Running the Bulls Read online

  “Pete,” Howard tried again.

  “Okay,” said Pete. “Then how ’bout this one?” Again, he pointed his martini at Wally. “There is something about a martini, a tingle remarkably pleasant,” Pete recited loudly. “A yellow, a mellow martini, I wish I had one at present. There is something about a martini, Ere the dining and dancing begin, And to tell you the truth, it’s not the vermouth, I think that perhaps it’s the gin!”

  Wally now seemed on the verge of hyperventilating. Bottles sang out from the cooler as he began stocking it to the hilt with Budweisers.

  “Is Wally pissed at me?” Pete asked. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Howard. “Wally will whisper it to you sometime, but not now.” He nodded his chin toward the lounge door. Eva Braun was hovering there again, like some damn Nazi. Then she was gone.

  “Who the hell was that?” Pete asked.

  Howard shrugged.

  “Another woman who has changed the course of our lives,” he said. He took a generous sip of his own martini.

  “Who?” asked Pete.

  “Corporate America,” said Howard. “In a skirt.”

  ***

  It was after ten when Howard finally crawled into bed. He soon found that sleep was impossible, given that room seventeen was in the direct line of fire from the lights of the Holiday Inn sign. No wonder it was vacant. After staring at the ceiling, from which thumps seemed to be emanating downward, and after listening to the ice machine make even more ice—who the hell needs ice in the middle of the night?—he gave up. He snapped on the bedside light and looked around for something to read. He had picked up a Golf Digest the day before, along with a copy of The Sun Also Rises, but realized now that the book and the magazine were still in the backseat of the convertible. He was in no mood to dress and go out into the night to fetch them. So he pulled at the drawer on his nightstand, just to see what might lie inside. It refused to open at first, and Howard assumed it was glued shut. Or perhaps it was a false door, a sham assembled to appear functional. He would put nothing past a major hotel chain. But when he applied as much force as a retired and sleepless man can muster in the middle of the night, next door to the ice machine, the blasted thing flew open in his hand. He peered inside and saw that the Gideons had left their usual calling card, a small Bible, purplish, the color of a plum. Other than the typical propaganda flyers and leaflets from the Holiday Inn’s corporate office, it was all Howard could find to read.

  He took the Bible out, propped the pillows up behind him, and opened it. He tried to remember data from those Sunday school lessons when he was a boy. Just where was it in the Good Book that bad things like adultery happened? The Ten Commandments would be a good place to start, but Howard couldn’t remember where they were. To his dismay, he noted that some rude guest had ripped out all the pages of Genesis, a deconstructionist, no doubt. Only remnants and shards were left to tell of the creation of the world, that first ray of light, the first leafy trees, the coming of the oceans, the fishes and animals, and then Adam and Eve themselves.

  Howard flipped onward, through the other Biblical books. He suspected that adultery came up often in those times: all that red wine and yet no television. As he turned on his side, hoping for more reading light, he heard what sounded like a soft hiss let loose from the mattress itself. He imagined marauding bugs of all sorts hidden out, guerilla-style, in the hills and coils of the metal springs. He would no doubt wake in the morning to find himself become Gregor Samsa, the Kafka character, a traveling salesman who turned into a six-foot-long cockroach. But at least he would fit right in. Earlier, he had noticed a couple cockroaches strolling along the length of Wally’s bar, as though it were a plein air promenade. The Montmartre.

  “Aha!” Howard said, for he had discovered a concordance at the back of the book. There it was, there was the evil word itself: adultery, violation of marriage. Damn right. Violation, with a capital V. He read the first listing:

  Penalty is death, Lev. 20:10

  Howard paused. No, death wasn’t somehow right. For Ben, yes, absolutely, you bet. Skewer the bastard and then leave him in the hot sun, his eyes pried open with golf tees. But not for Ellen O’Malley. Howard reached for the lamp shade over the ceramic lamp on the nightstand—the base was a large yellow pineapple—and tilted the shade so it would share a parcel more light. Then, he scanned onward.

  Spiritual Jer. 3:8–9

  With the Egyptians, Ezek. 16:26

  In the heart, Mat. 5:27

  With the Egyptians? Somebody had committed adultery with the Egyptians? It sounded like a Biblical orgy. Howard went back to In the heart and read the words again. This one was Jimmy Carter’s tailor-made sin. Lusting in the heart. Yet surely lust-but-don’t-touch should be allowed, or at least given only a few seconds in the penalty box. It was the kind of thing Howard himself did all the time. Poor Jimmy Carter. Poor bastard. There are some things you should keep to yourself, no doubt about it. Just ask Performance Ford.

  Howard tilted the lamp shade yet again. Beneath the extra light, the pineapple base glowed a burnished yellow, the color of rotted fruit.

  Causes loss of inheritance, I Cor. 6:9

  God will judge, Heb. 13:4

  Howard reread the last listing. God will judge. He closed the Bible and placed it back in its drawer, where it would wait until the next pilgrim came searching for answers. Ellen would bank on that last one, believing in God as she did. But Howard Woods had grown to think, over the four decades of his marriage, that a husband has a right to judge just a tad himself. He thought of Ben Collins again, a steady habit of his lately. Had Ben ever found himself in some motel room late at night? Had he ever opened the Bible and scanned down through the listing under adulterer? Had he ever been repentant of what he’d done with another man’s wife, and that man a fellow educator? A man with whom he had golfed, had thrown a snowball, had shared a plate of weenies.

  “Bastard,” said Howard. He snapped off the light and the big shiny pineapple disappeared, the way fruit in Ellen’s refrigerator did the second the door was closed. The sign from the all-night gas station across the street blinked red, then white, then red, casting a mottled scene across the canvas of ceiling. He thought of Jake Barnes in his own set of rooms, that little flat in Paris, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was to this flat that Lady Brett had once turned up in the predawn hours, drunk and giddy, as Count Mippipopolous waited with his chauffeur in a limousine just up the street. Jake had kissed her good night, and she had shivered, standing there on the stairs leading up to his flat. “You don’t have to go,” Jake had said. But she did. “Yes,” she told him, before she started back down the stairs. Women like Brett always do have to go somewhere, anywhere. Even as one novel finishes, you have the sense that they’re off to another adventure, sad though it may be. This is the curse, the tragedy of women like Brett Ashley: they’re too big for real life. That night on the stairs in Paris, Brett had made her way down past the angry concierge and back up the street as Jake watched from his window. Brett, with her man’s cap pulled low on her short hair. Lady Brett, walking out of his life once again, walking toward her own future without Jake Barnes.

  Howard felt engulfed in sadness. He tried not to think of Paris as it was in the 1920s, for it was gone now, lost to him forever. Now there were only ghosts drinking in those smoky little bars, ghosts parading on the crowded sidewalks, ghosts catching late-night dinners at the Senlis. Phantoms. Instead, he watched the flickering light from the gas station as it played across the ceiling. He imagined Ellen, awash with the powdery smell of her nightly bath, all curled up, all tucked in, all ready for sleep, and wearing that lacy little nightshirt she always slept in. Ellen, over on Patterson Street. He wondered now if she still rose in those late night hours to stare out into the moonlit garden and ponder her guilt, now that Ben Collins had skipped the light fantastic.

  Clink
, clunk.

  Howard did yet another quick flip in bed, turning his back to the door and the mechanical ice falling on command. But now he was facing the light of the Holiday Inn sign, an insulting glare that the thin Holiday Inn curtains could not obstruct. He heard his mattress emit yet another low hiss as it settled beneath him. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself beating the pants off Pete the following day. But all he could see, on the golf green in his mind, was Ellen’s beautiful face, hovering just above the sixth hole, where that clump of willow trees grew, the hole that always tested Howard most. Ellen’s soft, lovely face. And then, unable to stop it, Ben’s handsome face appeared next to Ellen’s, right on the damn golf course! Did the guy have no shame? How would Howard Woods ever excel on the sixth hole now?

  Clink. Clink. Clunk.

  As the new cubes of ice were falling, Howard buried his head into the pillow, padding each ear. How could tiny squares of frozen water be so loud? Why hadn’t every single person on the Titanic heard the iceberg? Howard tried not to think of Ellen rising from her warm bed at seven a.m. to make coffee, its rich, thick smell permeating the whole house, the sound of toast popping, the fridge door opening and closing with its own sucking noises. He tried not to think of these sights and sounds as he fought his way toward sleep.

  After all, if Howard Woods did so, he would have to juxtapose those wonderful breakfast images of Ellen with an image of himself fighting some pudgy, out-of-state salesman—a six-foot cockroach in a gray-striped business suit—for the last stale croissant at the complimentary breakfast bar.

  Clunk.

  Landfills

  “It’s no life being a steer.”

  —Robert Cohn, The Sun Also Rises

  “When’d you start wearing pink?” Pete Morton wanted to know. He was waiting for Howard by leaning against the side of his car and smoking a cigar. Pete had given up cigarettes three years earlier when it had become difficult to play a game of golf without gasping for air. Howard thought then that he was free of Pete’s secondhand smoke, but now Pete was back with cigars substituted for cigarettes, as if shortening the word itself would somehow make the action less carcinogenic.

  Howard looked down at his formerly white golf shirt and his formerly khaki pants. He shrugged.

  “It takes a real man to play golf in pink,” he said. Pete was extinguishing his cigar in the ashtray of his car, where he could light it up again during the break after the first nine holes.

  “Maybe,” said Pete. “But it takes a better man to play golf with someone who’s dressed in pink.”

  “When one is retired,” Howard noted, “one can do unorthodox things.”

  They shouldered their golf bags and headed to the first hole.

  “Heads or tails?” Pete asked, pulling a quarter from his pants pocket. He balanced it precariously on his thumb and waited for Howard to answer.

  “We’ve been playing golf for over twenty years,” Howard said, annoyed. “And yet you still ask me heads or tails.” Pete’s fingers were now in place, ready to flip the coin into the air. He gave Howard a quick look.

  “You could change your mind,” he said. “One of these days.”

  “I doubt it,” said Howard. “I’m a creature of habit.”

  “I’m waiting,” Pete said. “Come on now, heads or tails.”

  Howard frowned. He sighed one of John’s deep sighs. He rocked on the balls of his feet. Still, Pete waited.

  “Heads,” said Howard. “Goddamn it, Pete, you know it’s heads.”

  “I don’t know any such thing,” said Pete, as the quarter flipped six inches into the air. He reached out, caught it, and slapped it onto the back of his hand. Tails.

  “Looks like I’m up first,” Pete said, and winked. This was the time, before they even tackled the very first hole, that Howard always asked himself why he played golf with Pete Morton. Playing golf was supposed to be a means of relaxation.

  “You have my blessings,” Howard said, and gestured down the fairway.

  As Pete was taking aim, Howard stood back and surveyed the hills and sweeps of the Bixley Golf Course. It had been constructed atop a landfill, a forty-foot-high heap of rotting garbage. This meant that all sorts of items eventually made their way to the surface and broke through to annoy even casual players. Howard had once seen a television documentary about how hundreds of recreation areas around the country—parks, golf courses, ski slopes, and the like—had only a few inches of green grass separating them from the trash of landfills. And, often, a buildup of dangerous gases was also lurking down there, waiting, like something out of The Twilight Zone. But this was America’s method of ridding itself of two hundred and nine million tons of yearly waste. Over his years of playing on Bixley’s golf course, Howard had seen a multitude of pop-up waste items: a rubber hose, a bowling ball, blood bags, syringes, tires, a wig, a car bumper, shoes, and once even an old TV set. But it could be worse, for the documentary had shown that some of those landfill recreational spots even blow up, thanks to the methane underground.

  It was on the fourth fairway that Howard broke down and disclosed Ellen’s infidelity to Pete Morton. Pete had been about to shoot. He was polite enough, even for a serious golfer, to take a minute to console Howard.

  “How’d you find out?” Pete asked. He seemed a bit uncomfortable. In all their years of being friends, Pete Morton had never hesitated a moment in telling Howard all about the women he had had affairs with while on the road as a salesman for the Keaton Electronics Company. Howard had heard about breast size, tightness, multiple orgasms, toe fetishes, you name it. And yet, when it came to talking about their own wives, when it came to sexual ideas concerning Ellen Woods or Carolyn Morton, Pete was reduced to a high school boy.

  “Ellen told me,” said Howard. “She even spent a week with him in Buffalo.”

  “Not exactly the romance capital of the world,” said Pete. He had glanced up to see a foursome approaching from down the green, and now he seemed anxious to move on. “It was a mistake for her to tell you, that’s one thing.”

  Howard protested this notion. How could it be a mistake to finally tell the truth?

  “Because look where it got you both,” Pete explained. “You’re at the Holiday Inn and Ellen’s home alone.”

  Howard took a deep breath. He looked skyward, to where turkey vultures had caught an unseen thermal and were now twirling about in it, their silhouettes like dark half-moons. Black, smirking smiles. What the hell did he expect from Pete Morton, who, if he started confessing now, would never be able to list for Carolyn all the women he had slept with over the years, from Bixley to Boston to Birmingham to Bozeman, and that was just in the B section of his address book. All those pop-up women he had thrown away, once he left their city behind. Why the hell had he, Howard, even bothered? Because he needed someone to talk to, that’s why. Someone other than his own son. A compadre who would pat him on the back and say, “Jeez, buddy, what a rap she dealt you.” Pete was not that person.

  Voices rose up behind them as the foursome approached the fourth green.

  “I filed for divorce,” Howard now said. Pete seemed shocked. There was something about divorce that still frightened Howard’s generation. After all, they had been raised believing marriage was eternal, like death and taxes. You hung in there for the sake of the children. Happiness was dished over to a back burner of the stove. When one of their own finally broke ranks and ran, well, it scared the hell out of the rest.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Pete. “Are you kidding me? That’s pretty radical, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like she’s having an affair now. It was all those years ago. The guy’s dead.”

  They didn’t speak again until they approached the sixth hole tee.

  “What if it was Carolyn who had cheated?” asked Howard. Pete looked quickly at Howard’s face, astonished.

  “Are you nuts?” Pete as
ked. “Carolyn won’t even have sex with me.”

  “You gents mind if we play through?” a voice asked. Howard looked up to see that the same foursome were all leaning on their clubs, like lopsided, silver-legged birds, waiting their turns. Pete shook his head, declining their offer. He readied his club and peered down the fairway. He was immediately more relaxed, Howard could tell, now that he didn’t have to make eye contact.

  “Marriage is like this landfill, Howie,” Pete said. He cozied the club up against the ball, calculating his swing. “You gotta expect a little shit to rise to the surface now and then.” Pete swung and connected to the ball with a deadening thunk.

  “That’s awfully romantic,” Howard said. “Marriage as a garbage dump.”

  Pete said nothing, his eyes glued to the ball as it grew smaller, a tiny white comet retreating. Howard watched the ball, too, in spite of himself. Sure, his wife had cheated on him, in Buffalo no less, and that was important. But he was a golfer, too, damn it. The ball bounced a few times, then lay still. Pete’s face brightened with that same sixth-hole smile that Howard had come to despise.

  “Two hundred and fifty yards, smack dab down the middle of the fairway,” Pete whispered, as if in awe of himself. “Jesus, you gotta love it ’cause it don’t get much better,” he added.

  Howard took his own turn, calculating carefully, then swinging. Tink. The ball rose into a silly arc and then curved off toward a patch of willow trees just a hundred yards away. Howard watched as it hit with a silent splat and then rolled pleasantly in under the trees. A little game of hide-and-seek. It seemed a metaphor for his entire life, this veering from the track.

  “I bet it’s nice and shady in under there,” Pete said, in mock sympathy.

  Howard could tell already that it was going to be one of those days.

  At the eighth hole, a bubbling ooze was seeping up from a sunbaked strip of ground that could not sustain grass, no matter how hard Bertie, the groundskeeper, tried to get it to grow. After sending a sample in to some lab, Bertie had been told that the oozing blob was caused by algae feeding on the iron-rich liquid just beneath the surface.