Running the Bulls
Authors: Cathie Pelletier
Copyright © 2005, 2014 by Cathie Pelletier
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Cover design and illustrations by Amanda Kain
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for quotations from Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright renewed 1954 by Ernest Hemingway.
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“
Une
génération perdue
⦔
âProprietor of Hotel Pernollet in Belley, France, to Gertrude Stein about the mechanic who was working on her car
“You are all a lost generation.”
âGertrude Stein, later in conversation with Ernest Hemingway
Bixley, Maine
When Howard Woods awoke on what would become the most fated day of his life, he squinted his eyes at the bedside clock. Still only three a.m. He had been dreaming again. He could feel the moist sweat on the sheet beneath his stomach, the damp of his own pajama top. He turned over onto his back, even though this meant he would snore off and on until morning, with Ellen poking at his ribs to quiet him. But if Ellen were deep into her own sleep, she wouldn't hear. Howard stretched an arm over to touch her, to assess the situation, but Ellen's side of the bed was empty.
This was nothing unusual since Ellen Woods had always admitted to being a night person. Many times over the years, Howard would wake to find her standing at the window, silver in moonlight, silent. Other times, he'd hear her prowling about in the rooms of the house, like some kind of midnight burglar.
My
night
owl,
Howard Woods called Ellen. Even when the two were still teaching at Bixley Community CollegeâEllen history and Howard literatureâeven then Ellen was often up at night, restless. “Come back to bed,” Howard would say to her. And then, with sleep pulling him down, with the alarm clock waiting to maliciously uncoil, he would drift back to his own dreams, knowing he could snore freely if the urge should come upon him. Yet, at breakfast, while he ate his oatmeal and drank his coffee and read a swatch of the morning paper, Ellen was the one who had enough energy to ransack the house for Howard's quarterly tests, the ones he had finished correcting the night before. And Ellen was the one to gather up the dishes and leave them in the sink so that she could find them soaking after school, instead of clogged with egg yolk and jelly. Ellen was the one who said, “It's there, Howie, next to the chair in the study, that's where you left your briefcase.” And when the children were still with them, Greta, Howard Jr., and John, she would putter about the house, finding their shoes, their socks, their sweaters, their books, and then seeing that all three ate a hearty breakfast. Ellen did this, even though Howard might have awakened the night before to find her standing at the window, head tilted, her eyes fixed on the garden. Or perhaps she was staring at a darkened tree, the house next door, some clouds. Who knew? Ellen was a night owl with energy to burn the next day, and Howard had grown to accept this.
So how could he know, how could Howard Woods
imagine
that a year and six days into his retirement, Ellen would finally tell him what she'd been staring at those moonlit nights, or nights of snowflakes trembling their way over Patterson Street, nights of terrified rainfall, the gutters and downspouts full to bursting. But that's what happened. Howard opened his eyes to see his wife in her usual stance at the window. Then he had fallen back to sleep. It was another dream of the classroom, another lecture he was trying desperately to deliver, about how
Macbeth,
Shakespeare's shortest play, was really a
study
in
fear.
He was telling this to a dream class of college students who were not only unwilling to listen, they were incapable of hearing him, for in the dream
none
of
them
had
ears!
It was a dream of retirement, no doubt about it, a dream of emasculation, a dream of finding one's way in the world after almost thirty years of chalk and test papers and classroom talks. And it was a recurring dream, one that he'd started having just days after their retirement party at the Knights of Columbus Hall. But it was a dream he would not dream to the end, at least not on that night, for he felt Ellen's hand on his arm, and this catapulted him, if not wide-awake, then into some kind of waiting room to his conscious mind.
“What is it?” Howard muttered. He kicked a foot at the top sheet, as if struggling to unwrap himself from the madness of the dream. The lecture he'd been trying to deliver had involved the three witches that Macbeth and Banquo encounter on that deserted heath. The witches and their prophecy.
Double, double, toil and trouble.
“Howie, wake up.”
Howard fought to pry his eyes into a believable, wide-awake look, but too much of the dream was still in them. Poor Macbeth, compelled to cross that same barren heath every time someone picked up the play and read it anew, cursed forever by academics and indifferent students to meet up, perpetually, with those three nasty hags and watch the course of his life spiral downward.
Fire
burn
and
cauldron
bubble.
“Howie, it's important.”
Howard's conscious mind was telling him that this was no longer about Macbeth and his witches, that something must be wrong, just as something had been wrong on all those nights, years ago, when Greta had come down with appendicitis, or Howard Jr. had been up sleepwalking again, or John had had another nonstop nosebleed.
“I need to tell you this,” Ellen said, “before I lose my nerve.”
Howard sat up against his pillow. The narrow slats of the window blind had been left open and now Ellen's face was ribboned with moonlight. Even her eyes were a shimmering silver, like those highlights in her red hair that had appeared slowly, over four decades of marriage. A sexy kind of silver that Howard had always liked.
“What's going on?” he asked. He could feel her fingers firmly on his arm and knew he was no longer dreaming. Ellen's fingers, sure and steady and cool to the touch, burning into the warmth of his skin. His wife's fingers, in the middle of the night. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I'm talking about guilt, Howie,” Ellen said, “and how it can eat at your soul. I think men know how to handle guilt. That's how they spread their seed. I think nature gives them a little something extra in their genes that fights guilt off, the way cells fight bacteria.”
“Ellen,” was all Howard said, and he knew then that he didn't like the feel of her fingers on his arm. They were roots, roots that had sprouted well during all those nights he'd seen her standing at the window, meditating, pondering, whatever the hell it was she did over there.
Double, double, toil and trouble.
He wished the fingers belonged to someone else. Greta maybe, who was now married and living in Miami, with three daughters of her own. Or Howard Jr., who was a lawyer in Philadelphia and also had two girls. Or John, the baby of the family, who had been the pilot of an F-15 fighter during Desert Storm but was living in the same town as his parents, an executive now with Sounder Aeronautics, living just fifteen miles from Patterson Street, with his wife, Patty, and their son, Eliot. Howie wished Ellen's fingers would melt, would fall away from his arm and into a pool of silvery moonlight. But they didn't. They squeezed harder. He felt his heart lurch. His mind was still reeling itself toward total consciousness.
Guilt.
What did guilt mean? Had she wrecked the car, bounced a check, ironed a hole in his favorite golf shirt?
Guilt.
“I'm talking about
me
,” Ellen said at last. “I'm talking about me, and Ben Collins, and guilt, and how the three of us have lived a lie, a little ménage à trois of a lie.”
This information brought Howard wide-awake.
Ben
Collins. Ben Collins.
He was trying to place him, for he knew most certainly that he was acquainted with Ben Collins. Ben Collins! He had taught ancient history at Bixley Community College, years ago, filling in for Samuel Frist, who was on sabbatical. When Frist returned from Greece the next year, with far too many slides of the Parthenon and a suspicious Hellenic accent, Ben had packed up his family and moved on, downstate somewhere. Yes, Howard had even played golf with Ben Collins, and remembered him as a not-too-shabby player. And then there had been all those school functions where they had run into each other, Ben with his wife, and Howie with Ellen. Sometimes, they went with other teachers and spouses for an after-the-game beer, bundled in heavy coats during basketball season and huddled around the fireplace at Red's Tavern. But then, Ellen had known Ben well. They were in the same department.
Ellen
had
known
Ben
very
well.
“Ben Collins?” Howard said, and it seemed that by just speaking the name, something broke, something fragile as glass. Howard reached out now and snapped on the night-light. The silver disappeared, flew back to the moon, most likely.
Ben
Collins.
He stared at Ellen's face, the straight bridge of her nose, the pretty cheekbones. He waited.
“It started just a few months after he was hired to teach at the college,” Ellen said, distant, as if she were talking to someone else, her history class maybe, that old sea of faces that had risen before her eyes for almost thirty years. She might as well be staring out the window again, peering into the garden. But she wasn't. She was staring right at Howard Woods, her husband. “Ben and I were both trying to quit smoking, and we both had free periods at the same time. So, in the teacher's lounge, well, we became friends. And I want you to know that, Howie. I want you to understand that we were friends first, Ben and I. If we hadn't been, the affair never could have happened.”
This threw Howard forward in the bed. He had been trying to listen to what she was saying:
Guilt. Seed. Cells. Bacteria.
He hadn't quite figured out the scenario since, in his half sleep, it sounded like a botany class. But he knew in his gut that it was worse than a middle-of-the-night nosebleed. Only when she said the word
affair
could his brain register the full impact. It was because he knew Ellen so well, maybe, that he was kept frozen in suspense, unwilling to understand until she spread it all before him, unwrapped the ugly blanket of her deceit. Ben Collins! Howard leapt from the bed and groped on the chair for his pants.
“The bastard!” he said, poking with his right foot at the waist opening in his pants while he balanced himself on the left.
“It was a long time ago, Howie,” Ellen was pleading now. “And it was over quickly. I wish I could have told you then. For all these years I've felt terrible.”
But Howard didn't care to hear Ellen's pity for herself.
“So, Lady Macbeth,” he said. “Driven mad by your conscience, are you?”
“Lady Macbeth?” It was Ellen's turn to be confused. “For heaven's sake, Howie, listen to me.”
“The dirty bastard!” Howard shouted. Since his right foot couldn't find a leg slot in the pants, Howard switched feet. “I'm gonna kill him, I'm gonna kill him!” He repeated this new phrase as though it were a poem, a mantra for the retired male. “He'll never lay his hands on my wife again because I'm gonna kill him!”
Then, trousers in hand, belt dangling, Howard sat down on the edge of the bed, winded. For Christ's sake, he was sixty-three years old and yet here he was, expending energy like some teenaged wolf. He would take his time, like the mature, retired adult that he was. He would put his pants on the proper way, one leg at a time, followed by his shoes. Then, he would get a butcher's knife from the kitchenâthat big, shiny thing Ellen used on the Thanksgiving turkeyâhe would find his car keys, and he would drive to Ben Collins's houseâwherever the hell
that
wasâand he would stab the son of a bitch until the cows came home.
Howard slid his pale legs into his pants, the right one first, then the left. He pulled the pants up around his waist, zipped them, then tightened and buckled his belt. He looked over at Ellen.
“I'm gonna kill him,” Howard said again. He was instantly pleased to hear the calm now in his voice. Even Macbeth, that henpecked thane of Cawdor, hadn't managed
that
in the face of adversity.
“You're too late, Howie,” Ellen said. She was back at the window now, spying on the last of the spring daffodils, petals frosted with moonlight. Or maybe she was remembering the pretty spot where the kids had had their swing set, until it fell apart with age. “Ben's already dead.”
***
Howard's little blue Ford turned left at the traffic light by the library and then cruised slowly toward John's street. Spring had come and gone in Bixley, Maine, and now summer was in the airâit being the first day of Juneâwith lots of leafing and budding and flowering. Lilac bushes up and down the streets had little purple blooms on them, and lawns were turning green as indoor turf. A splash of dawn was hitting the eastern sky, down where the big drive-in screen used to loll, all those summer evenings when the kids were little, and he and Ellen had taken them with snacks and blankets and pillows to see whatever movie had caught their fancy that week.
All the lights were still out at John's house, but Howard knew the house would be asleep. He had just glanced at his watch and saw that it was a quarter of five. John's station wagon was dozing in the drive, its ass pointed toward the street, its eyes shut tight, thanks to those automatic lids. Howard pulled up behind it and cut the Ford's engine. He wanted to go up to the door instantly and ring the bell. He was reminded of all those middle-of-the-night nosebleeds when the faucet between John's eyes had spewed red until the early hours of morning, while he, Howard, had stood holding a cloth to his son's face, holding the boy's tilted head, and muttering to himself, “Clot, dammit, clot, clot, clot.” Surely, if he knocked on the door now, John the adult would understand. “It's payback time, buddy,” Howard would tell him.
But Howard couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, he sat staring at the bicycle that he and Ellen had dipped into their retirement money to buy for Eliot, their only grandson. It leaned against the front steps of the house, the paint turning from deep burgundy to apple red as the sun rose over Bixley and life began to stir, to rekindle itself inside bathrooms and kitchens up and down the street. Inside John's own house, Howard saw light finally burst forth, a tiny supernova in the bathroom. Then, one in the kitchen, as the window turned a warm yellow. Still, Howard waited.
