The Prince of Frogtown (18 page)

I
MIGHT HAVE GONE TOO FAR,
too soon with the snipe hunt.

One cold night in our first year, after the snakes had gone in their holes, I told him it was time for his rite of passage. We were at my mother’s farm in late fall and had just had supper with my family, my mother saying how it was a sin, what they charged for KFC.

I stood and hitched up my pants in a manly fashion.

“Put your coat on, boy,” I said, “and let’s go get us a snipe.”

“What’s a snipe?” he said.

“It’s a flightless bird,” I said.

“I never heard of them,” he said.

“Well, they’re rare,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

“But they’re not real bright,” I explained.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“You can catch them in a sack,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

“You get to hold the sack,” I said.

He got so excited I thought he was going to levitate.

Anything we did together, just us, made him smile. We did his homework together, trekked with Coronado and Ponce de León, pounded spikes on the Great Plains. I worried over logic, named off state capitals till my lips went numb, and when he opened his math book I did not even try. At night, on an old couch with three boys’

worth of Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers and SpongeBobs lost forever in its dark recesses, we watched men wrestle giant snakes, and ate sugarless Popsicles that tasted a little like cough medicine on a stick.

He still believed the only thing that really held me to him was the woman, so even in the middle of a belly laugh he could look a little sad.

But the snipe hunt tickled him to death. He had heard me talk about hunting, how it was something men did where I was from, something that fathers and sons did together, free from women in the dangerous, primal woods. I did not tell him it was also a tradition to take a boy on a snipe hunt and, for the sake of frivolity, abandon him in the trees.

So we got a sack and flashlight and walked into the dark, his mother again drilling holes in me as we went out, but not stopping us. A few minutes later my brother Sam slipped out the door and crept behind us, then circled behind and above us, on the hill.

The traditional snipe hunt is not too traumatizing, in itself. You just position some poor fool bent over holding a sack in the dark, and go home.

Sooner or later, bent over like a moron, he figures it out.

But we have our own twist here. As the boy and I walked in the gloom, Sam, above us in the dark, pushed a big rock down the hill.

It rolled crashing through dead leaves and dry sticks, banging into tree trunks. He aimed it away from us, of course. It would not have been funny if one of us had been knocked off the mountain by a rock the size of a five-gallon bucket.

“What’s that?” the boy hissed.

“Bear,” I whispered.

We hunkered down in the leaves.

“Rick?” he whispered.

“Shhhhhh,” I whispered.

“Rick?” louder this time.

“What?” I said.

“What do we do?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “hope it ain’t hungry.”

I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.

He was shaking.

“You want to run home,” I said.

“No,” he said.

But I think he changed his mind when my brother began to stomp down the hill in the dry leaves.

“Rick?”

“What?”

“Should we pray?”

“Well,” I said, “the bear might hear.”

The woods were still now, except for the faint creaking of the trees.

“I think we’re okay,” I said, to give the boy a shred of hope.

“Why?”

“’Cause he’ll probably just eat one of us.”

A full minute passed in silence.

“Which one?” he asked.

“The slowest one,” I whispered.

I had heard that joke somewhere, about how fast a bear could run.

For dramatic effect, I slipped my pocketknife out of my jeans and opened it up, with a loud click.

“You ain’t armed?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Pity,” I said.

Out of sight, I eased the knife closed and put it back in my pocket.

Fun is fun until someone puts an eye out, Momma always said.

“Well, I better lead, then,” I said.

We began to ease down the hillside.

“Now,” I said, “if the bear attacks, don’t wait for me. I’ll keep him occupied.”

“Okay,” he said, a little too quick.

Soon we saw the warm, yellow lights of my mother’s house shining through the dark, and I think the boy did say a prayer then, of thanks. When we were safe inside he told the story of his near-death experience, leaving out the part where I heroically agreed to fight the bear off while he ran home. He did not notice the smiles for a good long time.

“Son,” I said, “there was no bear.”

I pointed at Sam.

He waved.

The boy just looked at me.

“There’s no such thing as a snipe.”

I saw tears begin to form in his eyes.

Of all the boys left in the woods, I never saw one cry.

“He thought he was going to get a bird to take home,” his mother told me later.

The boy always wanted a bird, she said.

“Well how in the hell would I know that?” I said.

At first, I fretted again at his fragility. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that boy just wanted there to be a bird to catch, and even wanted there to be a bear in the trees. And he wanted to believe that, together, we were safe in the woods.

CHAPTER TEN

What You’re Supposed to Do

T
HEY TALKED ABOUT IT ONE TIME,
what they saw across the ocean, and never talked of it again. They both had a story to tell, one that just wouldn’t sit right in their mind, and the liquor made it easier, that’s a fact. “I remember I was sittin’ at the house, me and Hubert Woods and his brother Slim. We’d been out on the reservation, playing music,” Jack said. “They wanted me to go out with them that night, to do some runnin’ around, but then I saw Charles’s car comin’ up the driveway. ‘Y’all go on,’ I told ’em, ‘I’m gonna stay here and talk to Charles.’ Well, I had some beer in the house, and I had some white whiskey hid in the back, and we just set and talked a long time, like we did when we was kids. Charles said, ‘Jack, you see a lot of bad things over yonder?’ and I told him I did…” He told my father how he was an army medic at the close of the war, assigned to the minefields and the young men who cleared them. The mines went off and blew men apart, and he bandaged what was left. He came home to work in the mill, but on weekends he still pulled on his western suit, and picked every place he could find a stage. He was still whole, and if someone tossed him a dream he could still grab it with both hands. “Well, I told it, and we dranked.” They drank it all, and sat in the quiet, listening dark.

Jack picked a little, to satisfy it.

As I walked down the streets of Laredo

As I walked down Laredo one day

I spied a poor cowboy all wrapped in white linen

Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay

“You believe I killed a feller over yonder, Jack?” my father asked.

“Why, sure I do,” Jack said.

“I didn’t shoot him,” my father said.

“What’d you do?” Jack said.

“I drowned him,” my father said.

He sounded ashamed.

“Ain’t no need talkin’ about it, Charles,” Jack said.

“I drowned him with my own hands,” my father said.

Jack took a pull on the air itself.

“You don’t know anybody you shoot,” my father said. “You just shoot, and you don’t really see their face. Well, I know how it feels to look ’em dead in the face.”

The story my father told, he told in a few sentences, the same way he told it to my mother on a sleepless night, and told to me, when I was in high school, as he finished drinking himself to death. He told of a bitter-cold night, and killing a man with his bare hands, holding his head underwater until he went still.

“You think if somebody does somethin’ like that, in a place like that, it ought to bother you?” he asked.

“You didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” Jack said.

“No?”

“You didn’t do nothin’ you wasn’t supposed to do,” Jack said.

“I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy”

These words he did say as I boldly stepped by

“Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story

I was shot in the chest and I know I must die”

“There was still killin’ goin’ on when I got there, and Charles got there before I did,” Jack said. “He was a fighter, your daddy, but he hadn’t never killed nobody.”

All my life I had wanted an excuse for his drunkenness, a catalyst for the man he was, and I seized on that, when I was a teenager. Jack is sure it haunted my father. Certainly, he had to water it down with whiskey to even speak of it. “But there was a lot of things haunted your dad,” Jack said. The people who loved him say what happened to him in Korea rode in his mind forever, but did not begin his alcoholism. That train had been rolling a long time. He was born on that train.

It is likely, though, that the killing made it worse somehow. I really don’t know. I just know that in the early 1950s my father was still on the threshold of his adult life, and killed a man before he was old enough to buy a beer or cast a vote, or shave. If it was a ticking bomb, an unexploded mine in my father’s head, it rattled round in there with other things, Jack said. “He never blamed anything that happened to him on it,” Jack said. Besides, Jack said, my father would have drowned a man every night in his dreams, if he could have only done over the years to come.

That night, he just picked, and they let the liquor run through their blood, circle their heart, and soften their heads, like a pillow, without laying down. It did not matter if the lyrics were sad. It never had. He picked and my father rested. The thing that outsiders never understood about old country music, the music derived from Irish ballads and mountain folk songs, was that the sadder it was, the better it made you feel. It told you that you were not alone on this miserable rock, not fighting anything special, anything new.

“What you gonna do now, Charles?” he asked.

My father’s dreams had shrunk, become more practical. He intended to romance as many pretty women as possible before he found the one he wanted, the one he could not live without, and have fat, pretty, happy children, and maybe get out of this town after all, this time for good. He was still in uniform, but there was plenty of blue-collar work out there in the big cities. Detroit, maybe? Half of Alabama had moved to Detroit, to hang bumpers on Cadillacs. He had always wanted to try on a big city, and see if it fit him all right.

Jack told him that seemed fine.

“We never did say no more of it, that other,” Jack said.

Jack watched my father meander to the car. He walked with his back straight, with dignity, but his legs belonged to somebody else. He fired up the old smoker and left, the tires wandering.

Jack put his guitar away, the way a nurse puts away a hypodermic.

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly

And bitterly wept as we bore him along

For we all loved our comrade so brave, young and handsome

We all loved our comrade even though he’d done wrong

The Boy

T
HE FIGURINE
on the basketball trophy seemed familiar.

He was clean-cut and handsome, the boy made over, in chrome.

The engraving read:

MOST CHRIST-LIKE

The boy has several trophies in his room, most of them for sports-manship. He asked me if I had any, and I told him no, but I did get whistled once for elbowing a man in the stomach on the foul line at the YMCA, during a time-out.

“I wasn’t always a good sport,” I admitted.

“Why?” the boy asked.

“I just wasn’t a good boy,” I said. “I mean, I wasn’t good.”

It was painful, to watch the boy’s team play. It was a church team, so there was no cussing except for what little bit might have escaped my lips in the bleachers, and I had to be careful myself, being as I was in the gym of the Lord. There was a lot of running up and down the court, but not a lot of scoring.

“Do you not ever pants anybody?” I once asked the boy, referring to the practice of tugging down another player’s shorts on the foul line.

“No,” the boy said.

“Want to?” I asked.

“No, he does not,” said the woman.

They played mostly other suburban churches, with final scores of 12–6, and 7–2, till the day finally came when they played a team of inner-city children from Memphis.

The home team walked into their threadbare gym in mismatched uniforms. One of them, a fat kid, had no strings in his sneakers. There were only six of them, and two of them, the biggest two, were girls.

“This is gonna be bad,” I whispered to the woman.

She looked at me, questioning.

“For us,” I said.

One of the two girls scared me, and I was a spectator. She stalked the hardwood floor as if she could smell the weakness in the white-bread boys. If one of the little boys got close to her, she plowed through them, and if one tried to drive the lane, she put them on the floor.

The first little boy went down hard, curled up in a ball, and sobbed. The second, the one she put into the wall, lay in the fetal position, as if she had knocked him back in time. The third, a big kid himself, took an elbow, and lay on the floor like cast-off clothes.

So the woman was right. Our boy was not special.

The boy only got to play about half the time, and for the first time I was kind of grateful. But with so many weepers on the floor, he had to take his punishment sooner or later. He was not a great shooter, but he tried hard and played good defense. He took a carom off the board and was dribbling up-court when the big girl came at him like a locomotive.

“Oh Lord,” I said out loud.

She reached for the ball with her left hand, and, still moving forward at a dead run, slashed her right elbow across his mouth.

I have never seen a finer elbow thrown, at any level.

I still don’t know how he kept his feet. The ball went rolling, and as players from both sides chased after it he just stood there, hurting. Then, he came wobbling diagonally across the court, toward his mom.

No foul was awarded, no time-out was called. It was surreal, in a way. As the game continued down the court he just meandered to the bleachers.

“Go back,” I said.

Then I saw his face. His lips were already swelling.

“Don’t cry,” I said under my breath. “Don’t cry, don’t cry…”

He didn’t. He just wobbled on, till he stood before us.

“She knocked out my teef,” he said, and spit them into his hand.

The girl had snapped his front teeth in two.

He handed the pieces to the woman.

Then he looked me right in the eye, and walked back on the court.

“THAT’S MY BOY,” I shouted, and I thumped my chest.