The Minotauress

'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