Robert Snerd watched him without contempt, just then. Moved in fact to charity, feeling old and the butt of something himself, he looked down at the clean pavement at another blind decade, gray with infinitesimal holes like invoked another memory of Nigero once when he saw him alone watching his enormous shepherd run down the hill of a ditch near the baseball stadium. Niggero looked very foreign and diminished by the healthy players out tiny on the practice field. Snerd was lost by a sudden respect for the fellow, so made for treachery, like an idol of betrayal, there scrambling down for his dog, stubborn in a culvert.
When Mrs.Niggero died an acutely quadraplegical musculer almost overnight, three years later, Robert Snerd thought for a while that the formality of his public inexpression of grief had damaged his true sorrow. He had never wept, only stared. He could not wink out even a drop, even missing Nancy and seeing her whole, in sandals only, her bold chest and public darkness strutted out for him as a display of promised bounty. This was a posture she had never struck in a real life. Here she was whispering something with a sly smile on her, and holding a sheaf of her unpublished poems behind a thigh as if to promise even rares pleasures if he could help her get them published, a thing with his considerable connections to small elegant presses, he had never been able to accomplish in real life. In fact her only public poem was the one Cornelius had chosen for her gravestone in quotation marks. To Snerd, this was unfortunate. It was a poem crisp but woozy at the same time, so sentimental it almost washed out her eminence in flesh and belied her highly arousing natural voice, a music of the most moving classical resignation. But then as the weeks passed, he knew he was doing no act for the town and propriety but was an utter stone bastard. He simply was not feeling that much. He had let everything of her but the merely photographic go, entirely. This thing terrified him. All those thousands of books around him thirty years and what they had made him was a monster insensate as a concrete city lion.
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.