Belly (2 page)

“Maybelline,” he said, “I will meet you there at six.” She handed him her phone number on the back of a Springway Diner business
card. He tried not to smile, but a big dumb grin erupted on his face. He thought of that one dead tooth, that brown bicuspid
poking from the side of his mouth, and he hoped she couldn’t see it. She sashayed back to work, and he watched her ass move
in acid-wash jeans, and he changed his mind: everything would be fine, easy as pie.

H
e stood at the window, smoking and staring into the sun. How many years since he’d whiled away an afternoon at Springway Diner?
Of his four daughters, only the third one ever wanted to come here, the one who was not with him anymore. Sometimes he’d take
a break from the bar and walk down to meet her here, him and the kid in her favorite old-lady pink cardigan with the Izod
alligator, slurping a cup of hot chocolate while she showed him her plans for the science fair: The Secret Life of Tornadoes.

He flinched when he saw Nora pull up alongside the diner, the tires of his sweet black Bronco squealing to a stop. It was
a great truck, the best he’d ever had, with rock-stomper rods and 230 horses, tinted windows and chrome rims and a thin red
pinstripe clinging to the sides. He could see two small dents like vampire bites by the rear left fender as he went out to
meet her.

“I thought you quit,” was the first thing Nora said when she saw him drag on his Newport, though she had an unlit cigarette
poking from between her first two fingers. Her three boys in the backseat kept quiet.

“I did,” Belly said, “but only ’cause it was so freaking hard to get cigarettes.” He tossed the cigarette to the ground and
swiveled his foot over it.

She didn’t get out of the Bronco, just let her cigaretted hand hang out the open window, so he stood by the door and put his
free hand on her shoulder, making a right angle. There was so much space between them.

“Nice to see you,” he said.

She said, “Get in.”

The burning feeling was back. He walked around to the back of the truck, his shirt sticking to him in the heat, and threw
his duffel bag in, continued around till he got to the passenger door, and climbed inside. His license had run out almost
two years before, and he knew his near future included a trip to the dreaded DMV, but not yet, not right away. He lowered
himself into the seat and thought how he’d never been on the right side of his own truck. It was only five years old. He’d
bought it just a few months before they locked him up.

Nora put the truck in reverse.

He turned to his grandsons. “How you boys doing?”

They just stared at him: a teenager, a little kid, a baby in a car seat. He noticed a slight tremor in his hands, like his
fingers were saying hello without his consent. He placed one hand on top of the other to still them.

“You guys remember me?”

“It’s only been four years, Belly,” said the middle boy.

“That’s Grampa to you,” and he turned back around. This, he thought, is what it feels like on the first day of a new job you
didn’t want to do, standing there waiting for someone to direct you through a series of meaningless tasks, waiting for the
day to end.

“Isn’t it funny,” he said, slipping the cigarette from Nora’s hand and lighting it. “I think the only other time you drove
me around was right after you got your permit. You must have been sixteen.”

“You let me drive when I was twelve.”

“Did I?”

“You made me drive even when I didn’t want to, when you were too drunk.” She rolled down her window to let the smoke escape
and pressed the button to open Belly’s. “You mean Eliza. You made Eliza wait till she was the right age.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Four daughters and three grandchildren and their names circled above him like a fly he couldn’t catch. Their differences eluded
him.

“Well,” he said, turning back to the boys. “Which one is which now?”

“See the one who’s not even a year old, Belly?”

Why couldn’t she call him Daddy?

“That’s King. You haven’t met him before.”

“I’ve seen your picture, though,” he said to the baby, who drooled on a plastic bib around his neck. “Who’s this one named
after?” he asked the oldest boy, the one who had turned into a teenager, pimples beginning to surface on his pale Irish skin.

The oldest boy turned his attention out the window and the middle boy said, “B. B. King.” He looked down at his lap, then
raised his eyes to his grandfather. “I’m Jimi,” he said. “That’s Stevie Ray.”

“I know that,” said Belly. “Stevie Ray with the big birthmark on his knee.” He looked at the stretched-out teenage boy and
could not believe he was the same little kid he said good-bye to four years ago. “How old are you now?”

The boy said nothing. “Stevie, your grandfather is talking to you,” Nora said. “You know, when somebody talks to you, it’s
polite to say something back.”

The boy shrugged.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young man.”

“I didn’t,” Stevie Ray said in a small voice, a voice far too delicate for a boy with O’Leary blood.

“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.