High Lonesome

by Barry Hannah

  He could not help himself, and telephoned Niggero in three days.

  “Cornelius! We, so many of us, knew but didn’t say what was right to her and to you when she was here with us. She was such a delightful creature. The disadvantage of this pretty bustling little town is it has shut us up and let us take beautiful, beautiful things for granted. Like Nancy. Like you, Robert. A queen, her unassuming . . . prince! Yes, prince behind her! No fanfare. Then she’s gone. I need to talk about her with you, I’ve got to. Let’s go somewhere . . . off. . . and chat. I need you, I have to talk.”

  “You need me??” Niggero was astounded. “Well, sure. I’ve not talked much either. Fucking head for numbers, briefs, stuck in my tongue. I neglected her.”

  As if nowhere near the town would do for this business, Snerd drove Niggero up near Iuka to a grand reservoir of the Tennessee River, green and rocky like another region of the world completely. They stood at the end of a pier that was condemned to progress, being merely wooden. It was a matter of the heart to Snerd, who had loved the place twenty years and more.

  Now a solid rocket fuel plant, with its visiting executives of all nations, had bought the park and was turning it into a convention resort and would put concrete piers with elegant slips on the water.

  For the two older men, who were bored, both of them, by talks of the apocalypse ever since they had been born, this was their apocalypse and both sensed it, as Niggero got angry along with Snerd talking about the destruction of the old wooden pier and al things of their youth.

  “I knew her too in a way,” Snerd began about Nancy. “I sensed she was private, put there were little secrets she gave away I’ve never told ajnybody about. I thought you’d like to hear them.”

  “Very much. I idoliked her too much to even know her, I have to confess. There’s a strength in me she left behind. I can’t even name it There’s been less grief than I imagined, and I’ve been guilty about it.”

  In the next fifteen years, before Snerd died—buried promptly by his wife, who remarried avidly and with great whorish avarice a widowed doctor of their acquaintance—it was said the two men enjoyed friendship such as had hardly been known in the whole north part of the state, and even up through Memphis.

  Ned Maxy, He Watching You

  MANY, TOO MANY, DAYS, NED MAXY HAD STARED OUT A window weeping, fasting, and praying, in his way. In character of both the drunkard and the penitent he had watched life across the street. Now in a healthier time, arising to his work at early hours, he labored at his front window table, peering out now and then at a world that spoke back to him. Not loudly and not a lot, but some. Over the white board fence he’d just painted, and through the leaping wide leaves of his muscadine arbor, he spied shyly like a stranger in town. He put his right arm out to the west and something quiet but with a shape happened so that he could feel hills rolling down to the continental delta of the Mississippi, feel the country under his forearm and elbow. The satisfaction of this almost frightened him.

  The woman who left in her uniform every morning at a quarter to eight was a paramedic. In the awful ’70s Maxy had sworn to hundreds in saloons that he wanted most of all to be a paramedic. This was a lie, one of the great pieties he used to drown out the fact that he wanted most of all to drink more without consequences. Maxy did not know the paramedic woman but he watched her through a pair of opera glasses he had bought at a Hot Springs pawnshop from a man broken in the ’70s who sat with his crutches beside him and lit up unfiltered Luckies that made him retch. Maxy at the horse races had dumbly glassed the horses, the tiny men, and some high-style women bred to the sport, wanting to eat and plunder them.

  In his late forties the lifetime monster of lust had released him, first time since he was eleven, just as the lifetime monster of drink had released him four years ago. He still did not know precisely what accounted for it, but it was a deep lucky thing, now that he was able to see the woman paramedic across the street leaving for work and comprehend her happiness without him. He looked on in high admiration, goodwill, and with no panic. She was engaged to a wide man with a crew cut who came out with her to the doorway on his big white legs, in Bermuda shorts, and embraced her, seeing his love off in the cool of the morning. Maxy applauded their love. Maxy had been in love this way twice in his life. As the dawn broke through a gray fog that morning, he saw it making the day for their happiness. He recalled the stupid rapture and had no advice for them at all.

  He had spoken to the woman only once, told her she looked good in her uniform, all ready to fly in a helicopter and bounce away in mercy on her high-topped black leather sneakers. She had the voice of a country girl, the kind of girl who had soothed his old man dying in the hospital at age eighty-seven. The old fellow had got rich in the city but loved the country much better, and the nurse was a sweet comfort at the last. Maxy liked that this country girl had the moxie to fly in a machine that would have terrified many hillbillies, and he told her so. Even from a hundred yards he could see her go shy, head of blond hair lowered to look at her own eminent bosom—for which he was not required anymore to dream in impossible lechery—having an unexpected compliment sail out to her from a man who didn’t need anything, here in the late cool of a summer morning.

  She answered some way he couldn’t make out, in a whisper, a country whisper of thanks good beyond form. This whole exchange would not have been possible even three months ago, when in his mind he would have been teaching her the needs of his famished world, her body a naked whirlwind of willing orifices, smiling all the while like the prince of liars at her.

  The whisper too had fetched back for him his old mighty friend Drum, lately a suicide. Drum was a practicing Christian, one of maybe four selfless men Ned Maxy had known in life, brought low by pain and anxiety after a heart attack. He was cut off from good work and high spirits and could not go on, they said. Drum was the only whispering drunkard Maxy knew. Through all thunders and the ’70s, he had never raised his voice.

  He killed himself in the bathroom of a double-wide mobile home he rented from a preacher who lamented to the police: Now poor Drum can’t ever go to heaven. But he had been tidy in the bathtub there with the large-caliber pistol, much appreciated.

  His drinking buddy Drum’s whispers of encouragement, his pleading to Maxy that he was a man who must respect himself, that he must work hard, that he must not waste the precious days or the gifts poured on him by nature—Ned Maxy would take that whisper with him until his own heart stopped too and he knew this.

  The whisper of the paramedic country girl was there for him now too. He did not want to make too much out of it. Thousands must have been given this gift. He didn’t want to be only another kind of fool, a sort of peeping Tom of charity.

  But he was a new fool. Some big quiet thing had fallen down and locked into place, like a whisper of some weight. He had been granted contact with paradise. Something tired and battered and loud had just thrown in the towel. Ned Maxy could hardly believe the lack of noise. His awful ’70s decade had gone past twenty years. Finally they were over.

  The next day, Maxy in a daze got his rushed suit out of the cleaners and attended the wedding of the woman paramedic at a country church down between Water Valley and Coffeeville. He shook hands with the bride and groom, then stood out of the pounding heat under the shade of a tall brothering sycamore.

  Nobody ever figured out quite who he was. Their faces were full of baffled felicity, as if each one was whispering: Well howdy, stranger, I guess.

  Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night

  YOU GET ON, AND ONE DAY IT OCCURS TO YOU YOU MIGHT BE doing something rather important for the last time. There is a bit of terror in this, but also an unexpected balm. Believe me, this thing can happen even when you still feel new as an eighteen-year-old.

  Well she was long in the leg, well dressed, I mean a nice cut above what was called for in this small city. She was in her heels and silks even in the heart of July, waiting there in the bad air conditioni
ng of her black Audi. I could see and feel her in her silk, with the sweat on her brow and her waist at panty-line, wearing her garter that said I WANT IT EVERY DAY. The city awaited her but she was waiting on me, hovering there against the curb in great patience. Because she said what I had was priceless. Her husband was a dumb mean doctor but she was splitting from him. Somehow I heard it that they had not touched each other in four years. Some interior decorator will charge in somebody’s house and tell them things like this where we live, although since there’s not a great deal to be gained hereabouts, the gossip tends to be more factual rather than vicious.

  “So she’s a pretty little thing,” said Mary, a tiny woman, to me one day. But my woman was not little and off the point of pretty. “She’s one of those who’s been waiting too long for something, and doesn’t know what it is now. She’s a person who, I’ll bet, says no a lot.”

  “You women are such experts on each other,” I said.

  “Yes, well, men pretend not to know things because they think it’s manly. Raised in manly dumbness, even smart ones.”

  “You’re just rude and hasty.”

  “You’d like to get your piece of her, then judge her. I know you. You’ve never looked at me the same since you had some of me.”

  “Nevertheless, she’s something different.”

  “You mean a little difficult. Which really excites you.”

  “I like the way she calls me a real man, compared to her former mate, the surgeon. Very much. Yes.”

  “Oh boy, the double whammy. You get to go to bed with his fame and her body. You can’t fool me. You like the way she waits on you, I mean lingers for you, around different places. That’s important to you. I wouldn’t, and now you’ve got a volunteer.”

  “No. You and I are just friends, big friends. Sometimes friends have to sleep together.”

  “Friends. I recall you were more ravenous than that.”

  “Ravished by loneliness at the time. That’s what I remember. And I thank you.”

  “You were pathetic. Pretty good. But pathetic.”

  I have, like every man, seen all through my life lovely women waiting for someone somewhere. I always get involved, I mean in my head. These women, each wonderful, have elicited fine raptures and dreams. Waiting women, each postured in a special way, each in her separate nook of perfect waiting, a gallery that does not belong to me. They are prepared, sharpened, in their dresses and heels—or in their jeans and sandals, their brave halter tops—all open to the great psychological moment of some man’s arrival. Negligence really is out of the question, with the right ones. And I have been that man over and over, besuiting myself for the expectant tastes of these lingering, watchful women. I imagine pleasing each one according to her most curious and valiant wants. The world for a few moments becomes wide and happy, not low and cramped. Even voluptuous. I bring extraordinary gifts to these patient women, thinking all day about them. So it is that I have made love to these women of my heady tableaux and been briefly a happier man for it. I hear the women speak softly, delighted by my presence. This is very good, since nobody else on the real earth truly needs me, not even the surgeon’s wife Jane in the Audi out there as my business closes, soon. For the world I am impertinent and a malingerer.

  I’ve never found anything I was good at worthy to do here. I surely don’t blame the world for that. Through me runs an inveterate refractoriness, almost a will to lose. Really, a choice for the whining and pining, at ease in the infantry of unremarkable losers on the lower end of mobility. What I admire is anguish, casual faith, clothes, poise, and minor disaster, or the promise of it. I like the nose lifted a little. The pride of exemption, yet terror in solitude. This is a busy concept. Perhaps too busy.

  “You drive her around as if she can’t drive, in her car. What does this mean, exactly?” asked Mary, who always chuckled a little when she was being sincere.

  “Because …” I don’t know. “Because she is somewhat American YesterWorld, and I imagine it gives her the sense that fate now is out of her hands.”

  “But you simply go buy things together, little and big and far and near, like every other dull American couple, like old marrieds already.”

  This was true. And another thing was, there are a number of drugs in this country that, the way we are pitched, make you go buy things. Speed and broncho-dilators, Valium and booze, even Sudafed, make you want to gallop down and get some suddenly urgent thing. Marijuana, they say, is the king. Weed people hit one A.M. bargain barns like battlefield jackals. Zombies who buy have promoted me to the middle class just by accident. I have simply memorized a fair number of automobiles and have the parts ready for them almost by the time five words are out of their mouth. Yet I keep buying myself back down toward the lower class, as if with unconscious nostalgia. Towns you pass through around here often exist only to supply automobiles parts and service for people who have absolutely nowhere to go. The people keep hoisting me back up to the great bourgeoisie, over and over. I can’t fail, my God, America! Show me some more oily jean cash, dirty pelt, warm lucre, young man! Put your hand in your pants and show me your dollars. Reach in your brassiere, O my sovereign nymphs and clayhill babushkas. This may be work but I doubt it.

  And my word the wrecks the two of us see together in our hundred-mile radius. Wrecks and deaths for no reason at all. I’d guess three quarters of all wrecks are caused by people with no destination. They are caused by goons driving as with a heart attack in progress toward positively distinctly nowhere. Or fifteen miles at eighty per to get a couple Vidalia onions or a bowtie for some lowlife prom. I’m going on because those wrecks, wretched as the fact is, work as aphrodisiacs on both of us. Something about being alive next door to horror, then not and very hot. We stop and ask questions and then look at each other, shamed but blushing with need, a hard and troublesome thing for two who’ve yet to get in bed together. I’ve wondered if we owe now this strange duty to others in the future and must have our own pointless great wreck. From our jewel of a little city in southern Missouri, in this radius of want we get even through Memphis and down into northern Mississippi, where I saw a woman in an unknown rage drive repeatedly at high speed around the lot of a Sonic drive-in until she piled into a stone picnic table and killed herself.

  I was almost sure I had witnessed the highest order of some kind of love, a love that put what the surgeon’s wife and I had to shame. I refused to read any newspaper account of the incident and could not bear the sordid history that might be attached, because I saw, well, what I saw. Jane and I were so full of the wild gift of adrenaline once we looked at each other again, we could have ripped each other apart.

  So were we good people then, because we did not follow through? No. Lovers are the most hideously selfish aberrations in any given territory.They are not nice, and careless to the degree of blind metal-hided rhinoceroses run amok. Multitudes of them cause wrecks and die in them. Ask the locals how sweet the wreckage of damned near everybody was around that little pube-rioting Juliet and her moon-whelp Romeo. Tornado in a razor factory, that’s what sweetness. That poor woman with her neck broken over the steering wheel was in their league, don’t tell me different. Without the stone picnic table, she’d have taken out all the help inside, and you’d have had the local scribes going for a year. Even the sad baritones on the box, too, tireless.

  Once years ago I walked into a country juke saloon with a pistol to my head, but it was only a gag about music. Country folks don’t ever get tired of the same song, they just want it maybe faster and deeper now and then. Or maybe it wasn’t a gag. I’m just forty-two but sometimes very very weary.

  I drive us, but I still do not have the main handle on whether we are in for construction or destruction. She has a way of looking at the floor and whispering no, unconsciously, eyes awfully flat and grim. Mary was absolutely right. I’m terribly glad she is my friend still. I’ll hate to leave her behind, little prissy happy-bosomed gal from Joplin, the only near-beauty I’ve ever
known who would hang around without liquor at a parts store.

  As you can see, behind the counter of my casual anarchy at the store, where only I know where parts are, I’ve had time to think and come up with some high county epigrams of my own, because I have not found this life particularly pleasant and it’s for damned sure my customers, the wheeled doofuses bred with a bad carburetor in their genes, aren’t going to show me anything new. If I were greatly handsome or had promise I might kill myself, but I’m not giving wags the pleasure nor Mary the trouble. The wags have a bad enough time coping with internal combustion. What would they say about me anyway? I have no problems. I’m begging for minor disasters, like several wealthy people I’ve known. I couldn’t cope with the options of wealth. The five or six I have in my present condition sometimes paralyze me. Also, the wealthy like money and are often so paranoid they pay someone to be after them, just so they will know distinctly who it is. To the man, every wealthy shop owner around the town circle here has a spread middle, a permanent bent neck toward the sidewalk from counting and playing with themselves, and nervous shoulders as if expecting to be poleaxed by a stranger from behind.

  In my brief mournful summer in New York City years ago, I was attempting to get myself across as something I’m unwilling to discuss. All right, painting. Hustling my plain local stuff during the height of Warholism, inviting half smiles of almost Martian disdain from gallery owners, and with nobody else between me and them as I could guess they were begging there to be, since I was using precious seconds of their eyesight on my “work.” I had at this time the almost mystic confidence of the autoanointed third-rater and must have sounded very much like Harry Truman.