The Prince of Frogtown (14 page)

“He couldn’t scare hisself enough,” Billy said.

It was the same on the cotton mill corkscrew run. Cotton mills were death traps in fires, because even the air burned in the swirling lint. In Jacksonville, the company built a fire escape ramp on one wall, a massive corkscrew with a slick, stainless steel slide. For generations, village boys sneaked into the mill, and rode it down, for fun. But for real speed, you needed a sled. Billy Measles remembers how happy my father was the day they liberated a wooden Coke crate from the back of a grocery store and lugged it to the mill. The watchman, a man named Duck Ford, tried to catch them, but Duck was old and they evaded him, and stood at the top of the corkscrew, looking down. My father rode the Coke crate down, banging into the walls, leaving skin on the screwheads and metal seams, hollering “Wahoo!” till he shot out the bottom onto a concrete pad, grinding to a stop. Later, he would tote up a bucket of water and pour it down, to make it slicker, but it was never slick enough, or fast enough, to take you anywhere but down.

Karl Wallenda, the great-grandfather of daredevils, said life is the wire, and the rest is waiting.

My father couldn’t scare himself, but he could scare the rest of them.

“I guarantee you, we wasn’t never bored for long,” Billy said.

Some of the town boys had BB guns, but that was an impossible dream, here. So, they sawed the rough shape of a rifle from a scrap board, fixed a short nail at the front, where a front sight would be, another where the rear sight would be, and stretched a long, thin circle of inner tube around the nails. They loaded them with chinaberries, which flew straighter than a rock but hurt just as bad, and went to war. It was just a wicked slingshot, really, but it would break a beer bottle. “Your daddy’s would raise a blister, when he hit you,” Billy said. His had to be stronger, had to pull tighter.

At one o’clock, on the days she was off, Velma called him in to eat, and the rest came, too, the screen door rattling as a small army of boys rushed through. There they would have to wait in line with cousins and other kin, but no one was turned away. Later, full as ticks, the boys lay in the shade, trying unsuccessfully to beg a cigarette off stingy Alfred, as the ones who had money for the cowboy matinees filled in the ones who didn’t have money on what had happened a Saturday before. “Well, you see, Red Ryder got Little Beaver from them Indians, and was raisin’ ’im…” They spent a lot of time talking pure nonsense, like who could hold their breath the longest, or kill the most Germans.

“But mostly,” Billy said, “we talked about girls.

“There was Mary Ellen Coker. Black hair. Purty. And Joyce Phillips. Dishwater blonde. Had these big brown eyes, hazel eyes. Lord, I loved them hazel eyes,” and all the breathtaking rest. They would pass and a boy would whistle—it was Garfield, usually—taking his life in his hands. If you whistled at a village girl, she might walk over and punch you in the mouth, or her papa might kill you—in the village, romance could make a black widow seem like a sweet deal. “Most of us was still scared of girls,” said Billy. If a live girl had stopped to talk to them, they would not have known what to say, and some of them would have turned and run. “Except Garfield. Garfield never run from a woman in his life. He run toward a bunch of ’em, though. He was a booger.

“But we didn’t know nothin’ really, about girls. One day I had to go to the bathroom real bad out behind the mill, where they had all these outhouses set up, and I snatched a door open and there sat Missus Edna Allen. And she just looked at me. ‘I will be out in just a little bit,’ she said. But I was already tearing out of there at a dead run. That ain’t the way you want to find out about girls.”

My father loved girls, but there was no girl he was in love with, not that Billy knew. He was in love with the idea of girls, all girls, and he would sit in the circle of lies at the bonfires they built in the middle of dark fields and talk about a shape, a look, a sound, long before he had firsthand knowledge. Even Garfield claimed more knowledge than he had, unless getting your face slapped on the square is considered second base.

The bonfire, made from pine and trash and whatever they could find, would pop and shoot sparks till it singed someone, and then they would laugh about that. They talked for hours, till their mommas’ calls drifted in from distant porch lights. Billy cannot remember one story they told. It was being there, he said, that was worth remembering.

Some nights, walking home, the gaggle of boys would see what seemed to be a meteor arc through the night, a ball of fire with an orange tail six feet long. It would land in the wet grass with a hiss and splatter of flames and roll smoking across the field. It was kind of beautiful, on a slow night, burning red and orange in the air. But when one of them, the bravest, rushed over to pick it up, it was just a softball soaked in kerosene. He threw it to the bigger boys, who chased it back and forth across the night sky until it just consumed itself, and winked out.

“Daddy got a job a couple years later up in Albertville, sharecropping, and got free rent on a house,” Billy said. “We left the village, and I lost track of your dad. I came back when I was seventeen to work in the mill, but your daddy was done gone.”

I asked him if he kept up with any of the other boys.

He heard Bill Raines was still alive.

“But I think most of ’em’s dead, son,” he said.

I heard one or two of the others might still be alive, and tried to track them down. I found a Wallace Key in the Anniston phone book, and dialed the number. An ancient voice answered the phone.

“I been lookin’ for you,” I said.

“Who?” he said.

“Wallace Key.”

“Who?” he said.

“WALLACE KEY.”

“I’m him,” he said.

“I think you played with my daddy, Charles Bragg…”

“Who?” he said.

“CHARLES BRAGG.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t recall.”

My heart sank.

I asked him, twice, if he remembered Billy Measles.

“No,” he said, “I don’t recall him, either.”

I guess a bonfire only burns so long, too.

“Could be,” the old man said, “you got the wrong Wallace Key.”

In the background, I could hear a television roar.

“Wallace Key,” I said, my voice ratcheted up. “Lived in Jacksonville in ’45. Liked to buck-dance.”

“No,” the old man said, “I never did.”

He said there were about five of them, around, with that name.

“I know that Wallace Key. He died.”

He told me he was sorry he was the wrong one, and hung up.

But I wasn’t sorry.

I am sorry dancing Wallace Key is gone, but in a way I was relieved. I had started to count on the notion my father the boy was someone people remembered, and I didn’t like the idea that he could be forgotten like everything else.

“I won’t never forget your dad,” Billy said, looking at his boots.

His trailer on the Alexandria Road is spotless, his yard immaculate. There is a wagon wheel by the front gate, and a permanent porch. Living here, you realize that just because a house is dragged in by a truck, it doesn’t mean it will ever be dragged back out again. No college men, not a one, remember my father’s name, but they will never forget him in the mill village, or mobile homes.

As for those outhouses, I remember how my father used to laugh every time he saw one upright. They had been a refuge once, when he was small, but that wasn’t how he remembered them. They were trophies.

The statute of limitations, surely, has long run out, but the last living princes of Frogtown will not inform, not turn, not rat each other out even when so many of them have escaped into their graves.

“I guess I turned over that Shuttles gal’s outhouse every time I seen her in it. I didn’t wait for Halloween,” said Bill Joe Chaney. “She was about three hundred pounds, but once you got ’er to rockin’, well, she just had to go. But I do not believe your daddy was with me when I did that, and if someone else was to say different, well, that’s their business. I’m sayin’ he was innocent, of that.”

Then, looking me right in the face, he winked.

To escape detection, some of the boys would turn over their own outhouses. Then, the next morning, they would go around the neighborhood to help the other people set their outhouses upright. What good boys, the people said, and sometimes they pulled out a change purse and gave them a buffalo nickel.

“Oh, we was innocent back then,” said Billy Measles. “We was innocent all the time.”

The Boy

S
HE WAS HAPPY
with a gentle, helpless boy, because a boy like that would need her forever.

“That one will love you forever,” I told her, certain of that.

Some boys just have Peter Pan in them.

But sometimes there is a sadness in mommas so deep you are afraid to get close to it, lest you fall in.

She had a door frame in her house in Memphis marked with her boys’ names, ages and their heights, year after year. She would have ripped it off the wall and broken it in two, to stop time, to keep them all needing her forever, and loving her the way little boys do.

I destroyed one of her memories, by accident. Throwing a football in the front yard with the middle boy and the little boy, I threw a pass with less than pinpoint accuracy, barely missed the head of the woman who was sitting on the front porch, and shattered an old clay pot. At least, I thought that’s what it was.

She just stood there, looking at the pieces.

“It had the handprints of all my boys in it, in the clay,” she said.

Some days, you wish you had never left Alabama.

“I’ll glue it back,” I said, and never did.

She saved the pieces.

I tried to make it up to her, with another keepsake. The woman had a tiny wooden table and chair in the living room, in front of the television. All three boys had sat there, eating breakfast, mesmerized by cartoons. It was made for a five-year-old but at ten the last little boy sat there still, ridiculous, like an elephant on a motor scooter, till the wood split under his weight.

“He looks kind of silly, doesn’t he?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

I glued it back together for her, the best I could.

It may be I am jealous of this boy.

I watch him sometimes and I try to put myself behind his eyes, but there is just too much distance between that boy and the boy I was. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if we had met on a playground, in a neutral time, both of us just ten years old.

I think I would have beaten him up.

I did pick and shovel work when I was his age. I ached to grow up, to get away. I watched my mother break herself on her responsibility to us, to lift us a few inches off bottom. You love her for that, but you always wonder why it had to be you, and her, that way.

“My dad’s house,” the boy told me once, “has four TVs.”

He has all the love in the world. He has everything. What did he get from me, from being around me?

I told the woman once that I should have found a poor woman, with a poor child. Then, at least, I would have had something, something solid and concrete, to give to them. And it would have mattered to them, those things. It would have made their life better. I would have made their life better no matter how badly I messed up at everything else.

I grew up in my grandmother’s house, a Jim Walter Home, a small wooden box. You lived elbow to elbow with people, knee to knee, but there was a room in the back, a tiny bedroom that was all mine. My mother made it possible by sleeping, all her young life, on a living room couch. There was no door, no privacy. You passed through my room to go to the bathroom. There was no light fixture, just the naked bulb on a bright orange drop cord. It doubled as a storeroom. Clothes, boxes, everything we owned, leaned against the walls. Mice and rats and chicken snakes lived in the maze of boxes, and skittered and rustled in the dark.

Long before I had a boy, I thought of the room I would give him.

I gave him two.

In our Tuscaloosa house he has a flat-screen television, a desk and bookshelves, an ergonomic chair, file cabinets for his schoolwork, all on a gleaming hardwood floor. On the walls I gave him the adventures I thought were missing from his world. Paintings promised him travel by sea, air and train. In a big poster, a seaplane dropped from a tropical sky as a beautiful girl in a grass skirt, flowers in her hair, waited by a blue lagoon. Dolphins jumped across the waves on one wall, and pirates—I always wanted to be a pirate—leered down from the shelf. You have to walk through his room to get to a bathroom, too, but it is all his. A grown-up guitar leans against one wall. When I was done with it, done nailing, decorating, I found a chair and just sat there, wishing it was mine.

On the Alabama coast, in a house I always wanted not far from Mobile Bay, a sign in his room welcomes you to a
TROPICAL PARADISE
. He has a papasan chair, another television, and a floor plan big enough for Frisbee-throwing, or a football game. Marlin leap from the walls, and he has a chart with pictures of every game fish in the Gulf of Mexico. There are boogie boards leaning on the wall, diving masks and flippers on the floor. His room has a view of the pool.