Denis Johnson - Train Dreams

In Galveston, Texas

No One Under 16 Admitted

Matinee

Ladies Only

Night

Men Only

In Person

Professor Howard Young

Dynamic Lecturer on Sex.

Daring Facts Revealed

The Truth About Love.

Plain Facts About Secret Sins

No Beating About the Bush!

Grainier read the advertisement several times. His throat tightened and his innards began to flutter and sent down his limbs a palsy which, though slight, he felt sure was rocking the entire avenue like a rowboat. He wondered if he’d gone mad and maybe should start visiting an alienist.

Pulchritude!

He felt his way to the nearby railroad platform through a disorienting fog of desire. Sins of Love would come August 22, Thursday. Beside the communicating doors of the passenger car he rode out of town, there hung a calendar that told him today was Sunday, August 11.

At home, in the woods, the filthiest demons of his nature beset him. In dreams Miss Galveston came to him. He woke up fondling himself. He kept no calendar, but in his very loins he marked the moments until Thursday, August 22. By day he soaked almost hourly in the frigid river, but the nights took him again and again to Galveston.

The dark cloud over the Northwest, boiling like an upside-down ocean, blocked out the sun and moon and stars. It was too hot and muggy to sleep in the cabin. He made a pallet in the yard and spent the nights lying on it naked in an unrelieved blackness.

After many such nights, the cloud broke without rain, the sky cleared, the sun rose on the morning of August 22. He woke up all dewy in the yard, his marrow thick with cold — but when he remembered what day had come, his marrow went up like kerosene jelly, and he blushed so hard his eyes teared and the snot ran from his nose. He began walking immediately in the direction of the road, but turned himself around to wander his patch of land frantically. He couldn’t find the gumption to appear in town on this day — to appear even on the road to town for anyone to behold, thickly melting with lust for the Queen of Galveston and desiring to breathe her atmosphere, to inhale the fumes of sex, sin, and pulchritude. It would kill him! Kill him to see it, kill him to be seen! There in the dark theater full of disembodied voices discussing plain facts about secret sins he would die, he would be dragged down to Hell and tortured in his parts eternally before the foul and stinking President of all Pulchritude. Naked, he stood swaying in his yard.

His desires must be completely out of nature; he was the kind of man who might couple with a beast, or — as he’d long ago heard it phrased — jigger himself a cow.

Around behind his cabin he fell on his face, clutching at the brown grass. He lost touch with the world and didn’t return to it until the sun came over the house and the heat itched in his hair. He thought a walk would calm his blood, and he dressed himself and headed for the road and over to Placer Creek, several miles, never stopping. He climbed up to Deer Ridge and down the other side and up again into Canuck Basin, hiked for hours without a break, thinking only: Pulchritude! Pulchritude! — Pulchritude will be the damning of me, I’ll end up snarfing at it like a dog at a carcass, rolling in it like a dog will, I’ll end up all grimed and awful with pulchritude. Oh, that Galveston would allow a parade of the stuff! That Galveston would take this harlot of pulchritude and make a queen of her!

At sunset, all progress stopped. He was standing on a cliff. He’d found a back way into a kind of arena enclosing a body of water called Spruce Lake, and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens. Beyond, he saw the Canadian Rockies still sunlit, snow-peaked, a hundred miles away, as if the earth were in the midst of its creation, the mountains taking their substance out of the clouds. He’d never seen so grand a prospect. The forests that filled his life were so thickly populous and so tall that generally they blocked him from seeing how far away the world was, but right now it seemed clear there were mountains enough for everybody to get his own. The curse had left him, and the contagion of his lust had drifted off and settled into one of those distant valleys.

He made his way carefully down among the boulders of the cliff, reaching the lakeside in darkness, and slept there curled up under a blanket he made out of spruce boughs, on a bed of spruce, exhausted and comfortable. He missed the display of pulchritude at the Rex that night, and never knew whether he’d saved himself or deprived himself.

Grainier stayed at home for two weeks afterward and then went to town again, and did at last get himself a dog, a big male of the far-north sledding type, who was his friend for many years.

Grainier himself lived more than eighty years, well into the 1960s. In his time he’d traveled west to within a few dozen miles of the Pacific, though he’d never seen the ocean itself, and as far east as the town of Libby, forty miles inside Montana. He’d had one lover — his wife, Gladys — owned one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon. He’d never been drunk. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He’d ridden on trains regularly, many times in automobiles, and once on an aircraft. During the last decade of his life he watched television whenever he was in town. He had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him.

Almost everyone in those parts knew Robert Grainier, but when he passed away in his sleep sometime in November of 1968, he lay dead in his cabin through the rest of the fall, and through the winter, and was never missed. A pair of hikers happened on his body in the spring. Next day the two returned with a doctor, who wrote out a certificate of death, and, taking turns with a shovel they found leaning against the cabin, the three of them dug a grave in the yard, and there lies Robert Grainier.

The day he bought the sled dog in Bonners Ferry, Grainier stayed overnight at the house of Dr. Sims, the veterinarian, whose wife took in lodgers. The doctor had come by some tickets to the Rex Theater’s current show, a demonstration of the talents of Theodore the Wonder Horse, because he’d examined the star of it — that is, the horse, Theodore — in a professional capacity. Theodore’s droppings were bloody, his cowboy master said. This was a bad sign. “Better take this ticket and go wonder at his wonders,” the doctor told Grainier, pressing one of his complimentary passes on the lodger, “because in half a year I wouldn’t wonder if he was fed to dogs and rendered down to mucilage.”

Grainier sat that night in the darkened Rex Theater amid a crowd of people pretty much like himself — his people, the hard people of the northwestern mountains, most of them quite a bit more impressed with Theodore’s master’s glittering getup and magical lariat than with Theodore, who showed he could add and subtract by knocking on the stage with his hooves and stood on his hind legs and twirled around and did other things that any of them could have trained a horse to do.

The wonder-horse show that evening in 1935 included a wolf-boy. He wore a mask of fur, and a suit that looked like fur but was really something else. Shining in the electric light, silver and blue, the wolf-boy frolicked and gamboled around the stage in such a way the watchers couldn’t be sure if he meant to be laughed at.