Running the Bulls Page 10

  Howard shook his head as he stared down at the ooze.

  “We ought to complain about this,” he said. But it was what he always said at the eighth hole, just as he always picked heads at the first hole. Just as he always went for the willow trees at the sixth hole. He was what he always admitted he was, a creature of habit. He kicked at a graying set of dentures that had partially worked its way through the thick, wet rug, as if taking one last gulp of air, another bite out of life before going back under with the sandals, and old lamp shades, and empty Pepto Bismol bottles.

  “There’s enough gas down there to blow us to Timbuktu,” Pete said. He nodded at the wet blob, pure amber in color. With the toe of his golf shoe, he kicked at a rusted toy car that had driven itself up to the surface and was now idling there in the warm sun. It looked to Howard to be a 1959 Ford Galaxy. The dirty bastards. Good thing they didn’t have the Lemon Law in 1959. As Pete took aim at the ball, Howard put his foot firmly on the roof of the car and pushed it back down into the slimy muck. Water and ooze crept in slowly, covering the spot where the little Ford had parked itself.

  “We need a new golf course,” Pete was now saying. He swung and the ball flew. “A real one, for Christ’s sake. We should write a letter to Ralph Nader, or some watchdog group who gives a shit.”

  “Yeah, well,” Howard said, as he lined up his ball and then stared with deep concentration down the fairway. Creatures of habit and watchdogs. Maybe the two didn’t mix. And besides, where were the watchdog groups that kept husbands and wives from cheating? “Let’s hope it holds. We got ten more holes.”

  ***

  It had been another golf victory for Pete Morton. As Howard sat at the Holiday Inn after the game, sipping on a cold beer, he had to wonder why. Pete really wasn’t a better player, not when it came to concentration and execution. So how come Pete always won? At least, most of the time he did. Howard had come to suspect that it was tied in to confidence, something undefinable in the DNA. Pete had been a high school and college jock, and the physical body never forgets that, not even after the middle-age paunch begins to appear, and the muscles slacken, and the old ticker wears itself out in just five minutes of basketball layups. There’s still a memory of greatness that lingers, even after the greatness is gone. Therefore, there must also linger a memory of being the guy who took an extra science lab because he didn’t make the team, as Howard had done. That memory never goes away either, even if it’s replaced one day by corporate or academic success. The nerdy guy always remembers how it felt to sit in the stands perpetually. This is how corporate assholes are born in the first place, at least as Howard Woods saw it.

  Howard pushed his beer aside and ordered his first Bacardi rum of the night. He had already come to think of the Holiday Inn lounge as his own kind of Hemingway hangout. It was a good place to sit and ponder the course of one’s life. He had decided that he liked the smokiness embedded in the rug, the curtains, the threadbare stools. It felt more, well, European.

  On his way through the lobby after the golf game, Howard had noticed a sign announcing a Seniors Dance. Singles Only! the sign warned. As he sipped on his rum, he thought about this senior notion. It was like being back in high school again. Seniors will have their class pictures taken on Friday. The seniors will be going by bus to the museum. The seniors are sponsoring a Halloween dance. Jesus, he was a senior again. It was like being demoted after years of struggling to grow up. And then, it was a different group today than in his father’s generation. For Christ’s sake, Jane Fonda was over sixty! Paul Newman over seventy! Liz Taylor was well into her sixth decade when she took off on a motorcycle with a shaggy-haired construction worker. A woman in Italy had given birth, birth, at the age of sixtysomething! People were living longer and looking better, sometimes thanks to cosmetic surgery and sometimes thanks to an energetic lifestyle. “There needs to be a plan for postretirement these days,” Howard had told Pete, during one of their perpetual golf games. “People need to start thinking about a second career at age sixty-two, not a bag of prunes and a good retirement community. I’m too young to go willingly to pasture.” But Pete was not in agreement. “Nature doesn’t intend for Tony Randall to father a kid when he’s in his midseventies,” Pete had argued. “And that’s because nature doesn’t want a young male who should be out spreading his genes spending all his time at home, spoon-feeding his toothless old pappy.” Howard thought differently, damn it. Howard thought young, and who could blame him for that? But a Seniors Dance? What next? If this had, indeed, been high school, he would be racking his brain, trying to figure out who he’d ask to the dance. Then a thought flashed through his mind, another snapping of the old neurons. He was single again! He could go to the damn dance. He could get a date, a woman in her forties or fifties, if the dance chaperones allowed seniors to bring freshmen. Maybe that blond who worked at the bank, the one who was always leaning low to show off her beige-colored cleavage. Howard could take her to the Seniors Dance and twirl her about the floor, the envy of all the retired males who were stuck, perpetually, with their senior wives. Chang and Eng. Till death did them part. Howard could make up for high school, damn it, when he always had to pick from the leftovers, which had been very unpleasant considering that he, too, was one.

  That’s why Ellen, in college, had surprised him so. Ellen was no leftover. She just happened to prefer brains to brawn. Ellen.

  “Hey, Howie, where’s Ellen?”

  Howard looked up to see Larry “Mr. Mellow” Ferguson, the singer-pianist, leaning on the end of the bar.

  “Home, I guess,” Howard told him. He took another drink of his rum.

  “Many a tear has to fall,” Larry suddenly sang. “But it’s all in the game.” He smiled a wide smile at Howard.

  “Cut it out, Larry,” Wally told him. He put a glass of water down in front of Mr. Mellow. “The lawn mower catches you singing for free and your ass is mowed grass, remember?” Larry cast a worried look over his shoulder.

  “I was only asking about Ellen,” he whispered.

  “We’re getting divorced,” said Howard, quite firmly. He remembered Robert Cohn’s own divorce, before he met and married Frances, his divorce from the first girl who was nice to him. Hemingway had written the words hard and tough for poor Cohn. He could have been a bit easier, considering how many times the author himself would marry and divorce. As Cohn had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself her departure was a very healthful shock. Poor Robert, poor steer. “We’re getting divorced,” Howard added, “but it’s a healthful shock.”

  Mr. Mellow thought about this for a few seconds.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” he asked. Howard just shrugged, since he only imagined what it meant. That while Cohn was stunned his wife had left him, had run off with a miniature painter, he had nonetheless wanted the marriage to end.

  Larry picked up his glass of water and moved over onto the lopsided stool next to Howard.

  “Balls,” said Larry. “What a trip. And I thought I had problems.” Then, he quickly brightened, as if Howard’s forty-plus years of marriage had required no more of a moratorium than that. “Hey, you going to the Seniors Dance?”

  Howard shrugged. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.

  “There’s this broad been coming in here for the past month,” said Larry, his eyes running constantly from Howard and Wally, over to the door where Eva Braun might appear. It struck Howard that this must be how men appear before they are electrocuted, always looking over their shoulder for the zap. “She’s going to the dance. She told me so. I think she was hinting. I think she wants to get in my pants.”

  Wally frowned at the thought. Howard frowned a millisecond behind Wally.

  “What a nasty place to end up,” Wally said. “The inner sanctum of your pants.” Then, he added, “Myra Butler’s her name. She’s Rick Butler�
�s widow.”

  Larry took this news in eagerly. He ran a finger over the top of his brown hair, as if making sure it was still there. To Howard at least, it appeared as if Larry’s hairpiece had rooted too far over on the left side of his head. Mr. Mellow was dangerously close to looking like a televangelist.

  “Did you, you know, tell her?” Larry was now asking Wally. Wally threw his bar towel down and plunged both hands into the basin of sudsy water. Two glasses came out looking a bit soap-streaked but passably clean.

  “Tell her what, Larry?” he asked.

  “You know,” Larry said. “About it.”

  “Are you insane?” Wally wanted to know.

  “I kinda wish you would,” said Larry. “Then, if she’s still interested in me, well, I’d know for sure.”

  “Are you a lunatic?” Wally asked. “How do I bring something like that up to one of my customers?” Wally turned his back and began arranging clean glasses on the shelf over the bar.

  “Man oh man,” said Larry, “it’s a tough thing to break to a potential girlfriend. Makes me wish I was still married to Betty. You know, for better or worse.”

  “Maybe you should print yourself a card, like mutes have,” Howard suggested. “You could just hand it to a woman and then wait.”

  “Lawn mower!” Wally hissed under his breath, a part of the ventriloquist act he had perfected ever since the new management had taken over. Larry shot off his stool, pushed his free glass of water away, as if declining even it, and went back to his piano. In no time, a shaky version of Sting’s “Fields of Gold” was emanating from the piano. Howard glanced at the door. Eva Braun. As entrenched as a hawk on a tree limb. He took a last big drink of his rum and then motioned to Wally for another. Before Wally could deliver it, Eva Braun was gone again, mysterious bird of prey that she had become.

  “Poor Larry,” said Wally, as he put the fresh drink down on the bar. Howard nodded but said nothing. He stirred his newest drink with the small plastic pole Wally had stuck in the glass, propped up with a chunk of lime. There was not much Howard could say. Larry had been having some serious problems with impotency, ever since his younger girlfriend, an aspiring singer, had dumped him six months earlier. Apparently, he had been nothing more to her than piano accompaniment for her self-penned songs, until she met a strapping guitarist her own age. Filled with despair, and after weeks of sulking secrecy, Larry had finally confided to his fellow males that he had been rendered impotent. That should have been bad enough. But now he was like a born-again Christian: He couldn’t keep his mouth shut about it. He seemed to think the guys in the bar would enjoy learning all about the malady, in case it struck them down one day. He was dead wrong, but that didn’t deter him. And new discoveries apparently weren’t helping any. Viagra, as described by Mr. Mellow, was “like giving my dick a breath mint.” It did nothing but cause Larry’s stomach to growl while the more important organ remained quiet. And so his doctor had prescribed for Mr. Mellow a vacuum pump, one that would pump him to erection on those lucky nights when he managed to talk some lonely woman in his audience into going home with him. The pump was always on Larry’s mind. He had even pulled it out of its little duffel bag one night, during slack moments of a happy hour, and showed it to Howard, cautious as always that Eva Braun didn’t catch him and wrest the thing out of his hands. The pump, to Larry, was what the Colt 45 was to John Wayne in all those old Westerns. He never went anywhere without it. Just thinking of Larry’s pump had given Howard such a sympathetic pain in his scrotum that he was compelled to cross his legs, hold his breath, and nod in a dreamlike daze as Larry explained the mechanics of the thing.

  “See this?” Larry had asked Howard, the first time he showed him the magical pump. “It’s a hand pump and cylinder, tension rings, personal lubricant, instruction manual. And look at this. It even comes with a videotape, in its own carrying case. You ever need one, Howard, you let me know. I get a hundred bucks for every new customer I bring to the pump.”

  To Howard, the pump looked very much like the plastic cylinders he and Ellen used for drive-through deposits at the bank. He always waited until Larry was out of hearing before he asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: “Tension rings?” Howard’s only answer from the boys in the lounge was shrugged shoulders and looks of pure terror. But Larry Ferguson’s External Vacuum Therapy System gave new meaning to the language of Howard’s generation, that old sexual use of the verb to pump. “I’d like to pump her,” Pete used to say, as some younger woman sashayed past. But now Pete, too, fell silent in the shadow of Larry’s new apparatus. Instead, like Howard, he simply stared at the thing as though it might one day jump from Larry’s hands and attack any man who still had a functioning dick attached to him. No doubt about it, the pump was a penis’s worst nightmare.

  Larry had just hit his stride with “Fields of Gold” when John Woods appeared on the stool next to Howard. This surprised Howard. He was at first pleased to see his son, grateful for the company, but then he remembered their last meeting. An image flashed through his mind of the young woman with the great ass, the firm breasts, and too much familiarity in her eyes when she looked at John Woods.

  “Hey, stranger,” said John. Howard said nothing. Instead, he stared at the faded picture of Lola Falana, hanging precariously from its piece of yellowed tape. Study the past, if you would divine the future.

  “Beer,” John said to Wally, who nodded. When the beer arrived, John took his glass and tapped it against Howard’s rum. “How about a truce?” he asked. At this, Howard gave in. He clinked his rum to John’s beer. There would be plenty of time in the days and weeks ahead to talk some sense into his son. But now was not the time. The truth was that Howard needed John right then. Who else could he talk to? Wally “The Martini King”? Pete “Mr. Golf” Morton? Larry “The Pump” Ferguson? Freddy “The Mattress Mogul” Wilson, who was currently on vacation in the Bahamas with his newest salesclerk?

  “Okay,” said Howard. “Truce. But just for a while, and then it’s war again until you come to your senses.” John didn’t like this, Howard could tell, but he let it pass.

  “So what’s really bothering you, Dad?” John asked. This caught Howard off guard. He thought it was as plain as the surgically altered nose on most people’s faces. Ellen had cheated on him. But apparently John begged to differ. “This isn’t about Mom having an affair back in the Dark Ages,” John added. “So what’s it really about?”

  Howard said nothing for a time. He was thinking of how fast William Cohen had aged since those days when he walked the length of Maine, asking for votes. Even the picture of him shaking hands with Wally seemed to be an artifact. The tape holding it up was as yellow and dusty as Lola Falana’s own adhesive strip. What’s it really about?

  “It’s about your mother and Ben Collins,” said Howard. “At least, that’s numero uno.”

  “What’s number two?” asked John.

  “I need to pay my dues, son,” Howard said, and it surprised him. He watched as Wally made someone at the other end of the bar a splendid martini. Paying dues. Proving one’s manhood. Men had always been doing that. But it was also about heart, wasn’t it? Passion? It was Hemingway’s own sympathy with the Loyalist cause that had carried him to Spain and his first war. It had carried him toward the sad, irreversible knowledge that if liberty is lost anywhere in the world, then liberty is in danger everywhere in the world. This was why John Woods had gone to Kuwait, wasn’t it? Howard thought of Byron, outfitting an entire ship that he would then sail to Greece to help fight for their independence, Shelley freshly dead. Was it merely a way for the poet to overcome that misshapen foot? After all, and as Howard had often told his own students, George Gordon Bryon wasn’t one of the swashbuckling heroes he often wrote about. He was short, chubby, and a born limper.

  “I can pay my dues in Spain,” Howard added, and heard John’s stool twitch, as if in disapproval. He tried not
to think of how Lord Byron had died fever-stricken in Greece, thirty-five years old. Leeches had sucked the blood out of him as if it were his last, fluid poem.

  Howard finally looked over at John, who, in turn, looked around the shabby lounge, at the stools tilting beneath asses, the table legs hoisted up with matchbook covers, the broken chips floating in the bowl of half-eaten salsa.

  “You’re paying your dues here,” John noted.

  “It’s called success, my boy,” Howard said now. “And it has always eluded me, like some prostitute who keeps turning the street corner just ahead.”

  “Aw, come on, Dad. You were successful. Hell, you’ve taught hundreds of students, maybe thousands.”

  Howard shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I read in a magazine once about a cat in Scotland, a mouser. During its lifetime it caught and killed twenty-eight thousand mice. Was that cat happy? Happier than the cats who ate Purina and never caught a single fucking mouse? I don’t know, son. What is success? I guess it all comes down to that.” The rum was making the pit of his stomach warm and fuzzy.

  “It all comes down to catching mice?” John asked.

  “I know I’ll never be a shaker and a mover,” Howard went on. “I’ll never be the kind of guy who soars, like a kite. But I would like to grab on to the tail of the kite.”

  “If you run the bulls in Pamplona, I guarantee you’ll fly higher than any kite,” John said. Howard ignored this.

  “Mind you, I’m not asking to see what the kite sees,” he added. “I’m just asking to go where the kite goes.”

  “Jesus,” said John. “It’s worse than I thought. I figured you were just upset over retiring, maybe losing a few brown hairs. I didn’t realize it’s been about mice and kites all this time.”