The Prince of Frogtown (4 page)

Lit in the cool neon wash of the lovely old Princess Theater, he wooed my mother while she was on a date with one of his best friends. We have always been the kind of men who do not regard a woman as all that unattainable just because she is attached to somebody else by class ring, engagement ring or wedding band, but as backstabbings go, this one was remarkable, diabolical, and complete.

It was a Saturday, we believe. Underage roughnecks slouched dejectedly in front of the pool hall as, inside, decorated World War II veteran Homer Barnwell watched over the tables. “I never could play,” he would tell the boys, but he took a lot of money off the ones who said they could. The theater marquee spelled out Johnny Mack Brown for the main event, but promised werewolves for the midnight show. Officer Walter Rollins, who worked days in Hoyt Fair’s sawmill, circled the square in his faded black patrol car. The chief, Whitey Whiteside, had been shot to death in the mill village just months before by a drunken man named Robert Dentmon, a few days before the two men had planned to go fishing. His widow, Mary, took money for the show in her booth under the marquee. Lorrene West sold fresh popcorn.

Across the square, the Boozer brothers, buzzing clippers in their hands, shaved flattops so close it was a wonder they didn’t draw blood. Ed Johnson cashed paychecks at the IGA, and Alfred Roebuck welcomed both the hopeful and bereaved into his furniture store, selling sofas in front and coffins in the back. Little boys counted pennies on the soda counter at West Side Drug Store as, in the nearby Creamery, crew-cut college boys in skinny ties chatted up flowers of the Deep South over cones of black walnut, pistachio and butter pecan. A Greek man named George turned big steaks and seared fat hamburgers at the Ladiga Grill, as redheaded Louise Treadaway welcomed travelers off the bus from Anniston at her family’s bus stop café. Old men told lies in decrepit vinyl chairs at Mathis Cab, and a black cat glared from the window at Reid’s shoe shop. Some nights there was gunfire and heartache and car crashes, but most nights, slow nights like this, you could have cut the whole town out of the air and hung it on the wall.

The young man my mother was seeing then, a tall, black-haired, green-eyed boy, was a good-looking rake just like my father. They were just hanging out, killing time, when the boy told his buddy Charles that he wanted to take that Bundrum girl out on a proper date. But he had just had his prized ’48 Ford painted a sharper battleship gray, and any fool knows that if you drive a car before the paint dries good, every speck of highway dust in four counties will adhere to the hood. Still, he was anxious. He was pretty sure that if he didn’t take her out, some sweet-talker would.

“That’s that pretty girl?” my father asked.

He knew good and damn well who she was. The boy had introduced them some time ago, and my father even asked if he might write her from where he was stationed, somewhere far off and probably dangerous, and just wanted to read a friendly voice from home.

The boy said yes, she was pretty.

My father was willing to help a buddy out.

“You can take my car,” he said.

The boy was apparently not eager to date my mother in a car that was liable to choke her to death with smut, but he had little choice here. He said, Thank you, buddy, and reached for the keys. My father dangled them but didn’t let go.

“Do you mind,” he asked, “if I go with y’all?”

When the boy went to pick up my mother, my father was sitting in the backseat, his suit pressed, a carnation in his lapel. It was cool weather, and all the flower pots and beds were just dead sticks, and she has always wondered if he crawled in a hothouse, or a bedroom window. He did not buy flowers. It was against his religion.

He just nodded hello as she climbed in the car. The other boy touched the gas pedal, and they left in a black, reeking cloud. The gears were out of sync, so my father, as the engine began to whine, would fling himself forward from the backseat, shout at the boy to press the clutch, and, leaning between the boy and my mother, shove the gearshift up or down or sideways with a horrible, grinding sound, and then settle back into the backseat, till he had to shift again.

They hadn’t gone a mile when my father began talking to the backs of their heads.

“I reckon you’re the most beautiful thing in this whole town,” my father said.

My mother, and the boy, too, didn’t know what to do.

“I reckon you’re the most beautiful thing I ever seen,” he said.

She just stared out the windshield, embarrassed.

“In the whole world,” he said.

Whiskey can make men talk like that. But there was not one trace, one sniff, on his breath.

Then he leaned forward and tapped the boy on the shoulder.

“I’m gonna take her away from you,” he said.

He did not sound like he was joking.

The boy could have fought for her, but the world is full of brave boys who limp home with their lips split and still no kiss good night. He was a rough fist-fighter himself and, my mother said, “could be mean as a scorpion.” But my father’s reputation, and his family’s reputation, prevented a lot of violence in those days. A family that so routinely pulled knives on each other was not one you engaged without at least weighing the consequences. The boy was seething, though, and steered the oil-burning hulk to his own house, took my mother by the hand and tugged her away. He opened the door of his still-moist Ford so my mother could slide in, then drove off mad as hell, flinching at every puff of sand or flying leaf that brushed his quarter panels, leaving my father on the sidewalk, grinning like a devil in the lingering smoke.

That is what she saw, those white, perfect teeth in that devil’s grin, as the other boy told her good night.

My father took her out himself the next weekend, and the next, and if any other boy even expressed an interest he paid them a visit, and the suitors began to peel away. He told my mother, all the time, that she was just by God beautiful, as pretty as Rita Hayworth. He said these things in a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. You could feel it, not just hear it, feel his whole chest vibrate from that deep voice, as if, like a little car with an engine that’s just too big, the voice could shake that pretty little man apart. Anyway, it is the kind of voice you believe.

They got to know each other in that wretched car, just riding around; once you saw the movies, and if there was nothing happening at the convention hall, there was nowhere else to go for a month or two. She was a little bit ashamed to ride in it, but only a little. She had the beauty, the currency, to marry outside her class, but the truth was she would have been uncomfortable with a richer boy, with a people who might have looked down on her, or worse, on her people.

His family was legend in the mill village. The Bragg men drank corn whiskey, played poker, rolled dice and settled arguments with fists and knives and sometimes just acted a little peculiar, but worked hard in the mill, never refused a plea for help, gave away truckloads of food from gardens and hog killings, and asked only to be left alone, at least until the sound of glass breaking and women crying. Their women were long-suffering, loyal unto death, and lost in love, and if they had not been, their men would have rotted in jail.

“They was respected people,” Carlos said, “with a few vices.”

My mother’s own daddy made whiskey, but drank and laughed, drank and sang, never took a sip in front of her, never let it change him from a good man into something else. Why on earth, she wished with all her heart, could it not be that way again?

She remembers a smell of citrus the first time he took her to meet his mother and father. “He had been down to Florida, and their house was full of the biggest grapefruits, oranges and lemons I ever seen,” she said. She knew better than to ask how he got them. A man who could not drive past a rosebush or window box without committing larceny could not be expected to pass a thousand acres of citrus growing at the side of the road.

His mother and father, little people like him, greeted her at the door. She noticed, with some embarrassment, that she was the tallest person in the room. Bobby, his father, was ironed so stiff he seemed to be all sharp angles and flat planes, like a paper doll with a little, round, white-topped head perched on top. He wore a starched white shirt buttoned to the neck, overalls so new and stiff they made a racket like plywood rubbing together when he walked, and immaculate, black, wing-tip shoes.

Velma was tiny like her man, and had the kindest face my mother had ever seen. She was already gray-haired, a slightly stooped little woman who worked a full shift at the cotton mill, cleaned houses, helped raise other people’s children and spent every other free moment trying to keep her husband, a rapscallion and brawler when he was well-oiled, from harm at the hands of police, card players, drinking buddies, his own sons, and himself. My father was her baby, the pride of her life. He called her Momma, and called his daddy Bob.

My mother noticed a tension in them, sitting there knee to knee, and when she looked closer she noticed that Bob was quite drunk. It seemed that he had gotten lit and picked a fight with Velma, and had not sobered up enough to tell her he was sorry. “He got real, real red-faced when he drank, and he was red-faced then,” my mother said.

“What’s wrong, Bob?” my father said.

“She’s got a man hid in the house,” he said.

Velma rolled her eyes.

“She ain’t got no man in the house, Bob,” my father said.

“I tell you she does,” Bobby said.

Here my father was, trying to impress his new girl, while his daddy was having a delusion. My mother just sat, staring at her lap, and whispered: “My, them lemons sure do smell—”

“I heard him, goddammit,” Bobby said.

“—nice,” she squeaked.

My father vaulted to his feet.

“Come on, Bob, we’ll find him.”

He went from room to room, looking in closets.

“Not here,” he shouted.

He ran to the kitchen, and jerked open the refrigerator door.

“Reckon he’s in here, Bob,” he said.

His father sat, his face redder.

My mother wanted to laugh, but just sat, politely.

It was like the circus to her, with midgets and everything.

The one thing that worried her was the way his mother looked at her. “I thought she didn’t like me, ’cause she just sat there, and looked at me so sad,” my mother said. As they left, Velma reached as high as she could and hugged her neck, fiercely. Years later, she would tell her what she wanted to say, but dared not, with the men in the room.

She wanted to tell her to run.

But there seemed no need to be afraid, then.

“I never saw him drink then,” my mother said. “He drank coffee. I never even remember seeing him with a beer. I had heard all them people who went off in the military was social drinkers, but we would sit for hours and hours, him sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes, acting like a real gentleman.”

He told my mother he had prospects, told her he might be in the Marines for life, or might work with his brothers in a body and fender shop. But he told her he would starve before he would work in a cotton mill, choking on cotton dust in a place where blades and gears chewed up people, taking their fingers, hands and arms. He had grown up seeing coughing, maimed, broken-down men pass the caskets of their brothers and sisters through the windows of houses too small and tight to fit the coffins through the halls and front door. He was not afraid of anything, usually, but that was his terror, to be passed around like that. But he told her not to worry, that he would give her and their children a better life than that. He told her, holding her hand, she could depend on him.

He was kind to her mother, who didn’t like his fancy looks, and respectful to her father, who was almost a folk hero in these hills, a tall, gaunt moonshiner and hammer swinger who had never in his life lost a stand-up fight with another man, or any two men. My father took work with him on the weekends, roofing a house with him, and spent his paycheck on a suit for her, in the style the women called “sweater suits.” Before he had a chance to give it to her, my grandfather took my mother aside. “Now, that boy thinks he’s done somethin’ real big, and you act proud, now, when he gives it to you.” She told him yes, she would, but it had not been necessary. It was the first dress she ever had that was not homemade or cast-off, given to her by the rich ladies whose floors she swept.

He made her other promises, crossed his heart and hoped to die.

He gave her a silver dollar as seed corn, for money they would save.

He gave her a cedar hope chest, to hold their future.

“For when we get us a house,” he told her.

When he heard she had never had a doll, growing up poor in the foothills of the Appalachians, he went to a doll maker in Jacksonville, an old woman famous for her fancy needlework, and had her make his new wife a ballerina, what my mother called a dancing doll. It cost twenty-five dollars, about half a month of a Marine’s pay.

He gave her flowers all the time.

“But they didn’t cost him nothin’,” she said.

He would strain to stand as tall as he could when they had their picture made, so he would be almost as tall as her. It never worked. His feet were so small he could wear her shoes, and he did sometimes, puttering around the house in her little flat shoes, to make her laugh.

They spent every waking minute together, and would have spent more, but her daddy would have killed him. He disappeared on Sunday night, to go back to the base in Macon in time for duty on Monday morning. Every Sunday, he stayed with her until the last minute, then roared off into the night, sliding around the twisting roads, racing the sun.

The old car took too long to get there, and cut into his time with her. So he saved up and got a machine that would move. It was a 1954 Hudson, and had a chromed, winged hood ornament that made it look like a silver eagle was flying just ahead of it on the highway. It rolled on gangster whitewalls and four perfectly matched factory hubcaps, and had a “Big Six” six-cylinder motor, three-speed on the column, fender skirts on the rear wheels and six little-bitty chrome letters that spelled out “Hornet” on the side. On Sundays, they rode and listened to the radio and talked about the sons they would have. They would all be sons, he figured. They would have to be. They decided to name the first one Samuel, after his grandfather. With a big name like that, their kin kidded them, the boy would probably come into the world, dust himself off, and walk home.