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“Where are you going? You’ll hurt my feelings if you don’t come in." He is a small man who stands in front of the single-storey cottage that serves as the village store. He might touch five feet with heavy boots on. Dirty jeans and a creased blue shirt meet over his pot belly. Suspenders accentuate the stoop of his shoulders, holding the ensemble together. Four braided blue and white tzitzit hang from his belt. The olive-skinned face beneath the baseball cap is surfeit with lines of longitude that terminate in the twin puffs of his beard, like mammatus clouds that echo a faraway storm. I add a wheat stalk to his picture and make him chew it, chuckling to myself at the stereotype I have so fruitlessly imagined. I take it out again when he offers me a free drink. The porch is dominated by a vending machine and the ubiquitous ice freezer rusting beneath the window. Even the word ice, blue on the white appliance, continues the colour scheme set by the Star of David plaque above the door. The walls of the dim interior are a photographic monument to the cyclists who have passed through here, as I do now. We are the only visitors left. If it wasn’t for the cycle trail he would see none at all. Drink fridges glow fluorescently in one corner. Candy bars like cinder blocks are pasted to the shelves with dust. I prise one out, waiting for the structural tremor. I pay for the chocolate with a few coins. The price of the drink is hearing his story, a liturgy of religious redemption, from drug abuse and being wanted by the police, to his present life in a backwater of the eastern United States. His undertaking now is the rebuilding of the local church, an edifice eternally under construction. He is a pariah among pariahs in this forgotten town, a reputation not helped by the slurs of Nazi and KKK that he tosses so casually over his shoulder at his unredeemed neighbours. I see nothing of them. What few remain stay behind torn mesh curtains as the August sun peels another strip of paint from their untended window sills. He asks my story and I tell him about cycling across America, the dull immensity of Kansas after the dramatic beauty of Utah’s canyons and crossing the continental divide through Colorado. When I tell him Israel is my next destination, his eyes open in starstruck awe. “The homeland,” he smiles joyously, attaching beatific status to this unseen land. He wants to know if I will stay the night. A bed? A meal? These are luxuries when you have been on your bicycle for nine hours. But I am uncertain of him. He may be a religious extremist, he may be only a lonely old man. Both are the fuel of rich conversation, but spending the night in the next room might be more than a story is worth. I tell him I’ll think about it and sit outside with my chocolate bar, watching his terrier, with a hernia half as big as herself, waddling under the trees. Do I have three more hours of pedalling in me? Do I have a choice? I take out my phone, seeking reliable confirmation from previous cyclists that this place is safe. I find anecdotes from riders who came and saw and left. Those few who stayed are quick to detail the thumps heard on doors and the unexplained lights seen blinking in the trees at night. Before I leave he gives me a handful of DVDs. The words god, saviour, and messiah peek out at me from among the jumble of paper cases. I reach Chanute at 9.30pm that night. I'm waiting at the first set of traffic lights when a pickup pulls up beside me. I turn at the screech of the window as it descends into the door. Pastor Joe is smiling at me.