Running the Bulls (21 page)

With less than ten thousand souls in Kittery, it wasn't hard to find someone who knew where Spring Street lay. While Howard paid for his bottle of lemonade at the local 7-Eleven, a sleepy-eyed clerk had given him precise directions. At Spring Street, things were quiet. Howard counted the uneven numbers down as he cruised to the end of the street. There it was, on the mailbox in front of a modest house that had a
For
Sale
sign in the front yard. It was a one-story house, the kind of redbrick ranch built in the fifties that is so hard to sell in the nineties. By this time, the plumbing is tired, the way a person's veins grow old and thin. The carpet and floors are wrecked, the roof is leaking, the basement has a crack running from one end to the other. It takes a modern sensibility to keep an old house up and respectful, as Howard had done for the one back on Patterson Street. But he doubted Ben Collins was the house-loving type. And now Vera would be left to sell the aftermath.

Howard pulled up into the yard and killed the engine. He saw movement behind the curtain in what must be the kitchen, a woman leaning forward, as if over a sink, to peer out at him. Why couldn't he remember a single thing about Vera Collins? Had she been just a virtual wife? Nothing but smoke and mirrors? Is that why he hadn't noticed? His new jeans squeaked all the way up the brick walk.

When Vera opened the door, she seemed taken aback. She gave Howard a penetrating stare, as if desperately trying to place him.

“I thought you were from the real estate agency,” she said. She appeared tired, no doubt having been kept awake nightly by the sorrow of her recent loss. Her short, dark hair had traces of gray here and there. Howard remembered now, seeing them again, how large and dark her eyes were. And he remembered that Vera Collins had been tiny, petite, especially next to Ben's impressive stature.

“I hope you don't think I'm rude, Vera,” Howard said, and held out his hand. “My wife and I were friends with you and Ben a lot of years ago.” Vera's eyes stayed on Howard's face. Then she smiled.

“You taught at Bixley Community,” she said, “at the same time Ben did.” Howard nodded as she accepted the hand he was still offering her.

“Howard Woods,” he said. “I taught in the English department. My wife, Ellen Woods, she taught in the history department with Ben.” Now Vera's memory had been fully kick-started. She nodded, her eyes glazed with that
thinking-back
look, that veiled peep into the past.

“We only lived there for a year,” said Vera. “And my memory isn't what it used to be.”

“I heard, we heard about Ben,” Howard told her. It was the truth, damn it. And then he lied. “I happened to be in Kittery, so I thought I'd tell you how sorry we are.”

A sadness came over Vera's face just then. She held the door open to him.

“For heaven's sake, come on in,” she said. “How is your wife? Ellen, you say? Yes, of course, I remember now. She had reddish hair, didn't she?”

Before Howard stepped inside, he had wanted to give Vera a chance to respond either for or against the mention of Ellen's name. For if Ben's widow knew about the affair, then Howard would apologize and leave immediately. He wanted no part of hurting an innocent woman even more. But, damn it, he had so many questions. Now it was obvious by her words that Vera hadn't been told. So much for Ben's honesty.

Howard stepped inside the bastard's house.

What do you say after twenty plus years to someone you never had anything in common with in the first place? Very little. Vera told him all about the children and then the grandchildren, whom she and Ben adored. Howard understood. He loved his own offspring. He produced pictures from his wallet to prove it to her, Eliot, and the five granddaughters. Seeing the young and smiling faces that had been in Howard's hip pocket, Vera insisted that he now look at the fruit of the Collins family tree. She reached under the coffee table and came out with a fat photo album.

“This is Ronny,” she said, and pointed to the face of a small boy who was missing his front teeth. “His first school picture. He's our oldest grandson. And this is Janet, and Laura, and that's Stacy. And that's Shelly, Brian, and Sean. They loved their grandpa.”

Howard politely looked at each photo. It struck him how all kids, like baby chicks, look alike: the shorn bangs, the gaps for teeth, the freckled noses, the cowlicks, the ponytails, the button eyes. These could have been his own family pictures.

“Nice,” he said. Vera pointed to a photo of an old man lying back in a reclining chair, a blanket tucked like a shroud beneath his arms. Howard nodded as he looked at the ravaged face of a man he suspected was her father. Howard's own father had passed away, his mother too, over a decade earlier. Losing people is tough.

“That was taken over a year ago, on Ben's sixtieth birthday,” Vera said. “It was the last time the entire family gathered, what with Lynn Marie living out in Seattle.” Howard said nothing for some time. He leaned in closer for a better look. This wasn't her father? Better yet, it wasn't
Ben's
father, for it did, indeed, look like Ben Collins. But this Ben was an old man, wrapped in that blanket and waiting to die, two plastic tubes running up into his nostrils. Howard suddenly realized what Vera was saying. This was Ben!

“Those darn cigarettes,” said Vera. Her voice trembled. “No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't quit. Ben loved his Winstons. Of course, now we know how the big cigarette companies put all kinds of chemicals in the tobacco. I've heard it said that cigarette smokers are more addicted than cocaine addicts.” She looked at Howard. His face must have given away his shock. “You didn't know that Ben died of lung cancer?” Vera asked. Howard shook his head.

“I thought he quit smoking years ago.”

“He was always trying,” Vera said. She smiled at Howard then, a pretty smile, turning her almost girlish. Of course. Vera Collins! How could he have forgotten her so easily? “He used to quote Mark Twain,” Vera added. “‘Giving up smoking is easy. I've done it a thousand times.'” She closed the book and slid it back under the coffee table.

“I'm sorry,” said Howard. Vera thought about this before she replied.

“My son, Ron, says it was a blessing in disguise,” she said. Then, as if sitting were too confining for such sad thoughts, Vera stood. “The emphysema started in his late forties. By the time he was fifty-five, he could barely walk. He spent a lot of years in that recliner.” She looked at Howard. “I'll make some coffee,” she said.

With Vera clinking saucers and cups in the kitchen, Howard sat on the sofa and felt weak with the emotion that was coursing through him. Ben Collins, not as the rugged golfer who was fixed in Howard's mind, but as a man grown old young, confined to a chair and plastic tubing. It was an amazing discovery. He could hear Vera's voice as it drifted in to him from the kitchen, talking to him now about safer things, such as how she planned to sell the house and move out to Seattle to be with her daughter and grandkids.

“Do you take cream?” Vera asked.

Howard told her that he did, indeed. And then, before Vera reappeared in the living room, he grabbed up the photo album and opened it again. He flipped past pink booties and bows, ballerina dresses and baseball uniforms, braces and casts and crutches, bathing suits and beach balls—the traces of Ben's children and grandchildren unfurling their lives—flipping through the pages as if they were years. And then, there it was, the photo of Ben, curled up like a leaf in a black recliner. Howard slid the picture out from under the protective plastic and slipped it into his shirt pocket. A part of him, the jealous part, wanted to show Ellen what had become of her lover. Time had reduced him to a sickly, vulnerable mortal. And not only had Ben kept on smoking, but the cancer sticks had killed him in the end. So much for their bonding in the teacher's lounge.

Vera appeared with cups of coffee and a plate of cookies. She put the tray down on the end table next to Howard. He felt a spray of guilt just then but ignored it. Something told him he
needed
that picture, needed it now and would need it even more later on. It was the only way he would be able to erase forever that image of Ben still carved in Ellen's mind, that younger Ben, that vibrant Ben. Besides, Vera had plenty of other photos. Howard had seen them. There were so many snapshots of the ailing Ben Collins at the back of the album that it looked like the sick ward at some hospital. Ben, in the last throes of emphysema, tubes running like spider webs into his nostrils. Howard promised himself that he would mail the photo back to Vera Collins one day.
Sorry, but I accidentally took this with me, Howard Woods.

He stayed long enough for a cup of coffee and a chocolate cookie with some kind of sprinkles on the top. Then he bade Vera Collins good-bye. At the door he shook her hand, promising he would tell Ellen hello, and that if they were ever in Seattle, they would give Vera a call.

***

The rain ending, at least for the time being, Howard sailed up I-95 with the top down. Wind ripped at his face, his hair, but he didn't care. He almost couldn't hear the song floating about in the front seat of the little car, what with the torrents of air rushing at him.
No
paint
was
on
the
door, the grass grew through the floor, of Tony's two by four, on the Bilbao shore.
He couldn't explain it, but he felt like a changed man, Lazarus come back from the dead. He had put the photo of the sickly Ben Collins on the dashboard of the little car, as though it were an icon of some sort, a plastic Jesus. As he drove, Howard managed to glance at it now and then, to study the tracks that time and illness had left on Ben's face. And that's when he came to think of that face as a kind of landfill where everything was obliged to finally wash to the surface, wrinkles, age spots, carcinogens, even
deceit
, for Howard could see a sadness in Ben's eyes. Every day until he died, Ben Collins had had to look at that sweet, lovely woman he married, knowing what he was leaving her in his will: Vera Collins had become the beneficiary of a lie. But had Ben been right to take his secret with him? Look what the truth had gotten Ellen.

Howard Woods felt a certain measure of peace settle down in his heart.

Maybe it's the beginning for me,
he thought. In less than a week, after all, he'd be in Pamplona. But when he came home a changed man—how can one run with bulls and not be changed?—that's when he would go to Ellen and tell her that the past was the past. After all, we make mistakes. We're human. Would he show her the photo of poor Ben Collins? Would he even want Ellen to see the ruins of a once fine man?

Damn right he would.

***

It was nine thirty and happy hour was long over when Howard walked into the Holiday Inn lounge. A fresher hell had broken loose while he was gone, and now Larry Ferguson seemed on the verge of tears. At first Howard thought that Donna Riley had changed her mind, had returned to her white elephant and her sure-fisted monarchy. But it was worse than that. Someone had stolen Larry's pump. He had left it where he always did, tucked away safely in its duffel bag and leaning against the inside of his keyboard where no one would see it. But someone did, for it was gone. Vanished. Larry had looked high and low in the lounge, under the tables and chairs, behind the curtains, the jukebox, the boxes piled near the bar. And then Wally had looked high and low. And then Pete and Freddy Wilson had turned up for an after-the-golf-game drink, Freddy having filled in for Howard at the last minute. Pete and Freddy had looked high and low. Then, they had all looked high and low as a team, asking the few customers seated at tables if they minded lifting their feet as Larry's flashlight swept across the rug. But no pump. They found quarters and dimes, room keys, a couple unused condoms, hair combs and barrettes, cigarette stubs, matches, several BIC throwaway lighters, business cards, and a high school class ring. But no duffel bag containing a vacuum pump with cylinder, tension rings, and personal lubricant.

“I left it here last night,” Larry said, his voice shaky. “I was going home alone anyway, so I figured what the hell. We were all celebrating, and I didn't even think to check for it. Now, it's gone. I should have taken it with me. I shouldn't have left it like that.”

“Why'd you even bring that thing in here?” Pete asked him. Larry shrugged. He looked like a helpless boy.

“I just never know when I might need it,” Larry said. He was staring at the two plump women who were seated at a table near the stage, watching every move Larry made, his own personal groupies. “I just never know,” Larry added.

It appeared, given the circumstances, that someone had actually purloined the pump. How else was it missing? It couldn't walk, not even with those tension rings to buoy it up. But Larry didn't want to phone the police. He wanted as few people told as possible.

“I have my reputation to think of,” Larry said.

“Can't you just buy a new one?” asked Howard. It seemed reasonable since Larry often mentioned how the apparatus didn't cost much. Larry shook his head.

“It's personal,” Larry said. “You just can't understand until you own one.”

Freddy Wilson was picking through the broken bits of chips in the chip basket, and doing his best to dip the shards in the last of the salsa.

“I lost my dog once, when I was a kid,” said Freddy. “It hurts like hell.”

No one said anything for some time, a kind of male moratorium. A few moments of silence for the pump.

“The show must go on,” Larry said then. He went back to the stage and took his seat behind the keyboards. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, then smiled at the listeners before him.

“I wanna do this song for the lovers out there tonight,” said Larry, his voice gravelly with emotion. “And you know who you are.” The two women at the table near the stage smiled big, identical smiles. Then, Larry launched into “I Won't Last a Day Without You” by the Carpenters.