The Prince of Frogtown Read Online Free Page B

years.
    “Now,” she said, “it was a pretty car.”
    She remembers him that way, in smoke.
    But sometimes, in a blue moon, she remembers him on his knees.
    “It was about four months after we started seein’ each other. We was at Germania Springs, and he was gettin’ him a drink of water, laying on his belly on the creek bank. You could drink it right out of the creek back then, and it was good ’n’ cold. Well, he got a drink, and he turned and looked at me. ‘Will you marry me?’ he said. And I laughed at him and he got mad. I think he cussed a little, too. But, I mean, who asks somebody to get married while they’re on their belly gettin’ a drink of water? ‘You’re kiddin’, ain’t you?’ I told him, and then he cussed again. He said, ‘Hell, I was serious. Will you marry me?’ But I giggled again. I couldn’t quit.”
    She has tried to forget so much it seems odd to try to remember. But she can still see him pushing himself up to his knees for a little dignity. For a second, just a second, he faced her on one knee, just like in a storybook.
    “I mean it, goddammit,” he said.
    His face was bright, burning red.
    “Will you, or not?”

    H E WAS NOT A MARRYING MAN .
    The old men laughed at him, all duded up with that oil bucket in his hand, but the women loved his face. Even men—men so afraid of appearing feminine they would walk a wide loop around the unmentionables in Sears to avoid being in proximity of a panty—would concede that, yeah, that Charles Bragg was a good-looking man. He had a movie star’s squared-off chin with a dashing white line across it, like a dueling scar. He got it one night, drunk, when he banged his face on the steering wheel, but it made him look mysterious and a little bit dangerous all the same. He had Indian blood and cheekbones, proud and high, and his face tanned to dark red. His ears and Adam’s apple were too big but his hands were as small and delicate as a woman’s, yet strong as wire pliers, like his daddy’s had been. He talked country but dressed for town, as all the boys from the mill village did back then, a hybrid hillbilly with silver dimes flashing in his black penny loafer shoes. He chain-smoked Pall Malls and toted a thin, yellow-handled knife in his left hip pocket, so he could get at it, quick. He hid a snub-nosed pistol at the small of his back, but only on the weekends, and never when he was with her. He raised fighting dogs, bet on chickens and loved vanilla ice cream, and I guess he was a scoundrel before he knew what a scoundrel was.
    “He would cut you, if you hemmed him up,” said my father’s cousin Carlos Slaght, whose daddy named him after a label he saw on a crate of Mexican apples in Christmas 1932. “But he was a good boy, all in all.” If you turned him upside down and shook him, as his older brothers were prone to do, dice and a pint of liquor would have bounced across the floor and fifty-two cards would have fluttered down, or fifty-one, if he had one hid. The darkness he had done an ocean away had left a mark on him, sure, but he hid it then, like his tattoos. Back home, he drew his pocket comb like a gun, and could often be seen slouched at a table in the Ladiga Grill, preening, pretending not to notice the girls who noticed him.
    “He walked by me once on the street and didn’t speak, and turned around and followed me down the sidewalk,” my mother said. She caught him doing that, caught his reflection in a storefront window, but she didn’t turn around and embarrass him. She just smiled, and kept walking. He showed up a lot when she was in the café, and he would sit and smoke and drink black coffee and steal looks at her over the top of a paperback western.
    He had a reputation of course, but she didn’t know, and that is the same as having none at all. “Charles always had the women,” said his buddy Jack Andrews. “Nice girls, too, I mean. Church girls. But your momma…He fell in love with her. He made up