In a small antique shop, I find a cowhide stacked up inside a cupboard. Its white fur has discoloured a little, but nothing a dry clean wouldn’t sort out. I ask the old lady whether she has any more. ‘Sure,’ she says, ‘got some right out back here.’

I follow the hunched, achingly slow figure through the shop and into a stale-smelling living room where a wedding photo is prominently displayed on top of a cabinet filled with the gloomy knick-knacks of widow-hood, a porcelain sheep and shepherdess, a white bobbled punch bowl with glasses hooked to its side. The old lady pushes open the fly screen and steps out onto her porch.

‘There,’ she says.

I look for a rug on the sun-bleached wood, but she taps my shoulder and points to a small group of cows grazing peacefully in the distance.

‘You can have Merleen or Lorraine or Eleanor.’ She fixes me with watery eyes. ‘Jest as soon as I git ‘em butchered.’

My quest for kitsch results in two punctured tyres on the butterscotch truck, both of which I get fixed at the M&M, a truckstop west of Ague which has a sign offering ‘A Square Meal and a Hot Wheel’ and a constant stream of gleaming Mac trucks rolling in and out, with names like ‘Road to Perdition’ and ‘Duel for Life’ painted on their front cabs. The proprietor of the place is called Dud and has the smallest piggy curl of a tail growing from the back of a wide sunburnt neck. His face is deeply weather-beaten, and when he opens the customer hatch he reveals himself the owner of a massive pigeon chest which is thrust out in front of him as he walks me through to the workshop at the back. The mechanic I’m turned over to is small and sinewy, and wearing a peaked leather hat set jauntily over white hair, making him look like one of Santa’s elves. A Dobermann pinscher playing with an oily cloth jumps at me, licks my fingers then bites me playfully on the calf. ‘Ouch, hey,’ I gasp. Blood seeps through my jeans.

‘Jest a puppy,’ the Santa’s elf says and winks.