Belly Read online

  “Who lives there now?”

  “Yuppies,” Nora said. “City people who come up on the weekends.” She straightened up, slowly, holding on to the creaking rail. “So you’re going to the pallet factory tomorrow, right? Gene says you can work in the office, if you want. I imagine you know a little bit about bookkeeping.”

  Belly looked at Nora. “It wasn’t all me,” he said.

  “I know, I know it.”

  “There were lots of other people in on it, too.”

  “I know, Belly. You don’t have to tell me.”

  He looked at Nora, swollen Nora with her secret fat boy-friend and her whiny children and her absent husband and he said, “Okay.”

  “I’ll take you over there tomorrow afternoon.”

  Belly pressed on the sagging wooden plank beneath his feet and it gave a little, so splinters of dead wood poked through. “All right,” he said. “Okay.”

  Belly walked down Caroline Street, crowded and teeming with drunken tourists.

  He had lived in this town all his life, as had his father, and he didn’t recognize a soul. Somewhere in this milling mess of people, he was certain, walked Loretta and the NYRA boys and his old clients and his regulars. They must have found a new home somewhere, maybe at the ridiculous fancy bar Loretta preferred near the end.

  He crossed Broadway, the dividing line between east and west, and headed behind the bank, to the big blight of a supermarket they called the Ghetto Chopper—the slum version of Price Chopper. He bought two bottles of cheap Cabernet and a plastic pocket combination corkscrew/ bottle opener and headed back south, through the perfectly restored little enclave of Franklin Square with its Italianate mansions that now housed a bridal shop and a funeral home.

  He hooked back to Broadway and stood in front of the visitors’ center, looking at the pretty little bungalow of a building, the numbers 1915—the year it was built—sunk into a block of cement below it. He was a tourist in his own town, and the thought made him so thirsty. He kept walking till the sidewalk ended, all the way to that once-abandoned Tudor building by the state park that now housed the Museum of Dance. It was lit from below, looming like a mausoleum; the half-timber poked from the stucco like it was trying to break loose.

  Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would not drink, he would not be cruel, he would follow the rules and obey. He would sober up and have his shit together by Sunday. He just needed one more night of swimming in alcohol, of losing himself in it, and then he would come back. He sat on the dried-up lawn while cars streamed along Route 9, he opened both bottles with his new corkscrew and he drank one while he waited for the other to breathe. He felt sorry for the grass, so brittle and beige and begging for rain. Even after the sun set the air was still thick, and he laid his head back on the lawn and waited for the world to cool.

  He saw the women of his life swaying before him, his daughters, mistress, wife, parole officer all dancing on the SPAC stage, led by some prima ballerina in a toga, a girl with a beautiful, doll-like face. He was on the dais, prostrate, the women as whirling dervishes around him, concocting some spell, choreographing a tour of his wrongs and misdeeds, his grand mistakes. They were lifting him up without touching him, the lady in the toga—it was Grace Kelly in Rear Window—leaning over him, tickling him with her blue eyes and blond hair and her perfect features till he could stand the tickling no longer and he reached out to grab her by the hair and her hair came tumbling out.

  It was the grass. The grass tickled his face. His face was in the grass, sharp little blades digging into his cheeks. He’d drunk both bottles, slipped straight into oblivion and did not realize it till he was on his way home. He raised himself on his wobbly hips and his knees were stained green and the world seemed new in that moment, and also it seemed like a big mean place, like a woman with a full cart of groceries who would not step aside to let him buy his one little thing.

  The walk home was long and hot and then he felt a few drops of rain. He thought, The rain is coming, but it was only a small rain, a sprinkle that taunted him, and when it left, the temperature rose like a laugh that gets bigger before it stops abruptly and makes you wonder what was funny in the first place.

  CHAPTER 3

  IN THE morning Bonnie nudged Belly awake. “You’re on the couch again,” she said.

  “I can’t make it up to the attic.” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. He’d slept in his clothes, and the zipper of his jeans had carved a neat vee in the flat skin of his stomach.

  “Coffee?” She handed him a rainbow mug with big brown letters that read World’s Greatest Mom.

  “Aw, you’re sweet,” he said. “For a man-hater.”

  She laughed. “I was warned about your tongue.”

  “Oh yeah? You been talking to my old girlfriends?” Something about this girl opened him, or closed him, he couldn’t tell which, something that compelled him to push on her or pull her toward him.

  “Well, no, that’s not what I mean, but more power to you. I heard you already found yourself a nice young one.”

  “Maybelline.”

  Bonnie handed him a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. “She called four times last night.”

  He crumpled the paper and tossed it toward the trashcan. He missed. “She’s just a distraction.”

  “From what?” Bonnie asked.

  “Anybody else call?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. You can ask Nora when she comes back. She said to tell you that you’re going to the pallet factory around 12:30 so you better haul your ass up and look for another job if you want one.”

  “What a sweet girl.”

  Belly got up and stretched, set his coffee mug on the TV, went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He’d skipped toothbrushing for two nights, and now he felt the enamel coated in a filmy mush. He came back and Bonnie was still sitting on the couch, those long legs, those tight jeans—even her knees were sexy—and he picked up the mug and sat down next to her. He was too tired this morning to summon his disapproval. He hated her for making him want her.

  “Are you excited for Stevie’s confirmation?” she asked.

  “I don’t know if that’s the word. I just hope I don’t catch fire the moment I set foot in St. Peter’s.”

  “Been out sinning?” she asked.

  “For years.”

  “Well, you went in there all these years you were divorced and nothing happened, right?”

  Belly rested the mug on his pants. “Who said I was divorced?”

  “Ann did.”

  “I’m Catholic,” he said.

  She said, “So am I.”

  “Well, I never divorced her, and as far as I know she never divorced me.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “But you wear no ring.”

  “Never did. Men didn’t wear rings back when I got married, back in the Stone Age.”

  Belly’s hips were stiff and his head ached and his mouth was dry and his gums were sore and parts of last night were chipped and faded or not there at all, and he did not want to talk about his wife.

  “Listen,” said Bonnie. “I don’t want to offend you or anything, but I have the feeling that if you keep drinking and don’t go out and look for a job you’re going to piss some people off.”

  “Oh, people,” he said. “You mean my family?”

  “Yes. Your family. Sounds like your parole officer, too.”

  “What can they do? Send me to prison? I’ve been there, and I can tell you, it’s starting to seem like a pleasant alternative to this nuthouse.” His empty words did not impress her; he didn’t even believe himself.

  “I highly doubt that.”

  He shrugged. “I still have a few days to get a job before I violate my parole, and the least the family can do is, you know, give me a little time to relax.” He looked for his cigarettes but could not find them. They seemed to have fallen from his pocket, swallowed up by last night’s grass. He searched through the kitchen cabinets until he found Nora’s mostly u
ntouched Marlboros, snuck one from the pack, and returned to the couch. “My family’s not the ones I have to worry about pissing off, anyway, ” he said.

  Bonnie lingered there a moment, her mouth opening and closing like a dying bass. What did she want to know, what did she want to tell him? He could see her fingers tapping at the couch cushions, wanting to walk toward his hands, what? Maybe she wanted to comfort him, and he wanted the comfort, too much: it made him feel sick.

  “I’m going downtown now, anyway. I’ve got something lined up.”

  “Sure you do,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Bonnie pulled her hair back in a ponytail, taunting him with that long neck.

  He said, “You’re leaving? What a shame,” and he smiled at her so she stood and shook her head. He smoothed out his shirt and rebuttoned his jeans and snapped his folded hand open and shut in a fake wave good-bye to his daughter’s wife. He put the unlit cigarette to his lips and pretended to smoke it, just like Nora did.

  When she left he felt the ghosts of Nora and Phil and the children following him around the house. He turned on the radio, a song: That ass, the dick or What a Wonderful World or too-smooth country music, and he turned it off. He sat in the brown recliner and the TV talked to him about elands and football and the heat wave and the big Whitney race and a girl who’d tumbled into a stretch of the Hudson overflowing with PCBs. He listened to the television chatter and to the telephone’s silence and when the same thought bubbled up inside him he said aloud, “Stop thinking about that.” He said, “No,” he said, “I don’t care,” he talked himself inside out but the thought would not go away. “I’ve got to get a job.” The word, job, felt like a prescription to spend the rest of his life in a dentist’s chair.

  By now, they should have called him. They should have sent Loretta over with his money and acclaim, maybe a mysterious letter from the bank that Nora’s mortgage had been paid. But their silence felt like a warning now, like an omen: he was on his own.

  He thought of one thing, one small possibility that lingered in his peripheral vision, a long shot. He tucked his shirt in and ran his fingers through his hair and he walked downtown, this time taking Circular to Lake and dipping down the steep hill, past the firehouse and the police station, avoiding the old War Bar altogether.

  The empty corridors of City Hall echoed, the marble floors so shiny they looked wet. It was over-air-conditioned in the lobby. It was fucking freezing, and somehow that made pools of nervous perspiration swim inside his shirt. He was a teenager again, again an insecure, unsettled adolescent, as if the first round hadn’t been bad enough.

  The building hadn’t changed much since he’d first walked in there, almost thirty years before, to file a DBA. The way it had worked, the way it had always worked in Saratoga, was you got the Republican chairman’s imprimatur on any piece of paperwork and you got what you wanted: a building permit, a summer job at the track, your parking tickets waived. Belly just figured he would walk down to City Hall and someone there—McSweeny or Bill Fisk or any of the NYRA boys lingering in the halls—would find him a sinecure, or shake his hand, leaving a rolled-up wad of twenties stuck to the palm. Somebody there would repay him for his silence.

  He eyed the empty halls and no one burst from the doors to greet him. He waited a minute, two minutes, and then he looked at the directory—small white letters on a felt board, so old-fashioned—but he knew none of the names written there. No McSweeny, no Fisk, nothing familiar on that whole right-hand panel of the board except Margie Kessel, town planner, Eliza’s sister-in-law. So he would not see his people yet. They were still hiding. They were waiting for the right time to contact him, that was it. They were waiting for the dust to settle, to make sure the new DA—whoever that was—hadn’t fitted him with a wire or tapped his daughter’s phone line before they came to give him back his money and his woman and his life.

  He moved his hips up the one wide flight of stairs to an office with drop ceilings where a secretary sat behind a too-tall desk. She had nice eyes but her hair was too big.

  “Margie Kessel here?”

  “Your name?” she asked, keeping her eyes trained on a messy pile of papers.

  “Belly O’Leary.” She looked up then, took him in. He knew she was putting a face to the name in the headlines. He ran his hands through his hair before he folded his arms across his chest.

  “I’ll tell her you’re here. Have a seat.”

  He lowered himself into a hard plastic chair, picked up a lone copy of National Geographic dated 1983. Spit and Spat, the statues in Congress Park, were on the cover, young children playing in the pool between them.

  “This is a strange surprise,” said Margie from down the dark hallway. She motioned for him to come toward her. “Step into my office.”

  He nodded, raised himself from the seat, and followed her like a pet. Her office was a small room with very high ceilings and one huge window sealed shut. It was covered in papers, blueprints, odd little maps with tiny colored plots. “What a mess,” he said. “What’s with the temperature?”

  “Hot outside, hot inside,” she said. “AC’s broken in here. Sit down.” Her armpits had half-moons of sweat stains beneath them.

  He pulled a chair up to the desk and sank into it. The air-conditioning hummed overhead, dripping Freon into an old rusty bucket.

  “You seem to have some trouble getting around,” she said.

  “New hips.”

  “When’d you get those?”

  “Prison,” he said.

  “Great. That’s just what I want my tax dollars to pay for. New hips for old criminals.”

  “Do you have to always start a fight?” he asked.

  “Do you?”

  He looked at his lap. “Bill Fisk here anymore?”

  “Not for ages. Can’t you tell? It even smells better in here.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “This is a much better place to work without the old Republican guard in place. I know they were your friends, but it was very hard to get anything done.”

  He nodded. Okay, he thought, they’re really gone. All of his old friends had vacated the premises, the plan. He was alone with no friends at City Hall now, no one downtown to save him.

  “Do you mind telling me what the hell you’re doing here?” she asked.

  He took a deep breath. “Listen.” He pressed his hands against the air in a gesture of stopping. “I thought you might help me get a job.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I mean, you were talking about the Small Business Association and everything, and maybe there’s some job for me. I had a bar for thirty years, maybe I can kill the corporate takeover, make sure the Golden Grill doesn’t close up shop.”

  “Have you been down Phila Street, Belly? The Golden Grill is gone. It’s a café.”

  “Another one?”

  “Listen, you’re just in time for the reign of the big-box shop. Wal-Mart’s the biggest corporation in America and one just opened up by the old mall.”

  “I didn’t know there was a new mall.”

  “My advice to you, Belly, is to go out there and get yourself a job at the Wal-Mart, in the liquor section or something, if they have one. They’re hiring a couple hundred people.”

  “That’s rich.”

  “Listen, the economy was really good until about two weeks ago, so a million of these giant stores moved in over the last couple of years, thanks to a nice tax break courtesy of the governor. We got Target, Lowe’s, Home Depot, whatever you like. Those are the jobs, unless you want to work at Ball or GE or Quad Graphics and those are heavy union and all the guys your age are already collecting their pensions.” Margie blew her nose. “You brought the rain with you when you came.”

  Belly covered his mouth with his hands. He said, “Fuck.”

  “Why don’t you go work for Gene? He’s got that thing he does with the wooden things.”

  “Pallets.”
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br />   “That’s right. The pallet company. Nora will know all the details.” Margie winked at him.

  “What’s that mean?”

  Margie looked at her hands, stretched her fingers, and twisted her wedding ring.

  “Haven’t you seen him? He’s at Nora’s house every day.” She coughed. “Maybe he’s just steering clear for your return.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows.”

  “Everybody knows what?”

  “About Nora and Gene.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, though he knew, and he didn’t want to know.

  “Listen, it’s not my place to talk about it. It’s Nora’s affair.”

  “What the hell do you mean by affair?”

  “Don’t give yourself a heart attack, Belly. You probably won’t get the government to pay the medical bills now.”

  He sank back in his seat. “I’m so thirsty,” he said.

  “Belly, thanks for stopping by. I have to work now.”

  He tugged at the collar of his shirt. “It’s so hot in here.”

  “It’s an old building,” she said, and she placed a hand on his shoulder as he rose.

  They stood there for a moment. He knew she was waiting for him to leave, and he looked at his shoes, he looked at the fluorescent greenish light flickering in the ceiling, he looked at the stained, gray, corporate carpet on the floor, and still he did not move.

  “Is there something else?” she asked.

  He kept his eyes trained on the condensation forming on the windowpanes as he asked her, “Can you sign this form?”

  “What is it?”

  “I have to show my parole officer I was looking for a job.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, but she wrote her initials in the appropriate place on the form.

  “Listen, Belly. Good luck. I mean it.”

  He said, “Thanks,” and walked down the hot, dark hallway, out the building into the blazing sun, and he did not know which direction to walk. He felt like a man with no zip code as he headed home to his daughter’s house.