Belly Read online

  “It’s all right, Nora. Jesus, give the kid a break. Sometimes a man just feels like keeping quiet.” He nodded at the boy, but the boy’s face was stone. Belly cleared his throat.

  “So it’s dead guitarists for all three of you, then?” he asked.

  “B. B. King is alive and well,” Nora said. She put a hand on her round stomach. “And number four is on the way.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Don’t say anything, Belly.”

  “Am I saying anything?” He looked at his grandsons. “Did I say anything?” The oldest one still wouldn’t look at him. Nora took another cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and put it to her lips. “Aren’t you supposed to give that up?” he asked her, and she turned and glared at him, let the car move down the street without even watching where it rolled.

  “Do you see me smoking it?” she growled. “Dr. Pearson said this is the best way to quit.” She nodded toward the ashes leaping from the tip of his cigarette. “You’re the one infecting us with the secondhand smoke. I’m just holding the thing.”

  Belly cleared his throat. “Well, how’s it going, then? Getting a girl this time around?”

  Nora turned her eyes back to the road. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, you better hope it’s a girl. Girls are so much easier.” He turned and winked at the boys in the backseat, but they didn’t even blink.

  “How are you doing, Belly?” Nora asked him. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

  “Hot.”

  “Me, too, Mom,” Jimi called. “Can you turn up the air-conditioning?”

  “When Belly’s done smoking.” She turned to him. “There’s a heat wave on. Supposed to last all week.” They were still on Broadway, inching down with racetrack traffic, and he noticed now just where they were.

  “Don’t you want to turn down Spring Street?”

  “We may as well just go on by there now,” she said. “Get it over with.”

  He nodded, adjusted the seatbelt that hugged the hollow of his stomach. There it was, the corner of Washington and Broadway, the large glass doors on the street level, his old apartment teetering on top. It used to be his Man-o-War Bar, though everyone called it War Bar for short. He threw his cigarette butt on the sidewalk.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Café Newton,” she said. She pulled up alongside it, put the truck in park. “I’m running in. You want something? A cappuccino?”

  Belly shook his head.

  “Be right back.” Nora climbed out the door. He could see now that she was pregnant, her stomach starting to pop out, leading her like a divining rod.

  He watched tourists mill in and out of his old bar, women in broad-brimmed hats and too much makeup and their toupeed husbands with diamond cufflinks glittering; he could almost see the clouds of perfume and cologne punctuating the air. These were people who never would have stepped foot in War Bar, and here they were surrounding it, squeezing the last bit of life out of its memory.

  Jimi scooched forward in the seat, his hands grabbing Belly’s headrest.

  “Stevie Ray’s getting confirmed on Sunday,” Jimi said.

  “That right?”

  The oldest boy looked at his hands.

  “I thought they did it older.”

  “They let you do it whenever you want to,” said Jimi.

  “Who’s your patron saint?” Belly asked his oldest grandson.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “Do you talk?”

  “He talks when he feels like it,” said Jimi.

  “Now tell me your ages again. I haven’t seen you boys since you were this big.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together.

  “You can’t see a baby when it’s that big,” said Stevie Ray. “Except on the ultrasound.”

  “Thirteen, eight, and eleven months,” Jimi informed him. “I’m the eight.”

  Nora came back with a large coffee. “Sure you don’t want some?” she asked. “It’s decaf.”

  He raised one eyebrow at her. “Are you trying to make this hard?”

  “It’s just a latte,” she said, but she was smiling, as if she’d won something.

  She started the car and lifted another unlit cigarette, and he leaned over and eased it out of her hands, and he thought how they were old enough now to share all their bad habits.

  “Belly,” Nora said, and he said, “What?” and she said, “Can you hand me another cigarette if you’re going to keep that one yourself?”

  He handed her one, and they continued down Broadway. “What happened to that old building by the Y? It’s got stars on it.”

  “It’s the Jewish Community Center. They restored it. That’s how it looked once upon a time and that’s how it looks again.”

  “They don’t have Christmas,” said Jimi in the back.

  “That’s right, honey, they’re different than us.”

  “I didn’t know we had so many they’d need a whole center,” said Belly.

  “There are more now,” Nora said, taking a long drag of her cigarette and ducking her head out the window to exhale. “One’s the mayor now.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s a Democrat.”

  Nora nodded.

  “Jesus, you’re gone five minutes and the whole place goes to pot.” He let this information sink in, tried to smooth out all its wrinkly meanings. He had nothing against the Democrats, not in theory, but without a Republican administration, all of Belly’s plans would change. Those were his friends in office, or if not his friends, then his contacts, the people who owed him. How would he collect now? Who would see to it that he was repaid? There hadn’t been a Democratic administration since before Belly was born. He wasn’t even sure he knew any.

  “They’re all gone now,” Nora said, looking at him sideways.

  “Did they call you? Any of them?” He turned and looked at his grandsons, but their eyes were glazed over in the heat and they were glaring out the window. “Did they say anything to you about me coming back?”

  Nora shook her head. “If you mean Loretta, no, I haven’t heard from her. Or anybody. They’ve left us alone and that’s just how I want it. That was your business, not mine.”

  He nodded, he bounced his head up and down, but he couldn’t shake this new information into submission.

  They kept driving, past where their favorite fast-food restaurant, the Red Barn, used to be, now some big chain bookstore, and the art supply store where his youngest daughter, Eliza, still worked, as far as he knew, past his old haunt Jatski’s Diner and the big town clock that never, until now, kept good time.

  “Looks like we got ourselves a makeover.” He motioned at the white picket fences and mums that circled the big oak trees, yellow ribbons panting from lampposts.

  “Those are the same decorations they put up every August. It’s track season, remember?”

  He remembered everything about track season. War Bar was his for more than thirty years, and the first twenty, the racetrack barely seeped inside. They might put the harness races up on the TV for a laugh, or take a glance at the Whitney, or some tourists might sit up at the counter on Dark Tuesdays and study up the tip sheets purchased from street vendors milling around the side gates. That’s how it was before his mistress, Loretta, wandered sideways into War Bar in the hot August afternoon, not a week after the accident, fixed herself a Cuba Libre behind the counter, and turned on the TV to catch the tail end of the Travers. He remembered that foggy light in her eyes, the realization that even after she’d analyzed the Pink Sheet all morning she forgot to place the bet, her saying, “Put one in for me, would you? I’ve got Tsunami to place, Nada, Nada, Nada to show, and Ivanhoe to win.” He remembered the soggy fifty-dollar bill that started the whole mess, that turned him from barkeep to bookie. It was all her idea. It was all her. He remembered this clearly while everything that went before, his real wife and daughters and their whole life together, remained a blur.

  They passed Furness House,
the old brown Queen Anne mansion on Union where the Down Syndrome kids used to live. It was pink now, or peach or salmon or one of those food names for pink, and it was a bed-and-breakfast with a fat, pastel “No Vacancy” sign out front.

  “Where did all the retards go?” he asked.

  “We have no idea,” said Nora. “We’ve been wondering that ourselves.”

  Belly shifted back and forth in his seat, massaging his new titanium hips, looking at the new face on his old town. Saratoga was as strange and cold now as his metallic body parts, and August, he thought, was like any woman you couldn’t live with or without. He thought of his grandmother in that last stage of her life, her dyed-rust pixie cut showing gray-white underneath, a marshmallow alcoholic smile continually pasted on her perfectly round face. Every time she looked up, it was as if she’d never seen you before. Right now, Belly felt just like that, like his grandmother, looking up and seeing Saratoga and her summer inhabitants as if for the first time, looking up and saying, again, Who the hell are all you people and what have you done with my town?

  They turned down Circular and drove past Congress Park, the site of everything that ever happened to him—first kiss, first fuck, first coke cigarette. “Thing about this town is, you could have your whole life in a six-block radius, you know?” Belly asked.

  His daughter nodded.

  “Every mistake you made’s in walking distance.”

  Finally they turned onto Spring Street, down one block and into the driveway. It seemed like the car ride took longer than the bus, and Belly just wanted to sit in the truck and take a nap, to wake and have his life be settled the way it was before. They all sat in the truck for a minute, Belly and Nora and the three kids, all quiet.

  “The house looks good,” said Belly. He was lying. An Erector set of scaffolding held up the front porch, and blobs of white paint dotted the soggy cedar siding. The houses all around looked pristine, straight out of a magazine, but their house seemed to belong on a long-gone block.

  “It’s getting there,” Nora said, getting out and unstrapping the baby from his car seat. “Gene’s been working on it for us.”

  “Gene, huh? He’s still around? What about your husband?”

  Nora pulled the baby up her hip and the boys ran ahead inside and she said, “Don’t start.”

  They walked up the creaking side porch steps. “No one’s fixed these yet, I see.”

  “It’s next on Gene’s list,” she said, throwing her purse on the kitchen table and setting her Café Newton coffee cup down on the counter. “You can work on the dining room table if you need something to fix.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It wobbles.”

  Belly put his lemon meringue pie in the fridge and sat down at the table, fiddling with the leather straps of Nora’s purse. He threaded one inside the other till they knotted up and held. “Any messages on that answering machine for me?”

  “You just got here.”

  “People know I’m back.”

  Nora set the baby down in his walker. Belly heard the TV go on in the room behind him and the boys flopping on the couch, fighting over the remote. “What people?” asked Nora.

  “People.”

  The baby waddled by him, banging plastic keys on the white rim of his walker.

  “What people?” Nora said again, and he said nothing. “Belly, you just leave them alone, and they’ll leave you alone. They let you rot down there, so just stay away from them. Especially that Loretta woman.”

  He unknotted the straps of her purse, tried to keep his hands busy so he wouldn’t slam them down on the table. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Sure, I don’t. Let’s just pretend I don’t know what I’m talking about. That sounds fine.”

  Belly pressed on the kitchen table to raise himself up. His hips were killing him. “Where do you want me?” He picked up the duffel bag.

  “Jesus, I forgot. You’re in the attic. There’s a girl staying in your room.”

  “That was very kind of you,” he said, but she didn’t smile.

  “Ann’s friend is here for the week.” Nora looked at him carefully when she said the name of his second daughter. “She’s staying with us.”

  “She is?” He let the bag slide off his shoulders to the floor.

  “Not Ann. Her friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “Bonnie.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “I gave her the guest room because she’s our guest, and you’re, you know …”

  They looked at each other.

  “What?” he said.

  “Belly, can I just ask you one thing, one favor?”

  “What?”

  Nora opened the dishwasher and set in a couple of dirty plates. Then she picked up a greasy saucer and held on to it for a moment and she said, “I want you to be at Stevie’s confirmation on Sunday.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Lower your voice.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked in a loud whisper.

  “I’m just telling you now so you know. It’s going to be a big affair.” She set the saucer in the dishwasher, rinsed her hands, and called to the boys, “Kids, get your suits.” Then she turned back to Belly. “We’re going around the corner to swim. To Mrs. Radcliffe’s. We do it every afternoon. Join us if you want.”

  Belly stood there with his duffel bag slumped around his feet and said, “I hate water,” and Nora said, “I know,” and she collected the baby and the boys like she was gathering dirty laundry in her arms. She said, “Make yourself at home,” and they were gone and the house was hollow and echoey and hot.

  He looked at the phone, but the phone did not ring. He picked it up, he cradled the receiver in his hand. He put it back. He lit a cigarette with his Maybelline lighter and he looked at her phone number scrawled in junior high school bubble letters on the card, and when he reached for the phone again, he could not remember Loretta’s number. Fifteen years of calling that number, and all of a sudden it was gone. He took it as a sign. He should clean up some before he saw her. He should wait for her to contact him.

  Belly sat down at the kitchen table in his son-in-law Phil’s house, the house that used to belong to Phil’s father and Belly’s ex-best buddy, Phillip Sr. He was Belly’s first friend to die, though they hadn’t been friendly for a long time when he passed; the man did not approve of Belly’s extracurricular activities. When Phillip Sr. used to live here, every house on the street had a menacing look, threatening to collapse. They’d sit on the sagging front porch and drink beer and joke about their kids hooking up and getting married, how the kids would steal their houses from them and banish them to nursing homes. By the time that prophecy half came true, Phillip Sr. wasn’t speaking to him anymore, and the bank had taken Belly’s own house around the corner. Just after their kids got married, Phillip had a heart attack one day while repaving the driveway. There was still that one darker strip of tar, as far as he’d gotten before he keeled over and died, right there by his car.

  In the corner of the kitchen a computer in a shocking shade of green sat atop a plastic desk. The kids’ drawings covered both doors of the fridge, and a printed-out picture from a sonogram was taped on top. Affixed to the left door was a long list of home repairs, almost half of them checked off, and then the ones left blank: the dining-room table, the front porch floor, the side porch steps, the two kitchen cabinets above the dishwasher, the leaky faucet, the stone walkway leading to the kitchen door. A silver medal from field day at the Lake Avenue School was looped around the refrigerator door. He remembered his mother telling him the only reason to have children was to have grandchildren, but already he couldn’t recall their ages. His mother had scolded him for not giving her a grandson. “Four daughters, four daughters. Belly, you’re doomed to a life of women,” she’d said when Eliza, his fourth and final daughter, was born.

  Belly inspected the cupboards. Fluff. Jif. Doritos. Not a
real thing to eat in the house. But he opened the fridge door to find a six-pack of Piels, his old watery favorite. What a good daughter, he thought, as he checked his watch to make sure it was after noon. It was. It was 12:05, and he popped open the can, and that crisp sound called every cell in his body to attention and once it was in his mouth, the hops and barley and the suds and the cold, he thought, I have never been so happy. I have never been this happy in my life. He held the liquid on his tongue for a moment till the carbonation dissolved, and then he swallowed.

  One beer sat stranded in the plastic loop when the side door burst open and Jimi ran inside, his wet suit dripping on the linoleum.

  Jimi came right up to him, then he stopped and looked carefully at Belly’s eyes.

  “Hiya, kid,” Belly said. He felt the whites of his eyes burning red; he felt the pure redemptive power of drunkenness.

  Jimi whispered, “Grampa,” and then climbed onto Belly’s lap. He was wet, the boy was wet, and he made dark circles on Belly’s jeans, his wet hair stuck to Belly’s stubble, and the feel of cold and wet burned on his skin but the boy put his arms around Belly and this was his first embrace in four years. He pressed the child to him.

  “Ow,” said Jimi. He climbed off Belly’s lap and scampered into the TV room.

  “The kid has my eyes,” he said to Nora, who leaned against the counter with the baby on her hip. Stevie Ray stood next to her, holding on to the baby’s foot and glaring at his grandfather. Nora hoisted the baby up higher and then Stevie Ray’s hand hung limp at his side.

  “What’s with you?” Belly asked him.

  “Were you really in jail?” he asked.

  “How old are you, again?”

  “Thirteen,” he said.

  “Shit,” said Belly. “That’s almost old enough to drive.”

  “Were you?” Stevie Ray asked again.

  “You bet,” he said. “Four years of it.”

  “All right, enough.” Nora gave Stevie Ray a light shove. “Upstairs, change, downstairs, dinner.”

  “I don’t want to change,” he said.

  “Stevie, goddammit, go up and change, I said.”