The Prince of Frogtown (2 page)

From her chair, her time machine, Ava noticed us. Her screams and curses clawed out at him, and snatched his head around.

She was coming for us. She was short-legged and bowlegged and it took a while, but she caught him at the fence. He took me by one arm and pulled me close just as she grabbed my other arm and almost jerked it out of its socket. “Give me the child,” she said as she set her shoes in the grass, ready to pull me in two if it meant saving half of me.

“I’m just takin’ him to see the cows, Missus Bundrum,” he said.

“Give him to me,” she said, pulling.

“I ain’t hurtin’ him,” he said.

Ava read her Bible and sent monthly payments to Oral Roberts for a written guarantee on her immortal soul, but that old woman could cuss like they were handing out money for it, and did, right in his face.

“You can’t have him,” she said.

It was like she was pulling against Legion himself, and maybe in her mind she was.

He turned loose and she dragged me away. He stood at the barbed wire as if he was caught on it. In the yard, people stared. Had he tried to hurt the boy? Unthinkable. He just hung there in the sunlight and paid for the man he was the night before, when he wobbled into my grandma’s yard and threatened to drown us all in that lovely stream.

I
DO NOT KNOW WHY,
in all the train wrecks of gibberish she endured from drunken men, that one splinter of foolishness lodged in her mind. I pity him for being punished so much for just trying to take a walk with his son, but you have to forgive old women, who suffer so many fools. It was a good world for drunks then, and a bad world for everybody else. A man could rise up in his drunkard’s raiment at night, dripping poison, and pull it off in the day like dirty clothes. I often wondered, if a man could look in the daylight on the drunk he was, would there be any drunks at all?

Ava made him look. It did not save him, but it was then he stopped trying to pretend. The immaculate young man began to slough away, revealing more of the drunk inside. It was the beginning and end of everything, the end of hope, and the beginning of the days we lived with him in the absence of it.

I have never dreamed of my father, but there are things that happened in our last year that seemed like dreams. From that time I carried a cloudy memory of choking in his arms, of the whole room turning red as he clawed at my clenched teeth and poured what seemed to be sand down my throat. It was the year I realized the TV preachers’rants on hell were all wrong, that the devil lives in Alabama, and swims in a Mason jar. He lost his looks, drank his paychecks, wrecked his old cars, and stiffed the Tennessee Valley Electric until all they would give us was free dark. My mother lived in fear of him, and my older brother, more aware of what was going on than me, lived in pure loathing. I have always felt guilty for the few nights I enjoyed, the perfume of old beer on floor mats, bald tires hissing on blacktop as we rode, him and me, to burn time in the company of sorry men. “You were his favorite,” my big brother told me, but I didn’t mean to be.

That is the man I wrote of in my early thirties. I summed him up as a tragic figure, a one-dimensional villain whose fists and tongue lashed my mother when he was drunk, who drove us away for months and years only to reclaim us when we again crossed his mind. Against his darkness her light was even brighter, as she just absorbed his cruelties till she could not take them into herself anymore, and wasted her beauty in a cotton field, picking a hundred pounds a day of a crop that was light as air. She turned thirty over an ironing board, smoothing other people’s clothes, standing in line for a government check. He became nothing more than the sledge I used to pound out her story of unconditional love. I wanted more, of course. I wished he could have been just rewritten. But I got what I needed from him.

It was hypocritical to condemn such a careless man, after my own careless, selfish life, but I did it. I sawed my family tree off at the fork, and made myself a man with half a history. I had just one people, my mother’s, and stood apart as my paternal grandmother grew old and died. Velma Bragg lived for over a century, surrounded by the family she watched over long after old age had taken her eyes. I was too stiff-necked to be one of them, one of her great family. I am truly sorry for that.

When Velma died, her youngest daughter, Ruby, gave my mother a small red box that held my father’s last possessions, things he owned when he died in the winter of 1975. My mother, not knowing what else to do, gave it to me. Inside it, I found a crumbling, empty wallet, a clip-on tie, and a pair of yellowed, mismatched dice.

I rolled them across my desk.

Seven.

I rolled them again.

Seven.

I do not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in loaded dice. I sat for a long time, clicking them in my hand, touching something he touched. I do not know what I expected to feel, but I did not feel anything good. It was just bones, clean bones. I tossed the dice into a desk drawer to be forgotten with the rest of the junk—.22 rifle bullets, eight-year-old aspirin, foreign coins as worthless as washers from countries I will never see again.

In the last weeks of his life I had reoccurred to him one last time, and he gave me a box of books. For years I lugged the books from city to city, not even sure why. They mattered less, it seemed, with every change of address, and as I got older, meaner, sadder and dumber, most of the books got lost or left behind. I left the last of them on a curb in New Orleans, with a sign that said
FREE
. By my forty-fourth birthday he had become no more than a question I answered at book signings in nice-sounding clichés.

People who cared about me had, for years, warned me it was stupid to ignore such uneasy dead. One of the most elegant writers I knew, Willie Morris, did believe in ghosts. One night, about a year before his own death, he drank a bottle of whiskey at a restaurant outside Jackson, bounced off the door frame on his way to his car, and told me I would never have any peace until I wrote about my father. Others told me the same, but none as elegantly as him. “My boy,” he said, “there is no place you can go he will not be.”

But that did not seem true. In my life, I swung a pick, drove a dump truck, ran a chain saw, fist-fought some men, disappointed some women and wrote a billion words. I traveled from Africa to Arabia to Central Asia to make a living, or just to see the elephants before they are gone. I had been happy in New Orleans, broke in L.A., bashed with a rock in Miami, dog-cussed in New York, sick on a bus to Kashmir, lost in London, belligerent at Harvard, and greatly compromised in the Gamecock Motel. I was teargassed in the Bazaar of the Storytellers, enchanted by a magical midget in a Sarasota trailer park, and bit on my privates by a spider in a hotel on St. Charles. In one year, I argued unsuccessfully for my little brother before the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, then gave the after-dinner speech at a banquet to honor a justice of the United States Supreme Court. I flew around the world at least three times and landed upside down in a convertible on Alabama 21, blue lights in my windshield, mud and glass in my mouth, and thinking, Man, this is cool.

He didn’t take nothin’ from me, really, that little man.

He had been worth three chapters to me, all he would ever be worth. Whole months went by, and I did not think of him at all.

Then, about three years ago, everything bounced, tumbled, rolled.

I got a boy of my own.

It is not that I went looking for one. I had never dated, in my disreputable life, a woman with a child, and dreaded women who seemed determined to have one. There was no sadness in it, no hole in my life. I did not want a child, the way I did not want fuzzy pajamas, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, neckties, sensible cars, department store credit cards, multivitamins, running shorts, umbrellas, goldfish, grown-up shoes, snow skis, and most cats.

I saw her, and I forgot.

I love women, but had seldom been plagued by the debilitating kind of love other men went on about, till it was just nauseating. My attention span, in romance, was that of a tick on a hot rock. Then I met her, and landed with a thud on the altar at the Peabody Hotel. “I have children,” she told me, and I am sure I heard that, must have heard it. But by the time I regained what sense I had, I was driving car pool next to a ten-year-old boy who, for reasons I may never truly understand, believes I hung the moon.

I guess it is natural that, in the company of the boy, I almost always think of my father. But if you add all the time I spent with Charles Bragg in the first six years he tore in and out of our lives, it comes to only a few months, not even one whole year. I remember him in fragments, because we left him too soon, and still not soon enough. With the weight of that new boy tugging at my clothes, I went to find him.

I
N THIS BOOK
I close the circle of family stories in which my father occupied only a few pages, but lived between every line. In my first book, I tried to honor my mother for raising me in the deprivations he caused. In my second, I built from the mud up the maternal grandfather and folk hero who protected my mother from my father, but died before I was born, leaving us to him. In this last book, I do not rewrite my father, or whitewash him. But over a lifetime I have known a lot of men in prisons, men who will spend their eternity paying for their worst minute on earth. It came when they caught their wife cheating on them and thumbed back the hammer on a gun they bought to shoot rats and snakes, or got cross-eyed drunk in some fish camp bar and pulled a dime-store knife, just because they imagined a funny look or a suspicious smile. You do not have to forgive such men, ever, that minute. You can lock them away for it, put them to death for it, and spend your eternity cursing their name. It is not all they are.

The Boy

Y
OU DON’T SLEEP GOOD
in a chair by a hospital bed, but you do dream.

I saw the woman in a bookstore in Memphis. She had the kind of beauty people write songs about, red hair that tumbled to her shoulders in loose curls, jade eyes flecked with gold, lips of the most promising pink. She was tall, and just a little bit slinky.

“Will you marry me?” I asked, smooth as a concrete block tumbling down a hill.

“No,” she said.

She taught at a college, and knew a half-wit when she heard one.

I watched her walk away for years, in my mind.

But I persevered, and we had a great, blistering romance. I wrote her love letters that should have made me gag, and she wrote me the same. I even saved one, for when I am old, or alone.

But she had to ask her littlest boy, who was her world, if she could remarry.

“Sure,” he said. “Where are we goin’ on the honeymoon?”

I turned forty-six in the summer of 2005 and became the closest thing to a father I will ever be, because I loved a woman with a child. I guess it happens all the time.

But a man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog that chases a car and wins. How many times since then have I stared at the boy in dumb wonder, and muttered: “Son, if your momma had just been homely, think how much easier my life would have been.”