The Rail (12 page)

“What they need to bring in here is a garage,” he said, “one that actually fixes things. It ought to put these low-life cocksuckers out of business in about five minutes.”

Neil flinched, surprised at his own squeamishness. He'd spent many hours the last two years with men who were capable of using certain profanities as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, gerunds and infinitives, sometimes in the same sentence, and his life in the big leagues was spent among profane men who spit out streams of curse words and tobacco juice the way some men breathe.

But he never really grew accustomed to it.

He has always disliked the heavier, darker profanity. The players who used it the most, he felt, were the ones who had to, as if acting the part would raise their meager batting averages, keep their curve balls from hanging. And in prison, the loud, swearing ones were always looking over their shoulders, checking to see who they intimidated, and who they didn't, never at ease.

David saw his discomfort.

“What? You haven't heard worse than that lately? Where've you been?” He stopped short, letting the words hang in the air.

Now, on the way to the Virginia Rail's first meeting with his parole officer, they are sitting in the parking lot of what is advertised as a “fun center.”

Two older women walk up the path to the small golf course's clubhouse on pale, heavy, varicose-veined legs. Only one baseball batting cage is in use. A father stands behind the screen, hands gripping the fencing, face pressed against it, feet out behind him a little. Inside, holding a metal bat and facing a Rube Goldberg contraption of a pitching machine, is a boy who might be eight or nine years old.

“Want to hit a few?” David asks.

There is nothing Neil would like to do less. He shakes his head.

“Come on. It'll be good for you. Do something you're good at.”

In the cage, the boy swings at and misses two pitches in a row. The father makes an impatient movement to the side, as if he has an urge to rush into the cage and hit the ball himself, then say, “There. That's how you do it.” But he stays behind the screen. The boy fouls one off, misses two more, then hits a dribbler that barely reaches the netting set up to stop balls 10 feet behind the pitching machine. From where Neil and David sit, it is hard to tell how fast the pitches are coming, or what exactly the father is saying, but it is obvious to both of them that his clapping after the one fair ball is more in sarcasm than praise.

“Let's go,” Neil says. David doesn't move, though.

When the father and son are finished, the man walks two steps ahead of the boy on their way back to the big sports utility vehicle. They get in their respective doors, not looking at each other, and the truck squeals angrily out of the empty lot.

“Remember?…” David asks, then stops.

“No,” Neil says.

But of course he does.

Neil Beauchamp was never quite sure how one went about rearing a male child. He has had ample time to consider it, and he wishes he could have had another chance.

One of his cellmates at Mundy was a ghost of a man who had spent much of his adult life as a sworn enemy of various governments. In the spring of 1995, he had broken into a restricted military installation in eastern Virginia, bent on doing as much damage as a 60-year-old black man armed with wire-cutters could do. He did manage to strike a guard, and he was serving a three-to-five-year sentence.

The man was left alone by most of the other prisoners, too old to be dangerous or to be meat for the sexual predators. He and Neil supposed they had been thrown together because of their age; they had nothing else in common. While Neil was batting his way into the baseball Hall of Fame, letting his manager, team traveling secretary, broker, business partners and wife deal with inconveniences such as hotel reservations, taxes, investments and child-rearing, Ambrose McDaniels was fighting. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school, then college, never attending an integrated class until law school.

He spent the '60s fighting state and local governments in his native Alabama, then, with Vietnam, took on a larger foe. He preached that black men and women were expected, and would be expected in the future, to fight America's wars, and he exhorted everyone of color to refuse to fight “whoever, whenever, whatever.”

Neil did not agree with all that Ambrose McDaniels said, and they had arguments that were both amiable and predictable. What did strike Neil, though, was his cellmate's religion.

Neil knew almost nothing about reincarnation, and when it was first explained to him, his wonderment provoked McDaniels to ask him if he had spent his whole life in an isolation booth.

Neil, whose religion was not then and is not now a solid object, more of an occasional scented vapor than a rock, was intrigued by the concept. The more he thinks about it, the more he wishes for reincarnation, or something like it. He knows he could do better next time, especially as a father. He has learned something, he believes, but he wonders what good it does him now.

Plus, from what Ambrose McDaniels has told him, he fears his next appearance on Earth might be as one of the lesser invertebrates.

Back then, Neil might wake up one morning and realize that he was letting Kate and the neighborhood raise his son. It would be a fall or winter day, or a rare summer day when the Indians were home and playing at night, leaving at least some of the morning free.

The day he and David both remember, as they watch the little boy struggle to please his father with a line drive up the middle, was in mid-June, 1970.

That morning, Neil lay there for a few minutes with his eyes closed, waking up to the sound of the clothes dryer, to Kate cleaning breakfast dishes down the hall, to the vague murmur of a faraway television.

It came to him, as sleep slowly lifted, that he had not acquitted himself very well the night before. He had gone hitless in three at-bats, suffering the still-rare indignity of being lifted for a pinch-hitter in the ninth inning of another losing cause.

The crowd had been so small that he could hear individual insults. One man in particular, one of the greasy-haired regulars who sat behind the dugout for the sole purpose of tormenting the unpromising home team, had been on him for several nights now. Neil's teammates, most of whom had felt his sting, called him the Polish Sausage, in honor of his ancestry, appearance and eating habits.

The man had never really bothered Neil. He had seen teammates run out of the major leagues because, when things went bad, they developed such rabbit ears that they could pick up insults half a stadium away.

That was not him, Neil assured himself, but then, he realized later, things had really never gone badly for him before, not on a baseball field. The kind of year Neil Beauchamp was headed for that year would have pleased most players. He would end the season at .287, with 14 home runs and 77 runs batted in. But Neil could see the diminishing returns he was getting at 35, and he could not imagine 36 being any better.

And so, the night before, there had been two voices in his ear.

The interior one whispered that it would soon be over, that before many more nights, he would reach the end of the only life he had really prepared for.

The exterior one was somewhat louder, with much the same message.

Over the past few games, the Sausage sometimes called him the Virginia Whale, in honor of the 20 pounds he had added over the past three seasons. Sometimes he was the Virginia Snail, after he had failed to reach a sharply hit ball down the first-base line, one he would have had two years earlier. Last night was the first time Neil could detect the occasional titter, an outright laugh now and then, from the Sausage's neighbors.

Neil knew the futility of answering the insults. The Sausage apparently spent much of his day thinking up torments for the Cleveland players. He was clever, and he never did anything in response to a threat or curse except laugh in the most perfect delight and stick the blade even deeper.

Neil knew this, but then he was called back from the on-deck circle, just as he was taking his first step toward home plate, focused on salvaging a dismal night. A kid of 22 passed him, pumped up, swinging two bats, determined not to be sent back to Buffalo.

“Hey, Whale,” the Sausage screamed, and Neil could see him out of the corner of his eye, a yellow smudge of mustard on his chin. “Whale! Hey, Virginia Fail-ure!”

Neil allowed himself a quick glance up, and that only encouraged the man.

“Now batting fifth,” he bellowed, using his program as a megaphone and doing a perfect imitation of the Cleveland announcer, “in place of the overpaid, underachieving Virginia Failure, who has been given the rest of the evening off to be with his family …”

Neil was on the dugout roof before he realized what he was doing, the bat still in his hand. He would always be grateful to the three teammates who dragged him back by the ankles.

The Polish Sausage would ease up on Neil after that, the only time anyone could remember the man showing any compassion, but in the silence Neil would feel a sympathy that was almost worse than the razzing.

After the game, Neil had gone out with the only Indians player older than himself, a relief pitcher getting by on a knuckleball, and had gotten as drunk as he ever did. Neil Beauchamp was not, in his playing days, a drinker. It bespoke, to him, an absence of the control that he felt he had over events.

This time, though, he had succumbed. Now, lying in bed, he wanted to repair things. And part of that repair, he thought, would be to “do something” with his son.

When he shambled into the breakfast nook, the sight of his backside, on the front sports page, as he was dragged off the top of the dugout and away from the seemingly shocked Polish Sausage, only made him more determined to right himself.

Kate did not speak to him, only patted him on the shoulder as she went past, on the way to get more eggs and bacon from the refrigerator. She was still defending him then.

Neil wandered into the family room, where David was lying on the floor, watching cartoons on television.

He sat down in the chair behind him, moving deliberately so as not to spook his son, who, it seemed to Neil, was on the jumpy side.

“Hey,” he said after the two of them had watched in silence as a cartoon coyote went over a cliff and then, in a small poof! hit a canyon floor miles below. “How about if we go hit some balls?”

The pitching machines were new to their neighborhood that year, part of a complex that also offered miniature golf and trampolines.

For some time, Neil had meant (when he thought of it in an idle moment) to take David there. He knew, from the one Little League game of his son's that he'd seen and the other six he'd heard about, that David was not having a great season. He was a second baseman, usually batting seventh. Neil could tell, just from the two times he'd seen David bat, that his son was neither a power hitter nor a contact hitter. What David was, the best Neil could tell, was an occasional hitter. And his fielding did not seem prizeworthy, either. It crossed the Virginia Rail's mind that David might not be starting at all if his last name weren't Beauchamp.

David did not respond at first to his father's offer. When asked again, he said, “I guess so,” and then got up without a word to change clothes and get a bat.

The complex was called, according to the large green sign that hovered above it, “Hit Something!” Most of the pitching machines already were in use, and it was necessary for David to squeeze in between two older boys who were knocking balls into the screen with grunts of satisfaction.

Neil was recognized almost immediately, even with sunglasses on. Most of the comments were sympathetic; this was, after all, his neighborhood, even if he seldom was seen in it except driving to and from the ballpark.

A small crowd of children and some parents gathered around him, asking for autographs, the adults offering insight into what was wrong with the Indians, telling him about their own sons who were tearing up one youth league or another.

At his father's command, David chose the highest of the three pitching speeds, which, it soon became apparent, was faster than anything he would face in a Little League game.

“You won't learn anything hitting powder-puff pitches,” Neil told him. He instructed from behind the fence.

Move closer to the plate. Don't put your foot in the bucket. Choke up a little. Don't close your eyes, for God's sake.

It was inevitable that the audience would take all this in, and almost as inevitable that Neil would, without thinking about it, turn a morning with his son into a community batting practice lesson, with David as the “before” who could, with work, be turned into a hitter.

“Now, see there,” Neil said, turning to the two older boys who had used all their quarters and now were watching David being overmatched by the pitching machine. “He's bailing out, putting his foot in the bucket. You've got to keep both feet in there, got to stay squared away toward the pitcher.… OK now, swing! See, he closed his eyes.”

“Can't hit what you can't see,” one of the older kids observed, and there was general agreement and a few laughs.

This went on for half an hour. Twice, David tried to leave, but Neil sent him back, putting more quarters into the slot, giving more free advice.

When it was over, Neil had provided a couple of dozen Chagrin Falls boys with a free batting lesson from a future Hall-of-Famer, which was what they already were calling him in the newspapers.

“You're lucky to have a dad like that,” one adult said to David as he left the batting cage, finally permitted to quit. “You listen to him, and you'll be a good one, too.”

Neil Beauchamp was not a quick study of humanity in those days, but even he realized he had lost sight of the morning's goal. David seemed to be striving mightily not to cry as they went back to the car.