Free The Bushwacked Piano by Thomas McGuane

bull did not fall over dead. Instead, he turned slowly from where he had taken the sword and began to walk away from the torero. He had his head stretched out low and far in front of himself, close to the ground. Part of the retinue joined the torero following the bull in its circling of the ring. The bull walked in agony, an ox driving a mill, the torero behind, patient, trailing the sword in the sand. The bull stopped and the torero and his retinue stopped as well. The bull heaved and vomited several gallons of bright blood on the sand and began plodding along again. Presently, the hind legs quit and the bull went down on its rear. The torero walked around in front of it and waited for the completion of its dying. The bulllifted its head and bawled and bawled as though in sudden remembrance of its calfhood.
    Laughter broke out in the stands.
    Then the bull just died, driving the one horn into the sand. The torero stretched an arm over his head in much the same gesture Payne had made in the bronc chute, and turned slowly in his tracks to the applause.
    “C-plus,” George Russell said. “An ear.”
    By then, anyway, it was not so easy to sleep. They had been in Spain some weeks now in the small house in the villa district of Malaga’s North End: Monte de Sancha. The days were not hot but still clear and the nighttime came prettily, zig-zagging up the sloped system of streets and passages. And when it was dark it would be quiet for a few hours. By midnight, however, the high-powered cars on the coast road would begin their howling at almost rhythmic intervals, now and again interrupted by the independent screams of the Italian machinery, the Ferraris and Maseratis.
    George, the employee of General Motors, and guarded car snob, dismissed the “greaseball hotrods”; but often paused in Torremolinos and Fuengirola to caress the voluptuous tinted metal or smile dimly into the faces of the drivers. Ann imagined the noise made him sleep even better; and in fact, coming in from the terrace, a sleepless middle of the night, the long cones of light pushed along beneath the house by a wall of noise rising and falling in sharp slivering of sound as the cars jockeyed for turn positions on the way to Valencia and Almeria, Gibraltar and Cadiz, she would see George, asleep on the big bed, his lip neatly retracted over the Woodrow Wilson teeth in something altogether like a smile.
    That day they returned from Seville where George hadtaken four hundred and nineteen photographs of Diego Puerta killing three Domecq bulls which he dismissed as brave but “smallish.”
    “Small but bravish?”
    “Brave but smallish, I said.”
    “Then why do you take their pictures.”
    “Oh, come on.”
    She had seen in George an unusual, even troubling, interest in the bullfighters, passed off with the same misleading sneer as the greaseball hotrods; but once she had caught him pinching his hair behind between thumb and forefinger, looking at himself sideways in the mirror, and she knew he wondered how it would be to wear the bullfighter’s pigtail—even in the clip-on version of the modern “swords”—and cruise the Costa del Sol in his Italian auto-meringue all the way from Malaga to Marbella where sleek former Nazis teased the flesh on the sun-dappled concrete of the Spanish Mediterranean and sent cards to Generalissimo Francisco Franco on his birthday.
    With none of this to endure, the sight alone of George throwing the absolutely limp and filthy wads of Spanish bills at waiters, at the African who bent iron reinforcing rods with his teeth in front of the Cafe España, or at the concierge of the Plaza de Toros in Seville whose under-shirted laborer son came to the door inopportunely as George highhandedly tried to bribe the mother; so that George very nearly got it, then and there, just got it; and when at the bars he would say in a loud voice, “Another Ciento Three para me,” she would begin vainly to plot her escape and was only stopped