Running the Bulls

by Cathie Pelletier

  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 forw
ard, 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.

  “Tell me something,” John said. “During Desert Storm, were you proud of me?”

  “Of course I was,” said Howard. “Both your mother and I were proud. And we were thankful that you managed to stay alive.” In truth, they had been more than thankful. They had also been doubtful. He and Ellen had lain awake far into the night, discussing the lives beneath the bombs, discussing the waste of it all, discussing the atrocity of war. But it wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t John’s fault. It was the fault of governments, of men like Saddam Hussein.

  “All I ever wanted was to fly airplanes,” said John.

  Howard smiled. John was the boy who had model airplanes dangling on strings from his bedroom ceiling by the time he was five years old.

  “It was tough at first for us to look each other in the eye,” John said then. “Do you remember that, Dad? War does that to people. It changes them forever.”

  Howard felt a great sympathy wash over him just then. He had an urge to take this man in his arms and hold him, cradle him. But they were not that kind of family, and both he and John knew it. Yes, he had heard the talk on television shows, in a paper here and there, in the cafés and restaurants, that these American pilots were like boys playing a video game, pushing buttons that caused sparks at a distance. It wasn’t as bad as what the veterans of Vietnam had to put up with, nothing like that, which was all thanks to Hussein himself. They had a visible enemy in such a crazed and dangerous man. But people who were on the sidelines could sometimes be cruel. They just didn’t know. They didn’t realize the horrors of having a son in one of those planes, just as Howard hadn’t known Sam Mason’s terror in having a son in the Mekong Delta. But he had never been ashamed of John, not once.

  “Do you remember what I said in the hospital?” John asked now. “The night Eliot died?” He looked up at Howard, who nodded.

  “I remember,” said Howard.

  “Well,” said John. “It was true. And it ended up being a ghost I brought home with me.” Howard tried to interrupt him.

  “Son, you don’t have to tell me this,” he said, but John held up a hand. His eyes were clear, steady. He’d lost a lot of weight in the weeks since Eliot had died, as if his grief was pulling away parts of him.

  “I do have to tell you this,” John said. “If we don’t get rid of the ghosts in our lives, Dad, they’ll ruin both our families, yours and mine.”

  “What do you mean?” Howard asked.

  “I mean you need to go home and tell my mother that you forgive her for what happened over twenty years ago,” John said. “And you need to mean it, Dad. That’s the catch.”

  Howard started to explain that he was trying, that he was working toward the day that it would happen. But that’s not what he said.

  “I still feel shame,” Howard said. “Shame that my wife would do what she did.”

  John studied his father’s face then. Outside, wind lifted a branch and slammed it against the back of the cabin. The rain was picking up, gathering its force from out on the lake.

  “You sorry son of a bitch,” John said, a near whisper. At first Howard thought he was mistaken, that John had said something else, expressing his anger at Roddy Burkette, maybe. After all, John had been the most obedient child, the one who always wiped his muddy shoes on the rug, who always rinsed his dish and placed it in the dishwasher, the kid who never, ever shot a sparrow or pulled a cat’s tail. “You sorry son of a bitch,” John said again, and now there was no doubt. Howard felt indignation rise up. This was his kid, for Christ’s sake. How dare he? But then John slammed his fist into his own chest, again and again, beating his breast as though it were another person receiving this punishment.

  “Do you know how many times in my life I’ve tried to talk to you?” he shouted. Seeing this, Howard felt the indignation replace itself with worry. He simply nodded, hoping it would placate John. His grief over losing Eliot was speaking now, Howard guessed. His despair after finally putting a name and a face to the driver behind the wheel of the blue car. Howard supposed there had been times that his son had wanted to talk to him in the past. Girls, in those early days. Peer pressure. Career. His marriage. There had been lots of reasons for a son to consult his father, but John never had. And then later, after John flew those missions over Baghdad, in that sleek F-15 fighter, he had talked to no one. Patty had told Ellen about the sleepless nights, in those months following the bombs, nights of staring at the ceiling, wordless nights with nothing but moonlight between them on the bed. But this wasn’t Howard’s fault, was it? They came from a long line of sensible families, such as the ones along Patterson Street, the Masons, the Taylors, the Bradfords, the Davidsons, folks who might have come over on the Mayflower, settled Jamestown, climbed into Conestoga wagons, and bounced West, the Hartmans, the Turners, the Whites. They could take on wild Indians, the prairies, buffalo herds, sickness, disease, the elements, good adventuresome WASPs that they were. But you couldn’t expect them to talk to each other.

  “You wanna know about shame, ace?” John asked. He looked at Howard, as if daring him to answer. “Shame is pushing a button on the cockpit of your airplane so that a laser-guided GBU-12 bomb will drop out of its belly. Shame is the pride you fe
el later, over a beer with your buddies, talking about precision, the incredible fucking precision of the hit. And collateral damage? That’s just a lot of dead strangers, those men, women, kids the same age as Eliot. Kids younger than Eliot. And you pretend that’s the end of it. But it isn’t, Dad. It’s just the beginning.”

  John paused, but Howard knew he wasn’t done. He knew his son had been waiting a long time to open this floodgate.

  “When I came home, I couldn’t make love to Patty,” John said then. In all their years of being father and son, the two had never discussed sex. Just as Howard had never discussed it with his own father. Just as the Hartmans never discussed it, or the Taylors, or the Bradfords. “It was as if Patty knew,” John went on. “She knew I dropped those bombs. She saw those kids on television, their arms blown away, their faces swollen with bruises. Patty knew, but Vanessa didn’t. Vanessa thought I worked for Sounder Aeronautics and nothing more. The thing with Vanessa is all over now, but see how simple it is, Dad, now that you know the truth?”