The Rail (20 page)

Between games, Brown complained about the heat, about the lefthander that Minnesota had thrown at them, who must be scuffing the ball to throw such curves, about the difficulty of playing an afternoon game in such godawful heat.

“Well, Brown,” the Tigers' catcher said, between sips of a 16-ounce beer that had chilled in a tub during the first game, “the second one, it'll be night again. And the Twins are throwing a righthander. You're bound to catch up.”

There was general laughter, and Neil regretted being baited into the bet, because he knew that Downtown Brown, a building block for whatever future the team might have, might have fouled his nest in Detroit that one day, with a combination of hubris and panic. He had, he knew later, made Brown doubt his invincibility.

The second game went much as the first had. Brown, swinging mightily, dribbled a single between short and third, and he hit another ball to the warning track. Neil homered in the third inning, then was happy enough to sit for the last three.

By the time they got back in the locker room, having swept the Twins 9-3, 5-3, the clubhouse man had already found from somewhere a piece of cardboard, on which was written: Rail 3, Brown 0.

Downtown Brown tore the sign to pieces and did not speak to Neil for the rest of the season. He paid Neil his five hundred dollars on the last day, after much harassment by his teammates. He brought in 500 one-dollar bills and dumped them in Neil's locker while he was taking batting practice. After the game, Neil's teammates helped him collect the bills and put them in piles of 50, more or less.

But Neil knew, even if his teammates or his manager didn't, that he was not meant to swing for the fence every night. He had seen others have that rare two-homer night, or just hit one far into the lights, and fall in love with the sound of the bat and the way the whole stadium rained its temporary love on the man who could knock the ball a country mile. He had seen the diminishing returns, the loss of the sweet, straight whip of a swing. He had seen the .300 hitter with a little power become a .240 hitter with not much more.

“I've got a line-drive swing,” he told his manager after he had won his bet with Downtown Brown. “If I start swinging for the fence, it won't work. It might for a while, but not forever.”

The manager thought to say to Neil that nothing lasts forever, anyhow. But then he thought again, and just, as he said to one of his coaches, “let the Rail be the Rail.”

He tells David the story of Downtown Brown.

“Yeah,” David says when Neil goes silent. “I know how you felt about those home runs. I turned down a Washington p.r. job one time, flacking for a ‘health-care provider.' ‘Healthcare depriver' was more like it. It would have paid almost twice what I was making at the paper. And, I'd probably still be employed. But I don't think I'd be very happy.”

Neil nods. He supposes it is a good comparison, but he wonders how anyone could ever love newspaper work the way he loved baseball.

“What was it like?” David begins and then hesitates, lost in this unexplored territory. “I mean, between you and Mom? I mean … Shit, what happened?”

Neil looks at him.

“Hell, son, you were there. You know what happened.”

“No, I don't. I mean, I thought everybody's parents fought sometimes. And I was gone before it got very bad.”

David was only five when the Tigers traded his father to Cleveland, in 1964. He grew up in the suburbs there, except for two junior-high years, while Neil was ending his career in Kansas City. When Neil took a job managing a Rookie League team in east Tennessee, Kate and David stayed in Cleveland.

Neil doesn't think, now, that Kate ever meant to be unkind, just as he never meant to hurt her. But he knew, as he saw his batting average fall, as he started lying awake in the predawn hours trying to imagine a bearable life that did not include playing baseball, that Kate's love was, after all, conditional.

Well, he supposes that his was, too. When his performance fell to a point at which Kate no longer treated his life as the sun around which hers and David's revolved, he turned cold, too. He drank, he strayed, he cursed.

The day Kansas City released him, in the summer of 1973, he was 30 pounds over his rookie weight, no rail by anyone's standards. With twice-cut-upon knees, he could hardly run at all. Even his sweet swing had turned sour. He had finally, in desperation as his reflexes lost another hundredth of a second, changed his batting stance, and by August, he was lost, a designated hitter who could no longer hit.

The general manager broke it to him. Neil had tried to imagine The End, when he could bear to look at that certainty straight on, but when the man across from him in the big office started talking about “new directions” and “other teams out there,” all Neil could do was sit and nod dumbly. He caught his own reflection in the glass of a print behind the GM's head. The print was of a painting Kate had—he was sure—told him about once in a museum. Neil still had on his uniform, leaving only the spikes in the locker room, and thought that his likeness very much resembled a little boy dressed in a little boy's clothes, far out of his present league.

They were in the middle of a homestand, so all Neil Beauchamp had to do was clean out his locker, put a bag of his belongings in the car, and drive to his and Kate's rented house in the Kansas suburbs. He did not say goodbye to a single teammate, in the same spirit in which he would later discourage visitors when he was in Mundy. Most of the Kansas City players didn't really know him very well, anyhow. They were all younger by then; he hadn't won a batting title in nine years. They didn't know or care about his .316 career batting average; they only knew that he hit a useless .235 that season.

When he got home, it was after one in the morning. By that time, Kate was not going to very many of the games. Neil, who was developing a taste for gin, worried sometimes that the bourbon seemed to be disappearing at an unhealthy rate in his absence.

In Cleveland, where he had friends, he would have just gone out drinking, come in at four or five and dealt with it in the morning.

In Kansas City, though, he felt alone.

He was relieved to see the bedroom light still on as he drove up.

But then, when he came into the room, he saw that the bad news had preceded him.

“Gus Marquette called,” she said, and her arms were folded. “He said you got cut today.

“Neil, why didn't you tell me this was going to happen?”

He had not known himself that the end was upon him. He supposed that he had fooled himself, believing right to the end that he would wake up one day a .300 hitter again.

“Told you?”

“I mean, here we are in Kansas City, in this hole, and now we can't even stay here,” and she started crying.

“Somebody'll pick me up,” Neil told her, but even he doubted it, and the following weeks, and then the silent winter, bore that out.

He considered himself lucky, after he had gotten over the pain, that the Indians were willing to give him a job managing in the minor leagues, a chance to stay with baseball. They had saved some money, and Kate had inherited more.

As he stood in the bedroom doorway that night in Kansas City, though, Neil Beauchamp looked down at the woman who had idolized him a few years earlier and knew that his world, whose balance of power had been shifting slowly for some time, was now an alien place. And he wondered where and if he would fit in it.

In the dark, Kate was crying, and he wanted to cry himself. He tried to comfort her, reaching a big hand across her from behind, his body spooning to hers. But she stiffened and moved a few inches toward her side of the bed, and he was too proud to follow her with his own body, seeking, reassuring.

Neil Beauchamp knew nothing was ever going to be the same.

He thought that night that the bill had come due on his entire adult life. And he doubted that he could pay it.

SIXTEEN

Neil is sitting in the dining room, carefully administering syrup to four pancakes that are fanned out on his plate like a hand of cards.

“Well, good morning,” Blanchard says when David walks in, rubbing his eyes. “I thought you'd be sleeping late today.”

“I couldn't. It was too quiet. Where are the piledrivers?” His smile is faint but almost straight-on.

“Even those sons of bitches take Thanksgiving day off,” Blanchard says, and goes to make more pancakes. “But I don't.”

Neil and his son look at each other. Neil shakes his head.

One summer in college, David worked with a construction crew whose job it was to lay the footings on which houses would be built. Sometimes it seemed fruitless; you couldn't even see what they had done once the house was under way. But the foreman told them, over and over, that nothing worked right if they didn't get the footings right.

David guesses that they might have been laying the footings last night.

They talked into the early morning hours about games and seasons long gone, about Mundy, about David and Carly and the girls, about what comes next. Nothing, though, about the photo album. The talk was so good, he and the Rail actually on the same wavelength for a while, that David did nothing to alter the temporary magic.

Blanchard comes back in and sees Neil dispensing syrup. He puts just enough out to spread a thin sheen on each pancake, and he is down to his last one. He hovers over the plate, his elbows to the side, as if to block anyone who might take his food.

“Jesus,” Blanchard says, taking a spatula and slapping three more pancakes on Neil's plate, then taking the syrup and pouring until the cakes are almost floating. “You're not in there any more, Neil Beauchamp. You can have as much damn syrup as you want, honey.”

“The last time I visited him,” she says, turning to David, “you know what he said he missed? Pancakes. Pancakes with all the syrup in the world. And now he's afraid somebody's going to hit him or something if he eats them.”

Her voice cracks, and she turns away.

Neil reaches over and puts his hand on her back.

“Give me a little time,” he tells her. “I'll be OK. I'm just not used to all this.”

Blanchard returns to the kitchen. She is baking sweet-potato pies as her contribution to dinner at Wat and Millie's.

“I hope that won't be too fancy to offend their tender sensibilities,” she says.

She comes out twice more to make sure both Neil and David have enough breakfast, then excuses herself to “prepare for the bacchanalia.”

The two men clear the table. While they are removing plates and putting away milk and orange juice and syrup, Neil asks his son about Kate. David doesn't remember his father asking about her before, ever. He must have, David thinks, and I just can't remember.

“Well, she's doing well,” he says, choosing each word as carefully as any politician he ever interviewed. “She's back in Detroit … Jesus, you know that. Grosse Point Shores. I guess Warren's doing pretty well.”

Neil nods his head. He knows where the former Kate Beauchamp lives, and he is aware of her husband's name and status.

“I mean,” he says, closing the refrigerator door and turning to face David, “is she well? Is she happy?”

David says she is well, well enough for 61, and he supposes she is happy, although she is not terribly happy with him at the present.

“She did it all,” Neil says, looking off through medieval windows into the woods beyond. “She raised you, and she carried me. She would pick out my clothes and pack my suitcase. Wouldn't let me lift a finger in the kitchen. I could barely dress and feed myself without her.

“She just thought I'd amount to more, is all. Thought I could do more than play ball. She had high standards.”

David leans against the kitchen counter and sighs.

“I hear that.”

“Well,” Neil says, “she has more reason to hope with you.”

“Right. I'm 38. I'm out of a job.”

“Been there,” Neil says, and he and David make eye contact and begin to laugh, Neil quietly while he sits at the table, David so uncontrollably that he has to wipe tears from his eyes.

The Great Letting-Go was not an avalanche. It was more like erosion as soft, rootless soil gradually slid downhill into a creek.

The Virginia Rail, once he had made it known that he wanted to remain “a baseball man,” spent two summers managing a team in a rookie league where the players were all less than 22 years old and the season lasted less than three months.

He would manage for six years total in the minor leagues. None of his teams ever finished higher than second, and he could not swear that he ever made one player better.

He'd seen managers and coaches, when he was a player, who had his particular problem. They once were great talents, but all their talent was either born to them or nurtured at some level beyond conscious thought.

A 19-year-old first baseman at Johnson City, that first season, asked Neil to help him with his swing after he had struck out three times in a row.

Neil would watch the first baseman swing, and then he would tell him to just swing level, get that hitch out, don't be too impatient. But he could not break down what he did to individual components, like taking a watch apart. He had never done that with his own swing, for fear that he could not put it back together.

“Just a nice, smooth, even swing,” Neil told the boy, and walked off. The player was gone after the season ended.

Kate stayed home. She had moved with David back to Cleveland, and the first two years, it wasn't so bad. Neil was only gone for a little more than three months, and his wife and son visited him on three occasions, although Kate thought the conditions of a minor-league manager were appalling and tried, not for the first time, to get him to go see her father about a position with one of his car dealerships.

“He wants you to take it over some day,” she told Neil, as she had told him before.