The Rail (27 page)

He had gone into the kitchen, just before he left, to get a glass of water. And there it was, only mildly strange to him then.

There was dry dog food spilled on the floor. He hadn't known that Blanchard carried it that far. And on the kitchen counter, directly above the dog food, was the still-open container of rat poison.

In his dream, Neil is back in William Beauchamp's house.

The house was heated by gas, which they also used for cooking. One of Neil's chores was to light the stove before breakfast and before dinner. He hated that stove, with its pilot light that had to be re-ignited every time they cooked a meal, the “whump” that always jarred his nerves when he reached in with the match. The smell of the gas before he lit it had a sickening odor, one he has always associated with danger.

Once, when he was 12, he saw the remains of a house blown up by leaking gas. There was nothing left except sticks.

He would never let Kate have gas put into any of their homes.

Now, he wakes up to that smell from long ago, only stronger. He finally realizes that he is not in his stepfather's house.

He wonders if he is dreaming, but the stench seems too real. In the distance he can hear a woman's voice singing something he can't quite make out.

He raises himself out of his bed and listens. The hairs on his arms are standing up. He knows he is at least 60 feet from the front door, and that the window behind him is closed.

He sees only one option. He drops as silently as he can to the floor, and he runs. He has not run in more than two years, and he is 62 years old. But he has heard enough; and the singing seems to be getting nearer. It is a pleasant voice, the voice of a once-beautiful woman who has reached and passed some crisis, whose mind is made up.

He charges out the half-open door and then down the hall as if he is trying to score from second on a left-field single, expecting every step to be his last, assuming he will be blown apart.

David is stuck in traffic, stopped dead a mile east of the Castle Road intersection. When the second fire truck goes by, forcing cars in the left lane into the median strip, he leaves the Camry and begins running toward the smoke up ahead.

He has returned to Penn's Castle far faster than he left, going 80 on the interstate, 65 in the 45 zone along the state highway.

And yet, as he gets nearer, running past surprised motorists, some outside their cars gawking at the spectacle and then at him, he sees he didn't drive fast enough.

“Go, O.J.!” one wit calls behind him, evoking a television commercial from the distant past and getting some laughs. Others honk their horns.

He is out of shape, and he can hear his own breath, coming in a ragged two-two count, then a one-one as he tries to suck in enough air to continue up the hill.

He crosses the highway at the intersection, running past a deputy sheriff who whistles angrily but helplessly. He passes the ruins of DrugWorld, still smoldering in the light rain.

Soon, he is running past fire trucks and rescue vehicles, and as he gets nearer, hoses snake across the road toward the place where Penn's Castle had stood a few minutes before. The abrasive blasts of sirens pierce the air.

In the road, and along the sides, David dodges pieces of stone that were hewn from an English quarry almost five centuries before, that survived disassembly and a trip across an ocean to be rejoined on a Virginia hillside and, finally, blown apart.

David stops as he gets to the driveway. He can run no farther.

He collapses into the gravel, defeated.

TWENTY-THREE

Saturday, 11 a.m
.

It isn't much of a parade.

Half a dozen floats, pulled by tractors, are interspersed with nine marching bands from every high school willing to send one, plus the convertibles with local politicians and their wives and children throwing candy canes and tangerines to a crowd that never surpasses one thousand.

There was considerable sentiment for canceling or postponing it, but everything had already been arranged, and it would have been hard to get in touch with the bands on such short notice.

The parade starts at the bottom of the hill on Dropshaft Road, by Pride Creek.

Normally, it would run through the middle of town, past Penn Station and Tom Beauchamp's hardware store, then make a right turn and continue up Castle Road, past Penn's Castle, crossing Route 56 and disembarking, as the band director put it, at the high school.

This year, they have made one concession to the events of the past 24 hours. Instead of turning right, the parade will turn left and go past the strip mall, close to the new homes along the golf course. Then, it will loop around Lake Pride before disbanding. Many of the newer residents had been lobbying for such a route, arguing that the tax dollars that pay the town's officials' small stipend come mostly from the big homes near the golf course.

The parade starts uneventfully, but there is a restlessness, an irritability to it, as if spectators and participants alike, bent on having a Christmas parade, would as soon have it over.

The sun is out, but it has turned cold, and many of the parents and children alongside Dropshaft Road are wearing their winter coats for the first time.

Before the parade has fully passed through the little downtown, a deputy has forced one band to pull off to the side of the street after warning its director once already to “step it up” and keep pace with the Miss Junior Penns Castle float that it follows. The director argues with the deputy and is arrested. People in the crowd boo.

And then, with the parade almost past the old railroad station, much of it already headed south toward the lake, the deer appears.

It must have been roused out of the thick woods behind the Presbyterian church by all the noise, people would say later.

The first anyone sees of it, it is hurtling in a blind panic across the street, between the Elks Club float and the last convertible, which is carrying Old Saint Nick himself.

The Beauchamp family is represented by Patti and Rae Dawn, who insisted on seeing the parade.

“Look!” the little girl cries out as the deer stops on the pavement, his hooves skidding, hemmed in by buildings. The man pulling the Elks Club float stops, and Santa Claus' driver almost rams it from behind.

The deer paces back and forth once, quickly, then runs back across the street, this time behind Santa Claus. It streaks mindlessly straight for Penn Station and crashes through the diner's plate-glass window. Patrons come running and falling out the door.

It is finally the cook who somehow maneuvers the animal from the back of the building, where it has destroyed several tables and a juke box, and gets it to leap back out the now-windowless window opening. The crowd outside spooks the animal, which turns and runs, seemingly no worse off than it was five minutes before, back into the hardwoods.

The little girl tugs on the sleeve of the stranger standing next to her and her mother.

“That was Dasher,” she says, wide-eyed, and the man nods and pats her head.

David passes the King's Dominion sign. The traffic is starting to thin out from the merge with 295 and won't be really bad again until he gets near the giant shopping complex that is the state's largest tourist attraction.

He eases his grip on the steering wheel and lets out a long breath.

He looks to his right, where the once-famous Virginia Rail has fallen fast asleep.

The blast came no more than a second after Neil hit the ground, rolling him like a log into the brush beyond the driveway. All the way out of the house and into the yard, he had expected it, expected death. But when it had not yet come by the time he cleared the gravel drive, he dove to the wet clay, in time.

He lay there, fetal, for several seconds, deaf and afraid to look. He could feel the thump of large objects nearby. As soon as he opened his eyes, he saw that the building blocks of Penn's Castle had fallen all around him. Some of the pieces of stone would be found more than 200 yards away. One crashed through the roof of a Castle Road home, destroying a La-Z-Boy recliner that was (miraculously, everyone agreed) unoccupied at the time.

He wandered through the brush along the edge of the yard, too stunned to call attention to himself. He felt as if he were already dead, walking in a silent world obscured by smoke. He could see enough of the space before him to know that Penn's Castle had disappeared.

The first to arrive were people whose car windshields had been shattered by the blast. Two of them had driven into the ditch, blown there by the explosion, they would swear later. The firemen and rescue squad were on the scene within five minutes.

Neil sat down by a tree on the edge of the woods, not far from the road, unnoticed. He had been sitting there for almost half an hour when he saw his son run into the driveway, then stop. David's appearance only added to his belief that he was either dead or dreaming, although the fact that he already had regained some of his hearing made him think he might be alive and awake. Neil felt that, if he was not dreaming, he should warn David to take it easy; he looked as if he were about to have a heart attack.

David collapsed to the ground, and Neil, bleeding and limping, got up and went to his son's aid.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and David looked up, speechless, his mouth open.

“Careful,” Neil said, as his son pulled him to the ground, hugging his aching ribs. He said it again, louder, to be sure he was heard. “I'm OK. But Blanchard …”

David can't believe he was able to leave Penns Castle with his father. After his experience with car repair, he had become convinced that nothing happened quickly or effortlessly in his father's hometown.

But nobody seemed interested in locking up Neil Beauchamp, or even holding him for questioning beyond an hour or so at the hospital, where stitches were administered to his right arm and forehead. He was advised, before they released him, that he might suffer some permanent hearing loss.

The police said they would be asking more about the explosion later, and David gave them his address in Alexandria.

Neil, with David helping, told his story. Tom, who had come running almost as quickly as the first fire truck, added that Blanchard Penn had been somewhat “beside herself” of late, that they were afraid she might do something like this.

Neil assumed that the detective questioning him did not recognize him in time to make real trouble.

What they found of Blanchard Penn mostly consisted of scraps of cloth here and there, a shoe she was apparently wearing.

That night, at Wat and Millie's house, Neil broke down.

No one had ever seen him like this, not even the late Blanchard on her visits to Mundy. He excused himself from the den where he had been sitting gingerly in an easy chair and went to his guest room after tears had begun running down his cheeks in the middle of a TV sitcom no one was watching. For an hour, he wouldn't let even David in. He cried for Blanchard, whom he could not save, whom he didn't even try to save, he realized.

David is sure that he and Neil will be visited, very soon, by detectives, and he worries that the authorities will use any excuse they can find to make life hard for a man with Neil's record.

He wonders what they might surmise when and if they find a gas can or incriminating footprints leading from the ruined DrugWorld to the leveled Penn's Castle.

Still, he is buoyant. He doesn't know why, but he starts whistling, driving up I-95, a road that normally makes him grind his teeth. He believes, against all odds, that he and his family, including the Virginia Rail, will land on their feet.

Neil wakes up and looks over at his son, an unspoken question on his face. He has been dreaming of prison again. Looking over his shoulder, he half expects that they will be pulled over, that he will be handcuffed and hauled back to Richmond, to jail. He can't hear well at all, and he wonders if he doesn't have a concussion. He had three of them while he was playing baseball, and they felt like this.

“Don't worry,” David tells him. “The worst is behind us now.” And he resumes whistling. Through the fog, it sounds to Neil like “Blue Skies.”

With the cold Virginia morning rolling past his window, Neil Beauchamp leans against the door and is soon asleep again.

Later, when they shift lanes, his weight falls toward his son, who reaches out with his right hand and catches him.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Howard Owen

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1211-9

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