Train Dreams Read Free Page A

ones awake, and those sleeping farther away in the camp later reported hearing from him in their dreams that night, mostly calling out his own name—“Who is it? Who’s there?” he called. “Billy? Billy? Is that you, Billy?”
    Harold’s fever broke, but Billy’s lingered. The captain acted like a man full of haunts, wandering the camp and bothering the men, catching one whenever he could and poking his joints, thumbing back his eyelids and prying apart his jaws like a buyer of livestock. “We’re finished for the summer,” he told the men Friday night as they lined up for supper. He’d calculated each man’s payoff—Grainier had sent money home all summer and still had four hundred dollars coming to him.
    By Sunday night they had the job shut up and the last logs down the mountain, and six more men had come over with chills. Monday morning the captain gave each of his workers a four-dollar bonus and said, “Get out of this place, boys.” By this time Billy, too, had survived the crisis of his illness. But the captain said he feared an influenza epidemic like the one in 1897. He himself had been orphaned then, his entire family of thirteen siblings dead in a single week. Grainier felt pity for his boss. The captain had been a strong leader and a fair one, a blue-eyed, middle-aged man who trafficked little with anybody but his son Harold, and he’d never told anyone he’d grown up without any family.
    This was Grainier’s first summer in the woods, and the Robinson Gorge was the first of several railroad bridges he worked on. Years later, many decades later, in fact, in 1962 or 1963, he watched young ironworkers on a trestle where U.S. Highway 2 crossed the Moyea River’s deepest gorge, every bit as long and deep as the Robinson. The old highway took a long detour to cross at a shallow place; the new highway shot straight across the chasm, several hundred feet above the river. Grainier marveled at the youngsters swiping each other’s hard hats and tossing them down onto the safety net thirty or forty feet below, jumping down after them to bounce crazily in the netting, clambering up its strands back to the wooden catwalk. He’d been a regular chimpanzee on the girders himself, but now he couldn’t get up on a high stool without feeling just a little queasy. As he watched them, it occurred to him that he’d lived almost eighty years and had seen the world turn and turn.
    Some years earlier, in the mid-1950s, Grainier had paid ten cents to view the World’s Fattest Man, who rested on a divan in a trailer that took him from town to town. To get the World’s Fattest Man onto this divan they’d had to take the trailer’s roof off and lower him down with a crane. He weighed in at just over a thousand pounds. There he sat, immense and dripping sweat, with a mustache and goatee and one gold earring like a pirate’s, wearing shiny gold short pants and nothing else, 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, while out of this big pile of himself poked his head and arms and legs. People waited in line to stand at the open doorway and look in. He told each one to buy a picture of him from a stack by the window there for a dime.
    Later in his long life Grainier confused the chronology of the past and felt certain that the day he’d viewed the World’s Fattest Man—that evening—was the very same day he stood on Fourth Street in Troy, Montana, twenty-six miles east of the bridge, and looked at a railway car carrying the strange young hillbilly entertainer Elvis Presley. Presley’s private train had stopped for some reason, maybe for repairs, here in this little town that didn’t even merit its own station. The famous youth had appeared in a window briefly and raised his hand in greeting, but Grainier had come out of the barbershop across the street too late to see this. He’d only had it told