I fell asleep after the album finished, and woke up as we were decelerating through bumpy clouds.  I was in that drowsy, disconnected state where the bits of the brain that dream dreams and come up with crazy ideas haven't been brought back on message by the rational part, so that everything goes a bit haywire, and I remember watching the US coast, far, far below, and thinking, Well, here I am, and Stephen's in Washington DC; at least if there's some comprehensive world-wide catastrophe we'll be on the same continent.  In the event of some deep-impact type disaster — if I survived — I could start walking and attempt to find him.  Yes, and Mrs B might have died tragically and we could start a new life together…

I shook myself out of it and looked out my US passport, to speed the formalities when we landed.

JFK, an American 737 to Chicago (iffy lunch but the coffee had improved), a slim commuter Fokker to Omaha and a very noisy military-looking Huey to Jebbet E.  Dessous' vast property on the Nebraska/South Dakota border; eighty thousand acres of plains, cattle, scrub, trees, roads like a map grid and all the dust you could eat.  The co-pilot who helped strap me in insisted I wear a pair of heavy olive-green headphones for the journey.  My hair, which had survived intact for four flights, one ocean and half a continent but which has always reacted badly to hats and serious headphones, was going to need fixing later on.

Half an hour in we hit some low-level turbulence over a series of pine-covered ridges.  My lunch began to let me know it hadn't really settled down properly and was thinking of relocating.  I considered the potentially onomatopoeic name of the helicopter I was travelling in, and tried to take my mind off my nausea by thinking of other modes of transport with dubious names, but only got as far as Sikorsky and the Cess in Cessna before we reached calm air again and my lunch decided that — on balance — it was happy where it was.

We landed in late afternoon in a dusty airport on the outskirts of what looked like a small deserted town, kicking up a great rolling ochre cloud.

'Welcome to Big Bend, ma'am,' the pilot said.

'Thanks.'

I took my time unclipping my harness and disconnecting the headphones while the dust settled.  An ancient Willis Jeep in US army colours roared up and sat just outside the limit of the slowing rotor blades.

The breeze was cold and sharp and dry beneath a lapis sky stroked with feathers of high pink cloud.  I could hear the steady crack-crack-crack of heavy machine-gun fire from some way off.  The co-pilot dumped my bags in the back of the open Jeep and jogged back to the Huey, which was powering up again.

'Ms Telman.' The driver was a grizzled but healthy-looking guy a decade or so older than me, dressed in army fatigues.  He stuck out one hand. 'Eastil.  John Eastil.  That all your luggage?'

'How do you do.  Yes, it is.'

'I'll take you to your cabin.  Hang on.' He spun the Jeep's wheel and gunned the engine; we roared away from the Huey. 'Sorry it's not a limo.'

'That's all right.  Good to get some fresh air.' Actually I was pleasantly surprised by the way Mr Eastil drove: it was a lot more relaxing than Uncle Freddy's floor-the-pedal-and-damn-the-speed-bumps banzai style.

'Take you long to freshen up, Ms Telman?' Eastil asked. 'Mr Dessous would like to meet with you directly.'

'Five minutes.'

My cabin was a ten-minute drive away; a sprawling wooden thing set in amongst the pines overlooking a slow-flowing river winding through a shallow valley carpeted with long, pale grass.  While Eastil waited in the Jeep outside I hung up my suit carrier, washed my face, squirted perfume behind my ears, dragged a brush through my hair, a toothbrush across my teeth and plonked the sad-faced monkey on a bedside table.  The walk-in provided a skiing jacket, which I pulled on as I strode out to the Jeep.

We drove back into town, through its deserted streets and out the far side.  We arrived at an old drive-in movie theatre; a huge field shaped like a baseball ground with the gantry for a vast screen at the wide end, though there was no screen, just the slim web of girders of its support structure.  There were a lot of trucks and heavy rigs scattered around, and two big mobile cranes, one of them with its jib extended and its body raised up off the ground by its extended jacks.

Short rusty posts, which must once have carried the speakers for the parked cars, were arranged in serried rows across the weed-strewn lot.  We parked alongside a handful of four-wheel drives and sport utilities by the projection building, which looked a lot like a concrete bunker, with no proper windows but a scattering of small rectangular apertures all facing in the direction of the absent screen.  A long tube poked out of one hole.

'Miss Telman!  Good to meet you.  Jebbet E. Dessous.  Call me Jeb, I don't answer to much else.  I'll call you Miss Telman till I get to know you better, if that's all right with you.  How was your flight?  Cabin okay?'

Bustling out of a door in the projection building came a large, red-faced man dressed in the sort of speckled beige army fatigues the world has come to associate with the Desert Storm campaign.  He wore a similarly camouflaged cap — incongruously, it was the wrong way round, as though he was trying to look New York Hip of about five years ago — from under which stuck tufts of hair that might have been sandy or just yellowing white.  He thrust out one massive hand.

His grip was delicate, even sensitive.

'How do you do, Jeb.  Everything's been good.'

He let go and stepped back to look at me. 'You're a fine-looking woman, Miss Telman, hope you don't mind me telling you that.  My opinion of my dumb-ass nephew has gone up, and that takes a lot of doing, I'll tell you.'

'How is Dwight?'

'Oh, still stupid.' He nodded at the Jeep. 'Come on, I'll take you to him.' He looked up at the sky with a frown, then pulled his cap the right way round.

Jebbet E. Dessous' driving style was more muscular than that of Mr Eastil, who sat in the back, holding on tight and chewing on a cold cigar.

'Sing us a song, John,' Dessous shouted, as we swung round the outskirts of the deserted town.

'What do you want to hear?' Eastil asked.  I got the impression this was not an unusual request.

'Anything.' Dessous looked over at me and tapped the centre of the Jeep's bare metal dashboard. 'Can't get any sort of sound system in these things,' he said.  I just nodded.

John Eastil launched into an enthusiastic — no, make that just loud — rendition of an old song I vaguely recognised but couldn't place until he got to the chorus, when I realised it was 'Dixie Chicken' by Little Feat.  Dessous tried singing along too, but was patently tone deaf.

We headed along the bottom of a small dry creek towards the jumbled shape of a sprawling stone-and-log-built cabin, which looked like it owed something to Frank Lloyd Wright.  Probably an apology.

'Boy comes here to write,' Dessous shouted at me.

'I see.  How's he doing?'

'Oh, got some play opening in New York, so he says.  Dumbass fool probably financed it himself.  Still wants to make it in Hollywood, get his name above the titles.  That's what — well, you'll hear.'

'Uncle Freddy seemed to think Dwight had some mad scheme you wanted me to talk him out of.'

'I don't want to prejudge anything here, Miss Telman.  I don't know you, don't know which way you'll jump.  I just want you to be honest with the boy.  He talks about you a lot.  Might listen to you.  Sure as hell doesn't listen to me.'

'I'll do my best.'

'Yeah, well, just give it your best shot.'

We stopped outside.  Eastil stayed with the Jeep again while Dessous jumped out, strode to the door, hammered on it once and marched in. 'Dwight!' he hollered, as I followed him. 'You decent, boy?  I got a lady here to see you!' He pulled his cap off and ruffled his hair.