The Rail

by Howard Owen

  That morning, he helped Wade Ramsey open up, then stocked the shelves, applied a layer of paint to the old office, worked the counter for a while. Around one that afternoon, as he was getting ready to go for lunch at the Castle Grill three doors down, the phone rang, and he answered.

  “Neil? Is that you? Neil, I’m in trouble. Can you come? Please?”

  He still saw her from time to time, even though the Penns had moved out of their castle and into Richmond the year before. She wrote him during his summers in Georgia or Pennsylvania, during his winters in Cuba, and he would send back postcards. She always knew when he was coming home, and she’d arrange to see him. She couldn’t drive yet, and they would often meet at the lunch counter at one of the downtown department stores. He was supposed to meet her at one of them in two days.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He knew Blanchard was capable of over-dramatization. Once, the fall before, she had lured him to Richmond, where he picked her up on a street corner in the West End, two blocks from her house. “This is deadly urgent,” she had told him, and the problem had turned out to be no more than a wandering boyfriend.

  This was different, though.

  “They want to put me in jail, Neil. Daddy is going to kill me.”

  The problem was a watch. It wasn’t even much of a watch, it seemed to Neil, surely not worth the risk. The clerk in the Broad Street jewelry store had seen her slip it into her handbag and he and another clerk stopped her in the parking lot, heading for a bus back home. The girlfriend with whom she was skipping half a day of school ran away, leaving Blanchard to first deny that she had the watch and then beg them to let her make one phone call to a friend who would straighten things out.

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said, and then he had to talk on the phone with the store manager, urging him to not call the police just yet, that he would make everything right.

  Neil was barely 20, and he had no idea how he might actually make things right. He stopped by the house, on his way into Richmond, thinking he would need his checkbook. In a corner of his room, he spied the old black bat, the one Buddy Wainwright had given him two years before. In a flash of inspiration, he grabbed the bat and threw it into the back seat of his car.

  By the time he got to the store, in downtown Richmond, it was almost two o’clock.

  Blanchard was in the manager’s office. She apparently had been trying to convince a gray-haired man in a somber black suit that her friend had slipped the watch into her purse, but she didn’t want to give the friend’s name.

  She ran to Neil and hugged him, crying.

  “Don’t let them take me away,” she said. “Don’t let them tell Daddy.”

  Neil had never been in a jewelry store before. In his wrinkled white shirt and work trousers, he would not have been mistaken for a serious customer.

  The manager, though, knew him. Blanchard had told him that the man coming to her rescue was none other than Neil Beauchamp, who was going to be in the big leagues any time now, maybe this year. The manager read the sports pages, and he remembered the column that had been done on Neil the previous December. The headline had asked, “Penns Castle to Briggs Field?” It left no doubt as to the answer.

  “You’ve got quite a talent, son,” the man told him, after reciting some of the particulars of the column to Neil. “Be careful that you don’t get messed up like some of ’em do when they hit it big.” Neil imagined that part of the man’s idea of “messed up” involved associating with female kleptomaniacs.

  “Can we talk in private, sir?” Neil asked him, and the two of them walked outside, leaving Blanchard sitting in the manager’s office.

  “I’ve known her all my life,” Neil told the man. “She’s not a bad girl, just a little wild. Is there anything I can do that will keep her from getting this on her record? I’ll be glad to pay for the watch, anything you want for it.”

  The manager, enthralled though he was to have a future big-leaguer in his presence, did not want to let matters drop. He did not think it was right to let somebody steal and get away with it.

  “I think it would be good for her to have to deal with this, and not have somebody fix everything for her,” the manager said before going silent. “I’m going to have to get the authorities in on this. Let her daddy take care of it, if he can. I know of the Penns, and I know he’s a fine man. He’d like to make sure she didn’t do anything like this again, I’ll bet.

  “Besides, everybody that works here knows what she did. How will it look if I let her go?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have to let anybody know, would you?”

  The man shook his head. He had decided, it appeared to Neil, that he was going to stand his ground on this, no matter what.

  Neil thought about it, and then asked the manager to come over to the car with him.

  The man shrugged and then followed him.

  Neil opened the door and reached into the backseat. He pulled out the old black bat. The manager took a half step back in alarm, until he saw that Neil did not intend to pummel him with it.

  “You remember Buddy Wainwright?” Neil asked.

  The manager nodded. “Led the league in home runs two times.”

  Neil explained about Buddy Wainwright’s bat, how Buddy had given it to him in 1953, the same day they cut him, how it had been Neil’s good-luck charm, how he’d gone 8 for 12 with it, never using it except when he really needed it.

  “If you’ll let me pay you for that watch and let her go,” he told the man, “I’ll give you this bat.

  “And, sir, not to be bragging, but one day I’ll be in the major leagues, and that bat will be worth even more than it is now.”

  The man stood with his hands in his pockets for half a minute. Then he took the bat, holding it as if he were appraising its true value.

  Finally, he just said, “Deal.”

  Neil wrote him a check on the hood of his car, then waited outside while the man went back to his office and showed Blanchard out the back door, telling her that she was lucky to have such a friend as Neil Beauchamp.

  Neil thought the man might be so impressed with his offering that he would let Blanchard go and tell him to keep the bat. It was Neil’s intention to emphasize how far he was willing to go to keep his half-sister out of trouble without actually having to pay the price. He loved the old black bat Buddy Wainwright gave him as much as it was possible to love an inanimate object.

  But the man took the bat, and he never gave it back. Almost 40 years later, before the Virginia Rail’s final fall from grace, the man’s son sold it to a collector for $5,000 and told the old family story to a reporter, who promptly printed it in the Richmond paper. The company lawyers wouldn’t let him use Blanchard Penn’s name, though, once it was determined that she was still alive and living in Richmond.

  Blinking in the welcome daylight of freedom, Blanchard ran to Neil and threw her arms around him.

  “You are my prince, come to save me,” she whispered to him. “I have to find some way to thank you.” And she kissed him on the lips, inserting her inquisitive tongue into his mouth.

  Neil never told her what he’d paid for her release. He just wanted to get back to Penns Castle, back to the store, where he was already overdue.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” he said. “I don’t even know why I did it.”

  “Please don’t leave. You’re all the family I’ve got. You mean all the world to me.”

  Neil pointed out the obvious, that she was the only child of two very wealthy parents.

  “They’ll never forgive me. For Jimmy. I see it every time one of them looks at me.”

  Neil doubted that this was true, and he tried to convince Blanchard that nobody in his right mind could hold her responsible for that.

  They sat, silent.

  Then, Blanchard asked him to take her back to Penn’s Castle.

  “The place or the town.”

  “The place. My home. Our home.”

 
; “It sure as hell ain’t my home. I doubt if James Penn would say it was my home.”

  “It’s as much yours as anybody’s.”

  She took his right hand in both of hers.

  “Let’s go, Neil. Let’s go out there. I haven’t even seen the place since we moved last year.”

  Neil didn’t know why he did it, although he wonders if he was guilty of baser motives than a desire to make Blanchard Penn happy one last time.

  He called the store from a pay phone and apologized to Wade Ramsey, told him that a friend was in serious trouble and that he would make it up to Wade the next day.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked Blanchard on the way out of town.

  “I don’t know. Something told me to do it. Something is always telling me to do stuff.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  “Well, you know one of these days I won’t be here.”

  “It was fate, don’t you think, that you were here this time?”

  Neil said he didn’t know much about fate. He was more of the make-your-own-luck school.

  “Take me out there,” she said. “Please. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “I’m not sure I want you to make it worth my while,” he told her.

  Neil Beauchamp knew exactly what Blanchard was offering, as much as he tried to deny it to himself later.

  “Oh,” she said, running her left hand high up his inner thigh, almost making him run the red light at which they were stopped, “I think you do. Don’t you?” And she ran her hand even higher.

  And so Neil drove Blanchard Penn back to the castle where they both started their lives.

  When they got there, Neil had to park alongside the road, because a chain barred the driveway. The house itself was locked, and Neil wouldn’t let Blanchard break one of the windows.

  “Haven’t you done enough mischief for one day?” he asked her.

  “Well, come on, then,” she said, taking his hand.

  They went around the house, to the back of the yard. To the gazebo, almost obscured by the weeds growing around it.

  It was not a particularly cold day, but it was mid-February. Neil was comfortable enough in his jacket. Blanchard was wearing a tartan skirt and white blouse, with a cashmere sweater over the top.

  No one could see them, but it still was as stunning to him as anything so far in his young life when she reached underneath her skirt and—she was not wearing stockings—slid her panties down to her ankles and then off, handing them to him.

  “This,” she said, “is your payment, kind sir.”

  He took the panties, slipping them into his pocket.

  “Now,” she said, moving closer to him and reaching for his zipper, “why don’t you do something nice for both of us? Like fuck me.”

  Neil had never heard a woman say that word.

  Neil Beauchamp never admitted it, but he was, that Valentine’s Day, a virgin. Blanchard Penn, he soon came to understand, was not. She straddled him on the swing in her family’s abandoned gazebo that February afternoon. She rocked the swing sideways, riding Neil until he had come three times. She whispered into his ear, “I’m never going to let you go.”

  Blanchard Penn was as beautiful as any 15-year-old in Richmond that year. She had sky-blue eyes and a face in which baby fat had been burned down to aristocratic lines. Her full lips were almost erotically pink. She was stylish and worldly far beyond 15. She flirted capably with grown men and was the wet dream of boys her own age. The occasional “zone” was seen not as a sign of insanity but as part of the general otherness that made Blanchard Blanchard. And she hadn’t really had a bad spell in years, that anyone knew of.

  Neil Beauchamp leaned back on the arm of the old swing and looked up at her while he stroked her ample breasts through the soft fabric and the bra underneath. He moaned her name and thought desire could not go beyond this without the risk of permanent injury.

  Indeed, he could not swear to you now, with his sexual life a wilting flower, that his erotic pleasure ever exceeded that sunny afternoon on the slope beyond Penn’s Castle, in the embrace of his half-sister, with a crow mocking them from a dead poplar tree in the field below.

  When they were through, the post-coital cold and the shame almost made him want to cry. In spite of Blanchard’s kisses, he had seldom felt more alone.

  In his lust, he had not even thought about protection. He had carried a prophylactic in his wallet, had carried it for so long that it had left a circular bulge in the fabric, but it had not even occurred to him to put it on. By the time he thought to do so, it was too late to stop.

  He was too embarrassed to mention this to Blanchard. Later, from her letters he received in Florida, he surmised that protection was the last thing she had wanted that day. But she did not get pregnant. Neil had, of course, never seen a woman achieve orgasm before, and he only realized, when he had a basis for comparison, that what he saw that afternoon in the Virginia woods went beyond passion and into what the Penns knew as a zone.

  He left two days early for spring training, and he made it a point, for many years, to avoid situations where he might be alone with Blanchard Penn. They “stayed in touch,” never going more than half a year without a call or a letter, more often from Blanchard than from Neil.

  “You know,” she finally told him, years later when she was living in New York and he was playing for the Cleveland Indians, in town for a four-game series, “you’re the only man I ever wanted. You broke my heart.”

  Her second husband was sitting beside her, across the restaurant table, and he laughed as if he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world.

  David has had time to read two of Blanchard’s poems when he hears them coming in the back door.

  He puts the album away, as close as he can to the way he found it. It’s too late to escape the library undetected, so when they discover him, he is browsing, looking through a first edition of an early Dreiser novel when they come to the door.

  “Well,” Blanchard says, “isn’t this a mess?”

  “It’s wonderful,” David tells her. “I’d kill to have a collection like this.”

  “See anything you like, take it.” She waves her arm to include the whole musty room.

  David tells them the car is not ready yet, and excuses himself to make a phone call.

  He catches Carly at home.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” he tells her. “They won’t be able to fix the car until Friday morning. Something about a part that they can’t get until then. Whatever. You know me and cars. I don’t imagine this is what you want to hear, but I think I’d better stay down here, just have Thanksgiving with my father and his family tomorrow. Be a shame to have to come right back Friday morning.”

  Carly understands. Part of David wishes she wasn’t quite so understanding. He speaks to both their daughters, assuring them he’ll be home before they know it.

  “Carly,” he says, when she takes the phone again, “We’re going to get through this. I swear. I love you.”

  “I know,” she says. “Me, too.”

  She sounds tired.

  Back in the living room, David tells his father and Blanchard that the garage has done it again, that they won’t be able to fix his car until Friday morning.

  “Do you think they’ll have room for one more at Millie and Wat’s tomorrow?” he asks them.

  FIFTEEN

  At first, Neil doesn’t hear the knocking. His ears aren’t what they once were.

  When he opens the door, slightly and with trepidation, David is standing there.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks his son.

  “Nothing. I just wanted to ask you something.”

  It has been a quiet evening. After dinner, Blanchard put half a dozen jazz CDs on shuffle mode, and she and David drank half a fifth of bourbon while Neil sipped two colas. Blanchard told David stories about his father as she remembered him, with Neil only occasionally c
orrecting her.

  She did not offer to bring out any scrapbooks, though.

  By 10:30, Neil could hardly keep his eyes open, and when he excused himself, the other two got up, a little unsteadily, to go to bed as well.

  “Don’t let me spoil the party,” he told them.

  “What fun is it to talk about you if you aren’t here to embarrass?” Blanchard asked him, her words only slightly slurred.

  “Well, I could tell him later,” David said, but they were all tired.

  “What?”

  Neil, standing before his son in the old-man’s boxer shorts and T-shirt he brought from Mundy, wants nothing less than a little heart-to-heart. Even when he and Kate were happily married, a condition that he believes existed for the majority of their wedded time, he was marked down for not being more open.

  He thinks, now, that nothing in his life ever prepared him for openness, not his first life as Jimmy Penn, or his second as Neil Beauchamp, or his third, as the Virginia Rail. In the worlds in which he lived, people in general and men in particular bore joy and anguish in relative silence. They did not bare their souls. They most certainly did not cry.

  Only in prison, when he had too much time to consider his life, did he concede that he might not have taken the most prudent course in the area of human emotions. By then, though, he was prone to agree with a fellow inmate who attached himself to Neil for some reason, a mostly toothless day-laborer who had cut up his foreman over some real or imagined slight. “You can lead a horse to water,” the cellmate had said, “but you can’t teach a old dog new tricks.” The man advised Neil on many aspects of life, apparently being one of those souls who can solve others’ problems but not their own. “You got to take it slow, enjoy life,” he told Neil one day not long before Neil was likely to be paroled. “You got to stop and smell the coffee.”

  “What.” David repeats the word as if it embodies all that has stood between them: What do you want now? What’s the matter? What’s so important that you have to disturb me? What’s the use in talking?