by Rick Bragg
“Can I have a quarter?” was all he said.
A few arcade games stood in a corner. I fished out a handful of change and put in our order at the counter. The woman and I sat at one of the hard plastic tables, not saying all that much. A large family sat just a few tables over, sheltering as we were from the storm.
I knew them, not their names but their lives, or thought I did. They were working people, mill or day laborers, a woman in dollar-store clothes, a man with grease embedded in his hands, pants pocked by battery acid, cheap boots, vinyl maybe, cracked and run-down. Women know shoes. Men see boots. They had five or six small children, and even in McDonald’s that can put a dent in a poor man’s paycheck, at suppertime. A little blonde girl, smaller than my boy, was asking for money, too, but the woman shook her head and the man didn’t acknowledge her at all, not being mean, just unwilling to pay good money for a few seconds of bright, blipping lights. The little girl did not cry or whine, just walked over to stand in front of one of those games, the kind where you pay your quarter and then try to snatch a stuffed animal with a dangling claw. It was full of bears, cats, dogs, cartoon characters. She just stood there, looking inside.
My boy stepped in front of her as if she was invisible.
I went cold.
I didn’t yell or put my hands on him. I never felt it was my right. I just called to him, and for the life of me I can’t recall what I said. But I can still see his cheeks go red, like I had slapped them. If he had been a man, I would have. I would have knocked him to the floor.
He didn’t say anything, just walked away. Then, as if it was his way of telling me to go to hell, he circled around to the game and dropped in his quarter.
So it was true, I thought.
I had one of them.
He is at home in an arcade, in a life where the quarters run in a silver, tinkling, never-ending stream. On his first try, the boy deftly snagged a stuffed animal, a blue and yellow dog.
Then he walked over and handed it to the little girl.
“Thank you,” the girl’s mother said to us.
The man nodded his thanks, too.
I sat there ashamed of myself, till the last cold French fry was dragged through a puddle of red.
The boy walked a little apart from me as we left, but I walked over, quick, and threw my arm around his shoulders.
“You are a noble boy,” I said, and squeezed him till he yelped.
“What’s that?” he said.
I told him it didn’t matter, but it was good.
We walked into the parking lot, the storm not over, just gone someplace else.
“Ride with me, the rest of the way,” I told him.
I unlocked the doors, but he ran toward his mother’s car.
“Where you goin’?” I shouted.
“To get my blanky,” he said.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX
Flying Jenny
THE BOYS PULLED ON their most raggedy garments, because something unspeakable could splash on them, especially if there was a big girl inside. It happened in the season of the witch, pumpkins aglow on every porch. My father and the rest gathered quietly in the backyards of A, B, C or D Street, to skulk and whisper in the weeds. Before long, a screen door would bang, a flashlight beam would jiggle across dying grass, and footsteps would rustle through fallen leaves. A creak of hinges followed by a soft thud, the closing of the outhouse door, would sound in the darkness, telling the boys it was safe to creep closer, closer. Sometimes one of the delinquents would giggle and the girl inside, a big girl usually, would freeze, Sears, Roebuck in her fingers, drawers to her knees. The outhouse door would crash open and the flashlight would stab the dark, accusing, till she finally gave up, muttering. As soon as the door shut, the boys rose like Lazarus from the dark, mouthed “one…two…three” and swarmed. They rocked the structure once, twice and heaved, the occupant snatching at her clothes, yelling curses as she rode her outhouse down. The boys scattered, laughing, as porch lights winked on up and down the street and old women screamed what they have screamed over generations: “I see you, you little half-raised idiots.” The next morning, the victims would raise their outhouses up again, but it was like rebuilding in the known trajectory of a hurricane. In the village, boredom would build into imagination, swirl into mischief, and blow them down again.
Billy Measles was twelve, maybe thirteen, when his father got on at the mill and moved his family to D Street, three doors from the Braggs. My father, about the same age, introduced himself with a hard, hooking left to the new boy’s head, and as soon as lights stopped twinkling around Billy’s skull he saw, instead of an enemy, a tight new circle of friends.
“We run with Bill Raines. He was short, redheaded, had freckles. He had a good heart. There was Leeman Bragg. Leeman was hairy as a monkey and stocky-built, loved horses more’n anything. And there was Garfield Bragg, darkish, a loverboy, always after women. Whistled and hollered at ’em, all the time. Alfred Davis was lanky, slender, and black-headed. He smoked cigarettes and played marbles. You’d try to bum a cigarette off Alfred and he’d say the same thing. ‘These got to do me all week.’ Say it in this grown-up voice, ‘Boys, I’d like to, but these got to do me…’ Bill Joe Chaney was there. He turned over the outhouse with that big Shuttles gal in it. And Dave and Jake Strickland, short and stocky, both of ’em, and black-headed. Billy Joe Champion. He was a talker, and liked to build big bonfires, and he’d sit by ’em all night. Wallace Key had blond streaks in brown hair, and he could buck-dance. His daddy taught him. Little Carl Bragg was with us. Carl wouldn’t go to bed by himself. And me. I think I weighed ninety pounds. And there was your dad. He was left-handed. Did you know that? Well, I didn’t. I thought the world of him, but I won’t never forget that hard left hand…”
Billy Measles is seventy-two years old now. He is a smallish man, like my father was.
“I guess,” he said, “it was the time of our lives.”
Their club had no name, no treehouse, no secret handshake. Their leader was not elected. He took power, through a series of tests. Who could build the most lethal weapon from scrap wood, chinaberries, and cut-up inner tube? Who could jump the widest ditch with a night watchman on his tail, talk to a live girl without sounding like a dumb-ass, or pick up a softball soaked in kerosene and, bare-handed, throw a comet across the evening sky?
Who could ride Flying Jenny and not throw up?
Who could drink a gallon of water and pee over a Studebaker?
Who could beat up everybody else?
“He was the best, your daddy was,” Billy said, “at all that stuff.”
But he remembers the fighting best. It seemed like my father always had his fists up. “Your dad just didn’t know how to take nothin’ off nobody,” said Billy. He fought big boys and town boys—when they were foolish enough to stray into the alphabet streets—and won, always won. He could have been a great painter, or a captain of industry, and not mattered as much to people here as he did for that.
Child labor laws had given them a childhood, and banished the shame of eleven-and twelve-year-old mill hands. But the boys in the mill village, and the girls, still didn’t have as much time left as the children in town. The law said you had to be sixteen to quit school in the state of Alabama, but could quit at fourteen if your mother or father would sign for you. You had to be sixteen to take full-time work in the cotton mill, but your people could sign for you there, too, sign away the last days of your life barefoot and buck-wild. But for now there was still time, time to rattle down the suicidal corkscrew of the mill fire escape on a sled made from a Coke crate, time to spy on the high school girls at the swimming pool, gasp, choke, fall to the grass, clutch your heart and pretend to die.
It was an exclusive club. You could be stingy like Alfred, redheaded like Bill or hairy like Leeman, but could not win a place in their circle till you had the guts to look another boy in the eye and fight him, win, lose or draw. You could even be afraid of the dark l
ike Carl, as long as you did not run away in the morning.
The boy Billy had to fight, the one they all had to, was my father.
Billy’s father was a sharecropper who followed the promise of the mill into town, like everyone else. Billy was waif-thin and short but he wanted to belong, so he raised his fists and waited for the dark-haired boy to step into a ring formed from the bodies of all the rest. He did not expect to win. “Nobody ever whipped your daddy,” Billy said.
The other boys did not whoop or holler.
This was too serious.
Would the new boy run, or cry?
Or would he take it.
“Well,” Billy said, “we didn’t even get started good.”
My father walked into the circle in a pair of neatly ironed bib overalls—Velma even ironed their underwear—and set himself in a classic, right-handed fighter’s stance. The boys might not have known much about the outside world, but they were students of violence. They watched newsreels of Joe Louis, and listened to prizefights that hissed from the single speaker of big, waist-high radios. When they fought, they did not swing wild but jabbed, jabbed, then came in quick with hard overhand rights or undercuts that could make you bite your tongue off, if you happened to be waggling it at the time. The boys in the circle smiled as my father set himself, his left hand leading, his right held back, for the big punch, the tooth-rattler. They had seen this secret weapon before.
“I didn’t know he was really left-handed, or maybe I forgot,” Billy said.
My father jabbed with his left, almost gently, but Billy kept his eyes locked on the right hand, the punishing hand.
He didn’t see my father shuffle his feet, shift his balance. He jabbed with his right and Billy automatically ducked away—right into the path of a wicked, hooking left.
Oh Lord, he thought, as the world came apart into twinkling lights.
Purty, he thought.
My father didn’t hit him again. The new boy seemed lost.
“I wobbled around and just sat down,” Billy said.
After a while, he saw my father kneeling in front of him.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.
“Yeah you did,” Billy said.
But now he understands that, among boys who had so little apparent gentleness in them, he was seeing them at their most gentle. My father could have beaten him half to death that day for sport, but that was not the point. He and the other boys knew all they needed to know. Billy Measles, all ninety pounds of him, was a member with all privileges in a club that had just one. For the rest of his fleeting time as a boy, no one would get to knock him down except one of his best friends.
THEY HAD NEVER SEEN a roller coaster. There was just a lumbering Ferris wheel and a mamby-pamby merry-go-round, which came once a year in ragged caravans of poo-flinging monkeys, scarred, crippled elephants, and hucksters who charged people a dear nickel to gaze on a two-headed pig in a jar, or bounce softballs against milk bottles filled with lead. Men stuck their heads into the yawns of toothless lions and walked a wire no higher than a clothesline, and still had the gall to shout “Ta-da!” My father might have run off to join the circus if one had ever come by that was worth his time.
“Your daddy was a real daredevil,” Billy said, and the village was his big top. He led his troupe into local history, if history means old men will one day shake their heads and wonder how, in the foolishness of it all, they did not die.
In the summers, some of them took part-time work in the mill, sweeping up mountains of lint, but as soon as they had a little silver they were gone, standing barefoot at the little clapboard stores to buy ice-slicked RCs, then running wide-open to the banks of Shit Creek. Sometimes, their heartless mommas kept them in bondage a few awful hours more, toting wood or scraping dried egg off plates and stainless steel, “but not Charles, ’cause you sure wouldn’t never catch Charles washing no dishes,” Billy said.
The boys were amazed by Bob, but careful what they said. Young Charles would blaze up like a match dragged across a cement block, and bloody their nose and black their eyes. He did not respect Bob always—that is why, as he grew older, he called him Bob—but he loved him, my mother always said.
Once, when my father was just twelve, Bob got into an argument with his middle son, Roy, that escalated into a bloody fistfight and threats of more bloodshed. Afraid that his brother would, in his rage, hurt or even kill his father, my father hustled Bob down the road and into the woods. My father slipped back into the house in the dark and took a .22 rifle, an ax, a knife, and an old piece of tarp. He built a shelter, kept a fire, and hunted for rabbits and squirrels. They stayed there for days as Bob sobered up, as the hot-blooded Roy calmed. “It’s that damn Indian in you,” Bob told his son, “that made you able to do this.” When the other boys asked him where he had been, he told them he had to smuggle Bob out of town. Knowing Bob, the others nodded their heads, but said nothing.
But most days, when Billy knocked on the door, my father just pushed through with a cold tater biscuit in one hand, and together they picked up more boys as they ran through the streets. Some days they would go to the baseball field or city pool, but most days they wound up on the creek, to fish and to lie. They fished village-style with old circular saw blades discarded from the mill. They stood on the banks, waiting for a fish to wiggle by. Then they would throw, and cut the fish in two. It was a cruelty, but in that place, among those boys, it was only a small violence, one to grow on.
They cobbled their day together that way, from scrap. But while others built treehouses and soapbox racers, they built flying machines.
The Flying Jenny was about the most dangerous thing in Alabama except for the electric chair. The boys found a fresh-cut stump, about waist-high, and drilled or burned a dime-sized hole in the center. They stole a two-by-six or a two-by-nine board, at least six feet long, then drilled a hole in the center of that. They greased the top of the stump—little boys can always locate grease, the same way a dog can always find a tick—and lined up the holes. They slipped a long, greased bolt through the hole in the board, into the stump, to create something much like a propeller on a plane. Finally, they fixed a rope to one end of the board, so they would have something to pull on. My father always went first. The other boys took their places on the rope, grinning, as he climbed onto the other end, got a grip on the board and told them: “Let ’er go.” The boys ran in a circle, pulling till the board spun faster than they could run, spun till the bolt began to smoke in the hole. If you fell, it would knock out your brains. He flew, flew till he was sick, green, and flew off, then staggered around like a drunk man as the other boys whooped and hollered like it was the grandest thing they’d ever seen. He flew a hundred miles, a thousand, and once the scenery itself finally stopped spinning around him, he saw it had not changed.
“He couldn’t scare hisself enough,” Billy said.
It was the same on the cotton mill corkscrew run. Cotton mills were death traps in fires, because even the air burned in the swirling lint. In Jacksonville, the company built a fire escape ramp on one wall, a massive corkscrew with a slick, stainless steel slide. For generations, village boys sneaked into the mill, and rode it down, for fun. But for real speed, you needed a sled. Billy Measles remembers how happy my father was the day they liberated a wooden Coke crate from the back of a grocery store and lugged it to the mill. The watchman, a man named Duck Ford, tried to catch them, but Duck was old and they evaded him, and stood at the top of the corkscrew, looking down. My father rode the Coke crate down, banging into the walls, leaving skin on the screwheads and metal seams, hollering “Wahoo!” till he shot out the bottom onto a concrete pad, grinding to a stop. Later, he would tote up a bucket of water and pour it down, to make it slicker, but it was never slick enough, or fast enough, to take you anywhere but down.
Karl Wallenda, the great-grandfather of daredevils, said life is the wire, and the rest is waiting.
My father couldn’t scare himself, b
ut he could scare the rest of them.
“I guarantee you, we wasn’t never bored for long,” Billy said.
Some of the town boys had BB guns, but that was an impossible dream, here. So, they sawed the rough shape of a rifle from a scrap board, fixed a short nail at the front, where a front sight would be, another where the rear sight would be, and stretched a long, thin circle of inner tube around the nails. They loaded them with chinaberries, which flew straighter than a rock but hurt just as bad, and went to war. It was just a wicked slingshot, really, but it would break a beer bottle. “Your daddy’s would raise a blister, when he hit you,” Billy said. His had to be stronger, had to pull tighter.
At one o’clock, on the days she was off, Velma called him in to eat, and the rest came, too, the screen door rattling as a small army of boys rushed through. There they would have to wait in line with cousins and other kin, but no one was turned away. Later, full as ticks, the boys lay in the shade, trying unsuccessfully to beg a cigarette off stingy Alfred, as the ones who had money for the cowboy matinees filled in the ones who didn’t have money on what had happened a Saturday before. “Well, you see, Red Ryder got Little Beaver from them Indians, and was raisin’ ’im…” They spent a lot of time talking pure nonsense, like who could hold their breath the longest, or kill the most Germans.
“But mostly,” Billy said, “we talked about girls.
“There was Mary Ellen Coker. Black hair. Purty. And Joyce Phillips. Dishwater blonde. Had these big brown eyes, hazel eyes. Lord, I loved them hazel eyes,” and all the breathtaking rest. They would pass and a boy would whistle—it was Garfield, usually—taking his life in his hands. If you whistled at a village girl, she might walk over and punch you in the mouth, or her papa might kill you—in the village, romance could make a black widow seem like a sweet deal. “Most of us was still scared of girls,” said Billy. If a live girl had stopped to talk to them, they would not have known what to say, and some of them would have turned and run. “Except Garfield. Garfield never run from a woman in his life. He run toward a bunch of ’em, though. He was a booger.
