The Rail (8 page)

He hit ninth, of course. He didn't get to bat until the third inning; until then, his only action was running in from right field to back up the first baseman on two ground-ball outs, trying to impress with his boundless desire.

By then, it was almost sunset. The games lasted, usually, until the failing light caused someone to lose a fly ball or get hit by a pitch. Neil knew he had only one at-bat coming.

They all moved in on him. The three outfielders were just a few steps back of the worn base paths. In the distance, he could hear the train whistle signifying the return of the rail line's one engine to its terminus.

“Awright, easy out,” he heard someone say.

“Let him hit it,” another fielder, a boy smoking a cigarette while he played an indifferent third base, called out.

“Like hell,” the pitcher, a boy just out of eighth grade, responded. He wound up and threw the ball.

The first pitch that came Neil's way, the first ball thrown overhand toward him in a game, he swung at. He somehow knew he would hit it, and he did, hard enough that it went past the right and center fielders on the fly. They were too stunned to even chase it for a long second, and by the time the ball had been retrieved and relayed to the infield, Neil Beauchamp was sliding into third base, the way he had seen the bigger boys do it. He can still remember the first sweet sound of cheers from the handful of grown men who were watching.

He never missed a game after that, when William Beauchamp could spare him at the store. He didn't hit a triple every time, and he was 10 before one of his long fly balls reached the tracks for a home run, but he was better than many boys three years older. He had, beyond size and speed, the reflexes and eyesight that would carry him even after the more obvious physical skills began to break apart. He could see the individual stitches as the ball left the pitcher's hand; when time speeded up for the less talented, more excitable boys, it slowed down for Neil Beauchamp.

He never forgot anything he saw on a baseball field, never failed to practice what he was shown until he had honed it to near perfection. He was the student that he never would be in the classroom.

William did not care very much for baseball. He was forced to work in his father's store when he was younger than Neil, he told Jenny, and he could see no good coming from a boy wasting his life chasing a ball. Jenny interceded, though, and Neil was allowed to earn enough money at the store to buy a fielder's glove and a bat by the time the next spring came around.

The glove he rubbed with neat's-foot oil every year. But it was the bat that he really wanted, even though it was less essential, since there was always at least one bat available, usually taped up and chipped at various places along its grained surface.

But Neil knew, even at eight, that this was what he was meant to do—hit a baseball. He played the field well, but catching and throwing were not what made him special, and he knew this from the first time he struck a pitched ball.

He coveted the bat from the first time he saw it in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue the October after his first triple. He wanted it for Christmas, but he didn't get it until he had earned it at his stepfather's store in the cold predawn of January and February, rising even before William to get the wood stove going before he left for school.

The blond wood Louisville Slugger had Lou Gehrig's name etched in cursive script on it, and to Neil Beauchamp, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The day it arrived, he went outside and swung it for an hour, at nothing anyone could see, smashing imaginary pitches for line drives that kicked up the chalk along the first-base line.

For the two seasons he had the bat, Neil never let anyone else use it. He was normally a generous boy, sweet-natured toward Millie and then Willa and later little Tom, but he was more than willing to fight anyone who wanted to use his bat.

Neil was a natural athlete, agreed all the 4-Fs and old men who brought crates and chairs across the tracks to drink from paper bags and watch the kids play, remembering themselves. “Natural athlete” was an arbitrary designation to them, like genius. Neil grew up thinking that a certain, small number of people were graced physically, another small number mentally. It was something you were born with, like brown hair or blue eyes, and although he was never allowed to even say the name, he attributed this gift to his Penn-ness. The fact that no Penn in memory had succeeded as an athlete made no difference. The Penns were tall and lanky, like him. He was a Penn. Thus, he believed he was bound for greatness.

He excelled in football, too, and in the desultory, sporadic basketball games. It seemed clear, though, that Neil Beauchamp was born to play baseball.

He listened to the Senators on the radio, when there were no chores to do, no little half-siblings to mind.

The boy won his precious hours at the field beyond the tracks by doing whatever his stepfather ordered done, never letting his anger show, as cool in the sight-lines of William Beauchamp's spite as he was in the batter's box. He seldom had to beg permission, though, because the other boys soon were coming around to beg it for him, even offering to do his chores.

“He's going to get big-headed,” William would tell Jenny, after a platoon of boys older than his stepson had unloaded a truck of supplies in 10 minutes on Neil's behalf. “First thing you know, I'll have to take him down a notch.”

Jenny, with a two-year-old and a new baby in tow, didn't even bother to argue. She seldom did. Neil generally felt loved by his mother, even if she didn't always show it. His memories of her now, more than half a century later, are of a young woman distracted and overtaxed, too busy with two and then three young children, too unsure of herself, to be his champion.

Neil Beauchamp at 10 was a boy of average looks. He would have profited from braces, and his ears grew at an alarming angle from his head. His hair was given to cowlicks. His eyes, a dark blue, were his best feature.

He was no scholar. His superiority in athletics did not carry past the classroom door. He had been no better than an average student before he and baseball discovered each other. Afterward, he was a clock-watcher, willing classes and days and years of school to go away and let him do what he did best.

Once, when Neil was in his prime, he and Kate visited Penns Castle for a week in the offseason. On the way home, Kate asked him why few of his mother's old stories seemed to involve him.

“I was working,” he told her, “or playing ball.” He didn't admit that he sometimes wondered, too. Sometimes, growing up, he feared that his mother wanted to forget James Penn and everything reminiscent of him almost as much as William Beauchamp did.

Tom shows Neil and David around the hardware store, now expanded as much as it can at its present location, spilling its fall flowers and wooden lawn furniture, its bird feeders and whiskey-barrel planters, onto the sidewalk and out the sides. He's been out of the grocery business for many years, and the immigrants from the city are providing him with a good living. This Tuesday, several women in their 30s and 40s are wandering the aisles, shopping for curtain rods, fertilizer and garden hoses. A few of the husbands are there as well.

“They come in here to buy a toggle bolt and wind up with ninety dollars of tools,” Tom tells Neil and David out of the corner of his mouth. “Where the hell do people get all this money from?”

He leaves the store in the hands of his assistant manager, and the three of them walk over to the Station for lunch. Inside, there are murals of old locomotives on the walls. A bar area in the middle of the large room has been made over to roughly resemble a Pullman car, with stools alongside.

Tom seems to know everyone, new and old. A couple of men in their 60s, both classmates of Neil whom he can barely remember, stop to say hello. They try to talk a little baseball, but they obviously know more about this year's World Series and next year's chances than Neil does. He worries that they will think he's standoffish, but he's never been crazy about talking baseball.

He hears his name spoken, and out of the corner of his eye he sees a table of younger men, in dress shirts and ties, sharing a table perhaps 20 feet away, looking toward him. They look down as he turns to face them, and two of them laugh at something the other must have said.

Neil is used to this. There weren't many celebrities at Mundy.

SEVEN

Neil says they have a grocery list, that they have to go and check on David's car. Tom promises they'll be back at the store by 3 o'clock at the latest.

So they squeeze into the cab of Tom's truck, faded to near-pink and dwarfed by the newer one.

They turn left on Castle Road, away from Blanchard's, then left again on a street that was only a pair of ruts through the hardwoods the last time Neil saw it. They loop gradually to the right and soon are in sight of two long lines of brick homes, Georgian and Colonial mostly, flanking the road.

The leaves are nearly gone, so that Lake Pride is visible across three-quarter-acre lots, sending the low-riding sunlight to them on one hop. Cul-de-sacs peel off through the forest, most of them still works in progress, with finished houses next to bare footings. Some of the streets are not paved yet. The asphalt is cracked already and streaked red from the big trucks that rumble past, bringing lumber, taking away felled trees.

They go halfway around the lake and then Tom takes a left and they are on a road that circles Lake Pride Estates' other main selling point: the golf course. Twice the road crosses the cart path. Through the backyards, they can see occasional gumdrop bursts of brightly-colored sweaters as retirees ride alongside the emerald grass, casting long shadows as they get in one more Indian-summer round.

“Isn't this something?” Tom asks. “There's five hundred houses already built, and they say they plan to build a couple of thousand more. 'Course, the ones on the golf course got gobbled up fast.”

“So I guess we can't go fishing?” David says, showing the twisted smile again.

“Nah. Not here anyways. I'd like to see somebody go traipsing through one of these folks' yards and throw a line in the water. Have your ass put in jail.”

He points out one particularly large home, set on a small rise so that the golf course and lake are visible.

“They say that one's worth $600,000. How do you make that kind of money? You know, I watch 'em when they come in the store sometimes, trying to figure out what makes them special. I mean, I expect a man that lives in a $600,000 house to be Einstein or something, but some of these folks, I don't know if they can screw in a lightbulb or not.”

Neil allows that he doesn't know much about how money flows. He's been the conduit for enough of it, God knows, but the mystery of how it went from some big-league team to banks and creditors and business partners and bartenders, some even to Tom and his sisters back in Penns Castle, Virginia, is something of a blur.

Neil knows that Tom has always wanted money, is actually making some now, it seems. He wonders if it's better to have it in ample supply and then lose it, or to go wanting for 50 years and then cash in, too old to enjoy it to the fullest, maybe, but old enough not to piss it away.

When he was in his prime, Neil thought money was what you chased if you didn't have a Talent. Now, without either, he can see that it has its uses.

Tom takes them up by the new strip mall back out on Castle Road, parallel to the golf course but not visible from it. The pizza parlor, Chinese restaurant, tanning salon, drugstore, and assorted shops offering golf equipment, movie rentals, antiques, “Christian literature” and women's clothing are identified by look-alike green signs beneath a common roof meant to imply Williamsburg.

Beside the strip mall sit an eight-theater movie complex and a grocery store. Tom parks, and the three of them go inside to do the one task Blanchard has assigned them.

It takes them almost an hour to find the dozen items on the list, mainly because Tom keeps running into people he knows, including two who recognize Neil and carry on short, strained conversations.

On the way back to Blanchard's car, the sun is low enough that Tom pulls his visor over the side window. With no warning, the deer crashes out of the brush 20 yards in front of them and runs off toward the golf course, in and out of sight in no more than two seconds.

“Jesus,” David says.

“Dasher,” Tom replies. “Damn deer is going to get somebody killed.”

The deer around Penns Castle have gone full cycle since his youth, it seems to Neil. He never saw a live one when he was a boy, growing up in the town and walking to work or play through the then-untouched forest that surrounded it. Only after he left for baseball did they start coming back, and then, according to his sisters and Tom, they suddenly were everywhere, eating shrubbery all the way up to the houses, running in front of hapless drivers.

And now, according to Tom, they're gone again. It is possible that only the one remains, the rest thinned to nothing by cars and guns and real-estate developers. At least, no one has seen another live one this season. Two doe have been killed by cars since summer on Castle Road, plus many more on the state highway, and hunters have dispatched several south of the lake.

“People used to kill 'em for the meat,” Tom says. “I don't know if these boys now would know what venison tastes like.”

They drive back to the middle of Penns Castle and get out of the truck. The commuters from Richmond already are starting to stream by on Dropshaft Road in their white Cherokees and gray Lexuses that are even newer than their homes. The three of them lean against the metal and talk, David listening mostly. The wind has died down, and it's at least 60 degrees. It is, they all seem to silently agree, a good day to lean against an old red truck, breathe the late-fall air, and talk.

David drops his father and the groceries at the castle and drives back out to check on the car. The one bag Neil carries has black plastic handles, and David catches sight of the Virginia Rail in the rear-view mirror, his back bent slightly, a shuffle to his walk, carrying his load like an overburdened child or a very old man.