Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Author:Denis Johnson [Johnson, Denis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781250007650
Amazon: 1250007658
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2012-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

6

Not four years after his wedding and already a widower, Grainier lived in his lean-to by the river below the site where his home had been. He kept a campfire going as far as he could into the night and often didn’t sleep until dawn. He feared his dreams. At first he dreamed of Gladys and Kate. Then only of Gladys. And finally, by the time he’d passed a couple of months in solitary silence, Grainier dreamed only of his campfire, of tending it just as he had before he slept—the silhouette of his hand and the charred length of lodgepole he used as a poker—and was surprised to find it gray ash and butt ends in the morning, because he’d watched it burn all night in his dreams.

And three years later still, he lived in his second cabin, precisely where the old one had stood. Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

Just such a dream woke him in December his second winter at the new cabin. The train passed northward until he couldn’t hear it anymore. To be a child again in that other world had terrified him, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He stared around the cabin in the dark. By now he’d roofed his home properly, put in windows, equipped it with two benches, a table, a barrel stove. He and the red dog still bedded on a pallet on the floor, but for the most part he’d made as much a home here as he and Gladys and little Kate had ever enjoyed. Maybe it was his understanding of this fact, right now, in the dark, after his nightmare, that called Gladys back to visit him in spirit form. For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed.

He put his right hand on the little dog stretched beside him. The dog didn’t bark or growl, but he felt the hair on her back rise and stiffen as the visitation began to manifest itself visibly in the room, at first only as a quavering illumination, like that from a guttering candle, and then as the shape of a woman. She shimmered, and her light shook. Around her the shadows trembled. And then it was Gladys—nobody else—flickering and false, like a figure in a motion picture.

Gladys didn’t speak, but she broadcast what she was feeling: She mourned for her daughter, whom she couldn’t find.

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