"Train Dreams"

[fiefoe]

Denis Johnson's prose has what I would call good bones.

• But he bested them by clinging to their arms and legs, weeping his gibberish, until suddenly he let go and grabbed the beam beneath him with one hand. He kicked free of his captors easily, as they were trying to shed themselves of him anyway, and went over the side, dangling over the gorge and making hand-over-hand out over the river on the skeleton form of the next span. Mr. Toomis’s companion rushed over now, balancing on a beam, kicking at the fellow’s fingers. The Chinaman dropped from beam to beam like a circus artist downward along the crosshatch structure.
• Grainier’s experience on the Eleven-Mile Cutoff made him hungry to be around other such massive undertakings, where swarms of men did away with portions of the forest and assembled structures as big as anything going, knitting massive wooden trestles in the air of impassable chasms, always bigger, longer, deeper. He went to northwestern Washington in 1920 to help make repairs on the Robinson Gorge Bridge, the grandest yet.
• * he’d lived thirty-two years a bachelor before finding a wife, and easily slipped back into a steadying loneliness out here among the countless spruce.
• sawyers labored in pairs to fell the spruce, limbers worked with axes to get them clean, and buckers cut them into eighteen foot lengths before the chokers looped them around with cable to be hauled out by the horses.
• * the trees themselves were killers, and while a good sawyer might judge ninetynine times correctly how a fall would go, and even by remarkable cuts and wedging tell a fifty-tonner to swing around uphill and light behind him as deftly as a needle, the hundredth time might see him smacked in the face and deader than a rock, just like that... It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.
• Most stayed in tents: These were ancient affairs patched extensively with burlap, most of them; but their canvas came originally from infantry tents of the Civil War, on the Union side, according to Arn Peeples. He pointed out stains of blood on the fabric. Some of these tents had gone on to house U.S. Cavalry in the Indian campaigns
• I don’t get my gears turning smooth till it’s over a hundred. I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long.
• “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
• Billy probably hadn’t let go of two or three words the whole time the men had known him
• Grainier had paid ten cents to view the World’s Fattest Man... 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,
• 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.
• 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.
• he came on an itinerant bum, a “boomer,” as his sort was known, holed up among some birches in a sloppy camp
• “Little young Susan had a child in her, is what her mother told me. And her father beat on her to drive that poor child out of her belly. Beat on her till he’d killed her.”
• Grainier considered the pasture a beautiful place. Somebody should paint it, he said to Gladys. The buttercups nodded in the breeze and the petals of the daisies trembled. Yet farther off, across the field, they seemed stationary. <> Gladys said, “Right now I could just about understand everything there is.”
• The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream. They spent the whole afternoon among the daisies kissing. He felt glorious and full of more blood than he was supposed to have in him... The white daisies dabbed the field so profusely that it seemed to foam.
• * Soon he was passing through a forest of charred, gigantic spears that only a few days past had been evergreens. The world was gray, white, black, and acrid, without a single live animal or plant, no longer burning and yet still full of the warmth and life of the fire.
• * All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.
• but sometimes the idea stormed over him, positively stormed into his thoughts like an irresistible army, that Gladys and Kate had escaped the fire and that he should look for them everywhere in the world until he found them.
• * Some might have called it an ill-considered plan, but the experiment had the effect of bringing him to his senses. As soon as he entered the remains he felt his heart’s sorrow blackened and purified, as if it were an actual lump of matter from which all the hopeful, crazy thinking was burning away.
• The hinges broke away and the door came off. Inside sat a chunk of birch, barely charred. “Gladys!” he said out loud. Everything he’d loved lying ashes around him, but here this thing she’d touched and held.
• He stayed on for weeks in this camp, waiting, wanting many more such visions as that of the bonnet, and the chocolates—as many as wanted to come to him; and he figured as long as he saw impossible things in this place, and liked them, he might as well be in the habit of talking to himself, too. Many times each day he found himself deflating on a gigantic sigh and saying, “A pretty mean circumstance!”
• Animals had returned to what was left of the forest. As Grainier drove along in the wagon behind a wide, slow, sand-colored mare, clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees.
• But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant. <> He tried telling Kootenai Bob of this development. “Howling, are you?” the Indian said. “There it is for you, then. That’s what happens, that’s what they say: There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.”
• By then Kootenai Bob was strewn for a quarter mile along the right-of-way. Over the next few days his people were seen plying along the blank patch of earth beside the rails, locating whatever little tokens of flesh and bone and cloth the crows had missed and collecting them in brightly, beautifully painted leather pouches, which they must have taken off somewhere and buried with a fitting ceremony.
• it always brought into his mind the image of William Coswell Haley, the dying boomer. Rather than wearing away, Grainier’s regret at not having helped the man had grown much keener as the years had passed. Sometimes he thought also of the Chinese railroad hand he’d almost helped to kill. The thought paralyzed his heart.
• But the hauling itself was better work than any he’d undertaken, a ticket to a kind of show, to an entertainment composed of the follies and endeavors of his neighbors.
• 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.”
• “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.”
• 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.”
• * 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.
• She stooped and dropped the candy and the heavy book at her feet while she tied the child inside her apron, and then she was able to pick them up again. Needing a hand to steady her along the rocky bluff as they descended, she tossed away the Bible rather than the chocolates. This uncovering of her indifference to God, the Father of All—this was her undoing.
• One by one from eddy pools and from among the rocks, the baby plucked the scattered chocolates. Eighty-foot-long spruce jutting out over the water burned through and fell into the gorge, their clumps of green needles afire and trailing smoke like pyrotechnical snakes, their flaming tops hissing as they hit the river.
• * 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.
• 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.
• “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?”
• 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.
• By now it no longer disturbed him to understand that the valley wouldn’t slowly, eventually resume its condition from before the great fire. Though the signs of destruction were fading, it was a very different place now, with different plants and therefore with different animals. The gorgeous spruce had gone. Now came almost exclusively jack pine, which tended to grow up scraggly and mean.
• Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he’d have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night’s noises had stopped. The whole valley seemed to reflect his shock. He heard only his footsteps and the wolf-girl’s panting complaint.
• Kate-no-longer lay on her side, her left leg akimbo, splintered and bloody bone jutting below the knee; just a child spent from crawling on threes and having dragged the shattered leg behind her. He’d wondered sometimes about little Kate’s hair, how it might have looked if she’d lived; but she’d snatched herself nearly bald. It grew out in a few patches.
• He stood at the window and watched her in the dawn effulgence, crawling and pausing to twist sideways on herself and snap at the windings on her leg as would any wolf or dog. She was making no great speed and keeping to the path that led to the river. He meant to track her and bring her back, but he never did.
• 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. .. 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!
• 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.
• * 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.
• 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.
• 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.