The Rail

by Howard Owen

“How hard is that?” asked a woman who had been a city-hall reporter since David was in high school. “You fire people and get your news off the wires. Screw quality; no profit center there. But you’ve got to have somebody to tell you to do it, so it isn’t your fault. Pontius Pilate would have used consultants. ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Christ. It isn’t our idea, but we paid these consultants a lot of money, and they said we could maximize profits if we nailed your ass to this cross.’”

  As the Washington correspondent, David felt blissfully above all that. He commiserated with his colleagues when he was back in town, and by phone and e-mail at his office in D.C. But he’d never even seen any of the consultants. When they announced the first round of layoffs and buyouts, which were referred to first as downsizing and then rightsizing and finally as career growth opportunities, he went to a tearful party for two friends who were among those cut.

  Even when the assistant managing editor started mentioning the “next round” being a little closer to home, David never worried that much. He’d been with the paper 10 years and had won several state awards, had even been nominated for a couple of Pulitzers. Granted, he’d not won anything in the last three years, maybe was in a little bit of a rut, but he’d stand on his record, as he told Carly, who took it all more seriously than he did.

  When he was called back to Cleveland in September, he told his wife not to worry, but even he was worried by this point. The first wave had cut almost 10 percent of staff, and now they wanted more.

  The meeting was held in the human resources office. The sign was newer than the ones on the other doors in what the newsroom referred to as the beancounter wing. The department’s old name, Personnel, had been considered too cold and unfeeling.

  The director of human resources was a man two years younger than David. His name was Tad Winkler, and he was as universally despised as anyone in the entire company. He never smiled, but he never frowned. He wore neutral-colored suits (no one had ever seen him in anything except a suit) and small, brown-framed glasses. He was of average height, average build, as mild as a lamb. His job was, it seemed to David, to do whatever needed doing that no one else was willing to do.

  “Winkler,” someone had said at the going-away party following the first round of cuts, “was born in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I’m thinking Germany, nineteen-thirty-nine. He’s great at following orders.”

  By the time the meeting was over, David was no longer an employee of the newspaper. He would be given six months’ severance, the director told him. David kept thinking that at any moment, the assistant managing editor, or the managing editor himself, would come bursting in and tell Tad Winkler there was no way he was going to be allowed to fire David Beauchamp, who had done such a wonderful job for so many years. Soon, though, he came to understand that he was alone, and he was screwed.

  He’d always thought, when he allowed himself the dark fantasy of being in this position, that he’d spring across the desk and throttle the living shit out of the godless humanoid on the other side, something he and old cronies would laugh about 20 years later in some bar in some other city. When it was over, though, he realized, when he shut the door quietly behind him, that he had issued only a minor complaint, so seamless was the process, so devoid of any criticism of anything David might have done or not done. (“The consultants say, David, that we’ve reached a point where this paper can no longer afford to have a Washington bureau, for now, although certainly that could change. We know we need a Washington correspondent, but they are adamant, and the corporate people agree. We are working on the most generous packages we can offer, especially for valued employees such as yourself. You will be well-provided for.”)

  David never saw the assistant managing editor again. He went back to the hotel, answered no calls, flew home, and made one more trip back to Cleveland, to clear up the particulars of his benefits package.

  In the final analysis, he didn’t even blame Tad Winkler, who was doing what he had always done and always would do. He forfeited the thin hope of future employment at the paper when he sent his two immediate bosses 30 dimes each for Christmas.

  Carly took it badly, then seemed to recover. Their townhouse in the Old Town section of Alexandria had a mortgage far too heavy for them to carry past the middle of March, when the checks from Cleveland would stop coming, but she soldiered on.

  The depth of his problem would manifest itself to him slowly. Carly was always telling him how much she loved him, and he was always quick to respond. He had lived in a family where the word “love” didn’t get used often enough, and he thought it couldn’t hurt to say it as often as possible.

  In the weeks of September and then October, though, he detected a change in the old familiar pattern. Where she had been the one to say the first “I love you” before (to which he always responded, almost always enthusiastically), now he found that often she was headed out the door, going to show houses or to shop, and his unprompted “I love you,” which he had to admit sometimes sounded almost desperate, tagged after her like an abandoned puppy. And her responding call seemed to be diminishing into nothingness. Sometimes she said (in what seemed to him an almost-impatient tone, as if she resented the delay to her departure) “Love you.” Sometimes, the echo from Carly was so short and devoid of vowels that David thought it might have fit well on a vanity license plate: LV U.

  And there was the oral sex.

  Carly had been an enthusiastic sexual practitioner since their dating days, and she was, in general, an athletic, good-natured partner, willing to try new things and perfect the old ones. One of David’s favorite sexual memories, one that could arouse him whenever he thought of it, was of a vacation trip they’d once taken to San Francisco. He had suggested, after they drank the complimentary sauvignon blanc in their hotel room, that they try something “a little different.”

  What he wanted her to do, he said, was let him pick her up. He told her to go down to the bar and wait there for him. He would pretend to be a salesman, in town for a convention, and she would be at the same convention, but they would never have met before.

  “I’ll start coming on to you,” he told her, nibbling her ear and then sliding his tongue inside it. “I’ll say all kinds of outrageous things to you, and you’ll pretend you want me to stop, but you won’t really. We’ll go farther and farther. And then I, a complete stranger, will take you back to my room and fuck you silly.”

  She seemed to lean into his tongue a little.

  “Am I married?”

  He hadn’t thought about it.

  “Yes,” he said, reaching around her from behind and sliding his fingers over her nipples. “You’ve got a trusting husband back in Virginia who you’d never think of doing all these nasty things with.”

  They determined that David was married, too, and before Carly headed out the door, she sat down on the bed and wriggled out of her pantyhose and panties, leaving them on the floor.

  “Who knows?” she said, and the look she gave him made him want to throw her on the floor right there, half in the room and half out. “I might get picked up by some stud salesman.”

  After they had played their game, getting each other hot enough in the hotel bar to draw stares, he took her back to the room, unbuttoning her blouse on the elevator and taking it and her bra off while they were still in the hall outside. They made love all afternoon.

  They played the game twice again, both times when they were out of town. It was part of what made their marriage work, David thought, that they played so well together.

  Sometime in October, though, David had wanted to have mutual oral sex, and Carly had said she didn’t feel like it. He asked her again a few days later (and he never remembered having to ask before, not really; it pleased her as much as him, he had always thought). She said no, and now he was too proud to ask again. And the fact that something was not the same as it was, that there were limits, made it all different. They’d had straight, missionary-style sex just three times in the p
ast month.

  Now, in the tenth week of his unemployment, after getting maybe-laters and nothing-nows from half the newspapers with Washington bureaus, he is starting to suspect that he has drifted into the land of Wrong and must be punished.

  David wonders how much of it is Carly and how much is him accepting his status. He remembers how it was when he was a kid, and he’d have a B on his report card when it should have been an A, or he’d want to go outside and play before he had done his homework or some chore. The disapproval hung like smoke from a burned dinner, and he would do anything, anything to redeem himself.

  He was always letting The Rail down, too, he could see, but his father would get over it, not through any strength of character, but because there was always something else coming along to distract Neil Beauchamp. David has always half-blamed his father, half-blamed himself for the fact that they were not usually interested in the same things. If he had been a better ballplayer, or if he had at least worked harder at being above-average, he’s fairly certain The Rail would have paid him more attention. But he has always blamed his father for not caring more, and he wonders if Kate Beauchamp was so judgmental toward him to compensate, or if Kate and Neil were just a case of opposites attracting.

  David has tried to learn from what he experienced. When he was actually being paid to produce articles for the Cleveland paper, he would miss interviews, sometimes to the detriment of his job, to “be there” for Frannie and Abbie. He always insisted on giving them their baths and reading them bedtime stories, showering them with attention even before he became a temporary house-husband.

  Last week, though, something happened that made him think about his life plan, his whole philosophy of using The Rail’s paternal skills as a reverse compass.

  Frannie learned to read before she was five. Now, in the first grade, she is something of a prodigy, even by over-achieving professional Washington standards, adept at the computer, comfortable with numbers, learning cursive script.

  David and Carly figured the bed-wetting would have stopped already. Even Abbie had stopped. But almost every other night, there was the same scene, now David’s chore to clean up.

  When he came in to wake her up Wednesday morning, after she had two dry nights in a row, and the bed was soaked again, he scolded her, told her that she’d have to do better, then just caught her eye and glared until she looked away. All through breakfast, he didn’t speak, and then all the way to the bus stop, where she stood a few steps away from him, not playing with the other children as she usually did.

  That afternoon, he sat her down when she got home, and explained to her that this was not something big girls did, that if she wanted Daddy to be proud of her, she must stop wetting the bed. She bit her lip and nodded, then went to read a book.

  Dinner was quiet that night, and when David finally tried to cheer Frannie up, she just seemed nervous. She went to her room early.

  He awoke sometime after two to go to the bathroom. On the way down the hall, he heard something, and when he went into the girls’ room, he could see, from the hall light behind him, Frannie turn quickly away and feign sleep.

  He walked over and sat quietly on the side of her twin bed. He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered. His oldest daughter kept her eyes tightly closed, then finally spoke, with her eyes still shut.

  “Nothing.”

  “You ought to be asleep. Don’t you feel well?”

  She turned over, eyes open now, her look nailing him like a deer in the headlights.

  “I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m not ever going to sleep again.”

  David started to tell her how silly that was, when he realized why she had said it, and what willpower it must take for a six-year-old to stay awake that long. And he wanted to cry. Before he could beg forgiveness, before he could tell her that he’d be glad to lie down beside her, and if she wet the bed, he didn’t care, she had turned over to face the wall.

  He left the room and didn’t sleep much that night.

  What he thought about, then and the next brooding day, was how much that scene resembled one he and his mother had played out more than 30 years before.

  He also thought about the last letter he’d gotten from Neil Beauchamp, who was getting his parole. David made a couple of phone calls.

  That night, he told Carly (and it was the first time lately he’d had the will to actually take a stand on anything) that Frannie would quit wetting the bed when she quit wetting the bed, to not worry about it and let him deal with the sheets, since he had nothing else to do.

  But first, he told her, he had to leave for a few days.

  He had to go and retrieve the Virginia Rail, who might or might not be worth the effort.

  FOUR

  Neil and David are helping Blanchard wash the dishes when the doorbell rings.

  “That would be Wat and Millie,” she says, drying her hands with a paper towel.

  She opens the front door, the men two steps behind. From the greetings, and the observations about paint jobs, the new fence and lost weight, Neil sees that they haven’t been in each other’s company for some time.

  “And Neil,” Millie says, saving him for last. She lets it stand at that, squeezing his arm a little. “It’s been a long time.” Wat mumbles something and shakes hands somberly, as if greeting the next of kin at a funeral.

  More than two years, for sure, Neil resists saying. Hell, that’s how he’d told them he wanted it. The week before they sent him to Mundy, he’d called everyone he knew who might have had the urge to visit and ordered them not to. Everyone except Blanchard took him at his word.

  They sit around the great room, Blanchard trying to keep the conversation alive. Neil is struck, not for the first time, by the difference in his half-families.

  When he was a schoolboy, the geometry teacher would make them draw circles with their compasses, perfectly round, sometimes intersecting each other at two points or, if the distance was exactly right, just one, the curved lines from the Number Two pencil lightly kissing each other at their one common ground. That is how Neil has long thought of the Penns and Beauchamps. He is that point, touched by two otherwise-independent entities.

  The Penns are (were, except for Blanchard) tall and thin, adept at parlor conversation but too reserved, really, for the backslapping, half-jolly, half-mean spirit Neil remembers pervading his childhood in the Beauchamp household.

  “The Penns,” William Beauchamp said once (and no one thought he meant it in a sympathetic or admiring sense), “are just too good for this world.” The Beauchamps were (and are) keen-eyed merchants, never giving anything away, never owning up to good fortune for fear it might abandon them, always talking poor in the style of the put-upon subsistence farmers they once were.

  Blanchard is, despite all the bourbon and wine, cool and undistracted (her distractions not coming principally from any bottle, Neil knows), dressed smartly in clothes from Ann Taylor, the reds and tans just right for her, the hair perfect without hinting at great effort to make it that way.

  Millie, seven years younger than Neil, has gained weight since he last saw her. She was never as pretty as Willa, who came two years later, and now she seems to have passed the point where she really cares about being fashionable. She seems to be settling.

  She and Wat appear to be comfortable. Neil doubts either of them has had any more regret than brother Tom over staying in Penns Castle. They dated in high school, got married in the Oak Grove Baptist Church within sight of the brick rancher William Beauchamp bought after the war, and then built their own house, a place from which to watch their children and now grandchildren thrive.

  They believe, although Neil knows they would never say it to her face, that Blanchard and all Penns are frivolous, highhanded people, undeserving and pretentious. Neil finds it strange that Penns Castle is the domain of the Beauchamps now, with three generations building a stronghold while Blanchard stands alone in Penn’s Castle its
elf. She (whose family gave the town its basis for existence and then its name) is the come-here; they are the original settlers who know the language she has forgotten or never knew.

  They talk about nothing much at all.

  “Tom said he saw you this afternoon,” Wat offers after a silence that seemed to David at least five minutes long. “Said your car got messed up pretty good by that deer.”

  David nods his head.

  “Did you hear what Rae Dawn calls him?” Millie says.

  “Who?” Blanchard asks.

  “Dasher,” David replies, his eyes closed.

  “She is the cutest thing. I can’t wait for you to see her. Which reminds me: You are both—all three—invited over to our place for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Blanchard and David both say they can’t make it. Blanchard has not, from what she has told Neil, been inside any of the Beauchamps’ homes since she moved back, and he imagines she is not at all sure the invitation now is sincere. David tells them he plans to leave on Wednesday.

  “Better let me have somebody look at that car tomorrow, then,” Wat says.

  “Oh, come on, Blanchard,” Millie says. “Everybody’s going to be there. Willa and Jack, and their kids, and Tom. What’s one more plate, honey? We’re all family here.”

  Neil would do almost anything to avoid being in what he remembers as a small dining room full of loud adults, with their equally loud children at the card tables set up in the living room, a television football game blaring, the many dishes passed around so slowly that it is impossible to have an entire, intact, hot meal. He has missed good and plentiful food, but he craves a quiet place more.

  He sees that there is no getting around this, though, and if he is going, he wants Blanchard to be there, too, a wish he conveys to her across the coffee table. She accepts.

  “Well, good,” Millie says. “Come on over about three.”

  “Can I bring anything?” Blanchard asks.

  “Oh, no, honey. That’s OK. I’m afraid that whatever you fixed would be too fancy for that crowd. We’re just going to have some plain old turkey and dressing and such.”