Free The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg Page A

they will run to their mommies,” I said, “and tell on you.”
    “What if they don’t run away?” he asked.
    “They won’t be able to see good after you thump ’em good that first time, right?”
    He said he supposed so.
    “Well, thump ’em again.”
    He was named, this boy, for a man who wrestled an angel, but had lived a life free of contention, free of consequence. I wished I could tell him it would always be that way, but all I could do was teach him how to bloody another little boy’s nose.
    “Repeat after me,” I said.
    “Hurt ’em quick.
    “Make ’em cry.
    “Go home.”
    Father of the Year.
    “What if they try to step back when you swing?” he asked.
    “You try,” I said, as I reached out to tap him on the head.
    He lurched back but could not move.
    I was standing on his foot.
    “Oh,” he said.
    I told him most little boys swing wild, from the side, and don’t connect with much of anything. I lost as many boyhood fights as I won, but I learned. I tried to show how to block, jab. “You punch straight ahead, like driving a nail,” I said.
    I could hear my father’s voice in my head.
    “Is it okay to cry?” he asked.
    It’s not even okay to ask that question, I thought.
    “Try not to,” I said.
    I am not, usually, an idiot. I knew I was being a little careless with the boy, the way I was with everything else. It is easy to teach someone to throw a punch in abstract, hard to explain the sick feeling that precedes any violence, even playground violence.
    So I told him to walk away when he could.
    “Is that what you would do?” he asked.
    “Not on your damn life,” I said.
    He was confused now.
    “I have run,” I explained, when I knew I couldn’t win, and the cause didn’t seem worth the pain. But I was always sick, after. You choose the sick feeling you can stand most, the one before you fight, or the one after you run away. But that was complicated, for a ten-year-old.
    “Son,” I said, “I once ran away in a Mustang.”
    I told him that the rules of conduct, from the school, the church, his beloved mom, didn’t matter much in the dirt, if you were getting hurt.
    “You bite,” I said.
    He looked amazed.
    “It’s fine to gouge,” I said.
    Then his mother walked up, and I was in trouble again.
    She would raise a gentle boy if she had to lock me in a shed.
    “He doesn’t need to know,” she told me.
    I nodded my head, hoping that might spare me.
    It never has.
    “He’s ten years old,” she hissed.
    I told her, yes, he was getting started late.
    “You are twelve,” she said.
    Still, I tried to modulate my behavior around the boy. Once, he asked me how to defend himself against a bigger boy.
    “Kick him in the…” and I searched my mind for a Baptist word.
    “Kick him in the scrotum,” I said.
    “What’s a scrotum?” he asked.
    He walked around giggling for an hour and a half.
    So, when his mother was not looking, we boxed in the living room, and sparred in the yard. But the boy wanted to be a fighter like I wanted to be a fat Italian opera singer. He smiled when he punched, he giggled, and I knew he might live his whole life, a complete life, and never strike another man in anger.
    “How did you learn?” he asked me.
    I told him it was in my blood.
    I saw my father fight. He barely took time to cuss a man before hitting him in the face. I remember he fought moving forward, almost dancing. At every reappearance, he schooled me. He baby-tapped me in my shoulders and gut as I swung so hard I fell. By the time I was six years old he smacked me upside the head, harder, when I dropped my guard. It was still just a tap, but it was like being hit with the end of a post. “The boy likes it,” he said, as my mother snatched me up and put a stop to it. I know I will never forget feeling like a big boy, fists clenched in front of my face.
    I was six, in my last fight he knew about, on the playground at Spring Garden Elementary. A boy shook loose of the hold I had on