Free The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg Page B

his neck and punched me in the eye. The teacher sent me home on the big yellow bus with a note folded in my coat pocket.
    My father read it, and tossed it in the trash.
    “Who whupped?” he said.
    I told him we didn’t finish.
    “Finish it tomorrow,” he said.
    I tried to tell him it was Friday, that we didn’t have school the next day. I waited, miserable, sad and nervous, to pick a fight with that little boy.
    The woman tells me I am a throwback, that children settle differences now with lawyers, guns and money.
    But you can’t do right all the time.
    A boy needs to know how to make a fist.
    You know that, being stuck on twelve.
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CHAPTER THREE
    Bob

    B OB NEVER MET a man he wouldn’t fight at least twice, if insulted, and he intended to slap all the pretty off Handsome Bill Lively’s face. It happened in a weed-strewn clearing at the corner of Alexandria Road and D Street, around the time of the Second Great War. The village gamblers liked to gather there, where the thick hedges, honeysuckle and possum grapevines screened them from their wives, the rare police car, and the Congregational Holiness Church. A man named Doug Smith got cut across the eyes there, “and there was always somebody fightin’, cuttin’,” said Jimmy Hamilton, who grew up in the mill village with his friend Homer Barnwell, and was just a boy then. “I remember Bill Lively as a nice-looking man, dark-haired,” said Jimmy. “If he’d had one of those pencil-thin mustaches, ain’t no tellin’ how far he could have gone. Well, Bill liked to pick at Bob when Bob was drinkin’, and that day, Bob come down to the poker game, drunk. Him and Bobby got to fightin’, and he worked Bob over a little bit.”
    Bob limped home, beaten.
    “Well, about fifteen or twenty minutes later, here come Bobby back,” Jimmy said.
    Bob was naked.
    “For God’s sake, Bob,” said Handsome Bill.
    “You whupped me with my clothes on,” Bob told him. “Now let’s see if you can whup me nekkid.”
    I would give a gold monkey to know what Bill Lively thought, standing there looking at Bob’s little-bitty, sweat-slicked, naked body, everything pretty much fish-belly white except the red on his arms and face and neck. Where do you grab a solid hold of a naked man? We just know that Bob balled up his little fists and flung himself on Bill Lively for revenge I guess, because I am not sure if you can fight for your honor with your parts exposed.
    What a wonderful story it might have been.
    What if he had somehow beaten down the bigger man, and gone home with his head high and posterior in the breeze?
    Instead, Lively worked him over again, snatched a pine sapling from the ground, and whipped Bobby’s bare behind down D Street.
    Velma was there—she was always there—on the stoop, standing as Bob climbed the steps, not ducking inside to hide her face and leave him to walk the last few steps alone. She glared out the door to let any busybodies know they could all go straight to hell, and stomped off to get the salve. “I ought to knock you in the damn head, Bob,” she always said to him, in times like these.
    There are some people in the world who are not necessarily good at life if you see it as a completed work, but who are excellent at it one daub of bright color at a time. Bob, when drinking, lived in the twitch. He might never be respectable, in a Methodist kind of way. But the way he saw it, and raised his sons to see it, he could be free as a bird on a bunk in the city jail, as long as he showed some guts and left some blood on the ground—his, or somebody’s. Bob, with a bottle, would wreak mayhem in disproportion to his size, and go find his angel, to hear his story, and bind his wounds.
    He was kind to her, when sober, but would forget to be kind when he was not. She just took it, and walked miles to bail him out of jail with money she made in that stifling mill. People recall that his dark red hair went white early in his life, as if he