The Rail

by Howard Owen

  “The reason we do this,” he told his stepson, “is because it’s ours. If you work like a dog all day, and you’re just doing it for someone else, it ain’t worth a damn. This is ours.” And he jammed his index finger down hard on the wood.

  By 1948, Neil had come to feel strongly that William Beauchamp was full of crap, a man who would walk out one night and never even glance back at his precious store or his family. But the advice struck a chord. He thought, as tired as he was some nights, that this was about all the Beauchamps were going to have, and they’d better hang on to it.

  That was what he told his mother.

  “How can we hold on to it?” she asked him. He told her they would go and see their lawyer, William Beauchamp’s lawyer, and get him to write up something that would protect them.

  Wade Ramsey took it better than Jenny thought he would, and he finally agreed, weeks later. He would, over the next several years, put less time into Beauchamp and Ramsey than Neil did, but he provided a lot of good advice and some valuable capital, and he and Neil got along better than either of them thought was possible. The post-war years were good for them, and they started edging more and more into the hardware business.

  By the time Neil left home, Tom was five, and it was established that one-half of Beauchamp and Ramsey was in the hands of Jenny O’Neil Beauchamp and her children as long as they wanted it that way. By then, Jenny was able to work the hours that Neil had earlier labored, learning more about hardware than she could have believed possible. Neither of the girls saw the store as anything but a place to toil until they could leave home, and by the time Tom, as uninterested in school as Neil had been and half as athletic, turned 18, it was waiting there for him, and he was ready for it.

  By then, too, Wade Ramsey was getting near retirement, and none of his children wanted to be in the hardware business in Penns Castle. Neil batted .314 and drove in an even 100 runs for the Indians that year, and part of his next-year’s raise became the loan that turned Beauchamp and Ramsey into Beauchamp’s again.

  It is after midnight when Blanchard finishes.

  David is wide awake half an hour after his normal bedtime. He wonders why he has never heard or even sought this story before. He knows he’s as much to blame as his father is.

  “How did you find time?” he asks, swallowing. “To play baseball and go to school, I mean.”

  “To go to school,” Neil repeats. “Well, there wasn’t much school. But the coaches looked after me. Didn’t want me to drop out.

  “And, you know, you’re young. You’ve got all the energy in the world.”

  “All the energy in the world,” Blanchard says, smiling. “You look like you might have done well to have saved some of it for your old age.”

  She grows solemn and looks at Neil closely, as if searching for something, then looks away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and the light reflects off the watery surface of her eyes.

  There is nothing to talk about, Neil knows, certainly not at this late hour.

  He gets up, stiffly, and he and David go down the long hallway to their bedrooms.

  Inside, with the door closed, Neil looks in the mirror, something he has avoided doing very much. He has never been a vain man, but he is laid low by the lines, the horizontal ones across his brow and the deep vertical one that bisects it, and by the hair, almost snow-white.

  How did this happen? he asks himself, staring. Where did the Virginia Rail go? When he went to prison, he was booze-heavy and red-faced, certainly, but he had energy. He had a sense, every day, that something might happen. The figure in the mirror seems drained, eviscerated.

  He wonders, in the near-sleep he has achieved standing up, how a man can avoid his own reflection, through shavings and washings, for two years. He supposes that anything is possible if you want it badly enough.

  NINE

  The sign rests on a giant golf ball and reads “Par-3.” The letters and symbol are white on Day-Glo orange. Underneath, in smaller letters: “Baseball, Softball, Putting Greens, Refreshments.” As they get closer, David sees the canvas-covered cages. On a whim, he whips the truck into the short exit lane and they climb a small hill to an almost-empty parking lot.

  He questions the impulse. He is not a spontaneous person, not spontaneous enough, according to Carly. But something about the batting cages connects, and he knows before he thinks about it that this is a rare common point, a place where he and the Virginia Rail once intersected briefly.

  Blanchard was out when they made their way to the dining room. While the two of them were preparing a breakfast of cold cereal, milk and orange juice, she came in, wearing jeans and an old shirt, both streaked and splattered with clay. She said she had been for a walk. She wanted to make them a hot breakfast, and when they insisted that they were fine, better fed than they had any right to be, she began crying, apologizing for not being there, apologizing for things that David couldn’t even see.

  He explained that they had to get a move on, because he wanted plenty of time to hound the mechanics at Garner’s before he and Neil went to see the parole officer.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, as they walked out the door. “I’m sorry,” and they both felt guilty for not staying, but it would have been another hour off their day.

  Then, the morning mechanic at Garner’s was nowhere to be found. The shop was locked. After a few minutes of waiting, looking in the rear-view mirror every time a car passed on the highway, David walked over and peered through the window at his damaged car, locked in the little parking lot, abandoned as a stray puppy, untouched since the evening before.

  Neil saw no reason to tell him that it was not unusual for an automobile mechanic in Penns Castle to take an unplanned day off when the late-November weather turned to Indian summer and deer season was in.

  “We’ll get it taken care of,” he said to David when he came back to the truck. “It’ll work out.”

  David smacked his left fist against the steering wheel.

  “How did you stand this place? Growing up here, I mean.”

  “It didn’t seem so bad then. I was part of it. I’ve changed, probably. It hasn’t.”

  “It ought to.”

  “Well, Blanchard thinks it’s changing too much.”

  David started the truck, then sat for a minute, afraid the mechanic would show up as soon as they left.

  “What they need to bring in here is a garage,” he said, “one that actually fixes things. It ought to put these low-life cocksuckers out of business in about five minutes.”

  Neil flinched, surprised at his own squeamishness. He’d spent many hours the last two years with men who were capable of using certain profanities as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, gerunds and infinitives, sometimes in the same sentence, and his life in the big leagues was spent among profane men who spit out streams of curse words and tobacco juice the way some men breathe.

  But he never really grew accustomed to it.

  He has always disliked the heavier, darker profanity. The players who used it the most, he felt, were the ones who had to, as if acting the part would raise their meager batting averages, keep their curve balls from hanging. And in prison, the loud, swearing ones were always looking over their shoulders, checking to see who they intimidated, and who they didn’t, never at ease.

  David saw his discomfort.

  “What? You haven’t heard worse than that lately? Where’ve you been?” He stopped short, letting the words hang in the air.

  Now, on the way to the Virginia Rail’s first meeting with his parole officer, they are sitting in the parking lot of what is advertised as a “fun center.”

  Two older women walk up the path to the small golf course’s clubhouse on pale, heavy, varicose-veined legs. Only one baseball batting cage is in use. A father stands behind the screen, hands gripping the fencing, face pressed against it, feet out behind him a little. Inside, holding a metal bat and facing a Rube Goldberg contraption of a pitching machine,
is a boy who might be eight or nine years old.

  “Want to hit a few?” David asks.

  There is nothing Neil would like to do less. He shakes his head.

  “Come on. It’ll be good for you. Do something you’re good at.”

  In the cage, the boy swings at and misses two pitches in a row. The father makes an impatient movement to the side, as if he has an urge to rush into the cage and hit the ball himself, then say, “There. That’s how you do it.” But he stays behind the screen. The boy fouls one off, misses two more, then hits a dribbler that barely reaches the netting set up to stop balls 10 feet behind the pitching machine. From where Neil and David sit, it is hard to tell how fast the pitches are coming, or what exactly the father is saying, but it is obvious to both of them that his clapping after the one fair ball is more in sarcasm than praise.

  “Let’s go,” Neil says. David doesn’t move, though.

  When the father and son are finished, the man walks two steps ahead of the boy on their way back to the big sports utility vehicle. They get in their respective doors, not looking at each other, and the truck squeals angrily out of the empty lot.

  “Remember?…” David asks, then stops.

  “No,” Neil says.

  But of course he does.

  Neil Beauchamp was never quite sure how one went about rearing a male child. He has had ample time to consider it, and he wishes he could have had another chance.

  One of his cellmates at Mundy was a ghost of a man who had spent much of his adult life as a sworn enemy of various governments. In the spring of 1995, he had broken into a restricted military installation in eastern Virginia, bent on doing as much damage as a 60-year-old black man armed with wire-cutters could do. He did manage to strike a guard, and he was serving a three-to-five-year sentence.

  The man was left alone by most of the other prisoners, too old to be dangerous or to be meat for the sexual predators. He and Neil supposed they had been thrown together because of their age; they had nothing else in common. While Neil was batting his way into the baseball Hall of Fame, letting his manager, team traveling secretary, broker, business partners and wife deal with inconveniences such as hotel reservations, taxes, investments and child-rearing, Ambrose McDaniels was fighting. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school, then college, never attending an integrated class until law school.

  He spent the ’60s fighting state and local governments in his native Alabama, then, with Vietnam, took on a larger foe. He preached that black men and women were expected, and would be expected in the future, to fight America’s wars, and he exhorted everyone of color to refuse to fight “whoever, whenever, whatever.”

  Neil did not agree with all that Ambrose McDaniels said, and they had arguments that were both amiable and predictable. What did strike Neil, though, was his cellmate’s religion.

  Neil knew almost nothing about reincarnation, and when it was first explained to him, his wonderment provoked McDaniels to ask him if he had spent his whole life in an isolation booth.

  Neil, whose religion was not then and is not now a solid object, more of an occasional scented vapor than a rock, was intrigued by the concept. The more he thinks about it, the more he wishes for reincarnation, or something like it. He knows he could do better next time, especially as a father. He has learned something, he believes, but he wonders what good it does him now.

  Plus, from what Ambrose McDaniels has told him, he fears his next appearance on Earth might be as one of the lesser invertebrates.

  Back then, Neil might wake up one morning and realize that he was letting Kate and the neighborhood raise his son. It would be a fall or winter day, or a rare summer day when the Indians were home and playing at night, leaving at least some of the morning free.

  The day he and David both remember, as they watch the little boy struggle to please his father with a line drive up the middle, was in mid-June, 1970.

  That morning, Neil lay there for a few minutes with his eyes closed, waking up to the sound of the clothes dryer, to Kate cleaning breakfast dishes down the hall, to the vague murmur of a faraway television.

  It came to him, as sleep slowly lifted, that he had not acquitted himself very well the night before. He had gone hitless in three at-bats, suffering the still-rare indignity of being lifted for a pinch-hitter in the ninth inning of another losing cause.

  The crowd had been so small that he could hear individual insults. One man in particular, one of the greasy-haired regulars who sat behind the dugout for the sole purpose of tormenting the unpromising home team, had been on him for several nights now. Neil’s teammates, most of whom had felt his sting, called him the Polish Sausage, in honor of his ancestry, appearance and eating habits.

  The man had never really bothered Neil. He had seen teammates run out of the major leagues because, when things went bad, they developed such rabbit ears that they could pick up insults half a stadium away.

  That was not him, Neil assured himself, but then, he realized later, things had really never gone badly for him before, not on a baseball field. The kind of year Neil Beauchamp was headed for that year would have pleased most players. He would end the season at .287, with 14 home runs and 77 runs batted in. But Neil could see the diminishing returns he was getting at 35, and he could not imagine 36 being any better.

  And so, the night before, there had been two voices in his ear.

  The interior one whispered that it would soon be over, that before many more nights, he would reach the end of the only life he had really prepared for.

  The exterior one was somewhat louder, with much the same message.

  Over the past few games, the Sausage sometimes called him the Virginia Whale, in honor of the 20 pounds he had added over the past three seasons. Sometimes he was the Virginia Snail, after he had failed to reach a sharply hit ball down the first-base line, one he would have had two years earlier. Last night was the first time Neil could detect the occasional titter, an outright laugh now and then, from the Sausage’s neighbors.

  Neil knew the futility of answering the insults. The Sausage apparently spent much of his day thinking up torments for the Cleveland players. He was clever, and he never did anything in response to a threat or curse except laugh in the most perfect delight and stick the blade even deeper.

  Neil knew this, but then he was called back from the on-deck circle, just as he was taking his first step toward home plate, focused on salvaging a dismal night. A kid of 22 passed him, pumped up, swinging two bats, determined not to be sent back to Buffalo.

  “Hey, Whale,” the Sausage screamed, and Neil could see him out of the corner of his eye, a yellow smudge of mustard on his chin. “Whale! Hey, Virginia Fail-ure!”

  Neil allowed himself a quick glance up, and that only encouraged the man.

  “Now batting fifth,” he bellowed, using his program as a megaphone and doing a perfect imitation of the Cleveland announcer, “in place of the overpaid, underachieving Virginia Failure, who has been given the rest of the evening off to be with his family …”

  Neil was on the dugout roof before he realized what he was doing, the bat still in his hand. He would always be grateful to the three teammates who dragged him back by the ankles.

  The Polish Sausage would ease up on Neil after that, the only time anyone could remember the man showing any compassion, but in the silence Neil would feel a sympathy that was almost worse than the razzing.

  After the game, Neil had gone out with the only Indians player older than himself, a relief pitcher getting by on a knuckleball, and had gotten as drunk as he ever did. Neil Beauchamp was not, in his playing days, a drinker. It bespoke, to him, an absence of the control that he felt he had over events.

  This time, though, he had succumbed. Now, lying in bed, he wanted to repair things. And part of that repair, he thought, would be to “do something” with his son.

  When he shambled into the breakfast nook, the sight of his backside, on the front sports page, as he was dr
agged off the top of the dugout and away from the seemingly shocked Polish Sausage, only made him more determined to right himself.

  Kate did not speak to him, only patted him on the shoulder as she went past, on the way to get more eggs and bacon from the refrigerator. She was still defending him then.

  Neil wandered into the family room, where David was lying on the floor, watching cartoons on television.

  He sat down in the chair behind him, moving deliberately so as not to spook his son, who, it seemed to Neil, was on the jumpy side.

  “Hey,” he said after the two of them had watched in silence as a cartoon coyote went over a cliff and then, in a small poof! hit a canyon floor miles below. “How about if we go hit some balls?”

  The pitching machines were new to their neighborhood that year, part of a complex that also offered miniature golf and trampolines.

  For some time, Neil had meant (when he thought of it in an idle moment) to take David there. He knew, from the one Little League game of his son’s that he’d seen and the other six he’d heard about, that David was not having a great season. He was a second baseman, usually batting seventh. Neil could tell, just from the two times he’d seen David bat, that his son was neither a power hitter nor a contact hitter. What David was, the best Neil could tell, was an occasional hitter. And his fielding did not seem prizeworthy, either. It crossed the Virginia Rail’s mind that David might not be starting at all if his last name weren’t Beauchamp.

  David did not respond at first to his father’s offer. When asked again, he said, “I guess so,” and then got up without a word to change clothes and get a bat.

  The complex was called, according to the large green sign that hovered above it, “Hit Something!” Most of the pitching machines already were in use, and it was necessary for David to squeeze in between two older boys who were knocking balls into the screen with grunts of satisfaction.

  Neil was recognized almost immediately, even with sunglasses on. Most of the comments were sympathetic; this was, after all, his neighborhood, even if he seldom was seen in it except driving to and from the ballpark.