The Rail

by Howard Owen

  “This is what: I want to talk to you. You’re my father, for Chrissake, no matter how much you might want to deny it. We ought to talk.”

  He is leaning against the door frame, and Neil can smell the liquor, one of the disadvantages of not drinking any more himself.

  “Ah, David,” he turns his head from his son and walks a few steps into the room, finally sitting down on the end of the big bed, its spread still undisturbed and quarter-bouncing tight from when he made it this morning.

  “I’ve never wanted to deny being your father,” he says, when he is seated, looking up at David. He is tired enough that he feels about half-drunk himself. “I’ve always been proud of you. You did things I never would have been smart enough to do. You’ve made me and your mother proud.”

  David is standing in front of Neil, his hands in his pockets.

  “Do you know, you’ve never said that before?”

  Neil is sure he has, somewhere. He just can’t remember when, and he doesn’t feel like arguing.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and he thinks back to all the times he said that to Kate, in the bad times, after Neil Beauchamp could no longer do the one thing God had made him to do. And how much it galled him, until he finally quit saying it—or anything else much—to the woman he once loved so dearly.

  There were many good years, though, before all that. Neil can’t deny it. He doesn’t think he has any valid reason to complain. The way he sees it, some people get the good things early, and others get it late. Both have their advantages. And some don’t have any good times at all, just one unbroken sea of crap from birth to merciful death. He learned that well enough at Mundy. But nobody, in Neil’s experience, gets to have it good from start to finish. For him, the bad, what he’s come to think of as The Time of Letting Go, came late, after everyone, including Kate, stopped cheering.

  Detroit was the best. He led the league in hitting two times in a row, and he was an all-star almost every year. Neighborhood children would hang around his and Kate’s house, hoping he might come out and talk with them, maybe even engage in a little game of catch. Later, he couldn’t help wishing his own son wanted to play with the Virginia Rail as much as strangers’ kids once did.

  And then, the first season in Cleveland, he won a third batting title. He figures that was the one that put him over the top later, got him in the Hall of Fame the fifth year he was eligible, by four votes.

  He sent money home to Penns Castle, long after it had stopped being “home” any more. He was liked by players and fans alike. He was adored by the beautiful Kate Taylor Beauchamp. He was a glittering adornment for her well-to-do family. Much later, he would understand that they had only known him when he was The Rail, and that neither he nor they were much enamored of the insecurity and emptiness and plainness that would outlive his ability to hit a baseball.

  Neil told people that his hitting paid for the meal, and his fielding took care of the tips. He was dogged but uninspired at third base, then left field and first base. At the very end of his career, they changed the rules, and he had a chance, briefly, to play the position for which he was born: designated hitter. He didn’t even have a glove.

  A columnist in Cleveland wrote that Neil Beauchamp had everything it took to reach 3,000 hits. “He’s got speed,” the newspaperman wrote, “and he’s got power when he wants to use it, although it seems sometimes that he’d rather drill a double into the gap in right-center than knock one over the fence. And he takes care of himself. He’s here for the long haul.”

  But then Neil stepped into a drainage hole chasing a foul ball one day in Baltimore, in 1966, and by the time he had rehabilitated his knee, he was suddenly 32 years old, doomed to be merely good for a while, and then not even that.

  He would later read an autobiography, when he was in prison, approximately the fifth book he had ever read that wasn’t assigned to him. The mildewed library, smelling of bad food from the kitchen next door, had a very limited selection, depressingly top-heavy with religious tracts and romance novels that were donated by churches and discarded by real libraries. One day, alone with nothing but his thoughts, Neil went down there, and he found a book written by a man who also made the Hall of Fame, one of Neil’s peers. The man was one of baseball’s all-time home run leaders, and in the book, he admitted that, at a point in his late 20s, when power was overtaking speed, he had determined that he was going to stop swinging level, stop going for the hard singles and the doubles and triples in the gaps. He was going to hit home runs.

  “All the guys getting the headlines were the sluggers, the home run guys,” he or his ghostwriter explained. “I realized that they were getting all the endorsements, all the attention, and all the money.

  “So I said, screw singles. I lost 30 points off my batting average, and I made more money. Everybody loves home runs.”

  Neil could relate. He never hit more than 27 home runs in one season, and that came late in his career.

  He knew that the old-time slugger who said home run hitters drive Cadillacs and singles hitters drive Fords was right.

  Still, he couldn’t do it.

  From the very beginning, he had felt there was a way to play baseball, a way to hit. Changing would have been a kind of betrayal. He had a swing, one that no manager or coach or scout ever taught him, and he thought that to alter that swing for the sake of money or fame (and he already had as much fame as he wanted) was unnatural.

  One day, his last season with the Tigers, late in the season when the pennant race was a foregone conclusion, lost again to the inevitable Yankees, a teammate of his, a rookie, started riding him.

  The rookie was one of those men Neil would see all through his big-league career, a one-trick pony who could hang well for a season or two but would eventually be undone by an inability to learn the pitchers’ weaknesses as quickly and as well as they learned his.

  That one year, though, the kid was on fire. By late August, he already had 26 home runs, with a chance for the American League rookie record. His last name was Brown, and he was, for that one season and a little bit of the next, Downtown Brown from Motown. Not only did he hit a lot of home runs, but he hit them deep, most going 400 feet or more, into the upper deck of Tiger Stadium or bouncing off its facade.

  “Hey, Rail,” he said to Neil in the locker room one day. “Rail! I got a hundred dollars says I get more home runs from here on out than you do all year.”

  It was a hot, humid day, and they were getting ready to play a twi-night doubleheader, something only the younger players had any zeal for at all.

  A couple of the other rookies laughed. To the players nearer Neil’s age, Brown was already wearing thin. Rookies, even at that late date, did not so freely throw around veterans’ nicknames, and they didn’t bait them.

  Neil just smiled and shook his head, went back to autographing the box of baseballs in front of his locker. He had, so far that year, hit only 14 home runs.

  “C’mon, Rail,” the rookie said. “I know those old arms of yours are getting too tired to hit home runs now. Let me get some of that big old salary of yours. I know I can take you.”

  The rookie was smiling, but no one missed the challenge.

  “Hey, Brown,” a veteran relief pitcher said. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”

  This only served to ratchet the rookie up a notch. Neil refused to acknowledge him except to shake his head and smile again, and Brown went back to his locker, where he held court loudly enough for Neil to pick up most of what he was saying. Most of it was about the problems of having to “carry this friggin’ team myself. Nobody’s got any spirit here.”

  After five minutes of it, and understanding that nothing but some kind of confrontation would settle matters, Neil walked across the room and stood over the rookie, who was reading a comic book with his back against his locker.

  “Tell you what.”

  “What?” The rookie put down the comic book.

  “It won’t be too good if we spent th
e rest of the season doing nothing but trying to hit home runs. How about this instead: I’ve got five hundred dollars says that I can hit more home runs than you by the end of the day. Either one of us gets benched, it’s off.”

  “By the end of the day? You mean just one day?”

  “That’s it,” Neil said. “One doubleheader. Five hundred dollars. Easy money.”

  Five hundred dollars was almost two months’ rent in the apartment complex where all the rookies lived. Neil could see Brown swallow. He knew he could hit two home runs for every one the Virginia Rail could hit. Still, he hesitated. Maybe, Neil thought later, it was an inability to play better when the stakes were higher that finally did Downtown Brown in.

  “OK, you got it, Rail,” the rookie said, and they shook hands on it.

  They were playing Minnesota that day. In the first game, Brown struck out twice and flied out twice, once to the warning track. Neil Beauchamp lined two home runs into Tiger Stadium’s upper deck, the first time he’d homered twice in one game in almost two years.

  Between games, Brown complained about the heat, about the lefthander that Minnesota had thrown at them, who must be scuffing the ball to throw such curves, about the difficulty of playing an afternoon game in such godawful heat.

  “Well, Brown,” the Tigers’ catcher said, between sips of a 16-ounce beer that had chilled in a tub during the first game, “the second one, it’ll be night again. And the Twins are throwing a righthander. You’re bound to catch up.”

  There was general laughter, and Neil regretted being baited into the bet, because he knew that Downtown Brown, a building block for whatever future the team might have, might have fouled his nest in Detroit that one day, with a combination of hubris and panic. He had, he knew later, made Brown doubt his invincibility.

  The second game went much as the first had. Brown, swinging mightily, dribbled a single between short and third, and he hit another ball to the warning track. Neil homered in the third inning, then was happy enough to sit for the last three.

  By the time they got back in the locker room, having swept the Twins 9-3, 5-3, the clubhouse man had already found from somewhere a piece of cardboard, on which was written: Rail 3, Brown 0.

  Downtown Brown tore the sign to pieces and did not speak to Neil for the rest of the season. He paid Neil his five hundred dollars on the last day, after much harassment by his teammates. He brought in 500 one-dollar bills and dumped them in Neil’s locker while he was taking batting practice. After the game, Neil’s teammates helped him collect the bills and put them in piles of 50, more or less.

  But Neil knew, even if his teammates or his manager didn’t, that he was not meant to swing for the fence every night. He had seen others have that rare two-homer night, or just hit one far into the lights, and fall in love with the sound of the bat and the way the whole stadium rained its temporary love on the man who could knock the ball a country mile. He had seen the diminishing returns, the loss of the sweet, straight whip of a swing. He had seen the .300 hitter with a little power become a .240 hitter with not much more.

  “I’ve got a line-drive swing,” he told his manager after he had won his bet with Downtown Brown. “If I start swinging for the fence, it won’t work. It might for a while, but not forever.”

  The manager thought to say to Neil that nothing lasts forever, anyhow. But then he thought again, and just, as he said to one of his coaches, “let the Rail be the Rail.”

  He tells David the story of Downtown Brown.

  “Yeah,” David says when Neil goes silent. “I know how you felt about those home runs. I turned down a Washington p.r. job one time, flacking for a ‘health-care provider.’ ‘Healthcare depriver’ was more like it. It would have paid almost twice what I was making at the paper. And, I’d probably still be employed. But I don’t think I’d be very happy.”

  Neil nods. He supposes it is a good comparison, but he wonders how anyone could ever love newspaper work the way he loved baseball.

  “What was it like?” David begins and then hesitates, lost in this unexplored territory. “I mean, between you and Mom? I mean … Shit, what happened?”

  Neil looks at him.

  “Hell, son, you were there. You know what happened.”

  “No, I don’t. I mean, I thought everybody’s parents fought sometimes. And I was gone before it got very bad.”

  David was only five when the Tigers traded his father to Cleveland, in 1964. He grew up in the suburbs there, except for two junior-high years, while Neil was ending his career in Kansas City. When Neil took a job managing a Rookie League team in east Tennessee, Kate and David stayed in Cleveland.

  Neil doesn’t think, now, that Kate ever meant to be unkind, just as he never meant to hurt her. But he knew, as he saw his batting average fall, as he started lying awake in the predawn hours trying to imagine a bearable life that did not include playing baseball, that Kate’s love was, after all, conditional.

  Well, he supposes that his was, too. When his performance fell to a point at which Kate no longer treated his life as the sun around which hers and David’s revolved, he turned cold, too. He drank, he strayed, he cursed.

  The day Kansas City released him, in the summer of 1973, he was 30 pounds over his rookie weight, no rail by anyone’s standards. With twice-cut-upon knees, he could hardly run at all. Even his sweet swing had turned sour. He had finally, in desperation as his reflexes lost another hundredth of a second, changed his batting stance, and by August, he was lost, a designated hitter who could no longer hit.

  The general manager broke it to him. Neil had tried to imagine The End, when he could bear to look at that certainty straight on, but when the man across from him in the big office started talking about “new directions” and “other teams out there,” all Neil could do was sit and nod dumbly. He caught his own reflection in the glass of a print behind the GM’s head. The print was of a painting Kate had—he was sure—told him about once in a museum. Neil still had on his uniform, leaving only the spikes in the locker room, and thought that his likeness very much resembled a little boy dressed in a little boy’s clothes, far out of his present league.

  They were in the middle of a homestand, so all Neil Beauchamp had to do was clean out his locker, put a bag of his belongings in the car, and drive to his and Kate’s rented house in the Kansas suburbs. He did not say goodbye to a single teammate, in the same spirit in which he would later discourage visitors when he was in Mundy. Most of the Kansas City players didn’t really know him very well, anyhow. They were all younger by then; he hadn’t won a batting title in nine years. They didn’t know or care about his .316 career batting average; they only knew that he hit a useless .235 that season.

  When he got home, it was after one in the morning. By that time, Kate was not going to very many of the games. Neil, who was developing a taste for gin, worried sometimes that the bourbon seemed to be disappearing at an unhealthy rate in his absence.

  In Cleveland, where he had friends, he would have just gone out drinking, come in at four or five and dealt with it in the morning.

  In Kansas City, though, he felt alone.

  He was relieved to see the bedroom light still on as he drove up.

  But then, when he came into the room, he saw that the bad news had preceded him.

  “Gus Marquette called,” she said, and her arms were folded. “He said you got cut today.

  “Neil, why didn’t you tell me this was going to happen?”

  He had not known himself that the end was upon him. He supposed that he had fooled himself, believing right to the end that he would wake up one day a .300 hitter again.

  “Told you?”

  “I mean, here we are in Kansas City, in this hole, and now we can’t even stay here,” and she started crying.

  “Somebody’ll pick me up,” Neil told her, but even he doubted it, and the following weeks, and then the silent winter, bore that out.

  He considered himself lucky, after he had gotten over the pai
n, that the Indians were willing to give him a job managing in the minor leagues, a chance to stay with baseball. They had saved some money, and Kate had inherited more.

  As he stood in the bedroom doorway that night in Kansas City, though, Neil Beauchamp looked down at the woman who had idolized him a few years earlier and knew that his world, whose balance of power had been shifting slowly for some time, was now an alien place. And he wondered where and if he would fit in it.

  In the dark, Kate was crying, and he wanted to cry himself. He tried to comfort her, reaching a big hand across her from behind, his body spooning to hers. But she stiffened and moved a few inches toward her side of the bed, and he was too proud to follow her with his own body, seeking, reassuring.

  Neil Beauchamp knew nothing was ever going to be the same.

  He thought that night that the bill had come due on his entire adult life. And he doubted that he could pay it.

  SIXTEEN

  Neil is sitting in the dining room, carefully administering syrup to four pancakes that are fanned out on his plate like a hand of cards.

  “Well, good morning,” Blanchard says when David walks in, rubbing his eyes. “I thought you’d be sleeping late today.”

  “I couldn’t. It was too quiet. Where are the piledrivers?” His smile is faint but almost straight-on.

  “Even those sons of bitches take Thanksgiving day off,” Blanchard says, and goes to make more pancakes. “But I don’t.”

  Neil and his son look at each other. Neil shakes his head.

  One summer in college, David worked with a construction crew whose job it was to lay the footings on which houses would be built. Sometimes it seemed fruitless; you couldn’t even see what they had done once the house was under way. But the foreman told them, over and over, that nothing worked right if they didn’t get the footings right.

  David guesses that they might have been laying the footings last night.