by Rick Bragg
“But we didn’t know nothin’ really, about girls. One day I had to go to the bathroom real bad out behind the mill, where they had all these outhouses set up, and I snatched a door open and there sat Missus Edna Allen. And she just looked at me. ‘I will be out in just a little bit,’ she said. But I was already tearing out of there at a dead run. That ain’t the way you want to find out about girls.”
My father loved girls, but there was no girl he was in love with, not that Billy knew. He was in love with the idea of girls, all girls, and he would sit in the circle of lies at the bonfires they built in the middle of dark fields and talk about a shape, a look, a sound, long before he had firsthand knowledge. Even Garfield claimed more knowledge than he had, unless getting your face slapped on the square is considered second base.
The bonfire, made from pine and trash and whatever they could find, would pop and shoot sparks till it singed someone, and then they would laugh about that. They talked for hours, till their mommas’ calls drifted in from distant porch lights. Billy cannot remember one story they told. It was being there, he said, that was worth remembering.
Some nights, walking home, the gaggle of boys would see what seemed to be a meteor arc through the night, a ball of fire with an orange tail six feet long. It would land in the wet grass with a hiss and splatter of flames and roll smoking across the field. It was kind of beautiful, on a slow night, burning red and orange in the air. But when one of them, the bravest, rushed over to pick it up, it was just a softball soaked in kerosene. He threw it to the bigger boys, who chased it back and forth across the night sky until it just consumed itself, and winked out.
“Daddy got a job a couple years later up in Albertville, sharecropping, and got free rent on a house,” Billy said. “We left the village, and I lost track of your dad. I came back when I was seventeen to work in the mill, but your daddy was done gone.”
I asked him if he kept up with any of the other boys.
He heard Bill Raines was still alive.
“But I think most of ’em’s dead, son,” he said.
I heard one or two of the others might still be alive, and tried to track them down. I found a Wallace Key in the Anniston phone book, and dialed the number. An ancient voice answered the phone.
“I been lookin’ for you,” I said.
“Who?” he said.
“Wallace Key.”
“Who?” he said.
“WALLACE KEY.”
“I’m him,” he said.
“I think you played with my daddy, Charles Bragg…”
“Who?” he said.
“CHARLES BRAGG.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t recall.”
My heart sank.
I asked him, twice, if he remembered Billy Measles.
“No,” he said, “I don’t recall him, either.”
I guess a bonfire only burns so long, too.
“Could be,” the old man said, “you got the wrong Wallace Key.”
In the background, I could hear a television roar.
“Wallace Key,” I said, my voice ratcheted up. “Lived in Jacksonville in ’45. Liked to buck-dance.”
“No,” the old man said, “I never did.”
He said there were about five of them, around, with that name.
“I know that Wallace Key. He died.”
He told me he was sorry he was the wrong one, and hung up.
But I wasn’t sorry.
I am sorry dancing Wallace Key is gone, but in a way I was relieved. I had started to count on the notion my father the boy was someone people remembered, and I didn’t like the idea that he could be forgotten like everything else.
“I won’t never forget your dad,” Billy said, looking at his boots.
His trailer on the Alexandria Road is spotless, his yard immaculate. There is a wagon wheel by the front gate, and a permanent porch. Living here, you realize that just because a house is dragged in by a truck, it doesn’t mean it will ever be dragged back out again. No college men, not a one, remember my father’s name, but they will never forget him in the mill village, or mobile homes.
As for those outhouses, I remember how my father used to laugh every time he saw one upright. They had been a refuge once, when he was small, but that wasn’t how he remembered them. They were trophies.
The statute of limitations, surely, has long run out, but the last living princes of Frogtown will not inform, not turn, not rat each other out even when so many of them have escaped into their graves.
“I guess I turned over that Shuttles gal’s outhouse every time I seen her in it. I didn’t wait for Halloween,” said Bill Joe Chaney. “She was about three hundred pounds, but once you got ’er to rockin’, well, she just had to go. But I do not believe your daddy was with me when I did that, and if someone else was to say different, well, that’s their business. I’m sayin’ he was innocent, of that.”
Then, looking me right in the face, he winked.
To escape detection, some of the boys would turn over their own outhouses. Then, the next morning, they would go around the neighborhood to help the other people set their outhouses upright. What good boys, the people said, and sometimes they pulled out a change purse and gave them a buffalo nickel.
“Oh, we was innocent back then,” said Billy Measles. “We was innocent all the time.”
* * *
The Boy
SHE WAS HAPPY with a gentle, helpless boy, because a boy like that would need her forever.
“That one will love you forever,” I told her, certain of that.
Some boys just have Peter Pan in them.
But sometimes there is a sadness in mommas so deep you are afraid to get close to it, lest you fall in.
She had a door frame in her house in Memphis marked with her boys’ names, ages and their heights, year after year. She would have ripped it off the wall and broken it in two, to stop time, to keep them all needing her forever, and loving her the way little boys do.
I destroyed one of her memories, by accident. Throwing a football in the front yard with the middle boy and the little boy, I threw a pass with less than pinpoint accuracy, barely missed the head of the woman who was sitting on the front porch, and shattered an old clay pot. At least, I thought that’s what it was.
She just stood there, looking at the pieces.
“It had the handprints of all my boys in it, in the clay,” she said.
Some days, you wish you had never left Alabama.
“I’ll glue it back,” I said, and never did.
She saved the pieces.
I tried to make it up to her, with another keepsake. The woman had a tiny wooden table and chair in the living room, in front of the television. All three boys had sat there, eating breakfast, mesmerized by cartoons. It was made for a five-year-old but at ten the last little boy sat there still, ridiculous, like an elephant on a motor scooter, till the wood split under his weight.
“He looks kind of silly, doesn’t he?” I asked her.
“No,” she said.
I glued it back together for her, the best I could.
It may be I am jealous of this boy.
I watch him sometimes and I try to put myself behind his eyes, but there is just too much distance between that boy and the boy I was. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if we had met on a playground, in a neutral time, both of us just ten years old.
I think I would have beaten him up.
I did pick and shovel work when I was his age. I ached to grow up, to get away. I watched my mother break herself on her responsibility to us, to lift us a few inches off bottom. You love her for that, but you always wonder why it had to be you, and her, that way.
“My dad’s house,” the boy told me once, “has four TVs.”
He has all the love in the world. He has everything. What did he get from me, from being around me?
I told the woman once that I should have found a poor woman, with a poor child. Then, at least, I would have had someth
ing, something solid and concrete, to give to them. And it would have mattered to them, those things. It would have made their life better. I would have made their life better no matter how badly I messed up at everything else.
I grew up in my grandmother’s house, a Jim Walter Home, a small wooden box. You lived elbow to elbow with people, knee to knee, but there was a room in the back, a tiny bedroom that was all mine. My mother made it possible by sleeping, all her young life, on a living room couch. There was no door, no privacy. You passed through my room to go to the bathroom. There was no light fixture, just the naked bulb on a bright orange drop cord. It doubled as a storeroom. Clothes, boxes, everything we owned, leaned against the walls. Mice and rats and chicken snakes lived in the maze of boxes, and skittered and rustled in the dark.
Long before I had a boy, I thought of the room I would give him.
I gave him two.
In our Tuscaloosa house he has a flat-screen television, a desk and bookshelves, an ergonomic chair, file cabinets for his schoolwork, all on a gleaming hardwood floor. On the walls I gave him the adventures I thought were missing from his world. Paintings promised him travel by sea, air and train. In a big poster, a seaplane dropped from a tropical sky as a beautiful girl in a grass skirt, flowers in her hair, waited by a blue lagoon. Dolphins jumped across the waves on one wall, and pirates—I always wanted to be a pirate—leered down from the shelf. You have to walk through his room to get to a bathroom, too, but it is all his. A grown-up guitar leans against one wall. When I was done with it, done nailing, decorating, I found a chair and just sat there, wishing it was mine.
On the Alabama coast, in a house I always wanted not far from Mobile Bay, a sign in his room welcomes you to a TROPICAL PARADISE. He has a papasan chair, another television, and a floor plan big enough for Frisbee-throwing, or a football game. Marlin leap from the walls, and he has a chart with pictures of every game fish in the Gulf of Mexico. There are boogie boards leaning on the wall, diving masks and flippers on the floor. His room has a view of the pool.
I used to daydream myself away from my room.
I want the boy to do that too.
I just don’t want him to have to.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVEN
My Fair Orvalene
MY FATHER THOUGHT no girl would resist him, at thirteen, and if he had kept his eyes from wandering outside the village he might have been correct. But he didn’t figure on Orvalene. She had blonde hair that was darkening to brown, fair skin, and made her own clothes. “I would not say that I was beautiful,” she said, fifty-six years later. But she was. She had to be. My father, so full of his little self, would not have looked twice if he had not seen a beauty there. They went to school together at Cedar Springs Junior High School just outside town, “but I don’t remember him being very diligent, as to school.” She believes the first time she ever really had any interaction with him was in the summer of her eighth-grade year. “We lived in Angel Station, close to the railroad tracks. As I remember, I was sitting on the porch, hemming a dress I had made, and I saw this horse and rider coming up the road. As they got closer I saw it was Charles, and I don’t know if he was coming to see me or if he just saw me on the porch and decided to stop and talk to me. I remember he had dark hair—long and slicked back—and dark skin. And…tell me, did your father have really pretty teeth? When I tried to remember him, I kept seeing those pretty teeth. I didn’t have pretty teeth, and it was the first thing I looked at. I guess I’d have to say that he was being a little bit flirty,” and might have been sweet. “He was just so bold, so much bolder than the other boys, and he just seemed older and wiser than the other guys. He said, ‘Why don’t we go for a ride?’ Well, my daddy was Baptist. We went to Angel Grove Baptist Church. And you know how Baptists can be.”
He did not say, as he swaggered up: “Would you like to go for a ride?”
He said: “Let’s go for a ride.”
“No, I can’t do that,” she said.
He asked again before she even had a chance to explain herself.
Her father, an auto mechanic, and mother, a seamstress, had rules. “When we were here by ourselves, we were not allowed to go off, and we were never allowed to bring people in the house,” said Orvalene. She didn’t quite know what to do about this boy who just showed up and expected her to go riding off into the sunset.
“I think he knew he was a good-looking guy—he always tried to look good, always dressed nice. I remember checkered shirts,” she said. “I think he knew he had some features that were quite acceptable.”
He chatted with her on the porch as the horse, his father’s horse, cropped at the grass. The horse was Able Lady, a chestnut, sleek and lovely. Bob wouldn’t have an ugly horse.
“Let’s just go,” he said again.
She told him no again.
He said, well, he reckoned he would just go, then.
“Can I have a glass of water first?” he asked.
Orvalene went inside to get his water, and when she came back he was leaning in the doorway.
“He scared me, a little bit,” she remembers.
“Come on. Let’s just go for a ride,” he said.
She was a little scared, not of my father, really, but of the possibility her father or mother would come home and find a boy at the threshold of their home. But he just drank his water, and rode away.
“He was determined,” she said. “And he was…confident.”
“Full of himself?” I said.
“He was that,” she said.
“Would you have gone, if you could have?” I asked her.
“Oh, Daddy wouldn’t have let me. The first question he would have asked me was, ‘Where does he go to church?’ And I don’t think that your daddy went to church, did he?”
No, I said. But, I thought, if it hadn’t been for a weedy ditch in Frogtown, I am pretty sure he would have fought clear into the parking lot of one.
“In that world, in that time, if you didn’t go to church, there had to be something wrong,” she said, and there was. My father was trouble no matter how you looked at him, and it didn’t matter if you were a Baptist, Methodist, or howled at the moon.
His pride wounded, he never rode by again, and he never told about it around the bonfire because they might have kidded him, and he would have had to beat them up—two or three of them at least. He had tucked his shirt in, mounted his charger and gone to claim a princess.
It might have been the first time he realized that being a prince in Frogtown might come with a tinfoil crown.
* * *
The Boy
THE BOY LOVED STORIES, and after a few months, after being shushed by the woman in mid-sentence a few thousand times, I finally figured out how to tell them to a little boy. I told him about seeing crocodiles lunge out of the water to seize a wildebeest in the Masai Mara, described coming face to face with a black rhino in a forest of thorns, and how the Masai warriors jumped high into the air around a popping fire as they sang of the killing of lions. I left out the women and children I saw starving against the wall of an Ethiopian church.
I told him I had been to the great deserts to see camel trains plod across a burnt-orange horizon, and stood on the same sand as Alexander the Great. I omitted the bombs, and men who leapt through flames from burning tires to prove their love of a man named bin Laden.
I told him of voodoo priests in Haiti, of zombies and pounding drums, but never mentioned bloody coups or funeral flowers cut from tin.
“He’s lived one inch from death,” the boy told his mother.
She rolled her eyes.
In my office, he saw guns, a lever-action Remington, a 30.06 with a scope, 12-gauge over-and-under bird guns, the stocks gleaming, blued barrels shining—because all I did was polish them now. In my mother’s house he heard us talk about being boys, tough boys, fighting boys.
It is easy to impress a ten-year-old.
That was the problem.
It happened
as I tried my first real lecture. He is smart, real smart, but sloppy in his schoolwork. I was, too. I told him, sitting in the living room, he had to do well in school, that it was his job. He just smiled, because a lecture from me was just ridiculous, as if the Abominable Snowman told you to stop tracking mud in the house, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon told you to be sure and put the toilet seat down.
Still, it made me mad to be ignored.
“I’m serious,” I said. “This is your world. You have to succeed in it. You are not tough enough to make it in a blue-collar world.”
It stung him.
For a while, he almost killed himself, to show he was not a pampered boy.
He had been so lazy he would help his mother carry in groceries by lifting a roll of paper towels, and skipping away. Now he staggered under bags, cartons of soda, and watermelons.
He suffered greatly from allergies, and it would break your heart, sometimes, to hear him trying to breathe in his room at night. Without thinking, I asked him one late afternoon if he wanted to throw the football. I had not noticed he could barely breathe. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the woman said. But the boy jumped off the couch, announced that he was fine, and after a half-hour search for his sneakers, ran into the yard.
He was so hopped-up on decongestant he could barely see. I threw a bullet at him in the backyard and it tore through his fingers and smacked him in the face, hard. He lay as if dead and he would have cried, he said later, but he could not feel anything above his chin.
I ran over to him, but he jumped up, pushed me away.
The welt rose on his face.
The other hurt was there long after that one faded.
He hurt me back a little, now and then.