The Rail

by Howard Owen

  When the blessing is over, Ella seems to have overcome her earlier shyness. She appears to be trying to draw Neil out, although David can’t hear everything she’s saying. Neil seems to be mostly nodding and answering as economically as possible.

  The table is covered from one end to the other with turkey, ham, dressing, gravy, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, carrots, beans, field peas, biscuits, cranberry sauce, stewed tomatoes and squash. There are three casseroles.

  Everything, David thinks, but a green salad. He feels as if he has gained five pounds already from his stay in Penns Castle, and he’s liable to add another five before the day is over.

  He and Carly agree that Thanksgiving feasts are a waste—all that food, she would lament, and everyone inhales it in 20 minutes. Then the men go back and fall asleep in front of a TV football game and the women clean it all up.

  One year, the two of them tried to make it better. They invited six friends over and planned a five-course meal that they would eat, one leisurely course at a time. They would have a different glass of wine with each one, and when it was all over, everyone would have enjoyed a three-hour dining experience in which you actually tasted the food rather than simply swallowing it. It was all very French.

  Their friends came, and for the most part they tried everything, remarking on how interesting everything was. After everyone left, David and Carly were quite proud of themselves and thought that perhaps they had broken new Thanksgiving ground. The next year, though, one of the other couples invited everyone over to their house, and there were the turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberries and all the rest, and no one mentioned the Beauchamps’ ground-breaking meal of the year before. They ate everything in an enthusiastic 20 minutes, and although the men did help clear the table, it was not appreciably different from the holiday meals the eight of them had eaten when they were children. Everyone watched the rest of the football game together.

  That was the point at which David and Carly stopped trying to improve on Thanksgiving.

  “You can lead a guest to turkey terrine and sweetbreads,” David told her on the way home that night, “but you can’t make them eat.”

  It takes 10 long minutes for everyone to pass everything to everyone else, and then the table gets quieter as serious eating begins. Over Millie’s protests, Wat has bought several bottles of passable Virginia wine, a merlot, and everyone except Neil fills a glass.

  After a few quiet moments, Ella turns to Neil.

  “So, Mr. Beauchamp,” she says, “I understand you’ve been away at Mundy. My cousin’s son is there. He was a fine boy, but he got mixed up with that crack cocaine.”

  The table grows quieter.

  “Yes,” Neil says, “I’ve been away.”

  David can see Tom’s face redden as he tries to nudge his friend into silence. David wonders if Blanchard hasn’t shared her cache of mini-bottles with Ella.

  “Well, I reckon everyone else knows,” she says gaily, “but what’d you do?” She giggles. Tom is looking down at his plate, his mouth full of food.

  Neil chews a few more times and swallows.

  “I was driving drunk and I ran over a man and killed him,” Neil says, staring straight ahead, at a spot beyond Patti’s head. Everyone is looking either down at their food or at Neil.

  “Well,” Ella Turpin says, “I guess that’s why you’re not having any wine.”

  “I guess so.”

  Susan gets up to go check on the children, and Patti follows her. Millie goes to get more turkey.

  The quiet lasts until Wat says, “We were all sorry, Neil. We wished you’d have let us come see you. Hell, nobody blames you. Ain’t been but one man that was perfect, and they nailed him to a cross.”

  Neil knows he’s trying to make it better, trying to guide this holiday meal through uncomfortable shoals without making him feel like a total asshole. But he doesn’t know what to say, other than, “Thank you.”

  It is Blanchard who gets up and leaves the table, her face pale and tight.

  By the time she comes back, 10 minutes later, the other women have brought out the desserts—sweet potato pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, lemon pie, pound cake, German chocolate cake, angel food cake—and a certain equilibrium seems to have been reached. Ella is restricting her conversations mostly to Tom, and Susan’s boyfriend is asking Neil about his glory days with the Tigers and Indians.

  “You know,” he said, as he lifted several ounces of pecan pie to his face, “I got your autograph once, when I was about six. You were out at the big card show they have every year. I’ve still got the ball you signed for me.”

  Neil nods. He autographed a lot of things, in a lot of cities, on his way to Mundy. After everything else went to hell, after the divorce finally came through and it was clear that he could not properly manage a baseball team, or a bar, or his half of a marriage, or even himself, it came down to signing things. He brought in more money on a slow July afternoon in Richmond signing scraps of paper and baseball cards, and caps and bats and gloves, than he made his first year with the Detroit Tigers.

  “Yeah,” Neil nods, looking across the table, “I signed a lot of balls back then.”

  Neil Beauchamp returned to Virginia the first time in 1985, the same year Blanchard came back. His plan was that he would start a sports bar in Richmond, which he would call simply The Rail.

  He still had some money after the divorce and settlement, and he knew other ex-players who claimed a sports bar was an intelligent way to make money grow. And by this time, Neil had had some experience with bars. His partner was a developer who put up 60 percent to Neil’s 40, since the developer had more money and considerably less name recognition.

  Neil was, by then, well into The Great Letting-Go. He and Blanchard had never completely lost touch with one another. She would write to him occasionally as he went from minor-league manager to major-league coach to unemployed and divorced, and as she went through two marriages and a breakdown.

  The developer also gave Neil a sweet deal on a condominium he had built in the Richmond suburbs. Having a Hall-of-Famer in one of his buildings could possibly help sales, the developer supposed.

  They called the living spaces units. Neil had one with three bedrooms and a fireplace; it overlooked a creek 40 feet below. Every night at 11, the train would pass along the opposite bluff, its light visible through the oak and sycamore leaves. Neil sat up and listened for the train, came to expect its two long blasts as it neared the crossing half a mile up the tracks. He looked as expectantly as a child for its one-eyed, ghostly appearance, gliding through the woods exactly at his level, across the ravine.

  Some nights, though, the Virginia Rail was not home to hear the train whistle. The condominiums were populated by retirees, young marrieds and what Neil’s neighbor and fellow divorcee Pat McLean referred to as the At Large. Weber kettle grills would be lit at six, down by the two picnic tables that sat in front of Neil’s unit, and the communal drinking would begin. On at least two occasions that Neil can remember now, no meat ever touched the grill’s surface, and they all drove to The Rail for burgers, with Neil picking up the tab.

  The sports bar lasted nearly three years. Neil had neither the patience nor the business acumen to be more than an occasional, drunken guest at the place that was draining his money. The man who would get up on the coldest winter mornings in Cleveland or Detroit in order to go to the gym and work out for two hours could not make himself rise to the call of commerce.

  After the bar failed, it was back to Cleveland, where a man who was once an Indians bat boy offered him a great deal on a restaurant. This time, the name was less subtle: Neil Beauchamp’s Hall of Fame Auberge. Later, after the bankruptcy papers had been filed, the former bat boy wondered if they shouldn’t have called it a restaurant instead.

  “People don’t like that fancy shit,” he said. Neil wished, as he had in Richmond, that he cared more.

  Neil spent a decade moving, from Richmond to Cleveland, back to Richmond f
or a short spell, then to Kansas City and finally, in 1994, to Richmond again. After a while, he stopped unpacking certain boxes, and it seemed to him that he liked every place he lived a little less than the one before.

  In Richmond, Blanchard would inevitably find him. No one else in his family tried very hard, and Neil had little heart for seeing them, ashamed that he could no longer send consistent small checks and occasional large ones, even though no one really needed the Rail’s help any more. He would visit over Christmas, maybe once in the summer, if then.

  He and Blanchard found that they were equally fond of drinking, and they would sometimes meet at bars in the Fan, or down in Shockoe Slip. Neil would be watching television in his apartment, and Blanchard would call, wanting to do something.

  He was spending more and more nights by himself, and it was harder to turn down Blanchard’s entreaties. He never came inside her big house in the West End, though. He never saw James or Virginia Penn in the years they had left.

  “They think,” Blanchard said to him once, when he was 57 and she was 52, “that you’re a bad influence.”

  And when Blanchard would hint, and then outright ask, to come home with him, Neil always told her no.

  In the year or so before the accident, she never even asked, and he assumed that the great, howling temptation that had always been there between them had at last, mercifully, become old and sickly, no longer scratching at his door, wanting to be let in as much as he wanted to let it in.

  By 1994, Neil Beauchamp’s sources of income were his baseball pension and the card shows. At the time little Parker’s father paid ten dollars for Neil’s name on a cheap baseball, he didn’t need the money that much. After two bankruptcies, though, at a time when the Virginia Rail could have used the cash, he had been devalued to five dollars a ball. The more he needed money, the less he seemed to make.

  The worst, he believes now, before the wreck, was when he did television commercials for what even Blanchard derided as loan sharks, trying to get people even more desperate than Neil to go deeper in debt for some short-term gratification.

  He couldn’t bear to look at the commercials when they came on. He would be standing there, looking almost as wooden as the bat he held on his shoulder.

  “Can’t get money?” he asked, and they’d had him do it at least 12 times to get the right emphasis in the question. “We’ll go to bat for you. We’ll drive home that new TV set, that new washer-dryer, that new car. We want to be on your team!”

  Among the very few good things that came from his prison sentence was that they stopped running the commercial.

  They are starting to drift away from the table now, the men looking for a place to collapse under dinner’s weight, the women carrying half-eaten platters into the kitchen to be tin-foiled and stored for a week of leftovers.

  Neil finally goes into the living room, where they make a place for him on the couch. In the middle of all these well-fed, good-natured men, he feels as much of a sense of camaraderie as he believes is possible. David is sitting across from him, and they exchange a smile.

  Within 15 minutes, Wat Moseley is asleep in the recliner next to him, snoring lightly, and Neil’s own eyes are getting heavy when he feels a hand on his shoulder.

  “Here’s the car keys,” Millie says softly. “Blanchard said to tell you she had something to do, for you all to stay as long as you like. She said she’d just walk home.”

  It’s only a quarter-mile walk, so Neil supposes she is already there by now. He takes the keys and slips in and out of sleep while the younger men watch the game to its conclusion.

  The other women rejoin the men, and they talk about the way Penns Castle used to be, the old times that link them. Wat mentions the new DrugWorld, which most in the group seem to support.

  “Hell,” Ray says, “they’re just trying to make a living like everybody else. It’s legal; what else you want?”

  “It’s a good thing Blanchard isn’t here,” Willa says. “She’d be ready to fight you right now.”

  There is laughter from all the adults except Neil and David.

  It’s almost an hour later, fully dark, when the two of them leave.

  Everyone overloads them with hugs and handshakes and turned-down offers of enough food to last them until Christmas. Still, Neil has the feeling that the conversation will be easier, that the whole room will sigh in unison, when he is gone. He wonders if he is getting paranoid.

  The sad truth he knows but won’t share, though, is that he really doesn’t know these people any more. They are family, and they bear him no particular ill will, that he can tell. He wishes sometimes he had been like Tom, always in Penns Castle, always of it. He wishes he were capable of bringing back a time when he bent down to take small hands and guide them across streets, when he tied toddlers’ shoes, when he bathed small faces and feet and backsides, when small milk-breathed Willa and Millie and Tom kissed him goodnight.

  But he, and they, have long since lost all that. Short of staying in Penns Castle, Neil doesn’t really know how the hell he could have kept it from happening.

  When they pull into the driveway, the only lights still on are the one in the front of Penn’s Castle and the one upstairs, in Blanchard’s bedroom.

  Neil knocks on her door and asks if she’s all right. She says she is, that’s she’s just exhausted “from all those damn Beauchamps.”

  “Just let me rest a few minutes,” she says. “You all fix yourselves a drink or something.”

  Neil turns to walk down the dark hallway to the stairs.

  “Neil,” she calls after him.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you get some of that dog food in the pantry next to the sink, and feed Cully?”

  NINETEEN

  At first, in his dream, he is back in Mundy, and the relentless blaring is the prison alarm system, the guards screwing with them as usual for no good reason, robbing them of precious unconsciousness.

  Then, it is an alarm clock. He flails about, futilely searching by touch for the button that will make the world silent again.

  By the time he is almost awake, he knows it is something else. The ancient walls of his room pulse red in rhythm with the noise.

  He manages to work himself out of bed, fearing that some still-lit cigarette of Blanchard’s has ignited the old house. When he looks out the window facing Castle Road, he sees that it is indeed a fire truck that is creating the hellish sound-and-light show, but before he can turn and run for his door and safety, he realizes that the truck is turning around in the circular drive, leaving rather than arriving. Then he sees that there is a brighter glow than that made by the truck, off to his right, beyond the far reaches of Penn’s Castle.

  Loud but indistinguishable voices correspond over radios outside. As Neil turns to put on pants and shirt, there’s a knock at his door.

  “Dad.”

  “I’m here.”

  “There’s a fire, but it’s OK. One of the firemen said it’s that drug-whatever building down the road.”

  Neil opens the door. As David stands there, he puts on his clothes, and the two of them go toward the main entrance, turning on lights as they make their way.

  Neil stops at the front door.

  “What about Blanchard?”

  David shakes his head.

  “She wasn’t in her room. I knocked, and then I opened the door. She wasn’t there.”

  Neil says nothing. He turns and goes back inside, returning with a flashlight. He motions for David to follow him into the house and out the back door into the garden and the woods beyond.

  The evening had been quiet. Blanchard came down to join them around nine, then turned in again shortly before 11. She drank water, claiming that she had overindulged, and she talked mostly about the people with whom they had spent Thanksgiving, with David asking her occasional questions about this or that aspect of Penns Castle and its residents.

  After she went to bed again, Neil said he supposed David would be
glad to get back to Carly and Frannie and Abbie, whose names he made sure to actually say this time.

  “Yeah, I miss all my girls,” he said.

  “Tell me what they’re like.”

  David looked over at him.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten. You haven’t seen Abbie.”

  “Just pictures. And I haven’t seen Frannie since she was six days old.”

  “Six days old.” David shook his head. “Damn.”

  “There weren’t many times I wanted ’em to see me in the last six years.”

  “Well, they’re going to see you, soon. We’re going to have you up. I promise you that.”

  Neil said he thought it might be better if they kept it like it was.

  “I’ll bet you’re a good father,” he said to David. “I bet you’re a good husband. You’ve done better than I ever could. I think your mother must have raised you right.

  “I don’t want to spoil it, don’t want ’em to see what a mess their grandfather is. I want ’em to think all the Beauchamps, since ’way back, were great husbands and fathers.”

  David looked over at him.

  “Do you know, do you have any idea, how much I would have given to be you? To be able to do what you did?”

  “That’s why you should be careful what you ask for. Any fool can be born able to hit a ball. It’s a parlor trick, like being double-jointed or seven feet tall. What you did, that’s the trick.”

  David said it was a trick at which he seemed to be losing his touch.

  The last time Neil Beauchamp had been in the same room with his son, before David showed up at Mundy to take him away, Carly had just come home from the hospital with Frannie.

  Neil had bought the largest stuffed rabbit he could find; it was larger than Carly herself. He had also stopped for a drink, which became a few drinks, at a bar in Alexandria, and he was slightly unsteady on his feet.