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

only memory that tempts symbolism is of the time Mom found a copperhead coiled in the bathroom at Grandpa’s house. I woke to screams in the middle of the night caused not by Harvey, whose haunting we by then were used to and thought so little of as to stop mentioning it to one another, hallway footsteps and pocket doors sliding open and shut. My brother Jason got the worst of it one night alone in the house, when the clanging of pots and pans, the slamming of kitchen cabinet doors drove him outside. A friend found him waiting to be picked up in the driveway wearing only his underwear. Animal control came to remove the copperhead, suggesting we might have a nest in the ventilation, but we never encountered another inside the house. In college, I could not believe how little most of my fellow undergraduates cared to be there, how they took their platinum education for granted. The school I’d chosen, with a monster for a mascot, was just like the high school I attended. Beautiful and privileged and full of young people who didn’t realize their luck. Grandpa was paying for it all, of course, and would follow the reading list for courses with me sometimes. Most weekends, I’d make the two-hour drive to Charlotte to spend time with him and my brothers. I spent half the weekend with him at his office, where he’d catch up on paperwork, and I made pocket money filing and cleaning up. We traded the same copy of Homage to Catalonia back and forth with notes in the margins for each other. I mailed large-print copies of Love in the Time of Cholera to Nana, among the humid, high romances I had just discovered that I loved. Books were saving me, as they always did. I sent her One Hundred Years of Solitude after that. Didn’t your grandparents ever say that time speeds up as you get older? “Sometimes I look in the mirror, and I don’t know who that old woman is,” Nana said to me more than once.

One early fall weekend, I drove to Charlotte, as I often did, to see Grandpa for a few days of work. I expected the following week’s classes to be canceled. It was hurricane season, and it was plain to anybody who kept a map that Hurricane Ivan would sweep up from the gulf through the oaky quads of my college town. Ivan was an unusual storm that should have been called Lazarus. It circled over the entire southeast before returning to the Atlantic and making an unheard-of downward spiral back to Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, where he was resurrected as a hurricane and made landfall for the second time. More elliptical in shape than the usual parabola across the page, if you are keeping a hurricane chart, as I have been taught to do.

I had been away from the coast long enough to misjudge the warnings.

Forgive this untruth. As we approach the last chapters, as pages wane to nothingness, I am tempted by swift absolution when I must confess to knowing what I was doing and then doing it anyway. Ivan was only a category one by then, weakened by its journey overland. A storm of so little consequence, I thought there was no danger in proceeding as normal. I repacked the car and drove back to college through the rain. I had thought that it would be fine, but the rain was heavier than I anticipated, and for the first time in a hurricane, I felt scared. The car buzzed over patches of hydroplaning I could not see. There was no witch protecting us with a wave of her fingers. I thought of Uncle Keith. Yes, here, as we approach our own ending, we find out what happened, as far as we know ourselves. Last we left off, he was on the lam, as they say, and only Uncle Jack knew his whereabouts. The FBI and the drug cartels or the mob or all three were rumored to have been looking for him, according to family stories, and eventually they found him by following Jack. They were in Florida, of course, where folks go to bask in their misbehavior, even in hiding. Jack got off a plane in Miami and was shot down on the tarmac. “He’s still got the scars,” Dad said recently, as these stories are told over and over, and I let Dad’s slip of tense slide, because Uncle Jack has been dead of cancer for years now. But back down in Florida, Keith and his wife were killed by an eighteen-wheeler, a log truck stacked with pines. Were they struck just as my parents were? Did they see the driver’s face? The other cars getting sucked under the belly? I thought of my parents and of my great-uncle and his wife. The driving was very bad in the hurricane, and in a fit of anxiety I could only recall disasters. As the story goes in our family, before the local highway patrol could get to the accident, the FBI had already roped off the scene, and it is all-around suspicious. This is how the story of Uncle Keith ends, and it always begins with Dad or Les going, “Let me tell you about my uncle Keith.” I got to school shaken and soaked. I walked to class avoiding flying tree limbs, only small ones, and got to the door to see that the university had canceled after all. Turning to rewalk the flooded path, my memories wandered farther, to wooden mermaids and the night of Hugo, to the Gray Man and to Alice Flagg just out of sight.

11

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The Suckers List

“I GOT A GREAT IDEA, BUT I DON’T HAVE A LOT of money and I’m in trouble with the law.” These are the words that brought the crook Denny Cerilli into our lives.

I can see it all now. Tall and