Belly (22 page)

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 Form
s 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.

He shouldn’t be here. He wasn’t supposed to be here. The days of bribing jockeys, the tellers not telling, altering the odds,
Filthy Phil Weiss and the Four Sons, underestimating golden two-year-olds on purpose, all the tricks were played and gone.
He’d gone from a stallion to a spit-the-bit, a worn-out old horse, and there wasn’t a single place for this old man to stand
in the whole of the Saratoga Racecourse. His town, his beautiful woman of a town, had spit him out like a piece of gristle.
He stood for a long time under the wooden awning of the Big Red Spring; he waited until the sun was high in the sky and he
was so hot and he labored out to the end of Union Avenue, thirstier than he’d ever been in his life.

H
e walked to the park entrance but he did not go in. He went around it, down Spring Street’s big dip and up again to Broadway.
He stood in front of the old library on the corner of Spring and Broadway, wondering where the new library was hidden. The
brick building was now an arts center, hovering atop the fault line, the bottom floor of the library—what used to be the children’s
section—leaning against the hill and looking out onto the park. Once or twice he had led his pride of daughters through that
tamed wilderness, past the duck pond and into the library, let them rub their greasy fingers along the hardcover books and
sat with them in beanbag chairs to read them their selections in the late afternoon.

He crossed the street to the bus stop and stood in front of the ruined strip mall and across from his old bar, and a solution
came to him, the answer to a problem he didn’t even know he had. For five days he’d been followed by the Sha-Na-Na theme song,
his daughters and parole officer and everyone he met telling him to Get a Job. All he had to do was walk two short blocks
to Caroline Street, order up a shot of Jack and show up for Ms. Monroe with the stink of whiskey on his breath. That would
be enough to send him back.

He stood at the bus stop and made a deal with God. He prayed, “If you send the bus here in the next five minutes, I will not
go to Ruffian’s.” He had no watch so he prayed, “I will count to three hundred and if the bus is not here by then, I will
go to Ruffian’s.”

He watched an old woman waiting under the glass awning, reading a Harlequin romance. She looked up and smiled at him, her
face bloomed into a million wrinkles, and she revealed a mouth of missing teeth. He looked away, and kept counting.

The bus rounded the curve of Broadway at 179, and he felt a strange mixture of relief and anger circle inside him.

The doors of the bus blew open and he climbed into the air-conditioning. The driver was a fat man with bushy sideburns wearing
a blue polyester uniform with stains along the collar. Belly nodded at him as he walked by.

“You gonna pay?” the driver asked.

“How much?”

“Eighty-five cents.”

He felt in his pockets but all he had was the paper money. “You have change?”

The driver pointed to a sign that displayed the fares and read “Exact Change Only.” Adults $1.15 and senior citizens eighty-five
cents. The bus door remained open and the driver stared at him and one passenger called, “Let’s go. Some of us have to get
to work,” and Belly wondered if the whole world knew.

He could get off now and drink instead. He could take this as a sign from God not to walk the straight path.

“Anybody have change?” he asked. No one answered. “You guys want to get going, give me some change.”

The wrinkly woman with few teeth opened her purse and handed him three quarters and a dime. She said, “This is laundry money,
you know.”

He wanted to say thank you but his mouth was too dry. He took the change and held his hand out to the bus driver, who said,
“Put it in the slot,” and he dumped the coins in the machine and it whirred as it ate the change.

Belly sat down in a handicapped seat near the front and braced himself as the bus jerked forward. He looked up at the sign
again and thought to tell the driver that he’d underpaid and then he looked at the strange gray hue of his own skin, the way
it was starting to slide off the bone, and said nothing.

Besides the Greyhound that had returned him home just a few days before, the last bus he was on brought him from the Circuit
Court in Albany to Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, and though it was September and the rolling hills were green and the promise
of fall was bleeding in the leaves, it had been a grueling ride, for he could see what surrounded the prison: nothing but
strip malls and strip malls. There was nothing to escape to, the whole world was one endless series of fluorescent-lit aisles
and he just wanted to get back to town so badly, he wanted to be back in his twenty-four-day town.

He turned to the wrinkly lady and said, “They undercharged me,” and the lady smiled her blank, blooming smile and looked at
her romance novel.

“Where does this bus go?” he asked the woman.

“To Ballston Spa,” she said, not looking up.

“But the other way, in the other direction. Where does it go?”

“Out to the malls, and to Wal-Mart,” she said.

He felt trapped—his choices were Ballston Spa or Wal-Mart, his choices were the parole officer or back to prison, some shit
job or another shit job, and nothing in his future was bright, or open, no door portended light on the other side.

The bus rolled on down Route 50, past the park and the visitors’ center and McDonald’s and the Chinese restaurant constantly
under new management, past the dance museum and the state park and everywhere he’d been in his five-day run as a tourist in
his own town. He was going backwards.

They passed the back entrance to SPAC, where the parking lot overflowed with tourist cars, and he heard someone say, “It’s
those Moody Blues in town tonight.” They passed Geyser Crest, the first crummy development to spring up beyond the city limits,
where Loretta and Darren used to live. They rolled through the little nontown of Malta, through the countryside, only there
was no countryside. It was all gone. It was all strip malls. Bars and restaurants in strip malls, smoke shops and lingerie
stores in strip malls, army-navy surplus and ammo supplies in strip malls, and the hills behind the strip malls rolled away
as if they longed to escape.