From the safety of a train top, the adult town of Mogul probably did have charms hygienic enough for a modern taste; up close, it was a symphony in shit. In the years since Jonathan had seen it, horse shit around the hitching posts had grown mountainous enough to raise the level of the street by half the height of a man. In the streets, chickens strutted and shat. So did geese. Pigs rooted and shat. There’s nothing so pungent as pig shit, which was, in fact, the dominant smell, overwhelming the reek of human shit, slops and rotting offal. Over all this – and as bred in the bone as the dusting of coconut on my aunt Claire’s pièce de résistance, gâteau au noix de coco, which she was just finishing off as Atlas began to tell me about Mogul – over all, a layer of vegetable peelings and empty tin cans labeled ‘green corn’, ‘pears’, ‘peaches’, ‘oysters’. Mogul was growing up with America, no sewers, no trees, no street lights, no running water: a full-blown boom-town geared to the quick sale of everything alive or dead, worldly or divine. Walls of saloon and Methodist chapel alike advertised whiskey, shaving cream, dried beef and – without so much as a change of paint color or script style – God Himself and the virtues of cleanliness. False fronts towered above the streets, so wretchedly put together that they swayed with every gust of wind; behind them squatted cheap little buildings, jerrybuilt like everything else for hundreds of miles around.

Jonathan and College arrived in the evening. The landlord of the Hotel Louis Quartz was just ringing the bell to announce supper. From my grandfather’s reports of it, this supper was no worthy ancestor for Claire’s gateau or for her pretty arrangement of chrysanthemums, either, in the cut glass vase on the plate glass table that was her pride (her style with flowers, as she said, owed a great deal to the Japanese): supper in Mogul cost twenty-five cents. Jonathan and College paid, fought their way to seats at a long dining-table, where a scrawny youth delivered platters as fast as he could ferry them from the kitchen – everything at once, mountains of pork, huckleberry pie, bacon, lakes of gravy. Guests snatched with bare hands, fork and Bowie knife; they beat away competitors with elbows, slapped booty down on plates over beans, potatoes and bread and shoveled it into their faces so fast that the meal took only ten minutes from payment to clearing.

Afterwards, the weather broke. Rain poured down. The street outside dissolved into liquid manure; the fumes that rose up were strong enough to make the eyes water. Jonathan and College ran to a saloon and sheltered there with a bottle of bourbon.

‘How old are you?’ College said suddenly. ‘Are you twenty-one yet?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jonathan said. ‘Maybe – near enough, anyway.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I am above such things,’ said Jonathan, whose speech patterns by this time had come to reflect not only the ease he’d learned from College but a rough elegance all his own.