The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  “They ought not laughed at him, though,” she said. “People’s mean.”

  The words must have tasted a little stale.

  She had not defended him in forty years.

  “Now,” she said, “it was a pretty car.”

  She remembers him that way, in smoke.

  But sometimes, in a blue moon, she remembers him on his knees.

  “It was about four months after we started seein’ each other. We was at Germania Springs, and he was gettin’ him a drink of water, laying on his belly on the creek bank. You could drink it right out of the creek back then, and it was good ’n’ cold. Well, he got a drink, and he turned and looked at me. ‘Will you marry me?’ he said. And I laughed at him and he got mad. I think he cussed a little, too. But, I mean, who asks somebody to get married while they’re on their belly gettin’ a drink of water? ‘You’re kiddin’, ain’t you?’ I told him, and then he cussed again. He said, ‘Hell, I was serious. Will you marry me?’ But I giggled again. I couldn’t quit.”

  She has tried to forget so much it seems odd to try to remember. But she can still see him pushing himself up to his knees for a little dignity. For a second, just a second, he faced her on one knee, just like in a storybook.

  “I mean it, goddammit,” he said.

  His face was bright, burning red.

  “Will you, or not?”

  HE WAS NOT A MARRYING MAN.

  The old men laughed at him, all duded up with that oil bucket in his hand, but the women loved his face. Even men—men so afraid of appearing feminine they would walk a wide loop around the unmentionables in Sears to avoid being in proximity of a panty—would concede that, yeah, that Charles Bragg was a good-looking man. He had a movie star’s squared-off chin with a dashing white line across it, like a dueling scar. He got it one night, drunk, when he banged his face on the steering wheel, but it made him look mysterious and a little bit dangerous all the same. He had Indian blood and cheekbones, proud and high, and his face tanned to dark red. His ears and Adam’s apple were too big but his hands were as small and delicate as a woman’s, yet strong as wire pliers, like his daddy’s had been. He talked country but dressed for town, as all the boys from the mill village did back then, a hybrid hillbilly with silver dimes flashing in his black penny loafer shoes. He chain-smoked Pall Malls and toted a thin, yellow-handled knife in his left hip pocket, so he could get at it, quick. He hid a snub-nosed pistol at the small of his back, but only on the weekends, and never when he was with her. He raised fighting dogs, bet on chickens and loved vanilla ice cream, and I guess he was a scoundrel before he knew what a scoundrel was.

  “He would cut you, if you hemmed him up,” said my father’s cousin Carlos Slaght, whose daddy named him after a label he saw on a crate of Mexican apples in Christmas 1932. “But he was a good boy, all in all.” If you turned him upside down and shook him, as his older brothers were prone to do, dice and a pint of liquor would have bounced across the floor and fifty-two cards would have fluttered down, or fifty-one, if he had one hid. The darkness he had done an ocean away had left a mark on him, sure, but he hid it then, like his tattoos. Back home, he drew his pocket comb like a gun, and could often be seen slouched at a table in the Ladiga Grill, preening, pretending not to notice the girls who noticed him.

  “He walked by me once on the street and didn’t speak, and turned around and followed me down the sidewalk,” my mother said. She caught him doing that, caught his reflection in a storefront window, but she didn’t turn around and embarrass him. She just smiled, and kept walking. He showed up a lot when she was in the café, and he would sit and smoke and drink black coffee and steal looks at her over the top of a paperback western.

  He had a reputation of course, but she didn’t know, and that is the same as having none at all. “Charles always had the women,” said his buddy Jack Andrews. “Nice girls, too, I mean. Church girls. But your momma…He fell in love with her. He made up this picture in his head of how he thought his life ought to be. She was in that picture with him, and he never did get that picture out of his mind.”

  I have rarely been able to describe her, the way she was then. I guess all boys have trouble with that. I said she looked like a movie star, but she was prettier than that, than that blowsy, made-up prettiness. Her face had peace in it then, serenity. It may be, after the way his life had passed, that was what he found to be most lovely of all.

  She was raised in the foothills. When she came to town as a young woman, it was to keep other people’s babies and mop their floors. Then here comes my father, all dressed up and slicked down and pool-hall cool, with the mountains in his own bloodline and the mill village on his driver’s license, but posing as something different, something more. He was quick and sharp as a serpent’s tooth in that white suit, but not sharp enough to see he did not need to pose for her. “Oh, he sure did priss around,” she said. “I just liked his teeth.”

  MY FATHER NEVER REALLY LIVED ANYWHERE but here, in the town where he was born. He was stationed overseas and in Georgia, incarcerated for a while in Virginia and found body and fender work in Texas, but mostly his life passed within the city limits of the northeast Alabama town of Jacksonville. It is a lovely town, and fifty years ago, as he wooed my mother, this was a postcard in real time, its main avenue lined with white-columned mansions and three-hundred-year-old oaks, its working-class people tucked out of sight and down the hill. The through street, old Highway 21, was named for John Pelham, a handsome young artillery officer blown off his horse by an exploding shell in the battle at Kelly’s Ford. General Lee wept when he received news of the death of the boy he called “my gallant Pelham.” But reverence just wasn’t in my father then. In ’55, he drag-raced his rod-knocking Mercury from stop sign to stop sign on Pelham Road, outrunning nobody, just powerfully bored. He checked his hair in the rearview mirror, checked his side mirror for the town’s one and only police car, and laid rubber all over hallowed Rebel ground.

  It ran just two lanes then, north to south. To the west was the mill village and its identical tract houses, each with its one, company-approved tree facing alphabet streets paved in ash, smut and cinders from the mill’s coal-fired power plant. The Pentecostals lived here, displaced mountain people. The mill people climbed the hill to go to town, and hard drinkers from the village liked to joke that if police let them out before they were sober, they could roll down A Street right into their beds. Here, freight cars backed up a half mile, hauling in whole counties of cotton and hauling out the earth itself, from hills of red soil piled at Dixie Clay. The East Side was the fashionable part of town, but the West Side bent its back to the place, powered it, made it run.

  The East Side wore a lace of dogwoods, azaleas and wild plums. Here were the college professors, the merchants and professionals, the landlords and the necktie men, prominent First Baptists and Episcopalians. The nice streets were paved with asphalt and clean, white gravel. “The East Side people dranked about as much as we did,” said Carlos, “but did keep it better hid.” Also to the east, but a discreet distance away, was Eastwood, which most people called Needmore. It was a black community of small, well-tended houses. On weekends, world-class baseball players, held here by color, played in epic games as concessionaires fried fish in big, smoking pots and served it on white bread with a single daub of catsup in the middle, like a bullet wound.

  To the north was the college, a beautiful landscape of brick buildings, tree-shaded and immaculate, a teachers’ school that grew into something more, and a small college football powerhouse. The mascot was a fighting gamecock, and when the marching band played Dixie, the East Siders and West Siders rose together, and roared.

  To the south was commerce, what people even now just call the Highway. You could see two drive-in movies in a five-mile stretch, visit a bootlegger who hid in plain sight, eat the best foot-long hotdog in the known universe and buy a pistol with no questions asked, and still not be more than seven miles out of town.

  In the m
iddle of it all was the square—not really a square at all but a circle. Off to one side squatted City Hall, not an antebellum showpiece, but a yellow fortress pieced from natural rock. For my people, it was just “the jail,” and we knew it the way some people know their church or a Mason’s Lodge. It was an old-time jail with iron bars and iron bunks and white beans seven days a week, but the worst thing about being locked inside was the constant sound of motion outside its iron doors, as the bored young people circled, circled in their cars.

  It was there, in that orbit of Hudsons, Packards and Chevrolets, that my father fell in love, betrayed a buddy, and third-wheeled his way into my mother’s heart. But it’s not like he snuck around about it.

  Lit in the cool neon wash of the lovely old Princess Theater, he wooed my mother while she was on a date with one of his best friends. We have always been the kind of men who do not regard a woman as all that unattainable just because she is attached to somebody else by class ring, engagement ring or wedding band, but as backstabbings go, this one was remarkable, diabolical, and complete.

  It was a Saturday, we believe. Underage roughnecks slouched dejectedly in front of the pool hall as, inside, decorated World War II veteran Homer Barnwell watched over the tables. “I never could play,” he would tell the boys, but he took a lot of money off the ones who said they could. The theater marquee spelled out Johnny Mack Brown for the main event, but promised werewolves for the midnight show. Officer Walter Rollins, who worked days in Hoyt Fair’s sawmill, circled the square in his faded black patrol car. The chief, Whitey Whiteside, had been shot to death in the mill village just months before by a drunken man named Robert Dentmon, a few days before the two men had planned to go fishing. His widow, Mary, took money for the show in her booth under the marquee. Lorrene West sold fresh popcorn.

  Across the square, the Boozer brothers, buzzing clippers in their hands, shaved flattops so close it was a wonder they didn’t draw blood. Ed Johnson cashed paychecks at the IGA, and Alfred Roebuck welcomed both the hopeful and bereaved into his furniture store, selling sofas in front and coffins in the back. Little boys counted pennies on the soda counter at West Side Drug Store as, in the nearby Creamery, crew-cut college boys in skinny ties chatted up flowers of the Deep South over cones of black walnut, pistachio and butter pecan. A Greek man named George turned big steaks and seared fat hamburgers at the Ladiga Grill, as redheaded Louise Treadaway welcomed travelers off the bus from Anniston at her family’s bus stop café. Old men told lies in decrepit vinyl chairs at Mathis Cab, and a black cat glared from the window at Reid’s shoe shop. Some nights there was gunfire and heartache and car crashes, but most nights, slow nights like this, you could have cut the whole town out of the air and hung it on the wall.

  The young man my mother was seeing then, a tall, black-haired, green-eyed boy, was a good-looking rake just like my father. They were just hanging out, killing time, when the boy told his buddy Charles that he wanted to take that Bundrum girl out on a proper date. But he had just had his prized ’48 Ford painted a sharper battleship gray, and any fool knows that if you drive a car before the paint dries good, every speck of highway dust in four counties will adhere to the hood. Still, he was anxious. He was pretty sure that if he didn’t take her out, some sweet-talker would.

  “That’s that pretty girl?” my father asked.

  He knew good and damn well who she was. The boy had introduced them some time ago, and my father even asked if he might write her from where he was stationed, somewhere far off and probably dangerous, and just wanted to read a friendly voice from home.

  The boy said yes, she was pretty.

  My father was willing to help a buddy out.

  “You can take my car,” he said.

  The boy was apparently not eager to date my mother in a car that was liable to choke her to death with smut, but he had little choice here. He said, Thank you, buddy, and reached for the keys. My father dangled them but didn’t let go.

  “Do you mind,” he asked, “if I go with y’all?”

  When the boy went to pick up my mother, my father was sitting in the backseat, his suit pressed, a carnation in his lapel. It was cool weather, and all the flower pots and beds were just dead sticks, and she has always wondered if he crawled in a hothouse, or a bedroom window. He did not buy flowers. It was against his religion.

  He just nodded hello as she climbed in the car. The other boy touched the gas pedal, and they left in a black, reeking cloud. The gears were out of sync, so my father, as the engine began to whine, would fling himself forward from the backseat, shout at the boy to press the clutch, and, leaning between the boy and my mother, shove the gearshift up or down or sideways with a horrible, grinding sound, and then settle back into the backseat, till he had to shift again.

  They hadn’t gone a mile when my father began talking to the backs of their heads.

  “I reckon you’re the most beautiful thing in this whole town,” my father said.

  My mother, and the boy, too, didn’t know what to do.

  “I reckon you’re the most beautiful thing I ever seen,” he said.

  She just stared out the windshield, embarrassed.

  “In the whole world,” he said.

  Whiskey can make men talk like that. But there was not one trace, one sniff, on his breath.

  Then he leaned forward and tapped the boy on the shoulder.

  “I’m gonna take her away from you,” he said.

  He did not sound like he was joking.

  The boy could have fought for her, but the world is full of brave boys who limp home with their lips split and still no kiss good night. He was a rough fist-fighter himself and, my mother said, “could be mean as a scorpion.” But my father’s reputation, and his family’s reputation, prevented a lot of violence in those days. A family that so routinely pulled knives on each other was not one you engaged without at least weighing the consequences. The boy was seething, though, and steered the oil-burning hulk to his own house, took my mother by the hand and tugged her away. He opened the door of his still-moist Ford so my mother could slide in, then drove off mad as hell, flinching at every puff of sand or flying leaf that brushed his quarter panels, leaving my father on the sidewalk, grinning like a devil in the lingering smoke.

  That is what she saw, those white, perfect teeth in that devil’s grin, as the other boy told her good night.

  My father took her out himself the next weekend, and the next, and if any other boy even expressed an interest he paid them a visit, and the suitors began to peel away. He told my mother, all the time, that she was just by God beautiful, as pretty as Rita Hayworth. He said these things in a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. You could feel it, not just hear it, feel his whole chest vibrate from that deep voice, as if, like a little car with an engine that’s just too big, the voice could shake that pretty little man apart. Anyway, it is the kind of voice you believe.

  They got to know each other in that wretched car, just riding around; once you saw the movies, and if there was nothing happening at the convention hall, there was nowhere else to go for a month or two. She was a little bit ashamed to ride in it, but only a little. She had the beauty, the currency, to marry outside her class, but the truth was she would have been uncomfortable with a richer boy, with a people who might have looked down on her, or worse, on her people.

  His family was legend in the mill village. The Bragg men drank corn whiskey, played poker, rolled dice and settled arguments with fists and knives and sometimes just acted a little peculiar, but worked hard in the mill, never refused a plea for help, gave away truckloads of food from gardens and hog killings, and asked only to be left alone, at least until the sound of glass breaking and women crying. Their women were long-suffering, loyal unto death, and lost in love, and if they had not been, their men would have rotted in jail.

  “They was respected people,” Carlos said, “with a few vices.”

  My mother’s own daddy made whiskey, but dr
ank and laughed, drank and sang, never took a sip in front of her, never let it change him from a good man into something else. Why on earth, she wished with all her heart, could it not be that way again?

  She remembers a smell of citrus the first time he took her to meet his mother and father. “He had been down to Florida, and their house was full of the biggest grapefruits, oranges and lemons I ever seen,” she said. She knew better than to ask how he got them. A man who could not drive past a rosebush or window box without committing larceny could not be expected to pass a thousand acres of citrus growing at the side of the road.

  His mother and father, little people like him, greeted her at the door. She noticed, with some embarrassment, that she was the tallest person in the room. Bobby, his father, was ironed so stiff he seemed to be all sharp angles and flat planes, like a paper doll with a little, round, white-topped head perched on top. He wore a starched white shirt buttoned to the neck, overalls so new and stiff they made a racket like plywood rubbing together when he walked, and immaculate, black, wing-tip shoes.

  Velma was tiny like her man, and had the kindest face my mother had ever seen. She was already gray-haired, a slightly stooped little woman who worked a full shift at the cotton mill, cleaned houses, helped raise other people’s children and spent every other free moment trying to keep her husband, a rapscallion and brawler when he was well-oiled, from harm at the hands of police, card players, drinking buddies, his own sons, and himself. My father was her baby, the pride of her life. He called her Momma, and called his daddy Bob.

  My mother noticed a tension in them, sitting there knee to knee, and when she looked closer she noticed that Bob was quite drunk. It seemed that he had gotten lit and picked a fight with Velma, and had not sobered up enough to tell her he was sorry. “He got real, real red-faced when he drank, and he was red-faced then,” my mother said.

  “What’s wrong, Bob?” my father said.