The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  I had not realized, after all the hatefulness we endured in that time, how long that particular hurt lasted in my brother. We have buried, between us, fifty dogs since then. “But it stuck in him,” my mother said. “If he thinks about it, even as old as he is now, he gets so mad he can’t stand it. That’s why he will not talk hardly at all about your daddy, because it makes him think of that dog, and what your daddy did to him.”

  One night, a lifetime later, she picked up the phone, and dialed seven numbers. It always starts with 435. If it wasn’t for me, running off to join the circus all the time, she would never dial more than seven digits, and every one of them would start with 435.

  “Sam?”

  Seconds later, she hung up the phone, and called me.

  “His name was Loco,” she said.

  THAT IS WHY I COULDN’T whitewash my father, because of that dog, and what it had done to the brother who spent so much of his life coming to rescue me from the side of the road. I stood a hundred times in a hated necktie, ineffectually holding the flashlight as his wrenches slipped and he gashed his knuckles on the fan blades of my junk cars, working for hours stooped over in black grease just to get me rolling again, to get me chasing something cleaner, easier. “Don’t get dirty,” he would hiss as I reached in under the hood to try to help. I have sometimes said that my older brother is who I want to be when I grow up, but that’s a lie. He works too hard and lives too straight, for me. There have been times in my life when all I truly cared about could dance on the point of my pen, but not Sam. He feels what he feels all the time, and would rather stand in the dark and listen to his dogs trail a coon than carry on a conversation. He discarded our father more than three decades ago, just took him out with the trash, because of a dog whose name I could not recall.

  There was more to it than that, of course, but the dog gave his anger a place to rest that was easier to remember than some of what happened to us then. It was the year of the great disappearing tricycle. Every word I wrote only brought me closer and closer to this point, and with every finished page I knew I was building him up only to have to tear him down again.

  The night he left with the dog, she started saving dimes, nickels and pennies, for our escape.

  “I loved him,” she told me, and in all my life I had never heard her say those words.

  It is why she ran away, and ran back.

  “I might could have run forever, by myself,” she said.

  “But I couldn’t run and carry y’all.”

  I told her I guessed some people were not meant to be daddies, and she told me she guessed that might be right. He never sang a lullaby in his life. But one night, before we were free of him, he was precisely the kind of man we needed him to be, in precisely the right moment, and if I had more faith, or put more value on my own life, I would believe that everything he had done or been in his life had led him to that moment. I don’t believe that. I just believe that, sometimes, you need dark men to do dark things.

  WINTER IS A BLEAK TIME in the Mountain South, a gray, wet, messy time, without the dry snows of the north or clear sunshine of the Gulf Coast. It can be humid and warm on Tuesday and 16 degrees on Thursday morning, with ice forecast for Friday night. I have always hated winters here, not for the cold or the ice but the gray, the unrelenting drizzle and rain that can settle in for a week at a time, turn the ground to soup and plaster the leaves to the car wind-shields like wet toilet paper. It was in weather like that, that mess, that I got sick for the last time in the big, cold house in Spring Garden, where we lived after coming home from Texas.

  The rides had stopped altogether. He rarely had money for gas anymore. Almost as if there really had been something medicinal in that open car window, my breathing got worse, and worse. My little brother Mark played on the floor as my mother perched day and night on the edge of the bed I shared with Sam, rubbing my chest, singing. She sat up all night, sometimes, just watching me, fingers on my chest, feeling it rise and fall. I believe that even if she had fallen asleep there in her straight-backed chair, she would have known if I had ceased to breathe, from the touch. One late night, the night before she was going to take me to the doctor in Piedmont, I took in a weak, ragged breath, and began to choke. Thick fluid, like left-out rubber cement, clogged my throat and nose and stopped my air, completely. My mother screamed, and lifted me from the bed like I was a baby. My father, who had already gone to bed, walked barefoot into the room and asked her what was wrong.

  “We got to get him to the hospital,” she said.

  The car wasn’t running. There was no phone in the old, creepy house, and never had been.

  “You got to do something,” she begged him.

  I had begun to turn blue when he took me from her, ran with me to the kitchen, and laid me on the table. He grabbed a box of salt, and dumped a fistful of it into one hand. In my panic I had clenched my teeth, and I ground them together as he clawed at my mouth with his free hand, trying to pry them open. Finally, he balled up his fist, to knock them out, and I opened my mouth to scream, with no sound. He poured the salt down my throat, then clamped his hand hard over my mouth as I convulsed, jerking in his arms.

  “You’re killin’ him,” my mother told him, but he just pressed down harder. When he finally lifted his hand I vomited with such force that the mess clogging my throat exploded outward, and I could breathe.

  He handed me, limp, to my mother.

  “Here,” was all he said.

  He went back to bed.

  She sat up with me all night, trying to rock me, big as I was, in a straight-backed chair.

  We left him not long after that. If I had lived, or died, it was done. She was pregnant then, and lost the fourth son not long after that. I blamed him because he made her life so hard.

  “But he saved your life,” my mother told me.

  I should have remembered it better.

  “But he did,” she said.

  “He didn’t seem real damn happy about it, did he?” I said.

  In my mind, all those years, I thought he was trying to hurt me. Now, just as my brother never forgave him for his nature and what it cost, I know that if he had been any other kind of man, a gentler man, I would most certainly be dead. They would have huddled together over me, man and wife, watching me die in as ugly a way as you can, as my older brother ran a mile to a phone, to call an ambulance that would come too late.

  * * *

  The Boy

  SO LET ME TELL YOU about my boy.

  It tickles him when I say things that make his mother’s head hurt, like the other day, when I noticed how tall he was. “Next thing you know,” I told him, “you’ll be running around with loose women and dancing the boogaloo.”

  “For Pete’s sake,” the woman said.

  “He doesn’t know what loose women are,” I said.

  “Yes I do,” he said.

  “No you don’t,” I said.

  I looked at him.

  “Do you?”

  His mother wished herself someplace else.

  That made us both happy.

  He hates it when I hurt. I have arthritis in my busted-up knees and feet and I limp a lot, and one day a pain like broken glass in my joints gouged me and I sagged against the car. I felt his hand at my shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked, and there was a fear in his face.

  “I am fine,” I lied.

  I straightened up, and walked inside.

  I don’t want that boy to ever see me weak and broken-down. He thought I was ten feet tall and bulletproof when he first saw me, and I want it to always be that way. But it may be he already sees me as used-up, and is too gentle to say.

  It is the first price you pay, for getting your boy so late in your life, but it is not the last.

  The fact is that he was improving, as our first year slipped by and he turned eleven, becoming the boy I needed him to be. He would never cry from a carpet burn again, or because he needed a nap.

  Or maybe the woman was r
ight. He was just a little boy becoming a big boy.

  I bought him a bow and arrow and taught him to shoot, and told him to never, never shoot me. My brother Sam shot me in the hand, and being shot with an arrow once in a lifetime ought to be about right. My niece bought him a BB gun, because boys need one, and it was worth any potential danger just to see the look on his mother’s face.

  I even let him shoot a .22 rifle at a tin can on my mother’s farm. His arms would not quite reach the trigger and the front sight wobbled drunkenly, but when he pulled the trigger the can jumped in the air. I have only seen pure joy a few times in my life, and I saw it then. (I am pretty sure he closed his eyes when he fired, but I slapped him on the back anyway, and pronounced his new name to be Dead Eye Dick.)

  At the pond, I taught him to cast with a Zebco 202, how to gently twitch the rod tip to make the rubber worm dance across the bottom, and he didn’t know I was the worst fisherman who ever lived and I didn’t tell him. But I got Sam to show him the fine points so the boy could actually catch fish.

  Mark taught him card tricks when he was home. I showed him how to cheat at poker, how to hide jacks in the waistband of his jeans.

  “You didn’t really teach me,” he said. “I just caught you.”

  I like to watch him live.

  He walks funny, like his feet don’t fit yet. But when we walk across a parking lot he never runs ahead or lags behind. He still walks with me.

  He has long, artist’s fingers, not little hands like mine. He has brown hair. I cut it once and did a good job, and cut a second time and made him look like Moe, from the Stooges. He is still a little upset about that.

  He has his mother’s eyes. His eyes are perfect. He can see a mile, more.

  His teeth will be perfect, a million dollars from now.

  We can’t keep his fingernails cut, let alone clean. I tell him he looks like a can-can dancer with those long nails, but he doesn’t know what that is either, so it’s all right to say.

  He couldn’t whistle a lick at ten. But he learned and now he whistles all the time. Maybe by twelve, he will whistle in tune, and my headache will ease.

  He still has trouble breathing, sometimes, from his allergies. In winter he has a chronic cough, deep in his lungs. I tell him he is the snottiest boy alive, to cover up what I really feel. I never believed I would hear a child cough, and hate it so much.

  He forgets things. He forgets to close the bathroom door. I walked by once and saw him on the toilet, perfectly at ease.

  “For God’s sake,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  He forgets homework. He forgets to change his underwear.

  The woman made him learn the piano, but his heart wasn’t in it. He banged at it anyway, beat it like he was mad at it. I know it is wrong to hate a child while he is playing church music. God help me I did.

  I waited for him, as he got older, to torture me with rap, or heavy metal, or plastic Top 40. But one day he heard Johnny Cash, and his life changed. I heard him in his room, singing “Get Rhythm” and “Folsom Prison Blues.”

  He sings well. His voice is deep, strong. He sings from the backseat. He sings to the dog. I stood in the kitchen recently and watched him sing as he walked around in the yard. It was one of the finer moments in my life.

  We got him a guitar for Christmas, and a genuine Johnny Cash songbook. Someday we might see him in the Opry, but I don’t know if even Johnny could play Nashville now. Those new guys, I told the boy, all look like they would run from a fistfight.

  “All hat and no cow,” I told the boy.

  He nodded, like he knew what I meant.

  He likes barbecue sandwiches, any gum that smells bad, and pie.

  We play the pie game in the car. He asked me if I would rather have a million dollars, or pie. I tell him a million dollars. But it has to be something real good, to beat pie.

  He does not like girls, yet.

  “Why do they talk so fast?” he asked me. “I can’t understand what they say.”

  “That’s all right, boy,” I said. “You won’t be able to understand them when they talk slow, either.”

  He still loves his go-cart, but wants me to leave the silver car to him in my will.

  He believed in Santa Claus until he was eleven. He says he stopped believing at ten, but we know better.

  He loves my mother. I was afraid he would see her as something from the dark side of the moon, too, but he didn’t. He says “yes ma’am,” and she drops another biscuit in his mouth. I think of Sea World, when she does that.

  He loves his mother more than anything, more than air.

  He calls her “evil,” and I call her “spiteful,” and we snicker. But the planet ceases to move, when she really gets mean, the way mothers have to when a boy does wrong, like ignoring his homework for a big part of the sixth grade. She can still make him cry, but not much else does.

  Sometimes I am obliged to side with her.

  Sometimes I pretend to, till she has stomped away.

  Then I shake my head.

  “Women,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  One Friend

  HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN in the tuberculosis sanitarium with a warm blanket on his legs, watched over by a mean big woman with a beehive hairdo and Scripture pamphlets in her smock. Instead, he lurched around town in an old white Pontiac, the engine missing time. The steering wheel bumped through fingers as thin as No. 2 pencils, and his breath rattled round his cigarette when he took a pull, with a sound like feathers rustling in a paper bag. “He’d come to the house in that ol’ car, it hitting on about two cylinders, and have a pint of vodka or some Seagram’s with him. He’d say, ‘Jack, that seal ain’t been broke. Pour as much of this as you want to drink.’ Charles didn’t want me drinking after him. He was always careful not to give me the TB. I’d pour a little in a glass, and he’d take the bottle and go sit in the door, ’cause it was easier for him to breathe. I’d say, ‘Charles, let me make you something to eat, some soup or something,’ ’cause I knew he liked that Campbell’s tomato soup. But he wouldn’t eat nothin’ then. He didn’t want to deaden that liquor. He just sat in that open door and talked, and drank till it was gone.” The Pontiac, ragged, dented and rust-flecked, means it was ’74, since cars are the way the working-class people of the Deep South truly mark their time. Listen to them, sometime, when they are groping for a memory, and they will find it beside a yellow Oldsmobile, or a baby blue Malibu. Life flutters past us here in pink slips, not diplomas, birth certificates or Christmas cards, and for the rest of Jack Andrews’ life he will think of my father’s suicide when he hears a Pontiac skipping time.

  “He killed himself, and he knew what he was doing,” Jack said. It would have been awful to witness, but as the liquor poisoned my father it numbed Jack and made it so he could stand it. It takes a long time, sip by sip, to stop a human heart, and it seemed like Jack and my father replayed their whole lives before his was through. It should have been a joy. Jack would get out a guitar and pick the lovesick blues, and they would laugh about being boys, fishing in the air. But after a while every breaking seal began to sound like a cocking gun, so Jack took a few sips for warmth, and followed his friend across the times they had. They were not old men. Both of them were in their late thirties. But there was no future together anymore, so they remembered like two old men in a nursing home, knowing that was all there would ever be. His death was so certain it was like it already happened. “You hear people talking about a wake?” Jack said. “Well, I guess that’s what we had.”

  In the last year or so of my father’s life, the alcohol was the only sustenance he cared to receive. He burned the sugar in it to power his feet and animate his mind, as everything else inside withered from disease. The TB squeezed his lungs and the cirrhosis ate at his liver, and it was a cruelty, what he did, forcing Jack to watch him die. But Jack doesn’t see it that way. There was no way to sa
ve him that he could see, and just running him off, making him do it someplace else, would have broken the promises they made to each other when they were still boys clicking down the sidewalk in Jacksonville with steel taps on their two-dollar Steinberg shoes.

  “We talked a lot about souls, there at the end,” Jack said. “We figured it was like the blade on an electric fan, running. You can’t see it, but you believe it’s there.”

  Jack was sure he had a soul, but not sure of its destination.

  I think it is better to think you don’t have one, than to think it will burn.

  Jack wiped at his eyes a lot as he talked of the last days. It is an acceptable way for a Southern man to cry. You can leak, when your heart busts in two, but you by God better not make any noise. I didn’t cry with Jack. I laughed with him, at the fun they had, but I still weighed everything I heard against the time I lived with him, and wondered what happened to that boy, that man, to the still-beautiful, indestructible boy my mother loved. He put us, his children, on this rock even as he was coming apart, ignored us as we did without, and never believed he did anything wrong.

  I told Jack that much.

  “That,” Jack said, “is not true.”

  “I guess we talked about everything, right before your dad died,” Jack said, “but mostly he talked about your mother. He talked about Margaret, and he talked about you boys.”

  I believed all my life we somehow just reoccurred to him before his death, as we had reoccurred to him every few years, when we were children. I had not seen him for nine years until I saw him for a fraction of one day in ’75, and then he was dead. But Jack told me he talked about us night after night, over years and years, and when he did he cried so fiercely he could barely tip the bottle to his lips.

  “Why?” I asked Jack.

  “’Cause he hated what happened in his life,” Jack said.