Authors: Denis Johnson
Train Dreams (4 page)
Peterson continued: “I believe he did it because he’d been confabulating with that wolf-girl person. If she is a person. Or I don’t know. A creature is what you can call her, if ever she was created. But there are some creatures on this earth that God didn’t create.”
“Confabulating?”
“Yes. I let that dog in the house one night last summer because he got so yappy and wouldn’t quit. I wanted him right by me where I could beat him with a kindling should he irritate me one more time. Well, next morning he got up the wall and out through the window like a bear clawing up a tree, and he started working that porch, back and forth. Then he started working that yard, back and forth, back and forth, and off he goes, and down to the woods, and I didn’t see him for thirteen days. All right. All right—Kootenai Bob stopped by the place one day a while after that. Do you know him? His name is Bobcat such and such, Bobcat Ate a Mountain or one of those rooty-toot Indian names. He wants to beg you for a little money, wants a pinch of snuff, little drink of water, stops around twice in every season or so. Tells me—you can guess what: Tells me the wolf-girl has been spotted around. I showed him my dog and says this animal was gone thirteen days and come back just about wild and hardly knew me. Bob looks him in the face, getting down very close, you see, and says, ‘I am goddamned if you hadn’t better shoot this dog. I can see that girl’s picture on the black of this dog’s eyes. This dog has been with the wolves, Mr. Peterson. Yes, you better shoot this dog before you get a full moon again, or he’ll call that wolf-girl person right into your home, and you’ll be meat for wolves, and your blood will be her drink like whiskey.’ Do you think I was scared? Well, I was. ‘She’ll be blood-drunk and running along the roads talking in your own voice, Mr. Peterson,’ is what he says to me. ‘In your own voice she’ll go to the window of every person you did a dirty to, and tell them what you did.’ Well, I know about the girl. That wolf-girl was first seen many years back, leading a pack. Stout’s cousin visiting from Seattle last Christmas saw her, and he said she had a bloody mess hanging down between her legs.”
“A bloody mess?” Grainier asked, terrified in his soul.
“Don’t ask me what it was. A bloody mess is all. But Bob the Kootenai feller said some of them want to believe it was the afterbirth or some part of a wolfchild torn out of her womb. You know they believe in Christ.”
“What? Who?”
“The Kootenais—in Christ, and angels, devils, and creatures God didn’t create, like half-wolves. They believe just about anything funny or witchy or religious they hear about. The Kootenais call animals to be people. ‘Coyote-person,’ ‘Bear-person,’ and such a way of talking.”
Grainier watched the darkness on the road ahead, afraid of seeing the wolf-girl. “Dear God,” he said. “I don’t know where I’ll get the strength to take this road at night anymore.”
“And what do you think?—I can’t sleep through the night, myself,” Peterson said.
“God’ll give me the strength, I guess.”
Peterson snorted. “This wolf-girl is a creature God didn’t create. She was made out of wolves and a man of unnatural desires. Did you ever get with some boys and jigger yourselves a cow?”
“What!”
“When you was a boy, did you ever get on a stump and love a cow? They all did it over where I’m from. It’s not unnatural down around that way.”
“Are you saying you could make a baby with a cow, or make a baby with a wolf? You? Me? A person?”
Peterson’s voice sounded wet from fear and passion. “I’m saying it gets dark, and the moon gets full, and there’s creatures God did not create.” He made a strangling sound. “God!—this hole in me hurts when I cough. But I’m glad I don’t have to try and sleep through the night, waiting on that wolf-girl and her pack to come after me.”
“But did you do like the Indian told you to? Did you shoot your dog?”
“No!
He
shot
me
.”
He
shot
me
.”
“Oh,” Grainier said. Mixed up and afraid, he’d entirely forgotten that part of it. He continued to watch the woods on either side, but that night no spawn of unnatural unions showed herself.
For a while the rumors circulated. The sheriff had examined the few witnesses claiming to have seen the creature and had determined them to be frank and sober men. By their accounts, the sheriff judged her to be a female. People feared she’d whelp more hybrid pups, more wolf-people, more monsters who eventually, logically, would attract the lust of the Devil himself and bring down over the region all manner of evil influence. The Kootenais, wedded as they were known to be to pagan and superstitious practice, would fall prey completely to Satan. Before the matter ended, only fire and blood would purge the valley …
But these were the malicious speculations of idle minds, and, when the election season came, the demons of the silver standard and the railroad land snatch took their attention, and the mysteries in the hills around the Moyea Valley were forgotten for a while.
N
ot four years after his wedding and already a widower, Grainier lived in his lean-to by the river below the site where his home had been. He kept a campfire going as far as he could into the night and often didn’t sleep until dawn. He feared his dreams. At first he dreamed of Gladys and Kate. Then only of Gladys. And finally, by the time he’d passed a couple of months in solitary silence, Grainier dreamed only of his campfire, of tending it just as he had before he slept—the silhouette of his hand and the charred length of lodgepole he used as a poker—and was surprised to find it gray ash and butt ends in the morning, because he’d watched it burn all night in his dreams.
ot four years after his wedding and already a widower, Grainier lived in his lean-to by the river below the site where his home had been. He kept a campfire going as far as he could into the night and often didn’t sleep until dawn. He feared his dreams. At first he dreamed of Gladys and Kate. Then only of Gladys. And finally, by the time he’d passed a couple of months in solitary silence, Grainier dreamed only of his campfire, of tending it just as he had before he slept—the silhouette of his hand and the charred length of lodgepole he used as a poker—and was surprised to find it gray ash and butt ends in the morning, because he’d watched it burn all night in his dreams.
And three years later still, he lived in his second cabin, precisely where the old one had stood. Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.
Just such a dream woke him in December his second winter at the new cabin. The train passed northward until he couldn’t hear it anymore. To be a child again in that other world had terrified him, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He stared around the cabin in the dark. By now he’d roofed his home properly, put in windows, equipped it with two benches, a table, a barrel stove. He and the red dog still bedded on a pallet on the floor, but for the most part he’d made as much a home here as he and Gladys and little Kate had ever enjoyed. Maybe it was his understanding of this fact, right now, in the dark, after his nightmare, that called Gladys back to visit him in spirit form. For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed.
He put his right hand on the little dog stretched beside him. The dog didn’t bark or growl, but he felt the hair on her back rise and stiffen as the visitation began to manifest itself visibly in the room, at first only as a quavering illumination, like that from a guttering candle, and then as the shape of a woman. She shimmered, and her light shook. Around her the shadows trembled. And then it was Gladys—nobody else—flickering and false, like a figure in a motion picture.
Gladys didn’t speak, but she broadcast what she was feeling: She mourned for her daughter, whom she couldn’t find. Without her baby she couldn’t go to sleep in Jesus or rest in Abraham’s bosom. Her daughter hadn’t come across among the spirits, but lingered here in the world of life, a child alone in the burning forest. But the forest isn’t burning, he told her. But Gladys couldn’t hear. Before his sight she was living again her last moments: The forest burned, and she had only a minute to gather a few things and her baby and run from the cabin as the fire smoked down the hill. Of what she’d snatched up, less and less seemed worthy, and she tossed away clothes and valuables as the heat drove her toward the river. At the lip of the bluff she held only her Bible and her red box of chocolates, each pinned against her with an elbow, and the baby clutched against her chest with both her hands. She stooped and dropped the candy and the heavy book at her feet while she tied the child inside her apron, and then she was able to pick them up again. Needing a hand to steady her along the rocky bluff as they descended, she tossed away the Bible rather than the chocolates. This uncovering of her indifference to God, the Father of All—this was her undoing. Twenty feet above the water she kicked loose a stone, and not a heartbeat later she’d broken her back on the rocks below. Her legs lost all feeling and wouldn’t move. She was only able to pluck at the knot across her bodice until the child was free to crawl away and fend for itself, however briefly, along the shore. The water stroked at Gladys until by the very power of its gentleness, it seemed, it lifted her down and claimed her, and she drowned. One by one from eddy pools and from among the rocks, the baby plucked the scattered chocolates. Eighty-foot-long spruce jutting out over the water burned through and fell into the gorge, their clumps of green needles afire and trailing smoke like pyrotechnical snakes, their flaming tops hissing as they hit the river. Gladys floated past it all, no longer in the water but now overhead, seeing everything in the world. The moss on the shingled roof of her home curled and began to smoke faintly. The logs in the walls stressed and popped like large-bore cartridges going off. On the table by the stove a magazine curled, darkened, flamed, spiraled upward, and flew away page by page, burning and circling. The cabin’s one glass window shattered, the curtains began to blacken at the hems, the wax melted off the jars of tomatoes, beans, and Canada cherries on a shelf above the steaming kitchen tub. Suddenly all the lamps in the cabin were lit. On the table a metal-lidded jar of salt exploded, and then the whole structure ignited like a match head.
Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She’d lost her future to death, and lost her child to life. Kate had escaped the fire.
Escaped? Grainier didn’t understand this news. Had some family downriver rescued his baby daughter? “But I don’t see how they could have done, not unbeknownst to anybody. Such a strange and lucky turn would have made a big story for the newspapers—like it made for the Bible, when it happened to Moses.”
He was talking out loud. But where was Gladys to hear him? He sensed her presence no more. The cabin was dark. The dog no longer trembled.
T
hereafter, Grainier lived in the cabin, even through the winters. By most Januaries, when the snow had deepened, the valley seemed stopped with a perpetual silence, but as a matter of fact it was often filled with the rumble of trains and the choirs of distant wolves and the nearer mad jibbering of coyotes. Also his own howling, as he’d taken it up as a kind of sport.
hereafter, Grainier lived in the cabin, even through the winters. By most Januaries, when the snow had deepened, the valley seemed stopped with a perpetual silence, but as a matter of fact it was often filled with the rumble of trains and the choirs of distant wolves and the nearer mad jibbering of coyotes. Also his own howling, as he’d taken it up as a kind of sport.
The spirit form of his departed wife never reappeared to him. At times he dreamed of her, and dreamed also of the loud flames that had taken her. Usually he woke in the middle of this roaring dream to find himself surrounded by the thunder of the Spokane International going up the valley in the night.
But he wasn’t just a lone eccentric bachelor who lived in the woods and howled with the wolves. By his own lights, Grainier had amounted to something. He had a business in the hauling.
He was glad he hadn’t married another wife, not that one would have been easy to find, but a Kootenai widow might have been willing. That he’d taken on an acre and a home in the first place he owed to Gladys. He’d felt able to tackle the responsibilities that came with a team and wagon because Gladys had stayed in his heart and in his thoughts.
He boarded the mares in town during winters—two elderly logging horses in about the same shape and situation as himself, but smart with the wagon, and more than strong enough. To pay for the outfit he worked in the Washington woods one last summer, very glad to call it his last. Early that season a wild limb knocked his jaw crooked, and he never quite got the left side hooked back properly on its hinge again. It pained him to chew his food, and that accounted more than anything else for his lifelong skinniness. His joints went to pieces. If he reached the wrong way behind him, his right shoulder locked up as dead as a vault door until somebody freed it by putting a foot against his ribs and pulling on his arm. “It takes a great much of pulling,” he’d explain to anyone helping him, closing his eyes and entering a darkness of bone torment, “more than that—pull harder—a great deal of pulling now, greater, greater, you just have to
pull
…” until the big joint unlocked with a sound between a pop and a gulp. His right knee began to wobble sideways out from under him more and more often; it grew dangerous to trust him with the other end of a load. “I’m got so I’m joined up too tricky to pay me,” he told his boss one day. He stayed out the job, his only duty tearing down old coolie shacks and salvaging the better lumber, and when that chore was done he went back to Bonners Ferry. He was finished as a woodsman.
pull
…” until the big joint unlocked with a sound between a pop and a gulp. His right knee began to wobble sideways out from under him more and more often; it grew dangerous to trust him with the other end of a load. “I’m got so I’m joined up too tricky to pay me,” he told his boss one day. He stayed out the job, his only duty tearing down old coolie shacks and salvaging the better lumber, and when that chore was done he went back to Bonners Ferry. He was finished as a woodsman.
He rode the Great Northern to Spokane. With nearly five hundred dollars in his pocket, more than plenty to pay off his team and wagon, he stayed in a room at the Riverside Hotel and visited the county fair, a diversion that lasted only half an hour, because his first decision at the fairgrounds was a wrong one.
In the middle of a field, two men from Alberta had parked an airplane and were offering rides in the sky for four dollars a passenger—quite a hefty asking price, and not many took them up on it. But Grainier had to try. The young pilot—just a kid, twenty or so at the most, a blond boy in a brown oversuit with metal buttons up the front—gave him a pair of goggles to wear and boosted him aboard. “Climb on over. Get something under your butt,” the boy said.
Grainier seated himself on a bench behind the pilot’s. He was now about six feet off the ground, and already that seemed high enough. The two wings on either side of this device seemed constructed of the frailest stuff. How did it fly when its wings stayed still?—by making its own gale, evidently, driving the air with its propeller, which the other Albertan, the boy’s grim father, turned with his hands to get it spinning.
Grainier was aware only of a great amazement, and then he was high in the sky, while his stomach was somewhere else. It never did catch up with him. He looked down at the fairgrounds as if from a cloud. The earth’s surface turned sideways, and he misplaced all sense of up and down. The craft righted itself and began a slow, rackety ascent, winding its way upward like a wagon around a mountain. Except for the churning in his gut, Grainier felt he might be getting accustomed to it all. At this point the pilot looked backward at him, resembling a raccoon in his cap and goggles, shouting and baring his teeth, and then he faced forward. The plane began to plummet like a hawk, steeper and steeper, its engine almost silent, and Grainier’s organs pushed back against his spine. He saw the moment with his wife and child as they drank Hood’s Sarsaparilla in their little cabin on a summer’s night, then another cabin he’d never remembered before, the places of his hidden childhood, a vast golden wheat field, heat shimmering above a road, arms encircling him, and a woman’s voice crooning, and all the mysteries of this life were answered. The present world materialized before his eyes as the engine roared and the plane leveled off, circled the fairgrounds once, and returned to earth, landing so abruptly Grainier’s throat nearly jumped out of his mouth.
The young pilot helped him overboard. Grainier rolled over the side and slid down the barrel of the fuselage. He tried to steady himself with a hand on a wing, but the wing itself was unsteady. He said, “What was all that durn hollering about?”
“I was telling you, ‘This is a nosedive!’”
Grainier shook the fellow’s hand, said, “Thank you very much,” and left the field.
He sat on the large porch out front of the Riverside Hotel all afternoon until he found an excuse to make his way back up the Panhandle—an excuse in Eddie Sauer, whom he’d known since they were boys in Bonners Ferry and who’d just lost all his summer wages in bawdy environs and said he’d made up his mind to walk home in shame.
Eddie said, “I was rolled by a whore.”
“Rolled! I thought that meant they killed you!”
“No, it don’t mean they killed you or anything. I ain’t dead. I only wish I was.”
Grainier thought Eddie and he must be the same age, but the loose life had put a number of extra years on Eddie. His whiskers were white, and his lips puckered around gums probably nearly toothless. Grainier paid the freight for both of them, and they took the train together to Meadow Creek, where Eddie might get a job on a crew.
After a month on the Meadow Creek rail-and-ties crew, Eddie offered to pay Grainier twenty-five dollars to help him move Claire Thompson, whose husband had passed away the previous summer, from Noxon, Montana, over to Sandpoint, Idaho. Claire herself would pay nothing. Eddie’s motives in helping the widow were easily deduced, and he didn’t state them. “We’ll go by road number Two Hundred,” he told Grainier, as if there were any other road.
Grainier took his mares and his wagon. Eddie had his sister’s husband’s Model T Ford. The brother-in-law had cut away the rumble seat and built onto it a flat cargo bed that would have to be loaded judiciously so as not to upend the entire apparatus. Grainier rendezvoused with Eddie early in the morning in Troy, Montana, and headed east to the Bull Lake road, which would take them south to Noxon, Grainier preceding by half a mile because his horses disliked the automobile and also seemed to dislike Eddie.
A little German fellow named Heinz ran an automobile filling station on the hill east of Troy, but he, too, had something against Eddie, and refused to sell him gas. Grainier wasn’t aware of this problem until Eddie came roaring up behind with his horn squawking and nearly stampeded the horses. “You know, these gals have seen all kinds of commotion,” he told Eddie when they’d pulled to the side of the dusty road and he’d walked back to the Ford. “They’re used to anything, but they don’t like a horn. Don’t blast that thing around my mares.”
“You’ll have to take the wagon back and buy up two or three jugs of fuel,” Eddie said. “That old schnitzel-kraut won’t even talk to me.”
“What’d you do to him?”
“I never did a thing! I swear! He just picks out a few to hate, and I’m on the list.”
The old man had a Model T of his own out front of his place. He had its motor’s cover hoisted and was half-lost down its throat, it seemed to Grainier, who’d never had much to do with these explosive machines. Grainier asked him, “Do you really know how that motor works inside of there?”
“I know everything.” Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, “I’m God!”
Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.
“Then you must know what I’m about to say.”
“You want gas for your friend. He’s the Devil. You think I sell gas to the Devil?”
“It’s me buying it. I’ll need fifteen gallons, and jugs for it, too.”
“You better give me five dollars.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You’re a good fellow,” the German said. He was quite a small man. He dragged over a low crate to stand on so he could look straight into Grainier’s eyes. “All right. Four dollars.”
“You’re better off having that feller hate you,” Grainier told Eddie when he pulled up next to the Ford with the gasoline in three olive military fuel cans.
“He hates me because his daughter used to whore out of the barbershop in Troy,” Eddie said, “and I was one of her happiest customers. She’s respectable over in Seattle now,” he added, “so why does he hold a grudge?”
They camped overnight in the woods north of Noxon. Grainier slept late, stretched out comfortably in his empty wagon, until Eddie brought him to attention with his Model T’s yodeling horn. Eddie had bathed in the creek. He was going hatless for the first time Grainier ever knew about. His hair was wild and mostly gray and a little of it blond. He’d shaved his face and fixed several nicks with plaster. He wore no collar, but he’d tied his neck with a red-and-white necktie that dangled clear down to his crotch. His shirt was the same old one from the Saturday Trade or Discard at the Lutheran church, but he’d scrubbed his ugly working boots, and his clean black pants were starched so stiffly his gait seemed to be affected. This sudden attention to terrain so long neglected constituted a disruption in the natural world, about as much as if the Almighty himself had been hit in the head, and Eddie well knew it. He behaved with a cool, contained hysteria.
“Terrence Naples has took a run at Mrs. Widow,” he told Grainier, standing at attention in his starched pants and speaking strangely so as not to disturb the plaster dabs on his facial wounds, “but I told old Terrence it’s going to be my chance now with the lady, or I’ll knock him around the county on the twenty-four-hour plan. That’s right, I had to threaten him. But it’s no idle boast. I’ll thrub him till his bags bust. I’m too horrible for the young ones, and she’s the only go—unless I’d like a Kootenai gal, or I migrate down to Spokane, or go crawling over to Wallace.” Wallace, Idaho, was famous for its brothels and for its whores, an occasional one of whom could be had for keeping house with on her retirement. “And I knew old Claire first, before Terrence ever did,” he said. “Yes, in my teens I had a short, miserable spell of religion and taught the Sunday-school class for tots before services, and she was one of them tots. I think so, anyway. I seem to remember, anyway.”
Grainier had known Claire Thompson when she’d been Claire Shook, some years behind him in classes in Bonners Ferry. She’d been a fine young lady whose looks hadn’t suffered at all from a little extra weight and her hair’s going gray. Claire had worked in Europe as a nurse during the Great War. She’d married quite late and been widowed within a few years. Now she’d sold her home and would rent a house in Sandpoint along the road running up and down the Idaho Panhandle.
The town of Noxon lay on the south side of the Clark Fork River and the widow’s house lay on the north, so they didn’t get a chance even to stop over at the store for a soda, but pulled up into Claire’s front yard and emptied the house and loaded as many of her worldly possessions onto the wagon as the horses would pull, mostly heavy locked trunks, tools, and kitchen gear, heaping the rest aboard the Model T and creating a pile as high up as a man could reach with a hoe, and at the pinnacle two mattresses and two children, also a little dog. By the time Grainier noticed them, the children were too far above him to distinguish their age or sexual type. The work went fast. At noon Claire gave them iced tea and sandwiches of venison and cheese, and they were on the road by one o’clock. The widow herself sat up front next to Eddie with her arm hooked in his, wearing a white scarf over her head and a black dress she must have bought nearly a year ago for mourning; laughing and conversing while her escort tried to steer by one hand. Grainier gave them a good start, but he caught up with them frequently at the top of the long rises, when the auto labored hard and boiled over, Eddie giving it water from gallon jugs which the children—boys, it seemed—filled from the river. The caravan moved slowly enough that the children’s pup was able to jump down from its perch atop the cargo to chase gophers and nose at their burrows, then clamber up the road bank to a high spot and jump down again between the children, who sat stiff-armed with their feet jutting out in front, hanging on to the tie-downs on either side of them.
At a neighbor’s a few hours along they stopped to take on one more item, a two-barreled shotgun Claire Thompson’s husband had given as collateral on a loan. Apparently Thompson had failed to pay up, but in honor of his death the neighbor’s wife had persuaded her husband to return the old .12 gauge. This Grainier learned after pulling the mares to the side of the road, where they could snatch at grass and guzzle from the neighbor’s spring box.
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