The Rail

by Howard Owen

  By the time he had started his own car and was edging out into the street, the Corvette was more or less consumed.

  She called him the next day. He told her that he wanted a divorce, which was a lie, but he had no choice, he felt. He knew people “patched things up,” but he had never learned much about healing, and he figured she had enjoyed as much of the Virginia Rail as she could stand, anyhow.

  For some reason, she never mentioned the Corvette to him.

  The pitcher was gone when the season ended, and by November, Kate Taylor had moved back to Detroit.

  By then, Neil Beauchamp, fired with the rest of the Texas staff at the end of a dismal season, was at long last out of baseball, unable to endure another bus season in Rochester or Wichita, unwanted in the big leagues, unskilled labor.

  SEVENTEEN

  Blanchard is wearing a black dress that shows off her still-fine figure and not-yet-faded tan. Neil doubts that she has gained a pound in all these years. She might even have lost weight since her New York days. She has used makeup and lipstick to maximum advantage.

  David turns from his conversation with Neil and whistles appreciatively. She kisses him on the cheek.

  “Somebody better get moving,” she says. “We’ve got to be over there by one-thirty, two at the latest.”

  There’s only enough hot water for one shower at a time. Neil insists that David go first.

  After he’s left the room, Blanchard looks over to the table where Neil is sitting. From somewhere, he’s gotten a pencil, and he seems to be scribbling numbers on a piece of scratch paper, lost in thought.

  She walks over and leans down, pulling his face to hers, and kisses him on the lips, slipping her tongue into his mouth. He can taste her perfume and the taste beneath that, still familiar to him.

  He tries to push away, scraping the chair backwards across the floor, but he feels the pull, too, and it takes him several seconds to escape.

  “Blanchard,” he says, leaning to pick up the pencil. “Don’t.”

  “Have you told him?” she asks, her eyebrows rising as she looks up at him.

  “Told him?”

  “About us. Of course, I don’t suppose you need to. Oh, it’s going to be grand, Neil.”

  Neil leans back against the sink.

  “Blanchard …”

  But she is walking swiftly toward the back of the house.

  “Cully! Here, boy!” She opens the door and starts whistling.

  Neil comes up behind her. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

  “Blanchard. Come on back. Come on now.”

  When she turns around, it’s as if none of it happened.

  “Well,” she says, “I guess we’d better start getting stuff gathered up. Can you put some tinfoil around these pies, Neil? Do you want something to drink? Damn, I could use something.”

  Neil doesn’t even know why she’s doing it. He’s looked in the mirror enough, as much as he tries not to, and he knows what two years in Mundy, plus all the wasted ones before, have done. Who would want him?

  When they’re seated at the table, her with her first bourbon-and-water of the day, him with a glass of orange juice, she looks over at him, more clear-eyed now that she has drained a long drink.

  “Neil,” she says, “I’ve got to make it right. I want to make it right. I owe you.”

  “You’ve taken me in,” he tells her. “But that’s all, OK? I can help around here. I’m not afraid to work.”

  “I’m not taking you in. He gave this place to you, too. It’s yours as much as mine. But you know how it is.”

  She shrugs her shoulders, and then she’s shaking, crying, her makeup and lipstick smearing.

  He does know how it is, wonders how it is that some things and some people don’t change. He’s gotten over a lot. He hardly even thinks of Kate now. But Blanchard hangs on to everything.

  Neil picks up the Richmond paper. There, on the bottom of the front page, is a story about a prison that the state is almost ready to open, built much farther back in the hills than Mundy, even. According to the story, the new prison is on top of a strip-mined mountain, with the possibility of a view stretching for miles.

  Someone in the corrections department, though, worried that the inmates would be unworthy of such beauty, and so the glass is to be tinted and distorted. They will only be able see the ridges beyond their world the way a person with cataracts might.

  Neil supposes a prisoner might derive some contentment or peace, maybe even false hope, from such unreachable scenery.

  As for himself, he doesn’t remember ever thinking to take the long view, if one even existed, during his time at Mundy. One minute, one hour, one day, one week, one foot in front of the other: That was how he got by. His only hope was that he would live to see a world where he might be able to hope again.

  He was there for 23 months. At the sentencing, the judge told him he could have gotten 10 years for vehicular manslaughter, along with the drunk driving and the other charges, but no one could remember a longer sentence being meted out to the guilty party in a DWI fatality.

  His lawyer told him beforehand that being a celebrity could work for or against him, that they might go easier because he was the Virginia Rail, or they might go harder, because he was the Virginia Rail.

  It did not help Neil that he already had one DWI charge in the previous two years.

  The late Lacy Haithcock’s father was quite eloquent, and there was a double line of state troopers sitting grimly, creased hats held in clenched fists.

  The judge, a man Neil’s age, had iron-gray hair slicked straight back in lines like prison bars. By the time he arrived at his sentence, even Neil Beauchamp accepted it as inevitable and fitting for such a crime.

  He said he was sorry, that he wished he could bring Lacy Haithcock back.

  “But you can’t,” the judge said, and he looked sad.

  There was talk that they might send a baseball Hall-of-Famer to a country-club prison, but Mundy was no country club. It was not hell, Neil supposed, but it was close enough.

  They strip-searched him when he arrived and then almost blinded him with disinfectants. He could hear the guards laughing; they were mostly ignorant younger men, almost all of them white. They didn’t know exactly who he was except that he was one of the mighty whom the gods dropped into their grasp on occasion, for their amusement.

  They took everything he wore in, returning it to him nearly intact almost two years later, long after he had forgotten he’d ever worn brightly colored shirts and pants with creases and shoes that shined. He found, dressing himself the morning David was to pick him up, that he had nearly forgotten how to tie a shoelace.

  He spent two weeks in “seclusion,” because there was a rumor that someone might hurt him, for some reason. Most of the time, though, he shared a 12-by-14 cell with from one to three other men. They tried, in what seemed an uncharacteristic act of kindness, to keep the older prisoners together.

  His pillow was a worn, folded-up blanket. He became accustomed to the cockroaches, the infested, inedible food, and the stench of shit and piss from backed-up toilets. He learned to sleep through the screaming, learned to look the other way. He had grown more garrulous in the letting-go years, but in prison he learned again the beauty of silence, the ugliness of talk to which he contributed only enough so as not to seem “above” the rest. In truth, he never felt above anyone at Mundy.

  The first week, he realized later, he was in shock, sleepwalking through it all. Then, the days started their ivy-slow creep. The time from breakfast until lunch was longer than any of his free days had been.

  After a month or so, they let him have pencil and paper. He did not write often, and then usually to Blanchard, his only visitor. He had made it clear to everyone, when he knew what lay ahead, that he wished to be among the dead at least until he was released.

  There were times when he wished that everyone except Blanchard—his other sisters and brother, his son, his ex-wife, his f
ormer friends and acquaintances—had not taken him quite so literally, but that usually was on visiting day or in the middle of the night. Mostly, he knew it was for the best.

  A reporter from the Detroit paper tried repeatedly to get him to submit to an interview; Neil finally wrote him, begging him to please leave him alone, which the reporter eventually did.

  Neil had never been a reader or a writer. With the paper and pencil, though, and nothing else with which to distract himself except light work in the kitchen and the banalities of such social contact as was necessary, he turned to numbers.

  He had been a good math student, or at least better than in other subjects. He had liked the hardness and sureness of numbers, as solid as a line drive past the pitcher’s ear.

  Now, he started playing mathematical games that he made up, scribbling constantly and then throwing the sheet of paper away. He would take numbers and square them, then cube them, subtract the square from the cube and compare the difference to the square and cube of the next-highest and next-lowest numbers. He would construct grids in which he squared numbers, then carried them to the third and fourth and fifth powers and beyond, then added up the horizontal, vertical and diagonal numbers, then subtracted them from each other, with no real motive other than to make what was in front of him, all around him, go away for a while.

  He would do division and multiplication in his head, three numbers times three. He would figure batting averages and earned-run averages, work backward through the years to determine the day of the week Hiroshima was bombed, the day Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, or any of a thousand other events whose dates he got from a world almanac someone had donated to the library. He could tell you the day of the week on which his mother and his father were born. He would, finally, make up a date from centuries past and calculate the day of the week on which it fell.

  Many around him, seeing him sitting on his bed or working in the prison kitchen with a faraway look, his lips moving slightly as he calculated some distant, meaningless sum, thought he might be losing his mind, but it was just the opposite. If anything kept him sane, he believes now, it was numbers. Their logic, cold and mysterious, would yield to him at unexpected moments some fact known by any college mathematics major but as amazing to Neil as an alien life-form.

  Some men found such salvation as could be conjured up in the Bible or the Koran. Some found it in law books and the overblown, overly-optimistic appeals that sprang from them. Some found it in the weight room, or drugs.

  For Neil Beauchamp, it was numbers.

  Now that he’s free again, he cannot tell you one single thing, useful or useless, that he learned in all his scribbling, all his figuring, except for the one, largest thing: how to make a nightmare world disappear, if only for a few minutes at a time.

  The only time the sheer claustrophobia of it all got to him was in the final two months. Before that, even Blanchard’s amazing news that he had inherited half of Penn’s Castle, that James Blackford Penn had finally recognized his only living son, was not enough to faze him.

  Neil knew of other men who had destroyed their chances for release with the open gates in sight, and some said it was because they couldn’t deal with life on the outside. Neil, though, believes it is something else that makes men founder yards from the finish line. In the last two weeks, he realized that he was more jumpy, more irritable than before, unable to concentrate on his mind-saving numbers. He almost got into a fight with a prisoner half his age, over a piece of bread. Once he allowed himself to see a date, an actual day and hour of his possible release, he was unable to make himself not think about it, and the knowledge of what was there, almost within reach, made the 12-by-14 reality of his world almost unendurable.

  He wonders what he might have done if he had not gotten his parole on the day he had allowed himself to hope he would get it, once he finally let hope crawl back into his life.

  “The first time I saw you in there,” Blanchard tells him, “I didn’t think you’d last a month. You’d lost 20 pounds at least, and you looked like you were scared to death.”

  “I needed to lose some weight.”

  “Well, now you need to gain some back. And I’m going to help you. You’ve always looked after me, Neil. Now you’ve got to let me take care of you.”

  Neil looks up at her.

  “Not always. There were lots of times I wasn’t there.”

  She smooths his still-uncombed hair.

  They hear David coming down the hall, and Blanchard is at the refrigerator, looking for something, when he enters the room.

  “Shower’s all yours,” he says. Neil rises stiffly and leaves.

  “Do you think he’s going to be OK?” David asks Blanchard after he hears the distant bedroom door close. “I mean, I could take him back up with me.” He can’t believe he’s said it, can’t really see how he could make it work if Blanchard called his bluff.

  She turns from the open door.

  “He’ll be fine,” she says, and there’s an edge to her voice. “Don’t you worry. He’ll be taken care of here. He belongs at Penn’s Castle.”

  EIGHTEEN

  To David, the chaos at Wat and Millie’s seems as practiced and expected as turkey and dressing.

  All of the women except Blanchard, are in the kitchen, talking over each other and arguing about the thickness of gravy and the necessity of cranberry sauce.

  The children—Ray and Patti’s Rae Dawn and Susan’s Sara and Ben—are watching the TV in Wat’s den, from which Rae Dawn emerges every five minutes crying that she is being picked on.

  Wat, Jack, Ray, David and Susan’s boyfriend Parker are watching a pro football game in the living room.

  Blanchard leans on the door frame leading to the kitchen, not quite in either orbit, sipping on a Coke enhanced by one of the mini-bottles of bourbon from her purse. She is watching Neil, who sits to one side of the small living room, facing the television but not joining in the sports banter around him.

  The heat is stifling. It is a cloudy, temperate day, more like early October; it’s at least 80 degrees inside. When Jack gets up during a commercial to go outside and get away from the cigarette smoke, David follows him to the cooler air.

  Wat and Millie’s porch is screened, looking out into a backyard of tan zoysia grass dotted with Bradford pears, pecan trees and crape myrtles.

  “Hot,” Jack says, and David agrees, breathing deeply and gratefully.

  “So,” Jack says, turning toward David, “how’s he doing?”

  “The Rail? Dad? Oh, he’s fine. Just adjusting to real life again. It’s going to take a while. At least he has a place to stay. Thank God for James Blackford Penn.” David forces a laugh.

  Jack is quiet. They both watch as two squirrels scurry along the branches of a pecan tree whose base is littered with ruined shells. David is about to make a comment about what a nuisance squirrels are, rats with tails, really, when a darkness passes in front of them. The red-tailed hawk is gone with the squirrel before they even know what it is. It becomes a speck against a gray sky in scant seconds. The other squirrel sits in the V of two branches, shaking and then scrambling as far up the bare tree as he can.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Jack says, and he and David concede that they’ve never seen anything quite like that.

  They compare other feats of nature they’ve witnessed, including Dasher.

  Jack sets his Coke on the ashtray along the porch rail. Then he turns to David.

  “I know the lawyer who drew up James Penn’s will,” he says, and David wonders what, if any, response is expected.

  There is silence for a few more seconds. Jack Stoner speaks again.

  “David, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except I can’t keep a damn secret. The lawyer, he can’t keep a secret either, I suppose, but he said he was just amazed when he heard what Blanchard was telling people. About the will.”

  “The will.”

  “David,” Jack says, drawing him by the elbow
away from the sliding glass door to the porch’s far corner, as if they could be heard over the now-resumed game, “James Penn left everything—the house, whatever money was left, everything—to Blanchard. Neil got nothing, at least not from him. Nothing. He wasn’t even mentioned.”

  David is looking across the yard, to the woods beyond. He thinks for an instant he sees a deer, but when he looks again, it is either gone or camouflaged.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing. I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know why I’m telling you.”

  David turns back toward the house, fixing his gaze on Dr. Jack Stoner for two seconds.

  “I don’t either.” And he goes back inside.

  The house’s population has grown by two while David was on the porch. Tom has arrived with a woman who appears to be about 10 years younger, a redhead wearing some kind of animal fur who looks as if she would rather be almost anywhere else.

  Tom introduces her as Ella Turpin, and the others greet her pleasantly enough. She wants to stay close to Tom in this house full of someone else’s family, and they settle in the middle area where Blanchard is trying to make her drink last as long as possible.

  They finally sit down to dinner at 4:30, all 16 of them. Wat has had to add two leaves to the table, which stretches out of the dining room and into the adjoining den. They’ve put a card table in the den for the three children.

  There is no seating plan, and they divide by generations. David joins Ray, Patti, Susan and Parker on the side of the long table nearest the children, with Willa, Jack, Tom, Ella, Blanchard and Neil on the other. Millie and Wat sit at either end.

  They join hands. Wat asks God’s blessing on the food before them and notes that he is thankful for family on such a day as this.

  David looks across to where Neil is sitting with his head bowed, between Blanchard and Tom’s girlfriend, Ella. He hasn’t heard Neil say more than a dozen words since they arrived, and he imagines his father is just as happy not to be entertaining questions about the last two years. Everyone seems to prefer it that way. Blanchard’s eyes are wide open, and they meet David’s briefly before the blessing is concluded. She appears flushed.