Running the Bulls Read online

  “Dad?” he said. “What the hell’s going on?” He was wearing only pajama bottoms, and as he came down the walk, Howard couldn’t help but feel a fatherly pride at his son’s physique, the well-muscled arms, the kind of washboard stomach that most men work out hours a day in the hopes of attaining. This was his son, John, the one who had flown that F-15 fighter, while back home all Howard and Ellen could do was sit on the edge of their sofa and watch the bombing on television. “It looks like Fourth of July fireworks,” Ellen had said, as Bernie Shaw’s voice transmitted news from a hotel room in Baghdad. Howie and Ellen had been pulled into a world they knew nothing about when John volunteered for Desert Storm, a world of precision-guided missiles, night vision, infrared navigation and target designation systems, laser and electro-optic guided bombs, target sensors, all devices that would allow for round-the-clock bombing. Back then, Howard had thought it the most terrible thing that could happen to him as a human being, having his son at war. And in his role as father, it still was.

  Howard got out of the car and then leaned back against it, the paper tucked up under his right arm.

  “It was delivered about five thirty,” he said. He handed the paper to John, who took it. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “You been sitting out here since five thirty?” John asked. Then, a look swept over his face. “Something has happened to Mom!” Funny, but Howard recognized that look as the same one that had filtered across Ellen’s face when Marlin Fitzwater broke the news to an astonished American public: the liberation of Kuwait has begun. In all their years of marriage, they had probably never been closer than at that moment—January 16, 1991, at six forty p.m. in Bixley, Maine—when one of their children was in grave jeopardy. He and Ellen had sat together on the sofa, her hand gripping his, watching as American planes zoomed in over Baghdad, F-117A Stealth Fighters, modernized B-52 bombers, F/A-18 Hornet fighters, Apache attack helicopters, SuperCobra helicopters, and, of course, those F-15 fighters, one of which was being piloted by the boy with the childhood nosebleeds. He and Ellen had sat with their strange new vocabulary floating between them, wondering each time, “Is that plane our son? Is that John Woods?” It was the look of losing someone you love dearly, someone you cannot imagine life without.

  “Your mother is fine,” said Howard. “Oh, she’s just fine and dandy.” He stared at his feet. He had forgotten to wear socks. He smiled as he pulled up his pants leg and showed John. “No socks,” he announced.

  “Have you been on some kind of bender, Dad?” John asked, looking down at the sockless feet. He then leaned forward to smell Howard’s breath, but Howard waved him back.

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth,” he said. “A bender would smell better right now.”

  “Then what?” asked John. “What the hell’s going on?” Howard ran his finger down the blue paint of his car. A Ford Probe GT. A lemon, and even Bixley’s Performance Ford admitted that it was. The transmission had gone twice in two years. Once, the muffler had dropped off in morning traffic. The windows shot up and down at random, as though ghosts were pushing the goddamn buttons. Howard was being kidded by the guys at Eddy’s Service Station for having bought a lemon in the first place. He thought then of Ellen. He thought of the woman he had chosen to be his wife, for better or worse, a warranty for a lifetime.

  “A goddamn lemon,” said Howard.

  “What?” asked John. He was looking back at the house, most likely wondering if Patty was awake and witnessing the scene out in their driveway.

  “The Ford Probe’s a lemon,” said Howard. “Don’t buy one, son.”

  “Dad, listen,” John said. He leaned against the car and put his arm around Howard’s shoulders. Big, sturdy arms. Like his grandfather, thought Howard. He felt like weeping in that instant at the sight of his son, tall, brave, honest. How had he pulled it off? How had he raised such a fine boy? And he had done it amidst the deceit of his wife, John’s mother, Ellen. He hoped he wouldn’t cry, not in front of John.

  “I know you didn’t come over here to talk to me about cars,” John said. “What is it? What’s going on? Mom said retirement hasn’t been easy for you. It’ll take time, Dad. Hell, I wish I could retire, spend more time with Patty and Eliot. Mom says you’ve been moping around the house, not getting any exercise at all.”

  “Ha!” said Howard, and made a fist. He held it up for John to see. “Ha!” he said again. Just the mention of her name, of her pretend concern for him. Oh, she wanted him out of the house all right, running his flabby ass off up and down Patterson Street just so that she could avail herself of another neighborhood stud. Carl Warner! Two houses down from theirs, who thought himself a ladies’ man and drove a Mercedes. By God, she was probably doing old Carl, and Howard didn’t even know it! And now, retired, well, no wonder he was cramping her style. No wonder she wanted him out exercising his calf muscles.

  “Goddamn lemon,” said Howard, and struck his balled fist against the Probe.

  “Jesus, Dad,” said John. “It’s just a car.”

  Next door, a man came out for his own morning paper. He saw John and waved. John waved back and then turned to face Howard. “Come on in the house, Dad,” John said. “Patty will get us some breakfast. And then maybe you’ll tell me what the hell is going on.” He motioned up the walk, then went on ahead, with Howard following as though he were on some kind of tether.

  “Wait,” said Howard. He went to the Probe and groped around in the backseat and came out with his suitcase.

  “Holy cow,” said John. “It’s this serious?” Howard made a pointless gesture at the suitcase.

  “Just a few things to tide me over,” he explained. “But I forgot to pack socks.”

  Patty was in the kitchen and still in her robe. She looked up at Howard in surprise, then over at the clock.

  “Dad!” she said. “Is everything okay? Is Mom okay?”

  Howard nodded and said nothing, so Patty looked to John, who shrugged.

  “From what I can make out,” said John, “he’s really pissed off that Ford sold him a lemon. And he’s been waiting out in the yard since dawn to tell me about it.”

  John motioned for Howard to take off his jacket. Howard did so and handed it to his son. No one spoke. Howard could hear water boiling in a kettle and then the kettle’s voice rising to a whine before Patty unplugged it. There was already a smell of muffins in the air, or some kind of bagel or cake, and it reminded him that he was quite hungry.

  “It’s Ellen,” he said finally. He would tell them. He would explain, and then he would feed his famished soul. “She threw me out.”

  “Mom threw you out?” John asked. He gave Howard that stunned look, the one animals have as they plod toward their own slaughter.

  “Well, actually,” said Howard, “I told your mother to get out of our home, and she refused to leave. So, here I am.” With his right arm he gestured pitifully at the length of himself. John and Patty exchanged a quick look, but Howard caught it. He had always caught John with those furtive looks. Like the time twelve-year-old John and his buddy Micky Pilcher played poker with Howard and a couple of fellow teachers, using their own marked deck until Howard, bankrupt and in debt to Micky for fifty dollars, saw something adrift in John’s eyes. The boy, at thirty-three, still had a face like an open slate. Guileless. A man you’d follow into battle, or would want to follow you into battle.

  “Why?” John was asking this cautiously now, frightful of the answer. “Why would you ask Mom to leave?”

  “Why?” Howard asked. “Because she cheated on me. That’s why.”

  John seemed to go pale at this declaration. He spun around and began rattling about in the cupboard for some plates. Patty, who’d been listening quietly, smiled at Howard. She gestured for him to take a chair at the table.

  “How would you like your eggs, Dad?” she asked.

  ***

  John cam
e into the den where Howard was lounging on the sofa, having a second cup of coffee. He sat down in the chair facing Howard and stretched his legs out before him. Howard smiled. It reminded him of another time, this quiet determination he could see in his son’s demeanor. It reminded him of the time John had been caught smoking pot in the boys’ bathroom at Bixley High. He had been expelled, and he had come home to wait for his father in the den, sitting stiffly in a chair, determined to defend himself, his legs thrust out before him.

  “Now, Dad,” said John. “I’ve called my office. I told them I’ll be in later. Don’t you think it’s time you let me know what’s going on?” Howard cleared his throat. He had been staring at the picture of Ellen and him on the mantel, a photo taken three Christmases ago, when the entire nuclear family had gathered in the house on Patterson Street to celebrate with eggnog and brandy and deviled eggs, to rejoice their good fortune in health and family and career. In the picture, their faces were still alive with the endorphins that were pumping that day, bringing with them the joy of family, of togetherness, of continuity. The littlest grandchild, Howard Jr.’s two-month-old daughter, was blanketed in her mother’s arms. Looking at the photo, Howard could now see Ben Collins nestled there in the gray coils of Ellen’s cerebrum, that trunk where old memories are kept. Everything seemed like a lie to him now.

  “Remember Ben Collins?” Howard asked, and as John filed through the Rolodex of names in his memory bank, Howard pulled up an image of Ben. He had been good-looking, manly in the way John was. Not that Howard wasn’t manly; he just wasn’t, well, rugged. Ben was handsome in that rugged way that women like, that Marlboro Man kind of way, at least before the Marlboro Man died of lung cancer. Ben was rugged, and he had a great golf swing, a real natural. Tears came to Howard’s eyes and he fought them back.

  “Oh yeah,” John said finally. “Mr. Collins. He taught history.”

  “Bastard,” Howard said. “Your mother had an affair with him.”

  “Jesus,” said John, that stunned-animal look returning to his face. Then the animal look went away and another one replaced it. “Jesus,” he said again, anger rising around the word. Howard held up a finger of caution.

  “Don’t waste your energy,” he advised. “The bastard’s already dead.” John took this into consideration.

  “Jesus,” he said again. Howard nodded, appreciating the sympathy.

  “Nice little mess to find myself in,” he said. “Me dreaming about goddamn test papers all night long, grading and regrading, over and over again. Or giving lectures that have no endings. I tell you, I never worked that hard when I was actually teaching. And then she goes and deals me out this hand.”

  The two sat on sofa and chair, father and son, silence crusting itself between them as they considered this new event in their lives. Patty’s head appeared in the doorway.

  “I’m off to the theater,” she said. “We’re getting the makeup and costumes ready for the play next month.” John stood to kiss her good-bye, and this gave Howard a particular pain. A husband kissing a wife good-bye. “What do you say I pick up Chinese on the way home tonight?” Patty asked. “Will you be joining us for dinner, Dad?” Howard’s eyes had teared at the sight of the kiss, and now they were growing more cloudy. He put his head down, only to raise it again instantly. In doing so, he caught John lip-synching words to Patty, trying to tell her before she left what the scoop was.

  “Ellen cheated on me,” said Howard, “with a man named Ben Collins. Twenty some years ago. He taught history with her at the college. They gave up cigarettes together and, apparently, at least according to Ellen, this act bonds people, like soldiers going into battle together. It lasted about ten months. He just died—the bastard!—and I guess that was a signal to Ellen that it was safe to tell me. Who knows why she told me? Guilt. She said men have something in their genes that protects them from guilt so that they can spread their seed. Cells and bacteria. We don’t have guilt, Ellen says, but women do, at least she certainly does, and she wants me to forgive her.”

  He was rambling and he knew it, yet he couldn’t stop. It was a strange sensation, like being in one of those slow-motion car wrecks. Time was slowing itself down for him, and for a change. Because the truth was, it seemed like only yesterday that Howard Edward Woods had accepted his first teaching position at Bixley Community College. He and Ellen had planned long and hard as a couple. When they’d both graduated from college, back in 1957, Howard had dropped out to sell life insurance while Ellen went on to graduate school first. They had been married just a month then, and it was impossible for both of them to go to school at the same time. They needed finances in order to build stable ground beneath their dreams. A year later, just as Ellen finished her MA in history, she discovered she was pregnant with Greta. They had planned it that way through long talks that they shared late into the night, in that first little house they had managed to finance, Ellen’s soft head resting on his arm, the two of them lying in the darkness as they laid out the course of their lives. It was Howard’s way, to plan carefully and with great foresight. Then Ellen had stayed home with Greta, until Howard Jr. and John had made their own appearances into the world. Howard had supported the family all this time as he waited for his own chance to go back to school. That happened just after he turned thirty-two years old. When he finally got his own master’s degree in English, he was still just thirty-four, and a job had opened up under his nose, at Bixley Community College. By this time, the two oldest kids were in grade school, and John was big enough to leave with a trusted babysitter. So it was Ellen’s turn to walk into her own classroom when a job teaching history also became available at Bixley Community. Now she, too, could settle down to a lifetime of instruction. Well planned. Every damn bit of it.

  Then, one day, Howard woke up—or one night, rather—his pajamas and sheets soaked with so much sweat they could have been dunked in that goddamn cauldron the witches had in Macbeth, he woke to find that he was a retired man of sixty-three years, gray hairs abounding where once a lively chestnut brown had lived, yellow growing over the pupils of his eyes, a paunch that would make a kangaroo proud, and a stiffness in his back whenever he swung a golf club. Time had sped the bejeezus out of his life, but now, in his greatest misery, time was slowing down again. Now, now that he found himself up to his knees in a puddle of angst he had not even imagined in his teens—when he could have handled it by just being young and stupid and filled to the gills with testosterone—now, here was Time, attaching a freeze-frame button to Howard Woods’s misery.

  “Bummer,” said Patty, and Howard remembered that he had a son, and a daughter-in-law, and that he was in their home, fifteen miles away from his own home. Bummer, indeed.

  “Yeah, well, what you gonna do?” asked Howard, and clapped his hands together. It was the line he had always said in response to why the Boston Red Sox seemed incapable of ever winning a World Series, cursed for eternity for trading Babe Ruth. It was the same hand clap he reserved for the poor Red Sox.

  Patty came over and touched his shoulder. She squatted before him. Howard felt as though he had just been caught smoking pot in the boys’ room at Bixley High. Patty looked at him kindly.

  “It happened a long time ago,” she said. “And it only lasted a little while. I’m sure it didn’t mean anything. At least she told you. If she didn’t love you, she would have kept it to herself. It’s a time for forgiveness, Dad.” She kissed his cheek, and he realized for the first time that he had a stubble of beard sprouting there, what he called his Dick Nixon Shadow. “I’ll see the two of you tonight,” Patty added. “You’ll know me. I’ll be the one with the bag of fortune cookies.” Howard tried to smile but couldn’t. “Forgiveness, Dad,” Patty said again. Another kiss to John and she was gone.

  Howard listened as the door slammed behind her. Forgiveness. He looked at John, who had been staring at him all this time, waiting.

  “Do you suppose,” How
ard asked his son, “that nature gave women forgiveness in their genes? Because I don’t feel it, son. I don’t feel it one bit.”

  John looked over at the Christmas photo on the fireplace mantel. Minutes slid away between them, the grandfather clock keeping track with ticks and tocks, ticks and tocks. Finally, John stood, rocked on the balls of his feet, just as Howard did in times of stress.

  “Still,” said John, “I think you should forgive her.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Howard. John said nothing. Ticktock. Ticktock.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not kidding. You’ve got to think of this family, Dad. You’ve got to think of us.” So Howard did that. He thought about his family. Ticktock.

  “I’m not gonna do it,” he said. “You’re the baby of the family, for Christ’s sake, and you’re thirty-three years old. Yet you say I need to stay with a philandering woman for the sake of the family? I don’t think so, son.”

  Howard went over to the fireplace where he could better see the photograph. He wiped a finger across the surface of the glass, leaving behind a pathway through a layer of dust. It reminded him of how a jet leaves its breath in the sky, a sign that it’s been there, if only for a short time. He had truly believed his son would die in the skies over Iraq.

  “She’s hardly a philandering woman,” John said now, still defending his mother. He went to the sofa and threw himself down on it. In his growing up years, John was always throwing himself on the sofa at Patterson Street whenever something wasn’t going well with the world. A football game lost, a quarrel with a girlfriend, a summer job denied him.

  “How long did you say this went on?” he asked.

  “Ten months,” said Howard. There was another long, excruciating pause.

  “Even so,” John said. “You’ve got to think of the family.”