Train Dreams

7

Thereafter, Grainier lived in the cabin, even through the winters. By most Januaries, when the snow had deepened, the valley seemed stopped with a perpetual silence, but as a matter of fact it was often filled with the rumble of trains and the choirs of distant wolves and the nearer mad jibbering of coyotes. Also his own howling, as he’d taken it up as a kind of sport.

The spirit form of his departed wife never reappeared to him. At times he dreamed of her, and dreamed also of the loud flames that had taken her. Usually he woke in the middle of this roaring dream to find himself surrounded by the thunder of the Spokane International going up the valley in the night.

But he wasn’t just a lone eccentric bachelor who lived in the woods and howled with the wolves. By his own lights, Grainier had amounted to something. He had a business in the hauling.

He was glad he hadn’t married another wife, not that one would have been easy to find, but a Kootenai widow might have been willing. That he’d taken on an acre and a home in the first place he owed to Gladys. He’d felt able to tackle the responsibilities that came with a team and wagon because Gladys had stayed in his heart and in his thoughts.

He boarded the mares in town during winters — two elderly logging horses in about the same shape and situation as himself, but smart with the wagon, and more than strong enough. To pay for the outfit he worked in the Washington woods one last summer, very glad to call it his last. Early that season a wild limb knocked his jaw crooked, and he never quite got the left side hooked back properly on its hinge again. It pained him to chew his food, and that accounted more than anything else for his lifelong skinniness. His joints went to pieces. If he reached the wrong way behind him, his right shoulder locked up as dead as a vault door until somebody freed it by putting a foot against his ribs and pulling on his arm. “It takes a great much of pulling,” he’d explain to anyone helping him, closing his eyes and entering a darkness of bone torment, “more than that — pull harder — a great deal of pulling now, greater, greater, you just have to pull …” until the big joint unlocked with a sound between a pop and a gulp. His right knee began to wobble sideways out from under him more and more often; it grew dangerous to trust him with the other end of a load. “I’m got so I’m joined up too tricky to pay me,” he told his boss one day. He stayed out the job, his only duty tearing down old coolie shacks and salvaging the better lumber, and when that chore was done he went back to Bonners Ferry. He was finished as a woodsman.

He rode the Great Northern to Spokane. With nearly five hundred dollars in his pocket, more than plenty to pay off his team and wagon, he stayed in a room at the Riverside Hotel and visited the county fair, a diversion that lasted only half an hour, because his first decision at the fairgrounds was a wrong one.

In the middle of a field, two men from Alberta had parked an airplane and were offering rides in the sky for four dollars a passenger — quite a hefty asking price, and not many took them up on it. But Grainier had to try. The young pilot — just a kid, twenty or so at the most, a blond boy in a brown oversuit with metal buttons up the front — gave him a pair of goggles to wear and boosted him aboard. “Climb on over. Get something under your butt,” the boy said.

Grainier seated himself on a bench behind the pilot’s. He was now about six feet off the ground, and already that seemed high enough. The two wings on either side of this device seemed constructed of the frailest stuff. How did it fly when its wings stayed still? — by making its own gale, evidently, driving the air with its propeller, which the other Albertan, the boy’s grim father, turned with his hands to get it spinning.

Grainier was aware only of a great amazement, and then he was high in the sky, while his stomach was somewhere else. It never did catch up with him. He looked down at the fairgrounds as if from a cloud. The earth’s surface turned sideways, and he misplaced all sense of up and down. The craft righted itself and began a slow, rackety ascent, winding its way upward like a wagon around a mountain. Except for the churning in his gut, Grainier felt he might be getting accustomed to it all. At this point the pilot looked backward at him, resembling a raccoon in his cap and goggles, shouting and baring his teeth, and then he faced forward. The plane began to plummet like a hawk, steeper and steeper, its engine almost silent, and Grainier’s organs pushed back against his spine. He saw the moment with his wife and child as they drank Hood’s Sarsaparilla in their little cabin on a summer’s night, then another cabin he’d never remembered before, the places of his hidden childhood, a vast golden wheat field, heat shimmering above a road, arms encircling him, and a woman’s voice crooning, and all the mysteries of this life were answered. The present world materialized before his eyes as the engine roared and the plane leveled off, circled the fairgrounds once, and returned to earth, landing so abruptly Grainier’s throat nearly jumped out of his mouth.

The young pilot helped him overboard. Grainier rolled over the side and slid down the barrel of the fuselage. He tried to steady himself with a hand on a wing, but the wing itself was unsteady. He said, “What was all that durn hollering about?”

“I was telling you, ‘This is a nosedive!’”

Grainier shook the fellow’s hand, said, “Thank you very much,” and left the field.

He sat on the large porch out front of the Riverside Hotel all afternoon until he found an excuse to make his way back up the Panhandle — an excuse in Eddie Sauer, whom he’d known since they were boys in Bonners Ferry and who’d just lost all his summer wages in bawdy environs and said he’d made up his mind to walk home in shame.

Eddie said, “I was rolled by a whore.”

“Rolled! I thought that meant they killed you!”

“No, it don’t mean they killed you or anything. I ain’t dead. I only wish I was.”

Grainier thought Eddie and he must be the same age, but the loose life had put a number of extra years on Eddie. His whiskers were white, and his lips puckered around gums probably nearly toothless. Grainier paid the freight for both of them, and they took the train together to Meadow Creek, where Eddie might get a job on a crew.

After a month on the Meadow Creek rail-and-ties crew, Eddie offered to pay Grainier twenty-five dollars to help him move Claire Thompson, whose husband had passed away the previous summer, from Noxon, Montana, over to Sandpoint, Idaho. Claire herself would pay nothing. Eddie’s motives in helping the widow were easily deduced, and he didn’t state them. “We’ll go by road number Two Hundred,” he told Grainier, as if there were any other road.

Grainier took his mares and his wagon. Eddie had his sister’s husband’s Model T Ford. The brother-in-law had cut away the rumble seat and built onto it a flat cargo bed that would have to be loaded judiciously so as not to upend the entire apparatus. Grainier rendezvoused with Eddie early in the morning in Troy, Montana, and headed east to the Bull Lake road, which would take them south to Noxon, Grainier preceding by half a mile because his horses disliked the automobile and also seemed to dislike Eddie.

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?”

“Which feller do you mean?”

Eddie had trouble getting a reply lined up. Meanwhile, Claire opened her door and pushed him aside, climbing out. She turned her back and stood looking studiously at Grainier’s horses.

Eddie came over to Grainier and said to him, “Which feller does she think I mean? This feller! Me!”

Grainier could only shrug, laugh, shake his head.

Eddie stood three feet behind the widow and addressed the back of her: “The feller I mentioned! The one to marry! I’m the feller!”

She turned, took Eddie by the arm, and guided him back to the Ford. “I don’t believe you are,” she said. “Not the feller for me.” She didn’t seem upset anymore.

When they traveled on, she sat next to Grainier in his wagon. Grainier was made uncomfortable because he didn’t want to get too near the nose of a sensitive woman like Claire Shook, now Claire Thompson — his clothes stank. He wanted to apologize for it, but couldn’t quite. The widow was silent. He felt compelled to converse. “Well,” he said.

“Well what?”

“Well,” he said, “that’s Eddie for you.”

“That’s not Eddie for me,” she said.

“I suppose,” he said.

“In a civilized place, the widows don’t have much to say about who they marry. There’s too many running around without husbands. But here on the frontier, we’re at a premium. We can take who we want, though it’s not such a bargain. The trouble is you men are all worn down pretty early in life. Are you going to marry again?”

“No,” he said.

“No. You just don’t want to work any harder than you do now. Do you?”

“No, I do not.”

“Well then, you aren’t going to marry again, not ever.”

“I was married before,” he said, feeling almost required to defend himself, “and I’m more than satisfied with all of everything’s been left to me.” He did feel as if he was defending himself. But why should he have to? Why did this woman come at him waving her topic of marriage like a big stick? “If you’re prowling for a husband,” he said, “I can’t think of a bigger mistake to make than to get around me.”

“I’m in agreement with you,” she said. She didn’t seem particularly happy or sad to agree. “I wanted to see if your own impression of you matched up with mine is all, Robert.”

“Well, then.”

“God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?”

“I don’t believe I am a hermit,” Grainier replied, but when the day was over, he went off asking himself, Am I a hermit? Is this what a hermit is?

Eddie became pals with a Kootenai woman who wore her hair in a mop like a cinema vamp and painted her lips sloppy red. When Grainier first saw them together, he couldn’t guess how old she was, but she had brown, wrinkled skin. Somewhere she had come into possession of a pair of hexagonal eyeglasses tinted such a deep blue that behind them her eyes were invisible, and it was by no means certain she could see any objects except in the brightest glare. She must have been easy to get along with, because she never spoke. But whenever Eddie engaged in talk she muttered to herself continually, sighed and grunted, even whistled very softly and tunelessly. Grainier would have figured her for mad if she’d been white.

“She prob’ly don’t even speak English,” he said aloud, and realized that nobody else was present. He was all alone in his cabin in the woods, talking to himself, startled at his own voice. Even his dog was off wandering and hadn’t come back for the night. He stared at the firelight flickering from the gaps in the stove and at the enclosing shifting curtain of utter dark.