Running the Bulls (20 page)

“I can't do that,” said Howard. Pete frowned, not understanding.

“Geez, Howie,” said Pete. “It's not like you gotta buy her dinner or anything.”

***

Howard went out into the sunshine of Bixley, away from the dark places where men have sex with imaginary women. He went flying into the fresh air and sunlight, spinning through town in the little Aston Martin. He knew now that
nothing
was real. Nothing can be counted on. His marriage wasn't real, not the way he had imagined it to be. The golf course wasn't real. Donna's breasts weren't real. Loretta's eyes weren't blue. The gold trim on the mirror behind the bar at the Holiday Inn was just paint. Even the ice in the ice machine was manufactured. It seemed the only thing left that you could depend on to be genuine, the only thing eternal, was pain. And maybe love, if you knew how to get it and hold on to it.

It was not until he pulled into the parking lot of Bixley Community College and shut off the engine that Howard realized where he had been headed. After so many years of driving out there, after so many mornings, he had gone like a rat in a maze back to some of the best days of his life. He paused for a time at the big front door before he opened it. Summer school had not yet started, and so he felt a measure of safety that he would not run into former students or colleagues. As he suspected, there were ghosts in the hallways. Ghosts were turning the pages of books long outdated. He looked in on Ellen's old room first, then the one where Ben Collins had substituted for Samuel Frist, thinking to find clues, perhaps, still embedded in the walls there. He even spent a few minutes gazing into the teacher's lounge, where the affair had sparked to flame in the first place. It didn't seem like a place to fall into lust, what with the tattered chairs and worn curtains, the walls a bleak lime color.
We
were
friends
first, Howie, or it never would have happened.

It was his own room that stirred him the most,
remembered
him,
as if it were whispering: “Welcome back, Howie. Take off your coat and grab some chalk.” It still smelled the same, a sterilized yet safe smell. On the blackboard he saw written:
For
Friday. Tennyson. The Coming of Arthur.
The class must be reading
Idylls
of
the
King.
He turned and stared at the rows of empty seats, imagined faces from years gone by, all his best students reassembled from three decades, all wearing the fashions of the day: bell bottoms, miniskirts, polyesters, denims, crew cuts, shags, French buns. And then he remembered Jennifer Kranston for the second time in less than a day, called her image up before his eyes, a Virtual Student, sitting at the desk she always chose as her own. It had been in 1969, his very first year of teaching, when he was thirty-four years old. Jennifer.
Jenny.
Who had wanted to be a poet, but who had died of a drug overdose in the early seventies. She looked up at him now, her soft brown eyes sober and staring. Howard felt a grip of emotion pull at his gut. His eyes watered.

“But o'er her meek eyes came a happy mist,” he whispered, remembering his own love for “The Coming of Arthur.” And then Jennifer was gone again, the ghost of a memory. Howard walked down the aisle and stopped in front of the desk where she used to sit. Funny, but he had forgotten her for quite a few years now, her memory emerging less and less to confront him. Even the ghost of Hamlet's father must grow tired, weary of those cold, Danish winters, that icy suit of armor. Jennifer Kranston. Christ, but he had felt something in his groin every time she walked into the classroom. After all, he was only ten years older than she. And it was not just her love of poetry but the sway of her ass that had pulled him to her. And those perfect, round breasts, back when you could be almost certain that breasts were
real.
Howard could tell she wanted him too. He knew this in that part of him that knows such things, that
natural
part, the one that drove even dinosaurs to mate while gnawing at each other's necks, rending flesh and smashing trees.
That
part.
Jennifer wanted him, too, and would have been his had he flicked even one of his fingers. But he hadn't. And it was because of Ellen. And the kids, those babies he had chosen to create during hot nights in bed with his wife. Howard felt overcome with sadness. It
was,
wasn't it, because of Ellen and the kids? Or had he been afraid of Jennifer, too, the way he had been afraid of the prostitute, afraid and yet ejaculating almost instantly into her warm, anonymous hand. The way he was afraid of Donna Riley's silicone breasts, of the Virtual Woman, reaching out to him from a blur of white computer blanket. The way he was afraid of Pork Chop Hill, the Bay of Pigs, the Mekong Delta. But he had fought his skirmishes and battles and wars in the classroom, hadn't he, and he'd been damn proud of it. So he had not taken Jennifer Kranston to a motel in Buffalo, or in Bixley, or anywhere, no matter how much poetry she had memorized. And he had prided himself on that for quite some time, until Jennifer learned a new poetry,
Hell
no! We won't go!
, and went off to protest another war Howard wouldn't fight, her new Afro hair grown frizzy with the electricity of life, her fingers perpetually forming a peace symbol. Until she took too much
something
one night and then died from it. Maybe it was an overdose of passion, a surfeit of
life,
all those things Howard had avoided as he plodded onward in his own safe existence.

He traced a finger along the edge of Jenny's old desk, tried to imagine how her breasts would've felt,
light,
probably, at least compared to a sack full of silicone. Or even compared to the heaviness of Ellen's own breasts, breasts that had nursed their children. He remembered how Jenny used to look at him, that inviting look, her arms loaded down with books simply to impress him, books on Shelley and Keats and Tennyson.

“But o'er her meek eyes came a happy mist,” Howard said again, his finger still moving, a blind man reading Braille, still tracing the old energy of the desktop. “Like that which kept the heart of Eden green, Before the useful trouble of the rain.” It was all somehow connected, wasn't it? Tennyson was certain that Camelot was unblemished and doing just fine until evil seeped in. And that evil was adultery, adultery committed by Lancelot and Guinevere. But Howard had never agreed with Tennyson. He had even told his class so, back before the adultery had happened to
him.
Passion wasn't evil, he'd maintained. Tennyson was too much a representative of that dominant Victorian social class. Too sentimental, too intellectually shallow, too narrowly patriotic. But this was at a time when American liberals had just bitten firmly into that wonderful and crazy apple of the 1960s, a full century after Tennyson's own 1860s. But Alfred's
sixties
had been a crazy time, too, a time when science was kicking the pants off religion.
Before
the
useful
trouble
of
the
rain.
If he had believed that, if Howard had disagreed with Tennyson, then why didn't he know what it was like to press little Jennifer Kranston onto her back in some motel room?

“Accountability,” Howard whispered aloud. “We need to be accountable, that's why.” But he knew that maybe that wasn't why. Maybe it was because he was a coward after all. Afraid of passion. And now he hated Ellen Woods, hated her for having the courage of
his
convictions, for marching onto a battlefield where he, Howie Woods, had never trod. Ellen had seen the blasted elephant, no doubt about it. Ellen was a goddamn soldier. A bell rang loudly, and Howard jumped. But then, there couldn't have been a bell. It was summer. The system had surely been turned off. But he had heard a bell, hadn't he? Was it real? For thirty years, Howard Woods had jumped to bells like some well-behaved Pavlovian dog. Bells ringing to announce cheese. Bells ringing just for the hell of it. Maybe Ellen was right this time. Maybe the two of them needed a break from their marriage, from each other. He would miss her. No, goddamn it, he would mourn her every day. But what else could he do? Howard lifted the top of Jennifer Kranston's desk, then let it drop with a heavy thud that echoed in the empty room, bounced at him from all angles, no bodies there now to absorb the sound waves. Empty. But even ghosts need a day off. Sometimes, ghosts even retire.

***

By the time Howard Woods strolled into the Holiday Inn lounge, the mood among the happy hour regulars was downright festive. Celebratory might be the better word. To Howard's astonishment Larry Ferguson was behind the bar, fixing himself a drink, the jukebox blasting away in his stead. Wally was having a martini while entertaining two attractive women at a table over in one corner. Howard could hear him all the way across the room, giving them his beloved martini chant.

“Oh, perhaps it's made of whiskey, and perhaps it's made of gin,” Wally was saying, “perhaps there's orange bitters and a lemon peel within, perhaps it's called martini, and perhaps it's called, again, the name that spread Manhattan's fame among the sons of men.” The women clapped, enjoying the free show.

Howard walked over to the bar and stood there. The place looked one step away from bacchanalian frenzy.

“What's going on?” Howard asked Larry, who beamed as he poured Howard a rum.

“Free at last, free at last,” Larry told him. “Thank God Almighty, we're free at last.”

Howard looked over at the stage. Pete Morton was just turning on the microphone. It reverberated, a deafening feedback that caused Howard to wince.

“Eva Braun quit,” Larry said, putting the drink in front of Howard. “She packed up her whips and chains and left about an hour ago for Boston.”

Howard had a sudden vision of Donna, up on all fours, her head tossed back, her throat humming. The truth was that he had liked her. He had liked the soft part of her that she kept covered up, down beneath the coarse red jacket and the silk blouse, the innocent part.

“Hey, Dick-in-a-Splint!” Pete shouted into the mike, at Howard. Glasses shook on the shelf behind the bar. “We don't know what you did to that poor girl, and we don't care. You have rid the lounge of its scourge and for that, sir, we salute you!”

“Darling, I've had such a hell of a time.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Nothing to tell.”

—Brett and Jake,
The
Sun
Also
Rises

Howard was having his morning coffee when he opened the first of his two letters from the Ford Motor Company. It appeared that while Ellen Woods didn't want him back, Ford did. The large American automaker seemed most anxious to
probe
him yet again.
Dear
Howard,
the first letter began. It seemed that he and Ford were now on a first-name basis. This was good. This was an improvement.
Performance
Ford
would
like
to
thank
you
once
again
for
acquiring
your
1995 Ford Probe from our organization. We now need to purchase several 1995 Probes before November 16 of this year in order to fulfill a special used car interest.
Did they think him daft? Did they really think he believed this nonsense?
As
general
sales
manager, I would like to offer you an opportunity. We will exchange your 1995 Probe for a new 1999 Probe with a monthly payment that fits your budget. Please stop by with this letter before November 16 and allow me to assess the value of your Probe.
Howard would allow his testicles to be stretched on a rack before he would do this. Did they also think him without dignity? It was signed Justin Hobbs and ended with a P.S. It would appear that big corporations also forget to include things in the bodies of the thousands of letters they mail out daily. Did they think all car owners brainless?
P.S. If you come by
before
November
16, you will receive a free lube job, as well as an oil and filter change.
He scrunched the letter into a ball and tossed it into the trash can next to his bed. He had a good mind to put a rubber glove on his right hand, smear it all over with Vaseline, storm into Bixley Performance Ford, and give Justin Hobbs his own free lube job. Bastard.

The second letter was less personal than the first, more hyped.
Go
ahead
and
throw
us
the
keys
to
your
1995 Probe and catch the keys to a brand-new Ford, with little to no money trading hands! That's right, Howard! Little to no money down!
Had Ford become some kind of sugar daddy? Howard imagined that this was the kind of language Freddy the Mattress Mogul used on his sensuous female clerks.
That's right, girls! A brand-new mattress, with little or no money trading hands!

Howard tossed this letter into the trash can as well. He got out a sheet of Holiday Inn stationary and found a pen.
Dear
Justin
Hobbs, and Ford Motor Company,
he wrote.
You
hurt
me
too
deeply
to
make
it
up
to
me
now. I wouldn't stop by Performance Ford for a free blow job, much less a lube. I'm sorry, but you should have thought of this back when I couldn't get you to answer my phone calls. Now, if you continue to stalk me, I shall seek some kind of restraining order. Get a life. Get some closure. Sincerely, Howard J. Woods.

He would mail it on his way to the library. His intentions were to drop by the mall first, for an hour or so. He had some quick shopping to do. After all, it was already the twenty-ninth of June, and since Ellen wouldn't run off to Spain with him, he was back to Plan A. He'd be leaving for Bilbao in four short days. He needed new tennis shoes, some khaki pants and underwear that weren't pink, a jacket, socks, the accoutrements one must have in order to be a skillful dodger. He thought it might be nice if he also wore a white shirt, around which he would wrap a red belt. That way, he would blend in well with the other Sanfermines. And a new pair of jeans, what the hell. Howard hadn't worn jeans in public for almost thirty years. He had an old, battered pair that he pulled on now and then for yard work. They were nice and soft, all broken in. He wondered if, at age sixty-three, he would live long enough to break in a new pair. But hey, the sky was the limit. With the excitement of the trip dangling again before his eyes, he was feeling his old energy seeping back. Donna would be proud of him. At
least
fifty
percent
of his time was now employed in thinking of bulls, and not his penis.

And Howard was thinking of his family again. With his departure day so fast approaching, he phoned John and asked if they could meet for lunch. Given his own marriage seemed to be over, Howard hoped he might still work some magic in John's. But John Woods had a full plate that day, or so he told his father.

“What about day after tomorrow, Dad?” John asked. Howard heard that important buzz of people in the background at John's office. Busy. Employed. Again, he couldn't help but feel a quick resentment. But soon, soon, he'd be busy himself, even if it
was
in extracting a bull's horn from his ass, as John had once predicted. “That'll still give me a couple days to talk you out of this foolishness,” John added.

Howard addressed the envelope to Bixley Performance Ford, then sealed it. He put the letter aside and took a drink of coffee. Then he picked up the small box that was lying next to him on the bed. He had made this special purchase on his way back from the college, a few days earlier, on the heels of his meeting the virtual woman, of remembering Jennifer Kranston, of visiting his old classroom where the past lay like dust balls in the corner. He had pulled into a RadioShack, on the spur of the moment and purchased a couple of needed items. He had even taken the time to sign up for some kind of long-distance service that would activate the thing, make it official. Now, he opened the box and took out the owner's manual.

Congratulations! You are the new owner of a dual mode cellular phone, which means you can automatically switch between digital and analog.

He had no idea what that meant, nor did he care.

***

It was just past eleven o'clock when Howard arrived at the library. He told the librarian exactly what he was looking for, an obituary that would've been in the newspaper during the last days of May. The librarian disappeared. In less than five minutes, she was back with newspapers from the last three days of the month. Howard chose a table over by the water fountain, a more private spot, and spread open the first paper. A man named Ben Freedman had died in Bangor, but surely Ellen hadn't slept with
him.
No Ben Collins in the second issue either, but there he was, in the obituaries for the final day of May.
Benjamin
Lloyd
Collins, 61, of Kittery died at home after a long illness.
The bastard! There was no photo of Ben, and that was one of the things Howard had been curious to see.
He
is
survived
by
his
wife, Vera Collins, also of Kittery.
Vera. So that had been her name, not Sheila, not Shelley. He read the rest of the piece with interest. Ben had served in the air force, had received his higher education at Boston University, had been a professor of history, lastly at the University of Southern Maine, had been a member of the Kittery Bridge Club, had had two children, a son and a daughter, and seven grandchildren. Services were held at a local funeral home, but friends were asked, in lieu of flowers, to send donations to the Cancer Society. That was it. The last chapter of Ben's life, short and sweet.

Howard looked at his watch. Pete would be just arriving at the golf course now, just taking that first cigar out of his shirt pocket, lighting it up, leaning back against his Jeep to enjoy it, knowing that Howard would arrive ten minutes later. Pete went early, had always gone early, so that he could smoke his stogie in peace. Howard folded the newspapers neatly and left them on the table where he'd been sitting. He nodded a thank-you to the librarian as he went out through the heavy front door. Rain clouds hung in the east, but Pete had predicted they'd get a full eighteen holes in before the shower truly hit.

As Howard swung the little black Aston Martin onto I-95 and headed south toward Portland—from there, it would be just another forty miles to Kittery—he imagined that Pete Morton was crushing the tip of his cigar in the Jeep's ashtray, knowing it would be waiting for him after the game. With his right hand, Howard reached for the new cell phone on the seat beside him. As he steered with his left elbow, he punched out a phone number. He looked up to see that he had swayed dangerously over into the passing lane. He veered back. How the hell did people stay on the road and talk on phones at the same time? he wondered.

A nasal voice answered on the other end of the phone line. Howard recognized it as belonging to Bertie, the groundskeeper. The only thing that excited Bertie anymore was his battle against the blob that was oozing out of the ground at the eighth hole. Bertie no longer saw the golf course as a haven for golfers, but as his own private battleground. His own personal hell.

“Bertie?”

“Yeah? What?”

“This is Howard Woods,” said Howard. “I need you to do me a favor. Pete Morton is out in the parking lot, just knocking the fire off his cigar.”

“So?”

“So, I want you to go out and tell him I can't make it today. Can you do that, Bertie?”

“I dunno,” said Bertie. There was a little pause. Howard heard Bertie take a deep breath. “I'm busy here, Howard. I'm waiting for a call from a lab out in Salt Lake. I sent them a sample. They can study the gases. Maybe tell me just what I'm up against. And I read about some fish that'll eat the fucking algae. I was just about to call the seller.”

Howard imagined Don Quixote, out tilting at the amber blob on the eighth hole, and the blob tilting back.

“One more thing, Bertie,” Howard added. “Make sure you tell Pete Morton that I called from my new cell phone.”

Howard hung up. His other major purchase of that morning was also beside him on the seat, a nifty CD player. He had even brought extra batteries. He assumed the first set would last on the trip down, but now he would be covered for the four-hour drive back north. One drawback of a classic car, unless one wanted to do modern nicks and tucks, was that it had only the most prehistoric kind of radio. Back in 1962, when the little Aston Martin DB was rolling off the production line, cassettes and CDs were not even wild dreams about to be dreamt. Even the eight-track had yet to make its appearance. What had Howard been doing in 1962? Selling life insurance. Saving for his retirement. He imagined himself back then, his hair full, still brown by nature, his briefcase stuffed with forms as he chatted up folks about the importance of insuring one's mortality. His family healthy and growing—they had two children by 1962, with John still to arrive—he had bought a Rambler, blue with a white top and gray interior, one of the most enduring economy-styled cars that automakers were offering the American consumer. It would remain the Woods family car for more than ten years, which was a good thing, considering the long, lanky legs that would appear on John and Howard Jr. Like Donna Riley, the Rambler wasn't a beauty, but she had guts and determination. She came equipped with an inline six-cylinder engine that produced 138 horsepower, enough to drag a lanky-legged family of five down to the local Dairy Queen, where they could then jump out, slam four doors, eat five hamburgers, drink five orange Crushes, use the bathroom, and then jump back in for the ride home. Howard had even
liked
the Rambler, with its push-button, automatic transmission. How had almost forty years dropped away? How had those lanky legs disappeared into the hairy legs of adult men? Those were the days when Howard had
longed
for retirement, imagining himself on the golf course daily while enjoying a life of hard-earned riches. Nineteen sixty-two. Out in the larger world, Mickey Mantle was still tearing up baseball, his own retirement just seven years away. The Cuban Missile Crisis had the world teetering on the brink of disaster, and John Kennedy had twelve more months to live. How the hell had so many years evaporated? Howard plopped his new CD disc—
Andy
Williams,
the two-disc Collector's Edition—into his new CD player and pushed number six.
That
old
Bilbao
Moon, I won't forget it soon, that old Bilbao moon, just like a big balloon.
He was amazed to see that Andy had cut “It's All in the Game,” as if there were no end to the knives Fortuna could stick into Howard's gut. But Howard Woods knew what bullfighters probably are born knowing:
Meet
the
horns
head
-
on.
That's the only way to get past them.
That
old
Bilbao
moon
would
rise
above
the
dune, while Tony's Beach Saloon rocked with an old-time tune.

Twenty miles south of Portland, he met the horns of the rain head on. He pulled into the first Texaco he saw and quickly put up the canvas top, snapped it into place. He found a local phone book, dangling by a chain to the outdoor pay phone, and flipped through the battered pages, over to the entries under Collins. There they were.
Benjamin
and
Vera, 257 Spring Street.
Howard paid the attendant for the full tank of gas and then politely answered all the questions about the Aston Martin DB that he'd grown accustomed to in the past couple weeks:
Yeah, she's a beauty, no she's not too hard on gas, yes, it's the same car as James Bond's, no, she's got more power than you'd think.
He had even kicked the back tire a couple times as he talked since it was the kind of thing guys do when they're talking about cars. Instead of using their hands, like women often do, guys like to use their feet. And then, top up and rain pelting hard on the roof, he had piled back into the car and spun out of the Texaco.