The Rail (19 page)

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 correcting 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?

“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 the 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.