The Prince of Frogtown (21 page)

It happens.

He cut her too sharp, sideswiped the pole and jumped the concrete foundation used to hold the whole apparatus upright. His machine wedged there sideways, one rear tire, the one attached to the drive chain, spinning wide-open, the motor screaming, as the boy unsnapped his harness and bailed out like he was on fire.

“What in the hell were you thinkin’?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking that much.”

The woman looked at me, in surrender.

“He’s yours,” she said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ross

I
F YOU BROKE THE LAW
you dealt with Ross, and dealt with him till the preacher led revival over your bones. Once Ross made up his mind you were trouble, he would fine, imprison and humiliate you with or without papers, because he didn’t mind signing a judge’s name to a warrant if it meant taking out the trash. If you fought him, when he was a young man, he would walk you to his police car across asphalt scattered with your own teeth. He was big and wide and white, like a Frigidaire sitting on size 12 wing-tip shoes, and wore black-framed glasses on his benign, MoonPie face. He had been a prizefighter before he served in the Pacific in World War II, and the blue steel .38 on his gun belt was just an afterthought, an unnecessary accessory, like a tie clip. Ross could point a finger at you and take everything you would ever have. He passed judgment on the Braggs soon after taking office, because they offended his sense of how the world should turn. “He hated your daddy ’cause he couldn’t get him to do right,” my mother said, and while that is certainly true, there was more than that between them. One day, in ’58, my father and mother were helping my grandfather Charlie Bundrum roof a house in town, and looked down to see Ross, all six feet five, three hundred pounds of him, leaning against the hood of his Chevrolet. Ross didn’t speak, just smiled pleasantly up at them, then cocked his thumb over a pointed finger, sighted down his knuckle on my father’s face, and squeezed the invisible trigger. “Bang,” he said.

Chief of police Ross Tipton lectured the Exchange Club on humane enforcement of the law, and liked to prove his humanity by giving some of my more docile, drunken kin his castoff shoes. But in my father, fresh from the Norfolk stockade, he found a poor but uppity white man he could not scare. Ross was determined to humble him, to break him, so he chained him like a dog where Pelham Road meets College Hill, and put him to work with a sling blade. That way, everyone saw what happened to people who dared strut around in Ross’s town.

My aunt Jo and uncle John Couch, two of the people who helped raise me, were walking through town one summer and saw him chained there, as the whole population rolled by. He had been arrested for public drunkenness and fighting and deserved his jail time, but men who worked off fines were not routinely chained. Ross stood by, his gun belt riding high on his big belly. My aunt Jo, a little woman with a heart of glass, could not stand it. Her eyes burned behind her cat’s-eye glasses, and she marched over and confronted the chief.

“You ought not do that to the boy,” she said.

“I have to,” he said.

“Why do you have to put him in chains?” she asked.

“He’ll run,” he said.

My father, shamed and helpless in the presence of his sister-in-law, hacked at the Johnson grass.

“Won’t you, Rabbit?” Tipton said.

My father’s eyes lifted from the ground and met Ross, but Ross stayed just out of reach. He had dealt with bad men all his life, and this whelp was nothing special.

“It’s not right,” my aunt Jo said.

But Ross got to say what right was.

My father dragged his chains past kin and friends and perfect strangers, stopping at dinnertime to eat a thin hamburger from Zuma’s café. At dark, Ross unsnapped his holster and put a hand on his pistol butt, till my father handed his sling blade to the trusty and shuffled into his cage. In his cell, he murdered Ross Tipton a thousand times.

It went on for years like that. We rode our momma’s hip, all of us, into city hall, as she made his bail a few dollars at a time.

If you are going to do right all the time, it matters very little who the police chief is in your town. You won’t see him except at Kiwanis. But if you know that sooner or later you are going to do wrong, that doing wrong is a part of who you are, it matters a great deal. For twenty-five years, Ross ran our town, respected by many, feared by some, and hated by people with my last name, because Ross rubbed our noses in our sins.

Carlos Slaght, who has a kindness in him you can feel and almost see, is one of the people who believe my father was somehow better than the life he led. He believes that, with a little luck, my father’s life would have been different, and, in a domino effect, other lives would have, too. It is a wonderful notion. But Carlos, Jack and others believe a series of events that began in the summer of ’55 made this town all but unlivable for him, smeared his pride, and quickened his decline. It is a gothic story, the way they tell it, and you can see the bad luck tumbling, as if the devil himself had shaved the dice.

“It goes back to Everett, my brother, who whupped Ross when he was one-legged, and started the feud,” Carlos said. “But I guess it goes back even farther than that. I guess it goes back to the killin’ of Chief Whiteside by Robert Dentmon. Dentmon don’t pull that trigger, there wouldn’t have been no place here for Ross.”

A
S MUCH AS ANYONE,
the people of the mill village and its close-in neighborhoods know violence. They accept industrial accidents and even a certain amount of murder, because some men just need killing. But there are things impossible to reconcile, and the killing of Chief D. E. Whiteside haunts the place and people even now. He was raised in the country, understood them and treated them like equals, and they lost him to a drunken meanness. D.E., whom everyone called Whitey, was an easygoing big man, bald as a boiled egg, and a respected member of the Mason’s Lodge. D.E. and Mary had five children, Peggy, Charlotte, Sandy, Bill and Jack, so Whitey drove a truck on his off days, hauling corn. He could throw drunks around like feed sacks, but when his children were scraped or burned, he could be gentle as a grandmother. “It’s him I remember looking after us,” said his daughter Sandy, who was ten years old in the summer of ’55.

“We never had trouble with Whitey,” Carlos said. “When we was teenagers he’d see us hanging around someplace, and he’d say, ‘Boys, I got to walk over here and check this building, and if you’re still here when I get back I’ll whip you all the way home.’” He tipped his hat to Velma, shook hands with Bob and the boys. He got along with my father, whom he treated with the respect due a returning serviceman, even if he had ended his hitch behind bars. “The thing about that cop was, he treated your daddy like a man,” said Jack Andrews, “and he treated everybody alike. He didn’t treat village boys any different than town or college boys.” He remembers a Grand Ole Opry traveling road show with Grandpa Jones and String Bean, on the square. Two drunken village boys kept disrupting the show, till Whiteside snatched them up, banged their heads together like in a cartoon, and led them out. What was unique about that was the fact he did not sweep all the village boys out of the tent. He
distinguished,
and that meant the world.

His killing by a village storekeeper makes no more sense now to Whiteside’s son Bill than when he was a seven-year-old boy on the front porch of their house on June 19 of ’55. He heard the phone ring, then saw his mother tear screaming through the screen door. “It was foolish how it happened,” he said. “That man killed Daddy on Monday, and they were going fishing Wednesday.”

In the police report, it says Whiteside died because of a dispute over a water line, but if you believe in the tumbling nature of things, he died from changing times.

By the end of the Korean War, the parochial society of the mill village had come undone. The mill no longer generated the village’s electricity, no longer gave workers a house. In ’55, the mill cut off its water supply to the houses. City work crews dug up the village, tapping old lines and laying new ones as people grumbled, damned if they’d buy water God made for free.

The mood was black already, and many workers blamed the changes in their lives on the latest mill boss. Mill workers joked that, when the boss died, he raised up in his coffin as six poor men carried him to the grave. “You put wheels on this thing,” he told the head pall-bearer, “you can lay off five of these fellers.” Backed by a new ownership group of New York investors, the bosses put in place slow-downs and stretch-outs. Bosses just laid people off when things were lean, then, when contracts were fat, worked people half to death in an attempt to see how fast the machines could run.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

The mill shut down.

It would only be idle a few months as another owner prepared a takeover, but for a few tense months there was a panic here. For store owners in the village, it was a death knell. One of them was Robert E. Lee Dentmon, a gaunt, sunburned, surly, besotted man who ran a little shack of a store, a Pepsi sign in the shape of a giant bottle cap tacked to the side. His friends knew he had a burning temper, carried a .22 in the bib pocket of his overalls, and drank whiskey like water when he was mad and sometimes when he wasn’t. He told customers he would shoot anyone who tried to take his water line.

He and Whiteside had known each other for decades. It was an odd friendship—one was strident, quick-tempered, the other quiet, peaceful—but they both loved to fish, and when the weather was good on Wednesday mornings they would meet before dawn and fish the ponds and rivers they fished when they were boys.

In June, the taps in Dentmon’s store went dry. J. T. Marible, a councilman and master mechanic at the mill, told the
Anniston Star
that Dentmon called him, incensed. “I told him he was talking to the wrong man. We [the mill] didn’t have anything to do with the water in the village anymore. He said, ‘I’ll give you till six o’clock in the morning to get my water on.’” Dentmon seemed determined to turn back time.

Marible told Mayor J. B. Ryan about the call the next morning, on June 19. Ryan sent a crew of city workers to the village, to plug water lines in the vicinity of the store. Dentmon was drinking his breakfast when the city workers—Roy Wilkerson, William Barnwell and Roy “Tot” Turner—showed up. When the workers said they only wanted to locate the old line, Dentmon replied: “It don’t make no difference. They ain’t gonna move it.” The three men went back to city hall, and told their supervisor Dentmon would not let them do their job.

Back at the store, Dentmon fumed about the water with Louis Snider, a produce salesman who sold the store owner watermelons and cantaloupes. As Dentmon griped, he reached under the counter and took out a box of shells, and began loading his .22, a poor man’s gun. It cost a dime to fire a .38, but just a penny for a .22.

Mayor Ryan called Whiteside. Ryan told him to go speak to Dentmon, but Chief Whiteside said it would be smart to wait. “Daddy knew the man,” said Sandy. “He knew his temper. He said, ‘Let him cool off.’” But Ryan insisted and Whiteside drove to the store, followed by Wilkerson, Barnwell and Tot Turner in their city truck. Dentmon, wearing a pair of overalls faded almost white, his close-cropped hair shining with oil, stood outside. As Whiteside stepped from his car, followed by the three city workers, Dentmon greeted him:

“Whaddaya say, cop,” he said, drunk.

Whiteside did not say a word. He just walked up to Dentmon, planning to pat him down for a weapon. As he came within arm’s reach, Dentmon pulled his .22 pistol and fired point-blank into Whiteside’s chest. The bullet, the size of an orange seed, went in below his badge, hit a bone and ricocheted into his heart.

“Kill him, Tot,” Whiteside said, and died.

Turner and the other men did not move. A dog came up and started to lick at the blood, and one of the witnesses kicked at it. “Kick that dog again,” Dentmon said, “an’ I’ll do the same to you.”

Even as the bullet came to rest in Whiteside’s big heart, its effect, its impact, was unchecked. “They gave Dentmon life in the penitentiary. But I didn’t know life meant seven years,” Bill Whiteside said. The bullet destroyed his family. Mary Whiteside, shattered, could not make enough money at the movie theater to feed, clothe and care for five children, and the county sent the children to live in a foster home. “That man,” Bill Whiteside said, “took all I had.”

City workers laid new water lines through the village, but for a long time, when people looked at scars of red dirt snaking through the streets, they thought of cemeteries. In ’56, Union Underwear bought the mill and renamed it Union Yarn, and it was like the scare never happened, like a bad dream. The city hired Bill Harris to be chief. He, too, understood the village and had even worked in the mill, and in the village people said there would never be anyone as straight with them as Whitey, but that Bill Harris would do. But bad luck just kept tumbling, and Harris died of a heart attack that year. In October of ’56 the job tumbled to Ross. He raised his right hand and swore to execute the duties of his office with professionalism, fairness and integrity. “So help me God,” he said.