Belly (30 page)

“The Lawn Jockeys,” he said.

“That’s right.”

His brain seemed to wake up then, he was using more than the three percent of it Shannon said all humans had access to. “Keep
going,” he said. “Keep singing.”

Gene stood next to him, awkward in his heavy Sunday suit over that lumbering frame. Belly nodded at him.

“She has the greatest voice,” said Gene.

“Yeah, it’s pretty good, I guess.” He paused. “Gene, do me a favor, would you? I mean, let’s fix the front porch. I really
want to fix the front porch. Get some pallets up in there and make that thing nice again.”

“We can do that.”

Gene sipped his beer and stared at Nora. “Belly,” he said. “You know you can’t work for me now.”

He said, “I’ve got something lined up. It’s okay.” All his life he thought he would come out above the bar, better than his
father’s life or his grandfather’s. He wanted what every parent wanted: for his children to be happy, for their lives to be
easier and more fluid than the bumpy ride he’d endured. He looked at his oldest daughter surrounded by friends and family,
he thought of his youngest daughter sewing bindings in Alabama, of Ann and Bonnie and their cosmopolitan lives, and he thought
of Shannon and her beautiful, sweet face, her eyes closed in the coffin.

He would never get his money back, never get Loretta, and he could never tell his daughters how he’d tried, for once in his
life, to do something for them. He would live with his daughter for a little while and work for some crummy corporation, he
would not be rich, and he would watch his grandsons grow into men. A small life, then, a small life of an old man near the
end.

Stevie Ray stood next to them, and Belly tried something, just for an experiment. He put his arm around the boy’s shoulders
and squeezed, just a little, the tiniest pressure, and Stevie Ray let him stay there a minute before he ducked out of Belly’s
grasp and back to his friends.

Up to the attic one last time. They could make a museum out of this place, he thought. A life: in furniture. And he didn’t
want it, not any of it, not his recliner, his Piels sign, his tropical island wall-sized poster, not his great-grandma’s spinning
wheel, not his daughter’s field hockey equipment, not the girls’ beanbag chairs and that shaggy rug they used to call their
pet doggie since he would not allow another animal in the house after Seaver passed. There was only one thing he would retrieve:
a small, framed portrait, a goddamned Sears portrait with a creamy-blue background and the family posed awkwardly, a mannequin
family with Belly at the head, Myrna next to him, wearing hangover eye shadow and orangey lipstick. All the colors faded till
they were just reds and greens—a colorless Christmas family, and their four beautiful daughters: Nora, a tad overweight with
a terrible feathery haircut, and Eliza sickly thin with a sallow smile, and Ann looking mean and glum and punk—he’d forgotten
about her punk phase, that stupid spiked hair and gobs of black makeup around her eyes and all those black rubber bracelets.
And Shannon, relaxed, smiling widely, in her homely thrift-store outfit. He looked at Nora’s thick arms and broad shoulders
in the picture, and around him now at her stacked-up tennis and field hockey trophies, and now he saw how she had tried her
best to fulfill his wish for a son.

They had been, he realized now, a normal, unhappy family. Most men lost interest in their wives. Most wives had a vice like
alcohol or cigarettes, television or the crossword puzzle; most gained weight, cooked poorly. Myrna had been kind to him,
and she had done everything she could to quit drinking, until all she could do was leave him.

The attic was cool now, relieved by the rain, and he retrieved Eliza’s homemade book and brought it back down to his grandson.
Stevie Ray was surrounded by presents, and by flowery Hallmark cards filled with checks. A painting rested on the back of
the couch. Belly felt it call to him, felt the colors beckoning. The whole world was a smear, but the painting remained sharp
and clear: a portrait of Nora and Phil and the three kids. They all wore sneaky little smiles, didn’t look happy or unhappy,
just content, or resigned, or something else. Just real. They looked absolutely real. There was a signature on the bottom.
Eliza O’Leary Kessel.

A card leaned on the gilded frame of the painting. On the front was the Irish blessing.
May the road rise to meet you.
And on the inside, though he knew he shouldn’t read it, was a note from Ann. She loved him. She was sorry she couldn’t be
there for his big day. She would come to see him soon.

May the wind be always at your back.
He lowered himself to the floor, next to the muck that had splayed from the crashed table, where the baby kneaded knuckles
of cauliflower.

May the sun shine warm upon your face.
That’s what he would do. He would commission a painting. A painting of him and his wife and all four of his daughters, and
he would move into his own place someday and put the painting right by the door where he could see it coming and going,
the rains fall soft upon your fields,
Eliza’s initials winking at him from the bottom, happy to have them with him. He held the card in his hands, and recited to
himself the words that graced the front of the card.

And, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Phil played a lamenting Spanish tune on the guitar, and Belly wobbled toward Nora with his bruised and aching hip and his
dirty shirt, the stale liquor on his swollen tongue, and he offered her his hand. Long ago he had showed her how to tango,
he had placed her tiny feet on his own and instructed her in the walk, the stroll, the chase, the beginning and the close,
all the churning steps of tango he knew. And he curled her across the living room floor now, her grown-up feet on the ground,
he guided her through the spilled crudités and appetizers that lay scattered across the rug like a massacre. They whirled
through the living room till the onlookers blurred into the background. They stopped, they stood and stared at one another,
and the room reeled around them, everything swirling except the faces of father and daughter, so much alike.

W
hen all the guests had gone, and the boys were asleep, and Nora and Phil passed out on the couch in front of the soft purr
of television, Belly clomped up to the attic and retrieved his belongings from the back. Then he made his way to the second
floor, down the hall to the guest room, Bonnie’s old room, Jimi’s old room: now it would be his room. He set his clothes in
Jimi’s little blue-and-yellow-stenciled dresser, his khaki pants in the closet. He lay on the little bed and stared at the
glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. He felt his liver relax; no more alcohol surged in his veins and he could see clearly
in the night, no spinning or blurring or twisting of the dark. Booze was like a baby blanket for him—he curled up with it
to sleep, but now was as good a time as any to start this terrible sobriety. He closed his eyes, and sleep came fast to find
him, sleep took him in and covered him so he did not have to dream.

O
NE STRIPE
of sun snuck in the window and rested in a band across Belly’s face. He rolled his head from side to side. He swatted at
it. It wouldn’t go away. He opened his eyes and he knew where he was and how he got there. He knew how many daughters he had
and he knew what he had to do. He looked at the wallpaper—dark blue with glowing planets and comets and meteors and gassy
stars, and he looked at Jimi’s astronomy books and his toys and his rug with the alphabet embroidered along the fringe, and
he was not sure his daughters ever had such things, if he or his wife ever stopped to ask them what they wanted or showed
them how to get it. He picked up a heavy hardcover book,
The Way Things Work,
and he opened it and read about the telescope, how it collects light to make faint objects visible.

The drawers of his new blue kid dresser slid open easily. The air was soft now, it was cooler and less humid; all that water
had let him go. He leafed through his jeans, darker jeans and lighter jeans and jeans with holes and jeans with patches, his
stained jeans and jeans from his heavier days and from when he was a little thinner. He shut the drawer and opened the closet
and plucked from the wire hanger his one pair of khakis with a crease streaming down the center. He showered and then he slipped
on the pants, the sleek polished cotton satiny against his shins, and they were an inch too big now, but he liked the way
they hung, the way they hovered a little too low on his bones, the hint of hipbone sneaking out the top of the waistband.
They looked like old-man pants, and it was a good look for him. He looked fine. He looked like a man who wouldn’t have to
hump someone half his age, who didn’t have to invent witty drunken comebacks in the bar, who didn’t have to chase women or
drink too much or hunt down old enemies who had disappointed him. He looked like a man who could sit on the porch and sip
beer and watch ballerinas waddle by in July, watch tourists cluck at the uneven bricks of the sidewalk and the sturdy tufts
of green weeds poking through, watch where the retards used to wander and where Shannon used to wheel by on white rollerskates
with pink wheels, watch all the ghosts float by and he wouldn’t have to talk to any of them. He wouldn’t have to move. He
could stay put in this life for as long as it took, him and his family, his cheap beer and his shit job and his old-man pants.

Nora had left him a note on the kitchen table—the family had gone to Jatski’s and he could join them if he wanted. The house
remained in last night’s postapocalyptic state, piles of dirty plates and dried-up appetizers crusting the edges of Nora’s
cut-glass serving bowls. He tiptoed through the downstairs, stepping around the mess and plucking from the surfaces cups and
saucers and stray pieces of flatware, and he piled them in the sink. He swept through all the rooms, straightening the furniture,
crumbing the couch, lifting the table and reattaching the lame leg until it stood upright again. He even straightened the
maelstrom of magnets and photographs on the refrigerator door. Two wallet-sized photographs of his grandsons were tucked under
a Cudney’s Cleaners magnet, and he slipped them off the fridge and into his wallet.

When he was satisfied he helped himself to coffee, sat and read the
Saratogian,
scanning the real-estate ads for cheap studios in Ballston Spa. Then he read the society section. Mary Lou Whitney was in
town, of course, and her whole socialite posse, unscathed by past racetrack scandals. The rich people in this town, the summer
people, were untouchable, and what made them so? Just because Cornelius Vanderbilt hooked up with some crooked Tammany Hall
boxer all those years ago to open the racetrack, now his distant relatives still reaped the benefits. It seemed so unfair,
that your genes decided your fate, or sealed it, or just cleaned it up so no matter how you erred you could still find your
face in the society section.

For a very brief moment, at the height of his bookmaking days, when Belly was welcomed at civic events and the Paddock Pavilion
at the track and even once ushered into Jack White’s fourth-floor box in the clubhouse, Belly thought he could jump ship.
He thought someday he’d shake hands with Mary Lou Whitney, thought he’d be invited to her glamorous gatherings, thought he’d
sneak his way into private parties at Siro’s, thought he’d leave behind his bland Irish roots, his blue-collar ties, thought
the working-class accent he couldn’t even hear would erase and he would slip into Society. Loretta had done it, had married
some money and floated away, but even with her new two-carat rock gleaming on her finger she was still a drunk, still slumming
at a crummy bar on a Thursday night, and maybe no one could escape his fate.

Belly closed the paper. He thumbed through a jar of coins perched atop the microwave, and then he made his way out into the
world.

He walked down Spring Street, and now he cut across the park, and it was the most beautiful day in the world, in his life,
in his new life which was now a week old: he thought about when Nora turned six months old and they knew they’d passed the
SIDS stage and they could breathe easily now. He was going to live.

As the opposite entrance of the park birthed him onto Broadway, construction crews were finishing the last big stretch of
work on the new building by the bus stop. Somehow while he wasn’t looking, brick walls were erected to make a nouveau strip-mall
fortress. Tourists sat in front of Café Newton with their million-dollar cappuccinos and everyone seemed calmer today in the
cooler air, everything seemed lighter. He sat at the bus stop, on the other side of the street this time, in front of the
ex-library, and watched the tourists stroll through the park, down Broadway, hands clasped at their backs in perfect leisure
pose, dreaming themselves back to the time when Saratoga was the Queen of Spas. If he closed his eyes and erased the construction
site behind him, erased the fancy new cars, if he just looked at the women with their broad-brimmed hats and the men in their
linen suits, Belly could believe he was back there, too; he was one of them.

The bus pulled up and today Belly had exact change. He had thirty-two dollars in his wallet and his expired driver’s license
and the photographs of his grandchildren, and he sat on the bus as it hobbled through town past all the rich people and the
locals sucking their money and the teenagers with piercings and skateboards and cotton-candy shades of hair.

They rolled down the arterial, Vanderbilt Highway, and Belly felt that sweeping sort of wind blow through his stomach, the
way he felt when he went over a bridge, or got near water, any road trip where the bad gets left behind and the future is
blessedly blank. And there was the mall.

He got off at the old mall, a mere shadow of a big-box that shrank next to its new mall neighbor. Inside he found the DMV,
the terrible DMV with a line snaking out the door. Here’s where all the angry people were.