Denis Johnson - Train Dreams

Much that was astonishing was told of the dogs in the Panhandle and along the Kootenai River, tales of rescues, tricks, feats of supercanine intelligence and humanlike understanding. As his last job for that year, Grainier agreed to transport a man from Meadow Creek to Bonners who’d actually been shot by his own dog.

The dog-shot man was a bare acquaintance of Grainier’s, a surveyor for Spokane International who came and went in the area, name of Peterson, originally from Virginia. Peterson’s boss and comrades might have put him on the train into town the next morning if they’d waited, but they thought he might perish before then, so Grainier hauled him down the Moyea River Road wrapped in a blanket and half sitting up on a load of half a dozen sacks of wood chips bagged up just to make him comfortable.

“Are you feeling like you need anything?” Grainier said at the start.

Grainier thought Peterson had gone to sleep. Or worse. But in a minute the victim answered: “Nope. I’m perfect.”

A long thaw had come earlier in the month. The snow was melted out of the ruts. Bare earth showed off in the woods. But now, again, the weather was freezing, and Grainier hoped he wouldn’t end up bringing in a corpse dead of the cold.

For the first few miles he didn’t talk much to his passenger, because Peterson had a dented head and crazy eye, the result of some mishap in his youth, and he was hard to look at.

Grainier steeled himself to glance once in a while in the man’s direction, just to be sure he was alive. As the sun left the valley, Peterson’s crazy eye and then his entire face became invisible. If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn’t know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor’s house. After they’d moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking of the wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark.

Grainier disliked the shadows, the spindly silhouettes of birch trees, and the clouds strung around the yellow half-moon. It all seemed designed to frighten the child in him. “Sir, are you dead?” he asked Peterson.

“Who? Me? Nope. Alive,” said Peterson.

“Well, I was wondering — do you feel as if you might go on?”

“You mean as if I might die?”

“Yessir,” Grainier said.

“Nope. Ain’t going to die tonight.”

“That’s good.”

“Even better for me , I’d say.”

Grainier now felt they’d chatted sufficiently that he might raise a matter of some curiosity to him. “Mrs. Stout, your boss’s wife, there. She said your dog shot you.”

“Well, she’s a very upright lady — to my way of knowing, anyways.”

“Yes, I have the same impression of her right around,” Grainier said, “and she said your dog shot you.”

Peterson was silent a minute. In a bit, he coughed and said, “Do you feel a little warm patch in the air? As if maybe last week’s warm weather turned around and might be coming back on us?”

“Not as such to me,” Grainier said. “Just holding the warm of the day the way it does before you get around this ridge.”

They continued along under the rising moon.

“Anyway,” Grainier said.

Peterson didn’t respond. Might not have heard.

“Did your dog really shoot you?”

“Yes, he did. My own dog shot me with my own gun. Ouch!” Peterson said, shifting himself gently. “Can you take your team a little more gradual over these ruts, mister?”

“I don’t mind,” Grainier said. “But you’ve got to get your medical attention, or anything could happen to you.”

“All right. Go at it like the Pony Express, then, if you want.”

“I don’t see how a dog shoots a gun.”

“Well, he did.”

“Did he use a rifle?”

“It weren’t a cannon. It weren’t a pistol. It were a rifle.”

“Well, that’s pretty mysterious, Mr. Peterson. How did that happen?”

“It was self-defense.”

Grainier waited. A full minute passed, but Peterson stayed silent.

“That just tears it then,” Grainier said, quite agitated. “I’m pulling this team up, and you can walk from here, if you want to beat around and around the bush. I’m taking you to town with a hole in you, and I ask a simple question about how your dog shot you, and you have to play like a bunkhouse lout who don’t know the answer.”

“All right!” Peterson laughed, then groaned with the pain it caused him. “My dog shot me in self-defense. I went to shoot him , at first, because of what Kootenai Bob the Indian said about him, and he slipped the rope. I had him tied for the business we were about to do.” Peterson coughed and went quiet a few seconds. “I ain’t stalling you now! I just got to get over the hurt a little bit.”

“All right. But why did you have Kootenai Bob tied up, and what has Kootenai Bob got to do with this, anyways?”

“Not Kootenai Bob! I had the dog tied up. Kootenai Bob weren’t nowhere near this scene I’m relating. He was before.”

“But the dog , I say.”

“And say I also, the dog. He’s the one I ties. He’s the one slips the rope, and I couldn’t get near him — he’d just back off a step for every step I took in his direction. He knew I had his end in mind, which I decided to do on account of what Kootenai Bob said about him. That dog knew things — because of what happened to him, which is what Kootenai Bob the Indian told me about him — that animal all of a sudden knew things. So I swung the rifle by the barrel and butt-ended that old pup to stop his sass, and wham! I’m sitting on my very own butt end pretty quick. Then I’m laying back, and the sky is traveling away from me in the wrong direction. Mr. Grainier, I’d been shot! Right here!” Peterson pointed to the bandages around his left shoulder and chest. “By my own dog!”

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.”