The Rail (24 page)

He couldn't bear to look at the commercials when they came on. He would be standing there, looking almost as wooden as the bat he held on his shoulder.

“Can't get money?” he asked, and they'd had him do it at least 12 times to get the right emphasis in the question. “We'll go to bat for you. We'll drive home that new TV set, that new washer-dryer, that new car. We want to be on your team!”

Among the very few good things that came from his prison sentence was that they stopped running the commercial.

They are starting to drift away from the table now, the men looking for a place to collapse under dinner's weight, the women carrying half-eaten platters into the kitchen to be tin-foiled and stored for a week of leftovers.

Neil finally goes into the living room, where they make a place for him on the couch. In the middle of all these well-fed, good-natured men, he feels as much of a sense of camaraderie as he believes is possible. David is sitting across from him, and they exchange a smile.

Within 15 minutes, Wat Moseley is asleep in the recliner next to him, snoring lightly, and Neil's own eyes are getting heavy when he feels a hand on his shoulder.

“Here's the car keys,” Millie says softly. “Blanchard said to tell you she had something to do, for you all to stay as long as you like. She said she'd just walk home.”

It's only a quarter-mile walk, so Neil supposes she is already there by now. He takes the keys and slips in and out of sleep while the younger men watch the game to its conclusion.

The other women rejoin the men, and they talk about the way Penns Castle used to be, the old times that link them. Wat mentions the new DrugWorld, which most in the group seem to support.

“Hell,” Ray says, “they're just trying to make a living like everybody else. It's legal; what else you want?”

“It's a good thing Blanchard isn't here,” Willa says. “She'd be ready to fight you right now.”

There is laughter from all the adults except Neil and David.

It's almost an hour later, fully dark, when the two of them leave.

Everyone overloads them with hugs and handshakes and turned-down offers of enough food to last them until Christmas. Still, Neil has the feeling that the conversation will be easier, that the whole room will sigh in unison, when he is gone. He wonders if he is getting paranoid.

The sad truth he knows but won't share, though, is that he really doesn't know these people any more. They are family, and they bear him no particular ill will, that he can tell. He wishes sometimes he had been like Tom, always in Penns Castle, always of it. He wishes he were capable of bringing back a time when he bent down to take small hands and guide them across streets, when he tied toddlers' shoes, when he bathed small faces and feet and backsides, when small milk-breathed Willa and Millie and Tom kissed him goodnight.

But he, and they, have long since lost all that. Short of staying in Penns Castle, Neil doesn't really know how the hell he could have kept it from happening.

When they pull into the driveway, the only lights still on are the one in the front of Penn's Castle and the one upstairs, in Blanchard's bedroom.

Neil knocks on her door and asks if she's all right. She says she is, that's she's just exhausted “from all those damn Beauchamps.”

“Just let me rest a few minutes,” she says. “You all fix yourselves a drink or something.”

Neil turns to walk down the dark hallway to the stairs.

“Neil,” she calls after him.

“Yes.”

“Would you get some of that dog food in the pantry next to the sink, and feed Cully?”

NINETEEN

At first, in his dream, he is back in Mundy, and the relentless blaring is the prison alarm system, the guards screwing with them as usual for no good reason, robbing them of precious unconsciousness.

Then, it is an alarm clock. He flails about, futilely searching by touch for the button that will make the world silent again.

By the time he is almost awake, he knows it is something else. The ancient walls of his room pulse red in rhythm with the noise.

He manages to work himself out of bed, fearing that some still-lit cigarette of Blanchard's has ignited the old house. When he looks out the window facing Castle Road, he sees that it is indeed a fire truck that is creating the hellish sound-and-light show, but before he can turn and run for his door and safety, he realizes that the truck is turning around in the circular drive, leaving rather than arriving. Then he sees that there is a brighter glow than that made by the truck, off to his right, beyond the far reaches of Penn's Castle.

Loud but indistinguishable voices correspond over radios outside. As Neil turns to put on pants and shirt, there's a knock at his door.

“Dad.”

“I'm here.”

“There's a fire, but it's OK. One of the firemen said it's that drug-whatever building down the road.”

Neil opens the door. As David stands there, he puts on his clothes, and the two of them go toward the main entrance, turning on lights as they make their way.

Neil stops at the front door.

“What about Blanchard?”

David shakes his head.

“She wasn't in her room. I knocked, and then I opened the door. She wasn't there.”

Neil says nothing. He turns and goes back inside, returning with a flashlight. He motions for David to follow him into the house and out the back door into the garden and the woods beyond.

The evening had been quiet. Blanchard came down to join them around nine, then turned in again shortly before 11. She drank water, claiming that she had overindulged, and she talked mostly about the people with whom they had spent Thanksgiving, with David asking her occasional questions about this or that aspect of Penns Castle and its residents.

After she went to bed again, Neil said he supposed David would be glad to get back to Carly and Frannie and Abbie, whose names he made sure to actually say this time.

“Yeah, I miss all my girls,” he said.

“Tell me what they're like.”

David looked over at him.

“That's right,” he said. “I'd forgotten. You haven't seen Abbie.”

“Just pictures. And I haven't seen Frannie since she was six days old.”

“Six days old.” David shook his head. “Damn.”

“There weren't many times I wanted 'em to see me in the last six years.”

“Well, they're going to see you, soon. We're going to have you up. I promise you that.”

Neil said he thought it might be better if they kept it like it was.

“I'll bet you're a good father,” he said to David. “I bet you're a good husband. You've done better than I ever could. I think your mother must have raised you right.

“I don't want to spoil it, don't want 'em to see what a mess their grandfather is. I want 'em to think all the Beauchamps, since 'way back, were great husbands and fathers.”

David looked over at him.

“Do you know, do you have any idea, how much I would have given to be you? To be able to do what you did?”

“That's why you should be careful what you ask for. Any fool can be born able to hit a ball. It's a parlor trick, like being double-jointed or seven feet tall. What you did, that's the trick.”

David said it was a trick at which he seemed to be losing his touch.

The last time Neil Beauchamp had been in the same room with his son, before David showed up at Mundy to take him away, Carly had just come home from the hospital with Frannie.

Neil had bought the largest stuffed rabbit he could find; it was larger than Carly herself. He had also stopped for a drink, which became a few drinks, at a bar in Alexandria, and he was slightly unsteady on his feet.

He saw the child, remarking that she looked just like David the first time he saw him.

The chill had already hardened into ice by then. Father and son had only seen each other once since the wedding three years before. It had been, by David's estimate, five years since he had seen his father fully sober.

Carly, who had heard all David's stories, had not even wanted to let his father in the house. She had taken David over into her family and didn't see why he had to even let “the old bastard” in the door.

But Neil was there. He had come in peace, although somewhat fortified. After a very few minutes of very small talk, he tried to pick up the rabbit and set it in Frannie's crib, which was smaller than the rabbit itself. Then he tried to set it next to the crib, but in wrestling the monstrosity into the corner, he tripped over the edge of a rocker and fell, he and the rabbit tumbling into and splintering the crib. Neil had ended up under his gift, pieces of wood beside and underneath him.

Carly had come running in, Frannie in her arms. When she saw the Virginia Rail sprawled across her carpet, amid the wreckage of the same crib in which she and her mother before her had once lain, she held the baby in one hand and, with the other, pointed toward the door. It struck Neil as funny, something out of a soap opera or a sit-com, but she just stood there, saying nothing, just pointing. Finally, when he saw that his son was going to say nothing, that indeed he was too embarrassed to say anything or even look at him, Neil got to his knees, then up on his feet, and he left.

Half asleep and night-blind, they are no match for the limbs and briers that lash them as they stumble through the quarter-moon darkness that the flashlight only pricks. The fire in front of them only makes the immediate foreground harder to see.

Neil, who has slightly better night vision, leads. He can hear David curse the branches and thorns. He isn't sure he hasn't led them on a fool's errand, but he feels alive. He's doing something physical, something that will test his body instead of his spirit. He breathes deeply, more deeply, he is sure, than he ever did in Mundy. He feels, he realizes, finally free. The humid night air and the damp leaves smell like lost time.

“You don't think she's out here, do you? Not really?” David asks. He is already out of breath.

“Don't know. She might be.”

In another minute, they are within 100 feet of the opening. In the middle of the scoured clay before them, flames are coming out windows and through the burned and collapsing roof of what was soon to be Virginia's 22nd DrugWorld megastore. It reminds Neil of the kind of football-season bonfires they used to have on fall Thursday nights, just across the state highway from where they stand now.

Between the fire, the trucks and the ceaseless radio communication, Neil and David can barely hear each other. They kneel and stare at the fire, which the ever-growing number of county volunteer units is only now beginning to neutralize.

“I hope to hell she's not down there,” David says into Neil's ear.

Neil just shakes his head and looks around, shining the flashlight cautiously at waist level. He is awake enough to know he does not want to be found anywhere nearly this incriminating for a very long time.

It takes him three circular passes to spot her.

He thinks he sees something more pale than the trees, 50 feet to their right. When he brings the light back, there she is.

Blanchard is sitting on a stump, her elbows on her knees, her chin resting on her folded hands. She might be watching a play or a ball game. She looks as much at peace as Neil ever remembers seeing her.

She doesn't even seem to know they're there, but when they get about 10 feet away, she turns toward them, not spooked at all. She smiles and yawns.

They kneel beside her for several silent minutes as the fire is gradually reduced, its devastation complete.

“Well,” Blanchard says finally, “I suppose we ought to be getting back. It was a hell of a show, though, wasn't it?”

They help her to her feet, but she leads them back, without benefit of a flashlight, going so fast that she has to stop twice and wait for them.

When they reach the back door, she stops and bends down to untie and then take off the pair of men's shoes.

“We might want to throw these away,” she says, and leaves Neil holding the oversized brogans. “You all might want to clean the mud off yours, too.”

When the two men get inside, Blanchard is in the process of locking the front door.

“I swear,” she tells them, stopping on the third step up the stairs, “I believe I could sleep a week.”

Neil is suddenly shaking, colder than he had been outside. He is afraid he might be coming down with the flu.

He and David turn out the lights and, without saying a word, go back to bed as if they had only gotten up for a midnight snack or a quick trip to the bathroom.

Under the covers, Neil shivers and waits for the doorbell to ring. At some merciful point, he falls asleep.

TWENTY

Running water wakes him up.

He rolls over and looks at the clock beside his bed. He has not slept five hours, and even that rest was disturbed by dreams of fire and prison.

He is exhausted, but he has to get up.

For one thing, he can smell the smoke, feels as if it is so ingrained in his skin that any deputy sheriff looking for an arsonist would have to look no farther.

He must wash himself clean. Maybe he can burn his clothes. Whoever is in the bathroom must have the same idea.

Five minutes later, David knocks softly.

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Shower's all yours.”

Neil is out of bed so quickly that the blood rushes to his head and he has to sit down. Then he realizes that it is not him, or at least not just him: The entire house smells of ashes. It has seeped through closed windows and under doors somehow.

He makes his way to the bathroom.

The face in the mirror startles him. He's getting used to looking old, but he's also dirty. He must have stumbled somewhere in their scramble through the woods and scraped himself. He has scratches on his forehead and the side of his neck. There is dried blood on his shirt collar. And he needs a shave.