‘It’s a dolly,’ the littlest girl whispered.

He told them with his hands that if he could make dolls at all, he would make one for each. They giggled.

‘What’s your name?’ the littlest whispered then.

Beyond the door, red-tinged grass surged away in billows. Jonathan reached into his mouth to hold his teeth. ‘Johnny,’ he said gently. He had a very gentle way to him sometimes. ‘I’m called Johnny.’

THREE

Wednesday noon

DÉTENTE

1

Railroads across Kansas and Colorado head into the Rockies at right angles. For three hundred miles, looking through the boxcar door, Jonathan would have seen only the prairies he’d known all his life. But then came Denver.

I have tried to bear in mind that George’s memoirs are the memoirs of a politician, that my grandfather, Jonathan, was talking about himself, and that by the time I taped my uncle Atlas telling this story, he had holes in his head from too much liquor. But all three of these men agree that Jonathan lured George down to the railroad track and left him there for dead. So when the train stopped in Denver and Jonathan saw the Rockies for the first time, it was as though the tumult in him – the rage that had at last conquered George –had ripped right on through the land and hurled chunks of Kansas into a heap at the edge of Colorado. It was early morning, and morning in the Rockies, they tell me, is a study in red: red sky, red clouds, red light on the granite rock faces. What wasn’t possible in such a place? Was it real at all? Eliza Gowdy’s train began to pull out of the station before he realized what was happening. Staring after the caboose, feeling the mountains at his back, he knew only that this was where he wanted to be.

After a time of war comes a time of peace. But peace, after all, is only war carried on by other means (I misquote Clausewitz a little but in a good cause). Peace is a time of bread and circuses, when gladiators tear each other apart to amuse the idle and the bored. We Americans are market-leaders in such things. But a circus Eden, even when you pick it yourself, can be hard to take at first. Denver was a boom-town, ugly, crass, brutal, awash with money and blood. My mother used to say that if you whispered ‘Money, money, money’ when you saw a falling star, you would get rich. She used to add, seeing my eager eyes, that anybody who could manage to think of money when a star was falling probably would get rich in the end anyway. There were the trappers in buckskin that you’d expect from the movies, maybe a little dirtier but not much, the mountain men, the ladies of pleasure in silk, gamblers, Indians in feathered headdresses, conmen, gunmen, thieves, murderers: all standard Hollywood fare, and in fact much of it was show even at the time – a nineteenth-century Disneyland laid on to entertain European aristocrats who crossed the ocean to pay out in gold for staged thrills in the mountains and at the gambling tables. The surprising thing, though, is the international flavor of a place so deeply buried in the entrails of a continent. Mexicans, Germans, French, Chinese, Englishmen, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, every nationality you can think of, all on the street at the same time and many of them in national dress. Natives spoke bits and pieces of all kinds of languages, much like the Swiss today, and much like the Swiss today, they welcomed any currency. Banks, gambling houses, even grocery stores could make change in marks or pounds or francs.