Running the Bulls (3 page)

Then, one day, Howard woke up—or one
night,
rather—his pajamas and sheets soaked with so much sweat they could have been dunked in that goddamn cauldron the witches had in
Macbeth,
he woke to find that he was a retired man of sixty-three years, gray hairs abounding where once a lively chestnut brown had lived, yellow growing over the pupils of his eyes, a paunch that would make a kangaroo proud, and a stiffness in his back whenever he swung a golf club. Time had sped the bejeezus out of his life, but now, in his greatest misery, time was slowing down again. Now, now that he found himself up to his knees in a puddle of angst he had not even imagined in his teens—when he could have handled it by just being young and stupid and filled to the gills with testosterone—now, here was Time, attaching a freeze-frame button to Howard Woods's misery.

“Bummer,” said Patty, and Howard remembered that he had a son, and a daughter-in-law, and that he was in their home, fifteen miles away from his own home.
Bummer,
indeed.

“Yeah, well, what you gonna do?” asked Howard, and clapped his hands together. It was the line he had always said in response to why the Boston Red Sox seemed incapable of ever winning a World Series, cursed for eternity for trading Babe Ruth. It was the same hand clap he reserved for the poor Red Sox.

Patty came over and touched his shoulder. She squatted before him. Howard felt as though
he
had just been caught smoking pot in the boys' room at Bixley High. Patty looked at him kindly.

“It happened a long time ago,” she said. “And it only lasted a little while. I'm sure it didn't mean anything. At least she told you. If she didn't love you, she would have kept it to herself. It's a time for forgiveness, Dad.” She kissed his cheek, and he realized for the first time that he had a stubble of beard sprouting there, what he called his
Dick
Nixon
Shadow.
“I'll see the two of you tonight,” Patty added. “You'll know me. I'll be the one with the bag of fortune cookies.” Howard tried to smile but couldn't. “Forgiveness, Dad,” Patty said again. Another kiss to John and she was gone.

Howard listened as the door slammed behind her.
Forgiveness.
He looked at John, who had been staring at him all this time, waiting.

“Do you suppose,” Howard asked his son, “that nature gave women
forgiveness
in their genes? Because I don't feel it, son. I don't feel it one bit.”

John looked over at the Christmas photo on the fireplace mantel. Minutes slid away between them, the grandfather clock keeping track with
ticks
and
tocks, ticks
and
tocks.
Finally, John stood, rocked on the balls of his feet, just as Howard did in times of stress.

“Still,” said John, “I think you should forgive her.”

“You're kidding,” said Howard. John said nothing.
Ticktock. Ticktock.

“No,” he said. “I'm not kidding. You've got to think of this family, Dad. You've got to think of us.” So Howard did that. He thought about his family.
Ticktock.

“I'm not gonna do it,” he said. “You're the baby of the family, for Christ's sake, and you're thirty-three years old. Yet you say I need to stay with a philandering woman for the
sake
of
the
family?
I don't think so, son.”

Howard went over to the fireplace where he could better see the photograph. He wiped a finger across the surface of the glass, leaving behind a pathway through a layer of dust. It reminded him of how a jet leaves its breath in the sky, a sign that it's been there, if only for a short time. He had truly believed his son would die in the skies over Iraq.

“She's hardly a philandering woman,” John said now, still defending his mother. He went to the sofa and threw himself down on it. In his growing up years, John was always throwing himself on the sofa at Patterson Street whenever something wasn't going well with the world. A football game lost, a quarrel with a girlfriend, a summer job denied him.

“How long did you say this went on?” he asked.

“Ten months,” said Howard. There was another long, excruciating pause.

“Even so,” John said. “You've got to think of the family.”

“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.

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 adrenaline 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 and down the street.