FROM "BELLY:"
SARATOGA SPRINGS was stoic as the Statue of Liberty with Grace Kelly’s face and the body of Bettie Page. That’s the way Belly O’Leary thought of his town, like she was a woman in a Greek robe, to be revered. He stared out the big tinted front window of the Greyhound bus as it hobbled north on Route 9, down the long line of motels that sat hungry all winter and grew fat with tourists in the summer. They were fat now. August. Cars streamed out the little roundabouts and bled onto the highway.
August changed the face of Saratoga, from Grace Kelly to something a little brassier. Kim Novak, maybe, or any of the girls on the Alberto Vargas cards his father used to keep hidden in his sock drawer. For one month a year, she was a woman with a bad dye job and too much makeup, and this was the town he was coming home to in 2001; this was the lady welcoming him back.
Only he didn’t recognize her. Where once green fields graced the sides of the highway, glass-box office buildings now rose like the great pyramids. Traffic and strip malls and smog choked the last promising stretches of hillside that used to hug the town.
The closer he got to home, the sicker he felt. A moan rumbled in his solar plexus. He recognized it as heartache. He was returning two years early to his hometown, four instead of six, his sentence commuted for good behavior—something he’d never been accused of in his life. He worried now he was back too soon. The town wasn’t ready for him. He’d walk in on her with another man. He’d catch her in a lie.
For four years he’d kept quiet in a cinder-block cell, waiting to hear from his old mistress, Loretta, waiting for word from their colleagues at the New York Racing Association. They’d advised him not to talk. They’d sent Loretta to the courtroom to remind him, quietly, with a hand pressing gently on his shoulder, that two of his three remaining daughters still lived in this town. Loretta with her lips twisted into that sideways life-threatening smile, walking off with his unmarked $172,000 stashed in her fake Hermès Kelly bag.
He half imagined her waiting for him, his midwestern princess, at the bus station now, opening her arms to him, opening the sack of cash, pulling out from her cleavage a shiny gold key to a small office at the back of City Hall, where the NYRA boys and the Republican chairman would offer him cigars and checks bubbling with zeroes and shake his hand for not giving up their names. But he only wanted to see Loretta in his fantasies.
The bus pulled up to Springway Diner and squeaked to a stop. He sat there, in seat 3C, the other passengers milling about, collecting their things, getting up to stretch as the driver turned off the engine and announced a twenty-minute rest before continuing on to Montreal. He sat there and thought about what the prison doctor had told him after his release physical: no salt or cigarettes or alcohol, nothing that might raise his blood pressure. He wanted all of those things now, anything to calm the erratic beating of his heart, to lengthen his short breath. His hands shook. Only two other times in his life had he been this nervous, so nervous it burned, it was something that had to be doused: at his wedding and then, twenty years later, at his third daughter’s funeral. Both those times, and now, he just wanted the moment to melt away, to have already happened. He wanted to turn around and see the hard times behind him.
He stepped off the bus into a blast of heat that surrounded him like an embrace. He’d left a dewy, cool Pennsylvania that morning for this: a thick stew of atmosphere, the air heavy and wet, and he was at that moment so very tired. Across the street from the bus stop were new stores and crummy old motels with new paint jobs and the road sparkled with new, dark tar. His oldest daughter, Nora, was not waiting for him. No one was. He looked at the strangers and tourists loitering on the concrete outside: Who the hell are all you people and what have you done with my town?
This used to be a twenty-four-day town, Belly thought. He remembered the queer quiet just before the racetrack opened each summer, the whole town preparing for the rain, the reign, of tourists to descend. It was like that every year: upscale specialty shops selling fancy linens and New Age chachkas and glossy horse paintings bloomed on Broadway, only to wither once track season ended. But now, since he’d been away, the racetrack stayed open almost twice as long, reaching back into July and stretching all the way to Labor Day. A season of horse racing straddled the town, scarring it up for the rest of the year, just like what they used to say in AA: one foot in tomorrow, one foot in yesterday, and you’re pissing all over today.
