The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

“He felt sorry for himself?” I said.

  “No,” Jack said.

  He closed his eyes, to see his friend better.

  “He was sorry for what he done.”

  Jack has seen a lot of regret in his life, a lot of mistakes.

  “But I never seen a man more sorry for what he’d done.”

  I wrote, when I was younger, that hearing my father say he was sorry would do me no good at all.

  I am older than that now.

  I still didn’t believe it, not completely.

  A few years after they split up, my mother went to him, asking for money to help raise his sons. He ignored her. Then, on the urging of her sisters, she got a lawyer, and my father came to meet with her and her sisters, Edna and Juanita. They were all beautiful women, and he walked in and cursed them all. “Y’all look like three ol’ Dominicker chickens,” he said, and laid a ten-dollar bill on the table. He mailed her one more ten-dollar bill, and that was it forever: twenty dollars’ cash, for three lives.

  Saying you are sorry for what you did when it is too late to change is like saying from the wheelchair that you used to do a mean soft shoe. You can say anything, from the chair.

  “You can believe it,” Carlos Slaght told me later, when I shared what Jack had shared with me.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “’Cause Jack ain’t got no reason to lie.”

  Jack didn’t need to improve my father to love him.

  He loved him just fine.

  It is as close as I will get to knowing that he had regret, till he climbs from the grave, pays the light bill, steals my mother a fresh bouquet, pounds out the dents in that phantom tricycle, and buys my brother another goddamn dog.

  “He would sit and talk about y’all and he would cry and cry. I seen him, God, so many times. He stayed all tormented, all tore up,” Jack said. “Lord, how he did love your momma.”

  I had heard he had a new woman, and that he was living with a woman named Noby at or near the time of his death. “Noby was good to him,” Jack said. “She made sure he had things to eat, if he would eat, and made sure he had plenty to drink. But there was never nobody in his heart but your mom. He wanted a home, to be happy. But he knew he threw it away, and I never heard him blame anybody but his self. But he knew all about y’all, everything you did.”

  I learned that my father talked to friends of friends and kin of kin, and followed our lives twice and three times removed, from a safe distance. Once, when a man wanted to court my mother, he went first to my father, to ask permission. “I got no say about it,” my father said, “but if you ever lay a hand on my children, I will kill you.”

  “He talked about you, most of all,” Jack said.

  I thumbed my own chest.

  “Yeah, you. He knew all of what you did.”

  I didn’t do much. I lost a spelling bee, won a speech contest, wrecked a good motorcycle and burned my leg, broke the same leg playing basketball, twice, then broke my collarbone on the same damn motorcycle, but a different street. I hit two in-the-park home runs in a softball game against a team called the Jacksonville Merchants, but that was only because they had a bunch of rag arms in the outfield. But my father knew about the emergency rooms, saw my picture in the newspaper, and did not give me a call or write me a letter or reach out to me in any way, not until the end, till it was too late to say very much of anything except goodbye.

  “But he knew about it,” Jack said.

  He believed he was too far gone to try and be part of it, Jack said.

  He was just the drunk, the raggedy man.

  “He didn’t know how,” Jack said.

  Jack said he told him to call us.

  “They wouldn’t believe what I have to say,” my father told him. “When it’s all over and done, they’ll make me out to be one low-down son of a bitch. They won’t have one good memory of me.”

  Jack went to see him after we left him for good. My father was planting cedar trees. There are a lot of ways, down here, you can spit in the eye of God. You can sweep your house on New Year’s, and sweep your future right out the door, or let a bird in your house, which means someone you love will die. But the worst curse is cedar trees. No one plants a cedar tree, until they are ready to die.

  “When those things get big enough to shade your grave, you’ll die,” Jack told him.

  “Where’d you hear that,” he said.

  “I heard it all my life,” Jack said.

  My father laughed.

  “It was like he knew the only thing that could kill Charles, was Charles,” said Jack. “And when he made up his mind to go, he did.”

  We talked a long time that night, Jack and me.

  Finally, he walked me to the door.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He told me to come anytime, and not just when I needed something. He seemed to have something else to say, something he had a hard time getting out of his memory. It was a confession, I suppose, although he didn’t do anything wrong.

  Near the end of my father’s life, the phone rang in Jack’s place. It was well past midnight.

  “Jack,” he said, “will you come get me?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “Where you at?”

  “I’m in the hospital,” my father said.

  Jack didn’t know what to say.

  “They got me in the TB sanitarium.”

  “You want me to break you out?” Jack said.

  “Yeah,” my father said.

  “Charles, they’ll put me in jail,” Jack said.

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  Jack can still conjure him in his hospital dormitory in the middle of the night, the phone pressed to his ear. Three decades later, it still stabs his conscience, and breaks his heart.

  “They won’t let me take you out, Charles,” Jack told him.

  “I just want to go home,” my father said.

  They talked awhile, my father coughing. He was always coughing then.

  “I didn’t go up there,” Jack told me.

  I told him not to worry, that there was nothing he could do.

  Near the end of my father’s life, Jack drove past the cedar trees he told my father not to plant. “They were head-high,” Jack said. They cast a shadow six feet long, but my father didn’t believe in that and neither do I. You live until you drown in your scarred lungs, till your liver goes green. Then you die, begging and praying for one more breath, or in peace, or desolation, or in awful pain. You die asleep or you die surprised, die with angels in your arms or your feet on fire, or just die into a never-ending nothin’. Or, you just get tired of living without the things you threw away and you die remembering, and, if you are lucky, with at least one good friend.

  * * *

  The Boy

  THE WOMAN WAS RIGHT.

  The little boy just started to fade, like we left him in the sun too long.

  He had been a ragamuffin, hurled into space by the seat of his pants. Suddenly, he shopped for shirts, and worried about his hair. He got too heavy to throw.

  Girls giggled and passed him notes.

  He began to care if he had pancake in his hair.

  He turned twelve, then thirteen, and then the little boy just disappeared.

  Me? I was no longer the coolest thing around.

  “No offense, Rick, but I’m going to watch TV in my room,” he told me one day.

  He made his junior high basketball team. The first game I saw, he walked onto the court with the starting five, and even though that only left three boys on the bench, I was so, so proud. When he was still little and played on his church team, he would glimpse me in the bleachers, wave and grin. But now he was all business.

  “Don’t yell anything to embarrass me,” he admonished, before one game.

  The first game I saw, he put one boy on the floor, hard, on a rebound, not playing dirty, just aggressive, and he fouled out in the third quarter.

  He still goes to Baptist Camp. He came home with a new troph
y, the summer of his twelfth year. He was voted best cardsharp, to his mother’s shame.

  He is not helpless, not needy.

  He is everything I rushed him to be.

  I had missed this transformation in the middle son, or all but missed it. I never really knew the oldest boy, who was in college when I arrived, but in the middle boy I saw enough to scare me, as he was preparing to date, preparing to drive. His whole senior year of high school he wore only orange—skull-popping, eye-hurting orange—because he is a Tennessee fan, or because it is the only color they have on his home planet. He believed homework was an elective, too, but could tell you how many points UT scored in the fourth quarter in 1973. He was good-looking, blond, engaging and could talk paint off a wall, but went days without eating or sleeping, practiced the drums at two in the morning, and asked me questions like: “How deep is the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “Well, it varies,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  The woman told me once—she must have been in a fever—that I might have a talk about human reproduction with the middle son, and I told her no way in hell. But he cornered me one night, asked me a bees question—or birds, hell, I don’t know—and I listened till I had the gist of it, then told him to go to bed.

  He drove like everyone else in Memphis, like he woke up drunk. But just months after the wedding he went off to join other orange people in Knoxville, and I was spared. I meant to check his head for antennae, before he left for school.

  But what if my boy, my littlest boy, took to wearing orange, too, or asked me hard questions about the biology of love?

  What if he got cleaner, tougher, but stranger?

  I did what the woman did, with all her sons.

  I pretended it wasn’t happening.

  It did not stop the process. But now and then, the little boy peeked through from that hulk. I recognized him, on those big feet, behind that fine face.

  On the long rides to the coast, we still played his favorite game. The boy wants to be a marine biologist, wants to study sharks, and as we ride he makes me ask and answer questions about the sea.

  “What’s the fastest shark?” he asked.

  “Mako,” I said. “Gimme a hard one.”

  “Do you know what a narwhale uses its horn for?” he said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  He got a little smug over that.

  I fought back.

  “Is a sea cucumber a vegetable or—” I asked.

  “It’s a worm,” he said.

  “Well, hell,” I said.

  And so it went, mile after mile.

  “My daddy and me, we used to do something like this,” I told him.

  He liked that.

  He asked me if I knew what plankton was.

  “Little-bitty shrimp,” I said.

  You know stuff like that, somehow. You know it because the television remote got lost in the cushions with three boys’ worth of abandoned toys, and you sat with a boy, a little one, through a thousand hours of Nature Planet. You learn to stand the smell of sour-apple bubblegum and the company of a boy who jabs you in your belly before he makes himself comfortable, and tells you that you are “comfy,” not to be mean, just stating fact. Then, just when you get used to it, to not minding it so much, it all vanishes, and the little boy you launched into the air stands at your shoulder like a man, and when you turn to say something you find yourself looking right into his eyes.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Amen

  WHAT PEOPLE DON’T TELL YOU shapes a man, too, shapes the way he rides through your mind over a lifetime. I told my mother what Jack said, how my father loved her till the day he died, and all she did was nod. It was not news to her. He called her every day in the last year of his life, and told her that. But she never told me because it didn’t matter anymore. He pleaded with her to take him back, to let him try again. “He wanted to get married again, but I couldn’t,” she said. “I did think about it. I surely did.” But time ran out. “The doctor said he would have three or four years, but he didn’t. He didn’t even have a year.” I saw him once toward the end. It was like looking at a burned-up house.

  PEOPLE SAID HE WEIGHED less than a hundred pounds, and I know he hated that, to have people see him that way. My mother went to the visitation in the winter of ’75, and my father’s people were kind to her. They always were. The next morning she asked her boys if we wanted to see him buried. I was in tenth grade, Sam had quit school and Mark was a little boy. Sam, who went to work at thirteen, who dug coal out of the mud so she could heat the house, looked at the clothes laid on the bed. “Momma, I didn’t know him,” he said, but I think that was a lie. We walked out of the room together. Mark, who truly didn’t know him, who cannot even remember his face, went to play.

  My father told my mother he did not want a crowd at his funeral, just us, Velma, and Bob, but there was a nice crowd. He had also said he did not want to be buried in a tie. I understand that now. He would have considered it foolish to lose his looks and hang a tie on the wreck. They put one on him anyway, and there he lay, in a clip-on. Prince or not, the dead just don’t have much pull. But before they took him away his momma tugged the tie off his breast. What her boy wants, he gets, if it was in her power to give.

  I have it now. It was in the box Ruby gave us after Velma died, with the wallet and dice. I still don’t believe in ghosts, but it seems funny in a way, like he was trying to send a message somehow: Rig the game if you can, ’cause luck is a bitch for a poor man; and don’t worry what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.

  I WISH IT HAD BEEN DIFFERENT, but I cannot see it. I cannot see him living off his pension, or singing a hymn, or lining up to vote. I cannot see him in shuffling old age with a little potbelly and bifocals, fretting over prescriptions, waiting in line at Wal-Mart. I cannot see him in a sensible car, driving the speed limit, police waving, saying: “You know, there goes a good ol’ boy.” I cannot see him going home to a paid-for house, with pictures of his boys on the wall. And I cannot see her there with him, to make it complete. But now I know he did see it, and that has to be worth something.

  * * *

  The Boy

  WE WALKED ONTO THE COURT, my boy and me, on a Saturday morning. My feet hurt and my knees throbbed, and all I had done so far was walk in from the parking lot.

  The boy had never beaten me. I was too big, too tall. But every day he got bigger, stronger, and I just got old.

  “You want to warm up?” the boy asked.

  I shook my head. Warming up was playing for nothing. You don’t warm up in Vegas shuffling index cards, or putting washers in slot machines. I need every second I spent in motion to count.

  Pulled muscles and torn ligaments happen this way, but if you know you’ve only got so many minutes in you, you can’t waste a one. We had ten dollars riding on this, and my diminishing pride.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  He had never forgotten what I said about him not being tough, tough like me. The truth is I’m not that tough. I don’t even know if I ever had anybody fooled. But it was too late. Some things lay like a splinter in a boy’s head.

  He went at me hard from the first drumbeat of that ball on the gleaming hardwood floor, raking my face, jumping into me, landing on my toes, on top of a foot. He tumbled to the floor twice, but bounced up immediately, as if he was made of hard rubber instead of flesh and bone. I drove on him but he stuck his body in front of me like a mail-box post. I banged hard with my shoulder, lifting him off the ground, but in no time I was so tired I couldn’t shoot, or find a rhythm, or even breathe.

  He went for the ball—supposedly—as I tried a clumsy layup, and he dug a groove with his fingernails across my arm.

  “If you do that again I’m gonna put you down hard,” I told him, and as soon as he got the chance he did it again. I mustered the last energ
y I had and ran over him. It hurt me a lot more than it did him. I was done.

  He was still just a thirteen-year-old growing into his big feet, and he missed seven-eighths of his shots. I could have beat him still, I swear I could, if I had not been in the kind of shape where even putting on my socks made me see stars. I missed a short jump shot and we both leapt up for the rebound, but I am not sure my feet actually cleared the floor.

  He did not gloat or dance, at the end.

  I always had.

  He just held the ball and looked at me.

  “Want to go again?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Gimme a minute.”

  I staggered to a bench to rest, and to wish I were dead. I have always loved the cliché, the one about being careful what you wish for. I staggered through another game. He drew blood again.

  “You’re not trying,” he said.

  He knew how to hurt an old man.

  Then, white of face, I staggered to the parking lot.

  I threw my arm around his shoulders, like I did when he was little.

  He wrapped his arm around my waist.

  Together, me leaning on him, we made it to the truck.

  “Good boy,” I said.

  I patted him, like an old woman.

  He patted me back.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “You didn’t hurt me too bad,” I said.

  He grinned. When he does, you see the little boy again.

  He is not gone. He never will be. This boy’s heart will always be young, soft, or at least I hope it is. The little boy just lives inside the armor of this big boy, this young man. There was never anything hiding, lurking. There was never anything out there, not for him.

  One of the first trips we ever made home when he was still a little boy was in cool weather, early December. People told me not to even try to fish the pond, the fish would be so sluggish, but the boy wanted to fish. My first cast I snagged a five-pound bass—it was probably just four pounds, but it was a nice fish, even allowing for lies. The boy asked if he could touch it, and I told him sure, and he ran one finger down its lovely green scales. He is fascinated with fish. I tried to work the hook out but she had taken it deep, almost in her guts, and I have hated all my life to kill a fish that way. I could see a look on his face very much like panic, and I worked harder. If it had been a single hook and worm I would have bit the line in two and let it go, trusting the hook to rust out, but it was a plug, with eight barbs, and if she choked it down she would surely die.