A prideful thing had slowly grown between the two old men about who could rise earliest in the morning. Who knows where it got started. Sherman, the younger of the two by three years, had lately taken to sneaking out of his sleeping bag at 4:30 a.m. He would shuffle barefoot across the red linoleum in the pitch black, careful not to pick his heels up and cause any snapping sticky sounds. He would wrap a wash rag around the little chain switch on the fluorescent tube over the bathroom sink to muffle the hum as the light heated up and cast its flickering greenish gleam across the dreaming face of his partner Dean—his longtime partner, Dean. Sherman wasn’t quite certain where this deep satisfaction of winning the “early riser” contest arose in him. There wasn’t any money involved. No prizes of any kind. Most often they never even mentioned it to each other. In fact he couldn’t remember if they’d actually formalized it into a legitimate competition. It had just evolved over the years out of their endless days and nights together. There was definitely a sensation of winning, though. That was unmistakable. Sometimes he felt it in his feet—a warmth ascending slowly up into the calves and behind his knees. Sometimes he felt it in his chest and arms—and one electric morning he felt it directly on the top of his head. His whole head lit up. He remembered that. It lit up much the same as the fluorescent tube above the bathroom sink—a bright glow that flooded through his skull, washed down into his neck and backbone, and then seemed to switch on a light through his entire body. It was a light he’d never known before, and the only comparison he could make was to a dream he’d had of heaven when he was about ten years old. In that dream a similar light had appeared and he remembered the sensation of being directly connected to some force as strong as the sun itself. For days, as a boy, he walked around with the memory of that dream in his head, but the light never appeared again until this business with Dean developed—years down the road—this unspoken rivalry about waking. Sherman’s sense of victory was short-lived, though, since the very next morning Dean had managed to fake sleep altogether and was sitting ramrod straight, eyes wide open in the springback chair, while Sherman gurgled and buzzed away into his pillow. Dean had pulled the chair right up close to Sherman’s mummy bag so there’d be no mistake on Sherman’s part who the winner of the morning was. Dean could hardly wait for the sun to get high enough to warm Sherman’s eyelids and cause them to crack. There he’d be, staring right down into his long face while Sherman struggled between some REM-dream and the realization that he’d lost. Dean watched Sherman’s eyeballs roll and twitch behind the lids much the same as a dog’s will. Even the little moans and whines that came out of Sherman’s throat were similar to those of a sleeping dog. What in the world could he be dreaming about? Not women anymore—surely not that. Dean hoped it wasn’t a dream about women. For Sherman’s sake. They were both too old for that. Too painful. Why torture yourself when there were the simple pleasures of desert life to keep you company? The sounds of quail covied up in the shade; the smell of bacon, dominoes, spotting the mail truck’s dust way off, miles away against the jagged shadow of Smith Mountain. But most of all, the one great daily pleasure they both looked forward to was their walk down to Denny’s by the highway for coffee and paddy melts. That was truly like heaven to the both of them.