Belly (25 page)

The door did not answer. It did not swing open and unlock his wife from her almost ten-year silence, this ten-year night.

He pushed himself up from the ground and hobbled down to the river. He thought he might be sick, but he wasn’t, and he took
off one shoe and touched his toe to the tepid water and he remembered again: one foot in yesterday, one foot in tomorrow,
and you’re pissing all over today.

He unzipped his fly and relieved himself in the still Hudson River, his back turned to his wife’s little house. He remembered
the moment when his water phobia developed: they used to drive up north of here, where the Hudson River met the Sacandaga
in class-two rapids, at the Hadley-Lucerne bridge. Steep cliffs jutted from the water, enticing young boys all summer long
to jump from their slippery edges. And Belly was not afraid. He would scuttle up the rocks with the rest of his friends, leaping
from the top and holding his nose as he plunged thirty endless feet into the bubbling river.

And then one day there was a boy with his retarded little brother—they still called them mongoloids in those days—and the
retard had sat down next to Belly and his buddies, plunged his chubby hand right into their big bag of potato chips and crunched
on them till a mustache of crumbs covered his upper lip. Belly had made fun of the boy endlessly, telling him to go home to
Furness House, back to the funny farm. They razzed the little boy for not jumping, they harassed his older brother who stepped
off the cliff and flew into the water without ever turning around, leaving his little retard brother to cry and yell and suffer
at the hands of Belly and his terrible crew.

Then the boy stood and walked to the cliff’s edge. Belly and his friends chanted at the boy, bullied him until he lifted one
long foot trapped in Velcro sneakers and stepped off the rocks. Belly ran to watch him fall, just in time to see the boy twirl
in mid-air and scrape his blond head on the rock, see blood squirt from the scalp, see the boy’s mouth open as he splashed
sideways into the water and did not rise above the river.

A search ensued, police and ambulance and fire truck, and Belly and his friends hiding their beers and joints and trying to
flee but wanting so much to see the blond head bob above the rapids and be all right. They wanted the boy to live. But the
boy’s body was found, fifty miles down the river. It took two days to find him, and after that Belly never wanted to wade
in the water again. He stuck to dry land.

So he stayed along the riverbank until he could forget what he’d just remembered, and then he climbed into the truck and drove
back toward town, drinking his whiskey at the wheel, weaving in and out of the double line.

T
he car did it. The car veered itself toward the river, toward the Battlefield where the Revolutionary War was won, across
the street to the sleepy, sweet graveyard where he had not been since the day he put his daughter in the ground.

He parked, and opened the door, fell out of the truck right onto his fake hip. “Fuck!” he yelled.

Then he wandered in the midnight heat through the graveyard, past all the Irish names, all the Italian names, all the kiddie
graves with soccer balls in front, how strange, and a cell phone duct-taped to one. The victories of the dead etched,
Mother, Father, Husband, Wife, Son, Daughter, Teacher, Lover, Singer, Savior, Beloved, Missed, Called Back, There Is No Death.

It was the hottest night in history, and the longest, and he watched the stars as he walked, he wanted to see something that
could not move, could not change in his lifetime. He thought about the things Myrna told him about the stars, how it took
so long for their light to travel to earth that they might not even be there anymore. They could have died days ago, years,
she said, and he would never know. But he could see them. They hovered above him, lighting his way, and he knew they were
real, they were alive and still glowing. It was all true.

He walked through all the withered flowers and all the shined-up stones until he saw O’Leary carved in marble. A new bouquet
of daisies rested against her headstone, and he read her epitaph aloud.
God in his wisdom has recalled the boon, his love, too soon. The soul is safe in Heaven.

“Who the hell agreed to that?” Belly shouted. “She would not have wanted that.” He slid down to the dried-up ground and leaned
against her grave. He took a daisy from the bouquet and pulled the petals out one by one, letting the flower decide whether
he should live or die.

There was no reason left for Belly to live. There was no reason that his daughter had to die. It was God’s sick sense of humor,
it was God bored up there in heaven, fucking with him. Not God’s will, but God’s wrath, his punishment for Belly: adulterer,
gambler, liar, abuser, lazy drunk that he was. His daughter had been gone fifteen years, and he could just hear what Nora
would say if she were here right now. “Get over it. Come home, move on, get over it.” He had tried, he had tried, but he could
not forget that afternoon at the funeral home, could never forget what death looked like, the mean face of death, the dirty
trick of the life he was forced to live out.

“Shannon,” he whispered to the grave. “Please come back. Please come back. Shannon.” But the grave was sleeping, it was silent.
She was dead. And Belly was drunk. And Belly was alive. And Belly had to go home now. He rolled onto his knees and he kissed
his daughter’s name in the gravestone, and the gravestone was miraculously cool.

He wobbled back to the car. The monument from the Saratoga Battlefield—a miniature version of Washington’s tower—glowed in
the night, and he thought of Benedict Arnold, the traitor who saved America, and he thought, if you had only lost the war,
I wouldn’t have to be here now.

As he drove, he distanced himself from the foibles and failings of the night, but his knee and his ankle and his hip all reminded
him of his crimes. He tried very hard to stop thinking.

Sometimes, when a memory came crashing back—a flash of his hand flat across Nora’s face, his fist on Myrna’s cheek, the slap
of his fingertips staining red vines on Ann’s back—he shook. He shuddered. Something he couldn’t recognize, one of those goddamned
feelings, surged through him, inhabited him for a minute and then fled, leaving him exhausted, sick, begging for alcohol.
He drained the last hot sips of Old Grand-Dad and threw the bottle out the window.

Once it happened at the doctor’s office, the
marriage counselor’s
office. The
therapist’s
office. Myrna had dragged him there twice, after Nora left, before Shannon died, when he stopped coming home for one, two,
three days at a time. In that last year of her life, he was never around. “Put a space between the
e
and the
r
and you get ‘the rapist,’” he’d protested, but he had to do something, one thing for Myrna. Because Myrna, well, she was
a good woman. She was a drunk. She was a neglectful mother, that’s what he thought when he came home in the mornings and saw
the sandwiches she’d made the girls, soggy slices of white bread with wilty lettuce and one lame slip of pimento loaf. He
felt sorry for his girls, a mother like that. When they were little, even when they were little she was drunk, dressing them
in mismatched outfits, polka-dotted dresses and striped socks, their hair matted into rats’ nests. On Sundays Belly sometimes
would bathe his baby girls, wash their hair, joke with them about the first great lie of their lives on the Johnson & Johnson
bottle, “No more tears, my ass,” and he could be a real father if he wanted. So he agreed to the marriage counselor because
maybe he could help Myrna be a better mother. She was a drunk, yes, but a nice drunk, a malleable one, a rag doll but not
a rager. Not like him.

But then he quivered right there in front of that lady, that brown mouse of a woman with her fancy doctor glasses and her
stupid framed art and her fountain and her big bookcase, and the woman had asked him what was wrong. He told her he remembered
something, and she asked what, and he looked at Myrna, Myrna with her earnest loving look, her pretty green eyes, her skin
gray and prematurely aged from cigarettes and booze, and probably from being married to him, and he refused to say what had
caused that quake to erupt in him. It was the memory of Nora, just a few months earlier, all grown up and telling him she
was quitting the business, she was going away from the booking and the bar, and how he battled her to the ground and she was
so used to it, so inured, that she didn’t even cry. He couldn’t even make his oldest daughter cry by then, and he remembered
the way she looked up at him from the scratchy wood floor with razors in her eyes, with pity, and, yes, then he shook, right
there in front of the shrink.

The woman had told him when that happened to “shake off the shame”—literally. To rub his hand across his chest and simply
wipe the feeling away. He told her to fuck off, and then he left, left Myrna in the office alone and never went back.

And now, in the thick black of summer night, with the street wobbling in front of him, a million of those goddamned feelings
lit up around him like fireflies, taunting him
the girl in the pink sweater the girl in the pink sweater the girl in the pink sweater
and he took one hand off the wheel and tried to wipe them away, to fight them off, one by one, the bruised faces of his daughters
and his wife, the time Loretta threatened to leave him if he didn’t divorce Myrna and he fell to the floor and held on to
the hem of her skirt, begging, begging, crying, even. The time Shannon came to War Bar asked if he was ever coming home again,
and he’d said, “What do you mean? I live there,” and she just shook her head and said, “Not really, you don’t.” The one time
after Ann moved out that she appeared in the doorway of the bar, just looking at him, waiting to be invited in, and he called
to the bouncer, “No underagers, Johnny.” Eliza in the hospital bed, half-starved to death, Myrna in the hospital bed, holding
Eliza in the minutes after she was born and Belly shaking his leg in impatience, leaving her five minutes later to meet Loretta.
Myrna next to him at the morgue, crying, crying, crying so hard as they ID’d their daughter’s body and then, no, he did not
put his arm around her and hold her, he left her there and went to the bar and drank and fucked Loretta in the backroom next
to his daughter’s toe shoe boxes filled with illegal receipts
the girl in the pink sweater the girl in the pink sweater.
And the girl in the pink sweater.

It was too much. He had done too much wrong. He could not get a leg up, couldn’t shake it off, couldn’t erase it with a swipe
of his hand across his sweat-dampened shirt. There was no way to recover from a lifetime of wrongdoing. He would rather go
now—what was God waiting for?

The steering wheel fought him as he drove, as he tried to drive, back to town, and Route 29 still looked like a country lane
here and there … minus the McDonald’s. Back through Stillwater and Schuylerville and past Yaddo, he was almost home, he concentrated
on staying right of the double yellow line, but he was over it, he seemed to be moving very slowly, spinning and opening like
a big yawn or a tsunami or something and then: impact.

He stopped. His top and bottom teeth smashed, he tasted salt. Something dripped on his shirt, blood. He tumbled out of the
truck. The whole front end bit into a tree, twisted up, the engine smoking, his head bleeding. He looked at his lap, his favorite
jeans, and a dark red splash covered the thighs. He could only think of his favorite jeans, ruined by the night, by the women,
his best pair of pants stained forever. He did not seem to be hurt, though drops of blood gurgled from his head down his shirt.
Then he felt the throbbing, pulsing of blood rushing to escape through the opening in his scalp, and he wanted out like that,
out of his own head. He felt crazy. He pressed his cuff to his skull to stop the bleeding.

He turned the key in the ignition and it started up. He said aloud, “I love this truck.” And with the engine hissing and the
smoke escorting him, he drove home, the truck cracked and rattling. He prayed the whole way home, please God, no cops, no
cops, please God, if you keep the cops away, I’ll be good, I’ll be a good boy, and no cops followed him, and he turned the
truck off and the back door was open and there was the couch and he was down.

H
E WOKE
with ferocious sunlight attacking him. He was prostrate on the couch. The VCR clock read 11:11 and he remembered that he
was supposed to make a wish when he saw that. He remembered Myrna had told him that he should always wish to have a good day
and nothing more, a teardrop of wisdom so pure he sometimes still practiced it. He remembered in the days and weeks and months
after Shannon was taken just wishing on everything he could—the clock numbers, white horses, bridges, graveyards, railroad
tracks—that his family could have one good day, that Myrna could make it one day without drinking, that Nora could make it
one day without her sneering sarcasm, that Eliza could have one day where she ate something, where Ann could emit the tiniest
ray of warmth, that Loretta would love him again: that he could have one day, one good day, one day of peace. It never came.

When he lifted himself he saw a small mop of a dog, Eliza’s mangy mutt, lying on a low pile of laundry—Belly’s shirts and
jeans. The dog raised its glossy black eyes and looked at Belly, cocked its head to one side in a question and Belly shook
his head. “She left you,” he said to the dog. “Just up and left you.”

The dog stretched back on its hind legs and stood, and then Belly saw the pile of twenty-dollar bills clinging to the top
of the clothes. He’d left them in the pocket of his jeans, left them for Nora to clean. He reached over and tucked them back
into the pocket, and then flashes of the night attacked him. The girl and the sweater and the darkness of the road: he had
committed a crime. She could be at the police station right now. A sketch artist could be capturing him in lead and paper,
his likeness faxed to the cops, and then to bounty hunters, maybe, who would track him down and take him out and excuse him
from the pointlessness of forward movement.