Running the Bulls Read online

  “Why do I have to think of a family that doesn’t even live with me anymore?” Howard wanted to know.

  “Because,” said John. “She’s my mother.” He threw a sofa pillow across the room. It struck the varnished wood beyond the rug and slid into a huge ceramic vase that seemed to be sprouting peacock feathers.

  “Throw all the pillows you want,” said Howard. “I’m not forgiving her.” John sat up and put his head in his hands. Then he sighed a heavy, tired sigh. A stranger peering in the window, seeing them both sitting there with such defiance nested between them, might think John the father, Howard the son.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m filing for divorce,” said Howard, and that’s when he realized the course his retirement years would take—just as Macbeth’s life had taken its own pitiful course after meeting up with the witches on that frozen heath—right there, right in the midst of that blurb of time in his son’s den. That was it, then. He was getting a divorce, at the age of sixty-three, when most men get gallstones.

  John pulled at a piece of thread on his shirtsleeve—ticktock—but Howard held fast. Finally, John looked at him.

  “Then what?” he said.

  “What do you mean, then what?” asked Howard.

  “I mean, what are you going to do once you’re divorced?” Time was moving fast again. Time was speeding up, asking for answers to questions that Howard hadn’t yet confronted. Then, remembering something he’d read in that morning’s paper, he knew what he was going to do. What he had almost done in his youth, in those green days before he fell in love with Ellen O’Malley and gave it all up. It had been a sublime dream of his, a great, great passion—well, he had at least considered it, briefly, just after he read his first Hemingway novel.

  “I’m going to run the bulls,” Howard said. Christ, it had a ring to it!

  “What?”

  “I’m going to run the bulls.” He wondered if he would meet up with the animal rights man from Los Angeles, maybe touch elbows with him during the run, compliment him on his streaming banner. Later, they could have dinner at some restaurant called Mi Casa, Su Casa, or something cleverly Spanish, two sweaty but victorious expatriates, enjoying some Yank chitchat over a bottle of sangria: How ’bout them Red Sox—how ’bout them Dodgers?

  John cleared his throat.

  “What bulls?”

  “The bulls in Pamplona.”

  John stared, that animal-to-slaughter look returning. Howard wondered what the look had been on his son’s face during all those air sorties, when John was floating like a silent hawk in the skies over Iraq. Now John stood, began rocking on the balls of his feet.

  “You aren’t by any chance talking about Pamplona, Spain, are you, Dad?”

  Howard nodded.

  “I’m gonna run the bulls!” he said. He felt instantly rugged. He was being tested, finally, the way his own father had been tested in World War II, in North Africa. The way his son, John, had been tested in Iraq. Howard would be tested in Spain.

  Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock.

  “Jesus,” said John.

  Buffalo

  Throughout the afternoon, while John was at his job as an executive for Sounder Aeronautics, and Patty was at her job as theatrical technician, and Eliot was at his job as a second grader at Bixley Elementary School, Howard moped around their house, looking at family scrapbooks, rubbing a finger across the dusty family photo on the fireplace mantel, and had no job at all. John called twice to check on him and to encourage him to talk things out with Ellen.

  “It’ll blow over,” said John. Behind his voice, Howard could hear other voices, busy with the chores of life, employed, engaged, occupied, busy. Howard heard those background voices and he hated them for their importance.

  “What would you do if it were your wife?” Howard asked, his eyes squarely on Ellen’s smiling face in the Christmas photo. He noticed that his arm was securely around her shoulders, the territorial mark of the male, his scent getting on her sweater, no doubt, his smell warding off other would-be suitors. And there Ellen was, as entrenched in her deceit as a fire hydrant. “Tell me that, son,” Howard insisted. “What would you do if it were Patty?”

  John didn’t answer right away. Voices rose and fell at Sounder Aeronautics as Howard waited.

  “Come on, Dad, for crying out loud,” John said at last. “This isn’t about Patty. This isn’t about my wife. It’s about my mother.”

  “I rest my case,” Howard said, and hung up. With John’s voice now cut off, along with those other ghostly voices at Sounder Aeronautics, the house fell into paralyzing silence. Howard flicked on the TV. He tried to concentrate on The Price Is Right, a show in which contestants were guessing the prices of common household products. Two women were up against a single man, a gentleman in his sixties, retired no doubt. But he proved a good adversary for the girls. Most likely the guy had been retired for more than a year because, the truth was, Howard Woods would have done pitifully had he been a contestant on the show. In the second year of retirement, he wondered, is that when this esoteric knowledge would come to him? Idle, tired of his slack face in the mirror, sick of his own miserable company, would he, Howard Woods, yearn to know the price of an electric can opener, a can of spray starch, a bottle of Windex?

  The phone rang again, its bleat breaking the silence so quickly that Howard nearly dropped the remote control. He assumed it was John phoning back to say, “Okay, you’re right. If it were Patty I might not be as forgiving as I think you should be.” And so, without waiting for the answering machine to click on, Howard grabbed the phone on its second ring. It was Ellen.

  “Howie,” she said. Her voice was tiny, grown small with sadness, and it hurt him to think of her that way. He felt an instant urge to rescue her from whatever was troubling her, until he remembered what was troubling her. “Howie, can we discuss this? If I had known—and I should have known—that you were going to react like this, I never would have, well, I don’t know what I would’ve done. It was hearing the news of Ben’s death, I guess, that made me think it was time. Death is so final, Howie. It’s so much worse than this.” She waited.

  Howard waited, too. Then he said, very coldly, “What do you want, Ellen?”

  “I want you to come home,” she told him.

  “Well, I’m not,” he said. “I’m not coming home.”

  “Then at least come to dinner. I’ll fix chicken cacciatore, the way you like it. We need to talk, Howie.”

  Again, Howard said nothing. A group of carousing youngsters biked by on the street outside, and the sweet sound of their laughter pierced into him. He missed his family, his kids, his goddamn seed if you will, dispersed now like dandelion spores. He missed the sound of Ellen’s voice. He missed her.

  “What time?” he asked.

  “Seven,” she said. Then, “Is that okay?” He felt an undeniable power in this, in being the one who had to be asked for forgiveness. And there was something about his being invited for dinner, to his own house, for chicken cacciatore, that especially excited him. This anger, this short separation, had sparked something primitive in Howard Woods, had jarred him out of forty-one years of wedded illusion. He and Ellen had done everything as a team for so long. They had taught school together, even retired together. But then Ellen started matriculating outside the notion of team. She had started playing tennis twice a week with her good friend Molly Ferguson. And now she was taking ballet lessons, ballet, for Christ’s sake, as if she were Zelda Fitzgerald. And then, just last week, she had come home to tell Howard that she and Molly were discovering the ancient art of making clay pots. And he was welcome to join them! Howard thought not.

  “Okay,” he told her. “I’ll be there at seven.” Then he hung up. He had never hung up on Ellen Ann O’Malley Woods in his entire forty-five years of knowing her. Electricity ran up the guilty arm, sheer adrena
line mixed with raging power at having finally done the act, in his retirement years, at the age of sixty-three, when he still couldn’t tell Bob Barker the price of an eight-ounce jar of Cheez Whiz, or a gallon of bleach, or a goddamn Waring food processor.

  “I’m not beat yet,” Howard said aloud. The room had fallen back into silence, and he wanted it vibrant with his victory. He looked at his watch. Five thirty. He decided to shower, then smooth his slacks with a damp cloth. They’d become wrinkled from all that time he’d spent in the Probe—the little blue lemon!—waiting for John’s household to wake up. And it didn’t seem worthwhile to struggle with a fresh pair from his suitcase. They would be even more wrinkled anyway. He could try ironing them, but he knew little about the attributes of steam irons. What would one cost? Ten dollars? Two hundred? Besides, who would know where Patty kept the iron. Theater people weren’t operating on the same plane as regular folks. In the shower, he felt strangely alive again, renewed, as randy as the first time he’d ever seen Ellen O’Malley, at a college dance, when he had gone with Stella Mapleton as his date and Ellen had walked in with Tyson Baker, a football quarterback. That’s the first time Howard had ever laid eyes on her, her auburn hair glittering with red highlights, her bluish-green eyes, that creamy skin. The next time he saw her was at the Christmas dance. She was alone and so was he. He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and they were both freshman. The year was 1953, and the song that kept playing was “Rags to Riches.” What a year that had been! A year of good grades from his professors, a year of good tunes on the radio, good movies at the local theater. A year of ducktail haircuts and Oxford loafers. And dungarees and T-shirts, a revolutionary style brought back to the states by World War II soldiers. It was a time when the whole country was sleepwalking behind Eisenhower, believing no wrong could come from promises of peace and prosperity, because the enemy was clearly defined in the Communist threat, in the Great Red Menace. Who would’ve known back then? Nineteen fifty-three. A truce had already been signed that very year, ending the Korean War and setting up the demilitarized zone over at the thirty-eighth parallel, a long way from Maine, a long way from the university world Howard had embraced. He told himself he had been too young for Korea anyway, and that had been mostly true. It was all over by the time he turned seventeen. But still it gnawed at him. He felt untested, one of those fortunate-unfortunate young men who remain caught between great wars. Caught between apathy and heroics. It would shape him for the rest of his life: Born too late to be Audie Murphy, and born too early to be Abbie Hoffman. So, when the war ended—they called it the conflict back then—he went back to concentrating on his grades, and singing along to “Secret Love,” by Doris Day, and going for a fourth time to see From Here to Eternity, with the surf washing up alongside Burt Lancaster’s rugged groin, Hawaiian sand all over Deborah Kerr’s magnificent legs. And Donna Reed as a prostitute! Could it get any better than that? That was the year Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, shaming the antics of McCarthyism, was a hit on Broadway, just months before the Senate would censure Joe McCarthy for good and sensible people could breathe easy again. Six months after that Christmas dance, a peace conference would be held in Geneva, Switzerland, ending French rule in Vietnam. So, how could Howard have known, with his thoughts and eyes glued fast to the 1954 Ford Thunderbirds already on the market—how could anyone have known—that not even a year would pass before U.S. military advisers would begin filtering into that part of the world, over by the seventeenth parallel this time, with fervent plans to train the South Vietnamese army? How could anyone have foreseen the hula hoop, let alone the fact that John Kennedy would go to Dallas with a smile on his handsome face and a pretty little wife beside him in a pink suit and a pillbox hat? With fourteen and a half million Allied soldiers dead from World War II, and over thirteen million civilians destroyed—120,000 Japanese alone died beneath the mushroom blasts over Nagasaki and Hiroshima—who could have foreseen 58,000 more U.S. soldiers scattered dead among the rice paddies of Vietnam, or imagined the long black memorial wall in Washington to remember them by? Who would’ve dreamed that man would really stand upon the craggy surface of the moon, next to the Sea of Tranquility, let alone watch as the Challenger blew into bits of cascading silver? That the Berlin Wall would go up, much less come down, and Communism would crumble like a stale cookie? Who ever dreamed that Ronald Reagan, who was brave and bold in 1953 as Marshal Frame Johnson in Law and Order—yes, Frame Johnson, that was his name!—who would believe that Frame Johnson would eventually become governor of California? And who would’ve ever believed that Ellen Ann O’Malley, after swearing to her God to honor and cherish her husband until death do them part, would, less than two decades after Howard Woods placed a gold band on the third finger of her left hand, cheat on him with Ben Collins? Then, Howard remembered what he had put aside during his new rush of power: he remembered Ben Collins.

  He got out of the shower humming “I Really Don’t Want to Know.” He couldn’t remember if it had been a hit in 1953 or 1954, only that he and Ellen had loved it dearly. Howard thought about this. Was that some kind of clue for them and they’d missed it? The words hadn’t applied to them then. They were newly in love with each other, and the idea of other arms, other lips, was as vague as Frame Johnson, dba Ronald Reagan, ever becoming governor of a civilized state, let alone leader of the most powerful country in the world. And that’s when he was struck with the most horrible thought yet. Had Ben kissed Ellen’s breasts? Of course, during the span of ten long months he would have discovered her breasts, there on her chest! The very notion almost brought tears to Howard’s eyes. Funny, but all day long he had thought about Ellen’s cheating in purely philosophical terms. He had thought about it in terms of ideas: honor, truth, commitment, fidelity, family. He had not yet thought of it in terms of lips, breasts, thighs, nipples, and orgasms, the stuff song lyrics are made of. Orgasms. Christ, but that last thought compelled Howard to lean back against the bathroom mirror and shake, shake all over, the way Elvis shook in his zoot suit in “All Shook Up,” which was the number one song in the country, the week of April 12, 1957, when Howard Woods and Ellen Ann O’Malley cordially invited friends and family to witness this union before God. Ellen having an orgasm with someone else! How many arms have held you? And hated to let you go? How many, how many, I wonder, but I really don’t want to know. Why had she told him? Some things you should never know, and Howard suspected that this was what the Ford Motor Company was onto when they declined to tell him he was buying an exquisite lemon in the Probe GT. Damn Ellen to hell for not letting him live out the rest of his miserable, retired life in a measure of peace! He gathered himself together. He’d just have to deal with it, that was all. He’d do as she asked. They’d talk.

  ***

  John was just getting out of his station wagon as Howard opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch, wearing his damp but unwrinkled slacks.

  “Hey,” said John. “You look like you’re in a hurry.” Then he noticed that Howard was carrying the suitcase. John smiled.

  “I hope this means you’re going home,” he told Howard, “and not to some seedy motel.”

  Howard ran a couple fingers through his hair. At least he still had hair.

  “I guess we’re going to talk,” he said at last. “Over some chicken cacciatore. I’m going to ask a few questions, and she’s gonna give me a few answers, and well, who knows?”

  “Good,” said John, and patted Howard on the arm. “Now you’re talking like a sensible man.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Howard, remembering the poor Red Sox and their own emasculation. “What you gonna do?” he asked.

  “If you need a place in the future,” John offered magnanimously, and Howard could tell that his son hoped the offer would be unnecessary, “you’ll always have one here, in the spare bedroom.” Howard nodded, and the two stood silently on the front porch, rocking on the balls of their feet and watching as cars careened up a
nd down the street.

  “Give Patty and Eliot a hug for me,” Howard said at last. Then he shook hands with John, loaded his brown suitcase into the Probe, and wheeled away in the direction of Patterson Street.

  ***

  Their hydrangea bush would be flowering soon, Howard noticed. And there was Ellen’s little gray Celica, in its usual space in the big two-car garage. For years he had pulled into the garage and parked next to whatever car was Ellen’s at that moment in time. But now, he braked sharply in the drive. He left the suitcase on the floor of the car, in the backseat, where it couldn’t be seen. Then, he strolled cautiously to his own front door. He couldn’t remember ever ringing his own doorbell, and as he did so the sound of it from outside his house was so alien to his ears that he stood entranced, listening, knowing how it must be sounding to Ellen’s ears, that inside sound.

  It would be impossible to know if Ellen had dressed especially for the dinner date with her husband. In all their years of married life, Howard had never seen her look less than beautiful. She was the kind of woman who could throw on one of his old flannel shirts, a pair of faded jeans, stuff her hair beneath a bandanna, and still be as alluring as if she’d meant it, had worked laboriously at it. When she opened their front door, she was wearing a black skirt and a green sweater, one he’d seen her wear before, but now it seemed even more green and fluffy. And the wearing of it had turned her blue-green eyes full green. She smiled.

  “You rang the doorbell?”

  Howard nodded.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Come on in, Howie. For heaven sakes, this is your home.”

  He said nothing, at least not yet. He had said quite enough that morning, had called her a whore, a word that stung her so in the hearing of it that he was almost sorry. Almost, but not quite. Instead, seeing the damage and hurt that could come from one single word, he’d said it again, and again, and again, until she told him she would not leave. “You leave,” she had said. “This is my home. It’s where I belong.” And that’s what he had done. He had taken his battered suitcase and, sockless, he had gone to John and Patty’s house in his blue lemon.