Long Tall Tale

ADDIE PRAY by Joe David Brown. 313 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

The heroine of this cheerful thimblerig of a novel is an eleven-year-old orphan whose mother was "the wildest girl in Marengo County, Alabama." More practical than Mama, Addie Pray takes up traveling with Long Boy Pray, one of several men who might be her father, in order to help him "do business"--meaning back-country bunco jobs.

One of Long Boy's favorites is to arrive in a small town, buy up a supply of white morocco-bound Bibles and check newspaper obituaries for the name of a new widow in a good neighborhood. Having affixed the lady's name on the Bible cover in gold leaf, he sends Addie up to her door. The Good Book, of course, is a C.O.D. present ordered by the deceased. It is rare that the mourning widow does not cry "tears big as horse turds" while handing over $25.

It takes Long Boy a while to realize just how gifted his precocious partner is. Cool and resourceful, she "smells out money like a honey bee smells out woodbine." Eventually he expands their operations. "Let's go ramify a big, fat farmer," he cries; and playing more on human greed than gullibility, he devises imaginative new swindles that net thousands. It takes nerve, but Addie thrives on "that crawly, goose-bumpy feeling I always got before we did business."

Occasionally, Long Boy overreaches. Once, he tried to sell a mean-eyed mountain bootlegger some of his own booze, and had to make it to the state line in a mighty hurry. But the Prays' illicit little empire grows and grows, until they join forces with a big-time con artist in an elaborate plot to pass Addie off as a missing New Orleans heiress.

An Amiable Bear. None of their schemes, however, is any craftier than the author's handling of material that is a bit light-fingered with both Huckleberry Finn and True Grit. An amiable bear of a man whose down-home drawl is deceptively similar to Long Boy's, Joe David Brown, 56, is a native of Birmingham and a former writer and correspondent for TIME and LIFE. Addie Pray is his fifth novel and his third to be sold to the movies (the others: Kings Go Forth and Stars in My Crown). Brown has a special feeling for the Depression-era South, and the touches of nostalgia that hover like hummingbirds over his narrative are most often exactly right --like Addie's partiality to strawberry Nehi and Nu Grape or a quick, vivid portrait of a small-time fair.

Brown also has a special feeling for the likes of his protagonist, who for all her conning ways is a pint-size frontier woman--tough, gritty, fiercely protective of her man. "Watching after a man is a hard, worrisome thing," she says, after opening Long Boy's eyes to a floozy's designs on his money. Most of the time on their travels, she and Long Boy share a room, but their relationship is almost puritanically free of any Nabokovian decadence. Addie's speech, however, is vulgar, pungent country talk, which adds greatly to the book's easygoing charm. Looking at Long Boy with his floozy, she observes that "he got that silly, dazed grin like a torn cat being choked to death with cream." Like that extravagant expression, the book is a long, tall, oldtime tale. But as Addie might put it, in the right hands that kind of yarn has a lot of prance left.

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