The door to the trailer opened and a man stepped out on to the porch. There was a pile of firewood stacked on the porch and it was covered with a black tarp.

The man held his hand above his eyes, shielding his eyes from a bright imaginary sun, though everything had turned dark in anticipation of the rain.

‘Hello, there,’ he said.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hello, honey,’ she said.

He shook my hand and welcomed me to his trailer, then he gave her a little kiss on the mouth before we all went inside.

The place was small and muddy and smelled like stale rain and had a large unmade bed that looked as if it had been a partner to some of the saddest love-making this side of The Cross.

There was a green bushy half-table with a couple of insect-like chairs and a little sink and a small stove that was used for cooking and heating.

There were some dirty dishes in the little sink. The dishes looked as if they had always been dirty: born dirty to last forever.

I could hear a radio playing Western music someplace in the trailer, but I couldn’t find it. I looked all over but it was nowhere in sight. It was probably under a shirt or something.

‘He’s the kid with the typewriter,’ she said. ‘He’ll get 1/3 for typing it.’

‘That sounds fair,’ he said. ‘We need somebody to type it. I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘Why don’t you show it to him?’ she said. ‘He’d like to take a look at it.’

‘OK. But it isn’t too carefully written,’ he said to me. ‘I only went to the fourth grade, so she’s going to edit it, straighten out the grammar and commas and stuff.’

There was a notebook lying on the table, next to an ashtray that probably had 600 cigarette butts in it. The notebook had a colour photograph of Hopalong Cassidy on the cover.

Hopalong looked tired as if he had spent the previous night chasing starlets all over Hollywood and barely had enough strength to get back in the saddle.

There were about twenty-five or thirty pages of writing in the notebook. It was written in a large grammar school sprawl: an unhappy marriage between printing and longhand.

‘It’s not finished yet,’ he said.

‘You’ll type it. I’ll edit it. He’ll write it,’ she said.

It was a story about a young logger falling in love with a waitress. The novel began in 1935 in a café in North Bend, Oregon.

The young logger was sitting at a table and the waitress was taking his order. She was very pretty with blonde hair and rosy cheeks. The young logger was ordering veal cutlets with mashed potatoes and country gravy.