This story is about perception - one man’s deduction of what a holy man’s life must be like and how trivial an ordinary man’s life is by comparison. My hope is to tie together what probably seem like random details at this point (I have a definite conclusion in mind … it’s getting there that will be tricky.) My attentiveness tends to wane in a short story’s development. My mind wants to move on to something else before finishing my original idea, but I’m not going to let it happen this time. Something beautiful is going to take place in the grocery store parking lot. You don’t want to miss it.

Arnie was a sensible man as most were in El Dorado, Kansas, not given to dreaming or anything creative minded, so it came as a miracle to most people who knew him that he had the ability to believe so deeply in God. But he arrived early every Saturday morning at the Piggly Wiggly for men’s group as he did at the Waffle House when they used to meet there and the Fork and Spoon before that. Braugher took what the world gave him and made his own sense of it. In the Midwest, men like him were the rule, not an exception. He could repair his own truck and farm equipment, and on the acres of land behind his house, he and his family could live self-sustaining lives as the good Lord intended.

Yet, as deep as his belief was and as grounded as he seemed to be, he couldn’t help but think sometimes that the parking lot was a strange place. Above him, the parking lot light poles cast spots on the asphalt that he thought were alien, shot from a UFO or something not Earthly. He’d never seen an unexplainable air craft in all his years in the Air Force, nor out in the fields harvesting his wheat crops late at night by the light of the tractor’s head beam. He’d never seen one while lying out under the stars as he and his wife one did during the first couple decades of marriage. They’d roll out a blanket and sit in the open spot between the barn and the house and eat fried chicken only a few feet from the coop that yielded the eggs and then the chickens that made the centerpiece of their meals. That was a long time ago and it surprised him that something as simple as a well-lit parlking lot could set off such a silly idea.

This association with aliens that Braugher made with the grocery lights wasn’t the only outer spasce connection in his mind. Pastor Allen White had often occasionally struck him that way in the pulpit on Sunday mornings. The pastor had a long neck, a thin narrow face and broad almond eyes. His hair also started high on his forehead but, parted down the middle, spilled over on either ear. Braugher felt sinful for the association, but it was a natural one. The mind goes places sometimes and he thought as long as it isn’t during prayer and that he ask for forgiveness, then it was no big matter at all.

Braugher parked his car in the first space facing east, the way he entered. This method required him to loop the car around and drive through a few empty rows of parking spaces. The dashboard was dusty in the overhead light and he took his sleeve and rubbed clean what he could reach. He listened to the AM radio voices offer investment advice, and he waited for another car to show, as he always did, never meaning to walk in the store’s sliding doors alone. Behind the “P” in the Piggly Wiggly sign, some birds had madd two decent-sized nests. The higher of the two appeared as though it was about to spill out. The early spring rain storm had come though and the winds had nearly pushed it out. Braugher had found a few Robin’s eggs on his property that had been blown frow nests and one baby bird no bigger than his pinky that was pressed down into the grass, hatched early by the storm and not yet ready to be born - his skin transluscent and the veins clear, pronounced as they are in human eyes. Braugher put his elbow up on the driver’s door and accidentally deporessed the door lock which gave him a sudden jolt of fear and he looked around after catching his breath to make sure no one had seen his folly. Seeing that no one had, he straightened his cap and commenced his look out.

The dashboard clock showed 5:49. In another five minutes or so, the others would show. This was his time to himself. He gave it to himself once a week, it was a gift, and in living with his wife Sarah for 53 years, they’d fallen into certain patterns so that the days were predictable, and privacu was not hard to plan for or to come by in a marriage that has lasted so long. He’d spent a considerable amount of time the day before in that garage working on the starter of his combine, but though he was alone, it really wasn’t private time. He was focused on something less than himself and didn’t come away from that experience deepky affected in any measurable way.

Braugher was a lonely man, set in ways, convinced of his own wisdom and approach to life - he’d led a quietly, satisfactory and productive life - he’s experienced love and grandchildren, success and being one with nature, but he hadn’t figured out loneliness or how to give himself entirely to someone, not even his wife’s name. This has him concerned about the after life, and at 76 years old, it was weighing heavy on his mind for to make it into Heaven was to offer himself up fully to the Lord. He’d need to be lifted in his entirety up into God’s hands, very similar to the way he imagined the extraterrestrials taking their samplings, and maybe that’s why the vision stick with and the preacher was an oddity.

While he was making this connection, two lights came into view - the headlights spread apart about the length that they are on a Buick LeSabre, which is the car the preacher drives. Braugher turned off the radio and began rolling up his windows. He popped open the driver’s side door and put a foot down on the asphalt. He felt the broken glass crumble and the sand leftover from the last winter snow storm grind. The preacher turned into the space across from his - not as careful or concerned to be pointed the way he’d need to go to head out. The preacher gave a half-wave with his hand still partially holding the steering wheel and turned off his front lights as he pulled into the space so as not to blind Braugher. Braugher nodded and climbed the rest of the way out.

The air was fresh from the recent rain and the cracks in the ashphalt were all lined with inch-long wet spots that hadn’t yet come to dry from the damp conditions that had carried on into the present day.

“‘Morning preacher,” Braugher said.

“Hi, Arnie,” Preacher White said. He extended his hand and took Braugher by the back. ” I don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding a table.”

The preacher motioned with his head on his long neck toward the grocery store. Throgh the glass windows at one end, a view was permitted into the deli and not only were there no other bodies in the chairs, the lights were still dark.

“I reckon not,” Braugher said. The two men walked into the crosswalk as the crossing arms lowered acrosd the interstate and a train sounded a distant whistle. Preacher White stopped as the sliding doors parted for him and Braugher.

“Wait, look at this,” he said. Braugher turned, as the preacher did, to see the train roll through. The light was still distant, a little less than a quarter-mile off.

The morning air filled with the anticipation for the rumbling train. Set several summers ago, the asphalt still managed to rumble as the train shrieked again.

“I want you to watch this,” Preacher White said. After another few seconds, the engine was in the intersection blasting a loud warning to no one in particular - there still was no traffic. The first few cars past which were flatbeds carrying non-descript metal beams for what purpose was anyone’s guess, but but just behind them were double-stack cars, a sickly green color to them all with “China Shipping” emblazoned on their sides.

Preacher White leaned in close to Braugher’s ear and shouted. “You see that? We don’t manufacture anything ‘re any more.”

Not getting a reaction from Braugher, Preacher White tried again and spoke louder as if that would clarify his point.

“We don’t build a thing. We’re all service now. America is filled with people that want white collar, well-paying jobs. No labor.”

Braugher thought it an interesting point to be made by a holy man. If people wanted to use their imagination or some other god-given skills, why shouldn’t they?

Bruagher nodded his head and went inside.

JUST ADDED

No one was working the counter at that hour and both men, antipating the delay, stood before the glass for several minutes and talked without eyeing the food. The food was pretty much the same every morning - standard fare, scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon strips, hash browns - but everyday a new dish was worked into the mix. This morning it was chocolate chip pancakes that appeared to Braugher to be especially bland. While the chocolate chips could be seen, they were almost too perfectly encased in the pancakes, a sign to him that were pre-packaged and pre-cooked, microwaved and set out under the hot lamps. When he made pancakes at home and tossed in chocolate chips, they would smear over one another and stick to his plate and he could see the serving dish was clean as a whistle.

“I guess they aren’t stretching themselves too far in the pancake department,” Braugher said.

“No, not at all,” the preacher said with a touch of rounded “oh” in his pronunciation. He’d come down to the Brittany Church from South Dakota where he’d been youth pastor. He gathered the yputh’s imagination and support by incorporating his acoustic guitar into his Wednesday night sermons. He come off as one of them. They trusted him, but equal with trust, he was glad that he had been accepted by the younger crowd. He seldom played his guitar now. The more serious the role he began to play in church, the less he came to rely on instruments or accessories. Now his word had become his appeal and he had helped so many deal with broken marriages, with financial problems, with runaway children and many combinations of those general problems - the runaway who has accused his financially strapped father of inappropriately touching him thereby putting a marriage on the rocks. There were problems - the couples that couldn’t agree on when to have children - and there were real problems - the mother whose husband had impregnated their teenage daughter and convinced the girl to have an abortion. He took all these challenges, as Braugher did, as theu came, and tried his best to find the message, the Lord’s word in them all, and he’d been successful at finding them, though sometimes it took considerable effort, late nights staring at the Dead End sign outside his bedroom window and hoping it was just a conincidence, no persecution of his faith. Pastor White was an upstanding man. He was. And any man, even the ones who had trouble with religion, would be hardpressed to find something about him not to like, to hold against him. There was nothing in his past to impune him and yet anyone in the church would say his best act was yet to come. His heavenly resume was lacking on experience though there seemed to be plenty there.

“Don’t look too fresh,” Preacher White said.

He was about to turn the subject to another topic when he upturned the meaning in the stale pancakes. This was a true talent he and other holy men had in finding a way to relate God’s word in a common way.

“The same thing can happen to our faith,” he said. “Our prayers can be affected like that, too. You pray the same way over and over and pretty soon, the message is the same. There is no emotion in it. You don’t mean it. Take a look at those pancakes. Do you think they mean it?”

Braugher laughed. “Not unless they mean to be bad.”

An attendant from the bakery made her way down the long display counter that ran the store’s entire length. She waited a few moments until the men noticed her, then after a brief acknowledgement that they’d not looked over the food, they stopped chatting and ordered plates.

Braugher felt uncomfortable that they’d simplay placed orders and did not flirt with this girl the way they’d done with Carol, the department manager who was there most mornings to field their order. As soon as the food was handed over to him, he forgot and followed the preacher to the condiment shelf.

“Where are the other boys?” Braugher asked.

“I’m not sure. I had heard Tom Mueller had the tin rooves ripped off a few outbuildings. And Gene Morris’ wife had her first chemo last week, but I heard she’d taken a turn for the worse. Poor soul. And you know Todd Johnson. He’s hit or miss depending on the day. We’ll just see who turns up.”

“Could be only us,” Braugher said.

The two men sat together in the wooden chairs by the tall windows looking out on the parking lot and talked.

Braugher saw the flashing crossing arms come down again at the intersection. Another train rolled through. This one carried military equipment, humvees, some long, metal weaponry that his mind likened to modern day cannons.

“When I was a little boy, we lived a mile or so from some railroad tracks that sounded a lot closer than they were,” Braugher said. “I used to pretend that my father and I were the only ones awake. He’d get up at 4 on Saturday mornings - that was his regular time during the week - and sit in the living room ruffling the newspaper and sipping coffee for hours before the rest of the world thought about being awake. I’d sit in bed for a spell listening to the paper rattle, then lay on the couch by him and fall asleep in the lamp light.”

He stopped oddly when he came to the word “light” and looked back out at the parking lot. The train was finished passing. Behind where the tall cars had been the horizon was plain and blue, a broad tapestry ready for the day and only darkened by the subtle dark ridges at its bottom. The strange lights that had bothered him earlier were still on, but now just individual glowing boxes 20 feet off the ground, the odd light absorbed by the dawn.

Preacher White noticed the lull in conversation and glances up from his biscuit and gravy plate. He sensed something in the pause and the bewildered expression on Braugher’s face.

“The glare bothering you?” he asked. “You can sit on this side if you like.”

He gave his plate a nudge and started to stand, but Braugher shook his head and waved his hand.

After another pause, he said, “Naw, it’s not that. Ugh, preacher, do you ever notice the light in the parking lot, you know, before we come in?”

“No, can’t say I have.”

“I have a habit of getting places early. I have all my life, so it’s not unusual for me to show here early, but I … I feel drawn to this place. I have strange visions, too.”

And it was then that Braugher opened up to the preacher in a way that he hadn’t done in the 11 years he’d been eating breakfast with the men’s group.

The two men were not dapperly dressed and far from donning church apparel. God has lessened his dress code for Sunday mornings in recent years. Such a statement could be made by assessing the attire they and the other small town folk deemed presentable for an ordinary church service in the bible belt. While casual dress churches with rock bands have been a trend in American worship for a few decades now, some days sill manage to press the limits for what the traditionals must have been willing to accept

Diesels climb the interstate’s slopes on all 18 wheels. Blue skies on another billboard for the Ramada with a photo of feet draped from car window. No shoes on and obviously summer. Land still scarred from eqipmnent that spread open the earth’s thighs for this messy interstate. Dirty cars with mush growing on fenders like crustaceans. One-dimensional cows black and grazing in terraced corn fields. Abandoned car suilk, beaten Buick, lime green from the 70s, outside a barn. Melting ice blowing back from the car’s grill into into the windshield.

The air warms as we head due south on a straight asphalt line. Under overpasses and none collapsing, winter snowstorm on the return from Nebraska truning to march warm front. Mother nature losing her hate. Warm wind from the Gulf Coast. Let me be back home before the sun goes down and it turns cold again. Buses carrying people to colder places northbound. To life and love to warm hearts and distant marriages lasting some 50 years. Wild creekbeds thawing the current strong but carrying no branches, just moving forceful along jagged banks. Trees bare like open veins. Waiting for blood to be taken or drugs pumped in with a sudden rush so that the sun comes out and color returns to verdant fields for the ponies to graze. Now they are abandoned on farms by the wealthy children who ride them when they want and the rich parents who like to pretend thay are talented. The horses drink from pails filled with rain water and leaves some frustration to be taken out about being ubdernourished. They’ll rear back and pitch off their rider. Hawks line utility poles and birds nests are in view in tallest branches. Another plain church passes. Gone again as fast as it come up over the dashboard. Goodbye. Gone to find love.

Beneath this illusion is more fakery in the glowing coals turned orange at the edges as though the wood pices had broken up in the fire and sprinkled ashen chips onto the grate. The heat from the flames is warm but inauthentic and somehow inauthentic - a modern concept somehow ruining the classic, esacpist feel that dwellings should bring out among nature.

I set my coffee down on the warm stones on the hearth, inadvertenly finding the perfect cup warmer on this cold Nebraska morning. Across the veranda laid in the same alternating brick color in the fireplace are knotted pine trees, a few flat oval circles on the tree trunks bare from a recent trimming. Tangled shadows fall in the direct light and I watch to see if any pheasants come from the thickets as they did the previous day to peck and food and cavort. We were walking our dog when we saw them. They went running across the front lawns in their strange form similar to exotic birds we’d seen in the islands, thrusting their heads and stepping on the tips of their feet.

These views and the wildlife, if they could ever belong to someone, are borrowed from a relative, as are the flames. The beauty that has so taken me is hers year round, there, outside to wake up to in soft spring thunderstorms, cool summer mornings and soft snowfall.

This morning, all that seems to be awake is the wind (gently brushing bach the tree boughs), the sun (warming what holds still qand happens to be in its direct view this January day), and the mystery of this property and the cabin-like dwellings on it that take the mind and the senses back a century or more to a simple fire and the oneness with nature. When the birds would show themselves, then, they would be game for the supper table, not strange majestic animals that temporarily catch our attention from windows.

Back in these woods, the views out into the thich foilage and browned leaf piles create a feeling of declusion and a distorted time. But there are signs all around the interior that the day is current.
The fire reflects in the golden pillars on the hearth. Inside the metallic tops as round as magic balls, the room is distorted and round. The view it returns is so much modern than the way it seems it would be - a flat screen TV, hanging lamps, carpet, and so on, not those items that traditionally fill a cabin - a small cooking stove, a few drafty windows and a cot beneath them, a lantern, some old metal dishes unwashed next to a small sink.

Time has slipped backward this morning, but I can feel myself tethered to the room - to the moment. I sip my coffee in the rocking chair and think about cranking up the fire.

I’ve read in your own works and those written by biographers that you led a rough life of homelessness and gambling addiction, and that alocoholism was your method for coping. I’ve read that your promising writing career was sidetracked for.a decade by bars and liquor stores and alleys where you slept off hangovers, but I now realize that the art form itself might have been one among lesser addictions that made your downfall so steep.

So many fall victim to it, this disease called writing. We share the same dehabillitating conditions with those we don’t know, whose names appear on book spines or above the copy blocks in newspapers and magazine. With anyone who scribbles in a journal or writes a simple letter or e-mail message, we share it - with anyone who has gone to the well and found the bucket empty and the source dried up except for the rotten leftover marsh at the bottom. This false lover called writing has romanced (but more often teased) me for the better part of 20 years, despite my faithfulness, my commitment to it and the profession.

Here’s the recent bitterness I’ve tasted: Yesterday, on the final day of the year - one that has been the best for me professionally and that I might have made the most significant strides in my abilities as a writer - I practically had to wrench words from my mind. I was working on two stories on deadline as I have been all week. The problems began even before the initial drafts, which is usually when I spill out all my thoughts, no matter how incongruent nonsensical, just to put them on paper. During the days leading up to deadline, I almost always scribble notes or sentences - sometimes entire paragraphs - when inspiration strikes, but this month, the place where those words were stored had been robbed. I know that must be hard for you to believe - a bard who takes a few sips of beer or a pull of whisky and taps the typewriter keys comfortably and careless of what comes out. If only I had the time to leave my work spilled on the floor and, after recovering from a hang over later in the day, toss out the pieces that miss the mark and keep the ones with a line or two of brilliance. I admire the fluidity in your approach and sometimes even the drunkeness. Most days, I’d trade my health for a few beautiful lines.

I would like to blame my recent lack of passion on the holidays, but I wasn’t looking forward to last few days in the year dwindling away. It has been so good to me. I suppose I am worn down, Mr. Bukowski, and if I knew where to find your gravestone, I’d gladly pour us drinks and bring a racing program for us to look over together.