Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

fine grains of quartz, smaller and softer underfoot than the hardier sand sucked up from the ocean floor and deposited heavy and rough where the surf breaks. These cool crystals came down from the Appalachian Mountains by natural, elemental means millions of years ago. Even our sand is from someplace else.

“One day,” says Keith, recalls my dad, and when I close my eyes, I hear and see it all, too, “this beach will be lined with hotels.” And he was right. His legacy now is the Myrtle Beach of spring break and regional family vacations. First hangovers and holes-in-one at Jurassic Mini-Golf. Perhaps not as elegant as the seaside he envisioned, which did exist, however briefly. The luxurious, marble heights of the Ocean Forest Hotel, built in 1930, hosted celebrities from what gets called the Golden Age of Hollywood. It looked like a real castle, not the plaster ones at the theme parks and golf courses around town. Nana once told me she saw Clark Gable on the beach with his pants rolled up to his knees, and I could only bring to mind the image of Drunken Jack the pirate. Like the Pavilion, the historic hotel was torn down for no good reason. The implosion, in 1974, turned the whole town into sightseers for a day.

Hurricane Hazel prompted a construction boom, and Keith began to make good in the hotel business. He and his wife had bought the Yachtsmsan, a club they turned into a high-rise hotel. One local history book hints that its buyers were men of ill repute. Practically ungodly is how it describes the new owners, my relatives, the moonshiners and gamblers. Liking the feel of the hotel business, Uncle Keith, with four of his brothers, bought the Gay Manor Motel from their father, Harvey, and they bought franchising rights to Holiday Inns between Richmond, Virginia, and Miami, Florida. He was arrested with a ton of marijuana in his car at one point, and according to the rumors, went on the run from the government, drug dealers, the mob, or all three at the end of his life. He just up and disappeared after setting up chains of hotels and motels across the South. Only Uncle Jack knew where they were hiding. Keith sent letters to his mother, Ol’ Mama, that Dad found in a shoebox at Nana’s house. “Dear Mama,” he wrote, “I’m sorry I haven’t written. It’s been dangerous where I am . . .” Dad and Les remember the FBI coming to their house, led by a Mr. Armstrong, to ask if Granddaddy or the rest of the Jones brothers had any idea where he was hiding. They’d sneak out of bed in their striped pajama sets and press their ears to the walls to listen to G-men ask Herman, Wilbur, Wendell, Jack, and Ralph about their eldest brother, Keith.

My granddaddy claims his crowning achievements as a pair of high-rise hotels, the Sandcastle in central Myrtle Beach, and the Sandcastle South, down toward Garden City. Each is done up as a mauve stucco tower with indoor and outdoor waterslides and a lazy river. The lazy river was always my mom’s favorite, and when it seemed like the family was on good terms, or he was out of town, she’d take us to ride its slow circles on sticky yellow inner tubes. I never liked the feeling of being dragged along with only my butt in the water and no say in where I was headed, but she’d close her eyes with one of my baby brothers asleep on her chest and go around and around. It was one of the few times she seemed truly at peace in my childhood. I myself would stand up inside the inner tube and fight the current by walking the other way. When I got to middle school, I refused to get in at all and hid with a book under a tent of damp beach towels.

Granddaddy moved his office to a ground-floor corner of the original Sandcastle and did business with a view of Ocean Boulevard and the National House of Pancakes on the other side of the parking lot. The hotel indeed looked palatial, and countless afternoons when Mom could not chaperone us napping on the lazy river, I led my brothers and cousins, a company of five or six boys, and we skipped across crosswalks at King’s Highway, down Ocean Boulevard, past the pier, and crashed the pool. We took turns anointing one another’s cheeks with runes in rainbow shades of zinc oxide that doubled as war paint. If ever asked whether we had parents with us or were perhaps hotel guests, we said our grandfather was Ralph Jones, and that was that. If a belt was guaranteed later anyway, we might as well get a few good cannonballs in, and we counted on his employees being as afraid of him as we were.

Though we had free rein at the pool, my parents enjoyed fewer perks of his wealth and spent most afternoons and evenings working at a rotation of pancake houses, seafood buffets, and bars, with the occasional odd job, usually painting houses or doing construction, thrown in as the expenses of living and consecutive children required. Dad’s regular daytime gig, before heading out to tend bar or play a show, was managing his uncle Herman’s Pancake House in Garden City. My brothers and I spent more time at Nana’s house than at our own. Nana glowed surrounded by all of her grandchildren, and she watched us most days while our parents worked. We basked in her supernova-style love, rays of sun without the burn, until we got picked up by our parents or lashed.

Right about when Granddaddy started making plans to buy the Sandcastle, he figured it was high time to move his own family up, if only for appearances. They sold their small house on Thirty-third Avenue across the street from Myrtle Beach High School and next door to the even