The Bishop of Wisconsin wants to be a little boy with black hair. That sort of thing.
Motion across the board goes from the edges toward the cent
er. Used to be a rule about collateral damage, but that seems beside the point now. Hardly anybody left here but us chickens.
And then there’s the prize. Didn’t I mention? That’s me. Hunkered down behind a bar with bourbon showering down on my hair and glass exploding in slow-motion.
I’m the Bride.
The Devil’s Mare
I suppose you want to know how it got to this. Truth is I don’t know. I wasn’t born til the players were on the stage. That’s kind of the point of me. I was born at Burnt Corn Ranch on the summer solstice and I came out of a pinto mare just as human as you like. Maybe you don’t like too much, and that’d be about right. Back then Burnt Corn were run by Tincup Henry and his girl name of Ashen. When she was a skinny little cough of a thing her mother said she whored with the Devil and ate of the bread of Dagon. She locked that girl in the barn with the new lambs and lit the whole thing on fire. Possible she knew what was coming, possible she was crazy. Ashen’s eyelashes and eyebrows and all her hair burnt off before her brother Cutter (who happened to be the Duke of Maine, but he didn’t know it yet) run out in all the stink of burning wool and beat the flames off with his own hands.
Ashen probably had a name before her skin went grey like that. Probably a nice, fancy one like farmers give their daughters when they hope for better days. But dead girls get new names, and Ashen just wasn’t the same before she went into that barn as when she came out. And it ain’t just about her being bald and hairless as a worm forever. Her momma run off and her daddy drunk himself into nothing. But when Tincup married her, well, you never saw anything like that wedding table. Loaves of bread like wheels on a cart and a cake like a house of sugar. Ashen didn’t say nothing.
