Belly (18 page)

“You know how to type?” Belly asked. “They teach you typing already? When I was your age only the girls took typing, and the
boys took shop.” Stevie Ray ignored him.

The computer made a terrible whining sound and the screen turned blue and then white. Stevie Ray typed something in and another
screen opened and he said, “You can do it now.”

“How do you make it go to someone?”

“What’s the e-mail address?”

“How should I know?”

“Who are you writing to?”

“Your aunt.”

“Which one?”

“Ann, dammit. I’m writing to Ann. Make it go to Ann.”

Stevie Ray typed her address at the top.

“Is that the real CBS?”

“Yeah. She took us to the studio where Dan Rather does the news and everything.”

“Well.” He could think of no response. “He’s probably a mean boss.”

“She makes a lot of money.”

“Probably not that much.”

“You can type now, Grampa.”

Stevie Ray got up off the chair.

“Where you going?”

“I don’t want to see.”

Stevie Ray headed toward the living room and Belly called, “What do I do when I’m done?”

“Hit
send.
”

Belly typed. He picked out the words with two fingers as they came into his head. He did not read over what he’d written,
he just typed and typed and hit
send.

“Stevie,” he called. “Turn this thing off.”

“Belly,” Nora stood in the doorway. “What did you just do?” She pressed some buttons on the computer and the screen went dark.

“I e-mailed.”

“Who?”

“Your sister.”

“Which one?”

“Listen, I just want to let her know that I know that homosexuals are sinners.”

Nora opened the fridge and took out a Piels, opened the can, and handed it to him. “Okay, go ahead and believe that.”

“Thanks, I will.”

“Kids,” Nora called. “Change out of your suits and get ready for dinner. We’re going out.” She turned to Belly. “Thursday
is family night. We have pizza at the restaurant with Phil, up at the bar.” She hesitated and he wondered if she wanted him
to come.

“Very wholesome,” he said. “Good wholesome family fun.”

He vaguely remembered something like that in his own household, some weekly dinner, one night he would take off and spend
with the girls, a ritual he looked forward to every week. A real gourmet feast. He tried to recall where this happened, and
when, but then it came to him: it was only a TV show his third daughter used to watch. It never happened to them. What they
really ate, what Myrna fixed them, was spaghetti, pizza, grilled cheese, hamburgers. It was basically the kids’ meal at Friendly’s.
Really, prison food was better than Myrna’s crummy culinary creations. He thought of telling Nora that, but then maybe she
would want to know more, more about prison. Or worse, maybe she would want to know nothing. He wanted to go with them to dinner
but he didn’t know how to ask.

She came to him, she reached her hand out for his and he took it. She pressed her palm against his palm and when she removed
it he was left with a fifty-dollar bill stuck to his lifeline.

B
elly sat on the couch in the empty house and flipped through every channel on the TV three times and drank beer and smoked
cigarettes on the porch. He put the fifty in his wallet and let it brew there. Then he climbed the stairs to Nora’s room,
he opened the drawers of her dresser one by one: underwear, socks, diaphragm, rubber things he did not want to identify, and
he did not know what he was looking for until he found a Ziploc bag with two joints stashed behind her short-sleeved shirts.
Underneath the bag hid a pile of crisp twenty-dollar bills and he looked at them for a moment. He put out his index finger
and pressed on the pile—trying to remember what it felt like to hold a wad like that, to remember how you could feel the weight
of a grand or two or ten. He didn’t want to, he didn’t mean to, but he picked up a twenty, he lifted six twenties from the
pile and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans.

He sat on her chenille bedspread and smoked one joint and looked at the pictures affixed to her mirror, pictures of her children
and her mother and her husband and Gene, Eliza with Henry and Ann with Bonnie and then an old school photograph with his third
daughter smiling in the center.

Ann was still gone and Eliza was going and the third daughter had been gone such a long time. Myrna had left him and Loretta
had forsaken him and he wondered which, if any, of these women would come back. Who would stay with him?

Downstairs, back in the TV room, the heat was unbearable. Belly lay in the fringed La-Z-Boy recliner waiting for night to
set in, for Nora and the children to return so someone could distract him from himself. He lay in the chair with a Piels in
one hand and the remote in the other and he thought, This cannot be my life. It’s Thursday night and this can’t be my life.

Outside the sun was setting; an orange haze seeped into the house and out the window he could see a sliver of moon rising.
He raised himself up and stood on the back porch and watched the sun fall behind the trees, felt the heat intensify when it
should diffuse, and he could not name the feeling settling in his solar plexus but he knew it was unbearable and he knew no
amount of alcohol could cure it.

Then an apparition rose from the sidewalk: a black figure circled in light, a walking silver lining. It could be Loretta,
or Phillip Sr., or his third daughter. It could be someone called back from the beyond to retrieve him, and he steadied himself,
he readied himself, for the next world.

It was only Eliza. Eliza walked down the driveway, silhouetted against the fiery sky. She walked up to him and took his hand
and said, “Belly, I thought maybe you could use some company.”

He shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said.

“You want to do some errands with me? I need a few things before I leave tomorrow.”

“No,” he said.

She said, “Please? Daddy, please?” and he turned and looked at his youngest child, her pale stringy hair and her pale eyes,
everything about her light against the darkening sky and he felt something strange, some foreign object clogging his throat.
I’m giving birth to an egg out my mouth, he thought, and then he coughed and made a sound and he thought, What is happening
to me, what is this? and Eliza put her skinny little arms around him and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, Daddy,” and he still
didn’t know, he could not see out his left eye and he let his head hang down on her bony shoulder and he shook and her shoulder
was wet. It was all over in a minute. Then the sky was dark.

Eliza said, “Come on, Belly, I’ll take you with me.”

He put his beer can on the back porch steps and let her lead him around the corner to her house, to her old Subaru station
wagon, and he strapped himself in the seat. She drove down Union, past the bed and breakfast where the retards used to live
and past the mansions and past the racetrack and the arts colony and he said finally, “Where are we going?”

“Wal-Mart,” she said, shifting into fifth gear.

“Oh, Jesus, what the hell?”

“What?” she said. “What’s the problem?”

“You’re the last person who should be going to a place like that.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Aren’t you and Margie the antichain gang or something? You hippie types hate that shit.” He wondered if she’d spoken with
Margie, if this was the official Wal-Mart intervention program, national get-your-father-a-crappy-job day. But he looked at
Eliza and everything about her seemed far away, disinvested. His youngest daughter was already gone.

Eliza turned onto the old road to the mall, past the former dump on one side and the new skating rink on the other and she
said, “I know it’s wrong, but I love it.”

“That’s just what your mother used to say,” Belly told her. “About drinking.”

“Well, that,” Eliza replied. Then, “Let’s not talk about Mom.”

“No, you know what? Let’s do. Let’s talk about your mother. You guys are constantly giving me shit and no one seems to mind
that your mother up and left you, you were still in high school and she left you. Now why do I get such a bad rap and your
mother is a saint? You don’t remember picking her up off the floor in the morning? You don’t remember how she was passed out
on the couch when you came home from school?”

“I do. I remember all of it. I remember going with her to rehab. Checking her in. I remember bringing her things at Four Winds,
her perfume and stuff. I remember riding my bike over there after school during visiting hours. I remember how I would never
let Henry come in the house. We remember all of it.”

“Then why? You’re not mad?”

“It’s too hard to talk about,” she said.

He put his hand on Eliza’s hand as she downshifted to second and they pulled into the ocean of Wal-Mart’s parking lot, lit
up like a football game. A big gray box with green light streaming from it and a giant red, white, and blue “Grand Opening”
banner stretched across the top.

“This is what everyone’s talking about?” he asked.

“It’s new,” said Eliza. She wandered off in search of he didn’t know what. It was so big, so bright, he felt paralyzed.

He walked along the endless rows of cheap electronics, past the “Join Our Team” flyers that decorated every aisle, past the
new employees, young and old, in blue smocks, and he recalled a promise his nineteen-year-old self had made: to never wear
a uniform for work. A banjo player, an older fellow with a gray beard who looked vaguely familiar, strolled through the aisle
strumming a Dixieland song—the tune Belly remembered but the words fell away—a big “Ask me: I’m here to help” button on his
lapel interfering with the strings.

The light from absurdly high ceilings cast a green glow over everything. Belly got the feeling Wal-Mart was a giant terrarium
in God’s garage, each aisle a treadmill, a maze, too many items, too many people, nothing familiar, nothing small, nothing
real in the whole box.

And then he saw Loretta.

She was wearing the same old kind of outfit: gold lamé hot pants and high heels and a ferocious fuchsia tank top, low cut.
It was so low cut. His Nebraskan prairie girl all dolled up for the little northeastern city. Behind her rolled her son in
his futuristic wheelchair, blowing in a plastic tube to propel it forward. Belly pressed himself against the shelter of a
My Little Pony display and tried not to look at the boy, and the boy, he realized, Darren, must be thirty-two or thirty-three
by now, a grown man. He could not believe this was the same stoned kid he sent to pick up his daughter at dance class in his
1972 Mustang, the kid who crashed into the back of the Shoe Barn, the car all covered in moccasins and his daughter with her
head snapped back like a Pez dispenser, landing the car and his daughter in the duck pond in Congress Park. If he looked at
the boy the ghost of his dead daughter’s face rose like heat monkeys on tarmac.

He remembered the time they ran into a neighbor of Loretta’s on the street, a young woman with a six-week-old, and after they
left her Loretta said, “That was one ugly baby,” and he loved her for her heartlessness. He wanted to see her, he wanted her
to see him, but not like this, not with tears dried on his unshaven face and sweat stains on his shirt and the whites of his
eyes dyed red from beer and pot and unsound sleep.

He wended his way through the endless store, tiptoeing into the aisles like a cat burglar, trying not to let Loretta catch
him. He found Eliza perched before the deodorant display, reading labels.

She stood up when she saw him. “Did you see her?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Did she see you?”

“No.”

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“I don’t know what you ever saw in that woman.”

He looked at the contents of Eliza’s yellow plastic basket: she’d managed to find the only products in there with the words
“all natural” written across the packages. He thought of her fat Jewish husband at home, slathering organic hair gel on the
site of his male-pattern baldness, he thought of their sickly dog, and he said, “You can never tell what goes on between two
people.”

Eliza looked up at him. She put her hand on his shoulder and said, “That’s so true.”

She asked him, “Do you need anything? Deodorant or anything? Shaving cream?”

“I’m using Phil’s,” Belly said. “He doesn’t know it.”

“Oh, Belly,” she said.

Eliza pivoted around in the toiletry section, filling her basket with Barbasol and Old Spice and Gillette—anything remotely
manly, Belly noticed—a whole bathroom cabinet’s worth of macho supplies, and then she led him to the checkout.

They waited in the long line at the register. He read
Reader’s Digest
while she cashed out and they headed toward the door, but Belly stopped. He told Eliza to wait and he turned around and walked
to the customer service desk, his cowboy boots slippery on the shiny white faux-marble linoleum. He walked up to a young black
girl in a blue vest and said, “Let me have an application.” She ripped one off a pad and handed it to him. He folded it in
half and then he looked up and asked her, “Is it okay if it’s folded?” and the girl shrugged her shoulders and said, “I guess,”
and he folded it again and put it in his back pocket. If he dropped off a filled-out application later, he could get some
nineteen-year-old manager’s initials on his form, buy himself a little time to find a real job.

Outside he saw Eliza, a postanorexic aging hippie leaned up against a piece-of-shit Subaru. A tiny twinge pricked at his chest:
she’d be gone so soon.

She said, “Okay?” and he nodded.

They sat in the car, in the heat, and Eliza handed him a small plastic bag. “I got you a present.”

Inside, an aluminum flask with faux alligator skin wrapped along the sides hugged the bottom of the bag. He looked up and
she smiled at him. He couldn’t remember how to smile back, the gift made him so suspicious. He unbuttoned the top of his shirt
and fanned the fabric against his chest. “Can you turn up the AC?” he asked.