by Rick Bragg
I rolled them across my desk.
Seven.
I rolled them again.
Seven.
I do not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in loaded dice. I sat for a long time, clicking them in my hand, touching something he touched. I do not know what I expected to feel, but I did not feel anything good. It was just bones, clean bones. I tossed the dice into a desk drawer to be forgotten with the rest of the junk—.22 rifle bullets, eight-year-old aspirin, foreign coins as worthless as washers from countries I will never see again.
In the last weeks of his life I had reoccurred to him one last time, and he gave me a box of books. For years I lugged the books from city to city, not even sure why. They mattered less, it seemed, with every change of address, and as I got older, meaner, sadder and dumber, most of the books got lost or left behind. I left the last of them on a curb in New Orleans, with a sign that said FREE. By my forty-fourth birthday he had become no more than a question I answered at book signings in nice-sounding clichés.
People who cared about me had, for years, warned me it was stupid to ignore such uneasy dead. One of the most elegant writers I knew, Willie Morris, did believe in ghosts. One night, about a year before his own death, he drank a bottle of whiskey at a restaurant outside Jackson, bounced off the door frame on his way to his car, and told me I would never have any peace until I wrote about my father. Others told me the same, but none as elegantly as him. “My boy,” he said, “there is no place you can go he will not be.”
But that did not seem true. In my life, I swung a pick, drove a dump truck, ran a chain saw, fist-fought some men, disappointed some women and wrote a billion words. I traveled from Africa to Arabia to Central Asia to make a living, or just to see the elephants before they are gone. I had been happy in New Orleans, broke in L.A., bashed with a rock in Miami, dog-cussed in New York, sick on a bus to Kashmir, lost in London, belligerent at Harvard, and greatly compromised in the Gamecock Motel. I was teargassed in the Bazaar of the Storytellers, enchanted by a magical midget in a Sarasota trailer park, and bit on my privates by a spider in a hotel on St. Charles. In one year, I argued unsuccessfully for my little brother before the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, then gave the after-dinner speech at a banquet to honor a justice of the United States Supreme Court. I flew around the world at least three times and landed upside down in a convertible on Alabama 21, blue lights in my windshield, mud and glass in my mouth, and thinking, Man, this is cool.
He didn’t take nothin’ from me, really, that little man.
He had been worth three chapters to me, all he would ever be worth. Whole months went by, and I did not think of him at all.
Then, about three years ago, everything bounced, tumbled, rolled.
I got a boy of my own.
It is not that I went looking for one. I had never dated, in my disreputable life, a woman with a child, and dreaded women who seemed determined to have one. There was no sadness in it, no hole in my life. I did not want a child, the way I did not want fuzzy pajamas, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, neckties, sensible cars, department store credit cards, multivitamins, running shorts, umbrellas, goldfish, grown-up shoes, snow skis, and most cats.
I saw her, and I forgot.
I love women, but had seldom been plagued by the debilitating kind of love other men went on about, till it was just nauseating. My attention span, in romance, was that of a tick on a hot rock. Then I met her, and landed with a thud on the altar at the Peabody Hotel. “I have children,” she told me, and I am sure I heard that, must have heard it. But by the time I regained what sense I had, I was driving car pool next to a ten-year-old boy who, for reasons I may never truly understand, believes I hung the moon.
I guess it is natural that, in the company of the boy, I almost always think of my father. But if you add all the time I spent with Charles Bragg in the first six years he tore in and out of our lives, it comes to only a few months, not even one whole year. I remember him in fragments, because we left him too soon, and still not soon enough. With the weight of that new boy tugging at my clothes, I went to find him.
IN THIS BOOK I close the circle of family stories in which my father occupied only a few pages, but lived between every line. In my first book, I tried to honor my mother for raising me in the deprivations he caused. In my second, I built from the mud up the maternal grandfather and folk hero who protected my mother from my father, but died before I was born, leaving us to him. In this last book, I do not rewrite my father, or whitewash him. But over a lifetime I have known a lot of men in prisons, men who will spend their eternity paying for their worst minute on earth. It came when they caught their wife cheating on them and thumbed back the hammer on a gun they bought to shoot rats and snakes, or got cross-eyed drunk in some fish camp bar and pulled a dime-store knife, just because they imagined a funny look or a suspicious smile. You do not have to forgive such men, ever, that minute. You can lock them away for it, put them to death for it, and spend your eternity cursing their name. It is not all they are.
* * *
The Boy
YOU DON’T SLEEP GOOD in a chair by a hospital bed, but you do dream.
I saw the woman in a bookstore in Memphis. She had the kind of beauty people write songs about, red hair that tumbled to her shoulders in loose curls, jade eyes flecked with gold, lips of the most promising pink. She was tall, and just a little bit slinky.
“Will you marry me?” I asked, smooth as a concrete block tumbling down a hill.
“No,” she said.
She taught at a college, and knew a half-wit when she heard one.
I watched her walk away for years, in my mind.
But I persevered, and we had a great, blistering romance. I wrote her love letters that should have made me gag, and she wrote me the same. I even saved one, for when I am old, or alone.
But she had to ask her littlest boy, who was her world, if she could remarry.
“Sure,” he said. “Where are we goin’ on the honeymoon?”
I turned forty-six in the summer of 2005 and became the closest thing to a father I will ever be, because I loved a woman with a child. I guess it happens all the time.
But a man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog that chases a car and wins. How many times since then have I stared at the boy in dumb wonder, and muttered: “Son, if your momma had just been homely, think how much easier my life would have been.”
The idea of having a boy had always nibbled at me. I could imagine us in a boat in the deep blue, casting into lucky water, talking about life. But the idea of a boy is one thing, while the reality is you spend your last spry years at the Sonic, stabbing at a big red button, then watching him baste the interior of your truck in root beer and barbecue sauce as he squeals, whines, pouts and punches every button on the radio till all you can get is static and satanic howls. At least, I thought, there was just the one. Her two oldest boys were all but grown by the time I came along. The oldest referred to me only as “that dude,” and the middle one, I still believe, is from another galaxy.
But I would tolerate the little boy, for the woman. I believed I was catching him at a good age. He was house-trained, past diapering but still too young to borrow my car or ask me questions on sex, about which, of course, I would be forced to lie. I did not expect much. All I wanted was a brave, clean boy who would take out the trash, be kind to his mother, and occasionally bathe the big dog, which also came with the marriage and smelled as if it had already died. It would be nice if the boy was coordinated, had good oral hygiene, could catch a football, did his homework, and did not run buck naked in the house.
I should have lowered my expectations a little, to “house-trained.”
He refused to hold his fork right, transforming me from what I always believed to be a real man into an etiquette-quoting popinjay. I watched him, amazed, as he chased a single green pea across a plate and dumped a mountain of mashed potatoes on the white tablecloth, all of which he would have scooped
up and eaten if I had not threatened him with charm school. He showered as if he were running through a waterfall, barely getting damp before shouting to his beleaguered mother, “Where’s my pants?” If she did not respond, he would run naked after all. She had to inspect him after every bath because he would not use soap, or wash his hair, or else wash only the front or back part of his head, hoping that would be the part she chose to inspect. I was a boy once, too, but I did not look greasy after a bath, or festoon the backseat in used tissues, or sprinkle the floor mats with takeout biscuit crumbs as if I needed them to find my way home again.
“Enjoy it,” said the woman who bore this troglodyte, “because that little boy will disappear before your eyes.”
“When?” I asked, hopeful.
I almost ran the first time I saw him eat pancakes. He covered a table—and his upper body—with syrup, then spread it like plague across a new day.
In one restaurant, he managed to get a gob of spaghetti sauce on his underarm. “You got some…” I said, pointing.
He licked it off. I did not think it humanly possible.
In another, he blew his nose so loud at the table it trembled the water glasses.
“He’s yours,” I said to the woman.
If he did not like the taste of something, he just spit it out.
“He is not unusual,” the woman told me, but I saw doubt in her eyes.
I hoped a boy so nasty would be tough, gritty, but instead this was a child of piano lessons and gifted schools, a child once rushed to the hospital with a tummy ache, where an X-ray showed that he had merely overdosed on cinnamon Pop-Tarts and Chick-fil-A.
He yelled for his mother to come stomp a spider.
He wept from a boo-boo, or if he was tired.
It seemed too much, that the boy would be gentle, pampered, and nasty. I guess it might have been easier if he had looked, sounded or at least pretended to be a little like me, or the boy I remembered myself to be. But on trips, he traveled with his own pillow and blanket, which he called his “blanky.” He needed them, he said, to be “comfy.”
“Boys,” I said, “do not have a blanky.”
“Yes they do,” he said.
“No they—” and I gave up and walked away.
He was too pampered, too helpless, I thought, to enjoy or endure the company of men like me. He was a sensitive, loving, gentle boy who said his prayers without being told, loved his momma and, to my horror, attached himself to me with fishhooks I could not pull free.
At night, in front of a television frozen forever on Animal Planet, he used me for a pillow, and no matter how much I chafed or squirmed or shoved, he always came back. I would fret and the woman would smile as he dozed on my shoulder, a toxic wad of neon-green bubblegum hanging half out of his mouth. He followed me like a baby duck, stood glued to me in restaurants and stores, and expected me to hug him, as nasty as he was. I hugged, grimacing, as if I had wrapped my arms around a used Porta Potti. He even expected me to tuck him in at night, and as I did I wondered what had happened to me, and who was this nearly neutered man who stood in line for Day-Glo nachos and sticky juice boxes, and paid good money to see the march of the goddamned penguins.
He did not go on the honeymoon, but we felt so guilty we brought him back the next week to Fort Walton. The Gulf was rough and the boy swallowed a 55-gallon drum of seawater, most of which came up through his nose. He would reach for my hand in the water, but the idea of it still seemed wrong to me. “You just stand close, so I can grab you if you go under,” I said. Then a wave knocked him down and beat him up as it rolled him along the bottom, and I had to snatch him up, coughing, spitting. I let him hold my hand for a while as we waded into the shallow water, but as soon as his feet were under him I shook my hand free, because that is not the kind of men we are.
“He’s a little boy,” the woman said.
“He’s a boy,” I said.
“He’s not a little you,” she said. “You can’t make him be like you.”
I only wanted him to be ready. I just didn’t know what for.
I must have dozed awhile. An alarm screamed me awake, my heart jerking in my chest. I expected to see a team of doctors rush in to revive her. But instead a single, solid, middle-aged woman in a sensible smock shuffled in to change out a flattened IV, flicked off the alarm, then shuffled out. I waited for my heart to slow, and caught my mother looking at me. She is seventy now. She likes to quote a poem about an old woman who has come to live uninvited in her house, a wrinkled, ancient woman she can see only in the mirror. I watched her, through the dark and the fog of painkillers, try to figure out who I was. She cannot see a lick without her featherlight, Sophia Loren glasses, but her hearing is fine. She hears with absolute clarity the things she wants to hear, and not one syllable she does not.
It wouldn’t be long till the next shift, the next son. I asked how her pain was and she told me not too bad.
“Well,” I said, “you ought to be ashamed of your damned self.”
My bedside manner was not all it could be in the summer of 2006. I sat by her bed all night for three nights, to watch her breathe. She hated doctors and always had, and that almost killed her. She let a thing as simple as a bad gallbladder degenerate into gangrene, but a sure-handed surgeon in our small-town hospital saved her. I griped in the dark but never told her the truth, how I was never so scared in my life as I was outside her operating room. I mean, didn’t that silly old woman know that once she is gone there is nothing left?
But that was not really true, I thought, not anymore.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked.
“You can bring the boy to see me,” she said.
My boy.
“I like that boy,” she said.
“I know, Momma.”
She plies him with biscuits, and watches him read on the floor. Some women melt around little boys. She did not give a damn that he did not look like us, or come to her in the usual way. He looks like my father’s people, dark-haired, handsome. How odd, he would look like him.
“He’s spoiled,” I said. “You helped.”
She harrumphed. It is her prerogative to spoil a boy.
“He’s not real tough,” I said.
“He don’t need to be,” she said.
The woman says that, that same way. I sat awake another few hours as the window began to glow yellow behind the blinds. My big brother and sister-in-law tapped on the door and came in, half hiding a sack that smelled suspiciously like a sausage biscuit.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Still hurtin’,” I said, “but nothin’ she can’t stand.”
He smiled at that.
Once, a long time ago, we were not that tough either, him and me. But she was, or we would have vanished. I walked into the heat of the morning to my truck and drove through the town that had framed our story for a hundred years, past fast-food restaurants and antebellum mansions, rich cousins and poor cousins, waiting for the same parade. I glanced at my phone, knowing that I should check in at home.
This is what it is like, I thought, to be the circus bear. You pace your cage till they let you out to do tricks. You talk about tuition, hardwood floors, braces and sometimes algebra, and see how long you can balance on that wobbling ball before you go berserk and eat the crowd. Sometimes you bust out, but never get further than the Exxon station before you go slouching home, for treats. You are a tame bear now. They will have you riding a red tricycle and wearing a silly hat before too long.
I dialed, a little fearfully. The woman is mad at me a lot. I make her mad, being me.
The boy never is.
I walk in the door, and the boy never looks disappointed in me.
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
In a Cloud of Smoke
MAN, I WISH I COULD HAVE SEEN HIM. They say he was slick and pretty in ’55, and when he leaned against his black-and-pearl ’49 Mercury in his white Palm Beach suit and cherry-red necktie, he looked like he go
t lost on his way to someplace special and pulled off here to ask the way. He always stole a red flower for his lapel—what magic, to always steal a red one—and cinched up his pants with a genuine leatherette imitation alligator belt. His teeth were too good to be true, his canines long and wicked white, and he wore his wavy, reddish-brown hair swooped up high like the Killer, Jerry Lee. It turned black when he combed it back with Rose hair oil, and when he fought, leading with his right, punishing with his left, all that hair flopped into those blue-flame eyes. He only finished sixth grade but he was drawing good government money then, as a Marine, and drove home every weekend from the base in Macon with one thing on his mind. He liked to pose on the square and see the girls sway by, but wouldn’t whistle because he’d already found the one. “He smiled mischievous,” my mother said, like he was picking life’s pocket, like he was getting away with something by hanging around and breathing air. He was just another linthead kid, but as different from other men she knew, the brush-arbor prophets, pulpwooders and shade-tree mechanics, as the mannequin in Steinberg’s department store was from a cornfield scarecrow. When it was time to go he slid behind the wheel and turned the key, and he looked like an angel, one of the fallen kind, as the big engine caught fire and he vanished in a blue-black, oily, noxious cloud.
“His car burnt a lot of oil,” she said. “It burnt so much oil that a cloud followed him all around town, burnt so much oil he couldn’t keep oil in it, but instead of getting it fixed he’d just go out to that fillin’ station out on the highway, you know, where Young’s used to be, and he’d pull it up to a barrel of the burnt oil they drained out of people’s cars, and he’d dip it out in a bucket and put it in his ol’ car, and he’d just ride and ride. People used to laugh at him. They’d say, ‘Here comes that Bragg boy, in a cloud of smoke.’