The Rail

by Howard Owen

  “But it really messed up their party, I’ll tell you that. They’d lose a day or two like that.”

  Blanchard lets out a long sigh.

  “Of course, it was like spitting in the wind. Pretty soon, they’d be right back at it again. And then they started posting guards every night.”

  She gives Neil a look and a wink.

  “They took the guards off last week, though. I guess they thought whoever it was had given up. FFC.”

  Neil looks at her.

  “Fat fucking chance,” she says, and turns again to watch the workers.

  “You ought to be careful,” Neil suggests, but she doesn’t seem to hear him.

  They walk back the way they came, soon finding the path. Their shoes are caked with red mud, and Blanchard says she’ll clean them as soon as they get back to the house.

  They are almost to the gazebo again when the deer crashes out of the woods. It bounds over the ridge and is out of sight down the hill before they can walk over to watch.

  THIRTEEN

  David wanders through the house. He has called the garage this time and is assured that his wounded car is getting top priority.

  There is a photo wall in an alcove at the back of the great room. He is surprised to see how many of the pictures framed and hanging there are of Neil Beauchamp. Some are from newspaper clippings, some are promotional glossies, apparently designed to make the players look as foolish as possible. There is one taken at the kind of function the Tigers and later the Indians would have every year. In it, Neil Beauchamp, Number 7, is squatting beside his young son, who is dressed in an identical Detroit uniform. David guesses that he would have been four, because the year after that, the Virginia Rail was traded.

  David does not recall any photograph taken at a later date in which either he or his father looked so genuinely happy.

  Neil Beauchamp figures he would have made another $5 million playing baseball had he been born five years later, still ripe when the free-agent money started pouring in during the mid-’70s. By the early ’90s, he could make more signing his old baseball cards and children’s bats and gloves than he did as a player in his prime.

  When he was still making such appearances, Neil and old acquaintances would laugh and shake their heads about the strangeness of it all. Some of them were bitter, railing about the millionaire .240 hitters, the porcelain outfielders who were good for only 100 games a year, the rag-arm pitchers with losing records who made more than whole teams did 20 years before.

  Neil, though, would trade none of it for what he had. He can’t imagine how wealth could have made any of it better. His sole regret, large enough to blot out all the others’ bitter, small complaints, is that it ended.

  He thought $20,000 and 154 games a year were all he ever ought to ask for.

  When he was introduced to Catherine Anne Taylor, that magic rookie year when he had steaks for breakfast and rode in plush and important trains smelling of grandeur and comfort that would never be matched by any jet, he was drawing a salary of $10,000 a year and sending some of that home.

  What did he need with money? His meals were paid for, his hotel on the road was paid for, his train ticket, even his clothes, thanks to clothing stores that asked only that he drop around on the odd off afternoon to sign some baseballs and shake some hands. He still made extra money playing down south in the winter leagues.

  And there were girls.

  Neil turned 21 at his fourth Lakeland spring training; he hit two singles and a double that day.

  He was not handsome. His teeth had not been fixed yet, and when he was forced to smile at something, his left hand went up involuntarily to cover the lower half of his angular face.

  But he was tall and thin, and he had the power—not the power of politicians and tycoons, either, offering young women gilded luxury tempered by sweat-stained pillows and bodies best abided in dark chambers. Neil Beauchamp’s power was that he drew the people, made the cameras flash, carried whomever he was with into the center of the excitement with him, while he was still as untouched by time as a Greek statue (albeit one with bad teeth). He was the New Boy.

  He made love to two girls that spring. The first was a tall redhead five years his senior who, he later discovered, had been with two of his teammates already. The second, a blonde education major down from a Midwestern college, spent the better part of a week with him. He was not a voracious lover, neither devoured by want nor the need to prove himself, but he was sometimes dazzled that year by all the women, young and old, who sought him out. He only occasionally paused to think that, should he have met one of those women at a bar, dressed in his cheap slacks and short-sleeved striped shirt (he had six that all vaguely resembled each other), none of them would acknowledge his existence, much less remove her clothes and offer to do anything, anything you want, Neil.

  But Neil Beauchamp was not really dazzled, relatively speaking. He did not spend half his first year’s salary on a new Chrysler, like the fellow rookie, a pitcher, with whom he would room when they headed north. He did not have to hide from irate husbands or boyfriends or face paternity suits or assault charges, or worry very much about the clap. He was, it was agreed, quiet. The way he was hitting, he was allowed to be any way he wanted.

  “Don’t you get him laid,” one of the coaches warned an older player who was known to share his bounty with promising youngsters. “If he ain’t gettin’ laid now, a lay sure as hell couldn’t make him any better.”

  Maybe, Neil would think much later, he would have been better off if he had catted around, accepting all offers, working up some emotional calluses.

  But Kate Taylor changed that, and he did not, at that point in their courtship, resist the change.

  She was working that summer, between her junior and senior years at Michigan, in the Tigers’ front office. She was thin, with a long face and a jaw that was just strong enough. She had raven hair, a perfect nose and a look—at once the dreaminess of small children and the promise of abandon—that was defined by the Tigers’ veterans, some of whom had tried to take her out for drinks, as “bedroom eyes.”

  She chose Neil Beauchamp, who would have been too shy, even in that year when he was discovered by most of the population of a major American city, to choose her.

  He was embarrassed by his lack of education, painfully aware that his expertise was limited mostly to trains, hotels and baseball. He could not have pointed out the other cities in the American League on a blank map. He was essentially lost when he turned the daily newspaper away from the sports section or the comics. On the Tigers’ second trip to New York that season, he had asked the traveling secretary what the distant structure was, towering over all the buildings around it.

  “Jesus,” the man said, shaking his head, “didn’t you see King Kong?”

  Neil would never have gone after a woman like Catherine Anne Taylor, so self-assured, possessing secret knowledge of matters cultural and carnal to which, he was sure, he would never be privy.

  She had rejected several of his teammates, all more worldly than he, and he was stunned when she asked him one night, when he was walking out the players’ exit after a loss to the Orioles, if he would give her a ride home.

  Neil said he would, cursing himself for not combing his hair more carefully, for not dressing better before leaving his rooming house for the ballpark, for not keeping mouthwash in his locker.

  They stopped twice so Neil could sign autographs for children. He almost forgot to open the used Chevy’s door for her, taking her cue finally as she stood unmoving and patient beside the car.

  Inside, her perfume, less sweet, more nuanced than the cheap, bold fragrances his occasional dates wore, made his knees weak.

  They were almost out of the parking lot when she spoke.

  “If you don’t know where I live,” she said quietly, smiling slightly, “how are you going to drive me home?”

  “Maybe,” he said, his voice scratchy from nerves, “maybe I don’t want to
drive you home.”

  “Well, where do you want to drive me, then?”

  “Where do you want to be driven?”

  She smiled again, looking straight ahead.

  “You decide.”

  Neil stopped at the entrance to Michigan Avenue.

  “I don’t know anywhere to take a girl as pretty as you.”

  He had never been good at repartee. He envied the Northern boys, who spit out in machine-gun bursts the words that tumbled around in his slow mouth like marbles.

  But this one time, he felt he had said the right thing.

  She moved closer to him. He could feel her thigh against his.

  “Turn here,” she said. “I know a place.”

  Before the summer was over, they were an item. That winter, Neil went south again to Cuba for the last time. He wrote her every day, and she wrote him every day. His letters were about dusty bus rides and cockfights and ballparks where gamblers with guns gave the evil eye to errant batsmen. Hers were about philosophy classes and sorority parties and the annual trip to close down her parents’ cottage on the eastern side of Lake Michigan.

  In December, she flew down to Havana for a week, with her parents’ permission, and she and Neil, who everyone assumed had been “doing it” for months, made love for the first time in a hotel room near the harbor. The drums and horns of Latin music from a wedding reception drifted into their open window from somewhere on the street below, defining the rhythm of their passion.

  By February, they were engaged. Kate’s parents allowed her to spend a week in Florida. It unnerved Neil to be around the Taylors, partly because they knew two things, as hard as they tried to hide this knowledge: They were above him, and he was screwing their daughter.

  Neil would come to understand, in the good and bad years that followed, what he brought to the Taylors’ table. He would come to appreciate Kate’s keen eye for talent, her understanding in the summer of 1956 that the gangly, hungry country boy she saw taking extra batting practice every day was the genuine article, the player who would only get better, the one who would leave his mark.

  Kate Taylor loved baseball, and she enjoyed being around men who made their living by their testosterone. She did not intend, as she told one of her sorority sisters one night when they were both drunk, to marry “some limp-dick fratty-bagger living off his daddy’s money.”

  On the other hand, she did not intend to cast her lot with one of the oafs who occasionally and unsuccessfully sought her. She sensed who would drink and party his way out of the league too soon, which ones would never be strong enough to make it at all, which ones were bullies who would use their power to humiliate anyone—including their wives—they could control.

  Her father, a man who started out as a used-car salesman and wound up owning two automobile dealerships, had told her all her life that she was in a position, because of who they were, to choose.

  And Kate chose Neil Beauchamp.

  Neil saw, too, that she brought more than her beauty and intelligence to their unlikely union. She was able to smooth his edges without his even realizing they were being smoothed. She took him places, introduced him to people who didn’t really give a damn whether the Virginia Rail’s subjects and verbs agreed or not, were just happy to have a .300 hitter at their party. She took him to museums, talked about books and movies, never educating, just telling him stories, mentioning things that “somebody told me once” without ever intimating that these were things any educated person should know.

  They were married in June of 1957, and for a very long time, Neil Beauchamp thought his life was complete.

  David was born in March of 1959, while Neil was in Lakeland. He flew home to see his new son and was back in Florida two days later.

  He had driven in 121 runs the year before and batted almost .350. He was in the midst of a three-year run that would establish him as one of the best hitters in baseball. He was, with Kate’s guidance, becoming a fixture in Detroit, the man people called to make an appearance at a fund-raiser, to ride a float in the Christmas parade. The Rail was quiet, they agreed, but he didn’t drink too much, like some of them did, and he would keep his hands off the butts of their wives and daughters. He was polite enough, for a ballplayer.

  He stayed north in the winter now, and while part of him missed playing almost every day, he loved Kate, and while there were times he needed to be by himself, he cherished the unaccustomed feeling of warmth that she brought to the coolness of his life.

  When he went to spring training that year, he offered, over and over again, to stay with her in Detroit and let ’em fine him. They weren’t going anywhere without the Virginia Rail.

  “No,” she’d told him. “You’ve got your job to do. Your job is to make me proud.”

  Standing by her bed, the day after David was born, Neil took Kate’s hand in his. He kneeled and kissed it.

  “Are you proud of me?” she had asked him, and he thought there was something sad in the way she asked it.

  “I am always proud of you,” he told her.

  Kate just smiled and closed her eyes.

  FOURTEEN

  The copper-haired mechanic is a short, stout boy wearing a dark blue baseball cap with “Ford” across the front. He might not yet be out of high school, might not ever be out of high school, but here he seems to know that he holds all the cards.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” he says to David. “I got to be home by seven, and I got to pick up some stuff for my girl at the grocery store for Thanksgiving dinner. So, I expect you’d be alright coming back at six. I’m almost sure I’ll have it fixed by then.”

  In the short time David has been in the garage, the car’s chances of being repaired today have dipped from “definitely” to “almost sure.”

  “I’ll be back about 5:45,” he tells the boy, who only chews and nods.

  David wonders if it is too late to rent a car for two days, wonders if any car rentals will be open when he comes back in two hours and finds either the car not fixed or the feckless mechanic already gone. He wonders why he hesitates, why he doesn’t just call Hertz or Avis, charge whatever it costs. He could be home in time to tell Frannie and Abbie a bedtime story. He supposes he hates to admit he’s wasted so much time already; he thinks of himself as a lottery regular who plays the same number every day and won’t change for fear it will come in the first time he drops it.

  Back at Blanchard’s, he parks the truck and goes into the empty house. He can see her and his father at the far edge of the back yard, sitting in the gazebo. She seems, from this distance, to be leaning on Neil. They might be, from David’s vantage point, teenagers on a date.

  Blanchard has given them a desultory tour of the old place. The study particularly caught David’s eye, full of books from four generations of Penns, books from Blanchard’s New York days, more books than he has ever seen in a private home, stacked to the high ceiling in the built-in bookcases along all four walls, with boxes of them taking up half the available floor space.

  It is to this dark, comfortable room, this womb scented by ancient paper, that David wanders now.

  There is no order to it; some of the books were left when James and Virginia and their daughter moved to Richmond in 1954. Some were brought back by Blanchard when she reclaimed the old house.

  A Twain collection’s neighbors are Kafka and Belva Plain. A National Geographic collection running from the late ’50s until the present takes up most of one shelf along one wall, and children’s books from before World War II sit no more than half a dozen volumes from Henry Miller. Bellefleur and the works of Balzac are only coincidentally neighbors. Greek philosophy and Reader’s Digest condensed books battle for the scant light a lone window provides.

  The late afternoon sun spotlights the dust motes disturbed by David’s invasion. He walks the length of one wall, remembering the guilty comfort of childhood libraries, when he should have been outside, trying to be a better baseball player.

  There are sc
rapbooks here and there. David glances through some of them—mostly keepsakes from happier, brighter days at Penn’s Castle. James and Virginia’s wedding takes up one full album, as do Blanchard’s elementary school years. There is no obvious evidence of James Penn’s first marriage.

  In the corner, though, is an album, sitting on the next-to-bottom shelf, that has a title pasted across its spine, in letters an inch high. The letters look as if they might have been drawn by a child, and the album, unlike most of the books in this room, seems to have been explored in the recent past. There are holes in the front and back covers, and on the shelf next to it is an opened lock.

  Picking the album up, David can smell, even through the dust and old paper, Blanchard.

  Inside are clippings highlighting the career of the Virginia Rail, from high school write-ups in the Richmond Times-Dispatch to features in the Detroit papers and Sports Illustrated. Interspersed are handwritten notes, like pages from a diary, the earliest one on cheap, lined school paper. “Neil waved at me today.” “Neil looked so handsome today. He’s gotten his hair cut short for summer.” “Neil won’t let them pick on me. All I have to do is say the word, and he’ll protect me.”

  There are, here and there, poems.

  The pages are, for the most part, dated. On one, with “February 14, 1955” across the top in confident, showy penmanship, is written, over and over as if done for an after-school blackboard punishment, “I love Neil Beauchamp. I love Neil Beauchamp. I love Neil Beauchamp.” It fills the page, perhaps 200 repetitions of the same sentence.

  “You do remember, though? You didn’t forget?”

  Neil is staring straight out into the valley to the east. Blanchard is pressed hard against his right side. He lifts his arm and she slides even closer.

  Should Neil Beauchamp live forever, it would not be long enough to forget Valentine’s Day, 1955.

  He was still a minor-leaguer, still going to the islands every winter to play more baseball, still coming back home for a scant few weeks between seasons, his contributions to the store becoming more and more of a monetary nature. He was fairly certain they’d move him up to Triple-A when the season started, a step away from the big leagues. He was on track.