The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  That night, he just picked, and they let the liquor run through their blood, circle their heart, and soften their heads, like a pillow, without laying down. It did not matter if the lyrics were sad. It never had. He picked and my father rested. The thing that outsiders never understood about old country music, the music derived from Irish ballads and mountain folk songs, was that the sadder it was, the better it made you feel. It told you that you were not alone on this miserable rock, not fighting anything special, anything new.

  “What you gonna do now, Charles?” he asked.

  My father’s dreams had shrunk, become more practical. He intended to romance as many pretty women as possible before he found the one he wanted, the one he could not live without, and have fat, pretty, happy children, and maybe get out of this town after all, this time for good. He was still in uniform, but there was plenty of blue-collar work out there in the big cities. Detroit, maybe? Half of Alabama had moved to Detroit, to hang bumpers on Cadillacs. He had always wanted to try on a big city, and see if it fit him all right.

  Jack told him that seemed fine.

  “We never did say no more of it, that other,” Jack said.

  Jack watched my father meander to the car. He walked with his back straight, with dignity, but his legs belonged to somebody else. He fired up the old smoker and left, the tires wandering.

  Jack put his guitar away, the way a nurse puts away a hypodermic.

  We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly

  And bitterly wept as we bore him along

  For we all loved our comrade so brave, young and handsome

  We all loved our comrade even though he’d done wrong

  * * *

  The Boy

  THE FIGURINE on the basketball trophy seemed familiar.

  He was clean-cut and handsome, the boy made over, in chrome.

  The engraving read:

  MOST CHRIST-LIKE

  The boy has several trophies in his room, most of them for sports-manship. He asked me if I had any, and I told him no, but I did get whistled once for elbowing a man in the stomach on the foul line at the YMCA, during a time-out.

  “I wasn’t always a good sport,” I admitted.

  “Why?” the boy asked.

  “I just wasn’t a good boy,” I said. “I mean, I wasn’t good.”

  It was painful, to watch the boy’s team play. It was a church team, so there was no cussing except for what little bit might have escaped my lips in the bleachers, and I had to be careful myself, being as I was in the gym of the Lord. There was a lot of running up and down the court, but not a lot of scoring.

  “Do you not ever pants anybody?” I once asked the boy, referring to the practice of tugging down another player’s shorts on the foul line.

  “No,” the boy said.

  “Want to?” I asked.

  “No, he does not,” said the woman.

  They played mostly other suburban churches, with final scores of 12–6, and 7–2, till the day finally came when they played a team of inner-city children from Memphis.

  The home team walked into their threadbare gym in mismatched uniforms. One of them, a fat kid, had no strings in his sneakers. There were only six of them, and two of them, the biggest two, were girls.

  “This is gonna be bad,” I whispered to the woman.

  She looked at me, questioning.

  “For us,” I said.

  One of the two girls scared me, and I was a spectator. She stalked the hardwood floor as if she could smell the weakness in the white-bread boys. If one of the little boys got close to her, she plowed through them, and if one tried to drive the lane, she put them on the floor.

  The first little boy went down hard, curled up in a ball, and sobbed. The second, the one she put into the wall, lay in the fetal position, as if she had knocked him back in time. The third, a big kid himself, took an elbow, and lay on the floor like cast-off clothes.

  So the woman was right. Our boy was not special.

  The boy only got to play about half the time, and for the first time I was kind of grateful. But with so many weepers on the floor, he had to take his punishment sooner or later. He was not a great shooter, but he tried hard and played good defense. He took a carom off the board and was dribbling up-court when the big girl came at him like a locomotive.

  “Oh Lord,” I said out loud.

  She reached for the ball with her left hand, and, still moving forward at a dead run, slashed her right elbow across his mouth.

  I have never seen a finer elbow thrown, at any level.

  I still don’t know how he kept his feet. The ball went rolling, and as players from both sides chased after it he just stood there, hurting. Then, he came wobbling diagonally across the court, toward his mom.

  No foul was awarded, no time-out was called. It was surreal, in a way. As the game continued down the court he just meandered to the bleachers.

  “Go back,” I said.

  Then I saw his face. His lips were already swelling.

  “Don’t cry,” I said under my breath. “Don’t cry, don’t cry…”

  He didn’t. He just wobbled on, till he stood before us.

  “She knocked out my teef,” he said, and spit them into his hand.

  The girl had snapped his front teeth in two.

  He handed the pieces to the woman.

  Then he looked me right in the eye, and walked back on the court.

  “THAT’S MY BOY,” I shouted, and I thumped my chest.

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At Least a Hundred Dollars Then

  IT WAS THE YEAR my mother came to dislike roses.

  Their first year together was a good year, mostly, their one good year. She worked keeping house for the East Side ladies, and in the early evenings she filled her time with flowers. She spent hours, days, coaxing them to grow in cracked plastic ice cube trays, in the middle of whitewashed tires and in pots made from cut-down Purex jugs. Even when she didn’t have a leftover dime, when a five-cent packet of seeds was too much luxury to lavish on herself, she would take a cutting or a bulb from her sisters’ gardens, and she would have flowers. She had sweet williams, in purple and blue, and yellow marigolds, orange day lilies, and zinnias, which she called old maids, in red, pink, orange and the rare white. She found something pretty about spider plants, with blooms that looked like dangling legs, and grew them in discarded paper cups. She even grew roses, but they always seemed unfaithful, somehow. “They always stuck me,” she said.

  He was still stationed in Macon then, so she stayed with her momma and daddy, when he was away. But when he was home they stayed with his parents in an old house on the edge of town, not far from the mill village. The place heaved and sighed with family, wives, husbands, children, sweethearts, grandchildren, cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and people just looking to be fed. They all seemed to love her and treated her as family, and she loved them back, till the whiskey arrived, and the whole clan came to pieces for days, leaving women and men in a shaky aftermath, blinking like hurricane survivors in a landscape of blackened eyes and broken sticks.

  He said it was only temporary, that life. They fled it together, and rode through town, looking at FOR SALE signs on the narrow streets of the West Side, knowing damn good and well they lived in a FOR RENT world.

  He did not buy her a ring, at first. His sister Fairy Mae gave my mother one of her old wedding bands, just till he could do better. He saved money and, in that first year, gave her a plain yellow gold wedding band and an engagement ring with a tiny diamond. “They was real, and your daddy gave a whole lot,” she said. “It was at least a hundred dollars, even way back then,” she said. They were new, not once-tried pawnshop rings that carry the bad luck and unhappy spirits of the people who wore them before. These rings were new in the box. She was afraid to wear them, because she worked with her hands in soapy water, so she borrowed her daddy’s hammer and drove a nail into the wall, and hung them on it. That way she c
ould work, washing and ironing other people’s clothes, and still look at them.

  It took patience to love my father even in the best of times. He would volunteer to sweep the floors for her, because the Bragg men did things like that when they were all right, and he would sweep hard and vigorous, gouging at the corners, making the old wood floors shine. One day she noticed little humps in the rug in the middle of the floor, and in fact noticed little humps in all the rugs, on all the floors. “He would just sweep the dirt under the rug,” she said. “I told him not to, and he would say he wouldn’t do it no more, and then he would.”

  He got into fistfights and came home bloodied, and when she asked what he was fighting for, he explained with the depth and veracity of a six-year-old: “’Cause he got me mad.” He left broken glass in the yard from target practice with a .22 pistol, and locked himself in the bathroom for hours at a time to read stories like “I Battled a Giant Otter” and “The Whip-Crazy Killer of St. Paul,” in magazines like True Detective and Man’s Life. The outhouse was still the only place, in that roiling family, there was any peace. When my mother complained that, in her condition, she needed a little more access, he built her a little outhouse of her own. “He put a little window in it, so I could see out,” she said, shaking her head. It never occurred to him that people could also see in.

  He drank, of course. He had flat out lied about that. He loved to fish but would not fish sober, and would get drunk and fall in almost every single time. “Mark, that mud was slicker’n owl shit on a linoleum floor, and…” and he would blame it on everything except what it really was. On a road trip to Florida, he got drunk and stole an alligator, a four-footer straight from the pen at a roadside show, and stored it in the trunk, not as a prank, apparently, but as an investment. He figured there were several wallets, belts and key fobs in it, but he got pulled over in North Florida by the highway patrol and waited what seemed like an eternity for the trooper to write the ticket and disappear. He hopped out right there, opened the trunk and, using the tire iron as a prod, gave the thing its freedom.

  Then, on a frog-gigging trip, he and his brother Roy had enough whiskey to make them believe they could wade all the way across Aderholt Lake. But they didn’t want to get their pants wet, so they had my mother drive their shoes and pants around to the other side of the lake, as they wobbled off across the water in their boxer shorts, tridents in their hands. The bottom was mud and weed and rotted everything. “What does the bottom feel like?” my mother shouted to them. “Feels like plush carpet,” Roy said, and he and my father found that so uproariously funny that they began to laugh uncontrollably and had to hold to each other to keep from falling down. Passersby, some with little children by the hand, stopped to stare at two grown men knee-deep in the lake and in their obvious underwear, giggling and clutching each other while trying not to mortally wound each other with their three-pronged spears. They couldn’t have gigged a milk cow if someone held it still.

  But I think the whole whiskey-drinking world knows there are good drunks and bad drunks—not the men drinking but the experience itself—and those were mostly good drunks, then. They were not binges, really, not weeks at a time, but weekends, as he held to family tradition, to the almost sacred rhythm. He would announce he was going squirrel hunting, which meant he was going to get drunk, or say he was going rabbit hunting, which meant he was going to play cards and get drunk. He never stayed gone long and he always made it home at night, and if you ask some women what they will settle for in an imperfect world, that is it, exactly.

  He drank mostly as she worked, because in the beginning he did not want to waste his time with her by making her unhappy, and if a drinking man marries a teetotaling woman, there is no way to close the distance, when he is drunk. He did not get drunk in front of her at first, but she would return from a trip to town or from cleaning a house to find him so, the way a stern momma comes into the kitchen to find a child with a cookie on his breath.

  But the world was backwards, or upside down, in his daddy’s house. Most people come home to get sober, to get all right, but at home he did not lock the liquor out when he closed the door, he locked it in. Toward the end of that first year together, she began to lose him to the family tradition. He rejoined his father and brothers at the table, around that can.

  Drinking men who remember that white whiskey say there was something special about it, something unreal. It hooked you like heroin, till it was hard to do much else with any pleasure, any real enthusiasm, except sip, swallow and pour, and as the weekends tumbled by he spent a little more time with it. On Sunday evenings, sometimes wobbling a little, he lifted his uniform out of the closet, hung it carefully on the hook over the backseat, and drove southeast to Macon, to be a Marine again.

  One afternoon, just a few days after he left for the base, a friend brought her a newspaper that said Marine Charles Bragg had been badly injured on his way to the base in Macon after running his car into a bridge railing, and had suffered severe head and chest injuries. He was in the hospital for weeks and in recovery for months, and though the Marines considered him fit for duty, Carlos, who knew something about car wrecks if not broken bones, said my father hurt the rest of his life from fractures in his chest and ribs. “He walked different and moved different and you could see him shifting his weight sittin’ down, because he hurt so bad,” Carlos said. He ate aspirin like M&Ms, and found a new reason to love the liquor. It was a painkiller now, not as good as morphine but close, close enough.

  “People said it was Korea that pushed him over the edge, but it was that wreck. That hurt him bad, and he wasn’t sober much, after that,” Carlos said.

  This was how their first year passed, with him broken up and hurting, medicating himself. From the beginning, they had seen each other only on his weekend passes, and it occurred to her, as she began to show, as their first anniversary neared, they had known each other less than a month, if you counted up the days.

  “I married a stranger,” she said.

  Like a few billion women before her, she believed that having the baby would settle him down. For a while, it did. He bought her a gown to wear in the hospital, and bought a tiny pair of overalls, tiny shirt, and four tiny pairs of socks, all blue. It would be a boy, he was certain. It had to be. It was his.

  But the odd thing was, no matter how much she told him how much he meant to her, he never quite believed. It is not a condition unique to him, I now understand. He lived in a common insecurity some men have about women, born of the simple fact that they can never quite figure out what women think—which, in his defense, is a little like trying to map the cosmos on the back of a Juicy Fruit wrapper with a toy telescope and a piece of chalk.

  It wasn’t enough that she loved him.

  It wasn’t enough that she said so, all the time.

  He had to be shown, to know it, absolutely.

  He got into trouble on base—what, we’re not sure—and the officers canceled his next few leaves. On his last trip home, the last time she would see him for weeks, she had to work part of the day, cleaning a lady’s house. She rushed home as soon as she could, so they could have just a few moments together. But the house was quiet. She ran from room to room, calling his name. She ran through the living room and checked the kitchen, rushed from bedroom to bedroom. She remembers turning in a circle, light-headed, then sat on the edge of a bed, and cried. She noticed, then, a scrap of cardboard taped to the front of a beautiful old dark wood chifforobe.

  It was a note from my father.

  Mark,

  I am sorry. I had to leave today. They would put me in the jail if I didn’t show up on time. I will write you, and see you when I can. I love you,

  Charles

  “It was just a little piece of cardboard,” she said. “It was three inches wide and five inches long.” She sat back down on the bed, the note in her hand, and cried again. Five minutes passed, maybe more.

  Then, behind her, the door of the massive old chiffo
robe slowly opened, and my father, resplendent in his dress uniform, tiptoed into the room.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She spun around.

  He just stood there, smiling.

  She forgot to be mad, forgot the cruelty in it.

  “Where you been?” she asked.

  She asked it a half dozen times.

  She should have balled up her fist again and punched him in his goddamn nose.

  But she just wrapped her arms around him, and waited for him to go for real.

  Later that day, my mother, her brother William, and his wife Louise drove my father halfway to the base in Macon, then let him out in Roanoke, to take a bus the rest of the way. She cried all the way home.

  When they pulled into the yard, he was standing in the front door.

  He was smiling. He had hitched a ride at the bus station, and beat them back to Jacksonville. He was AWOL by morning, and a fugitive by afternoon.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she asked.

  “I wanted to come home,” he said, and to her, he sounded like a little boy.

  “They’ll come get you,” she said.

  But he just stayed, and stole the days. The sheriff and his deputies came for him, once, twice, more. They never looked very hard. It was federal government business, and they had enough to do. He hid in the woods, at kinfolks’ houses, and in the chifforobe. “I never did figure out why he didn’t want to go back,” she said. “Sometimes your daddy did things that didn’t make any sense because he just wanted to do them. Sometimes he didn’t think things through real good.”

  He finally left in handcuffs.

  It was irresponsible of course to risk the future on the here and now, but if he was telling the truth, and maybe he was, it was because he just couldn’t stand to leave her.