‘You have a typewriter, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I’ve walked by your shack and heard you typing. You type a lot at night.’

‘Yeah, I have a typewriter,’ I said.

‘You a good typist?’ she said.

‘I’m all right.’

‘We don’t have a typewriter. How would you like to go in with us?’ she yelled across the mud puddle. She looked a perfect twelve years old, standing there in her white boots, the sweetheart and darling of all mud puddles.

‘What’s “go in” mean?’

‘Well, he’s writing a novel,’ she said. ‘He’s good. I’m editing it. I’ve read a lot of pocketbooks and the Reader’s Digest. We need somebody who has a typewriter to type it up. You’ll get 1/3. How does that sound?’

‘I’d like to see the novel,’ I said. I didn’t know what was happening. I knew she had three or four boyfriends that were always visiting her.

‘Sure!’ she yelled. ‘You have to see it to type it. Come on around. Let’s go out to his place right now and you can meet him and have a look at the novel. He’s a good guy. It’s a wonderful book.’

‘OK,’ I said, and walked around the mud puddle to where she was standing in front of her evil dentist house, twelve years old, and approximately two miles from the Welfare office.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

We walked over to the highway and down the highway past mud puddles and sawmill ponds and fields flooded with rain until we came to a road that went across the railroad tracks and turned down past half a dozen small sawmill ponds that were filled with black winter logs.

We talked very little and that was only about her cheque that was two days late and she had called the Welfare and they said they mailed the cheque and it should be there tomorrow, but call again tomorrow if it’s not there and we’ll prepare an emergency money order for you.

‘Well, I hope it’s there tomorrow,’ I said.

‘So do I or I’ll have to go downtown,’ she said.

Next to the last sawmill pond was a yellow old trailer up on blocks of wood. One look at that trailer showed that it was never going anywhere again, that the highway was in distant heaven, only to be prayed to. It was really sad with a cemetery-like chimney swirling jagged dead smoke in the air above it.

A kind of half-dog, half-cat creature was sitting on a rough plank porch that was in front of the door. The creature half-barked and half-meowed at us, ‘Arfeow!’ and darted under the trailer, looking out at us from behind a block.

‘This is it,’ the woman said.