The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ride

  MY MOTHER TOOK HIM BACK when he came home in summer of ’65, but whatever magic there was in the air in Texas did not blow this far east. It would be our last year, a nightmare year. But at least, if we all perished, we would be buried like sultans.

  My mother took out a burial policy on me, Sam, and the baby boy Mark. It cost a dollar a month, and would have paid three hundred dollars if one of us had died. At the first of the month, a man named Dee Roper knocked on the door, took an envelope from my mother’s hand, wrote out a receipt, and chatted long enough to be civil. Sometimes my father was there, sitting at the table in the middle of the day, a thin line of puckered scars showing through his undershirt at the bridge of his shoulders, a glass of whiskey in his hand. My mother called it “shell-shot,” and I think she meant shrapnel. “You got to be patient with that boy, because he’s been through something you and me can’t even imagine,” Dee Roper told her, and she told him, politely, yes, sir, she would be. I was five years old, sick and puny and almost translucent. I remember being ill, but did not remember it as so bad, or often. The croup and flu settled in for weeks and months. The worst was whooping cough, pertussis. My grandmothers treated me with white whiskey mixed with crushed peppermint, rubbed my chest with salve, and I still couldn’t breathe. There was only one place I could catch my breath, in the wind rushing through the window of my father’s doomed, raggedy cars.

  “You won’t drink with the boy in the car?” my mother admonished him, every time.

  Even that much could have set him off.

  “I won’t,” he lied.

  My mother remembers only letting me go once or twice. As I remember, we rode around the world. My father would set me in the front seat, against the passenger-side window, and we would motor. We would cross over into west Georgia on the mountain roads, the car radio blaring bluegrass and Texas Swing. It seemed like there were always five beer bottles—always five—rolling and clinking in the back floorboard, and one last, brown bottle dangling from the fingers of his right hand. He drove, always, with the wrist of his left hand draped across the steering wheel of the heaps he would ride to death, and jump from the saddle as they collapsed underneath, like an Indian off a dying horse. I would roll down the window—all the way if it was summer, halfway when it was cool—and the wind would rush in and fill my nose and throat, till I was pacified. If he was four or five beers gone, he would let me thrust my head and shoulders out of the car and I would ride that way for miles, until my teeth began to click. Sometimes he held to the back of my pants, to keep me from falling to my death, but most of the time he would not.

  I wasn’t afraid of him yet, not all the time.

  I didn’t understand it all that much.

  “You will feed the boy?” my mother always asked.

  “Hell, yes,” he would answer, mean, as if she thought he didn’t have sense to do such a simple task. Then he would run into a gas station and hand me a pack of Golden Flake Cheese Curls and a big RC.

  It was the only place I remember him talking to me. I guess he talked baby-talk to me when I was littler, but here he talked to me like I had some sense.

  “What you read in school?” he asked.

  “Dick and Jane and Spot an’ ’em,” I said.

  He asked me if Spot was a girl dog or a boy dog.

  I told him I didn’t know. I remember it because he thought that was just funny as all get out. I think it was the first time I realized that drinking, before it killed you or at least sent you to hell, could make you happy.

  He conducted slurred spelling bees, mile after dark mile. The headlights would settle, just a second or two, on a road sign, and he would ask me to spell it as it vanished in the dark.

  The towns and wide places in the road were easy.

  “Spell ‘Broomtown.’

  “Spell ‘Ringgold.’

  “Spell ‘New Moon.’”

  The rivers were hard.

  “Spell ‘Tallapoosa.’”

  The creeks were impossible.

  “Spell ‘Choccolocco.’”

  He rattled across Ketchepedrakee, Enitachopco and Tallassee-hatchee.

  We didn’t even try.

  I guess I should just be glad we didn’t kill anybody we met on those narrow, one-lane and two-lane bridges, his headlights weaving from one guardrail to the next. I was good at spelling, in a car, anywhere. I hated math, because it was dull, and once you were behind, you were behind for life. I was behind on the second day of first grade, and have been behind ever since. But I could spell at fifty-five, sixty miles per hour, spell even on the wrong side of the road.

  The police stopped us one night in Piedmont. I remember because the only part of the officer I could see was his flashlight beam, his belt and gun, and how he kept his hand on it, as he stood there. My father might have had a license but he didn’t have it then, but it was a different time, when such laws were more like suggestions. He asked my father if he had been drinking, stabbing his flashlight beam at the bottles. All my life I have wondered why he didn’t throw his empties out, instead of holding on to the evidence. “No,” Daddy lied. “Them’s old.”

  “Your daddy been drinking, boy?” he asked me.

  “Un-uh,” I said.

  I wondered if they had little jails, for boys and midgets, or if we all went to the big jails. I had seen a television show where little children just slipped through the bars, and I told myself I was brave enough to try.

  But he just let us go. They often did things like that. They would even help a drunk in his car, and tell him to drive straight home.

  Sometimes we went just to get beer or bootleg whiskey, sometimes to pick up his paycheck at a body shop or garage, and sometimes to pick up his father, Bobby, and take him for a ride. They would listen to the radio—the old man liked Ernest Tubb—and either pass a pint bottle of homemade whiskey back and forth or sip from beers wrapped up to the neck in brown paper bags. One of my most enduring memories of my father is tied to that old man. We were driving through Piedmont, past the hillside cemetery that is so steep you wonder if they have to bury people standing up, and my grandfather Bobby was holding to a bottle half hidden by a popcorn bag.

  “Don’t turn that beer up, Daddy,” my father said. “We’re in town.”

  “I know how to drink a damn beer,” Bobby said.

  I lived a long time after that believing you could hide any sin in the Bible if you had a big enough brown paper bag. I wish they made them people-sized. I would carry one in my trunk, or sleep in one, just to be sure.

  I was always glad when he dropped the old man off. This was our time, mine and my father’s. In cold weather he would crack the glass, just a little, turn the heater on wide-open, and I would ride with my feet and legs warm and a drill-like sliver of frigid, beautiful air boring into my lungs.

  “You got a girlfriend?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What’s her name?” he asked.

  “It’s a secret,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “She don’t know she is.”

  He laughed and drank and drove.

  He never took Sam or my baby brother Mark—he would have been more likely to be alone with a viper than a needy infant child. My two grandmothers, Ava and Velma, would keep them, or our aunts and uncles would. It may not make much sense, but I believe he left Sam at home because he believed my older brother could see into him, and disapproved. I think he didn’t like to ride the roads with that disapproving gaze against the side of his face. Me, I betrayed them both, my mother and brother, for an RC cola.

  He took me to the chicken fights, at least twice. I had seen chickens fight to the death in the backyard, so there was no horror or mystery in the cockfights. Like a lot of country boys, I had already begun to rate life on the kind of covering things had on them. Scales, on fish or snakes, didn’t count for much, and feathers didn’t count for much more. When told by m
y grandmother to “go get us a chicken,” I would take the broom handle from behind the door and leap from the porch into the backyard. I would play God and choose the one I believed to be the tastiest, then run it down and whack it hard about the head or neck. Then, I would go play until the plucked and fried pieces reappeared with biscuits and gravy. To demur at death at a cockfight would have been hypocritical. I guess the supper birds didn’t suffer, but if I had a choice of how I would go out, I would rather be a gamecock than a Sunday dinner.

  He might not have wanted us at all, his boys, but he sure didn’t want weak boys, boys with no guts. He took me, I believe, to see what kind of boy I would be. I never cried over a damn chicken in my life. He even let me ride his shoulders once, so I could see better. It is no wonder, surrounded by such spectacle, I didn’t really notice the dollars that slipped through his hands, and what it all meant. He bet a piece of the rent on a speckled Dominicker, and let the rest of it ride on an orange and black game rooster. He spent milk and bread for a pint jar of clear whiskey, and the electric bill on a gallon can.

  We would get home after the other boys had gone to bed. My mother sometimes worked the night shift at a truck stop, but if she was home she would be sitting up, or on the porch. I would crawl into the bed I shared with Sam and try to tell him what I had seen or heard, but he would tell me to be quiet and go to sleep, and I would lie awake for hours and listen for the train. The tracks ran right close by, and the train put me to sleep like a drug.

  I didn’t know, of course, how bad it was going to get. My brother Sam did understand, understood the levels of drunkenness, and could see ruination day coming closer.

  My father lost all of us that year.

  But he lost his oldest son first.

  IT TAKES A SPECIAL KIND of man to stomach a dogfight. I grew up with hard men, but only my father was able to choke back enough of his finer nature to handle a dog in the pit, and I believe he could only do that drunk. It was a ferocious battle till one dog turned cur, and began to yelp for its life, as if it was begging the all-powerful circle of men to spare it, and pry the jaws off its torn throat or mangled leg. It was not supposed to be a fight to the death. Two dogs, pit bulls, mutts, others, would be loosed in a shallow pit or barn or squared-off place in the underbrush, and fight until one of the dogs tried to quit. The problem was, some dogs would not turn cur, and others would not stop savaging the dogs that did, so some would be so badly mangled by the time a fight was called that they died right there, or in the truck beds on the way home, or were put out of their misery with a pistol shot just outside the circle of lantern light or headlights that lit up the pit.

  There was always a fight on the state line, because there was something about that invisible border that seemed to accept a stronger dose of meanness than other places. He always owned dogs, scarred, one-eared brutes that spent their wretched lives desperately jerking against a logging chain, till a night would come when he would hook a two-foot length of lead chain to their collars, and drag them off. They snapped at us but never bit at him that I could see, as if they recognized one of their kind. We never saw them again, so I guess he never won.

  In the fall of ’65, he opened the passenger door of his car and something wonderful sprang out.

  He was a boxer, and he was the prettiest dog I had ever seen. He was mostly brown but with a touch of white on his chest and black around his face, and he had brown, intelligent eyes and a two-inch stump of a tail that was always in motion, not just wagging, but damn near vibrating. Even with that ridiculous tail, he looked dignified. His eyes had a natural squint, and that made him look like he was always thinking hard about something, though he was probably just thinking about what all dogs think about: biscuits. He was as tall as my baby brother was high, and when he was told to “stay” he did not so much stand as pose, his head high, like a show dog. He never growled, even when I tried to ride him around the yard, and he would chase us for fun. His muscles rippled under his coat and he was hard to the touch, and when he ran he bounced from the ground, like a hard rubber Super Ball.

  From the second he leapt from the car, he was Sam’s dog. There are no magical stories to tell of it. The dog did not drag my brother from quicksand with his teeth, or crawl home after being mauled by a bear to lead a rescue party to starving children. He was just a good dog, and my mother and I would sit on the front porch of the falling-down house we rented, and watch the boy and dog run through the cornfield across the road. When they were tired they lay together on that porch, the big dog on his back, paws in the air, as if dead.

  “Crazy dog,” Sam said.

  Always that.

  “Crazy ol’ dog.”

  We never found out where my father got him. But people who know drinking, gambling men know that they bring home all kinds of trophies—worn gold wedding bands, cheap wristwatches, porch furniture, rusted bicycles, wrench and socket sets, suit coats, cowboy boots, used tires, car batteries, stereo speakers, car radios with the wires still hanging from the back, Saturday night specials with the three of the six chambers still loaded, leather jackets, dogs, but never cats. We figured he won him. It wouldn’t have mattered to us if he stole him. He gave my serious brother a gift that made him laugh out loud.

  “You can’t fight that dog,” my mother told my father.

  “I ain’t,” he promised.

  Like I said, he wasn’t a magic dog. He didn’t make everything all right. My father was mean to my mother, more and more, but for a while, maybe, we didn’t notice it as much. My father’s self-respect continued to peel, and finally he gave up on work altogether, living off the welfare check that my mother drew. He was living drunk, now. One night he staggered into the house and greeted my mother with a big smile. He was missing his front teeth. The thing she had loved about him most was his white, perfect teeth, and he had gotten them pulled, for meanness. He said it was because the teeth knocked loose in a long-ago wreck were bothering him, but the dentists had said there was no reason to pull them, that they could be saved. He had gotten drunk and had them pulled, and then followed her around that bleak house, smiling and smiling.

  I was sick then, and had to stay inside with all that meanness. Sam and the dog ran free of it outside.

  “What was that dog’s name?” I asked my mother, four decades later.

  “I don’t know if it had a name,” she said.

  “How long did we have it?” I asked.

  “Three days,” she said.

  At a gathering of other drinking men, an older man told my father he had seen the dog in our yard, and would give him two-to-one that his brindle pit bull could eat him alive. My daddy told him no, the dog was a pet. The man told him they would call it, quick, as soon as one dog turned cur. My daddy said no, the boxer was a lapdog. But the more he drank, the more reasonable it became. One afternoon, he loaded the dog into the car. My mother begged him, and Sam just sat outside on the steps, arms around his knees. He was not a crier, not then, not ever. He just sat there, till way after dark, waiting for his daddy to bring his dog back.

  The next day, my father’s car rumbled up in the driveway. He opened one of the rear doors and lifted the boxer from the backseat. The dog did not yelp or whimper, and must have been in shock. His guts had been opened up, and the skin around his neck and intelligent face was not just ripped, but ripped away. His dark eyes looked as hard as marbles, and his chest rose and fell in a jerking, ugly way. I wanted to pet him, but there was just so much blood, and no place to put my hands.

  Sam had come running, and just froze there, and went white as bone. My mother tried to get in his way, to shield him, but he was a big boy then, and too old to be protected with an apron. She told me, later, how he looked, like he had been stabbed, and just didn’t fall down.

  “Just stood there, a’starin’ and a’starin’,” my mother said.

  My father, hungover, listing a little, had not spoken.

  “Why did you bring it home?” my mother asked, quietly.


  He was not the kind of man you screamed at, even in times like these.

  “I didn’t know what to do with him,” he confessed. If he had been sober, maybe he would have known not to bring it home.

  Then something happened that never, ever had. My meek, gentle mother told my father to leave. She walked up to him, within range of his fists, and with her hands down at her sides, accepting of what might come, she looked him in his bloodshot eyes and ordered him away from her, from us. “Take the dog,” she said, and instead of turning on her, in fury, he scooped it up in his arms, and left.

  “I run him off,” she said, and forty-one years after the fact, she still sounds a little surprised.

  Sam went missing for a while after that, for a day or more. He hid in a tree.

  “He was nine then. He remembers it better than you,” my mother said.

  I remember it. Boys remember dogs.

  It never haunted me, not like it did him.

  “Sam feels things more than you do,” she said.

  She was not being mean. She just knows her boys.

  I don’t know what happened to the dog. If my father’s head had been clear, he would have just put him down, quick, with a hammer. He had done it before. Ours is a culture of cruelty, as to dogs. Runts are bashed against a tree. Strays are tied up in a sack and dropped off a bridge. I wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, but it was done. As it was, my father probably just rode around from bootlegger to bootlegger, seeking credit, and somewhere along the way the dog suffered and died, and was thrown off in the weeds.

  She relented eventually and he came home, but she never forgave him for what he had done to her son. There is no patch for that.

  His life had spiraled to nothing, taking us down with him. He was at a place where he was even willing to gamble his son’s heart in that pit, and maybe he could come home with cash money in his pockets, and show those men and his own family that he was more than what he had become. Wasn’t that worth the life of a dog? “He just needed something good to happen to him,” she said, and the dog was the only currency he had left.