No time now to dwell on my croppered career. I squared my shoulders, looking around the Denver airport: Judd, Crown Prince of Failure, reporting to the Queen Mother. For a long while I peered at a large, inelegantly formed old lady in a sort of monastic cloak, but no, it was not she.

A man approached me with a wide smile, baring a set of heroic teeth, not one of them homegrown. “Judd?” he asked, with tentative familiarity.

I nodded. Despite the teeth, he was not robust; rather he wore robustness the way he wore his clothes. The Pendleton jacket was a multicolored plaid dominated by magentas and greens; his red hunting cap was a polyester approximating rat fur.

“I’m Dil Quillet,” he said, extending a hand. An impressive knife hung in a leather sheath at his belt, the holding strap unfastened, as if at any moment he expected a marauding band of Sioux to storm over the hill and infiltrate the terminal.

“Where’s Mother?” I asked. “She said she’d meet me.”

“Working.”

“On a poem?”

“Mucking out the horse stalls. She loves it.”

“She’s okay?”

“Fine. But you know—once in a while, when she gets into the cooking sherry…”

I didn’t know. We walked down a bleak corridor and out into an ice age, the snow piled high on the side of the tarmac.

Quillet opened the door of a Dodge pickup. Immediately the clean mountain air was poisoned by a stench that combined ammonia concentrate and overripe shrimp. It emanated from a large, villainous dog seated behind the wheel. He bared his long yellow teeth at me, then found the spoor of his master. His tail beat against the upholstery, his mustard-colored body writhed with pleasure.

“Lee Roy!” Quillet barked. “Get in the back!” Lee Roy squirmed, twisted, and obediently vaulted the seat.

For a while the three of us drove in silence, Quillet concentrating on the road, pointing the rig in the direction that the sun, a raw red blister, was taking across the sky. Old Lee Roy’s cumbersome head hung between us, his slobbering muzzle close to my ear, his fetid breath on my nostrils.

We rumbled over the tracks of a railroad yard where a dirty sign, with the compelling ineloquence of a piney-woods preacher, emblazoned the Mosaic imperative: DO NOT HUMP.

We climbed on a wide turnpike—five lanes—and barreled down a steep declivity.

On each side of the highway was open country, vast under the gunmetal sky and blanketed with snow. A skulk of fox padded daintily over a stream-slashed meadow, and a herd of deer like iron ornaments stood stock still in their winter pelage. Suddenly they bolted like a burst of explosives and were gone among the pines.

I drowsed, fanned by the warmth of the heater humming beneath the dash; more likely I was etherized by the stench of that vile dog. His breath was of the stuff that withered crops.