The Rail (16 page)

Neil did not know what he could do about it, and said so.

Wainwright had been slouching against the wire fence. He eased himself up.

“Well, I tell you what. You got some payin' back to do. You can either pay me for that windshield or work it out.”

Neil said he supposed he would have to work it out.

“Be at my room at six tonight,” Wainwright said. “Don't be late.” And the three veteran players turned and left.

That evening at 5:45, Neil knocked on Buddy Wainwright's door. Unlike the minor leaguers, whose living conditions could border on the primitive, Wainwright and the other players who, it was assumed, would make the major-league roster, lived in relative luxury. The motel where Buddy Wainwright resided had a pool. It had an actual lobby.

After the third knock, Wainwright came to the door, looking as if he had been awakened from a sound sleep.

“What!” he said, then recognized the boy who had wrecked his car.

He went away from the door without a word and came back holding his spikes and a stained baseball uniform.

“I want you to shine these shoes, and I want you to get this cleaned,” he said. “The damn equipment man does a piss-poor job of cleaning. I want you to find somewhere where they can clean my damn uniform so it's white.”

Neil took the bundle without a word.

“Have it to me by tomorrow morning,” Wainwright yelled after him. “Don't be late. Leave it outside.”

For three weeks, Neil did Buddy Wainwright's bidding. Shoes to shine, errands to run, gloves to re-web, bats to tape. On one occasion, Wainwright even foisted a less-than-desirable date off on the player he had taken to calling “Virginia.” Neil rode with the woman, who was three years older than he and had a car, to a liquor store. He choked down his first beer sitting in a drive-in parking lot, and afterward, he kissed her goodnight. Her breath smelled of tobacco and bad teeth, and when she suggested they go dancing, he told her he had to be back by 11, because of curfew.

“Buddy don't have to be back by eleven,” she said.

“That's because he's a star,” Neil said, and left her sitting there.

The first time Neil Beauchamp stepped on a golf course was as Buddy Wainwright's caddy, and Wainwright had a wonderful time demanding an assortment of 10-irons, short niblicks and other phantom clubs while the other veterans with whom he was playing grinned.

Neil was well into the month when someone told him that the car's windshield was insured, that it didn't cost Buddy Wainwright a dime, but he already understood the rules by then. Neil had seen what happened to younger players who resisted the harassment thrown their way by bored veterans. They were said to have bad attitudes, and it seemed to Neil that unfortunate things happened to these more easily offended players. And he saw that the veterans didn't even bother making life a living hell for the ones who didn't stand out, the ones who had no chance of making it.

Buddy Wainwright's bullying, Neil came to see, was another indication of what he already knew. He, by God, was going to make it.

The day the veterans headed north, Buddy Wainwright came by the cottage Neil shared with a homesick shortstop from Waycross, Georgia.

Wainwright had a bat in his hand and a fierce enough expression on his face that Neil did not step from the shadows of the room at first.

“Here, Virginia,” the veteran told him. “I hit six home runs this spring with this sucker. You damn sure better take care of it. And you better not hit my fuckin' car with it.”

Neil took the bat, saying thank you to Buddy Wainwright's back. He did not find out until the maroon Buick convertible was somewhere beyond the Lakeland city limits that the Tigers had decided they could not afford to keep an aging slugger who either homered or struck out, much more of the latter than the former, and who was too fat to bend all the way down for ground balls at first base.

The story about Buddy Wainwright and his gullible minor-league caddy made the rounds, and Neil came to understand that he had bettered his stock by playing his assigned role.

He could, it was agreed in rooms where futures were decided, take it. So many of them couldn't, the cigar-smokers said, shaking their heads. Not like it was before the war. You had to take it then.

Neil Beauchamp would, of course, have been only a happy hod carrier without the sweet swing. But he batted over .400 that spring against other young men who would soon be assigned to play in places like Kinston and Jamestown and Lubbock. He was capable, as they all knew, of memorable home runs, but Neil's strength, then and later, would be his ability to hit hard, straight, predictable, unstoppable line drives, to not be seduced by the fences.

They sorted out the minor-league players two weeks before they broke camp. Neil would play on a Class D team in Valdosta, Georgia, a short trip north. He hitched a ride with an older player, and the only things he took that he hadn't brought south in February were his home and road uniforms and Buddy Wainwright's black bat.

He batted .360 in Valdosta, best in the league. He used the black bat only a dozen times all year, never making a big deal of it, never admitting the possibility that such a thing as luck existed, never telling anyone that he had four singles, two doubles and two home runs with Buddy's bat. One of the home runs was a grand slam that encouraged the country people in attendance to pass the hat and present him with forty-seven dollars and thirty-eight cents at the end of the game.

Once that summer, Jenny and the children took the train down, staying in a boarding house for two nights, so they could watch Neil wear out half of the Tallahassee pitching staff.

That fall, he went back to Penns Castle and worked at the store, trying to make up for all the time he was gone. Whenever the weather allowed, he'd get high school kids, some of them former teammates, to pitch to him at the old field behind the gym, the younger boys chasing the balls down in the outfield. In an interview years later, he said that he became even more of a line-drive hitter in that way, because if he had developed a long-ball swing, he would have lost all the baseballs to the woods behind the right-field fence.

Neil Beauchamp had teammates, in his three minor-league seasons, who seemed to waste whole careers in one winter. They would hit over .300 or win 18 games, then swagger off in September. Then, next spring, they'd arrive in Florida 20 pounds heavier, somehow distracted from the one thing most of them could do well. And then they would be gone.

Neil thought that perhaps the difference was that they had not staked their entire lives on baseball. He could not understand them, but he could learn from them. He never let up.

Neil hit .344 at Durham and Little Rock in 1954, tearing up the Carolina and Southern leagues. That winter, he was invited to play on one of the Cuban winter league teams and sent money home to his mother from Cienfuegos.

“Seems like I've found a way,” he wrote in one postcard, “to miss winter entirely.” He estimated that, between spring training, the minor-league season and the winter league, he had played in almost 250 baseball games in 1954. He does not remember a happier time.

The next year, he batted .364 with 13 home runs and 105 runs batted in at Charleston, West Virginia, in the International League, sending home postcards from Havana and Montreal, which Jenny would paste to the back of the store's cash register.

He spent September of 1955 on the bench in Detroit, where many of the veterans knew him already from spring training. The Detroit sports writers knew him, too, had been following him for three seasons in The Sporting News box scores, were proud they'd seen him hit one “at least six hundred feet” in Florida. They tipped off the fans, and when Neil Beauchamp first stepped up to the plate at Briggs Stadium, people nudged their less-savvy neighbors and pointed to the game program. “That's him,” they'd say. “That's the one I told you about.”

And he never looked back, never spent another day in the minor leagues. He hit .293 his rookie year, with 12 home runs. The next time he hit under .300, he would be well into his 30s.

“He is as thin as a rail,” the sports columnist at one of the Detroit papers wrote in May of 1956, “and his swing is as flat and level as one, not a wiggle or a hitch, so pure and solid you could drive a locomotive over it.” The headline the copy desk put on the column would stick to Neil for the rest of his life: “The Virginia Rail.” The sports columnist's obituary would list among his accomplishments giving Hall-of-Famer Neil Beauchamp his nickname.

Blanchard leads Neil on a path she has worn down, along the crest of the ridge. They walk through tulip poplars and oaks, past a couple of mounds signifying the openings to long-abandoned dropshaft mines, where many decades of branches, leaves and dirt cover holes more than 100 feet deep.

The trail fades away, and Neil has to trust Blanchard's sense of direction. Louder and louder, he can hear the short bursts, the mechanical grunts, of earth-moving equipment, of Caterpillars and backhoes. Soon, Neil sees red earth through the almost-bare trees.

Blanchard stops just short of the clearing, where they are still hidden from the workers below.

“Can you believe this shit?”

The construction crews are making the most of the last good weather, trying to complete the DrugWorld building before the first snow. The cinder-block walls are being covered with brick that is only slightly redder than the wounded clay on which they stand. Several roofers are beginning their work on the steep Dutch colonial pitch. The hammering has a rhythm that will carry the men to suppertime.

“When they first started,” she says, “after it was clear that Jimmy Sutpen and the rest of those thieves at the courthouse weren't going to do a damn thing, I'd sneak down here.…”

Blanchard is suddenly seized by a fit of giggling. It takes her a long two minutes to regain control.

“I would sneak down here,” she finally continues, “and I'd put sugar in their gas tanks. I did it three times, and then I got scared to do it any more.

“I got pretty good at it, really. I think I might have a flair for guerrilla warfare. I'd reach the spot where that thick clay started, and I'd put on a pair of Daddy's old shoes that I'd brought along. So they would think it was some man. Then I'd take the shoes off when I got back to that spot and walk back to the house. I'd wash Daddy's old shoes and hide 'em in one of the old plunder rooms.

“But it really messed up their party, I'll tell you that. They'd lose a day or two like that.”

Blanchard lets out a long sigh.

“Of course, it was like spitting in the wind. Pretty soon, they'd be right back at it again. And then they started posting guards every night.”

She gives Neil a look and a wink.

“They took the guards off last week, though. I guess they thought whoever it was had given up. FFC.”

Neil looks at her.

“Fat fucking chance,” she says, and turns again to watch the workers.

“You ought to be careful,” Neil suggests, but she doesn't seem to hear him.

They walk back the way they came, soon finding the path. Their shoes are caked with red mud, and Blanchard says she'll clean them as soon as they get back to the house.

They are almost to the gazebo again when the deer crashes out of the woods. It bounds over the ridge and is out of sight down the hill before they can walk over to watch.

THIRTEEN

David wanders through the house. He has called the garage this time and is assured that his wounded car is getting top priority.

There is a photo wall in an alcove at the back of the great room. He is surprised to see how many of the pictures framed and hanging there are of Neil Beauchamp. Some are from newspaper clippings, some are promotional glossies, apparently designed to make the players look as foolish as possible. There is one taken at the kind of function the Tigers and later the Indians would have every year. In it, Neil Beauchamp, Number 7, is squatting beside his young son, who is dressed in an identical Detroit uniform. David guesses that he would have been four, because the year after that, the Virginia Rail was traded.

David does not recall any photograph taken at a later date in which either he or his father looked so genuinely happy.

Neil Beauchamp figures he would have made another $5 million playing baseball had he been born five years later, still ripe when the free-agent money started pouring in during the mid-'70s. By the early '90s, he could make more signing his old baseball cards and children's bats and gloves than he did as a player in his prime.

When he was still making such appearances, Neil and old acquaintances would laugh and shake their heads about the strangeness of it all. Some of them were bitter, railing about the millionaire .240 hitters, the porcelain outfielders who were good for only 100 games a year, the rag-arm pitchers with losing records who made more than whole teams did 20 years before.

Neil, though, would trade none of it for what he had. He can't imagine how wealth could have made any of it better. His sole regret, large enough to blot out all the others' bitter, small complaints, is that it ended.

He thought $20,000 and 154 games a year were all he ever ought to ask for.

When he was introduced to Catherine Anne Taylor, that magic rookie year when he had steaks for breakfast and rode in plush and important trains smelling of grandeur and comfort that would never be matched by any jet, he was drawing a salary of $10,000 a year and sending some of that home.

What did he need with money? His meals were paid for, his hotel on the road was paid for, his train ticket, even his clothes, thanks to clothing stores that asked only that he drop around on the odd off afternoon to sign some baseballs and shake some hands. He still made extra money playing down south in the winter leagues.

And there were girls.

Neil turned 21 at his fourth Lakeland spring training; he hit two singles and a double that day.