Running the Bulls

by Cathie Pelletier

  At the corner of Patterson, Howard slowed the big truck as he shifted from third into second. Pete rolled his window down and rested his crooked arm in the open space. He looked over at Howard.

  “I mean, this is a Norman Schwarzkopf kind of truck,” Pete said.

  As they passed the massive lilac bush at Marjorie Cantor’s house, Howard shifted back into third. He wanted a big truck, dammit. He wanted Ellen to see in a big way what was taking place. He had called the night before to inform her that he would be arriving the next day to get his things, as her letter had instructed him. She was polite. She was cool. She was brief. “That’s fine, yes, that’s fine,” was all she had said. Now, Howard envisioned the big orange rental truck as a military maneuver all its own. When Ellen saw him packing his personal things, his clothing, books, mementos, into brown boxes that said Smirnoff and Cutty Sark and Jack Daniel’s, when she realized he was really moving out, the knowledge would shake her up. Funny, but in the beginning, the power of the fight had lain in Howard’s hands, at Howard’s camp, his to dole out as he wished. But now, he sensed a change in the air, something Stormin’ Norman probably also knew, a knowledge that the sands of war had suddenly shifted. They had shifted all right, and now Howard Woods had gone from being a general who could hang up on his wife to a nomad who didn’t even own a ratty tent. A funny thing, the war of divorce.

  “By the way,” Pete added. “I like your new hair. It takes a week off your age, maybe even two weeks.”

  Howard ignored him. He honestly didn’t care if anyone noticed that a few dignified grays were now tactfully scattered here and there among his natural medium brown hair. Let Pete joke all he wished. Howard did look younger, and what’s more, he felt younger too. He had even made an appointment with Cyndi, for the very week he returned from Spain. “Remember,” Cyndi had lectured him, the silver bead in her nostril catching the overhead light. “Roots are the enemy.”

  Howard tooted at some kids who were hovering dangerously close to the street, the chrome of their bikes gleaming beneath them. He could see his old driveway just ahead, so he shifted down to second and then to first.

  “You know,” Pete said, thoughtfully, “if I’m gonna use your room now and then, I wish you’d move away from the ice machine.”

  Again, Howard said nothing. He had no intention of letting Pete Morton use his room ever again, and this was even before he found the tan bikini panties under his pillow, looking more like a Band-Aid than an article of clothing. His true intention was to move out of the Holiday Inn soon, very soon. Whether he would be moving back to his home on Patterson Street or not remained to be seen. He would know more once he looked into Ellen’s green eyes and determined for himself what might lie in his future.

  Howard parked the truck close to the garage doors, which Ellen had actually remembered to close. He would be blocking her car inside, true, but he doubted she would go anywhere while such a dramatic event was taking place. After all, her husband for over four decades was moving out, the way Howard Jr. had moved out when he went to law school. The way Greta had moved out to take that job down in Miami. The way John had moved out to enlist in the Air Force.

  Howard pulled the heavy parking brake on and then opened his door.

  “Wait here until I talk to her first,” he said to Pete, who waved a hand, understanding the need for privacy.

  “Do what you gotta do, pal,” said Pete. He reached inside his jacket pocket for the remains of that morning’s cigar.

  Howard walked to the house with what he hoped was a confident stride. He knocked on the garage door but there was no answer. He turned the knob. Locked. The house itself was quiet, no radio playing, no sound of laughter from the back patio, no whir of a vacuum cleaner. He turned toward the gray cement stones leading across the lawn to the front door. Ellen had made that walkway herself, during one of her summer vacations from school. Howard saw a cloud of cigar smoke wafting from the passenger window of the truck. He felt Pete’s eyes on his back with every step he took. At the front door a note was taped to the outside knob. Howard pulled it away and opened it. There was Ellen’s old-fashioned handwriting again, those swooping tails on the Ss, those fancy loops and curls. He’d been seeing a lot of this writing lately. Howard. The key to the garage is under the front doormat. I’ve packed all your things for you. You’ll find the boxes in the garage. I’m at ballet class, but if there should be a problem, you may reach me on my cell phone. And she had kindly listed a phone number for him.

  With Pete’s eyes burning boulder-size holes into Howard’s back, he folded the note and slipped it into his pants pocket. He leaned down to the mat beneath his feet, lifted its corner, and found the key waiting for him. Ellen with a cell phone? One of those contraptions she was forever complaining about when they buzzed loudly in quiet restaurants, in bookstores, at the library? What she called “the end to civilization as we know it”?

  Ellen had a cell phone?

  Howard heard the truck door slam and Pete grunt as he jumped down from the passenger seat. Wanting to see for himself what awaited him, before Pete Morgan could add his five cents worth, Howard unlocked the garage door and stepped inside. What he saw overwhelmed him. There before his eyes was cardboard box after cardboard box, one piled on top of the other, all the way up to the ceiling of the garage and filling the entire space that used to hold Howard’s little blue Ford Probe. His life, his guts, all packed neatly and piled out in Ellen’s garage for him to gather up and disappear with into the world. If you push on something, it will push back on you. Howard heard Pete whistle softly from behind his shoulder. He hoped there was a lesson in this somewhere for his golfing buddy, hoped that something good would come from Howard’s pain. Maybe the brown mountain before them would inspire Pete Morton to toss out that little black book of which he was so proud.

  “Holy shit,” said Pete. “You mean I really gotta help you move? I figured you’d come over here, pack a golf club or two, and she’d start crying.” He whistled again, soft and low. Howard could do little but read the names on the sides of the boxes as he searched for something to say: Murray’s Clay Pot Kit, the Bread Company, Amazon Books, Lilly’s Glassware, and so on. Not a single Smirnoff or a Cutty Sark or Jack Daniel’s among the pile. So much for the opposite roads their lives had taken.

  Howard turned and walked out to the street. He stood there looking up and down the length of Patterson at the separate houses his neighbors had built for themselves, those wooden boxes in which to contain the years of their lives. The Masons, the Taylors, the Bradfords, the Davidsons. He could name every house on each side of the street if pressed to do so. It was as if they had all moved to that housing development at the same time, all hoping to raise their families in a pool of sensibility, as far from the riotous sixties as they could get while they struggled to keep the ideals of their parents alive. They had prospered as a team, the Kings, the Hartmans, the Turners, the Whites, names that might have come over on the Mayflower, the kind of folks who settled Jamestown or climbed into Conestoga wagons and bounced West, sensible and adventuresome WASPs that they were. They had been part of a team, those Eisenhower teens had, the dollars and cents on their paychecks growing thicker as their hairs grew thinner, an inground pool here, a gazebo there, AstroTurf here, a second family car there. That’s what Patterson Street had always meant to Howard Woods. Mornings when he came out to fetch his paper, the grass still limp with dew, he always took a few seconds to pay penance to the street where his kids had first walked to school, first pedaled their tricycles and bicycles, and then spun the tires of their first cars before disappearing out into the world. There was something about Patterson Street that had given Howard the illusion that he was still safe in the 1950s, on a street such as the one he had grown up on, in those days when he was just coming to his young manhood. Those were the times when one could hear hammers tapping out all over America as the earnest and well-meaning built homes away fro
m cities, those halfway houses between civilization and the primordial sea, between safety in numbers and no safety at all. Their own little purgatory, the ’burbs. And Howard had loved that notion, had loved his safe house, his safe job, his safe wife. Let others think what they would, but to Howard Woods the 1950s had been a sweet, almost idyllic time for him to grow up. It was all so easily defined back then: Democrats beat up on Republicans, who beat up on Communists, who beat up on the poor and downtrodden, who then beat up on each other. Nowadays, it was tough to tell a Democrat from a Republican from a Communist. But back then, in America, there was a new idea called the middle class, and Howard had found himself smack dab in the center of it, thanks to the fact that his father had managed to start his own construction company. And what a time to be building in the United States of America, when those soldiers who had been at war came back to set up housekeeping! Sure, it was also a time when your own neighbor might be a Commie spy, coming and going from the new ranch-style home with the latest model of Chevy gleaming in the yard, just to throw off suspicion. Who wants to borrow a cup of sugar from a Commie? So if the bastard’s got a strange last name, or a stranger accent, just tell him the house on the corner is no longer for sale. And keep your kids away from his kids, because Communism comes hand in hand with indoctrination. It’s catching. It rubs off. And if it does, well, you might as well pack up your Commie ass and move to Russia. That was the nature of the 1950s. If you weren’t for America 100 percent then, by God, you were against her. Sure, that decade had its modern critics, but Howard wasn’t fooled by that. He knew damn well that if it hadn’t been for the fifties there wouldn’t have been any sixties. Any dolt could see that it was back in those Cold War years, those days before color television, in those times of lynchings and McCarthy’s witch hunts, that the ideas took firm root for the seedlings that would crop up a decade later. This was where the feminist movement got its boost, in the dazed faces of all those suburban housewives, in all those old black-and-white TV commercials, women with aprons lashed around their waists and tied securely at the back in Little Bo Peep bows. Women who stood vacant over TV dinners and waited for the doorbell to ring and that briefcase to appear, the man they married firmly attached to its handle. Women who slipped off their Donna Reed high heels at the end of a day and soaked their swollen feet behind a closed and locked bathroom door. Were they unhappy? Were they anticipating the Valium and the Xanax, and all those other antidepressants that were still to come? Maybe. But Howard hadn’t forgotten the lesson Americans had learned from Khrushchev and Nixon: There are no modern kitchens in Commie Land, no new dishwashers, no new electric stoves and ovens, so before you sell a sketch of the atomic bomb to the Reds, you better shake the little missus out of her stupor and ask if she really, really wants to cook dinner where there’s no electric can opener.

  Ellen had a cell phone.

  Howard turned and walked back into the garage. Pete was sitting on the inside step that led up to the kitchen, just finishing the last of his cigar. Howard looked down at Pete. Neither man spoke of the incident, for this was their own code, just as Hemingway’s men had a code and stuck by it. Men of Howard’s generation didn’t appear on a television show to discuss their deepest angst. This was their own code, and they both knew it.

  “I’ll lift and carry,” Howard said to Pete. “You pack ’em into the truck.”

  ***

  It had taken them almost two hours to load all the boxes into the back of the big rental truck. At least, it had taken Howard that long. Pete had found one excuse after another to avoid work, cigar breaks being at the top of the list. And several times, declaring he could function no more without water, Pete had knelt by the outdoor spigot where Howard usually attached the garden hose and drank from the flow, his lips wrapped around the faucet like some kind of mutant horse. Howard’s impulse had been to run over and kick Pete’s ass, but then, the moving was his fault, not Pete’s. All Howard could do was carry away the contents of his life, pack them neatly into the back of the rental truck, and then drive away from the suburbs, toward the nasty cluster of billboards and businesses downtown.

  Now, aching and tired, he was sitting atop one of the lopsided stools in the Holiday Inn lounge as Larry sang “Candle in the Wind” to the happy hour crowd. It was the song Elton John had written about Norma Jean Baker, also known as Marilyn Monroe, and it was causing Howard Woods a great deal of pain. It wasn’t that he missed Norma Jean, or gave a hoot about her tragic life. It was because the sadness in the tone of the thing reminded him of his own sadness. But that was the general concept behind happy hour: render everyone so miserable and depressed they’ll drink barrels of booze.

  Wally came by and put a postcard down on the bar in front of Howard. It was from Freddy Wilson, the Mattress Mogul. The picture on the front was of a seedy-looking pinkish hotel in the Bahamas. This is where Howard Hughes lived for a time, Freddy had written on the back. Apparently, Freddy had beaten the postcard back to Bixley. According to Wally, the Mattress Mogul, like some kind of Elvis impersonator, had “just left the premises.”

  “That’s his cigar,” said Wally, and pointed to the still smoking butt in the ashtray at the end of the bar. And then Wally went to clean the ashtray, fearing, no doubt, another assault from Eva Braun.

  “Hey, Dances with Bulls!” Pete shouted from a nearby table. Howard ignored him. Minutes after they’d arrived at the lounge, Pete had spotted two plump, fiftyish women sitting by themselves for a happy hour drink. It had taken him just seconds to ingratiate himself, and now he was perched in a chair between them, hitting on the more attractive of the two. Howard knew that this was the exact verb that was taking place since Pete had said so. “I’m gonna go hit on those girls,” Pete had declared, as he took his martini and strutted off. As far as Howard was concerned, the only hitting Pete Morton should do at his age was that of a baseball to a grandson. And now, Pete was trying to enlist Howard into the action. He turned on his stool, away from Pete and the women, to listen to the last of Larry’s song.

  “Hey, soldier, when do you ship out?” he heard Pete shout from behind him. Howard picked up his rum, downed it, and motioned to Wally that he wanted another one. Just as Wally put the fresh drink down on the bar, Howard felt a soft tap on his shoulder. He spun around on his stool, ready to inform Pete Morton that it was time for him to grow up, and that’s when he looked into the face of a woman with eyes so blue they defied sensible genetics.

  “Loretta,” she said, and held a hand out to Howard, who took it. She had probably been a natural blond once, but now her hair was a Hollywood blond, and this made her eyes that much more unreal.

  “I’ve never seen eyes so blue,” Howard admitted. He simply couldn’t quit looking at them.

  Loretta leaned in close and confessed, “Contact lenses. But don’t tell.” Perfume hit Howard’s nostrils and a sweet, sickly taste appeared in his mouth. He had always hated too much perfume. “Why don’t you come join us?” Loretta added. “Your friend tells us you’re about to go to Spain and that you may not be coming back.” Loretta smiled at this. So, they were having a little joke about his running of the bulls, were they?

  Howard looked over at Pete, a cigar butt peeping from the corner of his mouth, as if he’d just swallowed something with a stubby brown tail. Pete held up his martini glass and toasted Howard from a distance. Howard looked back at the fake blue eyes before him.

  “Pete’s a funny guy, all right,” Howard said. “And now that the penicillin seems to be working, it’s good to see him dating again.”

  ***

  By seven o’clock that evening, Howard had dialed both Ellen’s home phone and her brand-new cell phone several times, but no answer. The rums had come in a steady stream, some being charged to his own tab, some from acquaintances who drifted in and out of the bar all afternoon as happy hour turned into happy evening. Pete had finally gone home to his wife, and the azure-eyed Loretta had gone t
o a birthday party, taking her friend with her. Now the people in the lounge had become a dreamlike kind of people, the mood in Howard’s brain switching from sad to pleasant, then more pleasant, then very pleasant. Fuck Ellen O’Malley Woods! Fuck her, and the horse she rode in on. Ben Collins would be a good name for that horse. Fuck them both. He had even dialed up her home phone yet again to tell her this. And yet again, her answering machine had clicked on. This time, instead of just hanging up so that she wouldn’t know it was Howard calling, he had taken the time to leave a message.

  “Fuck you and your horse Ben Collins!” Howard had said, noticing for the first time a sudden thickness to his tongue. “Fuck Buffalo and your friend Molly!” He hung up and then instantly called back. “And fuck those fucking pots you’ve been making! And your cell phone! And your fucking ballet classes!” Then, he slammed the receiver down. There, that ought to prove to Ellen that he had accepted the idea of divorce like a gentleman.

  On his way back from the men’s room, where it seemed the rum would never stop pouring out of the end of his dick, he stopped to request “Never Been to Spain” again. Larry Ferguson nodded, nervous suddenly, as if anxious for Howard to go sit down. Howard found this odd. He’d been requesting the song every half hour, and Larry was playing it almost that fast. Three Dog Night had been one of John’s favorite groups. How did Howard know, back in those years when he was listening to “Never Been to Spain” blasting from behind his son’s locked bedroom door, that it would one day be his own theme song? He couldn’t. Life was such a hoot, and Howard Woods was beginning to prefer it that way.