Two ex-college football players, now age 45, are disenchanted with the way their lives turned out. One becomes encouraged early, the other at the end.
A character study of the two single middle age men ensues as the more honest one, Russ the protagonist, accepts poverty. He's convinced that he's as secure in the spiritual world as anyone can be, and is not sanctimonious toward the antagonist Bud about it, neither self-serving, nor effacing. Bud is not condescending toward Russ. They discover inadequacies of character which they then surmount. The story moves using spiritual dependency and spiritual despondency as a means of examining the values of American life.
Russ and Bud help police in their home town of N.Y.C., diffuse drug dealing, while in conflict with standard working class problems of their own - in one night of an extraordinary peak to those conflicts. Afterward, they take what little they own to California in Bud’s van. Along the way they meet two dwarf size Klan members whom they then, Russ enthusiastically, Bud very reluctantly, take as far as Columbus Ohio, to help get them treated medically at its university hospital on a charitable basis. Russ teaches growing in grace through unfair trials of suffering is for learning. In a display of gratitude, the dwarfs help them capture human trafficking agents syndicated to drug rings.