Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  7

  _________

  Aces over Eights

  THE SUMMER AFTER HUGO, THE SUMMER OF 1990, my parents decided to make the move to Tennessee so Dad could sing country music on the radio. The Pancake House could do without Dad, and Waccamaw Academy would be shutting down at the end of the next school year. The inland tourists, the rubberneckers, the college kids, the Canadians, they were good for nothing but traffic and trouble. Among the locals, those who were taking their forever spots on the rebuilt pier with the other old men who fished every morning at dawn, who had played baseball for the Myrtle Beach High School Seahawks with my dad, who had lost something important to the ocean’s surf and surge as we all had, swirled a mix of disdain and deference to those out-of-towners. My parents did not want to end up like them. They had their own dreams to go after instead of giving up their time to the fantasies of these outsiders. Don’t you always end up hating most those you need to stay afloat? The tourist tips added up to not much. Glued to the tabletops with globs of Country Crock and spilled maple syrup, besides. These folks didn’t need my dad to scramble their eggs and deliver their hangover waffles. In Mom’s ruffled peach apron and his favorite baseball cap, he did that for us on his days off, with a perfected flair I mistook for magic instead of routine. Hope infects the smallest first. My little brothers and I divined the big time in the crystal balls of our parents’ eyes.

  When he was at work in the mornings, I liked to hide in his guitar case. He kept the guitar propped up on a metal stand if he wasn’t going out with it. When he got up from the couch, he held the fragile neck of it down at his side, like he was holding the hand of a sleeping child. The instrument seemed to follow him around more faithfully than the dog. Laid flat and left open on the carpet, I was more fascinated by the case, and when I could get away with it, would tiptoe into its empty body. The lining, a soft gray fuzz, welcomed me inside. I slunk down until my form had curled and contorted just right. The shape of that guitar case was made for the curve of my back. Smells of Camels, leather, and wood polish stayed on the fabric, softer and denser than Nana’s shag carpet. The metallic whiff left by the capo and the cash he kept rubber-banded in rolls behind a trap door in the neck of the case. While we were gone, he’d take out his earnings and rustle through the leafy bills, mostly ones, and spend it on whiskey and those copper energy bracelets that regulate the ions in your immune system and keep your aura fresh or some such. Around this time, he was working on a love song called “Sam Loves Sally,” a simple story about two teenagers falling in love. It never sold. The hard knocks that would give him his best material for the outlaw-country songs that did sell were still a few years away.

  For my parents, still young and beautiful, three kids and a mortgage before thirty must have started to weigh. The novelty that buoys love had become worn. A life that belonged to their parents. Their friends in Nashville were childless couples whose nights were filled with jam sessions, juke joints, and cheap drugs laced with baking soda. The anticipation of the move united them in new possibility. Real estate is a known salve for marital staleness. They had never even been on a honeymoon, pregnant with me as they were. They’d eloped one weekend to the Great Smoky Mountains, and their witnesses were my uncle Leslie and his then-wife Linda. When they drove away in Dad’s white Mazda pickup truck, the newlyweds found the winding roads of October Appalachia flooded with a thick, impenetrable fog. They couldn’t see what was ahead, and so they stopped the car and waited. Dad, I’m sure, felt protective of his brand-new wife and his coming baby, with the imperative only a twenty-four-year-old man can feel, an emotion I have seen fire up and then pass in my brothers as they’ve hit twenty-five. Still I can’t help but see something in this approach to the unknown: their first journey as a family bound together by God and the law was too hesitant, too tentative to charge ahead. Their instinct was to idle and wait for a clear path, and they were young enough to expect the appearance of one. How do I know all this? From Nana, of course. She collected the love stories of everyone she knew like she did her romance novels.

  On their house-hunting trips, heading up to Tennessee, they usually set off in the late afternoon, preferring always to drive at night. Even now, I attribute a preference for dawn departures to the childhood fear of pitch-dark drives through back-country roads. Looking out a window into shadows and tendrils of Spanish moss, which were comforting to me in the daylight, but too like the uneven, hanging robes of ghosts at night. Webworm tents transformed into groping hands after dark, and leaves caught midfall in the sticky gossamer could sometimes become the face of an evil plat-eye, the swamp ghost stolen and used carelessly by schoolchildren to scare. That last time they went to Nashville that spring of 1990, they’d already looked at a house they wanted to put an offer on. Things were being finalized. My parents plowed into this new decade, the one that felt like it was heading toward their true destiny, with all the determination they should have used to part that fog on the Blue Ridge Parkway back in 1982. Dad had lit out of our driveway with the unshakable confidence of a man who knows that fate’s got his back and his mom’s got the kids.

  I remember being bored with the goodbyes. Mom’s blood-red canna flowers stretching toward the sun. Many years later, walking down a street in India, I caught sight of the exact shade of these canna flowers in the vermilion powder parting a married woman’s hair. Memory plays tricks like that. When you’re as far away from your past as you can possibly put yourself, that’s when some sound or smell taps into the senses and unexpectedly knocks you back to where you came from. But I remember also begging to go with them, Mom tucking me in one of the twin beds in the Boys’ Bedroom, the bed on the left where my great-grandmother May Ella died in her sleep when I was four. My only real memory of her is being held on the couch, thinking she looked like the oldest person on earth, and running away from her to hide behind the curtains. I can say I remember being held in the arms of a grandmother who was not counted a person enough to vote for the first third of her life. Dad had gone to get her for coffee, walking the length of Nana’s hallway, the one still lined with repaired wedding portraits, baby pictures, and half a dozen cross-stitchings of the “Serenity Prayer” surrounded by slightly too square Easter lilies. She’d gone to God sometime in the night. Unlike Grandpa, Granddaddy would have nothing so imaginative or uncontrollable as a ghost in his house, and May Ella has remained at rest, it seems, no doubt happy to be gone. She hated my Granddaddy, even after she moved in with them. She dipped snuff her whole life, and at the supper table, Granddaddy said as he watched her place tobacco behind her lip, “May Ella, none of the women in my family dip snuff.”

  “Ralph, none of the men in my family are horse thieves,” she replied, the only one in the house who dared talk back. My dad and his brothers stared till food fell from their open mouths, and Granddaddy got up to leave the table.

  Again, I’m convinced my memory has it wrong about the night my parents left. Why wasn’t I in the Doll Room? The night Mom kissed my forehead. “I want to go,” I hear myself. Never before did I care to go on one of their scouting missions, but my presence seemed urgent, our separation not an option. And the anxiety must have been brewing for a while, or else Mom was feeling alarmingly sentimental, because she had a parting gift at the ready. A bunny with a purple ribbon tied around her neck. I kept that rabbit for so many years, the plastic heart glued to its fur eventually fell off. That lavender ribbon is still probably between Nana’s couch cushions. Maybe in her drawer of hair clips, with the real tortoise-shell combs. Violet was a shade she complained of never being able to wear. She didn’t think it necessary to tell us exactly what had happened to our parents when they failed to return on time.

  Mom was in the passenger seat on the way back from Nashville to Myrtle Beach, with a pillow over her knees. Dad in his Drunken Jack’s baseball cap and aviators. A Camel cigarette unspooling between the fingers of his left hand, the side where he keeps the nails clipped for fretting. He prefers to grow hi
s fingernails as guitar picks on the other hand, though I’m sure the floorboards of the car were speckled with his plastic picks. Tuned into that lull that descends on the return leg of all road trips. That truck had done the drive so many times, it could practically steer itself. The junctions of I-40 around Knoxville remain jumbled. Too many lanes, too much concrete all at a crook in winding roads. Knoxville is a trucking hub where tractor-trailers enter the highway in a steady flow of commerce. For years, I assumed the driver must have been drunk, the wreck the deadly consequence of carelessness or the karma of alcohol. And he was. Drunk enough to fall asleep at the wheel. Mom noticed the guy first. An eighteen-wheeler flying between lanes and cars like a pinball. “We were coming down a hill, and he was swerving all over the place. I remember saying, ‘He’s liable to hit somebody,’ and then he hit everybody.”

  As my parents descended in their eastbound lane, the eighteen-wheeler zigzagged through the westbound lane of traffic, heading straight for the station wagon that I knew from dance recitals, trips to Grandpa’s house, and backseat sing-alongs. Straight for my parents. He hit car after car, killing somebody on his side of the divide before busting through the concrete barrier. Between my parents and this behemoth was a teal Chevy Monte Carlo. My mother watched this car get sucked underneath the body of the truck, between the front and back wheels. She says, and I will never forget, she saw the couple duck just before the roof of the car was sheared straight off.

  And that’s when the engine of the truck, that terrifying face you always see riding your tail in the rearview mirror, hit my parents. It plowed into the driver’s side, right into my dad, and pushed that station wagon, a Subaru that Mom credits with saving their lives, off the side of the road before coming to a halt. Again, my memory swerves sharply from reality, and I am in the back seat of the car with them just before the crash, where I almost remember begging to be, and then I am suddenly skipping into the future. I’ve cartwheeled across our timeline as if it weren’t anything at all to time-travel—and when you’re seven, I guess it’s not. What I still don’t know could fill the roads between South Carolina and Tennessee.

  Back at the scene: cicadas clanging like church bells, ringing in the heat, and the ambulance sirens are heralding the end of Dad’s ambitions, which never had the chance to really get going at all. Looking back, this was the dividing point, the separation between hope and resignation for all of us. No, maybe not resignation. That sounds too quiet to my ears, and what followed was not quiet. Anything but. The wreck, as it came to be known, lit the fuse on a spectacular detonation of giving up in both my parents. This was the showstopper, literally, or for a good long while, though life gave them a couple of disastrous encores. Cut to movie montage. Reels of flashing lights and broken glass. Hospital gowns. Beeping heart monitors. Who knew we’d end up hearing more than our share of heart-monitor dings in the coming years.

  Nana did not tell us about the accident, but I remember the whispering. While doing headstands against the wall, reading from her book of ghost stories, playing with my brothers, all as she and her sister whispered, worried, and picked up the phone. Whispers, worry, phone. The clang of phone receiver finding its place atop the beige rotary. A kid can sense secrecy, even if she can’t tell what’s important. Jason claims that Uncle Leslie sat us down and said there had been an accident.

  I have this early memory of frying chicken with Mom, and it starts with the sounds. Sizzles and pops. There’s the smell of flour and grease, and I am hungry. I can feel the wall of heat from the stove. I see my legs, next to my brother Justin’s, dangle off the kitchen counter, thin and white, wiggling like fishing bait. The edge of the counter cuts into the back of my thighs. It must be summer, always summer, because we are both in our underwear and nothing else, and the chemical scent of chlorine lingers in my damp hair, which has turned green the few strands of almost-blond. Always summer.

  It is my turn. It is exciting. I can’t see her, but I know Mom is in the background. I pick up a raw chicken leg, almost the color of my legs, except for patches of pink and purple. But there are pricks in the wet, cold skin, and the flesh does not yield quite as easily to pokes. I do not recognize these dots as plucked feathers, but I feel them beneath my fingers, tiny and raised. I pick it up by the small end. The closer I look, the more I can see yellow underneath all the other colors. There are two grayish knots sticking out and into the pads of my fingers. I do not understand them as bone, like mine.

  There is a correct order to what I’m about to do. I look to Mom. She is young and beautiful and still happy. She points at the bowl of orange, eggy swirls. I dip the chicken in. It is colder than I expect, and the egg drips in strangely strong tendrils. Next is the bowl of flour, speckled with reds and blacks of spice. I drop the chicken leg into the white powder. It makes a muted thud, and flour jumps from the bowl onto the counter. I roll the leg around, feeling the slipping drippy egg catch the soft flour. It makes a sticky sludge that coats my fingers as well as the chicken leg. And I rub my fingertips back and forth, delighting in the slick globs. What is more satisfying than a good mess? The next step is to place it on a plate, full of pieces of already flour-muddied chicken, but I see the big black cast-iron pan. It is deep with bubbling grease that looks awfully busy reaching into the air. I want to do the next part too, and badly. I wait until Mom isn’t looking. My hand hovers over the pan. The gurgle of grease is hypnotic. I drop my creation into the liquid, and then I scream. Before I even recognize the pain, I hear my voice. Spots of purple-red on sickly yellow are appearing on my leg and arm, like the welts left on the raw chicken’s flesh.

  This image, these colors, were brought back to me when I saw Dad’s leg for the first time, a couple of weeks after the accident. The scar, still inflamed, ran in a thick, jagged line up his calf and shone violet mixed with the sickly yellow of a bad storm sky. The same primordial aura as the bloody fluid on the foam tray of a pack of Tyson chicken legs or the blood that puddled in muddy pools from the deer that Dora’s dad skinned. I’ve framed the wreck as a disaster, but they were lucky. Thank God they weren’t in Dad’s pickup truck, which had about the same minimal heft of our rusted swing set in the backyard. Dad spent eight days in the hospital in Tennessee. His leg was broken in seven places, the shin and ankle nearly crushed. There was talk of amputation, but in the end he had a metal plate put in his leg, to support the remaining bone, held into place by two dozen screws. The station wagon was totaled. In one of our many moves when I was in high school, I came across a Polaroid of it in the junkyard, an insurance snap maybe used in the court case against the truck driver. He’d been driving for days without a rest, popping pills to meet schedules. When his rig came to a stop, one dead and an interstate shut down completely, he hopped out of the cab and fled the scene on foot, leaving his son, who was about my age, alone in the passenger’s seat.

  Mom flew home a few days after the wreck. She limped out of baggage claim with crutches and a leg brace that extended from shin to thigh, with a little circle cut out over her kneecap. By some miracle, she’d only managed to tear some cartilage in her knee. Dad was driven home by a cousin. What followed was a period I hold as one of particular closeness to Dad, though the wreck must have been one of the worst things of his life. He was essentially bedridden, until he could walk with a cane. After the cast came off, he had a gel-filled boot he kept on his leg, the left one. He just wouldn’t get out of bed. So we played cards. Not the poker he’d taught all of us in late-night sessions around the miniature blue Playskool table. Texas Hold’em, five-card stud. We counted our ante in Cheerios and Froot Loops. I spent hours practicing waterfall shuffles with decks as big as my hands. “Deal to the left,” Dad instructed, wearing the white-banded visor whose clear green bill had a milky white scar where the plastic had been folded. I counted in clumsy swipes till we all had a hand. “Now, ante up,” he’d say, as excited to win a pot of breakfast cereal as the clinking color chips we were taught to play with later.

  “
Mark, I wish you wouldn’t smoke in here,” Mom said from the couch or the kitchen at some point, to which Dad would apologize in good humor, “I’m sorry, honey,” if he was winning or give an aggravated wave if he was not, in neither case putting his cigarette out.

  “Too rich for my blood.” I’d throw down the lingo as casually as I would fistfuls of Cheerios, just as he did, folding when I couldn’t make a decent hand.

  “One-eyed jacks are wild,” I called if I was dealing, “and aces are low.” The only hand you didn’t want was aces over eights. Bad luck. Nothing so serious or important as luck to gamblers.

  “It’s the dead man’s hand, kids,” Dad said. “The hand that old Wild Bill Hickok played when somebody shot him in the back of the head.”

  Once the father of a neighborhood boy came to our door and demanded to speak to Dad. “You been teachin’ my boy to gamble?” the prudish redneck grumbled. And my dad answered, “So what? He ain’t any good at it, anyway.” In some retellings of this incident, punches are thrown in the doorway, but in most, only the words are felt worth remembering. It was Nana’s side of the family who dealt stories, that Dad claimed more affinity for, but gambling was in the blood of the Joneses. Granddaddy and his brothers kept a gambling house on Chester Street and had poker games in backrooms all over town. Adjoining an office, they ran a burlesque club called the Gaiety Lounge.

  After the wreck, I think that Dad felt, at not yet thirty, that he’d gambled enough for his lifetime. He’d anted up big time and nearly lost the whole pot, tip and gig money, life and limb. Lying propped up on the bed, on frilly sheets of peach and blue, he taught me to play gin instead, and we played and played. “It’s the same rules as poker hands but with ten cards each, and you go back and forth pulling from the deck and discarding till you get all your cards in hands of three or more.”