The Prince of Frogtown Read Online Free Page A

is her prerogative to spoil a boy.
    “He’s not real tough,” I said.
    “He don’t need to be,” she said.
    The woman says that, that same way. I sat awake another few hours as the window began to glow yellow behind the blinds. My big brother and sister-in-law tapped on the door and came in, half hiding a sack that smelled suspiciously like a sausage biscuit.
    “How is she?” he asked.
    “Still hurtin’,” I said, “but nothin’ she can’t stand.”
    He smiled at that.
    Once, a long time ago, we were not that tough either, him and me. But she was, or we would have vanished. I walked into the heat of the morning to my truck and drove through the town that had framed our story for a hundred years, past fast-food restaurants and antebellum mansions, rich cousins and poor cousins, waiting for the same parade. I glanced at my phone, knowing that I should check in at home.
    This is what it is like, I thought, to be the circus bear. You pace your cage till they let you out to do tricks. You talk about tuition, hardwood floors, braces and sometimes algebra, and see how long you can balance on that wobbling ball before you go berserk and eat the crowd. Sometimes you bust out, but never get further than the Exxon station before you go slouching home, for treats. You are a tame bear now. They will have you riding a red tricycle and wearing a silly hat before too long.
    I dialed, a little fearfully. The woman is mad at me a lot. I make her mad, being me.
    The boy never is.
    I walk in the door, and the boy never looks disappointed in me.
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CHAPTER ONE
    In a Cloud of Smoke

    M AN, I WISH I COULD HAVE SEEN HIM. They say he was slick and pretty in ’55, and when he leaned against his black-and-pearl ’49 Mercury in his white Palm Beach suit and cherry-red necktie, he looked like he got lost on his way to someplace special and pulled off here to ask the way. He always stole a red flower for his lapel—what magic, to always steal a red one—and cinched up his pants with a genuine leatherette imitation alligator belt. His teeth were too good to be true, his canines long and wicked white, and he wore his wavy, reddish-brown hair swooped up high like the Killer, Jerry Lee. It turned black when he combed it back with Rose hair oil, and when he fought, leading with his right, punishing with his left, all that hair flopped into those blue-flame eyes. He only finished sixth grade but he was drawing good government money then, as a Marine, and drove home every weekend from the base in Macon with one thing on his mind. He liked to pose on the square and see the girls sway by, but wouldn’t whistle because he’d already found the one. “He smiled mischievous,” my mother said, like he was picking life’s pocket, like he was getting away with something by hanging around and breathing air. He was just another linthead kid, but as different from other men she knew, the brush-arbor prophets, pulpwooders and shade-tree mechanics, as the mannequin in Steinberg’s department store was from a cornfield scarecrow. When it was time to go he slid behind the wheel and turned the key, and he looked like an angel, one of the fallen kind, as the big engine caught fire and he vanished in a blue-black, oily, noxious cloud.
    “His car burnt a lot of oil,” she said. “It burnt so much oil that a cloud followed him all around town, burnt so much oil he couldn’t keep oil in it, but instead of getting it fixed he’d just go out to that fillin’ station out on the highway, you know, where Young’s used to be, and he’d pull it up to a barrel of the burnt oil they drained out of people’s cars, and he’d dip it out in a bucket and put it in his ol’ car, and he’d just ride and ride. People used to laugh at him. They’d say, ‘Here comes that Bragg boy, in a cloud of smoke.’
    “They ought not laughed at him, though,” she said. “People’s mean.”
    The words must have tasted a little stale.
    She had not defended him in forty