Read The Prince of Frogtown Online
Authors: Rick Bragg
The Prince of Frogtown
Contents
CHAPTER ONE:
In a Cloud of Smoke
CHAPTER FIVE:
The Bootlegger’s Rhythm
CHAPTER SEVEN:
My Fair Orvalene
CHAPTER NINE:
Settin’ the World on Fire
CHAPTER TEN:
What You’re Supposed to Do
FOR RANDY HENDERSON
Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin
Get six pretty girls to carry my pall
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin
Put roses to deaden the clods as they fall
“Streets of Laredo”
PROLOGUE
The Stream
I
N WATER SO FINE,
a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn’t hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. It took something as powerful as that, as girls, to tug me away from this tribe of sunburned little boys, to scatter us from this place of double-dog dares, Blow Pops, Cherry Bombs, Indian burns, chicken fights, and giggling, half-wit choruses of “Bald-Headed Man from China.” Maybe we should have nailed up a sign—
NO GIRLS ALLOWED
—and lived out our lives here, to fight mean bulls from the safe side of a barbed-wire fence with a cape cut from a red tank top, and duel to the death with swords sliced off a weeping willow tree. I don’t know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy. Then, a thrust to the heart only bent against my chest, in a place where I could look straight into the Alabama sun through a water-smoothed nugget of glass, and tell myself it was a shipwrecked emerald instead of just a piece from a broken bottle of Mountain Dew.
The stream began in a jumble of rocks beside the Piedmont Highway, bubbling up cold and clear a half mile from my grandmother’s house. The air always smelled of coconut-scented suntan lotion and lighter fluid, and in summer the white gravel parking lot filled with church buses, poodle walkers, and weekend Hells Angels who might have been born to run, but now lugged along well-fed wives in white go-go boots and polyester pantsuits rolled to the knee. It was a lovely park, but a boy, a genuine boy, can have no real fun with so many Presbyterians puttering around, and so many mommas in one tight place.
But if you followed the water a meandering half mile to the west, through a dark, spiderwebbed, monster-infested culvert tall enough for a small boy to run through, all the picnickers and weenie roasters vanished behind a curtain of gnarled, lightning-blasted cedars and thick, dark pines. The stream passed under four strands of barbed wire, flowed through a sprawling pasture studded with wicked blackberry thickets and the rusted hulks of old baling machines, then rushed into a dogleg against a high, red clay bank. Here, the shin-deep water pooled into a clear, cold swimming hole, made deeper by the ragged dam of logs, rocks and sandbags we built just downstream.
This was our place. From a running start, I could leap clear across it, heart like a piston, arms flailing for distance, legs like shock absorbers as I finally, finally touched down. This is where I learned to take a punch and not cry, how to dodge a rock, sharpen a knife, cuss, and spit. Here, with decrepit cowboy hats and oil-stained
BAMA
caps on our burr heads and the gravel of the streambed sifting through our toes, we daydreamed about Corvettes we would drive, wondered if we would all die in Vietnam and where that was, and solemnly divined why you should never, ever pee on an electric fence.
This is the last place I remember having much peace of mind. It is where I lay still shaking from the water and let the sun simmer me to sleep, my feet and legs slicked by nail polish to suffocate the chiggers that had hitched a ride on me the day before. I would wake, hard, to the bite of a horsefly, or soft, to a faint, far-off rumbling in still-blue skies and the frightened calls of a mother who always, somehow, foretold the storm. A few times I took a book, but it was hard to read with your brothers pelting you with day-old cow patties and green pinecones. And besides, in those days of bloody adventure, the Boxcar Children moved a little slow, and the Hardy Boys didn’t have nothin’ on me.
My mother had tried to open the outside world to me in the only way she could, by taking home a volume every Friday morning from the discount encyclopedia sale at the A&P, but the sale ended too soon and the world stopped at the letter K—Kyoto, Kyushu and Kyzyl Kum. I didn’t miss the rest of the alphabet or the world, not here. The only thing that could force an end to perfect days in the perfect stream was the dipping of that almighty sun, sinking into
Gunsmoke,
hot cornbread and cold buttermilk, and a preemptive “If I should die before I wake” as a shorted-out electric fan droned off and on in a window by my bed. Somewhere out there, my father drifted from ditch to ditch in a hundred-dollar car, but we were free of him then, free of him for good.
Yet sometimes, when I am wading through my memories of this place, I find the pieces of another day, a day told to me as much as it was truly remembered, because I was so small. My father was still with us then, his loafers spit-shined, his creases sharp enough to cut you in two, and he would have smelled of Ivory soap and Old Spice and a faint, splashed-on respectability. It is not the best or worst story I have of my father, but is worth telling if only because, this time, he was innocent.
I
WAS NOT A TODDLER ANYMORE,
but not yet school-age. Mostly, I remember the weather. It was late spring, after the blackberries bloom. Summer does not wait on the calendar here, and by the end of May the heat has settled across the foothills of the Appalachians like a damp dishrag. By Memorial weekend, the flies have discovered every hole in the screen doors, and the grass has been cut six times. But some years, just before four solid months of unrelenting sweat, a cool, delicious wind blows through the hills, mixes with the brilliant sunshine, and provides a few, final sips of dry, breezy, perfect weather. The old people call it blackberry winter.
It is fine sleeping weather and even better for visiting, and that is what brought us together in the early 1960s. By midmorning, the chert drive in front of my grandmother Ava’s house was crowded with fifties-model Chevrolets and GMC pickups loaded with chain saws, rusted picks and shovels, logging chains and battered toolboxes. There was work in the American South then, good blue-collar work with health insurance and solid pension funds. Smokestacks burned at midnight, and coated the parked cars in a film of black, beautiful, life-giving smut. If a man’s family did without, it was his own damn fault.
The hot-grease smell of frying chicken would have leaked from the windows and screen doors, as it did every Sunday, as aunts and cousins twisted the lids off sweet pickles and stirred yellow mustard into big gobs of potato salad. Gospel music from the black-and-white television mixed in the air with the smell from sizzling iron skillets.
“…and now, folks, from Pensacola, Florida, with sand in their shoes, it’s the Florida Boys…”
My grandmother Ava, who never really recovered from the death of the one man she ever deemed worthy of a second glance, would nod to the music, and dream.
The yard was chaos and tricycles, the red dirt and spring grass covered in pink-faced children crying, laughing, screaming, fighting, bleeding. Doll heads bounced across the ground, diapers were lost, green plums and some small measure of dirt were eaten. Wagons and Kiddie Kars crashed and overturned in wild onions and ant beds, but no baby’s suffering, not even a sweat bee sting, lasted too long. Daddies snatched up the afflicted, baby-talked into their ears, and jiggled them well again.
Older boys walked the nearby field, using Daisy BB guns to harass but miss clean thousands of birds, and shoot each other, giggling, in the behind. My older brother Sam, too grown up even at age seven for all that foolishness, stalked the tall weeds beneath the power lines, knocked big crows off the wire with his air rifle, then nailed them, wings spread, to the side of the barn. A dead dog would break his heart, but he was murder on crows.
My mother would have been beautiful then, her hair the color of fresh-picked corn, and my dark, blue-eyed father would have been the most handsome man in our part of Calhoun County. They belonged together, light and dark, I once believed. As the clock inched toward noon and the sun flushed out every dark corner of my world, he stood gun-barrel straight and stone sober beside my uncles, cousins and the other men. There would have been hangover in his eyes and in the tremble of his hands around his cigarette, but it wasn’t anything a little taste of liquor wouldn’t heal, once he had shaken free of his wife and kids like a man slipping out of a set of too-tight Sunday clothes.
The men segregated themselves under the chinaberry tree. They wore double-knit slacks and what we called sport shirts, not one necktie or day of college between them, but capable men who fixed their own cars, patched their own water lines and laid their own bricks. They were a mix of the Old and New South, men who drew their paychecks from the cotton mills, pipe shops and steel mills, but still believed that you could make it rain if you hung dead snakes in the branches of trees. They were solid as the steel they rolled or concrete they poured. They did not drink, did not cuss unless they were in the fraternity of like-minded men, and surrendered their paychecks to their wives the minute they walked in the front door. As they talked they clicked chrome Zippo lighters toward thin, tight, hand-rolled cigarettes, and stuffed strings of tobacco into their jaws until they looked deformed. Some were Saved, some backslid and some as yet unaffiliated, but even the ones who walked in the Holy Holy did not preach to the others, out of respect. If you went to work and fed your babies, you were already halfway home. So they spoke of the secular, of the secrets of fuel injection, how to put brake shoes on a ’64 Corvair, or the best way to worm a good dog. They believed in General Motors, Briggs & Stratton, Craftsman, Poulan, John Deere, International, Tree Brand, Zebco, Remington and Wolverine, and the bumper stickers on their trucks read
WALLACE
or nothing at all.
My father was, in the moment, one of them. He was a body and fender man when he was working. He drank, yes, but he had killed a man in Korea by holding his head underwater, and if that didn’t earn you a swallow at home, not much did. The truth is none of them knew him well. He was quiet when he was all right—our polite code for the word “sober”—and his close friends, which were few, said he was only at ease in conflict, fighting, taking some risk. He should have joined a circus, they said, and walked a wire.
I guess if we have to place the blame somewhere on how that day just came apart around us, we can blame it on the livestock. My mother had let me play in the dirt with the rest of the yard urchins, until I skinned myself raw on a Kiddie Kar. I had just started to weep when my father reached for me, and began to walk with me toward the pasture and stream beyond. It shamed him, to have his little boy cry in front of the other men.
“I’ll take the boy down to the creek and show him the cows, Margaret,” he said, and I stopped crying as if I had a switch attached to my simple mind.
“I like to see the cows, Daddy,” I said.
“I know, boy,” he said.
That was me.
Boy.
I don’t think he ever called me son, just “boy,” but that was good enough. It’s one of those words that bind you to someone strong as nylon cord, if you say it right.
I was too old to carry, surely, but I swung in his arms like a doll. He was a little man, even shorter than my tall mother, but incredibly strong. Through the open neck of his sports shirt you could see the tattoos of bluebirds inked high on his sunburned chest. My mother hated them, but the little boys were fascinated. It was a time when, if you had a tattoo, you had better be a Marine, and if you had an earring, you had better be a pirate.
Ahead of us, across the wire, a rust-and-white Hereford bull the size of a pickup watched over his harem, not far from the stream that would become our swimming hole.