He felt his legs wobbling beneath him a bit, it was still so hot, but he made it to the truck, started it up, he could go anywhere—Florida, Mexico, New York City. Saratoga Springs.
He couldn’t go home yet, over the highway and through Burnt Hills to Spring Street where all his neighbors and daughters kept track of his coming and going. It was late now, and dark, he’d long ago missed dinner or the chance of slipping in before Nora could notice he’d stolen his own truck. So he kept driving, sipping hot whiskey from the bottle, another fifty-whiskey night.
The sky lingered between dusk and night, and as Belly drove he saw a girl walking along the road, swinging her arms as she walked. A young girl in a white sundress, and even though it was hot and the heat had seeped into the truck and surrounded him, the girl wore a pink sweater over her shoulders. A pink cardigan. He could just make it out in the last bit of dark blue gloaming light. She was barefoot, and carrying a tote bag, and walking quickly but not hurrying, walking past the grand old houses of Ballston Spa. She looked like a girl from a picture book, a Disney movie. He slowed, he slowed, he paced her in the big black truck.
What happened to the pink sweater, to his daughter’s pink sweater? It was horrible to be old. Untenable. All these gaps of memory and information, retracing your steps, treading the same territory, just trying to recall. Only the things he wanted excised still remained: the painful irony of aging, the brain’s big joke. He had not let them bury her in her favorite pink sweater. How he hated that stupid pink sweater. How he hated the way she insisted on dressing like a bag lady after watching those John Hughes movies with the martyred working-class girls, pretending to be poor. You’re not poor, he would yell at her. I was poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. And how she would ignore him in those moments, those times when he couldn’t find his way back to an even temper, she would just walk right out the door and let him steam. He needed his third daughter, but she was not a normal child: she didn’t need him.
There were rules to follow, conventions. A body should be buried in black, in a long black dress, a dress suitable for tango. He would not budge on this point, and now he remembered how Eliza wore that pink sweater, pink the color of little girl cheeks, over her black dress to the wake, how she tried to press the sweater into the open coffin and Belly had grabbed and slapped her right there in front of the guests. He remembered what would happen to his body in these moments, every muscle wakened, every synapse firing. It was how he imagined the experience of Scotty beaming you up, breaking you down to the tiniest molecules and then reforming: that was the physicality of rage. He could see himself, watch himself, grabbing Eliza, wrapping his big hand around the tiny twig of her emaciated arm, he could hear the crisp sound of palm on cheek and then feel his pointer finger frozen in the air just an inch from her nose, and all that crying, so much crying, weeping everywhere around him. He reopened a thousand wounds with that slap. He did that. That was him.
“Fuck,” he said. If he were a superhero the power he’d want would be memory control—the ability to suppress or evoke any recollection he chose, to re-create his past as he saw fit.
The girl, now, on the road, in the pink sweater, now he knew: he remembered, after Myrna left, and they were packing the house, it was Ann who cleaned out her room, who boxed up her sister’s toys and toe shoes and carted them off to the Salvation Army, sweater and all, the Salvation Army in Scotia, just down the road, and this girl, it must be the same sweater, a thrift-store shopper, a vagabond, a bum, a girl bum, a bumette.
He veered to the right, pulled into the breakdown lane, and screeched to a stop. The girl started like a deer, recoiled, covered her chest with her canvas tote bag. He jumped out of the truck and the landing stung his leg, and the girl raised her hands like he was sticking her up. She was not a bum, just a goddamned hippie, and she was listening to some god-awful Grateful Dead-type music on her Walkman, it bled out the tiny headphones, and what was he going to do with her? It was dark now, and there were no cars on the road, and she was terrified and trembling, the girl.
There were woods right nearby, and he could take her there. He could. He could press her face into pine needles, she could scream into the soil and the soil would soak it up; what was he thinking, now, where was he going with this? It was dark now, and she might not see his face in full, might not burn an imprint of his description. He could get away, he could get away with it.
He kept his eyes down, he did not look directly at her, because somewhere inside him he knew better than to let her view the dimple in his chin or the centipede scar above his left eye or his one dead tooth or the precise icy blue of his eyes.
“What do you want?” she asked, and her voice was so tiny. Hippie Minnie Mouse in his dead daughter’s pink cardigan on the side of the road. He could rip off her white dress and fuck her into the ground, fuck her until she was covered, and this made his muscles contract in the same way, the same way, the same thing as slapping Eliza and he had to stop himself. “Please,” said the girl, who was crying now. “I don’t have any money. Nothing on me.”
He imagined the headlines, the one way he could make headlines now, a holdup in Ballston Spa, a Route 50 mugging. The girl shook, harder now, shoulders bopping up and down like she was dancing to the crappy hippie music.
“Your sweater,” he said.
“What?” Snot rolled down her upper lip and dripped off her chin.
“Give me your sweater,” he said.
She shook her head and stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
“Give me that goddamned sweater,” he said, and now he crossed the line, the white line on the side of the road, and he grabbed her. He grabbed her the same way he grabbed Eliza that day. He pressed on the back of the girl’s neck to hold her and he unbuttoned the front of the cardigan, his knuckles pressing into her chest, he could feel her nipple underneath, her nipple was hard, why was her nipple hard, did she like this?, and he pulled off one sleeve, aggressively, and then he gently slipped the other sleeve off, and there was the girl in her white dress, bare shoulders and bare feet. Maybe he ruined her life, but it was his sweater now. He tucked the sweater to his chest and sniffed it—yes, it smelled like her, it was hers, it must be hers, he ignored the absence of the little green alligator on the front. The girl was crying, and he said, “Sorry,” and got back in the truck.
He had a mission now. He would return the sweater to its rightful place.
The night his wife moved to Stillwater was the last time he saw her, ten or twelve or fifteen years ago, he couldn’t remember. The town slept alongside a particularly calm stretch of the Hudson, and Myrna rented half of an old bungalow on the river. He had helped her move her things in the little blue Chevy Luv he had back then. She took her clothes and her telescope and what seemed like hundreds of pairs of shoes when she left.
Only one bar graced this town, undoubtedly one of the reasons Myrna moved there. She’d been to rehab and back three times by then, but she just couldn’t kick the habit. Her role model was Betty Ford. Betty Ford, she used to say. She can do it and look at the man she’s married to.
Belly didn’t go inside that night when he’d dropped her off. He’d just lifted her things from the flatbed, hoisted up her suitcases and deposited them on the front porch, and watched her drag them in the door. She owned more shoes than anything else, walking shoes, running shoes (she’d never jogged a day in her life), sixteen different pairs of dancing shoes. Even when they were worn and scuffed and undanceable, she kept them as little leather memories of happier times.
When the flatbed was empty he’d said, “See you later,” and drove off.
He thought now how he had never really wanted Myrna, never openly craved her in that Pavlovian way that keeps a man captive. He admired her, he even liked her, but he was frightened of her. She had so many personalities crammed into one tiny body, a body that swelled four times with the promise of some gift, some bend in the road up ahead that would bring them, maybe this
time, to Paradise, maybe this time she would give him a boy, and each time she deflated and her skin sagged farther, her stomach a rippling pond of flesh, all that gravity pulling her down and he would find her some early mornings on the kitchen floor, that horrible stench of stale, watery beer emanating from her pores. She would pop open her eyes and smile at him, a stale, watery smile, the Busch beer of smiles, sharp and diffused at the same time like winter sunlight and her green eyes unfocused and panicked and blaming and calm all at once. These were the times he felt the faint twinge of love, in the aftermath of her drunkenness, but never before it, and certainly never during it. He would lift her up, sling her over his shoulders like Huck Finn with his bundle, and tote her up to bed. By the end these were the only instances that led them to share a mattress, a great sea of foam and metal springs, their pillow-topped ice floe there to rescue them.
It shocked him now to realize that though he had never lusted after Myrna, he had always loved her. He had always loved his wife, and he had failed her in every way a man can.
Since he’d last been to this town, a tornado had swept through it. He’d heard through Nora that the twister had ripped through a tiny piece of Myrna’s house, torn the dormer window right off the top and left a hole in the roof that peeked right into her bedroom. He’d planned on going up there to help her, he really had, but Nora had said she had renter’s insurance and the whole thing was covered. You could still see the line where the tornado had swung through, a squiggle of dead trees and destroyed land that curved along the river and the road.
The night curled around him now, in the truck, and he kept the brights on as he steered through town, the windows open and the AC on max just like he liked it, along the sleepy Hudson, searching for her house, refusing to think about what he had just done. He was his own superhero now. He was Captain Selective Memory. He drew heavily on his bottle of Old Grand-Dad.
He parked. He found her house, the short bungalow with no dormer on top and all its windows black, a round panel of glass where the dormer used to be, the butt of a telescope pressed against it. A low porch, empty of chairs, covered the front of the house, and he set the pink cardigan down there: a peace offering.
He looked at the moon, rising in the sky, and he thought about how his mother had taught Myrna things about the sun, how to tell the time from its angle in the sky. He could see her looking up at the sun, her pale skin all aglow from the light, the way she was before the Rudolph nose and deep, wavy lines cut into her face with alcohol. It was late and he was tired and he wanted to see his wife the way she used to be.
A small cross hung on the front door. He raised his hand to knock and then he let his hand fall back to his side.
He thought of Myrna, how Myrna had tried to take his babies away. Away to Stillwater, she had up and tried to slip them out in the night. In the night, he was with her that night he was unloading her boxes, he was backing the flatbed up to the porch. She had asked his baby girls to go with her and, this was the other part, the other side, that little jab of knowledge, he didn’t want to know. Everything was unraveling now, and then reweaving, and this tapestry, he thought, this blanket will circle him, made of information he craved and dreaded. His wife had told them, all three of them, what? I’m leaving your father. I’m moving to a crummy school district west of here, want to come? That’s why they stayed, yes. Who would want to change schools at the end like that? And their friends lived nearby, around the corner. That’s what Eliza said. We wanted to keep an eye on you. And now he wondered, was it the drinking that worried them? The gambling? Their father without his favorite daughter? We wanted to make sure you were all right.
He had always seen the booking as illegal, but not that illegal. It seemed so harmless. Maybe somewhere up the chain there was real live danger, intrigue, the Mafia shit, murders, but day after August day the same people wandered in, same slipping the money under the coaster, same exultations and lamentations from watching the TV, same voices on the phone, all of it finessed and finagled by Loretta. The only time it changed was after that phone call, that warning, that tip-off from the DA, and then Loretta’s disposition distorted. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. She wouldn’t kiss his lips. She wouldn’t suck his dick. Not for that whole month between the phone call and the raid, and now, of course, now he realized how blind he had been and who had turned him in and he laughed.
To his children he told the same story, and to the cops, to the judge and the jury. To all of them he said that the booking began after his third daughter died. He told that story over and over again, of Loretta’s fifty-dollar bill and the TV blaring behind him, of his dead daughter and Loretta’s debilitated son, told it so many times he’d believed it himself. But the booking started well before that, started when all four of his daughters were alive and well. Started in one of Myrna’s dry spells, even, when the house was clean and the children were properly fed and the bar was doing fine, just fine, and he got greedy. He got Loretta and he got greedy, and they cooked up a scheme to cultivate more funds, and the scheme germinated, it grew, and their plan had been to someday move together to one of those big flowery places on Fifth Avenue, when the kids grew, Loretta said, or when they had more money put away. She kept putting it off, a little more, she said, a little longer, and then their plans were foiled by the unexpected tragedy.
For a long time he wanted to go into her son’s room in the ICU at Albany Med and pull the plug on that kid, wanted to rip the clear blue plastic breathing tube from his throat, like cleaving a hook caught too low in a trout. Loretta’s son swiped him of his hope, and he wanted to kill that boy, and then for a while he wanted to kill Loretta, and once he was so pissed that his third daughter had died and fucked up his fantasy that he wanted to kill her … but she was already dead. And then they no longer talked of Fifth Avenue, and the booking bubbled on, meting out the money, and Loretta counting the loot, the drinks getting stronger and their sex-free stretches getting longer and then the raid and then the trial and then the end.
And then for a while he thought his daughter’s death was some kind of punishment, but his list of sins was so long that he could not pin it on any particular misdeed. For all his wrongs, the booking was his only illegality, and he tried, he did, he really tried to put it away after her death. She died ten days before track season started, and that whole first week he wouldn’t come to the phone, wouldn’t take the cash slipped under the coasters. But a funny thing happened. He missed it. He missed holding his breath from the moment the starting gates opened till the horses finished their last lap. He missed the bugle song of Call to the Post and the jockeys in the paddock and the camaraderie among the bettors in War Bar. And when Loretta wandered in that night and slipped him her sweaty fifty, he took it, and he took it up again, and he didn’t quit till it all came crashing down around him.
He laughed now because the woman he loved had ruined his life, because his daughters had stayed behind to look after him, because his wife had to leave him to keep from drinking herself to death, and because he was stranded in the middle of nowhere now, and his whole town was a mirage, the Queen of Spas, the Spa City façade.
He stepped down from the porch but there was no step and he tumbled and landed on his ankle. He looked up at the moon and the porch and the door and he said, “I’m all twisted up.” He said to the closed door, “Untwist me.”
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 Sacanda
ga 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.
Belly Page 19