The Prince of Frogtown (26 page)

From the second he leapt from the car, he was Sam’s dog. There are no magical stories to tell of it. The dog did not drag my brother from quicksand with his teeth, or crawl home after being mauled by a bear to lead a rescue party to starving children. He was just a good dog, and my mother and I would sit on the front porch of the falling-down house we rented, and watch the boy and dog run through the cornfield across the road. When they were tired they lay together on that porch, the big dog on his back, paws in the air, as if dead.

“Crazy dog,” Sam said.

Always that.

“Crazy ol’ dog.”

We never found out where my father got him. But people who know drinking, gambling men know that they bring home all kinds of trophies—worn gold wedding bands, cheap wristwatches, porch furniture, rusted bicycles, wrench and socket sets, suit coats, cowboy boots, used tires, car batteries, stereo speakers, car radios with the wires still hanging from the back, Saturday night specials with the three of the six chambers still loaded, leather jackets, dogs, but never cats. We figured he won him. It wouldn’t have mattered to us if he stole him. He gave my serious brother a gift that made him laugh out loud.

“You can’t fight that dog,” my mother told my father.

“I ain’t,” he promised.

Like I said, he wasn’t a magic dog. He didn’t make everything all right. My father was mean to my mother, more and more, but for a while, maybe, we didn’t notice it as much. My father’s self-respect continued to peel, and finally he gave up on work altogether, living off the welfare check that my mother drew. He was living drunk, now. One night he staggered into the house and greeted my mother with a big smile. He was missing his front teeth. The thing she had loved about him most was his white, perfect teeth, and he had gotten them pulled, for meanness. He said it was because the teeth knocked loose in a long-ago wreck were bothering him, but the dentists had said there was no reason to pull them, that they could be saved. He had gotten drunk and had them pulled, and then followed her around that bleak house, smiling and smiling.

I was sick then, and had to stay inside with all that meanness. Sam and the dog ran free of it outside.

“What was that dog’s name?” I asked my mother, four decades later.

“I don’t know if it had a name,” she said.

“How long did we have it?” I asked.

“Three days,” she said.

At a gathering of other drinking men, an older man told my father he had seen the dog in our yard, and would give him two-to-one that his brindle pit bull could eat him alive. My daddy told him no, the dog was a pet. The man told him they would call it, quick, as soon as one dog turned cur. My daddy said no, the boxer was a lapdog. But the more he drank, the more reasonable it became. One afternoon, he loaded the dog into the car. My mother begged him, and Sam just sat outside on the steps, arms around his knees. He was not a crier, not then, not ever. He just sat there, till way after dark, waiting for his daddy to bring his dog back.

The next day, my father’s car rumbled up in the driveway. He opened one of the rear doors and lifted the boxer from the backseat. The dog did not yelp or whimper, and must have been in shock. His guts had been opened up, and the skin around his neck and intelligent face was not just ripped, but ripped away. His dark eyes looked as hard as marbles, and his chest rose and fell in a jerking, ugly way. I wanted to pet him, but there was just so much blood, and no place to put my hands.

Sam had come running, and just froze there, and went white as bone. My mother tried to get in his way, to shield him, but he was a big boy then, and too old to be protected with an apron. She told me, later, how he looked, like he had been stabbed, and just didn’t fall down.

“Just stood there, a’starin’ and a’starin’,” my mother said.

My father, hungover, listing a little, had not spoken.

“Why did you bring it home?” my mother asked, quietly.

He was not the kind of man you screamed at, even in times like these.

“I didn’t know what to do with him,” he confessed. If he had been sober, maybe he would have known not to bring it home.

Then something happened that never, ever had. My meek, gentle mother told my father to leave. She walked up to him, within range of his fists, and with her hands down at her sides, accepting of what might come, she looked him in his bloodshot eyes and ordered him away from her, from us. “Take the dog,” she said, and instead of turning on her, in fury, he scooped it up in his arms, and left.

“I run him off,” she said, and forty-one years after the fact, she still sounds a little surprised.

Sam went missing for a while after that, for a day or more. He hid in a tree.

“He was nine then. He remembers it better than you,” my mother said.

I remember it. Boys remember dogs.

It never haunted me, not like it did him.

“Sam feels things more than you do,” she said.

She was not being mean. She just knows her boys.

I don’t know what happened to the dog. If my father’s head had been clear, he would have just put him down, quick, with a hammer. He had done it before. Ours is a culture of cruelty, as to dogs. Runts are bashed against a tree. Strays are tied up in a sack and dropped off a bridge. I wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, but it was done. As it was, my father probably just rode around from bootlegger to bootlegger, seeking credit, and somewhere along the way the dog suffered and died, and was thrown off in the weeds.

She relented eventually and he came home, but she never forgave him for what he had done to her son. There is no patch for that.

His life had spiraled to nothing, taking us down with him. He was at a place where he was even willing to gamble his son’s heart in that pit, and maybe he could come home with cash money in his pockets, and show those men and his own family that he was more than what he had become. Wasn’t that worth the life of a dog? “He just needed something good to happen to him,” she said, and the dog was the only currency he had left.

I had not realized, after all the hatefulness we endured in that time, how long that particular hurt lasted in my brother. We have buried, between us, fifty dogs since then. “But it stuck in him,” my mother said. “If he thinks about it, even as old as he is now, he gets so mad he can’t stand it. That’s why he will not talk hardly at all about your daddy, because it makes him think of that dog, and what your daddy did to him.”

One night, a lifetime later, she picked up the phone, and dialed seven numbers. It always starts with 435. If it wasn’t for me, running off to join the circus all the time, she would never dial more than seven digits, and every one of them would start with 435.

“Sam?”

Seconds later, she hung up the phone, and called me.

“His name was Loco,” she said.

T
HAT IS WHY I COULDN’T
whitewash my father, because of that dog, and what it had done to the brother who spent so much of his life coming to rescue me from the side of the road. I stood a hundred times in a hated necktie, ineffectually holding the flashlight as his wrenches slipped and he gashed his knuckles on the fan blades of my junk cars, working for hours stooped over in black grease just to get me rolling again, to get me chasing something cleaner, easier. “Don’t get dirty,” he would hiss as I reached in under the hood to try to help. I have sometimes said that my older brother is who I want to be when I grow up, but that’s a lie. He works too hard and lives too straight, for me. There have been times in my life when all I truly cared about could dance on the point of my pen, but not Sam. He feels what he feels all the time, and would rather stand in the dark and listen to his dogs trail a coon than carry on a conversation. He discarded our father more than three decades ago, just took him out with the trash, because of a dog whose name I could not recall.

There was more to it than that, of course, but the dog gave his anger a place to rest that was easier to remember than some of what happened to us then. It was the year of the great disappearing tricycle. Every word I wrote only brought me closer and closer to this point, and with every finished page I knew I was building him up only to have to tear him down again.

The night he left with the dog, she started saving dimes, nickels and pennies, for our escape.

“I loved him,” she told me, and in all my life I had never heard her say those words.

It is why she ran away, and ran back.

“I might could have run forever, by myself,” she said.

“But I couldn’t run and carry y’all.”

I told her I guessed some people were not meant to be daddies, and she told me she guessed that might be right. He never sang a lullaby in his life. But one night, before we were free of him, he was precisely the kind of man we needed him to be, in precisely the right moment, and if I had more faith, or put more value on my own life, I would believe that everything he had done or been in his life had led him to that moment. I don’t believe that. I just believe that, sometimes, you need dark men to do dark things.

W
INTER IS A BLEAK TIME
in the Mountain South, a gray, wet, messy time, without the dry snows of the north or clear sunshine of the Gulf Coast. It can be humid and warm on Tuesday and 16 degrees on Thursday morning, with ice forecast for Friday night. I have always hated winters here, not for the cold or the ice but the gray, the unrelenting drizzle and rain that can settle in for a week at a time, turn the ground to soup and plaster the leaves to the car wind-shields like wet toilet paper. It was in weather like that, that mess, that I got sick for the last time in the big, cold house in Spring Garden, where we lived after coming home from Texas.

The rides had stopped altogether. He rarely had money for gas anymore. Almost as if there really had been something medicinal in that open car window, my breathing got worse, and worse. My little brother Mark played on the floor as my mother perched day and night on the edge of the bed I shared with Sam, rubbing my chest, singing. She sat up all night, sometimes, just watching me, fingers on my chest, feeling it rise and fall. I believe that even if she had fallen asleep there in her straight-backed chair, she would have known if I had ceased to breathe, from the touch. One late night, the night before she was going to take me to the doctor in Piedmont, I took in a weak, ragged breath, and began to choke. Thick fluid, like left-out rubber cement, clogged my throat and nose and stopped my air, completely. My mother screamed, and lifted me from the bed like I was a baby. My father, who had already gone to bed, walked barefoot into the room and asked her what was wrong.

“We got to get him to the hospital,” she said.

The car wasn’t running. There was no phone in the old, creepy house, and never had been.

“You got to do something,” she begged him.

I had begun to turn blue when he took me from her, ran with me to the kitchen, and laid me on the table. He grabbed a box of salt, and dumped a fistful of it into one hand. In my panic I had clenched my teeth, and I ground them together as he clawed at my mouth with his free hand, trying to pry them open. Finally, he balled up his fist, to knock them out, and I opened my mouth to scream, with no sound. He poured the salt down my throat, then clamped his hand hard over my mouth as I convulsed, jerking in his arms.

“You’re killin’ him,” my mother told him, but he just pressed down harder. When he finally lifted his hand I vomited with such force that the mess clogging my throat exploded outward, and I could breathe.

He handed me, limp, to my mother.

“Here,” was all he said.

He went back to bed.

She sat up with me all night, trying to rock me, big as I was, in a straight-backed chair.

We left him not long after that. If I had lived, or died, it was done. She was pregnant then, and lost the fourth son not long after that. I blamed him because he made her life so hard.

“But he saved your life,” my mother told me.

I should have remembered it better.

“But he did,” she said.

“He didn’t seem real damn happy about it, did he?” I said.