‘Is there anything else, Johnny?’

He studied her. ‘Again?’

On his first day in Denver Jonathan had watched a man lean over the hand of a red-gowned lady, hold the pose a moment, then straighten, eyes on the red-gowned lady’s eyes. He’d thought of the scene off and on for the five years since. Fritzi had a farm girl’s large hands, raw around the knuckle, but when she said once more, ‘Is there anything else, Johnny?’ – when she said this for the second time, he took her raw hand in his without a word and bent over it, lips to her fingers just as though she were the elegant, red-gowned lady of Denver.

Fritzi giggled happily and took hold of her skirt to show him. ‘This is real store-bought calico,’ she said. She was only six weeks out of a rural slum where all her life she’d shared a single-roomed mud hut with her mother and ten other kids, all of them dressed in potato sacks. She tilted her head to study the folds of this store-bought calico and whispered in awe: ‘Sometimes on a Friday we wear satin.’

‘Johnny!’ College’s voice came from downstairs. ‘Hurry it up, will you? We’re shipping out tonight!’

9

The rain had given way to drizzle. College wore his fisherman’s coat, this icon bought to combat Jonathan’s icon – this well-bred boy’s cock-a-snook at the ambitions of his friend who had grown up a slave (a subject of which he knew nothing at all, not a whit, not a hint) and whose frock coat lay carefully folded in the caboose – dressed in this coat, College alternated on the couplings with Jonathan as he always had: he did the first, Jonathan the second, then College again. The first six – stibnite from Mogul to replace canned goods and cod from Portland – went without a hitch. Jonathan took the seventh. The pin wouldn’t drop. He bent over it, rain seeping through his shirt and trickling down the middle of his back.

College said, ‘In the interests of keeping dry, might you lower yourself to don this working man’s coat while the working man himself gets on with the next coupling?’ He held out the skirt of the coat as he spoke, much as Fritzi had held out the skirt of her Sunday school dress.

‘Shut up,’ Jonathan said.

College shifted his shoulders under the oilskin. ‘Sure?’

Jonathan gestures irritably to indicate that the pin is in fact dropped and turns toward the caboose. College steps between the next cars. The gap is nearly a foot. College chooses what they called a goose-neck pin, fits it, cocks it and signals the engineer. The train slacks. The cars touch. The pin bends in the link. All of this is in Jonathan’s diaries – staccato phrases, present tense and all – just the facts, no emotion. The slots are too far apart. College signals the engineer again. The train draws away a little. He maneuvers his body between the cars once more, brakeman’s light (pride at the whorehouse) in the crook of his arm. While this happens, Jonathan is walking toward the rear of the train; he comes slowly to realize that the cars are creeping forward toward the engine.