Running the Bulls Read online

  Billy smiled a wide smile. When Howard came back outside with a glass of wine, Billy was still smiling.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Howard. Billy took the wine and held it in his hand. He swirled it a bit and then looked up at Howard.

  “I always imagined what this would be like,” said Billy. “You know, the cool kids, the smart ones, they were always sitting with the teachers in the student lounge. Talking about stuff the rest of us didn’t understand.”

  Howard sat down next to Billy and picked up his own glass of wine.

  “Looking back on it now, Billy,” he said. “I doubt any of us knew what we were talking about. We just thought we did.”

  A chickadee sang out from the branches overhead. Howard was glad that he would have them all winter. He had already bought a twenty-five-pound bag of sunflower seeds. The chickadees and the finches and the gray jays, they’d weather the cold and the snow with him until the buds of May. So the feeding of them was the least he could do.

  “I just came to tell you that I finished it,” said Billy. Howard looked at him.

  “Finished what?”

  “The book,” said Billy. “The Sun Also Rises. I finished it last night.”

  “I see,” said Howard. Billy had begun reading that book the first of June. Well, what could Howard say? He still had a chapter to go himself. But then, he’d read it a dozen times over the years. He doubted Hemingway had read it that often.

  “What do you think?” asked Howard. These days, he was no longer afraid to venture into unknown territory.

  “As I see it, this group of friends go on a trip and realize just how unhappy they really are,” said Billy. “It’s like that time our senior class went to Quebec City. Shelly Lynn fell in love with the guy who worked at the hotel and even dropped out of school to move up there with him. But he was married and had kids and never told her that. And on that same trip, Maria was attacked by two guys who tried to rape her. I think you come back different from trips, even if you come back happy. I think trips change you forever, and that’s why I don’t care much if I ever travel far from Bixley. It’s just not, well, safe. I want to find a nice girl and get married, settle down and raise a family. By then, I expect to be managing the bookstore. And I think that’s all Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes ever wanted too, you know, families to belong to. They were just too far from home to do anything about it.”

  Billy was done. He took a deep breath. Howard realized that the young man had planned to say all this to him, had maybe even rehearsed it on the drive out to the cabin. It was as if Billy Mathews was finally taking the test he was supposed to take, back when he gave up college for good and dropped out, dropped away, disappeared until he turned up again at the bookstore. But now Howard understood that maybe Billy had gotten more from the class than any other student. More, even, than the instructor.

  “What did you get out of the book, Mr. Woods?” Billy asked. Howard considered this. How long had it been since he’d delivered a Hemingway lecture? A few years? He had loved it, hadn’t he, teaching? The thing about being a professor of any subject was that you got to stand at the front of the classroom, all those faces turned your way, all those eyes glued to your lips. It wasn’t that they liked you, necessarily, or even gave a shit what you had to say. It was that you held their grade at the tips of your fingers. A professor is the king, the queen of the classroom. Even if you were the kid back in high school no one wanted to date, the scrawny kid with glasses, never picked for baseball or the cheerleading squad. It was your turn now to shine, your turn to benefit from all those nights of hitting the books while the hippest fraternities and sororities partied all over campus. Your turn. And Howard had loved every minute of it, missed it deeply, longed for the part of him that was fulfilled by it each time he stepped behind that lectern. That’s when sexy young women like Jennifer Kranston, girls who wouldn’t have given him a sideways glance back in high school, when he was their peer, now gave him those little looks, those gestures to let him know, The answer is yes, Professor Woods, if you want it to be.

  Howard drank some of his wine. Billy was sitting, waiting, his jacket still zipped and keeping him warm on the front porch of the cabin.

  “There are two kinds of people in Hemingway novels, Billy,” Howard said. He could already hear the change in his voice, in the intonation of his delivery. He was Professor Woods again, and it felt good to be that person. “The first kind is the Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley kind. They’re the ones who have had their faith in moral values taken away from them by World War One, so they live cynical lives, and they care only about their own emotional needs. It’s how they survive. The other kind of people Hemingway wrote about are people who live basically simple lives, with emotions he saw as being quite primitive. Bullfighters, for instance, or prize fighters, especially the ones who battle circumstances outside of their control. Even the girl who brings them hot bowls of soup, in the little farmhouse so high up in the mountains of Spain, on that fishing trip that Jake and Bill Gorton took to Burguete. Remember her? Hot vegetable soup and wine and then fried trout. Wild strawberries. Sounds like nothing, doesn’t it? And yet to this day tourists go to that same farmhouse up in those Spanish mountains, and they ask for a bowl of the same soup that Bill and Jake had. And they think about that girl. I know they think about her, Billy; they think about her and her simple but courageous life.”

  Billy had listened carefully to this lecture, entranced, almost childlike. He said nothing for a long time. Then he reached inside his coat and brought out his copy of the book, the one he had shown Howard that day at the mall. The cover was now worn, a bit frazzled, but Van Gogh’s crows still rose up from their perpetual wheat field, their black wings destined to flap forever, just as Macbeth’s witches were destined to stir the cauldron out on that barren heath. Forever. Billy looked over at Howard.

  “I guess I’m that second kind of person,” he said. “At least I hope I am.”

  Howard smiled.

  “I’d say you are, Billy.”

  Billy studied the cover of the book in his hands. The title, the author’s name.

  “Ernest Hemingway,” he read. He looked over at Howard, questioning.

  “He was just another scared SOB,” Howard said. “Just like the rest of us.”

  “He still alive?” Billy asked.

  “No,” Howard said. “No, he isn’t.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Billy. Then, “What was he like?” For a second Howard wondered if Billy Mathews thought that he and Papa Hemingway were old friends or something, that maybe they’d fished for marlin off the Keys, drank large amounts of wine from leather gourds. A canoe passed far out on the lake and sent its ripples toward them. Howard watched as the small swells finally reached the shore.

  “He was all man, Billy,” Howard said, “and that’s why the sixties threw him away. He was too barrel-chested, too mythic, too masculine for the tone of the day. He stood for ideals that no one believed in anymore. Television replaced him, and jet planes, and computers. They replaced him, Billy, but they can’t seem to kill him. He’s the old bull that’s just too wise to die. He’ll be around long after the hippies and the yuppies, the investment bankers and the corporate lawyers, the Hollywood executives and the university academics, the Iron Johns and the feminists. Know why, Billy? He might have been scared, he might have been a lot of things, but coward wasn’t one of them.”

  Billy stood then, put his empty wineglass down by the leg of the chair. He slipped the book back inside his jacket and then zipped it against the cold. He looked at Howard.

  “Which one are you, Mr. Woods?” he asked. “Which Hemingway type are you?”

  Howard said nothing for a few seconds. He watched as a loon dove far out on the lake. The other loons had already gone, but he’d noticed this late straggler just that morning, autumn nipping at its tail feathers. He hoped it would go too, soon, be
fore the lake froze over and it had no options left. It was awful to be left without options. When the loon resurfaced, a hundred feet on down the lake, Howard looked back at Billy with his answer.

  “Once upon a time, I wanted to be the first kind,” he said. “Some of us, when we grow older, fall into a sort of panic. We want our lives to be larger than they really are, so that it seems the living of them was worth it. But it takes a lot of courage to lead a small life, Billy. It’s the kind of courage I think I’ve finally found.”

  Billy smiled, as if pleased that he and his old teacher finally had something in common.

  “You know, I always admired you, Mr. Woods,” Billy said then. “You done a lot for me. I’ll be seeing you then.”

  Howard watched as Billy went back down to his little green car and opened the door. Then, on an impulse he knew he’d never be sorry for, Howard stood up from the rocker.

  “Billy?” he said. Billy Mathews was just about to slide back behind the wheel of his car, but he stopped and looked up at Howard, there in the twilight of the front porch.

  “There’s a book called Walden,” said Howard. “You can buy it at the bookstore. I think there’s a lot of things in there that you’ll find interesting.” Billy’s face was instantly happy.

  “Can we talk about it afterward?” Billy asked. “Like we did just now? Like the class used to do?” Howard nodded.

  “You read the book and then we’ll talk about it, Billy,” he said.

  “Thanks a lot, Mr. Woods,” Billy said.

  Had Howard, for the first time in his life, finally become a teacher? As he stood watching Billy’s green car disappear into the dusk, back through the stand of straight white birch trunks, he thought about Papa Hemingway. So many scholars, students, even his friends had missed what was really great about the man. It was his comeback. Critics had predicted that he was washed up after he bombed with Across the River and into the Trees. Even his fans were embarrassed for him. But this was in 1950, and the son of a bitch had gone on to win the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize. His comeback had been extraordinary, remarkable, and yet people only remembered the hedonism of his fishing, his hunting, his drinking, his fucking. They forgot all about his relentless devotion to his art. Or the fact that The Sun Also Rises had changed the way a whole generation thought, how they walked and talked. Thousands of American college girls dreamed of being Brett. They wore their hair short like Brett’s; they smoked cigarettes and drank like Brett. They spoke in clever, Brettish phrases. And thousands of young college men wanted to be Jake before the war. But people forgot all that by the time the fifties rolled around and critics began to stab their knives into him. Papa must have sensed the sixties in the bottoms of his feet, the way rabbits know an earthquake is coming. He had taken a shotgun and put it to his head. He had killed himself before the new ideas of a world he would have hated did it for him. That was in 1961. So he must have seen it all coming.

  Before Howard went to sleep that night, he picked up his own copy of the novel and read that final chapter. Brett, her heart broken because she knew she could not keep the young bullfighter as her lover, had sent Jake a telegram, asking him to come to Madrid. Howard read on, and then he savored the last paragraph. Brett and Jake had found a taxi to carry them through the streets of Madrid, since Brett had never seen the city.

  We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via. “Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  Howard fell asleep with the book broken open across his chest. He dreamed then, the most vivid and colorful dream that he had since childhood, maybe ever. It was more a dream of life than it was a dream of the subconscious, so he was positive that it was happening. It was happening and he was caught up in it, unable to break free of the colors and sounds. It opened beautifully, filmlike, to the excited noise of a fiesta and the dust of the streets rising up in brown clouds. He even felt the intense heat, so hot that perspiration ran down the back of his neck. He knew instantly that he was in Pamplona, and that the bulls were about to run through the streets. And then Howard saw them, thousands of them, coming from the nearby villages, coming from the distant cities of the world, all dressed in sparkling white shirts and waving the red neck scarves, los sanfermines, those skillful dodgers. They were filling up the square in front of city hall, the same square Howard had seen so many times in the pictures of his travel packet. Then a man, a councilor, jumped up onto a platform and turned to the mass of faces before him. This is when Howard realized that he was one of those faces, in that sea of men. He, Howard Woods, of Bixley, Maine, was about to run the bulls! He looked down then and saw that his shirt was pure white, spotless, and in his hand was the red neck scarf. “People of Pamplona!” the councilor shouted. “Long live San Fermín!” Howard smiled. He had read that this would be shouted in Spanish and Basque, but the councilor was speaking English, which was very nice of him. And then noise exploded all around as a rocket soared high over the square and then burst into stars. As he stared up at the fireworks, Howard knew what John’s bomb had looked like to the faces on the ground. And then a festive cry rang out from the thousands of voices around him, as if a great bell were being rung. He felt himself being pushed along with the crowd. Now there was music in the air as the street bands beat out their songs. Voices sang in unison, sweet and pure: We ask San Fermín, as our Patron, to guide us through the Bull Run and give us his blessing. He saw vendors along the way, reaching out to him with cups of champagne, sandwiches, sunglasses, sombreros, ice cream. He tried to take some of their offerings, but they rushed past him in a blur, as he was pushed along with the wall of bodies, all those white shirts moving en masse, all those red scarves being waved about in the air. He was exhilarated, the heat, the music, the sweat of life unfolding as it was, like a great, unstoppable pinwheel. And then, someone shouted, “Los toros!” and Howard knew the bulls were coming. The film sped up then, much too fast for his liking, and he was pushed violently now. The crowd was changing; he could sense it, the happy faces growing stern, blossoming into anger. “Kill the bull!” someone shouted in English. And then hundreds of hands were raised into the air from out of the mass of bodies, hundreds of white shirtsleeves, the silver blades of hundreds of knives flashing in the hot sun. Howard realized then that the sanfermines were stabbing the bull, again and again and again. He turned to the man next to him, hoping he could help stop it. There was a banner floating above this man’s head: BULLFIGHTING IS CRUEL TO ANIMALS! It was the man Howard had read about in the newspaper, that fateful day Ellen told him about Ben, and he had driven to John’s and waited for his son to wake up. It was the animal rights activist! “Do something!” Howard shouted to him. “Help me stop this!” The man turned toward Howard then, his banner streaming above his head, and that’s when Howard realized that he no ears. Just as his students had no ears in those Macbeth lectures he’d been giving in his nightmares, ever since his retirement. Now Howard was frightened, his body tingling the way it does from the fear that comes with a nightmare. “We aren’t supposed to kill it!” Howard shouted to the man on his other side. “We’re just supposed to run alongside!” Now this man turned to look at Howard. His brownish hair was shoulder length, his eyebrows thick and full. He was dressed like the other sanfermines, the white shirt, the red belt, the neck scarf. Howard recognized him instantly. It was Roddy Burkette. “It has to die anyway,” said Roddy. “It has to die later, in the arena, so why not now?” Howard felt panic then. He had to find a way to save the bull. He elbowed through the crowd of skillful dodgers, that sea of faces, the boiling mass of hands, of knives. As they fell back, they reached out and touched his white
shirt with their fingers, leaving behind their bloody prints. And then, finally, Howard managed to reach the bull, so great was his desire to rescue it. He pulled away the last man who was kneeling over the animal’s body, which he knew must be dying. He pulled away the last sanfermine from the bull, only it wasn’t the bull. It was Eliot. Howard knelt and picked the boy’s head up into his lap. He cradled it. “Oh, Eliot,” he whispered. “I wish it had been me instead of you.” Eliot opened his eyes then and looked up at Howard. “I know, Grandpa,” Eliot said. “But it’s okay now. It’s almost over. And it doesn’t hurt so much, not as much as I thought it would.” Howard could only nod. He held the small body of his grandson up tight to his chest, which is what he wished he could have done the day Eliot had lain in the street, dying alone in that pool of blood. Eliot. And then, in the bizarre scheme of dreams, Howard began to sing to his grandchild, not a lullaby, for dreams don’t care for such sensible things. “That old Bilbao moon, I won’t forget it soon,” Howard sang, and in the dream he was just as good as Andy Williams. “That old Bilbao moon, just like a big balloon.”

  When Howard woke, he was already crying. He could still feel the warmth of Eliot’s body pressed against the sweat of his chest. Warmth, a thing that could be touched, alive, like electricity. And then the dream was shaken away from him like a cobweb, and Howard realized that the warmth was only the sweat of the dream itself, dampening his T-shirt. And now, the warmth, the wet, was growing cold as the night air reached it. Cold, as Eliot’s body must be, the sweet earth swallowing it up in its mouth, churning it into fertilizer. Howard didn’t think the cry from deep within him would ever stop. It came out of his body as if it had teeth, tearing at his gut, his flesh, his heart, ripping away any sense of shelter he had ever known. It was much worse than the night of Eliot’s funeral, and he had thought that was as bad as it would get. And then it was over.

  He went into the small bathroom where he bathed cool water onto his face, then patted it dry with a towel. The sky outside the window was just ripening with dawn. He went out to the other room and lit the oil lamp on the table. He put more wood in the stove and then, nothing but time on his hands, he stood before the photo of Ben Collins that was taped to his mirror. He hoped Ben could help him with this one, this big question. Had his life been lived for nothing? Maybe not. He had, after all, endured. The truth is that he’d been skillfully dodging the great issues of his life, all his life. He would give the goddamn symbolists their due, their crust of bread: He’d been running the bulls for as long as he could remember. As he peered into Ben’s eyes, Howard wondered if he would visit Roddy Burkette one day, in his jail cell. Or if he couldn’t visit, maybe he would find a place in his heart that would forgive Roddy, who seemed to need no help in his own self-destruction. One day. It all takes time.