Denis Johnson: Train Dreams

Arn’s best friend, Billy, also an old man, but generally wordless, mustered a couple of remarks by the grave mound: “Arn Peeples never cheated a man in his life,” he said. “He never stole, not even a stick of candy when he was a small, small boy, and he lived to be pretty old. I guess there’s a lesson in there for all of us to be square, and we’ll all get along. In Jesus’ name, amen.” The others said, “Amen.” “I wish I could let us all lay off a day,” the captain said. “But it’s the company, and it’s the war.” The war in Europe had created a great demand for spruce. An armistice had actually been signed eighteen months before, but the captain believed an armistice to be only a temporary thing until the battles resumed and one side massacred the other to the last man.

That night the men discussed Arn’s assets and failings and went over the details of his final hours. Had the injuries to his brain addled him, or was it the fever he’d suddenly come down with? In his delirium he’d shouted mad words—“right reverend rising rockies!” he’d shouted; “forerunner grub holdup feller! Caution! Caution!”—and called out to the spirits from his past, and said he’d been paid a visit by his sister and his sister’s husband, though both, as Billy said he knew for certain, had been many years dead.

Billy’s jobs were to keep the double drum’s engine watered and lubricated and to watch the cables for wear. This was easy work, old man’s work. The outfit’s real grease monkey was a boy, twelve-year-old Harold, the captain’s son, who moved along before the teams of horses with a bucket of dogfish oil, slathering it across the skids with a swab of burlap to keep the huge logs sliding. One morning, Wednesday morning, just two days after Arn Peeples’s death and burial, young Harold himself took a dizzy spell and fell over onto his work, and the horses shied and nearly overturned the load, trying to keep from trampling him. The boy was saved from a mutilated death by the lucky presence of Grainier himself, who happened to be standing aside waiting to cross the skid road and hauled the boy out of the way by the leg of his pants. The captain watched over his son all afternoon, bathing his forehead with spring water. The youth was feverish and crazy, and it was this malady that had laid him out in front of the big animals.

That night old Billy also took a chill and lay pitching from side to side on his cot and steadily raving until well past midnight. Except for his remarks at his friend’s graveside, Billy probably hadn’t let go of two or three words the whole time the men had known him, but now he kept the nearest ones awake, and those sleeping farther away in the camp later reported hearing from him in their dreams that night, mostly calling out his own name—“Who is it? Who’s there?” he called. “Billy? Billy? Is that you, Billy?”

Harold’s fever broke, but Billy’s lingered. The captain acted like a man full of haunts, wandering the camp and bothering the men, catching one whenever he could and poking his joints, thumbing back his eyelids and prying apart his jaws like a buyer of livestock. “We’re finished for the summer,” he told the men Friday night as they lined up for supper. He’d calculated each man’s payoff — Grainier had sent money home all summer and still had four hundred dollars coming to him.

By Sunday night they had the job shut up and the last logs down the mountain, and six more men had come over with chills. Monday morning the captain gave each of his workers a four-dollar bonus and said, “Get out of this place, boys.” By this time Billy, too, had survived the crisis of his illness. But the captain said he feared an influenza epidemic like the one in 1897. He himself had been orphaned then, his entire family of thirteen siblings dead in a single week. Grainier felt pity for his boss. The captain had been a strong leader and a fair one, a blue-eyed, middle-aged man who trafficked little with anybody but his son Harold, and he’d never told anyone he’d grown up without any family.

This was Grainier’s first summer in the woods, and the Robinson Gorge was the first of several railroad bridges he worked on. Years later, many decades later, in fact, in 1962 or 1963, he watched young ironworkers on a trestle where U.S. Highway 2 crossed the Moyea River’s deepest gorge, every bit as long and deep as the Robinson. The old highway took a long detour to cross at a shallow place; the new highway shot straight across the chasm, several hundred feet above the river. Grainier marveled at the youngsters swiping each other’s hard hats and tossing them down onto the safety net thirty or forty feet below, jumping down after them to bounce crazily in the netting, clambering up its strands back to the wooden catwalk. He’d been a regular chimpanzee on the girders himself, but now he couldn’t get up on a high stool without feeling just a little queasy. As he watched them, it occurred to him that he’d lived almost eighty years and had seen the world turn and turn.

Some years earlier, in the mid-1950s, Grainier had paid ten cents to view the World’s Fattest Man, who rested on a divan in a trailer that took him from town to town. To get the World’s Fattest Man onto this divan they’d had to take the trailer’s roof off and lower him down with a crane. He weighed in at just over a thousand pounds. There he sat, immense and dripping sweat, with a mustache and goatee and one gold earring like a pirate’s, wearing shiny gold short pants and nothing else, his flesh rolling out on either side of him from one end of the divan to the other and spilling over and dangling toward the floor like an arrested waterfall, while out of this big pile of himself poked his head and arms and legs. People waited in line to stand at the open doorway and look in. He told each one to buy a picture of him from a stack by the window there for a dime.

Later in his long life Grainier confused the chronology of the past and felt certain that the day he’d viewed the World’s Fattest Man — that evening — was the very same day he stood on Fourth Street in Troy, Montana, twenty-six miles east of the bridge, and looked at a railway car carrying the strange young hillbilly entertainer Elvis Presley. Presley’s private train had stopped for some reason, maybe for repairs, here in this little town that didn’t even merit its own station. The famous youth had appeared in a window briefly and raised his hand in greeting, but Grainier had come out of the barbershop across the street too late to see this. He’d only had it told to him by the townspeople standing in the late dusk, strung along the street beside the deep bass of the idling diesel, speaking very low if speaking at all, staring into the mystery and grandeur of a boy so high and solitary.

Grainier had also once seen a wonder horse, and a wolf-boy, and he’d flown in the air in a biplane in 1927. He’d started his life story on a train ride he couldn’t remember, and ended up standing around outside a train with Elvis Presley in it.

When a child, Grainier had been sent by himself to Idaho. From precisely where he’d been sent he didn’t know, because his eldest cousin said one thing and his second-eldest another, and he himself couldn’t remember. His second-eldest cousin also claimed not to be his cousin at all, while the first said yes, they were cousins — their mother, whom Grainier thought of as his own mother as much as theirs, was actually his aunt, the sister of his father. All three of his cousins agreed Grainier had come on a train. How had he lost his original parents? Nobody ever told him.

When he disembarked in the town of Fry, Idaho, he was six — or possibly seven, as it seemed a long time since his last birthday and he thought he may have missed the date, and couldn’t say, anyhow, where it fell. As far as he could ever fix it, he’d been born sometime in 1886, either in Utah or in Canada, and had found his way to his new family on the Great Northern Railroad, the building of which had been completed in 1893. He arrived after several days on the train with his destination pinned to his chest on the back of a store receipt. He’d eaten all of his food the first day of his travels, but various conductors had kept him fed along the way. The whole adventure made him forget things as soon as they happened, and he very soon misplaced this earliest part of his life entirely. His eldest cousin, a girl, said he’d come from northeast Canada and had spoken only French when they’d first seen him, and they’d had to whip the French out of him to get room for the English tongue. The other two cousins, both boys, said he was a Mormon from Utah. At so early an age it never occurred to him to find out from his aunt and uncle who he was. By the time he thought to ask them, many years had passed and they’d long since died, both of them.