At the fairgrounds he talked to a couple of Kootenais—one a middle-aged squaw, and the other a girl nearly grown. They were dressed to impress somebody, two half-breed witch-women in fringed blue buckskin dresses with headbands dangling feathers of crow, hawk, and eagle. They had a pack of very wolfish pups in a feed sack, and also a bobcat in a willow cage. They took the pups out one at a time to display them. A man was just walking away and saying to them, “That dog-of-wolf will never be Christianized.”
“Why is that thing all blue?” Grainier said.
“What thing?”
“That cage you’ve got that old cat trapped up in.”
One of them, the girl, showed a lot of white in her, and had freckles and sand-colored hair. When he looked at these two women, his vitals felt heavy with yearning and fear.
“That’s just old paint to keep him from gnawing out. It sickens this old bobcat,” the girl said. The cat had big paws with feathery tufts, as if it wore the same kind of boots as its women captors. The older woman had her leg so Grainier could see her calf. She scratched at it, leaving long white rakes on the flesh.
The sight so clouded his mind that he found himself a quarter mile from the fairgrounds before he knew it, without a pup, and having seen before his face, for some long minutes, nothing but those white marks on her dark skin. He knew something bad had happened inside him.
As if his lecherous half-thoughts had blasted away the ground at his feet and thrown him down into a pit of universal sexual mania, he now found that the Rex Theater on Main Street was out of its mind, too. The display out front consisted of a large bill, printed by the local newspaper, screaming of lust:
One Day Only Thursday August 22
The Most Daring Picture of the Year
“Sins Of Love”
Nothing Like It Ever Before!
see Natural Birth
An Abortion
A Blood Transfusion
A Real Caesarian Operation
if you faint easily—don’t come in!
trained nurses at each show
On the Stage—Living Models Featuring
Miss Galveston
Winner of the Famous Pageant of Pulchritude
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 th
em 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.
They were ready to laugh in order to prove they hadn’t been fooled. They had seen and laughed at such as the Magnet Boy and the Chicken Boy, at the Professor of Silly and at jugglers who beat themselves over the head with Indian pins that weren’t really made of wood. They had given their money to preachers who had lifted their hearts and baptized scores of them and who had later rolled around drunk in the Kootenai village and fornicated with squaws. Tonight, faced with the spectacle of this counterfeit monster, they were silent at first. Then a couple made remarks that sounded like questions, and a man in the dark honked like a goose, and people let themselves laugh at the wolf-boy.
But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moanmusic of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.
ALSO BY DENIS JOHNSON
FICTION
Nobody Move
Tree of Smoke
The Name of the World
Already Dead: A California Gothic
Jesus’ Son
Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
The Stars at Noon
Fiskadoro
Angels
NONFICTION
Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond
POETRY
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General
Assembly: Poems, Collected and New
The Veil
The Incognito Lounge
PLAYS
Shoppers: Two Plays
Copyright © 2002 by Denis Johnson
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
eISBN 9781429995207
First eBook Edition : July 2011
First edition, 2011
This novella was originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Paris Review, 2002.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Denis, 1949–
Train dreams / Denis Johnson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-28114-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
PS3560.O3745T73 2011
813’.54—dc22
2011007505
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
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