The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  It was foolish for any man, especially a married man with sons, but it was who he was. I guess it made him feel alive. I guess Ross was his wire.

  “He’d always say, ‘I outsmarted Ross,’ as he come in the door,” my mother said.

  It wasn’t like it is now, when the cars could hem you in. There was no other car in Jacksonville, especially on days there was a sewer emergency, so police had to run a man to ground to take him in. Ross would always find him, sooner or later, as he did that day he rolled up to the house where my father, mother and grandfather were working on the roof. He fired his invisible bullet, then walked to the ladder, and waited.

  “He was always telling everybody how sorry Charles was, how somebody ought to take him out in the woods and beat him to death,” said Jack Andrews. Sometimes, when my father was drunk or fighting or sometimes doing nothing at all, Ross would walk up, moving light and quiet for a big man, and crook his finger. My father would run if he could and fight if he was hemmed in, but Ross would just snatch him off the ground, bang him against the side of a car, then carry him like a child to jail.

  “Ross had a big belly, but was fast and he knew how to use his fists, and Charles just didn’t have no chance,” Jack said. “He’d have made two of your daddy.”

  He never beat or whipped him when he was in custody.

  He never starved him.

  He just put him in chains, in plain view.

  “Ross wanted to own him,” Jack said. “What it was, he had to break you. He hated disobedience. If you didn’t cower down, didn’t bow, he wasn’t satisfied. Charles wouldn’t. It wasn’t enough that he put you in jail, or on the work crew. He had to break your spirit, and he couldn’t break Charles.”

  One day, when my father was free, Ross saw my mother in town.

  “How’s your man?” he asked.

  “He’s working, doing good,” she said.

  “Well, I know he don’t treat y’all right,” he said.

  He tipped his hat.

  “You call me if there’s anything I can do.”

  It stopped being fun after a while.

  He and Jack liked to string trotlines then in the Coosa, up near the little town of Ohatchee. They would take Purex jugs and nylon cord, and bait the lines with whatever foul-smelling meat they had. The next day they would pull them in, and there might be crappie or catfish, always something. One day the lines were gone. Close by, they noticed varmint traps. A man named Johnson, a good friend of Ross’s, was the only trapper they knew.

  Johnson sold fur to department store buyers, and supplied fish to Ross in return for occasional favors. “No matter what he ever got into, Ross took care of it,” Jack said. Johnson was gray-haired, crew-cut and stocky, and had a reputation for smiling in a man’s face, “and popping a knife in you,” Jack said.

  “Well, we went to his house, me and Charles, and we’d both been drinking,” Jack said, “a little bit.”

  They found Johnson on the couch.

  “What you want?” he said.

  “You know anything about that trotline?” my father asked.

  “I know about lots of trotlines,” he said, and laughed.

  “Well this’un was ours,” my father said.

  The man’s smile faded, but he didn’t move, just lay there.

  “We saw your traps, right close by,” my father said.

  Johnson ignored him, like he wasn’t there.

  He was so unconcerned, he looked like he might take a nap.

  “You gonna just lay there,” my father said, “or do I have to pick you up to knock you down?”

  Johnson jumped to his feet as my father clubbed down with his fist. There was a crack, and the man crumpled to the floor, holding his face. My father had on a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots, and drew back his leg, to kick the man in the head.

  “Whoa,” Jack said, and grabbed him, and half carried him out the door.

  “What you gonna do, stomp him to death?” Jack said.

  “Yeah,” my father said.

  His face was bright red, twisted and ugly, but he let Jack push him into the car. In his mind, Jack said, my father could see those fish sizzling in Ross Tipton’s kitchen.

  My father knew Ross was untouchable. The best he could do was knock the hell out of his friends.

  Ross got serious, then. There are two definitions of wrongdoing in my hometown, and they have nothing to do with felony or misdemeanor. All that really matters is whether your crime required you to be sent off, or do your time at home. You could be sent off for stealing a car radio, and not sent off for opening up a man’s belly in the parking lot with a hawkbill roofing knife. If you were not sent off, you did your time in the city jail, so your momma could come see you. But if you were sent off, you went to county, or to an institution. Back then, it was at the police chief’s discretion where you did your time, and it was then, around ’59, Ross sent my father off.

  It was just a few months, for driving drunk, but it was a different jail. In county, the junkies screamed all night, peed on the floor and toted shivs made from melted pocket combs rubbed against the floor until they were needle-sharp and hard as bone. He would lay in his bunk and hear men’s teeth clack from the violent DTs, see them rock back and forth when the truth was he could have used a drink himself. Whiskey runners in overalls and dope peddlers in pointy shoes stared at each other, white and black, through the cells. But my father was a model prisoner, and worked his way up to trusty. He moved through the jail without chains, pushing a mop, emptying trash. He only had a few weeks left to serve when he escaped, and no one knew why he took the keys when he did, except to stick his thumb in the eye of the men who put him in a cage.

  Later, free again, he and Jack sat in his car at Germania Springs, listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes, as my father planned the destruction of the chief of police.

  He laid out a simple plan. He and Jack would put in a call to the dispatcher, late at night, and say that two delinquents were throwing trash, breaking beer bottles and raising cain at Germania Springs. Ross used prisoners to keep the park clean—it was his pet project—and would be livid. He would rush over alone, because Ross wouldn’t need help with delinquents. “We’ll lay for him with baseball bats,” my father said. As Ross stepped out of the car they would smack his head and break his legs, to bring him down, break his gun arm, and beat him to death.

  Jack just looked at my father’s dark silhouette.

  “We can’t,” Jack said.

  “Why not?” my father said.

  “’Cause they’ll put us in the electric chair,” Jack said.

  “I don’t care,” my father said. “I intend to kill the son of a bitch.”

  It is not unusual here, for men to get drunk and talk about killing. If you’re not talking about women, you must be talking about killing somebody. Jack spent a big part of the night talking my father out of his revenge, reminding him what he had to live for. He was pretty sure Ross would be hard to kill, would have shot my father or beat him to death or put him in prison forever. It was crazy. My father should have been home with his wife and babies, not out with Jack plotting the death of a chief of police, on a school night.

  Jack talked all night.

  The electric chair didn’t scare my father, but life in prison did.

  Jack talked on that, on the eternity of it.

  He told him it was a long way to the prison at Atmore, down on the Florida line. Poor people, sometimes, didn’t have a way, couldn’t afford the gas.

  “You won’t never see Margaret again,” he told my father.

  Men are forgotten, he said, so far south.

  “Oh hell yeah, he’d of done it,” Jack said, thinking back. “Your daddy wasn’t afraid to die.”

  But he did not want to disappear.

  MY FATHER WAS ALREADY WAKING with the shakes when I was born. He never stopped hating Ross, but as his life dwindled it wasn’t much of a contest. People who knew my father still blame Ross for q
uickening his end, and I guess I do, too. But the truth is he never broke my father down. The whiskey and TB did that. It is a hell of a way to win.

  As his career as chief neared its end, District Attorney Bob Field was finishing an investigation into Ross’s dealings, prompted by complaints from private citizens who served on grand juries, and by police officers and ex-officers who felt “the system may be breaking down.” Field said the major shortcoming in Jacksonville seemed to be the disposition of cases made by police officials outside the authority of the court, and, while it was found that Tipton had signed judges’ names to docket sheets and warrants and established the amount of fines on his own authority, he felt there was no criminal intent. He said, though, Jacksonville was the only police department he knew of that had no systematic way to keep up with evidence. People in the village laughed. Evidence was what Ross said it was.

  Ross Tipton was chief until he was sixty-eight years old. When he retired, on June 17, 1981, the State of Alabama had Ross Tipton Day. People wrote to the Jacksonville News to applaud him, to thank him for the money he gave to hardship cases, food to hungry dogs, and the justice he meted out to men who thanked him for sending them to prison. Faye Pritchett-Renfroe, of Tenth Avenue, wrote: “Thank you for the many fines you paid out of your own pocket on Monday morning so a father or husband could go to his job after squandering his family’s grocery money on booze, for the clothes and food you purchased for less fortunate, for the care given to the habitual drunks of our town, and for looking the other way when young people were arrested for minor things, for taking children fishing, and thank you for having been our friend. It is my family’s wish that your retirement will bring you joy and contentment, and may you know the peace of the Lord.”

  In the years my father dwindled, Jack still had occasional run-ins with Ross. He was married then, working third shift at the mill. He tried to stretch a dollar where he could, and was using old tags on his car, hoping no one would notice. Ross did. He told Jack not to move the car out of his yard till he bought tags. Jack told Ross if he couldn’t drive he couldn’t work. “I got two babies got to be fed,” he said. Ross told him he would have to walk. But later, he sent word to Jack that he guessed it would be all right to drive the car to work. “That’s what I mean, about the two sides of Ross,” Jack said. “There was evil, and something else. Once he had power over you, he was happy.”

  I HAD JUST ONE criminal encounter with Ross Tipton, if you don’t count the ones I committed behind the wheel. It was a weekday in summer and I was about eight years old. I walked to Germania Springs, where my father once plotted to kill Ross Tipton, and amused myself. I swung on a swing set and bounced rocks against a tree till I was hot enough to wade in the cold stream. I was still mightily bored, so I found some chert rocks the size of cantaloupes, and started a new dam.

  “What you doin’, boy?” a big voice said.

  I looked up to see the biggest man I had ever seen above me on the bank. He had on a white shirt and black pants with a yellow stripe running down each leg, and a big black gun belt. I had seen him a hundred times, but he had never spoken to me.

  “You can’t dam that water up,” he said.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “Well, now you do,” he said.

  There were no cars in the parking lot, so he must have wondered how I got there.

  “Where you live, boy?” he asked.

  I pointed across Roy Webb Road to Ava’s little house.

  Everyone knew we lived there when we ran from my father.

  “You’re Charles Bragg’s boy?” he asked.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  He did not say anything mean, did not say anything about him at all.

  “You tear that dam up, and fish them rocks out,” he ordered.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  He turned and walked to his cruiser, an old man in thick glasses walking soft on tender diabetic feet, but I was still scared to death. I fished out a rock or two, but as soon as he was gone I was running wide-open, stopping just long enough to check both ways on the blacktop before springing across, tearing through the yard, jerking open the screen door and stumbling into the hot little house.

  “Ross Tipton’s gonna put me in jail,” I shouted.

  My mother told me to stop playing folly, to go outside and play. But she told me not to go to the spring again, for a while. I hid in the bushes and watched the police cars circle in the gravel lot. After a few days, I figured I was safe, that they had forgotten my crimes. But now that I know my father better, now that I know Ross, I know I finally let him win, after all this time.

  He got one of us to call him “sir.”

  * * *

  The Boy

  THE BOY STOOD at my side in a black tuxedo, holding the ring. He was grinning, grinning. I thought his head would pop off, from grinning like that.

  I had been single twenty years, when the woman’s middle boy walked his lovely mother down the aisle. It took guts, for that boy to do that. I guess it took guts for both of them.

  Later, a rhythm and blues band played into the night on the roof of the Peabody Hotel, the big river pushing by, immense and silent in the dark. The boy danced until the last bass note fell on the floor, his shirttail out, his face covered in sweat. He did the electric slide and the funky chicken and probably the boogaloo, and of all the things that happened that night nothing impressed the old people more than that boy, dancing like he did. I don’t know what animated him that night, but if he was worried about me, about how he fit into all this, it didn’t show a lick. He just tore it up on that shaky ground, and figured it would all be all right in time.

  The script for the nuptial had me coming down at the last minute, just before the bride.

  The man holding the stopwatch was a competent, pushy if not imperious friend named Dana Rosengard.

  I came down from my room a few minutes early.

  “It’s not time for you,” he said. “Go away.”

  I turned and walked back into the elevator.

  I could run for it now.

  No one could say I had not given a good-faith effort.

  One of my best friends, Chris Smith, watched it happen.

  “You sent him away?” he said, incredulous. “You had him here, and you sent him away?”

  But I came back.

  And now I stood there, watching that boy throw down to “Mustang Sally.”

  In the din, in that whirl of friends and relatives, I remembered my last year in the wild. I washed my hair and my laundry in dishwashing detergent, and both got squeaky, lemony clean. I never wore an ironed shirt or even wished I had one. I still lived in hotels, mostly. I spent some nights in my mother’s cabin in the foothills, some nights in a house near Mobile Bay, some nights with friends in Tuscaloosa who had a magic refrigerator filled with limitless pie. I left clothes scattered ’round so I could travel light, and my mail piled waist-high. There was nothing in it that could not wait, even bills. I shot water moccasins with a .22 pistol for relaxation, wrote some words, waded a sparkling river in Montana, made some good money in Miami and still spent a good bit of time walking in New Orleans, till the water washed so much of it away. Then I was caught, and the wild was in my mind.

  This year, we added a new laundry room. I got a flu shot. I put the silver car, the one like James Dean had, up for sale.

  They took a million photographs the night of the wedding.

  Me, I have never taken pictures. I just figured I would remember for as long as I can, and then when I am old and lost, I will not have to sit at the county home, a photo album on my trembling knees, and wonder who all those people are.

  But I would like a picture of that boy dancing. Even if I forget his name, I think it would make me happy to look at it.

  “Whose boy is that?” some codger will ask me.

  “I ain’t sure,” I will answer, “but look at him go.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN
/>   Dallas

  MY FATHER’S LUCK was running out in ’62,’63.

  He might have been snuffed out in the day-to-day violence of his time, but Jack believes God protected my father, for one last chance to be with my mother, to be with us.

  “I knew a man in Atlanta who sold pistols cheap, Saturday night specials, and I would go over to Atlanta and get some and sell ’em from the trunk of my car at the Spur service station I was running in Anniston,” he said. “Well, one day me and your daddy was comin’ back from Atlanta with some pistols. I had that ’56 Chevrolet, brown and bronze—your daddy loved that car. Well, it started snowing, and there wasn’t but one way to get to Atlanta then, one good way, and that was on ol’ 78. And it was a dangerous road, and the more we drove the harder it snowed, and there wasn’t nobody on the road but us. I guess the rest of the people had more sense. Well, you couldn’t see nothin’, and I told Charles, ‘I hope this road don’t freeze over,’ but it did. We topped this hill, blind, and here come a eighteen-wheeler off the top of that mountain. I cut the wheel to miss him, and it was like we was in slow motion, as that car began to skid to the edge of the road, to the drop-off down the side of that mountain. ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Here we go.’

  “I come to, and saw we’d rolled. The first thing I said was, ‘Charles, you all right?’ And he told me he was. ‘Don’t kick that door open, Jack, ’cause I got a door open over here,’ and we crawled out, it just snowin’ like hell. I looked at your daddy and said, ‘We’re gonna freeze to death,’ but he just smiled. Well, we climbed back up to the road, and that’s when I heard a car comin’. It was a Chevrolet, black, and there was this old man in there with a hat pulled low over his face, this wide-brimmed hat like they used to wear, and I guess he might have been ninety years old. He said, ‘Where you need to go?’ and I told him we needed to get to Oxford, and he said, ‘I’ll take you there.’ He had on dark clothes, and that black hat, and I wondered all the way home what that old man was doing out there by himself on that dangerous road. But he drove us home on them slick roads, and let us out, and I never did even get his name.