Running the Bulls (5 page)

“Grandpa!” Eliot shouted, and raced toward Howard with great exuberance. Howard scooped him up, and Eliot's little arms immediately encircled his grandfather's neck.

John, who had been sleeping on the sofa, opened his eyes. He saw Howard standing there in the den, Eliot clinging like a small monkey from around his neck. John's eyes dropped down from Howard's face, down the length of his arm, to the suitcase that he carried. Then they ran back up Howard's arm and stared into his eyes.

“You look like you've been hit by a bus,” John said. Howard shrugged. Patty appeared at his elbow, touched him gently.

“If you're hungry,” she said, “there's cold chop suey in the kitchen.” Howard nodded.

“Grandpa, you have no socks on,” Eliot squealed. He pointed at Howard's feet. “Look, Daddy. How come I have to wear socks if Grandpa doesn't?”

“Eliot, take your grandfather to the kitchen and put the chop suey into the microwave for him,” Patty said. Christ, had he grown that pitiful, that his grandson had become his keeper?

Howard looked down at John, his pilot son, Ellen's son, their last born, their
baby.
He knew that John was waiting for some sort of explanation, but he had none. Not yet, anyway.

“I'm starving,” Howard said to John, who merely closed his eyes.

In the kitchen Howard lifted Eliot up and sat him on the counter. He stood watching as Eliot scraped cold Chinese food from a Styrofoam container onto a clean plate, then plopped it into the microwave. His tiny fingers sprinted across the numbers on the menu, a regular little Mozart, a little microwave prodigy. Howard waited as his grandson programmed the cooking time for three minutes.

“I'm gonna go watch my movie now, Grandpa,” Eliot said. “When it beeps, take it out. If you need anything else, ask Mommy.” Howard lifted the boy down off the counter, and Eliot was gone in an instant, back to the television.

He stood alone in his son's kitchen, on a street fifteen miles from the kitchen he had left behind on Patterson Street. Howard Woods stood there silently, waiting for three more minutes of his life to tick away. He wondered if Ellen had managed to wipe up all the broken glass, wondered if the glasses themselves had been part of her Waterford crystal collection, a thing she prized. She had bought them in County Cork, on a visit back to her father's birthplace. He hoped she hadn't cut herself. Before him, on the counter, several fortune cookies sat happily on a plate, portentous and smug. Howard studied them carefully before he finally selected one. He broke it open as though it were a clam, then pulled the narrow strip of paper from its belly.
Confucius
says, “Study the past, if you would divine the future.”

“Bastard,” said Howard. He scrunched the fortune in his hand, then tossed it aside on the counter.

He went back into the den. Eliot was engrossed in his movie, and Patty seemed to have disappeared. John was still on the sofa, but this time his eyes were open. He was staring at the Christmas photo on the mantel. Howard patted the tip of John's left foot. John looked up at him cautiously.

“The deceit is worse than I thought,” Howard announced. “It stretches all the way to Buffalo.”

John stared, thinking.

Howard rocked hard on the balls of his feet and waited. He heard the microwave beep that his chop suey was now ready.
Study
the
past, if you would divine the future.

“What does this mean in the larger picture?” John asked, quietly, so that Eliot wouldn't hear. Howard could now smell the chop suey, floating out to him from the kitchen. He was as hungry as a retired man, a jobless cuckold, could get.

“It means I'm back to Plan A,” said Howard. “It's Pamplona or bust.”

The next day, after a quick shave and a few exhausting pushups, Howard Woods walked into Books Etc., one of the stores in the new mall just off Davenport Road, and asked for the travel section. He was surprised to find Billy Mathews working in the store. He had taught Billy the year before retirement, American Literature the first semester, and Masterpieces of English Literature the second. Billy had been a memorable student only in that he was so remarkably
unmemorable.
Just before that second semester ended, right about the time Oliver Twist was about to ask for more gruel, Billy had dropped out of school for good.

“Travel's back in section three, against the wall,” Billy said, and pointed. “See the sign that says ‘Restroom'? It's just before you get to that.” Howard looked. There it was, written in plastic letters above the bookshelves—
Section
3: Travel.
He thanked Billy for his help.

“I can come show you, Mr. Woods,” said Billy, but Howard held up a hand, stopping him.

“Thanks, Billy, but I can find it on my own.” He turned again toward the travel section. A blindfolded bat could see the plastic letters.

“Going on a trip?” he heard Billy ask. Howard looked back over his shoulder, smiled.

“Sort of,” he said.

“Out of the country?” Billy wondered.

“Yup,” said Howard. He was now halfway down the store's length. He could even see the sign for the restroom up ahead. One might think of clear sailing, but Billy was unrelenting.

“We got some new guides in for Paris, France,” Billy announced, causing other customers to look up from their reading, at Howard, as though he were some kind of French ambassador. Howard stopped. He turned to face Billy, who was leaning over the sale table, twenty feet behind him.

“Thanks, Billy,” Howard said, trying to keep his voice to a respectable bookstore level. He knew it wasn't the same as being in a library or a hospital, but bookstores did demand their own dignified quiet. “But I'm not going to Paris.”

Howard found the travel section and stood before it, browsing through the alphabet, skipping over some countries, stopping to read the spines of others:
Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Spain.
He took the Berlitz guide for Spain down from the shelf. He had no interest in
Spain
on
Twenty
Dollars
a
Day,
for he had no intention of watching his pesos. He would throw pesos off the first goddamn Spanish bridge—see
puente
—he came to, if he so desired. He thumbed quickly through the index, glancing up once or twice to see if Billy was salivating behind his back, wishing to be of even further service. How had Billy Mathews ever managed to secure a job at a bookstore in the first place? Shouldn't one have
reading
skills for that? But then, Billy's job seemed to be nothing more than leaning on the sales table and tormenting customers. Howard found what he was looking for:
Pamplona, Fiesta de San Ferm
í
n, page 87.
He thumbed over quickly and read the brief paragraph:
The
Fiesta
de
San
Fermín
begins
with
daily
bullfights
preceded
each
morning
by
the
famous
Enclosing
of
the
Bulls, when they are driven through the streets behind crowds of skillfully dodging men and boys who are called Sanfermines. Starting on July 6, the fiesta lasts until the 14. The Running of the Bulls was described in Hemingway's novel,
The Sun Also Rises.
The
Fiesta
de
San
Fermín
is
named
in
honor
of
St. Fermin, its first bishop.

Howard went back and reread that beautiful line:
they
are
driven
through
the
streets
behind
crowds
of
skillfully
dodging
men
and
boys.
Jesus, he couldn't help it; he felt a surge in his groin, something that Neanderthals probably felt and military minds came to understand: the adrenaline of the hunt, the skillful dodging of the chase, the pure mark of manhood. He had no stomach for the bullfights themselves, even thought them barbaric. But the chase, the chase was the thing!

Billy was suddenly at Howard's elbow, like some kind of UFO, a bogey at five o'clock.

“Find it okay?” asked Billy, and Howard nodded. He flipped quickly from page eighty-seven and went immediately to page thirty-two, something about the Prado in Madrid. He stood reading about the surfeit of El Grecos and Goyas the museum had to offer, waiting for Billy to evaporate.

“Spain, huh?” said Billy, with a certain familiarity in his voice. Howard remembered Billy as the kind of student who would be hard-pressed to find
Canada.
Now here he was, bandying the word
Spain
about as though he were bored with those hilly, inaccessible Pyrenees. Howard put the book back on the shelf and took down
The
Berlitz
Guide
to
Norway.

“Just browsing,” he said.

“Norway, huh?” said Billy, inching closer. “Mrs. Woods going with you?” Howard slid the guidebook back into its designated slot and then turned to face the young man.

“Billy,” he said, “in the entire year that I taught you, two different and completely fascinating subjects, I don't remember you asking me a single question, not one. Now, you seem incapable of
not
asking
.”

Howard waited as his former student considered what had just been said. Then, Billy tilted his head at Howard, smiled a crooked smile. In his eyes was that lightbulb look Howard remembered from Masterpieces of English Lit, a kind of forty-watt glare, just before it burns out for good.

“I guess you might say I blossomed since then,” Billy answered. Then he beamed, pleased with his own joke.

Howard nodded. “Listen, Billy,” he said. “There
is
something you can do for me.”

Billy's face came to life. His whole frame grew taller, rose up for the occasion. Howard had no doubt that if Billy had had a dog's tail attached to his butt, it would be wagging. It would be causing more wind than the blades of a helicopter.

“What's that, Mr. Woods?” Billy asked.

“Would you go over to the fiction section for me?” asked Howard. “See if you can find a book called
The
Sun
Also
Rises
?”

“We're supposed to ask who wrote the book before we go looking for it,” said Billy. He seemed proud of this rule, as if he had been through an intense basic training and now was fully qualified for the job.

“Ernest Hemingway,” said Howard, when he realized that Billy was serious.

Without further instruction, Billy lurched off. Then, he stopped and looked back at Howard, his eyebrows knitting themselves into a question, a cloud forming over his eyes.

“The sun also
what
?” asked Billy.

Howard stared. It had been one of the five novels they had studied in American Literature.

“Rises,” said Howard. He pointed at the ceiling. Billy nodded happily and then disappeared. Not wasting another moment of valuable time, Howard grabbed the
Berlitz
Guide
to
Spain
from off the shelf—it included two cassettes to aid him in learning Spanish—and bolted for the checkout counter. It seemed the first
skillful
dodging
he would have to do, on the road to Pamplona, would take place right in his own backyard, in Bixley, Maine.

The girl at the checkout seemed surprised to witness Howard running. Was it not allowed in bookstores? She gave him a sharp, questioning stare as he patted his hip pocket to see if he had, indeed, remembered his wallet.

“Billy says you taught him English,” she told Howard, as she accepted the Berlitz guide from him. “That's cool,” she added.

“I believe Billy was somewhat proficient in English when I met him,” Howard replied. What the hell was happening to today's youth? It seemed as if four or five of them needed to congregate in order to come up with a single good thought.

“Anything else?” the clerk wondered. Howard shook his head. “Cash or charge?”

“Which is faster?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder to see if Billy had remembered that it was the
sun
that rises, and not bread dough.

“Cash,” she said. “Of course.”

Howard knew that this young woman thought him incurably dumb. He dug into his wallet and fished out a twenty. If tipping would speed her up, he would have offered her a dollar, for she took forever, the velocity of the young, operating beneath a brain that was running on automatic pilot. Finally, she gave him the bag after tossing his receipt inside.

“Are you interested in our Savings Plan?” she asked. “I was supposed to ask you that before I rang up the sale.”

Howard looked down the aisle and saw what was probably the top of Billy's head, brownish thick hair gliding atop aisle four like a wooden boat as it made its way toward the front of the store. Billy must have looked for Howard in section three, and now he was on an all-out search of the store to find him.

“You pay ten dollars for the card,” the girl was now saying, “but each time you buy a book you get ten percent off. It's pretty cool.”

“No,” said Howard, “I'm not interested. Listen, tell Billy I had to run, okay? Tell him I'll be in again and we can chat.”

Then, Howard stepped out into the flow of mall traffic, that wave of shoppers that soon swallowed him up in its ranks.

***

“¿Cómo está usted?”
Howard asked John, when they met in the den at six o'clock for a cocktail before dinner. Patty was still at the theater, working on the costuming for
Cyrano
de
Bergerac
—apparently there was more to it than just a long nose—and so John had promised to cook dinner.

“Come on, Dad,” said John, “enough is enough. When are you going to quit acting like a kid and go on home?”

“¿Habla mucho español?”
Howard wished to know. From what he'd read, the Spanish question mark was upside down to English readers. Howard imagined himself standing on his head at the airport in Madrid, asking questions of passersby.

“Mom is all torn up about this,” John said. “She won't say much to me, but she's told Patty.”

“Are we speaking of Ellen O'Malley, the former Ellen Woods?” asked Howard. “Good. Let her be torn up. Let her be
gored
by this, if you will. That's certainly how I feel.” He sloshed the rum around in his glass, clinking the ice. Then he took another drink.

John looked over at the bottle sitting on his bar, the one Howard had picked up on his way back from the bookstore.

“Bacardi, huh?” John asked. “And on the rocks, no less.” Howard shrugged, a
why
not?
shrug. He had been a Tom Collins man in his heyday, but, as he had suggested to Ellen O'Malley, what man could drink a Tom Collins and keep his mind off Ben all at the same time? Besides, Bacardi was the best he could do until he got his hands on some Pernod. Or was it called
absinthe?
That was the drink of matadors, by God.
Driven
through
the
streets
behind
crowds
of
skillfully
dodging
men
and
boys.
Howard smiled. He leaned back on the sofa and put his feet up on the ottoman.

“What's so funny?” asked John.

“Oh, nothing,” Howard said, furtively. “Nada.”

“Come on, what's up your sleeve?” John persisted. “What's going on in that retired brain of yours?”

Howard smiled again, mysteriously this time. He felt almost smug. After years of being the one whose job it was to pry the truth from his son, now
he
was hoarding facts. He, Howard, had always been a good and obedient son to his own father, and maybe that was part of his problem. He had never given the elder Woods any worry. The truth was that the old man would have kicked his ass to kingdom come had Howard disobeyed him. He wondered if courage and valor are forced, out of necessity, to skip generations. That was often true of artists and writers. How many famous creators gave birth to famous creators? There were the Bruegels, the father and a couple of sons. A few writers, yes—the Dumas men came to mind, the old man and the illegitimate boy. Howard couldn't think of any composers. And singers, well, he was able to come up with Frank and Nancy Sinatra, but surely
that
combo wouldn't qualify, given the fact that Nancy couldn't sing.

“You ever hear of San Fermín?” Howard asked.

“No,” said John. “Don't tell me Mother has slept with him, too?” Howard laughed at this, such a laugh that he was obliged to lean forward and whack his own knee. John caught the fever and laughed along with him.

“I think this is called a tension breaker,” John noted. He went to the bar and poured himself another scotch. “Now what was this nonsense last night about Buffalo?”

Howard held up his glass for a second Bacardi.