Running the Bulls (24 page)

Finally, Howard cried. And when he did, it felt as if his insides would run out of him, right through his tear ducts, his guts, his heart, his liver, his goddamn
soul,
whatever
that
was supposed to be, for this was where it hurt. It hurt in the part of him that
lived,
that recognized himself as a husband, a father, a grandfather. The human being part of him. Not the part that told him to invest a few pitiful dollars in McDonald's. Or the part that had aspired to teach literature for a weekly paycheck. Or even the part that had tried to have sex with Donna Riley, the same part that had created Eliot in the first place. No, it was the best part of him that hurt, the
divine
part. It was the part that made him human and godlike all at once, made him aware of sunsets, and good books, and the smile of a fine French wine. The part that tells painters to pick up their brushes and shape the world on canvas, if only to save it for a few hundred years, or even an hour. It was the part of him that kept his heart beating, like a ticking clock, the whispering part that said to him daily, “Time is running out, Howie, old chap. The goddamn bird is on the wing. So get the lead out.”

But at least Howard Woods cried.

“It's a shame you're sick. We get on well. What's the matter with you anyway?”

“I got hurt in the war,” I said.

“Oh, that dirty war.”

—Jake Barnes and Georgette, the prostitute,
The
Sun
Also
Rises

July had brought with it a record heat for Bixley. All that long month, Howard slept with the windows open at the cabin, atop sheets that were wet with perspiration. August came with a blessed cooling, followed by September, and the first signs of fall when a single maple across the lake burst into scarlet. As September inched away, he could almost feel the land pulsing beneath the floor of the cabin, getting ready, gearing up. He had lain awake many mornings, listening to that prehistoric call of the loons. He had read about this. Sixty million years ago, there were loon calls echoing on the earth, in the smoky gray mists of those ancient dawns. The squirrels grew bushier as they grew busier, and in the birds he could sense a kind of anxiety. Those that were leaving had a long way to fly. But the ones who stayed behind had a long way to go before spring.

With October came the gold, the red, the orange, the yellow, as winter hovered in the air each morning. Howard had long been making fires from that stocked wood box, the one he thought he'd never need. He had come to view the small brown cabin as a kind of shell, a sturdy nut that would keep him safe from the elements. He had grown to respect the simplicity of the oil lamp, of quiet nights without radio or television. If he wanted music in his life again, if that day ever came, he would have the trusty CD player and the trove of unused batteries. He boiled his morning coffee in a pot on the woodstove, learning after a time the perfect amount of grounds to toss into the bubbling water. He had gone so far as to talk to Pete about the possibilities of winterizing the cabin, which he would pay for himself, maybe adding a small generator into the bargain. As it was, he ate his main meal of the day, his only hot one, at the Bixley Café, a chance to hear human voices again, something he needed. He knew now why Thoreau, for all his claims of isolation, had sneaked into Concord each Sunday to have dinner with his mother. Human beings need each other. Pete had left the answer to winterizing up to Howard, since so much hung in the meaning of it. Did it suggest that he and Ellen would never reunite? Would Howard grow old in the cabin? Would he die some morning in the narrow bed, only the leftover birds of winter to mourn him? Who knew? Maybe the cabin could shelter him from the elements, from the wind, the rain, the snow, but it couldn't shelter him from life. He was one of those human beings, after all. But human beings endure.
It
all
takes
time.

As Howard stepped out onto the front porch he noticed that some of the birch leaves had fallen in the night, during the brief rainstorm that had swept over Bixley. The ground was yellow beneath the trees that grew around the cabin, as though someone had sprinkled gold coins there while he slept. And the canvas top of the Aston Martin was a blanket of leaves, too, a natural pattern, as if carefully arranged. The first fallen leaves of the season. It was coming. Winter was pressing in. There was a greater chill in the air since just the day before and Howard wondered if that was the day he'd need to replace his running shorts with sweatpants, his T-shirt with a sweatshirt. The temperature was dropping quickly by the day. And then he'd need those thermal underthings that cold-weather runners wear. And he would need a cap to protect the scalp beneath his thinning hair, which was now more gray than ever. He had long ago let his natural color grow back, deciding he liked the notion of
roots.

Howard leaned against the front of the cabin and stretched his calf muscles long and hard, feeling them pull like taut elastic bands. Stretching was essential before the brisk, five-mile run that he now took to begin each day, a run that brought him back to Bixley, then out past the community college and the cemetery, around the high school football stadium and then back to the lake. Five miles almost on the nose. He had slowly built up to the distance, thinking it a marathon at first, the road ahead of him seemingly endless. By September, the five-mile run was old hat. He had taught literature long enough to know that the symbolists would call it an
emotional
running, a
desperate
running. They would say that he was not running
to
something, but
away
from it. But Howard Woods was retired. He didn't have to think of the damned symbolists anymore.

Howard straightened and shook his arms loosely, getting them ready for the stride ahead. He took a deep breath and felt the cool air tingle the insides of his nostrils. He had forgotten how intensely alive and intensely mortal one can feel in the heart of autumn. He had even dug out the old dictionary again and looked the word up. It was thought to be of Etruscan origin, but it meant what he suspected it did:
a
period
of
maturity.
As he ran, the blue lake falling away behind him, he thought of Ellen. He had seen her occasionally during short visits he paid to the house on Patterson Street. She seemed to be doing all right. At least, she was surviving. She and Molly were still taking ballet lessons. Ellen said it was a kind of meditation for her, a way to put her mind on her body, and not on Eliot. So be it. Whatever it took. Once, Howard had seen her through the window of the Bixley Café having a coffee with Floyd Prentiss. They seemed to be in the midst of a heavy conversation, so Howard had not bothered to stop by their table and say hello. Instead, he changed his order, telling the waitress that he now wanted it
to
go.
Then, he had taken the white sack and left the café without so much as a look back. Ellen was a grown woman. What she did was her business.

The marriage dissolution papers were still unsigned by him and right where Howard had put them, between the pages of his dictionary, which lay on the table by the oil lamp. He had looked up the word
marriage
and discovered it was from the Old French,
marier.
That's when Howard decided to leave the papers right there, marking the spot. The symbolists would win this one. It was exactly halfway through his dictionary and that seemed perfect, somehow, given that marriage was supposed to be a fifty-fifty venture. If the day came when Ellen wanted him to sign them, if the day came when Floyd Prentiss evolved into something more than a kaffeeklatsch mate, then Howard would know exactly where to go for the papers. This would save Ellen time and money, too, considering that Howard had already paid Mike Harris's fee for divorce consultation. In the meantime, Ben Collins was keeping a good watch on the dictionary, on the room, on Howard. Some mornings, Howard saw in Ben's eyes a kind of desperation, what with those tubes running like useless veins up into his nose, those eyes peering out at the world with the certainty of a doomed man. But other times, Howard saw in those same eyes a kind of acceptance. It was the latter that Howard himself wished to find.

It was just as Howard crested the top of Stony Hill Road that he saw the cruiser coming toward him, Sheriff Lee Simmons behind the wheel. Howard slowed his stride and then, as the cruiser reached him, he stopped altogether. He knew what it meant without even seeing Lee's solemn face. He waited as the sheriff eased out from behind the wheel of the patrol car.

Lee didn't bother with the nuisance of formality, as in “great weather we're having, ain't it?” And Howard appreciated that.

“We found him,” Lee said. Howard turned then and stared out across the empty fields that lay on each side of Stony Hill Road, gone to brown and mulch now, waiting for the snows. “Or at least,
he
found
us
.” Howard looked back now at Lee's face, indicating to him that he was ready to hear the name.

“Roddy Burkette,” said Lee. “We arrested him on a drug charge. In the middle of his interrogation, he broke down and confessed. He's being held at the moment, but I suspect he'll be out on bail in a day or two.”

Howard simply could not respond, and so he didn't try to. With Lee still leaning against the patrol car, Howard broke back into his stride, down the rest of Stony Hill Road and out past the cemetery where Eliot was buried and then on to the stadium at the college. He knew Lee would understand. He'd known Lee from all those college sports events, when Lee had worked security for the college, fresh to his uniform back then and eager to talk with Howard about the semantics of basketball, or baseball, or soccer, whatever the season happened to be. And Howard knew Roddy Burkette, too. This was the part he still couldn't speak to Lee. He knew Roddy Burkette. But then, so did Lee, so did a lot of folks. Roddy had been the golden boy in his heyday. Roddy had been the basketball star, the football star, the soccer star, again depending on the season. Roddy had bedded the best cheerleaders, had even been courted by a couple major league teams, and had produced some of the worst academic work ever to befall Bixley Community College. Roddy had been a golden boy who began to tarnish as soon as sports left him behind. With ligaments torn in his knees, and with his twenties running out on him, Roddy had disappeared into a blur of drugs and booze and misdemeanors. Howard had even tried to talk to him once, just before the young man dropped out of college for good. But how do you tell Brick Pollitt, that good ole boy ex-football star in
Cat
on
a
Hot
Tin
Roof,
that he needs to put a few pennies into the piggy bank, that he needs to look to the future? The trouble with being a golden boy is in being blinded by the glare, and that was the case with Roddy Burkette. The last Howard had heard of him, he was divorced, the father of two children, and the owner of a run-down landscaping company. Roddy Burkette, in a blue car, on a rainy afternoon, nothing but time on his hands. It seemed the debris in Roddy's life had finally risen to the surface. He
found
us
,
Lee had said.
He
confessed.
It all takes time.

Howard made his turn around the stadium and then headed back toward the lake and the cabin. At the cemetery, he picked his pace up, even though the run was uphill. He had not been able to visit Eliot's grave since the day the boy had been lowered into it. He no longer pretended he would try to make the visit. He'd done that for the first month or two, always slowing as he reached the gates, then finding himself incapable of stepping inside. He would know when the time was right, but for now, it wasn't. And besides, what difference did it make? Graves were for the living. Eliot himself was gone, and his grandfather's memories of the boy were safe inside his head.

Roddy Burkette.

***

That night, Howard took up the Hemingway book again, finding his page marker right where he'd left it three months earlier, at the last chapter, nineteen, which was all of Book III. He forced himself to go back, as he always did, and reread the previous chapter, reminding himself of the tone, the landscape, the feel of the thing. But he had forgotten just how bad that chapter had been: the bullfight itself. He read quickly, trying his best to keep the emotion of it at a distance.

Then, without taking a step forward, he became one with the bull, the sword was in high between the shoulders, the bull had followed the low-swung flannel that disappeared as Romero lurched clear to the left, and it was over. The bull tried to go forward, his legs commenced to settle, he swung from side to side, hesitated, then went down on his knees, and Romero's older brother leaned forward behind him and drove a short knife into the bull's neck at the base of the horns. The first time he missed. He drove the knife in again, and the bull went over, twitching and rigid.

Howard closed the book, unable to read further. In the morning, maybe next week, he would pick it up again and finish that final chapter, the one without the bulls lying heavy and black on the sands of the arena, their limp tongues hanging lifeless from their mouths. He would read, instead, about Brett and Jake, and their ride together through Madrid in a taxi just as the lights were coming on in the square. But not now, not tonight.

Twilight was just settling over the lake as a thin, autumn rain began to beat on the tin roof. Howard heard wind rattle in off the water. Any day now, when it rained, it would turn to snow. Thinking ahead to what he predicted would be his coldest night so far in the cabin, Howard filled the fireplace with kindling and then heavier chunks of firewood. He would need more than just the tiny woodstove to generate heat on such a night. He had thought of dropping by Ellen's earlier in the day, to see how she was taking the news. But he had long stopped visiting without calling her first. It just didn't seem polite otherwise. And when he had phoned earlier from the café, there had been no answer. He had just finished lighting the wood when he thought he heard a car door slam. He assumed it had come from one of the nearby cabins, that the owner had driven out to do a last-of-the season check on things. But then he heard footsteps on the front porch, followed by a knock. He opened the door to see John Woods standing there.

“How are you doing, son?” Howard asked. He stepped back so that John could come inside. A wind wet with lake water followed him in.

“It was Roddy Burkette,” said John. Howard pulled a chair up to the fire for his son, and another for himself.

“I know,” he said. And then, “How's Patty taking it?”

“She's glad it's over,” said John. “Mom is with her now.”

Howard stared at the firelight.

“How are
you
taking it?” he asked then.

John shrugged. “It's too soon to tell,” he said. “But if I see the son of a bitch out on the street, I don't know what I'll do to him.” Howard nodded. He understood. It was too soon for any of them to know if they would find a way to survive. Anger would now be their greatest comfort, and anger was a dangerous thing. They sat for some time, both staring into the fire.