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

Hound. In most renderings, he will give chase to lonely walkers late at night, but this particular tale has always seemed too skeletal for my tastes. Ghost stayed with my dad for many years. They took long road trips and went deep-sea fishing. They took a johnboat to the tip of Sullivan’s Island, next to Fort Sumter, and rode the elevator to the top of the tetrahedron lighthouse locals call the Charleston Light. It was built in rare modern style in the years after Hazel to withstand the gusts of future hurricanes. From there, Dad and Ghost caught sight of the older lighthouses at Cape Romain a few miles up the coast. Under the water between these sentries lie the remains of the Planter, the steamship overtaken and liberated by the enslaved people onboard in 1862. After the Confederate dolts in charge disembarked for a night of drinking, an enslaved deckhand named Robert Smalls put on a captain’s uniform and sailed past the Southern watch posts, straight through to the safety of the Union blockade offshore. He freed himself, his family, and the whole crew, and the Planter sailed from then on for Lincoln. It sank during a storm a decade later, after delivering cotton to Georgetown, well into Smalls’s term as a congressman for South Carolina. Driving down Highway 17 one afternoon with Ghost, Dad was rear-ended and rammed into the car in front of him. He blacked out and woke concussed to a trucker shaking him and offering to take him to the hospital. “Just take me home,” he said, but then could not recall where that was. They drove ’round and ’round a neighborhood that seemed sort of familiar, and on the third or fourth time that Ghost barked with urgency in front of one house, the truck driver said, “I think this is where you live, son.” The dog disappeared just as he’d shown up in the first place. Ghost’s is a better story than the Hound’s.

By the time Dad and Ghost were living with his brothers, Mike and Leslie were very nearly full-time gamblers, paying the rent playing cards and tending bar. Perhaps wanting his own fearsome hound, my uncle Leslie responded one day to an ad in the Sun-Times. TIMBER WOLF FOR SALE. After driving eight hours to Rock Hill and back, half the time with a wolf in the back seat, it turned out that the wolf had more sense than my uncle and didn’t care much for his or anybody else’s company. In fact, he didn’t care at all for being pent up in a beachside condo and spent his days and nights pacing the floor and snarling at anyone dumb enough to think about coming into the bedroom where they kept him. Les threw a piece of raw chicken at him from the doorway twice a day for a few weeks, before some other kid took him away to let him loose in the swamps around Conway. Perhaps his descendants have joined the Hound or Ghost to wander the pine forests that connect the marshland to the jade tobacco fields, before the soil turns to terra-cotta red in the piedmont that yearns upward toward lush, wild Appalachia, though I’d be more scared of snakes than wolves in a Southern fairy tale.

The boys had all spent their early years in the back rooms of Granddaddy’s first motel, a squat two-story concrete affair painted gray and white on the beach side of Ocean Boulevard, much like the other motor lodges that sprang up in the 1950s. Sticking out like a hitchhiker’s thumb above the sidewalk, an Atomic Age sign of a blonde mid swan dive in a red bathing suit offered THE SEA DIP like an afterthought in Space Age Filmotype. They’d all been put to work as soon as they could talk and knew well the routines of life on the beach. They’d hop between restaurants bartending and tending the arcade games and waiting tables and stripping hotel sheets as needed, taking their cues from calls from uncles and cousins who owned every other establishment in town. As they earned only their keep from working for their father, they’d sometimes make fast cash in card games or other gambles, like diving for sand dollars as children and later dabbling in cocaine that continued its speedboat delivery from South America. They knew, as all young people from tourist traps inevitably discover, that getting high is the fastest and surest way of getting out of town.

Back at Drunken Jack’s, where we agreed to meet earlier, my parents’ love story, like all good ones, begins with an act of persuasion. Having been warned of his reputation by the hostess, a former waitress at the Hawaiian Village, Debbie refused the advances of the smooth-talking, dark-haired bartender. Between the aquarium on one side, babbling its unnatural shades of blue and bobbing with imported fish the bright oranges and yellows of drowned plastic mini-golf balls, and the waist-high stage on the other, she turned him down every night as she put in her drink orders. What started as an attraction became an opportunity to perform. Their relationship started on a stage, which is what they had both been waiting for without knowing it. As all young people do, my parents took their youth for specialness, believing that they deserved to be discovered by the world at large, and where fame hadn’t yet found my dad in South Carolina, love shone a spotlight instead. To be noticed and loved for nothing but being yourself is an attainable acclaim. Adoration elevates our opinion of ourselves. As it should, my nana would say. Love lets you expect more even when you’ve got less, and what didn’t they expect once they got together.

Have you seen it coming? How he won over the prettiest waitress this side of the Waccamaw? He wrote her a song. He set up a microphone, threw down some carnations, tied some balloons to the light fixtures in his