High Lonesome

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.