The Prince of Frogtown (3 page)

The idea of having a boy had always nibbled at me. I could imagine us in a boat in the deep blue, casting into lucky water, talking about life. But the idea of a boy is one thing, while the reality is you spend your last spry years at the Sonic, stabbing at a big red button, then watching him baste the interior of your truck in root beer and barbecue sauce as he squeals, whines, pouts and punches every button on the radio till all you can get is static and satanic howls. At least, I thought, there was just the one. Her two oldest boys were all but grown by the time I came along. The oldest referred to me only as “that dude,” and the middle one, I still believe, is from another galaxy.

But I would tolerate the little boy, for the woman. I believed I was catching him at a good age. He was house-trained, past diapering but still too young to borrow my car or ask me questions on sex, about which, of course, I would be forced to lie. I did not expect much. All I wanted was a brave, clean boy who would take out the trash, be kind to his mother, and occasionally bathe the big dog, which also came with the marriage and smelled as if it had already died. It would be nice if the boy was coordinated, had good oral hygiene, could catch a football, did his homework, and did not run buck naked in the house.

I should have lowered my expectations a little, to “house-trained.”

He refused to hold his fork right, transforming me from what I always believed to be a real man into an etiquette-quoting popinjay. I watched him, amazed, as he chased a single green pea across a plate and dumped a mountain of mashed potatoes on the white tablecloth, all of which he would have scooped up and eaten if I had not threatened him with charm school. He showered as if he were running through a waterfall, barely getting damp before shouting to his beleaguered mother, “Where’s my pants?” If she did not respond, he would run naked after all. She had to inspect him after every bath because he would not use soap, or wash his hair, or else wash only the front or back part of his head, hoping that would be the part she chose to inspect. I was a boy once, too, but I did not look greasy
after
a bath, or festoon the backseat in used tissues, or sprinkle the floor mats with takeout biscuit crumbs as if I needed them to find my way home again.

“Enjoy it,” said the woman who bore this troglodyte, “because that little boy will disappear before your eyes.”

“When?” I asked, hopeful.

I almost ran the first time I saw him eat pancakes. He covered a table—and his upper body—with syrup, then spread it like plague across a new day.

In one restaurant, he managed to get a gob of spaghetti sauce on his underarm. “You got some…” I said, pointing.

He licked it off. I did not think it humanly possible.

In another, he blew his nose so loud at the table it trembled the water glasses.

“He’s yours,” I said to the woman.

If he did not like the taste of something, he just spit it out.

“He is not unusual,” the woman told me, but I saw doubt in her eyes.

I hoped a boy so nasty would be tough, gritty, but instead this was a child of piano lessons and gifted schools, a child once rushed to the hospital with a tummy ache, where an X-ray showed that he had merely overdosed on cinnamon Pop-Tarts and Chick-fil-A.

He yelled for his mother to come stomp a spider.

He wept from a boo-boo, or if he was tired.

It seemed too much, that the boy would be gentle, pampered, and nasty. I guess it might have been easier if he had looked, sounded or at least pretended to be a little like me, or the boy I remembered myself to be. But on trips, he traveled with his own pillow and blanket, which he called his “blanky.” He needed them, he said, to be “comfy.”

“Boys,” I said, “do not have a blanky.”

“Yes they do,” he said.

“No they—” and I gave up and walked away.

He was too pampered, too helpless, I thought, to enjoy or endure the company of men like me. He was a sensitive, loving, gentle boy who said his prayers without being told, loved his momma and, to my horror, attached himself to me with fishhooks I could not pull free.

At night, in front of a television frozen forever on Animal Planet, he used me for a pillow, and no matter how much I chafed or squirmed or shoved, he always came back. I would fret and the woman would smile as he dozed on my shoulder, a toxic wad of neon-green bubblegum hanging half out of his mouth. He followed me like a baby duck, stood glued to me in restaurants and stores, and expected me to hug him, as nasty as he was. I hugged, grimacing, as if I had wrapped my arms around a used Porta Potti. He even expected me to tuck him in at night, and as I did I wondered what had happened to me, and who was this nearly neutered man who stood in line for Day-Glo nachos and sticky juice boxes, and paid good money to see the march of the goddamned penguins.

He did not go on the honeymoon, but we felt so guilty we brought him back the next week to Fort Walton. The Gulf was rough and the boy swallowed a 55-gallon drum of seawater, most of which came up through his nose. He would reach for my hand in the water, but the idea of it still seemed wrong to me. “You just stand close, so I can grab you if you go under,” I said. Then a wave knocked him down and beat him up as it rolled him along the bottom, and I had to snatch him up, coughing, spitting. I let him hold my hand for a while as we waded into the shallow water, but as soon as his feet were under him I shook my hand free, because that is not the kind of men we are.

“He’s a little boy,” the woman said.

“He’s a boy,” I said.

“He’s not a little you,” she said. “You can’t make him be like you.”

I only wanted him to be ready. I just didn’t know what for.

I must have dozed awhile. An alarm screamed me awake, my heart jerking in my chest. I expected to see a team of doctors rush in to revive her. But instead a single, solid, middle-aged woman in a sensible smock shuffled in to change out a flattened IV, flicked off the alarm, then shuffled out. I waited for my heart to slow, and caught my mother looking at me. She is seventy now. She likes to quote a poem about an old woman who has come to live uninvited in her house, a wrinkled, ancient woman she can see only in the mirror. I watched her, through the dark and the fog of painkillers, try to figure out who I was. She cannot see a lick without her featherlight, Sophia Loren glasses, but her hearing is fine. She hears with absolute clarity the things she wants to hear, and not one syllable she does not.

It wouldn’t be long till the next shift, the next son. I asked how her pain was and she told me not too bad.

“Well,” I said, “you ought to be ashamed of your damned self.”

My bedside manner was not all it could be in the summer of 2006. I sat by her bed all night for three nights, to watch her breathe. She hated doctors and always had, and that almost killed her. She let a thing as simple as a bad gallbladder degenerate into gangrene, but a sure-handed surgeon in our small-town hospital saved her. I griped in the dark but never told her the truth, how I was never so scared in my life as I was outside her operating room. I mean, didn’t that silly old woman know that once she is gone there is nothing left?

But that was not really true, I thought, not anymore.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked.

“You can bring the boy to see me,” she said.

My boy.

“I like that boy,” she said.

“I know, Momma.”

She plies him with biscuits, and watches him read on the floor. Some women melt around little boys. She did not give a damn that he did not look like us, or come to her in the usual way. He looks like my father’s people, dark-haired, handsome. How odd, he would look like him.

“He’s spoiled,” I said. “You helped.”

She harrumphed. It is her prerogative to spoil a boy.

“He’s not real tough,” I said.

“He don’t need to be,” she said.

The woman says that, that same way. I sat awake another few hours as the window began to glow yellow behind the blinds. My big brother and sister-in-law tapped on the door and came in, half hiding a sack that smelled suspiciously like a sausage biscuit.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Still hurtin’,” I said, “but nothin’ she can’t stand.”

He smiled at that.

Once, a long time ago, we were not that tough either, him and me. But she was, or we would have vanished. I walked into the heat of the morning to my truck and drove through the town that had framed our story for a hundred years, past fast-food restaurants and antebellum mansions, rich cousins and poor cousins, waiting for the same parade. I glanced at my phone, knowing that I should check in at home.

This is what it is like, I thought, to be the circus bear. You pace your cage till they let you out to do tricks. You talk about tuition, hardwood floors, braces and sometimes algebra, and see how long you can balance on that wobbling ball before you go berserk and eat the crowd. Sometimes you bust out, but never get further than the Exxon station before you go slouching home, for treats. You are a tame bear now. They will have you riding a red tricycle and wearing a silly hat before too long.

I dialed, a little fearfully. The woman is mad at me a lot. I make her mad, being me.

The boy never is.

I walk in the door, and the boy never looks disappointed in me.

CHAPTER ONE

In a Cloud of Smoke

M
AN, I WISH I COULD HAVE SEEN HIM.
They say he was slick and pretty in ’55, and when he leaned against his black-and-pearl ’49 Mercury in his white Palm Beach suit and cherry-red necktie, he looked like he got lost on his way to someplace special and pulled off here to ask the way. He always stole a red flower for his lapel—what magic, to always steal a red one—and cinched up his pants with a genuine leatherette imitation alligator belt. His teeth were too good to be true, his canines long and wicked white, and he wore his wavy, reddish-brown hair swooped up high like the Killer, Jerry Lee. It turned black when he combed it back with Rose hair oil, and when he fought, leading with his right, punishing with his left, all that hair flopped into those blue-flame eyes. He only finished sixth grade but he was drawing good government money then, as a Marine, and drove home every weekend from the base in Macon with one thing on his mind. He liked to pose on the square and see the girls sway by, but wouldn’t whistle because he’d already found the one. “He smiled mischievous,” my mother said, like he was picking life’s pocket, like he was getting away with something by hanging around and breathing air. He was just another linthead kid, but as different from other men she knew, the brush-arbor prophets, pulpwooders and shade-tree mechanics, as the mannequin in Steinberg’s department store was from a cornfield scarecrow. When it was time to go he slid behind the wheel and turned the key, and he looked like an angel, one of the fallen kind, as the big engine caught fire and he vanished in a blue-black, oily, noxious cloud.

“His car burnt a lot of oil,” she said. “It burnt so much oil that a cloud followed him all around town, burnt so much oil he couldn’t keep oil in it, but instead of getting it fixed he’d just go out to that fillin’ station out on the highway, you know, where Young’s used to be, and he’d pull it up to a barrel of the burnt oil they drained out of people’s cars, and he’d dip it out in a bucket and put it in his ol’ car, and he’d just ride and ride. People used to laugh at him. They’d say, ‘Here comes that Bragg boy, in a cloud of smoke.’

“They ought not laughed at him, though,” she said. “People’s mean.”

The words must have tasted a little stale.

She had not defended him in forty years.

“Now,” she said, “it was a pretty car.”

She remembers him that way, in smoke.

But sometimes, in a blue moon, she remembers him on his knees.

“It was about four months after we started seein’ each other. We was at Germania Springs, and he was gettin’ him a drink of water, laying on his belly on the creek bank. You could drink it right out of the creek back then, and it was good ’n’ cold. Well, he got a drink, and he turned and looked at me. ‘Will you marry me?’ he said. And I laughed at him and he got mad. I think he cussed a little, too. But, I mean, who asks somebody to get married while they’re on their belly gettin’ a drink of water? ‘You’re kiddin’, ain’t you?’ I told him, and then he cussed again. He said, ‘Hell, I was serious. Will you marry me?’ But I giggled again. I couldn’t quit.”

She has tried to forget so much it seems odd to try to remember. But she can still see him pushing himself up to his knees for a little dignity. For a second, just a second, he faced her on one knee, just like in a storybook.

“I mean it, goddammit,” he said.

His face was bright, burning red.

“Will you, or not?”

H
E WAS NOT A MARRYING MAN
.

The old men laughed at him, all duded up with that oil bucket in his hand, but the women loved his face. Even men—men so afraid of appearing feminine they would walk a wide loop around the unmentionables in Sears to avoid being in proximity of a panty—would concede that, yeah, that Charles Bragg was a good-looking man. He had a movie star’s squared-off chin with a dashing white line across it, like a dueling scar. He got it one night, drunk, when he banged his face on the steering wheel, but it made him look mysterious and a little bit dangerous all the same. He had Indian blood and cheekbones, proud and high, and his face tanned to dark red. His ears and Adam’s apple were too big but his hands were as small and delicate as a woman’s, yet strong as wire pliers, like his daddy’s had been. He talked country but dressed for town, as all the boys from the mill village did back then, a hybrid hillbilly with silver dimes flashing in his black penny loafer shoes. He chain-smoked Pall Malls and toted a thin, yellow-handled knife in his left hip pocket, so he could get at it, quick. He hid a snub-nosed pistol at the small of his back, but only on the weekends, and never when he was with her. He raised fighting dogs, bet on chickens and loved vanilla ice cream, and I guess he was a scoundrel before he knew what a scoundrel was.

“He would cut you, if you hemmed him up,” said my father’s cousin Carlos Slaght, whose daddy named him after a label he saw on a crate of Mexican apples in Christmas 1932. “But he was a good boy, all in all.” If you turned him upside down and shook him, as his older brothers were prone to do, dice and a pint of liquor would have bounced across the floor and fifty-two cards would have fluttered down, or fifty-one, if he had one hid. The darkness he had done an ocean away had left a mark on him, sure, but he hid it then, like his tattoos. Back home, he drew his pocket comb like a gun, and could often be seen slouched at a table in the Ladiga Grill, preening, pretending not to notice the girls who noticed him.

“He walked by me once on the street and didn’t speak, and turned around and followed me down the sidewalk,” my mother said. She caught him doing that, caught his reflection in a storefront window, but she didn’t turn around and embarrass him. She just smiled, and kept walking. He showed up a lot when she was in the café, and he would sit and smoke and drink black coffee and steal looks at her over the top of a paperback western.

He had a reputation of course, but she didn’t know, and that is the same as having none at all. “Charles always had the women,” said his buddy Jack Andrews. “Nice girls, too, I mean. Church girls. But your momma…He fell in love with her. He made up this picture in his head of how he thought his life ought to be. She was in that picture with him, and he never did get that picture out of his mind.”

I have rarely been able to describe her, the way she was then. I guess all boys have trouble with that. I said she looked like a movie star, but she was prettier than that, than that blowsy, made-up prettiness. Her face had peace in it then, serenity. It may be, after the way his life had passed, that was what he found to be most lovely of all.

She was raised in the foothills. When she came to town as a young woman, it was to keep other people’s babies and mop their floors. Then here comes my father, all dressed up and slicked down and pool-hall cool, with the mountains in his own bloodline and the mill village on his driver’s license, but posing as something different, something more. He was quick and sharp as a serpent’s tooth in that white suit, but not sharp enough to see he did not need to pose for her. “Oh, he sure did priss around,” she said. “I just liked his teeth.”

M
Y FATHER NEVER REALLY LIVED ANYWHERE
but here, in the town where he was born. He was stationed overseas and in Georgia, incarcerated for a while in Virginia and found body and fender work in Texas, but mostly his life passed within the city limits of the northeast Alabama town of Jacksonville. It is a lovely town, and fifty years ago, as he wooed my mother, this was a postcard in real time, its main avenue lined with white-columned mansions and three-hundred-year-old oaks, its working-class people tucked out of sight and down the hill. The through street, old Highway 21, was named for John Pelham, a handsome young artillery officer blown off his horse by an exploding shell in the battle at Kelly’s Ford. General Lee wept when he received news of the death of the boy he called “my gallant Pelham.” But reverence just wasn’t in my father then. In ’55, he drag-raced his rod-knocking Mercury from stop sign to stop sign on Pelham Road, outrunning nobody, just powerfully bored. He checked his hair in the rearview mirror, checked his side mirror for the town’s one and only police car, and laid rubber all over hallowed Rebel ground.

It ran just two lanes then, north to south. To the west was the mill village and its identical tract houses, each with its one, company-approved tree facing alphabet streets paved in ash, smut and cinders from the mill’s coal-fired power plant. The Pentecostals lived here, displaced mountain people. The mill people climbed the hill to go to town, and hard drinkers from the village liked to joke that if police let them out before they were sober, they could roll down A Street right into their beds. Here, freight cars backed up a half mile, hauling in whole counties of cotton and hauling out the earth itself, from hills of red soil piled at Dixie Clay. The East Side was the fashionable part of town, but the West Side bent its back to the place, powered it, made it run.

The East Side wore a lace of dogwoods, azaleas and wild plums. Here were the college professors, the merchants and professionals, the landlords and the necktie men, prominent First Baptists and Episcopalians. The nice streets were paved with asphalt and clean, white gravel. “The East Side people dranked about as much as we did,” said Carlos, “but did keep it better hid.” Also to the east, but a discreet distance away, was Eastwood, which most people called Needmore. It was a black community of small, well-tended houses. On weekends, world-class baseball players, held here by color, played in epic games as concessionaires fried fish in big, smoking pots and served it on white bread with a single daub of catsup in the middle, like a bullet wound.

To the north was the college, a beautiful landscape of brick buildings, tree-shaded and immaculate, a teachers’ school that grew into something more, and a small college football powerhouse. The mascot was a fighting gamecock, and when the marching band played Dixie, the East Siders and West Siders rose together, and roared.

To the south was commerce, what people even now just call the Highway. You could see two drive-in movies in a five-mile stretch, visit a bootlegger who hid in plain sight, eat the best foot-long hotdog in the known universe and buy a pistol with no questions asked, and still not be more than seven miles out of town.

In the middle of it all was the square—not really a square at all but a circle. Off to one side squatted City Hall, not an antebellum showpiece, but a yellow fortress pieced from natural rock. For my people, it was just “the jail,” and we knew it the way some people know their church or a Mason’s Lodge. It was an old-time jail with iron bars and iron bunks and white beans seven days a week, but the worst thing about being locked inside was the constant sound of motion outside its iron doors, as the bored young people circled, circled in their cars.

It was there, in that orbit of Hudsons, Packards and Chevrolets, that my father fell in love, betrayed a buddy, and third-wheeled his way into my mother’s heart. But it’s not like he snuck around about it.