So when College said to him, ‘Did you never have a friend when you were a boy?’ all my grandfather came back with was, ‘Leave me alone.’

But he was by no means always unlucky: College was not so easily put off. ‘My dear Carrick,’ he said, ‘it would be a pleasure for me to go where you go. Maybe not for good, but for awhile anyway. Would you be agreeable?’

Jonathan frowned, started to say something, looked at College, frowned again. With infinite care, he put down his glass. ‘Excuse me,’ he said – or at least he tried to say it, but the words got caught somewhere. He had learned that he could almost control the sudden spasms of anxiety that he’d suffered ever since his emancipation if he took in his breath at just precisely the right moment and held it. It was the only method he had. So he inhaled, walked out into the street, held on, coughed, inhaled again. After a few minutes, he made his way back into the bar, where he offered an almost steady hand to College and said, ‘Shake on it?’

Transcontinental assigned its new pair of brakemen to a Mogul engine going west.

5

Years ago, in Alabama at Christmas, the radio played ‘Holy Night’, the most glorious of carols – that soaring high note (especially sung full force by a pure, clean soprano) and gooseflesh all over: it’s one of the few places left where you can sense the mystery and beauty of the idea that it’s possible to save mankind. Alabama radio modulated the note into a sweet meaninglessness: a remarkable feat, the melody intact but no shiver for the listener to feel, no disturbance of spirit, nothing at all. Other countries left the power of their steam engines raw. Not us, not the people who rob even Christmas carols of their intensity. The Mogul that College and Jonathan got assigned to was dressed up for this peacetime circus of Jonathan’s like a circus bear in tutu and ribbons, red, orange, maroon, green paint, a different color for every section – pilot, sand box, steam chest, gilt and fretwork domes and lights – and on both sides of the cab full-color pictures of bears skulking about on the range. The conductor, as ringmaster, had come to resemble his beast: a joke of a bear himself, with a bear’s shoulders, a bear’s furry body, and a bear’s glassy eyes. He’d conducted this Mogul – it was already outdated at the time but a beautiful thing even so beneath its paint – he’d conducted it for twenty years and he had no thought of serving or being served by anything less.

‘Wait a minute,’ Atlas said, sending the tape recorder flying over the edge of his desk in his enthusiasm, ‘I got here – it’s somewhere here, goddamnit, I know it is.’ The tape recorder in its mechanical prowess (shaken but not broken by this attack) continued to record him while he dumped out the contents of one of the boxes he’d got down from the attic for me, shuffled through some of the pictures, mumbled, knocked over his coffee, swore and at last pulled out an old drawing, about half a standard typing sheet in size, pretty good condition (not counting the coffee, that is). ‘Aha, what did I tell you?’ he said in triumph. He patted at the picture with an embroidered handkerchief, soon coffee-stained like the picture itself. ‘Here’s an old drawing of that Mogul. See?’ But if the Mogul is there at all, it isn’t visible. Only the body of the train itself shows, climbing up into the Rockies after an engine that seems to be hidden behind an outcropping of rock. On one side of the track, the cars scrape the mountain face; the other side is a sheer drop. On the roof of one car stands a brakeman, arms akimbo, legs apart, while the train lurches around a bend in this uncambered stretch. ‘Well, what the hell, maybe it isn’t the Mogul. But that just could be dad.’ Atlas tilted the picture to study it from a new angle. ‘Who’s to deny it?’