Belly Read online

  He sat up and saw morning just beginning to creep into the room. He was hollowed out; someone, something, had just reached in and scooped out his organs, and hot air blew through him. Once he’d lost the crown off his right incisor, and each time he ate or drank, each time he breathed, a sharp, angry ache ripped into his gums. He had that same feeling, only now it focused in his heart, it beat against him.

  Maybe I’m having a heart attack, he thought. But he knew what it was and how to cure it.

  He did not turn the light on in the kitchen, just felt his way to the counter, rubbed his fingers along the liquor cabinet until he found the handle, and fumbled through the bottles. It didn’t matter which one. He pulled one down and unscrewed the cap and tilted his head back and poured. Cheap tequila burned the back of his throat and melted the ache away.

  He shuffled back to the couch and laid himself down, dizzy now as light filled the room, and he closed his eyes for a few more moments of sleep. He vowed that today he would be kind and keep sober, not lose his temper or his mind. He would start anew and do better this time.

  When he opened his eyes again, his youngest daughter peered down at him. His first night’s sleep as a free man in four years, and he’d spent it on the old plaid couch that once hugged the dirty walls above War Bar. For just a moment, he felt he was back there, in the old place, Eliza waking him before school to get a permission slip signed or tell him she’d be sleeping at Margie’s that night. But now his new hips pressed into the nubby fabric and he knew how much time had passed.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  The word softened him, his bones. He thought all the flesh would just melt off his body. Nobody called him Daddy anymore.

  Eliza sat down on the couch and he sat up. She wrapped her arms around him, her pale, freckled forearms clasping one another around his neck. She was still so skinny. He didn’t want to hug her for fear of cracking her.

  “Are you okay? Are you adjusting okay? I brought you a hemp bar.” She handed him a hard block of what looked like wood coated in Saran Wrap.

  “Are you still doing that health-food thing? Jesus, kid, you need to eat a steak.”

  He saw her mouth twist a little, her nose twitch.

  “What?”

  She withdrew from him. “Your breath.”

  “I just woke up.”

  She stroked his hand and stared so hard into his eyes that he felt her pupils pressing against him, some unanswered question in the black circles.

  “What?” he asked again.

  “You smell like alcohol.”

  “Oh, well. That.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “I had one drink. Last night.” This was true if “night” meant after eleven and before six.

  “You smell like a bar.”

  He could still feel the numbing power of this morning’s tequila and last night’s beer, that floating sensation he’d missed so much while he was away. He wanted it again, wanted to lie down and let the alcohol carry him off, carry him back to Before.

  “I thought they’d cured you of that. I thought you couldn’t drink there.”

  He thought, She can’t even say the word. His sweet little girl, his youngest, she always danced around an issue and never landed inside it. He put his arm around her and whispered “prison” in her ear.

  “I know,” she said. “I thought they fixed you.” His little puritan princess, this one was. For one of those hippie types, she was the most uptight, the one who used to sniff his breath at night if he needed to drive, who checked his room for unexpected guests, for anything with the appearance of impropriety. Poor kid. He gave her so much to fret about.

  “It’s not illegal or anything. I’m not doing anything illegal.” He put his right hand over his heart. “I will not do anything illegal.”

  She continued to stare at him, to squint her eyes and try to cull some information from him, some promise he couldn’t make.

  “What?”

  “Just be sober on Sunday, okay? For Stevie’s confirmation. And don’t forget to show up.”

  “You, too? What’s with you girls? Why wouldn’t I be there?”

  Eliza looked at her hands, and he felt nervous again, and sick, and too sober.

  “Why couldn’t God give me just one boy?”

  “You’ve got sons-in-law. It’s the next best thing.”

  “Oh, right. Your chubby little health-food Jew is just what I wanted.”

  Eliza pulled her lank blond hair into a ponytail, and she pasted a smile on her face. “I missed you, Belly.”

  “Oh, sure you did.”

  “I did.”

  Eliza stood up. She traced a line in the dust on the TV set. Belly spread himself out on the couch, lifted his right leg till his titanium hip screamed for him to stop. He wanted nothing more than to sleep, to sleep all day, to erase the four years of dawn wake-up calls, four years of strange sideways sleep-deprivation, of rising just when he felt it was time for bed.

  “You want me to help you?” she asked. “I could take the day off.”

  “Help me with what?”

  “Whatever you have to do.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “I don’t know. Nora knows. You have to see your parole officer, you have to get a job, stuff like that.”

  “There’s plenty of time for that.”

  “No, there isn’t,” she said.

  He sat up on the couch, and she stood silhouetted in the window.

  “If I need help, I’ll tell you,” he said, but that did not seem to satisfy her. “How’s the art world? Still piddling with the paints?”

  She smiled into her lap.

  “What?” he asked her. “What?”

  “Yes. Still piddling. With the paints. Sort of.” She reached into her purse and took out a small notebook wrapped in tinted aluminum foil and handed it to him. The front cover was made of wobbly cardboard, and inside, blank pages of thick, uneven paper crinkled.

  “I made it myself,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said, fingering the foil. “Is it candy or something?”

  “It’s an artist’s book. It’s my art.”

  “Can you make money at this?”

  She blinked big and slow, like a baby doll. “I’m not the one who has to worry about making money,” she said quietly.

  “What? Can you say that a little louder, please?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?” he yelled.

  “Not everybody wants to make lots of money.” She said, in a too-soothing voice, an imitation-maple-syrup voice, “Some of us would rather have less money and more integrity,” softly, with too much sincerity, and he felt the weight of his empty pockets and empty wallet, and he felt last night’s alcohol rise, he heard his own words come out with a wisp of slur, he watched her slump and make herself small like a feeble little animal, watched her seal her mouth in a tiny, fake smile.

  “You’re still just a little mouse. Look at you, skinny little mouse. You were supposed to be the strong one.”

  Eliza wobbled a little as she stood. She worked her lips into a wavering smile. She was still frail, and she looked afraid, but he hadn’t noticed how tall she was, how she towered over him as he sank into the couch.

  “Welcome home,” she said, and she turned and went into the kitchen. He heard Eliza and Nora mumble in conspiracy, heard Nora laugh and Eliza make those murine, sad sounds of hers.

  Belly rose, rubbed his eyes, stretched his arms, massaged the scars on his hips. He wound his way upstairs and to the bathroom. He turned on the water and tested with his hand until the temperature was just right. He slipped out of his boxers and tried to climb over the rim of the clawfoot tub, but his hips would not allow it, so he sat on the porcelain ledge and carefully swung one leg over and then the other, trying to ignore the fact that he was old. He lifted his arms and turned like a ballerina once under the spray, then turned the wate
r off and stepped out and shook himself like a dog. He estimated the whole operation took under fifteen seconds.

  Money or time, his grandfather always told him, a man can have money or time. He had no assets now, bank accounts depleted, pockets empty, and the days stretched out before him endlessly, punctuated here and there with a few minor appointments. He had three or four days in which to find a job, to find an answer to the inevitable question that would be posed to him Sunday at Stevie Ray’s confirmation: What now?

  He knew Loretta had his money, and he knew she was still somewhere in his town. He could feel it.

  He walked up one more flight to the stifling attic, took out a clean pair of jeans and another white button-down shirt. One of the things you long for in prison is to wear your own clothes, and now he saw his wardrobe contained replicas of the same outfit, day after day in a kind of no-man’s uniform.

  His wife, Myrna, used to read the same book to the girls every night, a big red hardcover they’d taken out of the library and never returned. It was called something like When I Grow Up, and the one night a week he was there at bedtime, he always read it to them. It showed a Mexican fireman, a white lady-doctor, a black policeman, and a black lady-teacher. He knew it was supposed to show the girls that they could have any kind of job they wanted—black or white, man or woman, it didn’t matter—but somehow the book had shut off his imagination: now, when he tried to summon up some vision of his future employment, the only choices before him were those four.

  He made his way downstairs and to the kitchen, where Nora was waiting for him, and he told her, “I’ve decided to be a Mexican fireman.”

  She said, “Great. Let’s go. Your appointment’s in fifteen minutes.”

  “Where’s Eliza?”

  “Work,” she said, lifting up the baby in her arms. “Work. Heard of it?”

  “What about the boys?”

  “Swimming at the Radcliffes. Let’s go.”

  He watched the strip malls flicker like a TV screen along the highway as they drove to Ballston Spa. The town’s Main Street was sleepy and slow, and he remembered that this was the original Saratoga Springs, but the water had dried up and they lost their resort privileges to the big brother next door. There wasn’t one apartment available in all of Saratoga in August, but here “For Rent” signs peered from windows all over town. He could probably find a little studio for two hundred bucks a month, a carpeted hideaway where his daughters couldn’t find him and he could work just a few hours a week to make the rent, spend the rest of his time drinking alone in leisure.

  There was nothing spa-like about Ballston Spa: it was a northeastern ghost town. But it was beautiful, it was much more beautiful, really, than Saratoga, with its unassuming buildings no one bothered to renovate, all sitting patiently on Main Street not even waiting for change. All the cruddy storefronts had put in lace trimmings and changed their signs from “Junk” to “Antiques.” Nobody believed it.

  Nora dropped him off in front of the drab county office building, a big box of beige stucco.

  “How about you get your license renewed sometime this week?” she asked.

  “Oh, like you’re too busy to drive an old man around.”

  “I am busy,” said Nora, putting the car in reverse.

  “Pick me up in half an hour,” he called after her.

  Inside it was just as beige and so air-conditioned he perspired even more, big jewels of sweat under his pits. A male receptionist—he looked mildly retarded with his jowly jaw, eyes too close together, and a pinstriped oxford shirt buttoned all the way to the top—sat at the front desk.

  “Did you used to live at the Furness House?” Belly asked him.

  The man looked up. “Can I help you?”

  Belly saluted him. “I’m reporting to my parole officer within forty-eight hours.”

  “Name?”

  “William O’Leary.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “I’d rather stand if it’s all right with you.” He patted his hips. “It’s hard on the old joints getting up and down.”

  The man didn’t look retarded anymore. He looked mean. “Sit,” he said.

  The only magazines in the waiting area were the self-help kind—lists of job agencies and healthy-living stuff. There was even a whole magazine for walking. If Belly opened up a place for people who’d just gotten out of jail, there would be Playboys all around. Walking. He shook his head at the strange ways of the working world.

  “Mr. O’Leary?”

  It was just his luck his parole officer had to be a good-looking redhead. Good-enough-looking, anyway.

  “Belly,” he said.

  “Come on back, Belly.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “You can call me Ms. Monroe.”

  He followed her down a long line of beige cubicles, watching her butt sway in her tight jeans. The face, the face was take it or leave it, but the ass was nonnegotiable.

  “What’s your first name, Ms. Monroe?” he asked.

  “Ms. Monroe,” she said. “Have a seat.”

  Her cubicle’s prefab walls were covered in uplifting prints and slogans. A poster Nora had as a child hung above Ms. Monroe’s desk: a gray kitten dangling from a tree with “Hang in there” written underneath. Only Ms. Monroe had crossed it out and tacked on a piece of paper that read Quit your complaining.

  She looked over his file. “How’s it going?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “That good, huh?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Adjusting okay?”

  “It’s only been a day.”

  She took a copy of his release plan from his file and listed one by one everything he had agreed to and he nodded at the whole list and when she was done he said, “You want me to pee in a cup and then I can go?”

  We could walk across the street to Wendy’s, he thought, and sit in a booth and drink Frosties till our mouths are nearly numb and then we’ll warm each other’s tongues. It’ll be just like high school, but good.

  But Ms. Monroe looked up from his file and said, “Actually, I’ll decide whether you require a urinalysis. I’ll decide how quickly you need to find employment and if that employment is suitable. I’ll be visiting you at your residence and determining if that residence is satisfactory. So I suggest you take this seriously.”

  He wanted to kiss her.

  “What’s going on with the job hunt?”

  “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s plenty of time.”

  “It’s hard because I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Well, get one,” she said. “That problem’s solved. What about the job here?” She tapped on the file.

  “My daughter just arranged that for parole purposes. It’s not a real job offer.”

  “That’s not the kind of thing you want to tell a parole officer. That constitutes fraud.”

  Belly uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, resting his elbows on her desk. “Okay, it was a real live job offer, but it’s not a job I want. I’m not working at the pallet company with my daughter’s boyfriend, or whatever he is. I’m going to find something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” He took a pencil from her desk and twirled it in his fingers. “I can’t do anything.”

  “What did you do before you worked in a bar?”

  “I went to high school.”

  “What other job did you have?”

  “Is this a trick question?” His longing to kiss her shortened and shrank. When did all the women get so hard?

  “It’s in your file, that’s why I’m asking. You put it down here when you made your release plan.”

  He thought back to that one summer, his last summer of freedom before he met Myrna and knocked her up. He was a roofer, long hot days in the sun with strips of tar paper and a hammer, a belt with pockets for his number eights and sixteens weighing down his hips. It was the only job he had where he could see evide
nce of change. At the bar he saw patrons get drunk and drunker, he saw them fluff up or deplete bank accounts, but only when he worked construction did he see something grow and shift until it became a home instead of a shelter.

  “I’m too old for that,” he said. “I have fake hips.”

  “There are plenty of jobs like that without heavy lifting.”

  “You want me to drive a backhoe?”

  “Why not?” Ms. Monroe closed his file. “Is there anything else you like to do? Anything you’ve always dreamed of?”

  “I love to tango,” he said. His feet automatically shifted a little at the sound of the word. He’d drunk and he’d screwed, but he hadn’t danced yet.

  “I’m serious,” said Ms. Monroe.

  “So am I.”

  “Listen, I’m giving you a week to find a job. I want you to have a certified offer of employment by next Monday. We’ll meet again on Friday morning to see where you’re at.” She shut the file and looked at him. “Get it?”

  “Why don’t we continue this conversation over a drink?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re drinking. Drinking is not allowed. You need a copy of your release plan?”

  “No, no, I have a copy. I’ve got the thing memorized.”

  She put his file in a metal holder, then she tapped a pencil on the desk and looked at him out the corners of her eyes. “Listen, here’s what I want to tell you: expect chaos.”

  “I do.”

  “No, really. Just expect it to be rough, and then you won’t be surprised when it is.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She handed him a form and told him to get it signed by anyone he talked to about work.

  “Mr. O’Leary,” she said. “I just want to remind you: You can’t drink. You can’t gamble. You cannot work in any establishment that serves alcohol or promotes gambling. But the rest of the world is open to you. It’s a whole sea of opportunity, so get on it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, and she nodded for him to leave.