The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  “When he pulled away I told Charles, ‘Charles, I believe that was an angel.’ He just smiled again. ‘You do?’ he said. ‘I do,’ I said. But your daddy didn’t believe in angels, I don’t believe. But you know, the Bible says you don’t have to pray to God to send angels, ‘for you will entertain angels unaware.’”

  It was about that time he took us to Texas.

  It was ’63. My father came home one night, sober, and said, “Margaret, how would you like to go to Dallas?” The brothers had found long-term work in Dallas at a big auto body shop. It was life-changing money, and it seemed like the whole Bragg family was planning to move out there overnight. My mother stared at the floor. He was asking her to leave home, leave her sisters and lovelorn mother, to follow a man who could self-destruct anytime, who might choose not to go to work any day, or pop the top on a single, sociable beer, and stay drunk a year. But he leaned across the table and took her hand, and told her this was their fresh start, their second chance in a place free and clear of accusing kinfolks and the persecutions of the law, in a big city where no one knew your history or cared. He said he had just used up this place, just wore out this little town, where he couldn’t drive to the store for a pack of cigarettes without Ross asking him to walk a straight line, and couldn’t go a mile without his junk car breaking down at an intersection, shaming him. He promised her a lot that night, promised to work steady and make a living they could be proud of, promised not to drink in the house in front of her and the children, or drink so much or so often. But he had promised her a lot before. He stayed sober for several days after that, to show her he was serious, to prove to her she could trust him this time, and every night he begged her to go with him, and start over. She finally gave in, but the day they left she got so nervous she dressed the baby, Mark, in new clothes, picked up her suitcase, walked out and left him on the bed.

  “They was hurryin’ me,” she said, the kinfolks swirling around, fussing, crying, saying goodbyes. Bot Wall was giving her and her boys a ride to the bus station in Anniston, but he was bad to let his car run out of gas on the way to anywhere, so they had to build time into the trip for that. “Well, I got Sam in the car, and you, and then I got in and said, ‘Let’s go.’ And Granny Bragg stuck her head in the window and said, ‘Margaret, honey, are you not gonna take the baby?’”

  We rode a bus halfway across the country, on faith. Sam was seven, I was four, and Mark was one, and I would stare for hours out the window at the swamps and rice fields and piney woods, at the vast, tea-colored ocean I now know was Lake Pontchartrain, at cattle without end and the oil wells that looked like iron dinosaurs. I would watch until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then crawl to the floor and sleep under my mother’s feet. It was just a two-day trip on that lumbering bus, but it seemed like a great journey, some vast expedition, before I heard the bus driver announce “Dallas, Texas,” and we stepped out onto the hot asphalt. My mother wondered, every mile, if he would come apart before she even got there, if he would have forgotten us. He did things like that. But there he was in that vast parking lot, waving.

  Then, the most amazing thing happened.

  He kept his promises.

  We lived in a house of our own, a little white wood bungalow with big porches and porch swings, and at three-thirty in the afternoon, every day, we would hear the tinkling music of an ice cream truck coming closer, closer. We had never seen an ice cream truck. My mother had a bottomless change purse, full of silver, and she handed out dimes to my brother and my cousins, and led me by the hand to the cut-out door at the side of the truck and said, just like we were somebody, “Two ice cream sandwiches, please.” I would eat all of mine as fast as was possible, and she would give me the bottom half of hers.

  I thought I had stepped through some magic window. One day she was dragging me on a cotton sack, pulling all day for a dollar and change, and the next day we were sitting on a porch step eating ice cream.

  “You remember the ice cream truck?” she asked me, forty-two years later.

  I nodded.

  “The other kids sat and ate their ice cream there, from all up and down the street, because we had the best steps, big, wide steps,” she said. They left their wrappers on the steps as they ran off with Sam to play. I would help her pick them up when they left, and if there was chocolate left on them, and she wasn’t looking, I licked it off. She caught me once and told me never to do it again, because it was plain nasty, but I was four, and it was chocolate, and you know how that is.

  It seemed like all the yards were dressed up for a party, but now I know it was just an election summer in Texas. Campaign posters in red, white and blue seemed to blanket every lawn, most of them for Governor John Connally, who would take a convertible ride here with President John F. Kennedy in the coming fall.

  I remember our time there in specks. I remember walking between them at the Dallas Zoo, her toting my little brother, and Sam running around and around in circles, forgetting for once in his life to be a serious boy, because he just glimpsed a live elephant through a fence. I remember seeing the monkeys, what kind of monkey I will never know, only that they smelled like something I won’t even say and really did fling their poo. I remember the baboons, or maybe monkeys, that for some reason did not have any hair whatsoever on their incandescent behinds, and how that made my mother go, “Oh. Lord,” and avert her eyes. For some reason I can still see my father’s clothes in my mind, his short-sleeved shirt with little palm trees on it, and dark pants, cinched high at the waist. He had always gone spiffy. But we were all spiffy now. I remember staring at some big cat through a forest of legs, and reaching a hand up to my father. He did not gently scoop me up but just reached down and grabbed my arm between the wrist and elbow and, because he was so strong, dead-lifted me, dangling, up to his shoulders. He knew I wouldn’t break, or squeal. I was his.

  He went to work every morning, early. He walked, because the shop was just a few blocks away, and if I had been older I would have marveled at that. In a car culture, you didn’t walk much further than the mailbox. It humbles a man, to walk to work.

  On Friday, every Friday for two solid months, he cashed his check and gave my mother money, enough money to live on, to buy clothes, groceries and ice cream.

  “We was fine,” my mother said. “We was all just fine.”

  For her, it was all as mysterious as it was to me. She had never seen a city like that, had never even been to Birmingham. The grocery store, a supermarket, really, was almost across the street, and it was just all so easy, somehow, compared to what she was used to.

  Mostly she remembers the beef, the slabs and slabs of red beef, and we ate it all the time, whenever we wanted. We had steak and biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Velma came for a long visit, and for supper there was Velma’s giant meat loaves, and short ribs with potatoes and onions, and homemade hamburgers with hot Spanish onions and slabs of yellow commodity cheese. “I mean, it was some of the prettiest meat you ever seen,” my mother said. “Me and Charles would go to the store together. We’d never done that before.”

  After supper, he and his brothers would go out in the backyard, or sit on the back steps and sip a beer. The rhythm of the bootleggers finally seemed to be broken here, and they drank a beer or two in the afternoons and quit, unless it was the weekend, when it might be a beer or six. But it was never the spectacle it was before, never the painful, grinding drunks that made her want to go find a hole and slip down in it.

  “He did good then,” she said. “He did real good.”

  I wish I could remember more.

  Sam explored the neighborhood, playing ball and hide-and-seek with the like-aged children until he discovered the home for old men down the street. They would sit in their chairs in the sun, and yarn. Once Sam discovered them, he spent all his time at the home, listening to stories, nodding his head, learning how to whittle or roll a cigarette or fill a pipe, “and at first I was worried about him, because I was afraid some of the old m
en was mental cases, but they wasn’t, they was just old,” and they loved the boy. He was in his true element, my brother, who has always been an old man trapped in new skin, and they would bring a chair for him, and a Coca-Cola, and from a distance he looked just like one of them, my mother said, but with shorter legs.

  There was a Laundromat on the corner, but she still lugged the wet clothes home, to dry on the line. She never liked machine-dried clothes, because they smelled just like that, not like the breeze and the sun. He went with her to do the laundry, too, as if he had remembered why he wanted to be with her, with all of us, and wanted to be with us again. He had never lived in a big city either, but he laughed at her when she saw things she didn’t understand, like pigeons. She had never seen uppity city birds before, birds safe from shotgun reprisals, and the first time she heard them squabbling she panicked. “I was afraid it was somebody beatin’ on them old people, it sounded so awful,” she said. “But your daddy took me by the hand and led me over to the window, and showed me all the pigeons, making racket on the roof—and he didn’t laugh at me. Why, I’d never seen pigeons. I didn’t know they made the awfulest, unnatural sounds.” She never did think much of pigeons after that.

  When it ended, after two months, it ended over a $54 welfare check.

  “Maybe I should have had more faith,” she said.

  This was a wonderful dream, this life, but it couldn’t last, it couldn’t be that real. She waited for the inevitable, for the night he didn’t come home, for the morning he just rolled over and told her to call his boss and tell him he was sick. She waited for two months, and there is a chance she might have waited forever, or maybe quit waiting, and believed in him. But there was a crisis at home that made her have to choose too soon.

  All she had to live on in much of her life with him was money she made picking cotton, taking in ironing, and cleaning people’s houses, never enough to feed and clothe three boys. But she got $18 apiece for us in welfare, $54 for the three of us, and that was enough. But the welfare was writing letters to her at her mother’s house, asking about her status.

  If she was with her husband in Texas, and he was working, then they would stop the check. You cannot explain to a bureaucracy the realities of living, that, yes, she was in Texas now, and yes, he was working now, but that it could all come apart with one popping top or breaking seal. In late July, the welfare woman came to Ava’s house.

  “Where is she?” she asked Ava.

  “She’s out,” Ava said.

  “Out where?”

  “In Texas,” Ava said.

  “I walked the floors then, hon,” my mother told me. “I walked them over and over again, day after day.” On top of it, there was simple guilt. Ava had never lost a daughter to such distance before, and wrote her every day, begging her to come home. Other kin did, too, not believing the fairy tales she fed them about supermarkets full of cheap beef, and door-to-door ice cream sandwiches. They pleaded with her to come home, these kindhearted people who always took her back when things went bad with her man. They did not trust him to do right for long, and in the end, she decided she did not trust him to, either.

  She told him she was going home, and she thinks, although she hates to, that she saw something break in him a little then. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, so she tried to do what she believed was the safest thing for her boys.

  At first he was mad, but he didn’t hurt her, or even yell.

  He begged.

  “Please, give it a while longer,” he said, but she wasn’t leaving because he had disappointed her this time. She was leaving because of all the times before, and he just couldn’t get his mind around that.

  “We was happy,” she told him, “and you done good. But I got to go home.”

  “I won’t send you home,” he said. “I won’t get you no ticket.”

  So she wrote her mother and had her send the check, and she cashed it at the convenient grocery and bought three tickets on a bus for home.

  The night before we left he begged her again to stay, and bought her a giant bouquet of flowers. He bought them, for the first time.

  The next morning she lay in the bed and weighed two months of happiness against eight years of everything else, and walked to the phone and called a taxi.

  Fifty-four dollars, guaranteed.

  But first, she put her flowers in the refrigerator, because she thought they might live a little bit longer there. “I hated to think of ’em dying.

  “He was sittin’on the banister on the porch when we left,” she said. “He looked whipped.”

  He found a girlfriend in Texas, not long after we left. My mother knew because years later, as Velma showed her some family pictures, she came upon the woman’s picture and hid it, quick, under her apron—just not quick enough. He told people he planned to start over, maybe even start a new family out there, and he should have.

  He should have stayed in Texas. He should have built a good, clean life with that new woman and had a whole new round of boys, and lived happy in the Lone Star State.

  But after a while he just followed my mother home.

  * * *

  The Boy

  IT WAS LIKE she drove a ten-penny nail through the last feeble, halting heartbeat of the man I was.

  “Can you pick the boy up from school?” the woman asked.

  At forty-six, I drove car pool.

  At first I was terrified I would run over half a dozen nut-job children on the way to get him, because when the bell rang they exploded from doors as if propelled by a cannon. They all wore the same damn clothes and all looked alike to me, at least at first, and what if I got the wrong one? I was always afraid I would be late, or he would perish from the elements, or get in a car with a stranger, even stranger than me.

  But I always snagged him clean, and we headed for the Sonic, for his tribute. The boy, the woman instructed me, was to have only a small drink, maybe a slush of some kind, so he would not “ruin his dinner.”

  It was a surreal thing, to hear that, like she was emanating from the speaker of a black-and-white television from 1963.

  But the best thing to do, I had learned the hard way, was make like some bobble-head doll.

  Few men get in trouble when they nod.

  I know the boy liked it, when I showed up. I watched for him in the rearview mirror, and when he saw it was me he started to grin.

  “Hi, Ricky,” he always said.

  Nobody but him and my momma get to call me that.

  “Let’s get us a treat,” I always said.

  The Sonic was just around the corner.

  “What do you want?” I always asked the boy, as I punched the magic sugar button and the voice on the other end said hello, and he dutifully gave his modest order, like the good boy he was.

  One day, about nine months into our time together, I punched, waited.

  Three seconds is a lifetime, at the red button.

  “May I help you?” the voice said.

  “I would like a forty-four-ounce root beer float with vanilla ice cream, and a corn dog,” the boy said.

  I just looked at him.

  “Please?” he said.

  “Your momma won’t let you,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, looking around the truck, “is she here?”

  I thought a minute about that.

  “Well okay,” I said.

  Over time we were found out—I would learn that the boy had a perverse need to confess all his sins to his mother—and she said I had to be responsible, said her son had not inherited a stepfather, but a coconspirator.

  I told her I would do better.

  Not long after that, another driver almost hit us as we drove through town. People in Memphis all drive like God is on their side.

  “I know what Rick would say,” he said, from the backseat.

  “What?” she asked.

  “He would say, ‘What the hell does that damn fool think he’s doing?’”

  Then he
just grinned, all proud of himself.

  She stared into me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Don’t ‘What’ me,” she said.

  I knew I needed some vitriol here, some passion, to get out of this.

  “Shame on you,” I said to the boy. “Just because you hear me say things, that doesn’t mean you can say them. If I was a smoker, you couldn’t smoke. If I was a drinker, you couldn’t drink. You’re a little boy. You are not me. You are not me.”

  He beamed.

  He had root beer residue on his cheeks.

  He had stains on his school clothes I did not want to think about.

  His halo hung lopsided on his head.

  And in mid-rant I started to laugh, not at the boy in front of me, but at the boy I was such a long time ago.

  I was five, maybe, playing on the porch with a few plastic army men. Suddenly, the yard was full of cows. A neighbor’s Herefords had found a gap in the barbed wire and wandered into our garden.

  “I ought to shoot them damn cows,” my father said.

  “Shoot them damn cows, Daddy,” I said.

  He laughed and my mother pretended to whip me. I ran and hid behind him, grinning at her from around one leg of his big-legged pants, the kind Ricky Ricardo wore. I never wondered then why that blue-collar man dressed so nice, like the invitation from his rich friends was lost in the mail. Anyway, it was the last time I ran to him in my life.

  Instead of shooting the invading cows, he jumped to the dirt, found some rocks and let rip. He never missed, not once, till he caused a stampede.

  In real time, I rolled my window down to feel the air on my face.

  I found I could remember better, that way.

  The woman and boy must have wondered where I went.

  * * *