The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE: The Stream

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER ONE: In a Cloud of Smoke

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER TWO: The Village

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER THREE: Bob

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER FOUR: Fearless

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Bootlegger’s Rhythm

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER SIX: Flying Jenny

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER SEVEN: My Fair Orvalene

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Hanging

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER NINE: Settin’ the World on Fire

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER TEN: What You’re Supposed to Do

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: At Least a Hundred Dollars Then

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Ross

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Dallas

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Ride

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: One Friend

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Amen

  THE BOY

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Circle

  THE BOY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY RICK BRAGG

  COPYRIGHT

  FOR RANDY HENDERSON

  Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin

  Get six pretty girls to carry my pall

  Put bunches of roses all over my coffin

  Put roses to deaden the clods as they fall

  “Streets of Laredo”

  PROLOGUE

  The Stream

  IN WATER SO FINE, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn’t hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. It took something as powerful as that, as girls, to tug me away from this tribe of sunburned little boys, to scatter us from this place of double-dog dares, Blow Pops, Cherry Bombs, Indian burns, chicken fights, and giggling, half-wit choruses of “Bald-Headed Man from China.” Maybe we should have nailed up a sign—NO GIRLS ALLOWED—and lived out our lives here, to fight mean bulls from the safe side of a barbed-wire fence with a cape cut from a red tank top, and duel to the death with swords sliced off a weeping willow tree. I don’t know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy. Then, a thrust to the heart only bent against my chest, in a place where I could look straight into the Alabama sun through a water-smoothed nugget of glass, and tell myself it was a shipwrecked emerald instead of just a piece from a broken bottle of Mountain Dew.

  The stream began in a jumble of rocks beside the Piedmont Highway, bubbling up cold and clear a half mile from my grandmother’s house. The air always smelled of coconut-scented suntan lotion and lighter fluid, and in summer the white gravel parking lot filled with church buses, poodle walkers, and weekend Hells Angels who might have been born to run, but now lugged along well-fed wives in white go-go boots and polyester pantsuits rolled to the knee. It was a lovely park, but a boy, a genuine boy, can have no real fun with so many Presbyterians puttering around, and so many mommas in one tight place.

  But if you followed the water a meandering half mile to the west, through a dark, spiderwebbed, monster-infested culvert tall enough for a small boy to run through, all the picnickers and weenie roasters vanished behind a curtain of gnarled, lightning-blasted cedars and thick, dark pines. The stream passed under four strands of barbed wire, flowed through a sprawling pasture studded with wicked blackberry thickets and the rusted hulks of old baling machines, then rushed into a dogleg against a high, red clay bank. Here, the shin-deep water pooled into a clear, cold swimming hole, made deeper by the ragged dam of logs, rocks and sandbags we built just downstream.

  This was our place. From a running start, I could leap clear across it, heart like a piston, arms flailing for distance, legs like shock absorbers as I finally, finally touched down. This is where I learned to take a punch and not cry, how to dodge a rock, sharpen a knife, cuss, and spit. Here, with decrepit cowboy hats and oil-stained BAMA caps on our burr heads and the gravel of the streambed sifting through our toes, we daydreamed about Corvettes we would drive, wondered if we would all die in Vietnam and where that was, and solemnly divined why you should never, ever pee on an electric fence.

  This is the last place I remember having much peace of mind. It is where I lay still shaking from the water and let the sun simmer me to sleep, my feet and legs slicked by nail polish to suffocate the chiggers that had hitched a ride on me the day before. I would wake, hard, to the bite of a horsefly, or soft, to a faint, far-off rumbling in still-blue skies and the frightened calls of a mother who always, somehow, foretold the storm. A few times I took a book, but it was hard to read with your brothers pelting you with day-old cow patties and green pinecones. And besides, in those days of bloody adventure, the Boxcar Children moved a little slow, and the Hardy Boys didn’t have nothin’ on me.

  My mother had tried to open the outside world to me in the only way she could, by taking home a volume every Friday morning from the discount encyclopedia sale at the A&P, but the sale ended too soon and the world stopped at the letter K—Kyoto, Kyushu and Kyzyl Kum. I didn’t miss the rest of the alphabet or the world, not here. The only thing that could force an end to perfect days in the perfect stream was the dipping of that almighty sun, sinking into Gunsmoke, hot cornbread and cold buttermilk, and a preemptive “If I should die before I wake” as a shorted-out electric fan droned off and on in a window by my bed. Somewhere out there, my father drifted from ditch to ditch in a hundred-dollar car, but we were free of him then, free of him for good.

  Yet sometimes, when I am wading through my memories of this place, I find the pieces of another day, a day told to me as much as it was truly remembered, because I was so small. My father was still with us then, his loafers spit-shined, his creases sharp enough to cut you in two, and he would have smelled of Ivory soap and Old Spice and a faint, splashed-on respectability. It is not the best or worst story I have of my father, but is worth telling if only because, this time, he was innocent.

  I WAS NOT A TODDLER ANYMORE, but not yet school-age. Mostly, I remember the weather. It was late spring, after the blackberries bloom. Summer does not wait on the calendar here, and by the end of May the heat has settled across the foothills of the Appalachians like a damp dishrag. By Memorial weekend, the flies have discovered every hole in the screen doors, and the grass has been cut six times. But some years, just before four solid months of unrelenting sweat, a cool, delicious wind blows through the hills, mixes with the brilliant sunshine, and provides a few, final sips of dry, breezy, perfect weather. The old people call it blackberry winter.

  It is fine sleeping weather and even better for visiting, and that is what brought us together in the early 1960s. By midmorning, the chert drive in front of my grandmother Ava’s house was crowded with fifties-model Chevrolets and GMC pickups loaded with chain saws, rusted picks and shovels, logging chains and battered toolboxes. There was work in the American South then, good blue-collar work with health insurance an
d solid pension funds. Smokestacks burned at midnight, and coated the parked cars in a film of black, beautiful, life-giving smut. If a man’s family did without, it was his own damn fault.

  The hot-grease smell of frying chicken would have leaked from the windows and screen doors, as it did every Sunday, as aunts and cousins twisted the lids off sweet pickles and stirred yellow mustard into big gobs of potato salad. Gospel music from the black-and-white television mixed in the air with the smell from sizzling iron skillets. “…and now, folks, from Pensacola, Florida, with sand in their shoes, it’s the Florida Boys…” My grandmother Ava, who never really recovered from the death of the one man she ever deemed worthy of a second glance, would nod to the music, and dream.

  The yard was chaos and tricycles, the red dirt and spring grass covered in pink-faced children crying, laughing, screaming, fighting, bleeding. Doll heads bounced across the ground, diapers were lost, green plums and some small measure of dirt were eaten. Wagons and Kiddie Kars crashed and overturned in wild onions and ant beds, but no baby’s suffering, not even a sweat bee sting, lasted too long. Daddies snatched up the afflicted, baby-talked into their ears, and jiggled them well again.

  Older boys walked the nearby field, using Daisy BB guns to harass but miss clean thousands of birds, and shoot each other, giggling, in the behind. My older brother Sam, too grown up even at age seven for all that foolishness, stalked the tall weeds beneath the power lines, knocked big crows off the wire with his air rifle, then nailed them, wings spread, to the side of the barn. A dead dog would break his heart, but he was murder on crows.

  My mother would have been beautiful then, her hair the color of fresh-picked corn, and my dark, blue-eyed father would have been the most handsome man in our part of Calhoun County. They belonged together, light and dark, I once believed. As the clock inched toward noon and the sun flushed out every dark corner of my world, he stood gun-barrel straight and stone sober beside my uncles, cousins and the other men. There would have been hangover in his eyes and in the tremble of his hands around his cigarette, but it wasn’t anything a little taste of liquor wouldn’t heal, once he had shaken free of his wife and kids like a man slipping out of a set of too-tight Sunday clothes.

  The men segregated themselves under the chinaberry tree. They wore double-knit slacks and what we called sport shirts, not one necktie or day of college between them, but capable men who fixed their own cars, patched their own water lines and laid their own bricks. They were a mix of the Old and New South, men who drew their paychecks from the cotton mills, pipe shops and steel mills, but still believed that you could make it rain if you hung dead snakes in the branches of trees. They were solid as the steel they rolled or concrete they poured. They did not drink, did not cuss unless they were in the fraternity of like-minded men, and surrendered their paychecks to their wives the minute they walked in the front door. As they talked they clicked chrome Zippo lighters toward thin, tight, hand-rolled cigarettes, and stuffed strings of tobacco into their jaws until they looked deformed. Some were Saved, some backslid and some as yet unaffiliated, but even the ones who walked in the Holy Holy did not preach to the others, out of respect. If you went to work and fed your babies, you were already halfway home. So they spoke of the secular, of the secrets of fuel injection, how to put brake shoes on a ’64 Corvair, or the best way to worm a good dog. They believed in General Motors, Briggs & Stratton, Craftsman, Poulan, John Deere, International, Tree Brand, Zebco, Remington and Wolverine, and the bumper stickers on their trucks read WALLACE or nothing at all.

  My father was, in the moment, one of them. He was a body and fender man when he was working. He drank, yes, but he had killed a man in Korea by holding his head underwater, and if that didn’t earn you a swallow at home, not much did. The truth is none of them knew him well. He was quiet when he was all right—our polite code for the word “sober”—and his close friends, which were few, said he was only at ease in conflict, fighting, taking some risk. He should have joined a circus, they said, and walked a wire.

  I guess if we have to place the blame somewhere on how that day just came apart around us, we can blame it on the livestock. My mother had let me play in the dirt with the rest of the yard urchins, until I skinned myself raw on a Kiddie Kar. I had just started to weep when my father reached for me, and began to walk with me toward the pasture and stream beyond. It shamed him, to have his little boy cry in front of the other men.

  “I’ll take the boy down to the creek and show him the cows, Margaret,” he said, and I stopped crying as if I had a switch attached to my simple mind.

  “I like to see the cows, Daddy,” I said.

  “I know, boy,” he said.

  That was me.

  Boy.

  I don’t think he ever called me son, just “boy,” but that was good enough. It’s one of those words that bind you to someone strong as nylon cord, if you say it right.

  I was too old to carry, surely, but I swung in his arms like a doll. He was a little man, even shorter than my tall mother, but incredibly strong. Through the open neck of his sports shirt you could see the tattoos of bluebirds inked high on his sunburned chest. My mother hated them, but the little boys were fascinated. It was a time when, if you had a tattoo, you had better be a Marine, and if you had an earring, you had better be a pirate.

  Ahead of us, across the wire, a rust-and-white Hereford bull the size of a pickup watched over his harem, not far from the stream that would become our swimming hole.

  From her chair, her time machine, Ava noticed us. Her screams and curses clawed out at him, and snatched his head around.

  She was coming for us. She was short-legged and bowlegged and it took a while, but she caught him at the fence. He took me by one arm and pulled me close just as she grabbed my other arm and almost jerked it out of its socket. “Give me the child,” she said as she set her shoes in the grass, ready to pull me in two if it meant saving half of me.

  “I’m just takin’ him to see the cows, Missus Bundrum,” he said.

  “Give him to me,” she said, pulling.

  “I ain’t hurtin’ him,” he said.

  Ava read her Bible and sent monthly payments to Oral Roberts for a written guarantee on her immortal soul, but that old woman could cuss like they were handing out money for it, and did, right in his face.

  “You can’t have him,” she said.

  It was like she was pulling against Legion himself, and maybe in her mind she was.

  He turned loose and she dragged me away. He stood at the barbed wire as if he was caught on it. In the yard, people stared. Had he tried to hurt the boy? Unthinkable. He just hung there in the sunlight and paid for the man he was the night before, when he wobbled into my grandma’s yard and threatened to drown us all in that lovely stream.

  I DO NOT KNOW WHY, in all the train wrecks of gibberish she endured from drunken men, that one splinter of foolishness lodged in her mind. I pity him for being punished so much for just trying to take a walk with his son, but you have to forgive old women, who suffer so many fools. It was a good world for drunks then, and a bad world for everybody else. A man could rise up in his drunkard’s raiment at night, dripping poison, and pull it off in the day like dirty clothes. I often wondered, if a man could look in the daylight on the drunk he was, would there be any drunks at all?

  Ava made him look. It did not save him, but it was then he stopped trying to pretend. The immaculate young man began to slough away, revealing more of the drunk inside. It was the beginning and end of everything, the end of hope, and the beginning of the days we lived with him in the absence of it.

  I have never dreamed of my father, but there are things that happened in our last year that seemed like dreams. From that time I carried a cloudy memory of choking in his arms, of the whole room turning red as he clawed at my clenched teeth and poured what seemed to be sand down my throat. It was the year I realized the TV preachers’rants on hell were all wrong, that the devil lives in Alabama, and swims in a M
ason jar. He lost his looks, drank his paychecks, wrecked his old cars, and stiffed the Tennessee Valley Electric until all they would give us was free dark. My mother lived in fear of him, and my older brother, more aware of what was going on than me, lived in pure loathing. I have always felt guilty for the few nights I enjoyed, the perfume of old beer on floor mats, bald tires hissing on blacktop as we rode, him and me, to burn time in the company of sorry men. “You were his favorite,” my big brother told me, but I didn’t mean to be.

  That is the man I wrote of in my early thirties. I summed him up as a tragic figure, a one-dimensional villain whose fists and tongue lashed my mother when he was drunk, who drove us away for months and years only to reclaim us when we again crossed his mind. Against his darkness her light was even brighter, as she just absorbed his cruelties till she could not take them into herself anymore, and wasted her beauty in a cotton field, picking a hundred pounds a day of a crop that was light as air. She turned thirty over an ironing board, smoothing other people’s clothes, standing in line for a government check. He became nothing more than the sledge I used to pound out her story of unconditional love. I wanted more, of course. I wished he could have been just rewritten. But I got what I needed from him.

  It was hypocritical to condemn such a careless man, after my own careless, selfish life, but I did it. I sawed my family tree off at the fork, and made myself a man with half a history. I had just one people, my mother’s, and stood apart as my paternal grandmother grew old and died. Velma Bragg lived for over a century, surrounded by the family she watched over long after old age had taken her eyes. I was too stiff-necked to be one of them, one of her great family. I am truly sorry for that.

  When Velma died, her youngest daughter, Ruby, gave my mother a small red box that held my father’s last possessions, things he owned when he died in the winter of 1975. My mother, not knowing what else to do, gave it to me. Inside it, I found a crumbling, empty wallet, a clip-on tie, and a pair of yellowed, mismatched dice.