by Howard Owen
He saw the child, remarking that she looked just like David the first time he saw him.
The chill had already hardened into ice by then. Father and son had only seen each other once since the wedding three years before. It had been, by David’s estimate, five years since he had seen his father fully sober.
Carly, who had heard all David’s stories, had not even wanted to let his father in the house. She had taken David over into her family and didn’t see why he had to even let “the old bastard” in the door.
But Neil was there. He had come in peace, although somewhat fortified. After a very few minutes of very small talk, he tried to pick up the rabbit and set it in Frannie’s crib, which was smaller than the rabbit itself. Then he tried to set it next to the crib, but in wrestling the monstrosity into the corner, he tripped over the edge of a rocker and fell, he and the rabbit tumbling into and splintering the crib. Neil had ended up under his gift, pieces of wood beside and underneath him.
Carly had come running in, Frannie in her arms. When she saw the Virginia Rail sprawled across her carpet, amid the wreckage of the same crib in which she and her mother before her had once lain, she held the baby in one hand and, with the other, pointed toward the door. It struck Neil as funny, something out of a soap opera or a sit-com, but she just stood there, saying nothing, just pointing. Finally, when he saw that his son was going to say nothing, that indeed he was too embarrassed to say anything or even look at him, Neil got to his knees, then up on his feet, and he left.
Half asleep and night-blind, they are no match for the limbs and briers that lash them as they stumble through the quarter-moon darkness that the flashlight only pricks. The fire in front of them only makes the immediate foreground harder to see.
Neil, who has slightly better night vision, leads. He can hear David curse the branches and thorns. He isn’t sure he hasn’t led them on a fool’s errand, but he feels alive. He’s doing something physical, something that will test his body instead of his spirit. He breathes deeply, more deeply, he is sure, than he ever did in Mundy. He feels, he realizes, finally free. The humid night air and the damp leaves smell like lost time.
“You don’t think she’s out here, do you? Not really?” David asks. He is already out of breath.
“Don’t know. She might be.”
In another minute, they are within 100 feet of the opening. In the middle of the scoured clay before them, flames are coming out windows and through the burned and collapsing roof of what was soon to be Virginia’s 22nd DrugWorld megastore. It reminds Neil of the kind of football-season bonfires they used to have on fall Thursday nights, just across the state highway from where they stand now.
Between the fire, the trucks and the ceaseless radio communication, Neil and David can barely hear each other. They kneel and stare at the fire, which the ever-growing number of county volunteer units is only now beginning to neutralize.
“I hope to hell she’s not down there,” David says into Neil’s ear.
Neil just shakes his head and looks around, shining the flashlight cautiously at waist level. He is awake enough to know he does not want to be found anywhere nearly this incriminating for a very long time.
It takes him three circular passes to spot her.
He thinks he sees something more pale than the trees, 50 feet to their right. When he brings the light back, there she is.
Blanchard is sitting on a stump, her elbows on her knees, her chin resting on her folded hands. She might be watching a play or a ball game. She looks as much at peace as Neil ever remembers seeing her.
She doesn’t even seem to know they’re there, but when they get about 10 feet away, she turns toward them, not spooked at all. She smiles and yawns.
They kneel beside her for several silent minutes as the fire is gradually reduced, its devastation complete.
“Well,” Blanchard says finally, “I suppose we ought to be getting back. It was a hell of a show, though, wasn’t it?”
They help her to her feet, but she leads them back, without benefit of a flashlight, going so fast that she has to stop twice and wait for them.
When they reach the back door, she stops and bends down to untie and then take off the pair of men’s shoes.
“We might want to throw these away,” she says, and leaves Neil holding the oversized brogans. “You all might want to clean the mud off yours, too.”
When the two men get inside, Blanchard is in the process of locking the front door.
“I swear,” she tells them, stopping on the third step up the stairs, “I believe I could sleep a week.”
Neil is suddenly shaking, colder than he had been outside. He is afraid he might be coming down with the flu.
He and David turn out the lights and, without saying a word, go back to bed as if they had only gotten up for a midnight snack or a quick trip to the bathroom.
Under the covers, Neil shivers and waits for the doorbell to ring. At some merciful point, he falls asleep.
TWENTY
Running water wakes him up.
He rolls over and looks at the clock beside his bed. He has not slept five hours, and even that rest was disturbed by dreams of fire and prison.
He is exhausted, but he has to get up.
For one thing, he can smell the smoke, feels as if it is so ingrained in his skin that any deputy sheriff looking for an arsonist would have to look no farther.
He must wash himself clean. Maybe he can burn his clothes. Whoever is in the bathroom must have the same idea.
Five minutes later, David knocks softly.
“Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Shower’s all yours.”
Neil is out of bed so quickly that the blood rushes to his head and he has to sit down. Then he realizes that it is not him, or at least not just him: The entire house smells of ashes. It has seeped through closed windows and under doors somehow.
He makes his way to the bathroom.
The face in the mirror startles him. He’s getting used to looking old, but he’s also dirty. He must have stumbled somewhere in their scramble through the woods and scraped himself. He has scratches on his forehead and the side of his neck. There is dried blood on his shirt collar. And he needs a shave.
He takes a quick shower, scrubbing himself raw, almost exhausting such warmth as Penn’s Castle’s water heater can produce.
When he’s dressed, he goes down to the front door and walks outside.
A front must have passed through during the early morning hours. It’s raining, the kind of soft, steady rain that will pace itself and last the day.
The air is thick with smoke, held down by the damp. To his right, he can see a haze hanging over the woods, settled into the tops of the trees. He can hear, again, the harsh squawk of men talking over radios.
Back inside, he finds David sitting in the dining room, alone at the big table. He’s made coffee, and Neil gets himself a cup.
“Want to walk down and see what’s left?” David asks him.
“No.”
“Hell, Dad, they’re not going to think you did it. For all we know, she didn’t even do it. Maybe it just caught fire.”
They hadn’t asked Blanchard the night before, hadn’t really wanted to know how she came to be sitting on that stump.
“Yeah,” Neil says, “maybe it was just an accident.”
But when he was helping Blanchard up from that stump, he could smell the gasoline. He imagines David could, too.
“You might want to clean your shoes off,” Neil says. “I hope she’s thrown hers away.”
“We went to watch the fire, Dad. We’ve got a valid reason to have clay on our shoes.”
They sit quietly for a few moments. David gets them both another cup of coffee.
“I’ve got to go. The car’s ready. They’re even going to bring it over here, believe it or not. I guess one mechanic’s going to follow the other one and drive him back. Six hundred and twenty-five dollars. Thank God for VISA.”
“Well,” David says, “at least we got to do something together.” They both smile.
After a few more moments of silence, David says, “Dad?” in a tone that makes Neil brace himself.
Still, at this late date, he has to try.
“Yes, son?”
“I need to know some things.”
Neil waits, barely even breathing.
“I found a scrapbook, in the library. There were things in there that Blanchard wrote about you … when you were young.” He has lowered his voice.
Neil tells him he and Blanchard were always close, that he supposed she looked up to him, for some reason. But he doesn’t really know what David has read.
“Were you and she ever, you know, intimate?”
Neil denies this, again too quickly. Then he looks away. He can feel his face burning.
“There are things, David … If you live long enough, you do things you’d do differently if you had another chance. But you usually don’t get another chance.”
David puts his hand on his father’s forearm.
“It’s OK, Dad. I just want to know who you are. It’s not like you were real brother and sister or anything …”
Neil jerks his arm away and looks out the window. His hands are shaking, and he puts the cup down.
“Don’t you ever tell another living soul,” he says, looking at David with red, moist eyes.
David promises, then speaks again, not sure he can press it any farther.
“Well, then, I guess that explains about the house, then.”
Neil looks at him.
“The house?”
“Penn’s Castle. This.” David waves his arms around. “I suppose it is better for appearances to do it the way you did.”
Neil asks him what the hell he’s talking about.
“Dad, Jack Stoner knows the lawyer that drew up the will. I just hope he doesn’t blab it to everybody in Richmond.”
Neil just stares, first at David and then out the window, as his son tells him that James Penn never meant to give his only living son a red cent.
“She didn’t,” Neil says at last. “Why would she do that? She didn’t owe me a thing.”
“That’s a lie and you know it.”
They both jump. David spills some of his coffee. They never heard her coming.
“David,” Blanchard says, standing over them like some apparition, wearing the same clothes, still smelling of smoke and gasoline, that she was wearing when they found her, “you need to know something about your father. You need to know what kind of man he is.”
“Don’t, Blanchard,” Neil begs her, but it’s no use.
“Let me tell you why your daddy deserves at least half this damn mausoleum, no matter what James Blackford Penn did or didn’t do.”
And so she tells the story, the one she has wanted to drop on some other living soul, the dead weight she has carried for two long years. Neil walks away from the table for most of it, wandering the near reaches of the house. Rain drips off the slate roof and splashes on to the stone outside.
That night, he had not planned to leave his apartment. But he was open to suggestions.
Neil Beauchamp was 60 years old, seriously committed to Letting Go, no Rail any more in deed or appearance. He was not a man who relished a good book or watched much television. Naturally shy, he most easily entertained himself in places where people laughed, alcohol was served and tongues were loosened. He had proved himself singularly incapable of being fit company for his wife or son, but others, on an occasional basis, found him interesting, amusing. Night by night, he devalued his legend through drunken familiarity.
On many nights, like this one, he would say to himself that he was not going out, when what he really meant was, he was not going out unless someone called.
This night, Blanchard called.
He had not heard from her in at least a month. Both her parents were dying, or “failing,” as their cousins put it. Blanchard, who too often was not totally able to take care of herself, had to deal with doctors and live-in care-givers and the smell of oncoming death.
Neil had meant to call her, but he hadn’t.
She wanted someone to have dinner with, she said. She was sick and tired of spending so much time around sick people. Many of Blanchard’s old friends had become ex-friends, either because they avoided her or because they had crossed her in real or imagined ways.
She told Neil, as she had often told him before, that he was the only one she could really count on. It made him uneasy when she said that. He knew just how undependable he had been.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go to Chiocca’s.”
It was one of Neil’s favorites, only three blocks from his apartment. It had the best sandwiches and the coldest beer in town, and everyone knew Neil Beauchamp, still called him “Rail,” as almost no one else did any more.
Two televisions—not the jumbo sets they put in the self-styled “sports bars,” but the kind Neil had in his living room—were usually showing some game or another, and the people there could comment knowledgeably on whatever was transpiring. Neil wished his late sports bar had had half as much atmosphere as Chiocca’s.
He said he’d meet her there. He walked over and had already enjoyed one Miller High Life sitting at the bar when he saw her walking down the stone steps from the street.
She had gone there with him once before and found the low ceiling slightly claustrophobic. She didn’t know the people, but it was Neil’s bar, and she wanted his company.
She soon caught up with him, four beers each, with a pastrami on rye (hers) and a carnivore’s delight known as the Beast (his) somehow consumed amid the talk (mostly hers).
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said, stubbing out her sixth cigarette.
“Sure,” Neil said. He thought that, if Blanchard was going to smoke a cigarette every 15 minutes, maybe they could go somewhere that had higher ceilings.
They made their way through the Fan, to Buddy’s, then John and Norman’s, finally to a place on Main Street where they could sit on the patio and enjoy the cool relief between two hot Richmond days, even feel the ghost of a breeze.
Neil was drinking one beer to Blanchard’s two by now, not having even one at Buddy’s but settling for a Coke instead, because he knew that he would have to—as he had done before—drive her several miles home, then call a taxi to take him back to his apartment.
“What the hell,” she said to him when he wondered if she didn’t want to slow down a little. “I’m a little too old to be developing good habits, don’t you think?”
Neil didn’t answer, but he was beyond trying very hard to discourage her.
They didn’t leave the last bar until nearly one a.m. Blanchard had parked four blocks back, and by the time they got there, she swore she was sober enough to drive.
“No,” Neil said. “Give me the keys.”
“Come and get ’em,” Blanchard said. She grinned at him as she reached inside the waist of her skirt and, after some fumbling and wiggling, brought the hand back out, empty. “Look, Ma. No keys.”
She would occasionally do something like that, although as they got older, Neil thought that surely it must be more for show than lust. Still, it unsettled him. He liked Blanchard, loved her he supposed, but he did not want this.
“Blanchard,” he said, and the look he gave her must have had enough pity and disgust in it to set her off.
“You think I’m some drunken old slut,” she said, raising her voice as he tried to calm her. “Get in the goddamn car. I’m taking you home. You’re no fun.” Neil could hear other, younger voices laughing somewhere close behind him.
He should have taken the keys from her, even if he had to pull her panties down to retrieve them. But he was exhausted, exasperated, and nearly as drunk as she was.
So he got in on the passenger’s side, as Blanchard was starting the car. He could have w
alked home from there, but he thought he ought to at least ride with her, in case there was trouble.
The Penns lived outside the city limits, on a curving road that drew the richest of the old-family city emigrants and the out-of-towners buying bargains: Southern real estate with Northeastern money.
The people who lived there had resisted widening or straightening the road, fearing that the teenagers and college students would only go faster if they were able to. It claimed a few of the careless and unlucky every year, but not enough to effect what people along the road wanted least in all aspects of life—change.
By the time Blanchard approached the last curve before the driveway to her home, it was 1:25, the report said later. She and Neil were arguing, or rather she was arguing, incensed that he had suggested she should slow down. The report estimated the Lexus was going 60 miles an hour, 15 miles over the limit even for the straightaways.
Ten minutes before, state trooper Lacy Haithcock had pulled a car full of teenagers, sure that they must have been drinking, or at least that they would be less likely to drink in the near future if he scared the hell out of them.
He did not smell alcohol, and the four girls were almost in tears. They had been going no more than five miles an hour over the limit, and trooper Haithcock let them go with a stern warning.
Returning to his car, he had to walk on the pavement, just over the white line. He didn’t even think about it. His blue light was on. Anyone could see it from four hundred yards.
Except that the curve cut that down to a hundred yards. Except that Blanchard was looking at Neil, screaming at him, and he was distracted by her.
The car clipped Lacy Haithcock, knocking his body a full 50 feet across the road and into the ditch on the other side.
Blanchard had also sideswiped the patrol car, damaging Neil’s side of the Lexus so badly that, when they skidded to a stop a few hundred yards beyond, he could not open his door.
“Oh, shit,” Blanchard said, pure panic in her eyes. “Oh, shit! Goddamn!” The car had choked out, and while Neil was trying to open the wrecked door, she started it again and went the short distance to the Penns’ driveway.