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

found a crowd of regulars to keep him company as they took advantage of my dad’s proximity to the alcohol and the cash registers. They were similarly good-humored men, for the most part, with dead-end jobs and no goals beyond a good time, who would dull the pain of being stuck in a small town, in a small life, with drinks and cocaine. Soon my dad followed suit.

He’d get home just as the sun was coming up, drunk enough to fall asleep with the car door open and one leg on the gravel. Mom would wait up for him, and just like in all the songs, would ask him where he’d been all night, even though she knew. It’s one of those tunes that gets in your head and just won’t stop playing. What would start as angry muffled voices became explosive, slurred screams. I knew he had passed out in the front seat if I heard the car come up the driveway, but not the bang of the front door slamming. I knew my brothers heard it, too, and at least if they were fighting, Dad was home.

Eventually he started sleeping all the way in the car, when he came home at all, and the only chorus we heard was Mom singing for a change. “Get out of my house” will probably not make the Top Ten anytime soon. I’d wake up for school and look out the window first thing. Some days, Mom wouldn’t come out of her room if Dad was there. She told us through the locked door to have him take us to school. So my brothers and I would shuffle out to the car and knock on the window. Dad would creak to life and mumble for us to get in. He’d drive us the ten minutes to North Myrtle Beach Middle School, not saying anything and probably still drunk. One morning, Justin was climbing into the front passenger seat, and Dad started backing up, reversing fast. Justin was knocked flat, but at least not run over.

Like Mom, I hated his new friends. The artists and musicians he’d known since childhood were replaced by the goalless and grungy. The magician who ogled my eleven-twelve-thirteen-year-old body when I was working at the bar. Dad claims that he saw the magician bend a spoon backward with his mind and that he made Uncle Herman cry, a feat no man had been known to do, with a trick he did for tips at the bar.

“Hey, man,” said my dad to the magician. “Herman just walked in, and I ain’t got the rent. Do something to distract him.”

The magician approached my great-uncle, who, like my granddaddy, his younger brother, did not then keep animals. “Think of the name of your favorite pet, and I will write it down.” He scrawled a few letters on a square white napkin, soggy from the condensation of free drinks my dad doled out, and slid it over to Herman, who then sobbed like a baby. “Red was the name of the only dog I ever loved.” I remember no magic on the part of this magician. Only eyes that clung, which I was long familiar with. Not just from pageants, but as any girl is by then. The jokes about chastity belts to parents who laughed politely and the close-up leers of patrons I was not as used to putting up with in quiet politeness. The urge to stab my paring knife into the hand of the magician every time it slid across the bar in my direction I grew used to managing and smiling through. I had been prepared my whole life to deflect with magnanimity the repulsions and violent urges induced by unwanted advances. Less conspicuous was more safe.

If the wreck hastened a giving-up for my parents, then the restaurant would be the giving-in. This was the place where their individual failures and disappointments would break their marriage. There was no hope for us after the restaurant. They would not officially divorce for three more messy years, but the writing was on the wall Mom had so lovingly painted. My brothers and I were waiting for it. Like the relief of four o’clock rain in summer. When Dad finally sat us down in the living room of a new house in a new town and gave us the usual lines from country songs, we knew the words by heart. Children see everything, even the ghosts and creatures adults have long shoved under the bed. As my dad, his words and his presence echoed with truth and authority. He was the biggest star there was in my eyes, which were not the stage he needed. These are dark and drug-hazy times, and it’s bad manners to linger, so let us turn the page, as it is in our power to do here, when it so often in life is not. The mercy of time and the whims of the weather. A counterclockwise wind is gusting.

10

_________

Hurricane Games

AS RULES ARE KEPT TO BY THE REAL AND RESPECTABLE ghosts of the Low Country, here follow the rules for hurricanes:

One: 74 to 95 miles per hour. “Very dangerous winds will produce some damage.”

Two: 96 to 110 m.p.h. “Extremely dangerous winds will cause extensive damage.”

Three: 111 to 129 m.p.h. “Devastating damage will occur.”

Four: 130 to 156 m.p.h. “Catastrophic damage will occur.”

Five: 157 m.p.h. or higher. “Catastrophic damage will occur.”

Surely the good gentlemen of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not lack a thesaurus. If such a repetition were in a song, I would say that such a choice must have been made to invoke a rhythm, to emphasize an outcome, to imbed a theme. But then I think, well, there is no point in nuance once you get to catastrophe. The scale is a tool for alerting people in the way of what to go about saving, or the people watching on far-off TVs how much popcorn to make.