Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  Whispers from the muses, ancestors dead and gone, or else buried psychology. “Whiskey Jones,” Dad said one day in the parking lot. He said it louder once again and smiled, unaware of a moment I look back on as fore-shadowing, though I’d still wear the T-shirt. The logo really was something. Not quite Drunken Jack’s, but a man who could have passed for a brother in a panama hat, linen suit, and glasses. The sign has long been locked up in a storage unit of Uncle Herman’s, taken as collateral for rent unpaid, so I cannot confirm the monocle, but let’s throw it in for fun.

  For a minute, it was the hottest place in Myrtle Beach, but it’s hard to keep up the effort of service when your heart’s not in it. It’s hard to break even when you’re giving the drinks away, and it gets harder still to notice you’re short-changing yourself when you’re knocking back your own drinks. Having accepted his fate as any other Jones of Myrtle Beach, just one more son of sons in the restaurant business, resignation filled up the cups but not the bank. As if that wasn’t enough, they’d found one bank that loaned them a down payment for a new house in Little River, just inland from Cherry Grove, over a different swing bridge that we had to cross every day to get to school. We were often late, when the bridge, with limbs like a daddy longlegs, twisted away from the main road, looking as if it were dangling the spidery legs over the Intracoastal Waterway, so that tall fishing boats and barges could float through the narrow passage. Our new house, a big blue one, was too perfect-looking for us and our perilous finances, which still included a mountain of medical debt from keeping Jared and Mom alive, two years after he came home from the hospital. There are priceless things, but life has never been one of them. Their medical debt came to hundreds of thousands. The big blue house in Little River had a wraparound porch, but it would never be the little brown house in Conway.

  We drove up and down King’s Highway in Mom’s new minivan, a Christmas gift from Grandpa the year we were living at the beach house. It seemed like a modern marvel, with sliding doors on both sides and painted a deep galactic green. Like our big blue house, it felt like it didn’t match our family’s state. Beaten down by one bad break after another, surviving as always due to the generosity of family until it was too much effort to imagine escaping. My strongest memory of the alien green minivan is that we could not afford to fix the things that went wrong with it. The windshield stayed cracked. The sliding doors stopped opening. The wipers broke and had to stay that way for weeks. On the drive to Nana’s house for Christmas one year, rain and sleet fell in obscuring coats across the windshield already black with night. All the restaurant lights and signs for seafood were unlit for the holiday. Mom pulled over on some roadside grass before getting to the swing bridge, tears of anger falling down her cheeks in flat lines through the shimmer of her face powder. She twisted around from the driver’s seat in total silence, the only true tell of her mood, and pulled a large dinosaur toy from Jared’s hands. Rolling down her window, she curled her arm around the front so she could wedge the long plastic tail on the Tyrannosaurus rex into the closer wiper blade, and moving the dinosaur, gripped by the neck, up and down with the window wide open to the freezing rain, that is how we traveled the hour to Nana’s house. Soaked but safe. How sore her arm must have been. For a while during these years, I became more afraid of space aliens than of ghosts, and made Mom sit on the edge of the bathroom sink while I showered. Sometimes, after pushing back the shower curtain with a clanging of rusty hooks, I’d emerge to find she had quietly left me there alone, and the heartbeat of panic recalled the night in the mall parking lot when I thought she might leave, when I realized that she could.

  Most afternoons during the school year, we were ferried down to Whiskey Jones with backpacks full of homework and a list of chores to complete before the doors opened for happy hour. It was always tight. I would put my bag down on the checkered tile and head behind the bar, stained dark and glazed with finisher and the foggy tracings of spilled drinks. The bar, baroque and heavy, stretched the length of the front room and held up a wide mirror that doubled it. My everyday jobs were to cut the oranges, limes, and lemons for the drinks, arrange them in orange, green, and yellow hollows of the plastic white trays. Even now the smell of limes reminds me of being behind the bar, barely able to see over the top, feet squishing on and sticking into the black rubber anti-fatigue mat, slicing them first into half-moons and then waning wedges with the slits in the middle for easy sliding onto the rims of glasses. Often I put Jared to bed at night when my parents worked, and I’d repeat, not quite singing, but in sing-song whispers, “I see the moon and the moon sees me. God bless the moon and God bless me,” until his laughs and repetitions turned to snores.

  Cleaning up the bar most afternoons after school, I turned the glasses smeared with fingerprints and lipstick upside down and stuck them onto the black bristles shaped like fir trees in the sink. When my tasks were done, I settled down at the bar and watched myself write homework in the mirror, continuing even when the first patrons trickled in, then my brothers and I walked to Nana’s house to spend the evening. In the dimmed lights, surrounded by the dark stained wood of the bar, the shadows under the dozens of round tables in front of the stage, it felt as if a storm were always in the air, echoes of our parents’ arguments. I expected the clouds Mom painted on the wall, drawn in pencil above the Low Country marsh by Dad’s friend Clay, a silhouette artist, to light the dark, empty dining room with bouts of lightning, to flood the dining room with rain.

  Along each edge of the bar’s mirror, a waxy wood mermaid was carved naked at the waist but for tendrils of waving hair, her arms overhead to look as if she were holding aloft the top beam that connected the mirror to the ceiling. At my middle school, North Myrtle Beach Middle School, I had learned about the Mermaid Riots in Charleston. After weeks or months of confounding daily downpours that refused to clear by prayers to Jesus, a young doctor was accused of keeping captive a mermaid. This had angered the spirits that ruled the sea, it was clear. The good Christians of eighteenth-century Charleston thus gathered in a mob of top-hatted gentlemen swimming through the streets and rowboats containing any ladies who dared, and few churchgoing Southern ladies could resist the chance to run someone out of town. Regrettably, no torch kept alight in the heavy rain, but there were pitchforks and muskets to go around. And so this congregation of Charlestonians, probably all resting now in the tourist-filled graveyards of the Holy City, pounded on this doctor’s front door, demanding that he release the mermaid he held captive for the selfish sacrilege of science. It should go without saying that this guy was “from off.” The doctor was carried through the flooded streets toward the Battery, the seaside promenade that barricades Rainbow Row from the harbor, with the mermaid swimming in a glass jar, where he dumped her back into the ocean. Hallelujah, the rain stopped, say the books, which propose that this mermaid was nothing more than an unusually large frog or a baby manatee. If these ancestors of mine, Low Country people since before the days of Francis Marion, couldn’t tell the difference between a mythical sea creature and a garden frog, I might rather be descended from the frog. That the good doctor most likely kept a baby manatee was not very hard to figure out. The broad, slow rolls of their gray-brown bulk are still seen lolling in the rivers and marsh creeks every summer. Sailors had been mistaking their good-natured surface sunning for the enticement of mermaids since the Spanish landed in Georgetown.

  Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I severed one of these mythic idols from her perch above the bar and offered it up on my own to the ocean. I could easily slip away and walk across King’s Highway through the elephant-tall dunes onto the beach, and it would probably not be that hard to get hold of a crow-bar or hatchet. Would some relief come for my parents, for the floods of tears my mom cried, if I gave to the sea the only mermaid I had access to? Would the safety of music return and their worry stop falling as the rain in Charleston had ceased? Such an offering might make me as bad as the men who spread such a ridiculous tale. I wo
uld be participating, acquiescing to a world built on the ill-formed stories and logic of men that did not feel true to me. If I was going to get into the business of telling ghost stories, I might get to change the endings.

  I never took an ax to the figureheads that watched my parents disintegrate into their worst selves. Instead, after our chores on most days, we’d walk to Nana’s house to finish our homework and either spend the night there with Chris and Brian, or wait for Mom to pick us up around midnight. Dad always stayed till closing, but he’d do more than just lock the doors. After the excitement of finding a venue with a stage and hosting a few gigs at the beginning, he let that vital part of him fall away, and the stage was dark and empty for most of our time at Whiskey Jones. An entertainer without a stage, he soon 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. It does not count rainfall, tornados, storm surge, and wind gusts. It is only the sustained winds that are tallied above. The formation of a hurricane is the next step for a tropical storm, which originates with what they call a tropical depression. Nature gets the blues, like the rest of us, I suppose, and only tearing something up helps. I cannot blame the weather for something I am guilty of myself.

  Hazel, which arrived in 1954, is credited with transforming Myrtle Beach into the family-friendly and affordable tourist destination that it is today. Out to sea washed the beachfront shacks and up went the roadside motels, largely built by the H. C. Jones Construction Company. Aerial photographs of the area after storms are popular as postcards and on book-jacket covers of souvenir histories. Where lumber and bricks upheld dreams and protected a family of memories, there stood empty lots or piles of broken beams and debris. The pictures of Hazel seem to always be sold in a wash of sepia brown. Tourists buy prints of other people’s catastrophe, marveling at the unimaginable. I hope these are talismans by which they count their blessings, but I have a feeling that they are just turning a natural disaster into an attraction. At least the Pavilion did not wash away. No, that marvel was destroyed by nothing so marvelous in scale as a hurricane. Only the everyday greed of shortsighted men.

  The summer my parents announced their first separation in what would be a long series of rifts and reconciliations was a particularly active hurricane season for our stretch of South Carolina coast. At the very least, I will remember the blue house in Little River that was the scene of so much fighting and unhappiness as having the best front porch of all the houses we lived in. Mom spent days searching secondhand stores for rocking chairs to fill the porch and then painting them white to match the railings. Maybe she thought their wide arms would hold her family together. Not long after we moved in, even our beloved Bandit died. Mom picked us up from Nana’s after midnight, and as my brothers squirmed unseatbelted between bites of fast food in the green van, she began to cry in thin creaks at first and then sobs; unusual, as her angry tears were always quiet. Along the familiar neon stretch of Restaurant Row and past Bri
arcliffe Mall across the street from the Meher Baba ashram we didn’t know was there, she got it out that Bandit wouldn’t be coming home with us. His heart was infected with parasites, and they could only afford to put him down instead of treat him. Not long after, she said to us in the car, “We’re shutting down the restaurant.”

  “We know,” said her three eldest kids in unison. We knew it all, of course. They hadn’t been able to pay the rent for months, and Uncle Herman, a teetotaler like Granddaddy, would take the sign and whatever else he could sell in the building. The bank was about to take the house, and we were officially moving to Charlotte.

  Little River was one of Blackbeard’s hideouts. He buried treasure all over the inlets in our neighborhood. Glittering jewels and doubloons sparkling in the swamps and mud-colored waterways. The man who finally killed Blackbeard, Robert Maynard, was hired by the governor of Virginia to track down the most fearsome pirate of the Golden Age of Piracy. Maynard sent spies in canoes up waterways like the one by our new house to discover where the pirate and his crew were hiding. In a battle off Ocracoke Island, Blackbeard was captured and killed, his head displayed from the mast of Maynard’s ship and his body thrown overboard. The legends say that it swam headless in laps around the ship before sinking to the bottom of the ocean. My brothers and I roamed the neighborhood and the banks of the water with sticks and Super Soaker water guns, pretending to be pirates ourselves. We had been waiting and watching our parents take out their unhappiness on each other, and we wondered what was going to happen in the safety of the sappy pine lots, tracking the course of their love like we tracked the hurricanes swooshing across the Atlantic during the fall. In fact, before Hugo blew into town years before, the biggest news from our coast had been the discovery of a shipwreck that yielded one of the largest hauls of gold ever found on the bottom of the ocean, pulled up from the Central America, which had gone down in 1857.