All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  The principal and teachers, when they recognized who we were, where we ranked, told Sam that he could sweep the narrow halls, clean the bathrooms and shovel coal into the school’s furnace, to earn his free lunch. He took out the trash and burned it and unclogged the toilet. They never bothered to teach him to read very well; he learned that on his own. They never bothered to tell him about the world outside his narrow, limited one. They forgot to show him maps of the universe or share the secrets of history, biology. As other students behind the classroom doors read about about empires, wars and kings, he waxed the gymnasium floor.

  12

  Getting above your raisin

  My momma did not lecture much, but when she did it was about false pride. My daddy had it. It was what made him sit for hours and shine his shoes or sharpen his knife, and forget to care about things that were really important, like whether his wife had money for groceries. She said, now and then, that I had my daddy’s pride. I cared too much about appearances, about the façade that faced the rest of the world. I would have paid more attention to her if I had not known for some time that it was precisely that same kind of pride that kept her a prisoner in that little house. But I guess being a momma has little to do with logic.

  The really sad thing is that I let that false pride—that pride, and a fourteen-year-old girl—make me ashamed of who I was. Worse, I let it make me ashamed of who my momma was.

  It was the summer before I started high school, and even though I had long since discovered the differences in my family and others, no one had ever put it into words, until her.

  I was, in my own mind, a dashing figure. I had played on the basketball and baseball teams and I owned a motorcycle, a white-and-red Honda. The chain was prone to come off at high speed, locking up the rear wheel at sixty miles per hour, but it was still a motorcycle, paid for with money I earned working for my uncle Ed.

  The girl was my first steady one. She was tall, taller than most of the boys, with wavy brown hair, a vision in cut-off blue jeans and a T-shirt tied in a knot around her waist. She was a cheerleader, made all A’s, went to church every Sunday and liked to talk about going to college.

  She was the daughter of a respected family in the small community where I went to school, which was not—by luck—the one where I lived. She did not know anything about me, beyond what I told her. I did not invent a life, did not concoct a more respectable history. I would not have sunk that low. Instead, I told her nothing about my background. We sat in a swing in her backyard and talked and talked about everything except me, and I thought I was safe.

  Then one day there was a knock on my door. It was her, flanked by a covey of her girlfriends. They had gone to the nearby Germania Springs for a picnic, and came to see if I wanted to go.

  I will never forget the look on their faces as they took in the tiny living room with its ripped Naugahyde couch and the worn-out rug and the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  And I saw the way they looked at my momma, in her flip-flops and old pants cut off at the knee. I told them I had to work.

  A few days later she told me that we had to break up. She said we were too different. I asked her what she meant and she said it was because I was poor and she was not. It never would work, she said. She made it seem like we were grownups, instead of fourteen. She made it sound like she was the lady of the manor lamenting her romance with the garbage man.

  I should have told her to go to hell. Instead, I just said, “You might be right,” and rode away on my motorcycle, noble.

  I knew then there was no use in pretending, in hiding. I was still ashamed, but from that moment on I wore my poverty like a suit of mail. I brought my girlfriends home, and if I saw that look, that horror in their eyes, I took them back to their house and never came back. It, the look, was almost always there. It never even occurred to me that I was destined to lose. The only girls I had any interest in were the ones who represented the world I wanted to be a part of, the ones above my station, and in my part of the world class is damn near as strong as color. Luckily, a few of them liked slumming. They liked being on back of that motorcycle, being free of respectability, for a while. That was enough, then. Someone else could take them to the big dance. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind.

  My momma just kept trying, just kept pulling.

  My favorite Bible story is of the widow’s mite, of the poor woman who gave two small coins to the Temple. Rich merchants gave much more in tribute, but God saw her gift as greater because it was everything she had. So God blessed her.

  13

  Fine qualities

  When he died, I don’t remember any grief. It would have been artificial to grieve, like bending over plastic flowers laid at a gravesite, and expecting to smell their scent.

  You never know how brave you will be when you die. You may cry and you may cuss. You may shake your fist at God, or, with the last ounce of energy in your body, try to steeple your fingers. But I know one thing: when I see it coming, if I see it, I will not reach out to the people I hurt in life, and ask them to care. It is not that I will be so noble, so considerate. It is only that I would be afraid they would react in the same way I did, at the end of my father’s life. That I could not stand.

  My daddy had been sick for a long, long time by my fifteenth birthday, and by the time I entered high school, in the fall of 1974, he was near death. He sat in that little house and coughed out his life, day after miserable day, getting weaker, becoming more afraid, searching for God with no experience.

  We dreaded the phone calls. We had just gotten a telephone of our own, and we should have been enthralled by it, should have run to answer it. Instead, when it rang we just stared at it, as if death itself was on the other end, and in a way it was. We just stared at it until our momma picked it up, and listened, without speaking, to his fears. Sometimes she would just dip her head and close her eyes and sit, not moving, and I knew she was praying with him.

  There is little more to say about my last visit to him, that day he gave me the precious books and the new rifle and told me the stories of his war. Except maybe this: if it had never happened, if he had not bothered to tell me, then I would have hated him until my final breath. Instead, when his suffering was finally done, I truly did not know what to feel. But I know it was not hate. I know hate. There is nothing remotely like hate.

  He died on January 29, 1975. He was forty-one. He was sober, I believe.

  We did not go to his funeral, but Momma thought it was fitting that we at least go look at him in the funeral home. She laid clothes out for us on the bed, but Sam refused to go. In one of those few times in my life when I intentionally sided against her, with anyone, I said I would not go either. Maybe I was trying to repay Sam for that time he hurled himself at my father, to protect me. To Mark, he was a stranger. His death meant nothing. We all stayed home.

  Momma went by herself. She didn’t stay long, just long enough to pay her respects to my granny Bragg, and look one last time at his face. I never asked her what she saw or what she felt. That is between them.

  Many years later, a man who had known him all his life, longer and better than me, said this: “If you took away the likker, Charles had some fine qualities.” I told him I appreciated him saying that. I would like to believe it. I would have liked to have met him when he was a boy, before time had mutilated him so.

  I wonder, sometimes, if I would have seen anything of myself in him, in his face, in his mannerisms. I have been told, now and then, that I got some of my character from him, but it was mostly bad things. Anger comes quick to me, like him. Forgiveness comes slow or not at all, like him. I rage against things I cannot change, and let things I could affect, I could change, just slide. As he had.

  I would have liked to talk to him, before all that mess, all that terrible pain, all those gallons of whiskey, and search his face and his mind for something he had passed on to me. Something good.

  14

  100 miles per hour, upside down
and sideways

  Since I was a boy I have searched for ways to slingshot myself into the distance, faster and faster. When you turn the key on a car built for speed, when you hear that car rumble like an approaching storm and feel the steering wheel tremble in your hands from all that power barely under control, you feel like you can run away from anything, like you can turn your whole life into an insignificant speck in the rearview mirror.

  In the summer of 1976, the summer before my senior year at Jacksonville High School, I had the mother of all slingshots. She was a 1969 General Motors convertible muscle car with a 350 V-8 and a Holley four-barreled carburetor as long as my arm. She got about six miles to the gallon, downhill, and when you started her up she sounded like Judgment Day. She was long and low and vicious, a mad dog cyclone with orange houndstooth interior and an eight-track tape player, and looked fast just sitting in the yard under a pine tree. I owned just one tape, that I remember, The Eagles’ Greatest Hits.

  I worked two summers in the hell and heat at minimum wage to earn enough money to buy her, and still had to borrow money from my uncle Ed, who got her for just nineteen hundred dollars mainly because he paid in hundred-dollar bills. “You better be careful, boy,” he told me. “That’un will kill you.” I assured him that, Yes, Sir, I would creep around in it like an old woman.

  I tell myself I loved that car because she was so pretty and so fast and because I loved to rumble between the rows of pines with the blond hair of some girl who had yet to discover she was better than me whipping in the breeze. But the truth is I loved her because she was my equalizer. She raised me up, at least in my own eyes, closer to where I wanted and needed to be. In high school, I was neither extremely popular nor one of the great number of want-to-bes. I was invited to parties with the popular kids, I had dates with pretty girls. But there was always a distance there, of my own making, usually.

  That car, in a purely superficial way, closed it. People crowded around her at the Hardee’s. I let only one person drive her, Patrice Curry, the prettiest girl in school, for exactly one mile.

  That first weekend, I raced her across the long, wide parking lot of the TG&Y, an insane thing to do, seeing as how a police car could have cruised by at any minute. It was a test of nerves as well as speed, because you actually had to be slowing down, not speeding up, as you neared the finish line, because you just ran out of parking lot. I beat Lyn Johnson’s Plymouth and had to slam on my brakes and swing her hard around, to keep from jumping the curb, the road and plowing into the parking lot of the Sonic Drive-In.

  It would have lasted longer, this upraised standing, if I had pampered her. I guess I should have spent more time looking at her than racing her, but I had too much of the Bragg side of the family in me for that. I would roll her out on some lonely country road late at night, the top down, and blister down the blacktop until I knew the tires were about to lift off the ground. But they never did. She held the road, somehow, until I ran out of road or just lost my nerve. It was as if there was no limit to her, at how fast we could go, together.

  It lasted two weeks from the day I bought her.

  On Saturday night, late, I pulled up to the last red light in town on my way home. Kyle Smith pulled up beside me in a loud-running Chevrolet, and raced his engine. I did not squall out when the light changed—she was not that kind of car—but let her rpm’s build, build and build, like winding up a top.

  I was passing a hundred miles per hour as I neared a long sweeping turn on Highway 21 when I saw, coming toward me, the blue lights of the town’s police. I cannot really remember what happened next. I just remember mashing the gas pedal down hard, halfway through that sweeping turn, and the sickening feeling as the car just seemed to lift and twist in the air, until I was doing a hundred miles per hour still, but upside down and sideways.

  She landed across a ditch, on her top. If she had not hit the ditch in just the right way, the police later said, it would have cut my head off. I did not have on my seat belt. We never did, then. Instead of flinging me out, though, the centrifugal force—I had taken science in ninth grade—somehow held me in.

  Instead of lying broken and bleeding on the ground beside my car, or headless, I just sat there, upside down. I always pulled the adjustable steering wheel down low, an inch or less above my thighs, and that held me in place, my head covered with mud and broken glass. The radio was still blaring—it was the Eagles’ “The Long Run,” I believe—and I tried to find the knob in the dark to turn it off. Funny. There I was in an upside-down car, smelling the gas as it ran out of the tank, listening to the tick, tick, tick of the hot engine, thinking: “I sure do hope that gas don’t get nowhere near that hot manifold,” but all I did about it was try to turn down the radio.

  I knew the police had arrived because I could hear them talking. Finally, I felt a hand on my collar. A state trooper dragged me out and dragged me up the side of the ditch and into the collective glare of the most headlights I had ever seen. There were police cars and ambulances and traffic backed up, it seemed, all the way to Piedmont.

  “The Lord was riding with you, son,” the trooper said. “You should be dead.”

  My momma stood off to one side, stunned. Finally the police let her through to look me over, up and down. But except for the glass in my hair and a sore neck, I was fine. Thankfully, I was too old for her to go cut a hickory and stripe my legs with it, but I am sure it crossed her mind.

  The trooper and the Jacksonville police had a private talk off to one side, trying to decide whether or not to put me in prison for the rest of my life. Finally, they informed my momma that I had suffered enough, to take me home. As we drove away, I looked back over my shoulder as the wrecker dragged my car out of the ditch and, with the help of several strong men, flipped it back over, right-side up. It looked like a white sheet of paper someone had crumpled up and tossed in the ditch from a passing car.

  “The Lord was riding with that boy,” Carliss Slaughts, the wrecker operator, told my uncle Ed. With so many people saying that, I thought the front page of the Anniston Star the next day would read: LORD RIDES WITH BOY, WRECKS ANYWAY.

  I was famous for a while. No one, no one, flips a convertible at a hundred miles per hour, without a seat belt on, and walks away, undamaged. People said I had a charmed life. My momma, like the trooper and Mr. Slaughts, just figured God was my copilot.

  The craftsmen at Slaughts’ Body Shop put her back together, over four months. My uncle Ed loaned me the money to fix her, and took it out of my check. The body and fender man made her pretty again, but she was never the same. She was fast but not real fast, as if some little part of her was still broken deep inside. Finally, someone backed into her in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, and I was so disgusted I sold her for fourteen hundred dollars to a preacher’s son, who drove the speed limit.

  I tell that story to show just how effectively I wasted high school, and came so close to wasting my mother’s sacrifice. I had dreams but no ambition. I cut class and shot twenty-foot jumpers in the gym. I made a solid C average. I never, ever did any homework. I read things I wanted to read, but I never studied the things the teachers thought important. I was the master of ceremonies of the talent show, in a borrowed suit. I won contests in public speaking, because talking was so easy, and joined the school newspaper, because words didn’t cost anything. I drank a little at parties and after ball games and on a road trip to Atlanta to try and get into a topless bar—which failed. I never, never danced no disco, unless some young lady wanted me to. I pitched for the Ed Fair Landscaping Dirtdaubers in the summer, and in one game I hit back-to-back home runs. If I needed money for dates, and there was no work because of the weather, my grandmother gave it to me from the change purse she hid under the mattress.

  Because I worked, I paid for my lunches now. I had two pairs of blue jeans, which got me through the week, but nobody had to know that but me. I had a class ring made from fake gold, but nobody had to know that either. I was, if not brig
ht, at least not bad-looking.

  I should have studied hard and tried to win a scholarship to college, should have seriously prepared myself for the future, should have focused on dragging myself out of poverty, the way so many people do. But of the varied weaknesses in me, the strongest is a desire to live for the moment, and let tomorrow slide. That is fine, if you are a Kennedy. It was dangerous for boys like me, or at least, it should have been.

  But I had a charmed life. The wreck had proved it, as other things would, all my life. Even then, I was smart enough to know that when you perform without a net, you by God better not fall.

  When I took the girlfriend of the biggest and baddest ol’ boy in town to a football game, and he came after me with a carload of goons, I just out-ran him, first in my car and later on foot. The noble thing would have been to stand and fight him, and if honor had been at stake, I would have. But honor was not what was at stake, but a girl named Allison who was just a friend, anyway. If you are going to get beat to death, do it for love.

  My senior year, I borrowed money from a friend—I still owe him a hundred dollars come to think of it—and bought a bright-orange Suzuki 750, water-cooled. It would run 125 if you could hold on, but people called it the Water Buffalo because it was so heavy. In the summer I rode it bare-legged in tennis shoes, which was suicide. A wreck on pavement or gravel would have skinned me to the bone, so I could not wreck. I laid it down only once, at a red light in Lenlock, Alabama. I was talking to some girls in a car beside me and, not paying attention, let it lean a little too far to one side. It fell on me, pinning me down like a bug under a brogan shoe.