Belly

by Lisa Selin Davis

  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.

  The 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.

  CHAPTER 6

  HE 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.

  He was too tired this morning to raise his hips and practice his range-of-motion exercises, and his whole left side felt bruised and bullied. His release plan included a physical from Dr. Nielson, who’d written “68” under Life Expectancy on the form, and the gift of new body parts was a prediction that he would barely make it to his seventies. This morning he was glad of that. Sixty years of this life was plenty. Let the joints stiffen and halt, let them lead him into a corner and strand him there.

  The light diffused. Nora stood in the doorway between the TV room and kitchen, arms folded like a straitjacket. It seemed like the first time he’d seen her without the baby straddling her ever-widening hip. He sat up on the couch, swooning, put a hand to his head and felt dried blood. He looked at the bloodstain on the knees of his favorite jeans. Nora sat down next to him. She had a warm, damp washcloth and she smoothed it over his temple.

  “We have to get this checked out,” she said.

  “Anybody call for me?”

  “No one.”

  She put a thumb and forefinger to his scalp.

  “I was really looking forward to coming back to town,” he said.

  “I know you were.”

  “I thought it would be easy.”

  “Nothing is easy. You taught me that.”

  She raised herself from the couch. He heard the water running and she returned with the rinsed-out cloth and she put it to his forehead one more time.

  “We’re taking Margie’s car to go to the emergency room. I had the Bronco towed to the shop.”

  “Nora —”

  “I don’t want to know,” she said. “What happened, what you did, how you got home, who you were with, I don’t care. Don’t tell me. I don’t want any information.”

  “You sound just like your mother.”

  “Mom’s very wise sometimes.” She put the cloth on her swollen belly and said, “Let’s go. We’ll just make sure you don’t have a concussion. I’ve got a million things to do before tomorrow.”

  They both hoisted themselves from the couch, him with his fake hips and her with her big baby-to-be. They looked like a comedy routine, like father and daughter: the vaudeville act.

  Margie’s car was an ailing 1978 Dodge Dart. He remembered the car—the same one she had in high school, that Henry would borrow when he took Eliza out. “How is it possible she has the same car?” he asked.

  “She never drives it. Ever. She walks, or if she’s going somewhere far away she rides with other people.”

  He inspected the car. The rear end was covered in bumper stickers. Keep Abortion Legal. El Salvador Is Spanish for Vietnam. Break All Ties with Apartheid. Capitalism Is Killing Music.

  “Jesus, we can’t drive in this thing. We’ll get shot. The Lord will strike us down.” Ratify the ERA. Impeach Nixon. Some of these were older than the car itself. I Believe You, Anita.

  “Get in.”

  The car started beautifully. “How does it work if she never drives it?”

  “She starts it once a week and lets it run for fifteen minutes. She’s very organized.”

  “She’s a nut.”

  “That, too.”

  “Why did Eliza ever marry into that family?”

  “They’re a very nice family, they’re just incredibly strange.”

  Nora drove down Broadway in the still sleepiness of a Saturday morning, and the town, for a minute, looked the way she did in his youth, and he loved her.

  “Where are the children?” he asked.

  “With Phil.”

  “No kidding.”

  “He took them to the Great Escape.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “He took the baby, too.”

  “What can a baby do at an amusement park?”

  She put one of her unlit cigarettes between her lips. “He took the kids as a favor so I could take you to the doctor.”

  She pulled into the hospital parking lot.

  “Spending time with his own kids is a favor? Jesus.”

  “He did it as a favor to me, because if you’d woken up before he left he would have beaten the shit out of you.”

  “Oh.”

  They walked through revolving doors into the emergency room. He stopped.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I don’t have any health insurance.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. We’ve got it.”

  He said, “No. Let’s just go.” He tugged at her sleeve but she inched herself away.

  “Sit down, Belly. I’ll register you.”

  She came back with a form on a clipboard, made him fill out his Social Security number and a few other specifics. She’d written the number of her house down under “Permanent Address.”

  The emergency room ticked like a slow clock, a million years between every tick and every tock, no one in there but a teenage boy, scratching under his cast, and his overweight mo
ther. He thought of all the times he’d been there before, for the birth of his four daughters and the death of one of them, but the hospital had expanded and changed, refurbished into one giant pink womb, Pepto-Bismol pink, Chinese restaurant pink, baby skin pink.

  “I hate pink,” he told Nora as she lowered herself back into the seat next to him.

  “It won’t be long. They’re not busy, but you’re not an emergency.”

  “Then why are we in the emergency room?”

  “Because doctors don’t see patients on Saturday.” She picked up the Saratogian. He could be in there, a description of the accident, or the incident, an interview with the girl.

  “Nora, you don’t have to wait with me.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he said, but the look on her face silenced him into submission. He could see how outraged she was, and how sad, how much she hated him, and he thought maybe if he could keep pressing then she would set him free. If she would kick him out then he could voyage all the way to vagabond, like those women who let themselves get really fat, he could just give up or give in or give it all away, drink himself right back to jail, or right into the ground.

  “Let me see the paper,” he said, and he scanned the police reports but there was only news of a drunken hotwalker, an attempted break-in at the music shop, two teenagers—names omitted—caught throwing prunes at the windows of the new old-folks home. And with that absence of his offenses in ink, Belly began to wonder if it had happened at all, if the girl in the pink sweater was a drunken dream, a wake-up call, if that was Shannon’s apparition sent to tell him something. No, it had never happened. He had not ruined the life of some helpless hippie girl. He would never hurt someone like that. He was a changed man.