Running the Bulls (26 page)

***

It was just as the sun came to rest on the horizon of water, before it sank beyond the lake and evening moved in, that Billy Mathews came to visit. Howard was sitting in the rocker on the front porch, watching the late-feeding birds in their frenzy to grab that last meal of the day, when he heard the rumble of a car's engine. A small green vehicle, one of those unrecognizable Japanese models, made its way down the gravel road, through the white trunks of the birches, and up to the steps of the cabin. The engine died and the door opened. This was when Howard saw that it was Billy.

“Mrs. Woods told me where to find you,” Billy said. Howard was trying to imagine how he could untrap himself this time. He couldn't use Hemingway's old ploy,
Well
listen, I got to get back,
not out there in the woods. Billy came up the steps and onto the porch. He smiled as he held his hand out for Howard to shake.

“Billy,” said Howard. “Imagine running into you, out here in the woods.” Billy was staring out at the lake now, at the colors of the sun resting atop the water.

“This is sure nice,” said Billy. “I'm used to that indoor pond we have over at the mall.” Howard nodded, remembering the murky water, the Bird of Paradise flowers, the rigid benches.

“Well, welcome to Walden,” he said.

“Is that the name of the lake?” Billy asked, and Howard could tell by the guileless look on the young man's face that he meant this.

“Sit down, Billy,” Howard said, and Billy did, taking the empty chair beside Howard's. “I was just watching the sunset and having a glass of wine. Would you like one?”

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, before 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?”