‘You ran away – just – just—’ Jonathan stuttered. ‘Just because some other people and you didn’t exactly agree—?’

‘What’s truth, Johnny?’

‘Well, it ain’t’ – the pause was only fractional: the two years of fascination with College’s educated syntax had taught him so many things – ‘isn’t floating around up in the trees like that.’ There were already the beginnings of some music in the way Jonathan spoke, but even with the grammar correct, his words seemed to him to clatter onto the table. ‘Playing at babies being water lilies – what’s so awful about that? She never meant you any harm. You got to get a lot lower down: you got to grub where it hurts.’ He could see from College’s drunkenly blank face that not one word he said meant anything. ‘Oh, what the hell,’ he went on, giving up, ‘maybe you were just trying to get to the other side.’

College frowned. ‘“Come on, pretty biscuit” – that’s what my mother called me. “Come on, pretty biscuit, turn over on your left side so you can go to sleep.”’

‘I don’t mean that,’ Jonathan said in a gentle voice.

‘I wanted to sleep on my right side. There’s silence on the left side. I hate silence. I told you that, didn’t I? Jesus, I thought you were mute. That would have been – I just couldn’t – It’s on the left side: it hangs there, cold, gray, hazy, swinging a little in the draft and always on the left—’ Jonathan was shaking his head. ‘Well, so what side do you mean?’

‘Like that chicken,’ Jonathan said.

‘What chicken?’

‘The one that crossed the road—’

‘That’s not funny,’ College said petulantly.

Jonathan helped him up the hotel stairs and put him to bed, making sure he lay on his right side, away from the left and the silence that had frightened him there once upon a time – and plainly frightened him still.

8

After the crash, the episodes that made up Jonathan’s life grew even more disconnected, each piece less and less related to what preceded and what followed it. No pattern remained except his recurrent nightmare, which became his constant companion. He and College went west to New Mexico for six months on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. From there they went to the Great Northern Railroad for a couple of months, then eight months on the Pennsylvania Railroad, then five on the New York Central. In the winter of 1881, they were back with Transcontinental, which had ferried a whole town out in the desert three years before; and Transcontinental brought them to that town again, to Mogul.