Rick Bragg - The Prince of Frogtown

Streets of Laredo

PROLOGUE

The Stream

I N WATER SO FINE, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didnt hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. It took something as powerful as that, as girls, to tug me away from this tribe of sunburned little boys, to scatter us from this place of double-dog dares, Blow Pops, Cherry Bombs, Indian burns, chicken fights, and giggling, half-wit choruses of Bald-Headed Man from China. Maybe we should have nailed up a sign NO GIRLS ALLOWED and lived out our lives here, to fight mean bulls from the safe side of a barbed-wire fence with a cape cut from a red tank top, and duel to the death with swords sliced off a weeping willow tree. I dont know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy. Then, a thrust to the heart only bent against my chest, in a place where I could look straight into the Alabama sun through a water-smoothed nugget of glass, and tell myself it was a shipwrecked emerald instead of just a piece from a broken bottle of Mountain Dew.

The stream began in a jumble of rocks beside the Piedmont Highway, bubbling up cold and clear a half mile from my grandmothers house. The air always smelled of coconut-scented suntan lotion and lighter fluid, and in summer the white gravel parking lot filled with church buses, poodle walkers, and weekend Hells Angels who might have been born to run, but now lugged along well-fed wives in white go-go boots and polyester pantsuits rolled to the knee. It was a lovely park, but a boy, a genuine boy, can have no real fun with so many Presbyterians puttering around, and so many mommas in one tight place.

But if you followed the water a meandering half mile to the west, through a dark, spiderwebbed, monster-infested culvert tall enough for a small boy to run through, all the picnickers and weenie roasters vanished behind a curtain of gnarled, lightning-blasted cedars and thick, dark pines. The stream passed under four strands of barbed wire, flowed through a sprawling pasture studded with wicked blackberry thickets and the rusted hulks of old baling machines, then rushed into a dogleg against a high, red clay bank. Here, the shin-deep water pooled into a clear, cold swimming hole, made deeper by the ragged dam of logs, rocks and sandbags we built just downstream.

This was our place. From a running start, I could leap clear across it, heart like a piston, arms flailing for distance, legs like shock absorbers as I finally, finally touched down. This is where I learned to take a punch and not cry, how to dodge a rock, sharpen a knife, cuss, and spit. Here, with decrepit cowboy hats and oil-stained BAMA caps on our burr heads and the gravel of the streambed sifting through our toes, we daydreamed about Corvettes we would drive, wondered if we would all die in Vietnam and where that was, and solemnly divined why you should never, ever pee on an electric fence.

This is the last place I remember having much peace of mind. It is where I lay still shaking from the water and let the sun simmer me to sleep, my feet and legs slicked by nail polish to suffocate the chiggers that had hitched a ride on me the day before. I would wake, hard, to the bite of a horsefly, or soft, to a faint, far-off rumbling in still-blue skies and the frightened calls of a mother who always, somehow, foretold the storm. A few times I took a book, but it was hard to read with your brothers pelting you with day-old cow patties and green pinecones. And besides, in those days of bloody adventure, the Boxcar Children moved a little slow, and the Hardy Boys didnt have nothin on me.

My mother had tried to open the outside world to me in the only way she could, by taking home a volume every Friday morning from the discount encyclopedia sale at the A&P, but the sale ended too soon and the world stopped at the letter KKyoto, Kyushu and Kyzyl Kum. I didnt miss the rest of the alphabet or the world, not here. The only thing that could force an end to perfect days in the perfect stream was the dipping of that almighty sun, sinking into Gunsmoke, hot cornbread and cold buttermilk, and a preemptive If I should die before I wake as a shorted-out electric fan droned off and on in a window by my bed. Somewhere out there, my father drifted from ditch to ditch in a hundred-dollar car, but we were free of him then, free of him for good.

Yet sometimes, when I am wading through my memories of this place, I find the pieces of another day, a day told to me as much as it was truly remembered, because I was so small. My father was still with us then, his loafers spit-shined, his creases sharp enough to cut you in two, and he would have smelled of Ivory soap and Old Spice and a faint, splashed-on respectability. It is not the best or worst story I have of my father, but is worth telling if only because, this time, he was innocent.

I WAS NOT A TODDLER ANYMORE, but not yet school-age. Mostly, I remember the weather. It was late spring, after the blackberries bloom. Summer does not wait on the calendar here, and by the end of May the heat has settled across the foothills of the Appalachians like a damp dishrag. By Memorial weekend, the flies have discovered every hole in the screen doors, and the grass has been cut six times. But some years, just before four solid months of unrelenting sweat, a cool, delicious wind blows through the hills, mixes with the brilliant sunshine, and provides a few, final sips of dry, breezy, perfect weather. The old people call it blackberry winter.

It is fine sleeping weather and even better for visiting, and that is what brought us together in the early 1960s. By midmorning, the chert drive in front of my grandmother Avas house was crowded with fifties-model Chevrolets and GMC pickups loaded with chain saws, rusted picks and shovels, logging chains and battered toolboxes. There was work in the American South then, good blue-collar work with health insurance and solid pension funds. Smokestacks burned at midnight, and coated the parked cars in a film of black, beautiful, life-giving smut. If a mans family did without, it was his own damn fault.

The hot-grease smell of frying chicken would have leaked from the windows and screen doors, as it did every Sunday, as aunts and cousins twisted the lids off sweet pickles and stirred yellow mustard into big gobs of potato salad. Gospel music from the black-and-white television mixed in the air with the smell from sizzling iron skillets. and now, folks, from Pensacola, Florida, with sand in their shoes, its the Florida Boys My grandmother Ava, who never really recovered from the death of the one man she ever deemed worthy of a second glance, would nod to the music, and dream.

The yard was chaos and tricycles, the red dirt and spring grass covered in pink-faced children crying, laughing, screaming, fighting, bleeding. Doll heads bounced across the ground, diapers were lost, green plums and some small measure of dirt were eaten. Wagons and Kiddie Kars crashed and overturned in wild onions and ant beds, but no babys suffering, not even a sweat bee sting, lasted too long. Daddies snatched up the afflicted, baby-talked into their ears, and jiggled them well again.