The Rail

by Howard Owen

  They talked into the early morning hours about games and seasons long gone, about Mundy, about David and Carly and the girls, about what comes next. Nothing, though, about the photo album. The talk was so good, he and the Rail actually on the same wavelength for a while, that David did nothing to alter the temporary magic.

  Blanchard comes back in and sees Neil dispensing syrup. He puts just enough out to spread a thin sheen on each pancake, and he is down to his last one. He hovers over the plate, his elbows to the side, as if to block anyone who might take his food.

  “Jesus,” Blanchard says, taking a spatula and slapping three more pancakes on Neil’s plate, then taking the syrup and pouring until the cakes are almost floating. “You’re not in there any more, Neil Beauchamp. You can have as much damn syrup as you want, honey.”

  “The last time I visited him,” she says, turning to David, “you know what he said he missed? Pancakes. Pancakes with all the syrup in the world. And now he’s afraid somebody’s going to hit him or something if he eats them.”

  Her voice cracks, and she turns away.

  Neil reaches over and puts his hand on her back.

  “Give me a little time,” he tells her. “I’ll be OK. I’m just not used to all this.”

  Blanchard returns to the kitchen. She is baking sweet-potato pies as her contribution to dinner at Wat and Millie’s.

  “I hope that won’t be too fancy to offend their tender sensibilities,” she says.

  She comes out twice more to make sure both Neil and David have enough breakfast, then excuses herself to “prepare for the bacchanalia.”

  The two men clear the table. While they are removing plates and putting away milk and orange juice and syrup, Neil asks his son about Kate. David doesn’t remember his father asking about her before, ever. He must have, David thinks, and I just can’t remember.

  “Well, she’s doing well,” he says, choosing each word as carefully as any politician he ever interviewed. “She’s back in Detroit … Jesus, you know that. Grosse Point Shores. I guess Warren’s doing pretty well.”

  Neil nods his head. He knows where the former Kate Beauchamp lives, and he is aware of her husband’s name and status.

  “I mean,” he says, closing the refrigerator door and turning to face David, “is she well? Is she happy?”

  David says she is well, well enough for 61, and he supposes she is happy, although she is not terribly happy with him at the present.

  “She did it all,” Neil says, looking off through medieval windows into the woods beyond. “She raised you, and she carried me. She would pick out my clothes and pack my suitcase. Wouldn’t let me lift a finger in the kitchen. I could barely dress and feed myself without her.

  “She just thought I’d amount to more, is all. Thought I could do more than play ball. She had high standards.”

  David leans against the kitchen counter and sighs.

  “I hear that.”

  “Well,” Neil says, “she has more reason to hope with you.”

  “Right. I’m 38. I’m out of a job.”

  “Been there,” Neil says, and he and David make eye contact and begin to laugh, Neil quietly while he sits at the table, David so uncontrollably that he has to wipe tears from his eyes.

  The Great Letting-Go was not an avalanche. It was more like erosion as soft, rootless soil gradually slid downhill into a creek.

  The Virginia Rail, once he had made it known that he wanted to remain “a baseball man,” spent two summers managing a team in a rookie league where the players were all less than 22 years old and the season lasted less than three months.

  He would manage for six years total in the minor leagues. None of his teams ever finished higher than second, and he could not swear that he ever made one player better.

  He’d seen managers and coaches, when he was a player, who had his particular problem. They once were great talents, but all their talent was either born to them or nurtured at some level beyond conscious thought.

  A 19-year-old first baseman at Johnson City, that first season, asked Neil to help him with his swing after he had struck out three times in a row.

  Neil would watch the first baseman swing, and then he would tell him to just swing level, get that hitch out, don’t be too impatient. But he could not break down what he did to individual components, like taking a watch apart. He had never done that with his own swing, for fear that he could not put it back together.

  “Just a nice, smooth, even swing,” Neil told the boy, and walked off. The player was gone after the season ended.

  Kate stayed home. She had moved with David back to Cleveland, and the first two years, it wasn’t so bad. Neil was only gone for a little more than three months, and his wife and son visited him on three occasions, although Kate thought the conditions of a minor-league manager were appalling and tried, not for the first time, to get him to go see her father about a position with one of his car dealerships.

  “He wants you to take it over some day,” she told Neil, as she had told him before.

  But all Neil could see was a 20-year wait, learning “the car business” from a man who once fawned over him and would now be his boss. It was pride, as much as anything, Neil knows now. He was a baseball man, he told Kate. That was all he knew.

  But it was fear, too. Neil Beauchamp, for all Kate’s coaching, was a high school dropout whose skills inside the white lines of a baseball field far outstripped anything he had to offer outside them.

  Kate had always run things, right from that first impromptu date. Before, though, she spent her energy on ensuring that the Virginia Rail had a smooth, seamless world in which to hit baseballs. Now, she saw herself as a force to make a new Neil Beauchamp, one whose success at a game somehow translated into a larger world, one in which men wore suits instead of uniforms and achieved their victories with suavity and stealth.

  “Just let me try one more season,” Neil pleaded with her. “I can make it back. I’m a better manager than the pinheads I played for.”

  He had never, ever had to beg for anything when he was hitting .330, and despite his better instincts, it soured him.

  The third year, he was to be the manager of a Class A team in Winston-Salem. It was a step up, he insisted to Kate, and she said that at this rate he’d be 80 by the time he was a big-league manager.

  That May, David’s high school team was in the regional playoffs. When it reached the finals, scheduled for a Thursday evening, Neil left the team in the capable hands of his third-base coach for two days and caught a Thursday morning flight to Cleveland.

  David was a junior that year. He had managed, through determination and (he always suspected) the coach’s belief that genes would eventually out, to become the starting second baseman. He was the weakest hitter in the lineup but a competent fielder. Neil had worked with him during the previous two winters more than he had in the past, having less need to attend to his own physical fitness.

  The two of them, though, were never in harmony. David was far past the point where Neil could become part of his day-to-day life. The Virginia Rail didn’t understand the music, didn’t understand the hair, but mainly, as hard as he tried to conceal it, did not understand how his son could be as devoid of that one skill on which Neil Beauchamp had built his entire life: hitting a baseball.

  As useless as Neil was to his rookie league players, he was more so to his own son. If one of them wasn’t angry, the other was. Neil would fume about David’s inability to “just swing straight, dammit. Get rid of that hitch.” And when David did, for short stretches, make good contact with the batting-practice pitches he was throwing, Neil would compliment him and David would respond with sarcasm: “Oh, blessed day. I have pleased the Virginia Rail. My life is complete.” And Neil would get angry again.

  Off the field, there was less tension between them but even less to communicate.

  If there was a beach weekend to veto, a report card to criticize, a curfew violation, it fell to Kate. Neil had come
to believe, after so many years of absentee parenthood, that he did not even have the right any more to deal with his son except on a baseball field.

  “Neil,” Kate told him when he called to inform them that he would be flying in for the Thursday night game, “he’s not ever going to be you. He’s doing the best he can.”

  Neil said he knew that, that he just wanted to be there for his son.

  Kate sighed, and said she wished sometimes that she had never allowed David to play baseball.

  Neil hung up.

  He arrived in Cleveland at three in the afternoon. The game was scheduled for six. Neil planned to meet Kate there. With a couple of hours to kill, he went to an airport bar, where two men his age recognized him immediately and began buying him beers.

  Neil Beauchamp had, in the solitude of small summer towns, begun to drink more. He found that it smoothed the way between the games—which were played in tiny, aging confines of dying grass and rock-ruined infields that did not deserve the name “stadium”—and sleep, which was eluding him more and more.

  Sometimes, he and the coaches would drink a case of beer among the three of them before calling it a night. So, Neil didn’t suppose a few beers in an airport lounge would hurt much.

  By the time he left, it was after five, and he had enjoyed six beers at the expense of people who he felt still admired him. He was jolted a little when he saw, out of a mirror in the bar as he left, one of the men look at the other and smile with what might have been indulgence or even sadness, but certainly was not giddiness over spending two hours talking baseball with the Virginia Rail.

  It put an edge to whatever ebullience he had reached in the lounge, and he was more impatient than usual with the slow traffic of rush hour.

  The national anthem was just concluding when he reached the park. There were no more than 300 people in the bleachers around home plate and down the baselines, and he found Kate quickly enough.

  “You’ve been drinking,” she said, and he said just a drink or two on the plane.

  He remembered, later, being impatient when David struck out in the third and fifth innings. He remembered Kate shushing him and he remembered telling her, not too loudly, he was sure, to shut up.

  Pitching dominated the game, and David’s team trailed 2-1 going into the bottom of the seventh and final inning. The first two batters struck out, and people began collecting themselves to leave. But then a walk and a single to the team’s only two competent pinch-hitters put runners on first and third, and it was down to David.

  Part of Neil relished the moment, the way he himself had in that long-ago high school game in Richmond, when he revealed himself to be a Talent. Part of him cringed, and he knew he had no faith in his son. He knew that what he really wished he could do was go up there himself and be the hero, one more time.

  “Oh, my God,” Kate muttered, and he knew she feared the worst, too.

  There was no one left on the bench except a couple of ninth-graders and a boy whose foot was in a cast, and it looked to Neil as if the coach was seriously considering one of those three alternatives. Finally, though, he shrugged and motioned David toward the plate, which he approached with what looked like hesitation.

  The pitcher seemed to be smirking, and Neil remembered how he had loved to wipe the arrogance off such faces.

  The first pitch was dead across the plate, but David, hoping for a walk, watched it. Neil knew it was the best pitch his son would see.

  The second pitch was low and away. David, daring not let a second called strike go by, and not having his father’s quick and discerning eye to judge a pitch between the pitcher’s hand and the catcher’s glove, swung wildly and missed.

  “Oh, no,” Neil groaned, and Kate elbowed him.

  The third pitch was a cruel curve that came in knee-high and broke into the strike zone. David watched it, and the game was over.

  He argued with the umpire, but not even his coach backed him up, and when David turned around to walk toward the bench, they were already packing up the equipment.

  “Neil,” Kate said as they stood, taking his arm, “please don’t make him feel any worse than he already does.”

  And Neil really did not mean to make his son feel worse. He really did love David. He always had. But he was so disappointed. Despite David’s good grades and at least passable looks and personality, Neil felt the boy had to prove himself, at some point. He had to step up to something or someone better than he was and beat that thing or that person, if he was ever going to succeed.

  They waited for their son at Kate’s car, saying little to each other. David was supposed to be going somewhere afterward with his teammates, in his newly-acquired, well-worn Plymouth, but he’d said he would come by to say hello to his father first.

  Neil had a Saturday morning flight south, where he would rejoin his own team after a day with his family. David was taking Friday off from school. Maybe they could go to the lake, to the park they used to go to sometimes, where Neil could remember them being happy together.

  But David told them he thought he’d just go home, that he’d see them there later.

  “Why don’t you go out with your teammates?” Neil asked him.

  “Because I don’t want to.”

  Kate tried to usher Neil away. He had never taken the time to learn when to be silent, never learned the rhythms of teenage stages.

  But Neil moved away from her, toward David.

  “You’ve got to get right back in there,” he said, not sure he knew what he meant but feeling he had to say something. “You can’t let some candy-ass high school pitcher get the best of you. We’ll go out tomorrow …”

  David, who had his back to his father, wheeled around, and Neil could see his eyes shining.

  “You’d better remember this night, Rail,” he said—he seldom called Neil “dad” any more. “This is the end of a great career, the end of an era. You’ve seen the last appearance of David Beauchamp, Son of Rail. Career batting average, .125. Good field, no hit, no chip off the old block.”

  “You’ve just got to try harder …”

  “No! I don’t have to try harder. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to ever pick up a baseball again, and I’m not going to.”

  He spun and walked away. Neil grabbed him.

  “Okay, then. Go ahead and be a quitter.” The word stuck in his throat, but he plunged on into the dark. “You embarrassed me tonight. Who the hell taught you to hit like that?”

  David walked on, toward his new-old car. Kate had at first tried to stop Neil, tugging on his arm to quiet him. A small crowd, the remnants of the game’s spectators, was watching and listening.

  Then she let go, and she, too, turned away from him. Neil was left standing by himself in the asphalt parking lot, watched from a distance by strangers who recognized him.

  “I’ll see you at home,” he said, and Kate said, “No, you won’t.”

  When Neil drove the rental car into their driveway, the house was dark. He waited inside for an hour, but neither his wife nor his son appeared that night.

  He stayed in a motel, unable to bear the brick rancher by himself. He was able to change his flight the next morning after calling the house twice and getting no answer.

  Over the months and years, he and Kate and David would patch things up, but the wounds underneath got no air and didn’t really heal.

  David kept his promise and never played another game of baseball. Neil never asked him to.

  One more year, and David was out of high school, gone to Ohio State, with summer jobs, first in construction and then interning at daily newspapers in other parts of the country. It seemed to Neil that he chose the jobs that would take him as far as possible from home.

  It was easy enough for the Virginia Rail to stay employed in baseball, although the jobs that had either real money or real clout always seemed to go to someone else, someone who had gotten his college degree in the off-seasons or someone who could teach because, lacking Nei
l Beauchamp’s natural talent, he had been forced to learn.

  Neil spent summers in Salinas and Chattanooga and Buffalo, then four seasons as a base coach for Seattle and Texas.

  The marriage wouldn’t come completely apart until the summer of 1983, the year after he and Kate traveled to Cooperstown for the culmination of Neil Beauchamp’s life achievements, his induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Neil remembers that they argued back at the motel that night, something about his drinking too much.

  He and Kate had been as separated as a married couple could be, and Neil couldn’t even really remember when they became separated. He would go away every summer, and every summer he and Kate found fewer reasons to get together for occasional weekends. Their sex life, once a wet, lush entity, had dried up, and Neil added occasional women to his road vices, although he never felt a pull toward any of them that lasted longer than sexual fulfillment. In the winter, they had some good moments, and David would always come home for Christmas, first from college and then from jobs at small newspapers. They argued, but mostly they left each other alone.

  In the summer of 1983, Neil came back to Cleveland at the All-Star break, not really planning to spend his three days off with Kate, who didn’t know he was coming. Instead, he had decided that it was time to confront the rumors he had heard, second- and third-hand, that Kate Beauchamp had taken up with a relief pitcher for the Indians, a man 20 years younger. He didn’t completely discount it; Kate was still a fine-looking woman, firm of body and face, “a tough-minded broad,” as Neil had heard one of his old teammates refer to her.

  Still, as much as he suspected the worse, when he got there and saw how it was, he was undone. There was a new black Corvette in the driveway, blocking him, forcing him to park on the street. The pitcher’s clothes were in his closet, pushing his to the back corners. Neil’s picture was missing from the bedside table. A beer, not his brand, was stocked in the refrigerator.

  They were gone somewhere. Neil drank one of the relief pitcher’s beers. Then he walked out the kitchen door to the garage, where he found the gasoline for the lawnmower. He poured gas in front of the Corvette and watched it flow underneath the body of the car. He went back and found the kitchen matches. On his way out again, he stopped where the drive ran into the street, where the gas had stopped running, and he lit one match and threw it down.