The Prince of Frogtown (27 page)

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

S
O 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 right. 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

H
E 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 save 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.

“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

T
HE 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.