The Prince of Frogtown (23 page)

“Ross had a big belly, but was fast and he knew how to use his fists, and Charles just didn’t have no chance,” Jack said. “He’d have made two of your daddy.”

He never beat or whipped him when he was in custody.

He never starved him.

He just put him in chains, in plain view.

“Ross wanted to own him,” Jack said. “What it was, he had to break you. He hated disobedience. If you didn’t cower down, didn’t bow, he wasn’t satisfied. Charles wouldn’t. It wasn’t enough that he put you in jail, or on the work crew. He had to break your spirit, and he couldn’t break Charles.”

One day, when my father was free, Ross saw my mother in town.

“How’s your man?” he asked.

“He’s working, doing good,” she said.

“Well, I know he don’t treat y’all right,” he said.

He tipped his hat.

“You call me if there’s anything I can do.”

It stopped being fun after a while.

He and Jack liked to string trotlines then in the Coosa, up near the little town of Ohatchee. They would take Purex jugs and nylon cord, and bait the lines with whatever foul-smelling meat they had. The next day they would pull them in, and there might be crappie or catfish, always something. One day the lines were gone. Close by, they noticed varmint traps. A man named Johnson, a good friend of Ross’s, was the only trapper they knew.

Johnson sold fur to department store buyers, and supplied fish to Ross in return for occasional favors. “No matter what he ever got into, Ross took care of it,” Jack said. Johnson was gray-haired, crew-cut and stocky, and had a reputation for smiling in a man’s face, “and popping a knife in you,” Jack said.

“Well, we went to his house, me and Charles, and we’d both been drinking,” Jack said, “a little bit.”

They found Johnson on the couch.

“What you want?” he said.

“You know anything about that trotline?” my father asked.

“I know about lots of trotlines,” he said, and laughed.

“Well this’un was ours,” my father said.

The man’s smile faded, but he didn’t move, just lay there.

“We saw your traps, right close by,” my father said.

Johnson ignored him, like he wasn’t there.

He was so unconcerned, he looked like he might take a nap.

“You gonna just lay there,” my father said, “or do I have to pick you up to knock you down?”

Johnson jumped to his feet as my father clubbed down with his fist. There was a crack, and the man crumpled to the floor, holding his face. My father had on a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots, and drew back his leg, to kick the man in the head.

“Whoa,” Jack said, and grabbed him, and half carried him out the door.

“What you gonna do, stomp him to death?” Jack said.

“Yeah,” my father said.

His face was bright red, twisted and ugly, but he let Jack push him into the car. In his mind, Jack said, my father could see those fish sizzling in Ross Tipton’s kitchen.

My father knew Ross was untouchable. The best he could do was knock the hell out of his friends.

Ross got serious, then. There are two definitions of wrongdoing in my hometown, and they have nothing to do with felony or misdemeanor. All that really matters is whether your crime required you to be sent off, or do your time at home. You could be sent off for stealing a car radio, and not sent off for opening up a man’s belly in the parking lot with a hawkbill roofing knife. If you were not sent off, you did your time in the city jail, so your momma could come see you. But if you were sent off, you went to county, or to an institution. Back then, it was at the police chief’s discretion where you did your time, and it was then, around ’59, Ross sent my father off.

It was just a few months, for driving drunk, but it was a different jail. In county, the junkies screamed all night, peed on the floor and toted shivs made from melted pocket combs rubbed against the floor until they were needle-sharp and hard as bone. He would lay in his bunk and hear men’s teeth clack from the violent DTs, see them rock back and forth when the truth was he could have used a drink himself. Whiskey runners in overalls and dope peddlers in pointy shoes stared at each other, white and black, through the cells. But my father was a model prisoner, and worked his way up to trusty. He moved through the jail without chains, pushing a mop, emptying trash. He only had a few weeks left to serve when he escaped, and no one knew why he took the keys when he did, except to stick his thumb in the eye of the men who put him in a cage.

Later, free again, he and Jack sat in his car at Germania Springs, listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes, as my father planned the destruction of the chief of police.

He laid out a simple plan. He and Jack would put in a call to the dispatcher, late at night, and say that two delinquents were throwing trash, breaking beer bottles and raising cain at Germania Springs. Ross used prisoners to keep the park clean—it was his pet project—and would be livid. He would rush over alone, because Ross wouldn’t need help with delinquents. “We’ll lay for him with baseball bats,” my father said. As Ross stepped out of the car they would smack his head and break his legs, to bring him down, break his gun arm, and beat him to death.

Jack just looked at my father’s dark silhouette.

“We can’t,” Jack said.

“Why not?” my father said.

“’Cause they’ll put us in the electric chair,” Jack said.

“I don’t care,” my father said. “I intend to kill the son of a bitch.”

It is not unusual here, for men to get drunk and talk about killing. If you’re not talking about women, you must be talking about killing somebody. Jack spent a big part of the night talking my father out of his revenge, reminding him what he had to live for. He was pretty sure Ross would be hard to kill, would have shot my father or beat him to death or put him in prison forever. It was crazy. My father should have been home with his wife and babies, not out with Jack plotting the death of a chief of police, on a school night.

Jack talked all night.

The electric chair didn’t scare my father, but life in prison did.

Jack talked on that, on the eternity of it.

He told him it was a long way to the prison at Atmore, down on the Florida line. Poor people, sometimes, didn’t have a way, couldn’t afford the gas.

“You won’t never see Margaret again,” he told my father.

Men are forgotten, he said, so far south.

“Oh hell yeah, he’d of done it,” Jack said, thinking back. “Your daddy wasn’t afraid to die.”

But he did not want to disappear.

M
Y FATHER WAS ALREADY WAKING
with the shakes when I was born. He never stopped hating Ross, but as his life dwindled it wasn’t much of a contest. People who knew my father still blame Ross for quickening his end, and I guess I do, too. But the truth is he never broke my father down. The whiskey and TB did that. It is a hell of a way to win.

As his career as chief neared its end, District Attorney Bob Field was finishing an investigation into Ross’s dealings, prompted by complaints from private citizens who served on grand juries, and by police officers and ex-officers who felt “the system may be breaking down.” Field said the major shortcoming in Jacksonville seemed to be the disposition of cases made by police officials outside the authority of the court, and, while it was found that Tipton had signed judges’ names to docket sheets and warrants and established the amount of fines on his own authority, he felt there was no criminal intent. He said, though, Jacksonville was the only police department he knew of that had no systematic way to keep up with evidence. People in the village laughed. Evidence was what Ross said it was.

Ross Tipton was chief until he was sixty-eight years old. When he retired, on June 17, 1981, the State of Alabama had Ross Tipton Day. People wrote to the
Jacksonville News
to applaud him, to thank him for the money he gave to hardship cases, food to hungry dogs, and the justice he meted out to men who thanked him for sending them to prison. Faye Pritchett-Renfroe, of Tenth Avenue, wrote: “Thank you for the many fines you paid out of your own pocket on Monday morning so a father or husband could go to his job after squandering his family’s grocery money on booze, for the clothes and food you purchased for less fortunate, for the care given to the habitual drunks of our town, and for looking the other way when young people were arrested for minor things, for taking children fishing, and thank you for having been our friend. It is my family’s wish that your retirement will bring you joy and contentment, and may you know the peace of the Lord.”

In the years my father dwindled, Jack still had occasional run-ins with Ross. He was married then, working third shift at the mill. He tried to stretch a dollar where he could, and was using old tags on his car, hoping no one would notice. Ross did. He told Jack not to move the car out of his yard till he bought tags. Jack told Ross if he couldn’t drive he couldn’t work. “I got two babies got to be fed,” he said. Ross told him he would have to walk. But later, he sent word to Jack that he guessed it would be all right to drive the car to work. “That’s what I mean, about the two sides of Ross,” Jack said. “There was evil, and something else. Once he had power over you, he was happy.”

I
HAD JUST ONE
criminal encounter with Ross Tipton, if you don’t count the ones I committed behind the wheel. It was a weekday in summer and I was about eight years old. I walked to Germania Springs, where my father once plotted to kill Ross Tipton, and amused myself. I swung on a swing set and bounced rocks against a tree till I was hot enough to wade in the cold stream. I was still mightily bored, so I found some chert rocks the size of cantaloupes, and started a new dam.

“What you doin’, boy?” a big voice said.

I looked up to see the biggest man I had ever seen above me on the bank. He had on a white shirt and black pants with a yellow stripe running down each leg, and a big black gun belt. I had seen him a hundred times, but he had never spoken to me.

“You can’t dam that water up,” he said.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Well, now you do,” he said.

There were no cars in the parking lot, so he must have wondered how I got there.

“Where you live, boy?” he asked.

I pointed across Roy Webb Road to Ava’s little house.

Everyone knew we lived there when we ran from my father.

“You’re Charles Bragg’s boy?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” I said.

He did not say anything mean, did not say anything about him at all.

“You tear that dam up, and fish them rocks out,” he ordered.

“Yes sir,” I said.

He turned and walked to his cruiser, an old man in thick glasses walking soft on tender diabetic feet, but I was still scared to death. I fished out a rock or two, but as soon as he was gone I was running wide-open, stopping just long enough to check both ways on the blacktop before springing across, tearing through the yard, jerking open the screen door and stumbling into the hot little house.

“Ross Tipton’s gonna put me in jail,” I shouted.

My mother told me to stop playing folly, to go outside and play. But she told me not to go to the spring again, for a while. I hid in the bushes and watched the police cars circle in the gravel lot. After a few days, I figured I was safe, that they had forgotten my crimes. But now that I know my father better, now that I know Ross, I know I finally let him win, after all this time.

He got one of us to call him “sir.”

The Boy