"Go tell it to a tree," he said every time I complained or bragged and begged. Yet everything he did to me he did to save my life. Fed me crumbs in bed nights all I could keep down, helped me glug and didn't deny me any kind of drink. "I've got a dream of us on the high water," he'd said. He made it happen. He was like that—burning with want and courage, drunk that way. I had so much in kin with him, drunk on drink and supped and with my mouth full of deep meaning, drooling, head half caved-in from my fall from the train. He had changed full round from that dolt who came across me freezing in the woods outside New Haven. He had become, truth be told, a kind of monster. He talked of killing his father, wrath and bloodlust wrinkling his fine brow. "You've helped me," he always said. I knew what he meant. Fuck the world and go on, that was what I taught him. It seems he's fallen from his own train as now he shakes his face, blurries his eyes, smears tears away with the cuff of his unbuttoned shirt. "McGlue?" he asks, with nothing to follow it. Johnson would have dug his hands into my brain to pull out that one so rusted spring. But no. Bent and sore and dampened with gloom, this is not that man.