Belly (21 page)

“Because it’s over.” She drank some more. “It’s so over. It’s been over for such a long time and I don’t want to talk about
it.”

She took two cigarettes from her purse, her long, light cigarettes and she lit them both in her mouth and handed him one,
and he tried to touch her fingertips but even those she took away from him.

He said, “You have my money and my heart.”

Loretta laughed, a mean, choking laugh. “They’re both long gone,” she said. “You’ll never get them back.”

He gripped the lip of the bar with his hands. “Where’s my money?” he asked. “What did you do with it?”

“It’s not cheap with a quadriplegic son, let me tell you.”

“You got insurance money for that,” he said. “What did you do with it? You owe it to me. You owe me.”

She laughed again. “Nobody owes you anything,” she said. “You did what you had to and so did I. Expect nothing and you won’t
be disappointed.” She blew a long line of her smoke at her own reflection in the mirror. “Because that’s what you’re going
to get. Nothing. Expectations are just resentments waiting to happen.”

Belly started to shake. He pressed his wrists against the bar and watched his palms wobble. He clamped his fingers down on
the polished wood to keep them from hitting her. “It’s bad luck to be a bitch,” he said.

She waved her diamond ring at him. “I don’t need luck anymore, Belly, I’ve got money.”

“My money and my heart,” he said again, digging his nails into the wood until his fingertips turned white.

“Oh, poor fella. Had to sacrifice a few years of his pitiful little life in exchange for what—how many thousands did you take
in? How much of that money did you blow on coke? On cars? You want me to feel sorry for you?”

He laid his head down on his hands and he refused to cry. He said, “Yes. I want you to feel sorry for me.”

She drank. “Sue me,” she said. “I dare you.”

Belly watched as his own shaky hand reached for Loretta’s windpipe, as it clasped the chicken skin of her neck and pressed.
She watched him, and he watched her; it was like they were dancing. His hands were eating at her jaw, his fingers were sipping
from her larynx and then when she smiled, she floated away.

“I dare you,” she whispered. There was no fear in her eyes and he loosened his fingers and let them rest on her collarbones.
She reached up and pulled his knuckles to her hairline, rubbed them against the hidden scar from her facelift. “Just let it
be over. Let it be done.”

He thought of all the times he hit his wife; he hit Ann, and Nora, and Eliza, and he never hit Loretta, and he never hit his
third daughter, but that did not absolve his hands, and right now, with those guilty fingers, he was capable of murder.

She said, “I got the needlepoint line from Mel Brooks. You know that routine, about how you take the
M
from ‘Midwest’ and add it to ‘moron’ and you get ‘Mormon’?”

Belly took his shot glass and slammed it on the bar. It shattered. He yelled, “I thought you made that line up. You said you
made it up.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m used to disappointing people.”

And then there was trouble, chaos, the bouncer lifting Belly from his seat; suddenly Belly was so small, and he stumbled toward
home, wherever that was. A long beige Cadillac raced down the street, two teenage boys leaning out the window. “Go home, Grampa!”
they screamed. And he should. He was a grampa and he should go home, alone, with no mistress and no money, all the stars in
the sky laughing at him and all he wanted was to sleep.

H
E OPENED
his eyes and it was still dark. He knew right away that he was not in his pod, not in his cell, where the lights never completely
dimmed. But his pupils were too dilated and the walls were too far away and he had to piece together again what was real,
right there in the dark. He was home; he was back in Spa City, but he was not home. He was back in Saratoga, but it was not
the same town; he had no home. He was staying with Nora. It was Nora’s home. And Eliza did not live there anymore. And Ann,
he could not remember her, maybe she had never lived there at all. Maybe she was never real. And daughter number three, she
was here, she was sitting next to him on the couch with a cup of hot tea and a chunk of potato bread to mop up the alcohol
making the rounds inside him, she was studying, she had fallen asleep on the couch with her glasses tilted over her closed
eyes, and he took off the glasses and set them down carefully on the end table. He covered her in the red, blue, and purple
afghan knitted by his great-grandmother, spun and dyed herself from her very own sheep, he stood there and watched her safely
sleep.

He blinked, and then he saw the drop ceiling and the matted blue carpet and the worn plaid of the couch beneath him and he
was alone in the still, hot, middle of the night, last night’s clothes sticking to him. Right in the center of his chest a
stinging began, first a soft sort of singing and then something louder and full of feedback, fingernails on a chalkboard but
inside. Please, he thought, please put me in the bed. Please put me to sleep. Rub my back, scratch my back, make my back small
and smooth and hot and clammy, make me the back of a child, the small back where two adult hands can cover it. Make me small.
Make it go away. But it wouldn’t go away. The stinging reached out until it covered his whole chest like a blanket, he was
one long cloth of ache, he was mummified in it. He could not get away. He could not sleep.

He had a beer can cradled in the crook of his elbow and one stashed between his legs. He shook them. Both empty.

He lay with his eyes open and focused on nothing, focused on the dark, and every thought that passed through his mind, every
acceptable image skipped out into the dark and left him with the same implacable ideas. He tried to think of baseball, he
tried to think of Mookie Wilson’s tenth-inning ground ball through Bill Buckner’s legs in the ’86 World Series. He tried to
picture Ray Knight’s seventh-inning solo homer. He tried to think of that one good moment in 1986, that one little flash when
he thought maybe he could feel all right again. Maybe he could feel. But the rest of that year circled before him: standing
in the doorway of the morgue, watching his wife touch the toetag on his daughter’s bluish body, seeing how the kid’s pinky
finger splayed out to the side of her hand in an impossible right angle, the way her bed was made from that day forward, never
again a wrinkle in the sheets, the soft leather of her worn-out catcher’s mitt with her name in crooked black block letters.

He just wanted to rest in peace. He just wanted to sleep. Why wouldn’t sleep come and save him? Why wouldn’t morning come
to let him out? He needed light to breathe. He needed to stop breathing.

He wrenched himself from the abyss of sunken couch cushions and walked through the dining room and living room and out the
front door to the abandoned porch. In just his faded black watch boxer shorts he stepped down to the sidewalk, bare feet over
tiny tufts of grass that poked out from the cracks. He walked to the center of Spring Street and looked east, trying to find
a hint of horizon hiding behind fir trees and big Victorian houses. His town was sleeping, every single body horizontal in
the whole place, every life but his held in the peaceful secret sideways place of dreams. He waited there until one side of
the sky lightened to the color of pale fire; he waited, hoping one last lone drunk driver would fly up the fault line of Spring
Street and not see him in the softness of that almost-morning light, hoping his inebriated savior would whip down the asphalt
and lift Belly from the road, make him rise like flame from the hot concrete, let gravity release him so he could just float
away.

Far in the distance horses began to bray. The racetrack was waking up. A truck rambled down Nelson Avenue, an open-backed
pickup filled with the little brown men who rode into town every year with the weanlings and yearlings and two-year-olds.
The backstretch workers—grooms, stablehands, and hotwalkers. He thought of those men, paid next to nothing, men with families
stashed in unnamed southern countries, men who slept pressed into tiny tack rooms on the outskirts of the track. How did they
do it? How did they sleep through the night in their mud and concrete prisons? He’d heard once that when a backstretch worker
got sick—less than minimum wage and no health insurance—he’d go see the vet.

The sun rose and the sky filled with dusty blue, and for a moment the stinging inside him subsided. He turned and stepped
inside the sanctity of Nora’s sleeping house, he laid himself back down on the couch in his dirty boxers, and when he closed
his eyes now he saw baseball and thoroughbreds, and his daughter’s dead face was filtered away.

T
he boys made their way downstairs and played Grand Theft Auto while he watched them from the couch, and Nora wiped the kitchen
counters, and he heard the paper Wal-Mart application crinkle in his back pocket. Nora handed him the phone, holding it away
from her like it was something infectious. He thought, This is the call I’ve been waiting for, but when he said hello it was
only Eliza’s small voice on the other line.

“I’m sorry about leaving you, Belly,” she said.

He said, “Whatever.”

“You know, Ann still might come. Maybe if you call her or something and tell her you want her to.”

“Let me just ask you this: what kind of person are you to leave that little blind dog? That diabetic dog?”

She did not respond.

“You’re just going to leave your dog like that?” He heard sniffling on the other end. “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” he said. “Do
not cry.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “If it wasn’t for me, we’d all still be together.”

A dangerous feeling growled in his stomach. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“That day,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“I was supposed to meet her at dance class. Henry was going to drive us both home, don’t you remember? But I wanted to go
to this exhibit in Albany so I called you and you had Darren pick her up. Don’t you remember?”

“Shut up, Eliza. Just shut the fuck up.” And that was the last thing he said to her.

His grandsons turned off the TV and left him with that strange static aftertaste buzzing through the air: the presence of
absence.

In prison, his podmate received a letter from a son he never knew he had. The man passed the letter down from cell to cell,
pod to pod, hungry hands reaching out for the crumpled handwritten paper. The man said he knew it was his son: their I’s slanted
the same way. Belly read it three times before he passed it on. The son did not want anything from the man except possibly
to know what he looked like and a bit of his medical history, and to meet him someday if the father consented. The son wrote
that he had a good job, a girlfriend, and a son of his own, and was not seeking money. The son wanted only to talk. Nothing
more.

The letter caused a rupture in Belly—a great big hunger right above his diaphragm. He kept trying to think about Ann, his
second daughter, who would never come to see him, never talked to him again after that day he hit her on the couch. He wanted
the letter to make him want her. He wanted to want her back. But he could only see his wife’s eyes in his third daughter’s
pale, freckled face, her thick blond hair, her pink sweater: his baby who died at sixteen.

His podmate had told him, “If you don’t got kids, you don’t got nothing to live for. You don’t got nothing to fight for.”

And now he sat here with the phone face down on his knees, entwining the curlicues of phone cord around his fingers, and he
knew he should call Eliza back, he should call her back to him and beg her not to leave. But he leaned against the couch and
closed his eyes and saw his third daughter’s face, still with him after all this time, edging out the faces of the other girls.

The phone went dead, the strange seesaw tone erupting from the wire, telling him to hang up.

Nora slapped the knees of his jeans with a dishtowel and said, “Belly, you have got to get yourself up and ready to meet with
your parole officer.”

He said, “That’s not for hours.”

“You’ve got to get yourself there today. I’ve got too much to do before Sunday.”

“How do you expect me to get to Ballston Spa?” He stood and hung up the phone.

“Take the bus,” she said.

“What bus?”

“The CDTA.”

He didn’t even know what it stood for. But he conceded.

He went upstairs to change, too tired to face the shower, and he slipped on his last clean pair of jeans. They were his favorite,
worn to perfection at the knees, the most slimming Levis he owned. They were all the same size, but some hung awkwardly, some
were too tight, but these, these fine jeans hugged his bones perfectly and made him feel young. He took a clean white shirt,
same as the others, and buttoned it high, to cover the tiny sprigs of gray chest hair that sometimes poked through.

He came downstairs carrying his dirty jeans and white shirts and socks and boxers and said, “What do I do with these?”

“Leave them by the basement door and I’ll wash them,” Nora said. “They’ll be here when you get back.”

O
utside, Saratoga greeted him with thick waves of heat. His beautiful town, birthplace of the potato chip, the world’s most
attractive horseracing track, home of the twenty-two springs of crystal-clear water that ran straight up from the fertile
ground, water people came from hundreds of miles to drink though it tasted like old shoes. He meant to walk to the bus stop,
but he followed his feet down Union Avenue, past the glorious mansions, and he ticked off their architectural styles one by
one—Dutch colonial, second empire Victorian, Greek revival, Queen Anne, Richardsonian Romanesque. He’d gone through a whole
town tour’s worth of houses and he came to the beautiful Saratoga flat track.

The racetrack burst at its seams with Friday peddlers. He remembered Ann selling lemonade and brownies out front, getting
fifty-dollar tips from Trifecta winners, getting nothing but scowls from the losers, putting the money away and not taking
it out until she needed to buy something for the senior prom: she wore a man’s tuxedo.