In the room he listened to the walls crackle and sat in front of an oscillating metal fan and didn’t move for hours at a time. Down the street old Ralph the barber told his own kind of lightning stories about the Battle of the Bulge. If the rotating fan failed to keep him company, he’d go down to watch Ralph cut hair. Outside Ralph’s establishment a wooden pole turned to rot. Inside, the mirrors were clean and the chrome and white enamel basins were kept shiny. The sad parameters of his life became nicely apparent at Ralph’s. Here is a man defined by lightning, the shop said. Here is a man who could use a shave. A bit off the sides, layered in back. In the shop, his story was lore, it was myth, it was good talk. It was clear in those humble confines, amid the snip of sheers, the concise irreversible nature of cutting hair. (People just don’t realize how tough human hair is to cut, Ralph said.) Amid barbering—flattops, Princetons, layer cuts, wet and dry—the best Nick could do was to answer the probing questions that Ralph sent his way. He embellished as much as he could. But he didn’t lie. In the barbershop, words felt ponderous and heavy. He filled in with silence as much as he could, and when that didn’t work, he hemmed and hawed. But with Ralph the silence seemed necessary. What went unspoken was filled in with Ralph’s grunts and his nods and his attention to whoever was getting a cut; if he was between cuts, he might be cleaning the sink or arranging his scissors or stropping his razor with thoughtless Zen strokes. Christ, it’s a good story you got, Nick, he said after hearing an account of no. 7. Ralph had a long, pale face—the face of a man who seldom saw the sun—with eyes that drooped in sockets that drooped. Ralph sat on a fence between doubt and belief. He would never fully believe this strange man who came out of the blue and claimed to have owned the Morrison tract, the famous farm over in the next county, a farm that was at one time perhaps the best-run bit of land in that part of Lincoln County. He would only half believe this guy who seemed so weatherworn and odd. Men like this arrived often out of the Great Plains, even now, years after the great wanderings of hobos and tramps, and they often spoke in a reverent voice of preposterous and prophetic events, events that were mostly untrue but that somehow had the ring of truth. Ralph knew the importance of such souls. They walked the line between fact and fiction, and in doing so lightened the load of the truth. They made you aware of the great desolate span of the Central states, of the empty space that still prevailed. He snipped with care around the ears and then snapped the buzzers on and cleaned up the neck, working to create a neat line. He would listen to Lightning Man’s stories again, and by the time the man’s whole repertoire of tales was used up, another year or so would have passed and he’d be ready to hear them again, forgetting enough of the details to make it interesting. Lightning Man would become a fixture in the shop. He’d have his own chair and ashtray. Into the long afternoons his words would pass. A place would be found for this man. Odd chores would be offered so that he might find subsistence, a few bucks here or there. In this manner another soul would be able to conclude his days upon the earth—at least until the odd premonitions came and the air grew absurdly still and above the shop the clouds began their boiling congregation, and then a faint foreshadowing taste of ozone would arrive. Then everything would change, and nothing would be the same again.