The Prince of Frogtown (25 page)

She told him she was going home, and she thinks, although she hates to, that she saw something break in him a little then. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, so she tried to do what she believed was the safest thing for her boys.

At first he was mad, but he didn’t hurt her, or even yell.

He begged.

“Please, give it a while longer,” he said, but she wasn’t leaving because he had disappointed her this time. She was leaving because of all the times before, and he just couldn’t get his mind around that.

“We was happy,” she told him, “and you done good. But I got to go home.”

“I won’t send you home,” he said. “I won’t get you no ticket.”

So she wrote her mother and had her send the check, and she cashed it at the convenient grocery and bought three tickets on a bus for home.

The night before we left he begged her again to stay, and bought her a giant bouquet of flowers. He bought them, for the first time.

The next morning she lay in the bed and weighed two months of happiness against eight years of everything else, and walked to the phone and called a taxi.

Fifty-four dollars, guaranteed.

But first, she put her flowers in the refrigerator, because she thought they might live a little bit longer there. “I hated to think of ’em dying.

“He was sittin’on the banister on the porch when we left,” she said. “He looked whipped.”

He found a girlfriend in Texas, not long after we left. My mother knew because years later, as Velma showed her some family pictures, she came upon the woman’s picture and hid it, quick, under her apron—just not quick enough. He told people he planned to start over, maybe even start a new family out there, and he should have.

He should have stayed in Texas. He should have built a good, clean life with that new woman and had a whole new round of boys, and lived happy in the Lone Star State.

But after a while he just followed my mother home.

The Boy

I
T WAS LIKE
she drove a ten-penny nail through the last feeble, halting heartbeat of the man I was.

“Can you pick the boy up from school?” the woman asked.

At forty-six, I drove car pool.

At first I was terrified I would run over half a dozen nut-job children on the way to get him, because when the bell rang they exploded from doors as if propelled by a cannon. They all wore the same damn clothes and all looked alike to me, at least at first, and what if I got the wrong one? I was always afraid I would be late, or he would perish from the elements, or get in a car with a stranger, even stranger than me.

But I always snagged him clean, and we headed for the Sonic, for his tribute. The boy, the woman instructed me, was to have only a small drink, maybe a slush of some kind, so he would not “ruin his dinner.”

It was a surreal thing, to hear that, like she was emanating from the speaker of a black-and-white television from 1963.

But the best thing to do, I had learned the hard way, was make like some bobble-head doll.

Few men get in trouble when they nod.

I know the boy liked it, when I showed up. I watched for him in the rearview mirror, and when he saw it was me he started to grin.

“Hi, Ricky,” he always said.

Nobody but him and my momma get to call me that.

“Let’s get us a treat,” I always said.

The Sonic was just around the corner.

“What do you want?” I always asked the boy, as I punched the magic sugar button and the voice on the other end said hello, and he dutifully gave his modest order, like the good boy he was.

One day, about nine months into our time together, I punched, waited.

Three seconds is a lifetime, at the red button.

“May I help you?” the voice said.

“I would like a forty-four-ounce root beer float with vanilla ice cream, and a corn dog,” the boy said.

I just looked at him.

“Please?” he said.

“Your momma won’t let you,” I said.

“Well,” he said, looking around the truck, “is she here?”

I thought a minute about that.

“Well okay,” I said.

Over time we were found out—I would learn that the boy had a perverse need to confess all his sins to his mother—and she said I had to be responsible, said her son had not inherited a stepfather, but a coconspirator.

I told her I would do better.

Not long after that, another driver almost hit us as we drove through town. People in Memphis all drive like God is on their side.

“I know what Rick would say,” he said, from the backseat.

“What?” she asked.

“He would say, ‘What the hell does that damn fool think he’s doing?’”

Then he just grinned, all proud of himself.

She stared into me.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t ‘What’ me,” she said.

I knew I needed some vitriol here, some passion, to get out of this.

“Shame on you,” I said to the boy. “Just because you hear me say things, that doesn’t mean you can say them. If I was a smoker, you couldn’t smoke. If I was a drinker, you couldn’t drink. You’re a little boy. You are not me. You are not me.”

He beamed.

He had root beer residue on his cheeks.

He had stains on his school clothes I did not want to think about.

His halo hung lopsided on his head.

And in mid-rant I started to laugh, not at the boy in front of me, but at the boy I was such a long time ago.

I was five, maybe, playing on the porch with a few plastic army men. Suddenly, the yard was full of cows. A neighbor’s Herefords had found a gap in the barbed wire and wandered into our garden.

“I ought to shoot them damn cows,” my father said.

“Shoot them damn cows, Daddy,” I said.

He laughed and my mother pretended to whip me. I ran and hid behind him, grinning at her from around one leg of his big-legged pants, the kind Ricky Ricardo wore. I never wondered then why that blue-collar man dressed so nice, like the invitation from his rich friends was lost in the mail. Anyway, it was the last time I ran to him in my life.

Instead of shooting the invading cows, he jumped to the dirt, found some rocks and let rip. He never missed, not once, till he caused a stampede.

In real time, I rolled my window down to feel the air on my face.

I found I could remember better, that way.

The woman and boy must have wondered where I went.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ride

M
Y MOTHER TOOK HIM BACK
when he came home in summer of ’65, but whatever magic there was in the air in Texas did not blow this far east. It would be our last year, a nightmare year. But at least, if we all perished, we would be buried like sultans.

My mother took out a burial policy on me, Sam, and the baby boy Mark. It cost a dollar a month, and would have paid three hundred dollars if one of us had died. At the first of the month, a man named Dee Roper knocked on the door, took an envelope from my mother’s hand, wrote out a receipt, and chatted long enough to be civil. Sometimes my father was there, sitting at the table in the middle of the day, a thin line of puckered scars showing through his undershirt at the bridge of his shoulders, a glass of whiskey in his hand. My mother called it “shell-shot,” and I think she meant shrapnel. “You got to be patient with that boy, because he’s been through something you and me can’t even imagine,” Dee Roper told her, and she told him, politely, yes, sir, she would be. I was five years old, sick and puny and almost translucent. I remember being ill, but did not remember it as so bad, or often. The croup and flu settled in for weeks and months. The worst was whooping cough, pertussis. My grandmothers treated me with white whiskey mixed with crushed peppermint, rubbed my chest with salve, and I still couldn’t breathe. There was only one place I could catch my breath, in the wind rushing through the window of my father’s doomed, raggedy cars.

“You won’t drink with the boy in the car?” my mother admonished him, every time.

Even that much could have set him off.

“I won’t,” he lied.

My mother remembers only letting me go once or twice. As I remember, we rode around the world. My father would set me in the front seat, against the passenger-side window, and we would motor. We would cross over into west Georgia on the mountain roads, the car radio blaring bluegrass and Texas Swing. It seemed like there were always five beer bottles—always five—rolling and clinking in the back floorboard, and one last, brown bottle dangling from the fingers of his right hand. He drove, always, with the wrist of his left hand draped across the steering wheel of the heaps he would ride to death, and jump from the saddle as they collapsed underneath, like an Indian off a dying horse. I would roll down the window—all the way if it was summer, halfway when it was cool—and the wind would rush in and fill my nose and throat, till I was pacified. If he was four or five beers gone, he would let me thrust my head and shoulders out of the car and I would ride that way for miles, until my teeth began to click. Sometimes he held to the back of my pants, to keep me from falling to my death, but most of the time he would not.

I wasn’t afraid of him yet, not all the time.

I didn’t understand it all that much.

“You will feed the boy?” my mother always asked.

“Hell, yes,” he would answer, mean, as if she thought he didn’t have sense to do such a simple task. Then he would run into a gas station and hand me a pack of Golden Flake Cheese Curls and a big RC.

It was the only place I remember him talking to me. I guess he talked baby-talk to me when I was littler, but here he talked to me like I had some sense.

“What you read in school?” he asked.

“Dick and Jane and Spot an’ ’em,” I said.

He asked me if Spot was a girl dog or a boy dog.

I told him I didn’t know. I remember it because he thought that was just funny as all get out. I think it was the first time I realized that drinking, before it killed you or at least sent you to hell, could make you happy.

He conducted slurred spelling bees, mile after dark mile. The headlights would settle, just a second or two, on a road sign, and he would ask me to spell it as it vanished in the dark.

The towns and wide places in the road were easy.

“Spell ‘Broomtown.’

“Spell ‘Ringgold.’

“Spell ‘New Moon.’”

The rivers were hard.

“Spell ‘Tallapoosa.’”

The creeks were impossible.

“Spell ‘Choccolocco.’”

He rattled across Ketchepedrakee, Enitachopco and Tallassee-hatchee.

We didn’t even try.

I guess I should just be glad we didn’t kill anybody we met on those narrow, one-lane and two-lane bridges, his headlights weaving from one guardrail to the next. I was good at spelling, in a car, anywhere. I hated math, because it was dull, and once you were behind, you were behind for life. I was behind on the second day of first grade, and have been behind ever since. But I could spell at fifty-five, sixty miles per hour, spell even on the wrong side of the road.

The police stopped us one night in Piedmont. I remember because the only part of the officer I could see was his flashlight beam, his belt and gun, and how he kept his hand on it, as he stood there. My father might have had a license but he didn’t have it then, but it was a different time, when such laws were more like suggestions. He asked my father if he had been drinking, stabbing his flashlight beam at the bottles. All my life I have wondered why he didn’t throw his empties out, instead of holding on to the evidence. “No,” Daddy lied. “Them’s old.”

“Your daddy been drinking, boy?” he asked me.

“Un-uh,” I said.

I wondered if they had little jails, for boys and midgets, or if we all went to the big jails. I had seen a television show where little children just slipped through the bars, and I told myself I was brave enough to try.

But he just let us go. They often did things like that. They would even help a drunk in his car, and tell him to drive straight home.

Sometimes we went just to get beer or bootleg whiskey, sometimes to pick up his paycheck at a body shop or garage, and sometimes to pick up his father, Bobby, and take him for a ride. They would listen to the radio—the old man liked Ernest Tubb—and either pass a pint bottle of homemade whiskey back and forth or sip from beers wrapped up to the neck in brown paper bags. One of my most enduring memories of my father is tied to that old man. We were driving through Piedmont, past the hillside cemetery that is so steep you wonder if they have to bury people standing up, and my grandfather Bobby was holding to a bottle half hidden by a popcorn bag.

“Don’t turn that beer up, Daddy,” my father said. “We’re in town.”

“I know how to drink a damn beer,” Bobby said.

I lived a long time after that believing you could hide any sin in the Bible if you had a big enough brown paper bag. I wish they made them people-sized. I would carry one in my trunk, or sleep in one, just to be sure.

I was always glad when he dropped the old man off. This was our time, mine and my father’s. In cold weather he would crack the glass, just a little, turn the heater on wide-open, and I would ride with my feet and legs warm and a drill-like sliver of frigid, beautiful air boring into my lungs.

“You got a girlfriend?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What’s her name?” he asked.

“It’s a secret,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“She don’t know she is.”

He laughed and drank and drove.

He never took Sam or my baby brother Mark—he would have been more likely to be alone with a viper than a needy infant child. My two grandmothers, Ava and Velma, would keep them, or our aunts and uncles would. It may not make much sense, but I believe he left Sam at home because he believed my older brother could see into him, and disapproved. I think he didn’t like to ride the roads with that disapproving gaze against the side of his face. Me, I betrayed them both, my mother and brother, for an RC cola.

He took me to the chicken fights, at least twice. I had seen chickens fight to the death in the backyard, so there was no horror or mystery in the cockfights. Like a lot of country boys, I had already begun to rate life on the kind of covering things had on them. Scales, on fish or snakes, didn’t count for much, and feathers didn’t count for much more. When told by my grandmother to “go get us a chicken,” I would take the broom handle from behind the door and leap from the porch into the backyard. I would play God and choose the one I believed to be the tastiest, then run it down and whack it hard about the head or neck. Then, I would go play until the plucked and fried pieces reappeared with biscuits and gravy. To demur at death at a cockfight would have been hypocritical. I guess the supper birds didn’t suffer, but if I had a choice of how I would go out, I would rather be a gamecock than a Sunday dinner.

He might not have wanted us at all, his boys, but he sure didn’t want weak boys, boys with no guts. He took me, I believe, to see what kind of boy I would be. I never cried over a damn chicken in my life. He even let me ride his shoulders once, so I could see better. It is no wonder, surrounded by such spectacle, I didn’t really notice the dollars that slipped through his hands, and what it all meant. He bet a piece of the rent on a speckled Dominicker, and let the rest of it ride on an orange and black game rooster. He spent milk and bread for a pint jar of clear whiskey, and the electric bill on a gallon can.

We would get home after the other boys had gone to bed. My mother sometimes worked the night shift at a truck stop, but if she was home she would be sitting up, or on the porch. I would crawl into the bed I shared with Sam and try to tell him what I had seen or heard, but he would tell me to be quiet and go to sleep, and I would lie awake for hours and listen for the train. The tracks ran right close by, and the train put me to sleep like a drug.

I didn’t know, of course, how bad it was going to get. My brother Sam did understand, understood the levels of drunkenness, and could see ruination day coming closer.

My father lost all of us that year.

But he lost his oldest son first.

I
T TAKES A SPECIAL KIND
of man to stomach a dogfight. I grew up with hard men, but only my father was able to choke back enough of his finer nature to handle a dog in the pit, and I believe he could only do that drunk. It was a ferocious battle till one dog turned cur, and began to yelp for its life, as if it was begging the all-powerful circle of men to spare it, and pry the jaws off its torn throat or mangled leg. It was not supposed to be a fight to the death. Two dogs, pit bulls, mutts, others, would be loosed in a shallow pit or barn or squared-off place in the underbrush, and fight until one of the dogs tried to quit. The problem was, some dogs would not turn cur, and others would not stop savaging the dogs that did, so some would be so badly mangled by the time a fight was called that they died right there, or in the truck beds on the way home, or were put out of their misery with a pistol shot just outside the circle of lantern light or headlights that lit up the pit.

There was always a fight on the state line, because there was something about that invisible border that seemed to accept a stronger dose of meanness than other places. He always owned dogs, scarred, one-eared brutes that spent their wretched lives desperately jerking against a logging chain, till a night would come when he would hook a two-foot length of lead chain to their collars, and drag them off. They snapped at us but never bit at him that I could see, as if they recognized one of their kind. We never saw them again, so I guess he never won.

In the fall of ’65, he opened the passenger door of his car and something wonderful sprang out.

He was a boxer, and he was the prettiest dog I had ever seen. He was mostly brown but with a touch of white on his chest and black around his face, and he had brown, intelligent eyes and a two-inch stump of a tail that was always in motion, not just wagging, but damn near vibrating. Even with that ridiculous tail, he looked dignified. His eyes had a natural squint, and that made him look like he was always thinking hard about something, though he was probably just thinking about what all dogs think about: biscuits. He was as tall as my baby brother was high, and when he was told to “stay” he did not so much stand as pose, his head high, like a show dog. He never growled, even when I tried to ride him around the yard, and he would chase us for fun. His muscles rippled under his coat and he was hard to the touch, and when he ran he bounced from the ground, like a hard rubber Super Ball.