“Beer,” Owens said.

“What kind?” bartender said.

Owens folded down into the bar, slumped deeper into his stool.

Owens was in the middle of a drive across the country. Somewhere far enough off the freeway the world had mostly forgotten. One of those somewhere towns with a church, a bar. Somewhere in the Middle West.

Driving, wandering, in pursuit of whatever found him. Rambling.

Turn over enough rocks…, he seemed to remember there being a saying about. Drive long enough without purpose…, he thought there should be a saying about.

He’d always wanted to ramble. Always wanted to call it the Middle West, too.

Same as he’d always wanted to drink in one of those one church, one bar towns. Always wanted to sidle up to the bar, always wanted to order a beer and have that be good enough.

Bartender stood statue still. Bored.

Owens chose a beer and the statue moved, poured the beer. Served it. Walked back to the other end of the bar and became a different statue. Man staring at phone.

He’d hoped the bartender might serve him his beer and ask about his travels. His life. Maybe absolve him of his sins. One of those therapist- or priest-behind-the-bar kinds of bartenders. It had been a long time since he’d been asked about his life or felt absolved of anything.

He’d hoped there’d be others in the bar. Some regulars to talk to. Some other travelers to trade stories. Owens loved talking to regulars, loved trading stories.

Owens drank his beer and thought about what it meant to feel let down. To be let down. To be the one doing the letting down. He thought about hopes and dreams and expectations and desires. He finished another beer and his thoughts got a little fuzzy; another and he wondered if this wasn’t a kind of absolution. An unburdening. A forgetting. He wondered if those were different things or variations on the same.

Owens woke to knocking, a flashlight in his face. He tried to roll down the window but that wasn’t how windows rolled down anymore. He hadn’t had a car with a manual handle for the window in a decade, maybe two, but instincts die hard. Sometimes they never die. He opened the door.

“How are you tonight?” a uniform with the flashlight asked.

His body felt folded and stretched. It hurt different than all the normal ways. He wasn’t sure where he was, why he was in his car.

I’m sore and confused and was just startled awake, Owens knew better than to say.

“I’m okay,” Owens said. “Tired.” He rubbed his eyes, shielding them from the light and also waking them up.

The uniform angled his light down at the ground and Owens saw the pitch-black night outside its ray of light. He wondered what time it might be. How much of the night he’d slept away, how much he still had left. The uniform stared at Owens, Owens stared at the uniform.

“Is…” Owens tried. “Can…” he squinted hard, bent his neck to crack it. Waited for the uniform to answer a question he wasn’t sure of. The uniform kept staring, waiting for Owens to become sure of his question and ask it.

“Am I not allowed to sleep here?” Owens finally figured out and asked.

“No,” the uniform answered. “No, you’re allowed,” he said. “Just wanted to make sure everything is okay.”

Everything was, before you woke me up, Owens again knew better than to say.

“Just tired,” Owens said. “Passing through. Didn’t see any hotels or anything. Had a few beers. Figured I should get some rest. Figured I should probably not be on the road.”

The uniform stood back. Nodded. Turned around and followed his flashlight beam out into the night.

Owens wondered what the purpose of that had been. In the morning, he wondered if it had happened at all.

When Owens woke again, it was to activity, conversations. Daylight. Outside his window in every direction: dresses, suits, hand-holding, kids running out ahead of parents, kids being dragged behind.

He’d stayed until last call or he’d been told to leave well before that or he’d left after only a beer, bored and let down. He knew he shouldn’t drive or he was too tired to want to or the same daydreams that included rambling and sidling and bartender saviors and pint glass communions made space for a night in his car in a one-bar town.

Owens didn’t remember moving his car from one lot to another, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t. Owens was often surprised how much of his life he didn’t remember.

Owens got out of his car, followed the crowd. Followed them across the parking lot, followed them into church, followed them into sitting at a pew.

I’m following the following, he thought to himself, and chuckled.

Owens hadn’t been to church since going with his parents when he was little, but it all came back. When to sit, when to stand. When to respond to the pastor’s call. He said amen together with everyone else, surprised himself by knowing every word to the Lord’s Prayer. He didn’t recognize the songs, per se—they weren’t the same he’d sung along to as a kid—but they weren’t unfamiliar, either.

The pastor’s sermon was about striving for forgiveness. How it is hard sometimes—often—but the Lord said we should, and so we should.

He preached about striving to be better people—better husbands and wives, better parents and children, better coworkers, better neighbors. Better to ourselves. Better to strangers, better even to those who have wronged us.

Owens wasn’t sure if he believed in the Lord or not, but he believed in that.

His brain tingled and sparked in recognition. Agreement. His body became translucent—his whole glowing skeleton, his giant beating heart, his very essence a gift to behold to anyone who wanted to see.

It felt good to hear someone else say it aloud. It felt powerful that that someone was a pastor. It felt like the words for a feeling, an idea, a belief he hadn’t been able to describe but had been looking for.

Owens wondered if this was belief. Salvation. Understanding. The meaning of life. God speaking to him directly. All of it.

Owens paused at this point in his story. A resting pause. A dramatic pause.

He ordered another round. For himself, for both Russ and me. Like we might all need another drink for the next part of the story, or maybe just like we were celebrating. Congregating.

Some version of this had happened to us so many times. Not the buying us a round, though that had happened a couple times too, but the sharing of the story. We tended to have that effect on random guys in bars. I guess we looked like two guys who liked being on the receiving end of a stranger’s crazy story in a bar. We were indeed two guys who liked being on the receiving end of a stranger’s crazy story in a bar.

We’d be sitting there together, having a beer, reminiscing, and some guy sitting nearby would start telling us about a guy he knew who had died in a roofing accident, or that he’d just sold his houseboat to buy a ring but then found out his girl was cheating on him, or he was training to become the Guinness world record holder for standing on his head, or one time he’d driven across the country and stopped in some bar and had a beer or a couple beers or beers all night until the bar closed and then slept in his car and maybe he’d moved from one parking lot to another and had blacked it out or maybe the bar parking lot was the same as the church parking lot and in the morning he woke up and went to church for the first time since he was a little kid.

Sometimes I forget and think we were in that bar from the story with Owens. I can lose myself trying to remember when and why my buddy Russ and I had ever been traveling together, in some one bar, one church town in the middle of the country, the Middle West, before setting myself straight, remembering it was an entirely different bar where we met Owens. Where he told us his story.

The Middle West were Owens’ words. So were rambling and sidle up and absolve and cradled. None of those are my words, is why they so stood out. Why I remember them even when I forget some of the other parts.

That time we met Owens was actually the last time Russ and I were at a bar together. The last time some random guy interrupted our nostalgia tour stories to tourguide us through a nostalgia story of his own.

A month or two later, the world got shut down. We weren’t allowed to go to bars, or restaurants, or the gym. I remember hearing that even churches got locked down, had to move to online services, though that had no effect on my life of already not going. Russ and I were cut off from those nights of goading each other into one more, one more, until the bar closed down or we had to go home or another drunk would diagnose us as the two guys who liked being on the receiving end of a crazy story who we very much were. Then Russ’s wife got a job on the other side of the country and they moved. We couldn’t even have a going away party. A bon voyage last night out.

We videochat sometimes now. Share stories about our jobs, TV shows we’re watching.

We have no new stories about strangers from bars. Neither of us drink as much as we used to, though neither of us have quit altogether like so many others we know either. On those rare occasions either of us do go out, no one ever starts randomly telling us stories. Maybe neither of us alone look like what we looked like together.

Sometimes we retell the story of the roofer, sometimes the houseboat, sometimes the Guinness world record hopeful. But always, at one point or another, we remember when the story about Owens. Driving across the country, stopping in the Middle West. Sleeping in his car, going to church the next day. His retelling of the sermon.

When Owens told us, it sounded rehearsed. Like he’d probably told the story hundreds of times. In hundreds of bars. To whoever would listen. Like it could have been the whole reason he’d started telling us the story in the first place. Like he knew we’d be reminiscing about him and this story for years to come. None of which dulled it in any way. It might even have helped it light up in fireworks and neon, the story and the bar and our lives and all of life in that moment for us.

“The pastor held me there in the palms of his hands,” Owens told us. “He had me cradled. He was rescuing me. Saving me. He was carrying me to heaven.”

Owens held his hands together in front of us, showing us. He wasn’t holding anything, but he looked to be holding it incredibly preciously.

“But then the pastor pushed past what it meant to be a better person, into what it meant to be a better Christian. To serve God. Preaching about how everything, everything, should be in service of Him.”

Owens paused, drank his beer. Russ and I both drank ours, following his lead, waiting for whatever might come next.

“He had me ready to find a church when I got home,” Owens said. “Ready to join a congregation. A following, a community. And then he lost me”—Owens snapped his fingers right in front of our fingers—“just like that.”

Russ and I have spent hours retelling this story. Maybe days’ worth of hours. Back and forth to each other, to others. We use Owens’ words, with both reverence and humor.

Sometimes in our retellings, the story feels hopeful, other times sad. Sometimes the takeaway seems to spotlight cynicism, but other times a deep, pure belief. Always, I think I can hear in Russ’ voice, and I know somewhere in the timbre of my own, a kind of jealousy, a longing, a want and desire for some kind of moment like that for ourselves.

“He was carrying me to heaven,” Owens said again, maybe forgetting he’d already said that, maybe repeating it for emphasis. “But then, right before we got there, he let me slip right through his fingers.”

Owens stared at us, waiting for our reactions.

I don’t remember how we reacted.

What do you do with a story like that?

“I came crashing back down to everything just the way it had always been,” Owens said. “But, for a moment, I was carried right up to the doorstep of heaven. I felt the warmth of it all over me.”

---

Aaron Burch is the author of the essay collection, A Kind of In-Between, and the novel, Year of the Buffalo, among others. He edited the craft anthology How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing, and is currently the editor of the journals Short Story, Long and HAD. 

---