Belly (13 page)

Inside, big metallic machines gnashed and gnawed away, sawdust everywhere, churning out these plates of wood, and for what?
Pallets. Just slabs of tree so people who actually had something to ship, some real product, could do their jobs. In all his
dreams as a boy, he never could have imagined that this is how his life would be, fifty-nine years old and starting a new
job smashing pallets together.

He found Gene in the back office, a dank little room with greenish fluorescents buzzing above. Gene. Fat Gene. Back when Nora
was in high school, Belly and his old pal Phillip Sr. used to call the kid Fat Hands when he came by the house or the bar
to collect her. He hadn’t really gotten fatter, just more swollen, slower, big bags under his eyes and big pores and a big
sad smile. He was the kind of guy you immediately felt sorry for, like you wanted to buy him an ice cream cone or a beer.

“Belly, good to see you.” Gene looked at the big old school clock above the desk. “You’re a little late.”

He should say sorry. He should say, Won’t happen again. He should say, Thanks for the job. But he’d been his own boss for
thirty years. He said, “So this is it, huh? I thought it was a bigger operation.”

“It’s what it is,” Gene said. “It’s a job. Here’s some paperwork to fill out.”

“What is it?”

“An application and stuff. Background.”

“What kind of background?”

“Everybody here has to fill out an application. It’s not a test.” Gene handed him four sheets of paper and a pencil. “You
can sit outside with the guys if you want.”

Belly had nothing in his stomach but the residue of last night’s cheap wine. He made his way to the blinding brightness outside
where the men all sat with packed lunches from their wives. Their wedding bands gleamed in the sun.

He sat down at a table and filled out his name and age and Social Security number, scanned a little notice about health risks
and asbestos and sawdust. Then, for some reason, he could not make his hand grasp the pencil anymore. The connection between
his brain and hands faded in the sun and he couldn’t write anything, not one word could he elicit from his fingertips.

“Where’s your lunch?” asked a man with a walrus mustache. All these men were interchangeable, men with big beer guts and bad
haircuts and ranch houses and pictures of their kids in their wallets. Men leading the good life, the boring life, the empty
life, the life with no adventure and no tall tales. Fucking men. He’d had four years of nothing but men, men’s naked bodies
in the shower, men’s naked bodies doing things to each other Belly never, ever wanted to recall. He’d vowed to himself he
would never be around men again, only women, women forever, and here he was, surrounded.

“Must have misplaced my lunchbox,” Belly said.

“He’s got nothing to eat,” said mustache man, and then the men each took something from their lunchboxes, half a sandwich,
a bag of potato chips, three Oreo cookies, trail mix, Fig Newtons, Doritos, a pile growing bigger and bigger.

“That’s plenty, guys,” Belly said. “Enough.” He looked at the pile. He said, “Thanks.”

Mustache man was looking at Belly and Belly said, “What?”

“We’re taking a poll,” he said. “Not to be rude or anything, but are you the guy? The racetrack guy?”

“That’s me.”

“Belly O’Leary.”

“Live and in person.”

What was the problem? This was great. This was work. Lunch with the guys. Oreos. He could tell his stories, about Loretta,
about the parties in the back room on Travers night. A built-in audience. This would be fine.

“Did you do it?” asked a short guy with a receding hairline.

“What?”

“Did you take all that money from the government?”

“What are you talking about?”

Someone said, “Weren’t you the embezzler?” The guy had cookie crumbs in the corners of his mouth.

“I didn’t embezzle shit,” said Belly.

“From the government? That wasn’t you?”

“There was no embezzling. It was bookmaking.”

“Yeah, but it was all Mafia, right?” asked the short one. “Wasn’t there a whole Mafia thing, some scam, and you took all that
money from the city?”

“That was our tax money,” said cookie-crumb guy. “That was money for my kids’ school.”

Belly felt the wind shift, the mood change. He knew how easily a few men having lunch together could turn into a lynching
mob. He’d seen it many times in the last four years, though he had escaped unscathed. No one in Schuylkill had anything against
him.

“Listen, I’ll tell you what it was,” Belly said, his hands high in the air. “It’s really very simple. Instead of betting at
the track, they bet in my bar, tax-free, and then a few people got more money than they would have, you see what I’m saying?”

The men were all listening to him, five, six men, alert to his every word.

“All it was was more money for the people and less money for the track.”

The men were not convinced.

“Less money for the city,” said cookie crumb.

“It’s all right,” said mustache man. “We’d all do it, too, if we could figure out how.”

That seemed to calm them.

“How much money you make?” one asked.

Belly shrugged.

“Come on, tell us. What are we gonna do, turn you in?”

“A lot,” said Belly. “I made a lot and I blew it all on a woman.”

One guy raised his soda and said, “Here’s to that,” and then they all raised their drinks, or their sandwiches if they didn’t
have a drink, and they toasted to “blowing it all on women.”

“What do you guys think of Gene?” he asked the group.

They exchanged glances.

“What?”

“Aren’t you a friend of his?”

“He’s a friend of my daughter’s.”

“Right. The daughter.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Gene’s fine. He’s what they call one of those micromanagers.”

“What do you mean?”

The short guy said, “He comes over and, like, looks at every pallet to see if the screws aren’t sticking out. This other plant
up in Glens Falls got all these OSHA citations and now he’s obsessed with making sure we don’t do anything wrong.”

“It’s kind of a pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth,” said mustache. “We keep trying to think of how we can get
someone else to be foreman. Get Gene one of those fake promotion things so he can worry about the bills or something and leave
us alone.”

Belly thought, I could be foreman. Bump Gene out of here, out of Nora’s life, boss these boys around. I could get a little
money in my pocket, my own money, maybe even today, and I could call Loretta, tonight I will call Loretta, she must not know
I’m out, that’s why she hasn’t called. He was sweating now, and dreaming, and not really listening to the lunch chatter of
his new companions, some guys to watch the game with, a barbeque, a new apartment, maybe with a deck, a porch, a man must
have a porch to watch the dancers waddle by in their little outfits in the summer. Loretta will fix drinks, he thought. I’ll
tend the grill. It would all work out fine.

And then, again, he could not summon up her phone number. He couldn’t remember. All seven digits were erased from his memory,
and he panicked, and then he was back, in front of the pallet factory with his blank application.

“The only time he’s in a good mood is when your daughter’s around,” said cookie crumb, and then they all started to laugh.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing, just, you know, she’s always around, they’re always in the office having these powwows with the doors closed.”

Belly stood up. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing man, calm down.”

“No, fuck you, you got something to say about my daughter then get up.”

He didn’t know how it happened. He didn’t even know why he cared. So Nora was pregnant and humping her fat high school boyfriend,
so she was cheating in plain view of this captive audience. What business was it of his? But the same way he couldn’t keep
his fingers filling out the application, he couldn’t keep them from flying into the faces of these men, these men who had
donated their lunches to him—now they were the enemy, that’s what his hands thought, they fought without his okay, they reached
for the mustache and the cookie crumbs and the receding hairlines, and then there was Gene, big bubble of referee, pulling
him out, seating him in the corner, the principal’s office, detention, or worse, expulsion, and like that his work day was
done.

D
on’t say anything.” Nora had one hand on the wheel and the other on her unlit cigarette.

“Hand that over,” he said, feeling the other cigarette crushed in his pocket, leaking tobacco in his jeans.

“Nothing!” She was yelling at him. His own daughter, yelling at him.

“I can’t do heavy lifting.”

“Jesus, Dad. Jesus.” She shook her head. He took a cigarette from her pack on the dashboard and smoked it in silence as they
drove down Route 29. They passed a liquor store, and the neon lights called to him, curves of bright red beckoning.

“It was work,” he said again. “Something you wouldn’t know about.”

“I know about work,” she said.

“What job have you ever done?”

“I had my own business once.”

“For about five minutes,” he said. “It folded.”

“So did yours,” she said. “And I was a beer back, illegally, in your very own bar, if you recall,” she said, and then he didn’t
want to talk about it anymore. Why was Nora so stubborn, always trying to fight with him? Why couldn’t she be a good daughter,
like Eliza, or like his third daughter, gentle with her father, and supportive, and sort of far away instead of up in his
face all the time? He remembered what it was like when Nora worked at the bar, how she would obsessively clean the taps and
reorder the top-shelf scotches alphabetically, and how she’d hand him the phone, her whole face encased in scowl, when a client
would call. How she would straighten up his stacks of boxes with the receipts, and cover them with benign labels like “Taxes—1987”
or “Paystubs” or “Napkins,” doing her best to hide his flagrant misdeeds. With his other kids, he could pretend to be an upstanding
citizen, but with Nora, with Nora, he could only be himself, all the loose threads of his flaws hanging out.

Of course she knew everything, knew the contents of every slip of paper in her dead sister’s toe-shoe boxes. She must have
known that someday they would catch him, and she got out long before she could be implicated. A smart girl. So how had she
ended up with this ’50s sort of life, this housewife nightmare, when there was so much she could do?

Inside the house, he watched her remove the skin of an entire apple in one long ribbon of peel, this tiny perfect moment of
home economics, and this was the life she chose. Her boys sat in the next room glued to the TV, waiting for their predinner
snack, baby birds, waiting for their mother to serve them.

Belly looked at the list of repairs on the fridge and then he stood on a chair and opened the cabinets above the sink. They
stuck, so you had to tug with all your might to open them. He inspected the hinges that were rusty and crooked and maybe just
needed some WD-40, a little grease to get them going.

Nora looked up at him.

“You have any 3-in-1 oil?” he asked.

“What are you doing up there?”

“I’m going down the list,” he said. “Cleaning up house.”

“You don’t have to. Gene will do it.”

“That’s all right. I can handle it.”

“Don’t bother, Belly. Come on, come down. We’re going to Eliza’s for dinner.”

“Listen, I had planned to help out around the house. I would have fixed the porch railing, but Gene did that. Maybe I could’ve
cleaned out the gutters, but Gene did it. You know what I’m saying?”

“Not really.”

He could see that Stevie Ray was only half playing the video game. He lowered himself from the chair and hid deeper in the
kitchen, nodded for Nora to follow. The baby waddled by in his walker.

“What?” she asked.

“Listen,” he kept his voice low. “What I’m saying is, you need to leave something for the men to do. The other men, the ones
who live here.” He came and put a hand on her shoulder.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Gene. You and Gene.”

Without taking her eyes off Belly, Nora called over her shoulder, “Boys, go and clean up your rooms. Now.”

They protested lightly and she repeated, “Now,” and they scampered away.

Nora took Belly’s hand off her shoulder and led him to the kitchen table. “Sit down,” she said. He obeyed, and she put the
baby in his high chair, poured herself a cup of decaf, and sat down across from him. “I’m only going to say this once. I never
want to hear you speak about me and Gene. Not ever. You are not to speak one word against that man, or talk about his place
here in this house. He is our family friend, and that’s all. You don’t know anything about any of it.”

“I know what I know,” he said. “I got the fill-in from Margie, not to mention the whole pallet factory.”

“Don’t,” she said.

Jimi called from upstairs, “Mom, Stevie broke my Game Boy.”

“He broke it himself. He stepped on it.” Their screams echoed through the house.

“Stevie, apologize to your brother,” she called up through the vent. “I’ll be right up.”

“Go ahead,” said Belly. “We’ll talk more about this later.”

“We will never talk about this again.” Jimi was crying now, heavy sobs filtering through the house. “It’s okay, sweetie, I’m
coming.”

“You should have had girls,” he said. “That’s your problem right there. Boys will give you nothing but trouble.”

“Watch the baby,” she said, and headed upstairs.

He did. He watched the baby. He lifted King and took him back into the TV room, he sat on the couch and flipped on Animal
Planet and put the baby on the floor, surrounded by a rainbow ring of plastic toys. The baby had a full head of brown hair,
and Phil’s brown eyes, the same chubby cheeks Nora had as a baby. At least the baby looked like Phil, as far as he could remember.
The man was never home for Belly to lay eyes on. The kid must be Phil’s. Gene had some kind of light-colored eyes, and once
his third daughter had explained it to him, how brown eyes have the most power and blue eyes have the least and if the two
parents had light eyes their children would have light eyes and if one parent had light eyes and the other had dark eyes it
could go either way, and how if both parents had dark eyes then you could never tell. But two light-eyed parents could not
have a dark-eyed baby, so this baby could not be Gene’s. The baby had brown eyes.