The Prince of Frogtown (28 page)

“Don’t yell anything to embarrass me,” he admonished, before one game.

The first game I saw, he put one boy on the floor, hard, on a rebound, not playing dirty, just aggressive, and he fouled out in the third quarter.

He still goes to Baptist Camp. He came home with a new trophy, the summer of his twelfth year. He was voted best cardsharp, to his mother’s shame.

He is not helpless, not needy.

He is everything I rushed him to be.

I had missed this transformation in the middle son, or all but missed it. I never really knew the oldest boy, who was in college when I arrived, but in the middle boy I saw enough to scare me, as he was preparing to date, preparing to drive. His whole senior year of high school he wore only orange—skull-popping, eye-hurting orange—because he is a Tennessee fan, or because it is the only color they have on his home planet. He believed homework was an elective, too, but could tell you how many points UT scored in the fourth quarter in 1973. He was good-looking, blond, engaging and could talk paint off a wall, but went days without eating or sleeping, practiced the drums at two in the morning, and asked me questions like: “How deep is the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Well, it varies,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

The woman told me once—she must have been in a fever—that I might have a talk about human reproduction with the middle son, and I told her no way in hell. But he cornered me one night, asked me a bees question—or birds, hell, I don’t know—and I listened till I had the gist of it, then told him to go to bed.

He drove like everyone else in Memphis, like he woke up drunk. But just months after the wedding he went off to join other orange people in Knoxville, and I was spared. I meant to check his head for antennae, before he left for school.

But what if my boy, my littlest boy, took to wearing orange, too, or asked me hard questions about the biology of love?

What if he got cleaner, tougher, but stranger?

I did what the woman did, with all her sons.

I pretended it wasn’t happening.

It did not stop the process. But now and then, the little boy peeked through from that hulk. I recognized him, on those big feet, behind that fine face.

On the long rides to the coast, we still played his favorite game. The boy wants to be a marine biologist, wants to study sharks, and as we ride he makes me ask and answer questions about the sea.

“What’s the fastest shark?” he asked.

“Mako,” I said. “Gimme a hard one.”

“Do you know what a narwhale uses its horn for?” he said.

“Nope,” I said.

He got a little smug over that.

I fought back.

“Is a sea cucumber a vegetable or—” I asked.

“It’s a worm,” he said.

“Well, hell,” I said.

And so it went, mile after mile.

“My daddy and me, we used to do something like this,” I told him.

He liked that.

He asked me if I knew what plankton was.

“Little-bitty shrimp,” I said.

You know stuff like that, somehow. You know it because the television remote got lost in the cushions with three boys’ worth of abandoned toys, and you sat with a boy, a little one, through a thousand hours of Nature Planet. You learn to stand the smell of sour-apple bubblegum and the company of a boy who jabs you in your belly before he makes himself comfortable, and tells you that you are “comfy,” not to be mean, just stating fact. Then, just when you get used to it, to not minding it so much, it all vanishes, and the little boy you launched into the air stands at your shoulder like a man, and when you turn to say something you find yourself looking right into his eyes.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Amen

W
HAT PEOPLE DON’T TELL YOU
shapes a man, too, shapes the way he rides through your mind over a lifetime. I told my mother what Jack said, how my father loved her till the day he died, and all she did was nod. It was not news to her. He called her every day in the last year of his life, and told her that. But she never told me because it didn’t matter anymore. He pleaded with her to take him back, to let him try again. “He wanted to get married again, but I couldn’t,” she said. “I did think about it. I surely did.” But time ran out. “The doctor said he would have three or four years, but he didn’t. He didn’t even have a year.” I saw him once toward the end. It was like looking at a burned-up house.

P
EOPLE SAID HE WEIGHED
less than a hundred pounds, and I know he hated that, to have people see him that way. My mother went to the visitation in the winter of ’75, and my father’s people were kind to her. They always were. The next morning she asked her boys if we wanted to see him buried. I was in tenth grade, Sam had quit school and Mark was a little boy. Sam, who went to work at thirteen, who dug coal out of the mud so she could heat the house, looked at the clothes laid on the bed. “Momma, I didn’t know him,” he said, but I think that was a lie. We walked out of the room together. Mark, who truly didn’t know him, who cannot even remember his face, went to play.

My father told my mother he did not want a crowd at his funeral, just us, Velma, and Bob, but there was a nice crowd. He had also said he did not want to be buried in a tie. I understand that now. He would have considered it foolish to lose his looks and hang a tie on the wreck. They put one on him anyway, and there he lay, in a clip-on. Prince or not, the dead just don’t have much pull. But before they took him away his momma tugged the tie off his breast. What her boy wants, he gets, if it was in her power to give.

I have it now. It was in the box Ruby gave us after Velma died, with the wallet and dice. I still don’t believe in ghosts, but it seems funny in a way, like he was trying to send a message somehow: Rig the game if you can, ’cause luck is a bitch for a poor man; and don’t worry what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.

I
WISH IT HAD BEEN DIFFERENT,
but I cannot see it. I cannot see him living off his pension, or singing a hymn, or lining up to vote. I cannot see him in shuffling old age with a little potbelly and bifocals, fretting over prescriptions, waiting in line at Wal-Mart. I cannot see him in a sensible car, driving the speed limit, police waving, saying: “You know, there goes a good ol’ boy.” I cannot see him going home to a paid-for house, with pictures of his boys on the wall. And I cannot see her there with him, to make it complete. But now I know he did see it, and that has to be worth something.

The Boy

W
E WALKED ONTO THE COURT,
my boy and me, on a Saturday morning. My feet hurt and my knees throbbed, and all I had done so far was walk in from the parking lot.

The boy had never beaten me. I was too big, too tall. But every day he got bigger, stronger, and I just got old.

“You want to warm up?” the boy asked.

I shook my head. Warming up was playing for nothing. You don’t warm up in Vegas shuffling index cards, or putting washers in slot machines. I need every second I spent in motion to count.

Pulled muscles and torn ligaments happen this way, but if you know you’ve only got so many minutes in you, you can’t waste a one. We had ten dollars riding on this, and my diminishing pride.

“Let’s go,” I said.

He had never forgotten what I said about him not being tough, tough like me. The truth is I’m not that tough. I don’t even know if I ever had anybody fooled. But it was too late. Some things lay like a splinter in a boy’s head.

He went at me hard from the first drumbeat of that ball on the gleaming hardwood floor, raking my face, jumping into me, landing on my toes, on top of a foot. He tumbled to the floor twice, but bounced up immediately, as if he was made of hard rubber instead of flesh and bone. I drove on him but he stuck his body in front of me like a mail-box post. I banged hard with my shoulder, lifting him off the ground, but in no time I was so tired I couldn’t shoot, or find a rhythm, or even breathe.

He went for the ball—supposedly—as I tried a clumsy layup, and he dug a groove with his fingernails across my arm.

“If you do that again I’m gonna put you down hard,” I told him, and as soon as he got the chance he did it again. I mustered the last energy I had and ran over him. It hurt me a lot more than it did him. I was done.

He was still just a thirteen-year-old growing into his big feet, and he missed seven-eighths of his shots. I could have beat him still, I swear I could, if I had not been in the kind of shape where even putting on my socks made me see stars. I missed a short jump shot and we both leapt up for the rebound, but I am not sure my feet actually cleared the floor.

He did not gloat or dance, at the end.

I always had.

He just held the ball and looked at me.

“Want to go again?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Gimme a minute.”

I staggered to a bench to rest, and to wish I were dead. I have always loved the cliché, the one about being careful what you wish for. I staggered through another game. He drew blood again.

“You’re not trying,” he said.

He knew how to hurt an old man.

Then, white of face, I staggered to the parking lot.

I threw my arm around his shoulders, like I did when he was little.

He wrapped his arm around my waist.

Together, me leaning on him, we made it to the truck.

“Good boy,” I said.

I patted him, like an old woman.

He patted me back.

“You okay?” he asked.

“You didn’t hurt me too bad,” I said.

He grinned. When he does, you see the little boy again.

He is not gone. He never will be. This boy’s heart will always be young, soft, or at least I hope it is. The little boy just lives inside the armor of this big boy, this young man. There was never anything hiding, lurking. There was never anything out there, not for him.

One of the first trips we ever made home when he was still a little boy was in cool weather, early December. People told me not to even try to fish the pond, the fish would be so sluggish, but the boy wanted to fish. My first cast I snagged a five-pound bass—it was probably just four pounds, but it was a nice fish, even allowing for lies. The boy asked if he could touch it, and I told him sure, and he ran one finger down its lovely green scales. He is fascinated with fish. I tried to work the hook out but she had taken it deep, almost in her guts, and I have hated all my life to kill a fish that way. I could see a look on his face very much like panic, and I worked harder. If it had been a single hook and worm I would have bit the line in two and let it go, trusting the hook to rust out, but it was a plug, with eight barbs, and if she choked it down she would surely die.

“Run to the house and get my pliers,” I told him, and he took off like it was his life in my inept hands, not the fish.

The woman had bought him some new jeans and they fell down twice as he ran, and it would have been funny any other time. It was all uphill, about three hundred yards, and that might not seem far to you, but you try it, holding to your pants.

He half killed himself getting up that hill, to save a fish. I knelt down in the mud and eased the fish, still hooked, into the water, and rocked it back and forth. I tried again and again to get the hook out, my fingers numb and slipping, and was just about to give up when the hook came free, and I eased the fish into the water, alive.

I wish he could have seen it, seen that whorl of mud, seen it streak away.

But instead, as he ran up, his lungs on fire, I was already casting for a new one.

“Never mind,” I said.

His chest was heaving. Sweat ran down his face.

“Did it die?” he said.

“No,” I said.

He might have cried if it had, or wanted to.