He blinked, and then he saw the drop ceiling and the matted blue carpet and the worn plaid of the couch beneath him and he was alone in the still, hot, middle of the night, last night’s clothes sticking to him. Right in the center of his chest a stinging began, first a soft sort of singing and then something louder and full of feedback, fingernails on a chalkboard but inside. Please, he thought, please put me in the bed. Please put me to sleep. Rub my back, scratch my back, make my back small and smooth and hot and clammy, make me the back of a child, the small back where two adult hands can cover it. Make me small. Make it go away. But it wouldn’t go away. The stinging reached out until it covered his whole chest like a blanket, he was one long cloth of ache, he was mummified in it. He could not get away. He could not sleep.
He had a beer can cradled in the crook of his elbow and one stashed between his legs. He shook them. Both empty.
He lay with his eyes open and focused on nothing, focused on the dark, and every thought that passed through his mind, every acceptable image skipped out into the dark and left him with the same implacable ideas. He tried to think of baseball, he tried to think of Mookie Wilson’s tenth-inning ground ball through Bill Buckner’s legs in the ’86 World Series. He tried to picture Ray Knight’s seventh-inning solo homer. He tried to think of that one good moment in 1986, that one little flash when he thought maybe he could feel all right again. Maybe he could feel. But the rest of that year circled before him: standing in the doorway of the morgue, watching his wife touch the toetag on his daughter’s bluish body, seeing how the kid’s pinky finger splayed out to the side of her hand in an impossible right angle, the way her bed was made from that day forward, never again a wrinkle in the sheets, the soft leather of her worn-out catcher’s mitt with her name in crooked black block letters.
He just wanted to rest in peace. He just wanted to sleep. Why wouldn’t sleep come and save him? Why wouldn’t morning come to let him out? He needed light to breathe. He needed to stop breathing.
He wrenched himself from the abyss of sunken couch cushions and walked through the dining room and living room and out the front door to the abandoned porch. In just his faded black watch boxer shorts he stepped down to the sidewalk, bare feet over tiny tufts of grass that poked out from the cracks. He walked to the center of Spring Street and looked east, trying to find a hint of horizon hiding behind fir trees and big Victorian houses. His town was sleeping, every single body horizontal in the whole place, every life but his held in the peaceful secret sideways place of dreams. He waited there until one side of the sky lightened to the color of pale fire; he waited, hoping one last lone drunk driver would fly up the fault line of Spring Street and not see him in the softness of that almost-morning light, hoping his inebriated savior would whip down the asphalt and lift Belly from the road, make him rise like flame from the hot concrete, let gravity release him so he could just float away.
Far in the distance horses began to bray. The racetrack was waking up. A truck rambled down Nelson Avenue, an open-backed pickup filled with the little brown men who rode into town every year with the weanlings and yearlings and two-year-olds. The backstretch workers—grooms, stablehands, and hotwalkers. He thought of those men, paid next to nothing, men with families stashed in unnamed southern countries, men who slept pressed into tiny tack rooms on the outskirts of the track. How did they do it? How did they sleep through the night in their mud and concrete prisons? He’d heard once that when a backstretch worker got sick—less than minimum wage and no health insurance—he’d go see the vet.
The sun rose and the sky filled with dusty blue, and for a moment the stinging inside him subsided. He turned and stepped inside the sanctity of Nora’s sleeping house, he laid himself back down on the couch in his dirty boxers, and when he closed his eyes now he saw baseball and thoroughbreds, and his daughter’s dead face was filtered away.
The boys made their way downstairs and played Grand Theft Auto while he watched them from the couch, and Nora wiped the kitchen counters, and he heard the paper Wal-Mart application crinkle in his back pocket. Nora handed him the phone, holding it away from her like it was something infectious. He thought, This is the call I’ve been waiting for, but when he said hello it was only Eliza’s small voice on the other line.
“I’m sorry about leaving you, Belly,” she said.
He said, “Whatever.”
“You know, Ann still might come. Maybe if you call her or something and tell her you want her to.”
“Let me just ask you this: what kind of person are you to leave that little blind dog? That diabetic dog?”
She did not respond.
“You’re just going to leave your dog like that?” He heard sniffling on the other end. “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” he said. “Do not cry.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “If it wasn’t for me, we’d all still be together.”
A dangerous feeling growled in his stomach. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“That day,” she said.
“Don’t.”
“I was supposed to meet her at dance class. Henry was going to drive us both home, don’t you remember? But I wanted to go to this exhibit in Albany so I called you and you had Darren pick her up. Don’t you remember?”
“Shut up, Eliza. Just shut the fuck up.” And that was the last thing he said to her.
His grandsons turned off the TV and left him with that strange static aftertaste buzzing through the air: the presence of absence.
In prison, his podmate received a letter from a son he never knew he had. The man passed the letter down from cell to cell, pod to pod, hungry hands reaching out for the crumpled handwritten paper. The man said he knew it was his son: their I’s slanted the same way. Belly read it three times before he passed it on. The son did not want anything from the man except possibly to know what he looked like and a bit of his medical history, and to meet him someday if the father consented. The son wrote that he had a good job, a girlfriend, and a son of his own, and was not seeking money. The son wanted only to talk. Nothing more.
The letter caused a rupture in Belly—a great big hunger right above his diaphragm. He kept trying to think about Ann, his second daughter, who would never come to see him, never talked to him again after that day he hit her on the couch. He wanted the letter to make him want her. He wanted to want her back. But he could only see his wife’s eyes in his third daughter’s pale, freckled face, her thick blond hair, her pink sweater: his baby who died at sixteen.
His podmate had told him, “If you don’t got kids, you don’t got nothing to live for. You don’t got nothing to fight for.”
And now he sat here with the phone face down on his knees, entwining the curlicues of phone cord around his fingers, and he knew he should call Eliza back, he should call her back to him and beg her not to leave. But he leaned against the couch and closed his eyes and saw his third daughter’s face, still with him after all this time, edging out the faces of the other girls.
The phone went dead, the strange seesaw tone erupting from the wire, telling him to hang up.
Nora slapped the knees of his jeans with a dishtowel and said, “Belly, you have got to get yourself up and ready to meet with your parole officer.”
He said, “That’s not for hours.”
“You’ve got to get yourself there today. I’ve got too much to do before Sunday.”
“How do you expect me to get to Ballston Spa?” He stood and hung up the phone.
“Take the bus,” she said.
“What bus?”
“The CDTA.”
He didn’t even know what it stood for. But he conceded.
He went upstairs to change, too tired to face the shower, and he slipped on his last clean pair of jeans. They were his favorite, worn to perfection at the knees, the most slimming Levis he owned. They were all the same size, but some hung awkwardly, some were too tight, but these, these fine jeans hugged his bones perfectly and made him feel young. He took a clean w
hite shirt, same as the others, and buttoned it high, to cover the tiny sprigs of gray chest hair that sometimes poked through.
He came downstairs carrying his dirty jeans and white shirts and socks and boxers and said, “What do I do with these?”
“Leave them by the basement door and I’ll wash them,” Nora said. “They’ll be here when you get back.”
Outside, Saratoga greeted him with thick waves of heat. His beautiful town, birthplace of the potato chip, the world’s most attractive horseracing track, home of the twenty-two springs of crystal-clear water that ran straight up from the fertile ground, water people came from hundreds of miles to drink though it tasted like old shoes. He meant to walk to the bus stop, but he followed his feet down Union Avenue, past the glorious mansions, and he ticked off their architectural styles one by one—Dutch colonial, second empire Victorian, Greek revival, Queen Anne, Richardsonian Romanesque. He’d gone through a whole town tour’s worth of houses and he came to the beautiful Saratoga flat track.
The racetrack burst at its seams with Friday peddlers. He remembered Ann selling lemonade and brownies out front, getting fifty-dollar tips from Trifecta winners, getting nothing but scowls from the losers, putting the money away and not taking it out until she needed to buy something for the senior prom: she wore a man’s tuxedo.
Man O’War, Upset, Secretariat, Jim Danon, Onion, Four Star Dave, all the great horses had run here, and he’d seen some of their great races. His own family history wound around the track—it opened the same year his grandparents escaped famine-infested Ireland and hopped the wave of immigrants coming upstate to work in the foundries and factories, to build this very racetrack with their rough Irish hands, to build these mansions and the carriage houses behind them, the buildings downtown, the ones that burned and those that still stood. His family had settled on the West Side—they called it Little Dublin then, and then they called it Little Italy and then Little Harlem and then the family moved east.
At the main gate, a gaggle of teenagers hovered in security outfits. The uniforms draped like chintz curtains from their bones, they looked dressed for Halloween. And when he sidled up to the cashier the kid actually wanted to charge him an entrance fee. “My brother’s a Pinkerton,” Belly said.
The kid wrote a look of skepticism into his eyebrows.
“A Pinkerton,” he repeated. “My brother worked security here for forty years. I never paid to get in here once.”
“You mean a Wackenhut,” said the boy, as a security guard approached.
“What seems to be the trouble here?”
Everything, everything, he wanted to say. I am troubled by everything in this goddamned town, like somebody cleaned up and put everything back in the wrong place.
Belly looked at the logos adorning the security guard’s lapel: Wackenhut. He said, “No problem at all,” paid his first-ever entrance fee to the track, broke the spell of the fifty-dollar bill hiding in his wallet. How had it happened that spending two lousy dollars could hurt him so? They returned to him two twenties and a five and three ones, and the weight of paper made him safer.
He prepared himself to be disgusted at the changes, steadied himself to lament the loss of the old-time characters, refugees from William Kennedy novels, to see instead the wholesome families and rich New Yorkers who suddenly thought racing fashionable instead of repugnant. But they were there, all of them, the old-timers and families alike, the poor and the rich. It used to be like World War I in here, he thought, used to be only the children and the old men. But now the racetrack served as the meeting grounds for all different folks, the oval of dirt like a kiva—an architectural term he’d learned from the books Eliza gave him, a Native American word for meeting place. They’d fixed it up. Entire “family areas” graced what used to be empty plots littered with cigar butts and plastic beer cups, video gaming machines lined up like lemmings under white domes.
Old men with mangy faces and bandannas sold their homemade tip sheets. “Get the edge,” called one man. “Yesterday we had five exactas and the Daily Double. Only two dollars.” Belly reached into his pocket to the dwindling supply of bills and took the sheet. Two dollars poorer.
The names, numbers, the odds, the owners, the jockeys, the trainers: it all seemed like a foreign language to him after so many years away. The tip sheet recommended two yearlings, The Muse and Gentle Strength, numbers two and five, for the fourth race. Belly made his way to the paddock where the jockeys paraded their horses and he matched them to the numbers on his page. He watched a silver Akhal-Teke clomping around on the dehydrated grass, number twelve, named Legz, and above the betting windows flashed his odds, an unassuming six to one. Ignoring the tip sheet, Belly put a whole five dollars on Legz, to place, and another five on Thirty Percent Gray, number eight, to show, and he made his way to the front of the clubhouse. Low odds, that’s what he wanted. He wanted a sure thing.
A bugle wafted over the airwaves, Call to the Post. Patrons flocked to the monitors, stared up at it with their pink Racing Forms tucked under their arms, clutching tiny paper tickets. “It’s post time,” he heard, “And … they’re off,” and when the starting gates flung open and the horses came barreling down the dirt track, Belly’s breath shortened and he felt faint. Around him he heard the familiar cries, “Hit the whip, hit it,” calling out numbers and names. Number twelve, he prayed, first or second, come in number eight, first or second or third. He needed the money. He needed something good to happen.
What a strange thing, he thought now. Is this even a sport? It’s not like you had team loyalty, not like the Mets. He’d never bet on the Mets, not once, not even last year during the Subway Series. It was never money he’d wanted from his home team, just the glory. But money was all anyone wanted here, that’s all they had rooted in the win.
He watched the last lap of the race, his horses so far at the end of the line—out of the money, they called it, when a horse didn’t even show—and he felt tired and thirsty and half-dead. The race finished, he watched the body-English of all those gamblers, exulting or despairing. Gentle Strength and The Muse came in first and second, respectively, his unused tip sheet dead on. He tossed his paper ticket in the trash and an old man said to him, “Don’t worry. Most people lose.”
“It was a sure thing,” he said to the man.
“That’s why they call this place the graveyard of champions.”
He wandered over to the Big Red Spring, where a Dixieland band wearing red suspenders played between races. He vaguely recalled these old fellows, and he heard someone say to the band, “I come here every year just to see you guys play,” and the banjo player nodded at Belly as his hands raced across the instrument. The banjo player, the one who’d wandered around Wal-Mart the night before, played that same song, and now Belly heard the words: “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” He looked over at Belly, nodded, called, “Welcome home,” to him, then said, “Don’t think you’re supposed to be here,” all of this over the glorious old-fashioned music.
Belly ran his hand under the springwater, over the mottled mess of calcium deposits that covered the spigot, tasted a bit of Saratoga’s most famous offering, a sulfury sip of the stuff. He swallowed the putrid water and listened to the music, his feet involuntarily tapping, as he recalled his grandfather’s stories of when Congress Street was a red-light district, when Meyer Lansky was jailed in Ballston Spa, his grampa’s old saying, “Politics and poker make the average guy a heavy smoker.” He thought about his old pals at City Hall and the NYRA boys and Loretta and their conspicuous silence since his return. All had evaporated, all associations melted, leaving him alone with the memory of how it used to be weighing on him like cardiac arrest.
He thought of that first bet: such a haze he was in that month, with Myrna gone and Loretta permanently drunk and her son in the ICU and his third daughter in the ground. Loretta’s sweaty fifty calling from the countertop, and how from there, from that timeless slow moment, other bets came in. He’d won
Loretta’s fifty from her, and the other lazy drunks who couldn’t walk the mere eight blocks to the track decided to wager their money against Belly’s. The money poured in and out like the tide, and he had trouble keeping track, high or low. He’d bought a fifty-cent miniature spiral-bound notebook from Woolworth’s and wrote down dates and first names and race numbers and the horses and the odds as they flashed on the TV screen and held just seconds before the starting gates opened. When the notebook filled, he bought another, and kept buying them, funneling them into old toe-shoe boxes until the storage room had a leaning tower of evidence that the DA seized in the eerie, dull moments of the raid. By then, other bars in other towns and counties and finally other states would call in their bets. By then, Loretta made her daily deposits to the NYRA folks, to a few unnamed participants at City Hall. The money flowed in, it flowed out, it flowered and withered, it had its sunny season and then eleven months of sleep, he didn’t know and he didn’t care.
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