Denis Johnson - Train Dreams

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.

Though Grainier stood very near them, Eddie chose this moment to speak sincerely with the widow. She sat beside him in the auto shaking the gray dust from her head kerchief and wiping her face. “I mean to say,” Eddie said — but must have felt this wouldn’t do. He opened his door quite suddenly and scrambled out, as flustered as if the auto were sinking in a swamp, and raced around to the passenger’s side to stand by the widow.

“The late Mr. Thompson was a fine feller,” he told her. He spent a tense minute getting up steam, then went on: “The late Mr. Thompson was a fine feller. Yes.”

Claire said, “Yes?”

“Yes. Everybody who knew him tells me he was an excellent feller and also a most … excellent feller, you might say. So they say. As far as them who knew him.”

“Well, did you know him, Mr. Sauer?”

“Not to talk to. No. He did me a mean bit of business once … But he was a fine feller, I’m saying.”

“A mean bit of business, Mr. Sauer?”

“He runned over my goat’s picket and broke its neck with his wagon! He was a sonofabitch who’d sooner steal than work, wadn’t he? But I mean to say! Will you marry a feller?”