Running the Bulls by Cathie Pelletier

ambassador. Howard stopped. He turned to face Billy, who was leaning over the sale table, twenty feet behind him.
    â€œThanks, 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.
    â€œFind 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.
    â€œSpain, 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.
    â€œJust browsing,” he said.
    â€œNorway, 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.
    â€œBilly,” 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.
    â€œI guess you might say I blossomed since then,” Billy answered. Then he beamed, pleased with his own joke.
    Howard nodded. “Listen,