Beating all the kids who pulled my hair and pushed me in hallways, who emptied my book bag and kicked over my desks, in test scores and G.P.A. felt pretty good, though. In a science class my senior year, we had to construct a rocket with a parachute, and the team whose model took the longest to float down won. After seeing my assigned partner’s terrible calculus, I politely told him, as I imagined Nana might do, that he had not to worry about one thing. I would do it all. As all women learn, just doing the work yourself saves you the trouble of arguing with men who know less than you. Watching my rocket float down as lazy as an angel, and seeing the face of a regular bully crinkle in with sour petulance, well, it is a memory that buoys me still.
When I was sent home for wearing my best overalls to this fancy private school, I cried waiting for Grandpa to pick me up. He took me home and told me of the insults thrown at him for never having shoes at school. I knew that he understood without pandering to my tears. He recognized an outsider like himself. The shared wonder of education connected us further, and I suppose it was that day that I knew he would be my only friend in high school. I had wanted out of Myrtle Beach, but the confidence to cross a highway and own a lazy river was left back in the tangled limbs of marshside oaks. Dad left Charlotte for Nashville, as soon as he could, and we didn’t hear from him for a long time. Months without calls turned into years without seeing him. On his way out of town, leaving his family behind, Dad stopped by Lebo’s Country Western Store and bought a new cowboy hat and boots that he still has today. A dream can resurrect as easily as a memory, like a ghost you thought you’d gotten rid of, and for a while he was a ghost to us, as we were a memory for him. Untangling yourself from someone else’s dreams takes all the liquor and lyrics you’ve got, and he left knowing that Grandpa would take care of us better than he could at the time.
“You ever hear from Mark?” Grandpa would ask tentatively but regularly through my years of high school and into college, and I would only shake my head no. I trusted him, but also wanted to impress him. Didn’t want Dad to suffer in the eyes of a man I knew he admired, too.
“Nana, why can’t he just call?” I could ask her over the phone without fear, and let her see I also knew that my parents were still stuck in their rhythms of fighting and making up and trying to hide it, even though they were divorced by then.
“I don’t know, baby. He’s always had the devil in him,” she said. “Every night, it takes me two hours to say my prayers for my boys. And most of that time is spent on your daddy.”
A decade or so later, Dad called me up at two a.m. He sounded surprised I picked up, and I could tell he was drunk and in tears. My heart, in daylight angry and embittered at his absence, under moonlight cracked open under the transmission of his pain. “Was I a good father?” he whispered, not bothering to hide his weeping. It was not the moment then to say that he was, back when I knew him. It had been so long since I had known him as a young man with the sunshine of youth who would mend childhood scrapes with stories and card games.
As I longed to do then but could not, I will skip over the rest of high school. The 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
_________
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 white-haired. Described by newspapers as stylish and likable, as well as a con man. In the uniform of the men whose money he was so good at stealing. Collared polo shirt, wingtips of real Italian leather that fell off the back of a truck. Slacks of plaid or plain polyester with crease too prominent and waist too high. All the better for deep pockets, my dear.
He walked into my granddaddy’s office on Twenty-ninth Avenue and laid out a presentation of such improbable grandiosity that it had to be well thought-out. “Howdy, howdy,” Granddaddy would’ve said as he extended his hand.
“Mr. Jones, they tell me you’re the man to see in this town,” this stranger would have appealed to his vanity as he looked around at the peach carpet, his couch striped in burgundy and hunter green. Golf trinkets and pictures given as Father’s Day gifts lining the long tables of dark wood.
This is the part where we arrive finally at a moment of comeuppance. Denny was pushing a scam from top to bottom, and he called it the Carolina Amphitheater. This is the last scene where we see Granddaddy in a state of wealth and possibly a state of sanity.
How did he find my granddaddy? It used to be that when a bank refused a loan, they might recommend going to see somebody with large private funds. I think it more likely that Denny found his name on an official Suckers List, a directory of elderly, sick, or just plain gullible that circulates among scam artists.
His audacity made Denny a popular man in South Carolina, and like all con men, he picked up quick the language of the land. I have heard him called in tones of derision a carpetbagger by old Southern ladies, my nana included, for whom the mere approximation of profanity provoked a week of apologies. The only other person I’ve heard Nana take a cussword to is Uncle Mike. Denny had a vision, you see. A razzle-dazzle vision! An entertainment venue so grand, so majestic it would make every investor a millionaire ten times over. Right in the middle of Marion County, an hour and a half inland from Myrtle Beach and surrounded by two hours of swamp and farmland on all sides. He’d been arrested already for pulling the same scam, selling a town in Pennsylvania on a mountain amphitheater and lining his pockets with this small town’s cash before skipping town. If anybody comes at you saying they’ve got a vision, best to keep on walking because the only future they’ve seen is the one where they have all your money. Granddaddy was already a millionaire when Denny showed up to his office, but greed is like Low Country quicksand, and once you’ve got your foot in, there’s nothing to do but sink.
Dad had started making the rounds in Nashville by then, playing for tourists walking down Broadway on their way to the Ryman. Between busking in front of Tootsie’s and small-time gigs, Dad found that he needed some company to occupy the time and space formerly filled with all the noise of four kids. He adopted a shaggy brown Newfoundland dog so big there followed a spate of bear sightings in front of the Nashville Coliseum. Dad named the dog Conway, letting the musicians of Music City think he was named after Conway Twitty, when he was named for the town where we were once a happy family. They are bred, these dogs, to rescue the drowning, to pull bodies back to shore when they are drifting under, too tired to go on. Dad could not refuse Granddaddy when he called him up in Nashville and asked for his help with the Amphitheater, even after all the abuse and put-downs. The transmission of fantasies passes as easily across those invisible conduits that pass along hurts. Escape is never a onetime deal.
Denny, as per his usual modus operandi, had declared himself in charge of getting the construction going, after Granddaddy had invested most of his money and talked his brothers and friends into investing their own. Denny blew into town promising to make everyone richer, and I picture him riding out in a Thunderbird like my great-granddaddy’s, piles of cash in the back seat, bills sucked out and swirling in the wind of his French exit. He was a wanted man up north, wanted supposedly by both the mob and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, like the stories about Uncle Keith. It is said that when the feds came down to Myrtle Beach offering him immunity for his scams in Pennsylvania or Lord knows what, he took it and then took off, which might have been his plan all along, if that is what happened. Granddaddy lost millions of dollars, and his best friend would die a broke man. He’d gotten all his brothers in on the deal, and they lost just about as much. Uncle Jack sued Granddaddy and was the only one who got his money back. Until just recently a billboard announcing the Carolina Amphitheater stood over an empty field in Marion, South Carolina, looming over the imagined ruins of the biggest stage in the state.
After the Amphitheater, Dad and his dog, Conway, went back to Nashville full-time. After gigging around town for a while, he landed regular shows at the Bluebird Café, which, if you don’t know, is just about the best place to make a name for yourself if you want to break into songwriting big time. It’s where all the young, pretty faces looking for stardom go to find the words for their voices. At the Bluebird, he sang stories about losing the battle with alcohol and women’s fingernails running down his back. One night after a show, he drank in the dawn with Waylon Jennings and Emmylou Harris. He fell in with a new crew of outlaw country musicians and was arrested once or twice. If Conway was in the car when he got pulled over, he’d roll down the back window and let the dog stick his bear-size head over the side of the car. The cop would usually jump back and shout, “Shit, Mister. You got a grizzly in your truck?” And Dad would plead, “Officer, you gotta let me back on the road. I got a certified water rescue dog and we’re on our way to save somebody.” It wasn’t that much of a lie. Conway had rescued him. All the while, down South there is, as there has always been, fightin’ and fussin’, kissin’ and makin’ up, kept secret from Grandpa and half-hidden from me and my brothers. Dad’s visits to Charlotte are infrequent but the pattern remains unchanged: his truck pulls into my mother’s driveway for days or weeks, only to disappear in the middle of the night without a word of parting.
After a period of steady Bluebird round-robin nights and Mom bailing him out of jail for a variety of violations, just enough to give him that outlaw finish, he got an invitation to come see one of the most renowned publishing houses on Music Row. He and Conway were living in his truck at the time. He pulled into the office’s parking lot, behind the quaint-looking Victorian converted house. Unshaven and hungover, he stripped down to his underwear in the parking lot to change into a better outfit. The secretary watched from behind pulled-back curtains as he pulled on his boots with the fanged snakes’ heads on the toes, and she nearly wouldn’t let him in the door. The publisher led him into a conference room with a long table in the middle and walls of guitars. He’d left his guitar in the truck and asked to borrow one off the wall, and started playing and couldn’t stop. He played that guitar all afternoon and into the night, channeling the spirits it contained, not once getting up from the conference table. The publisher wouldn’t let him leave without signing a contract, and I wonder if Dad thought about all those times Uncle Jack had held him hostage, too, as all day and all night he played his own songs on the guitar that wrote songs for Patsy Cline and “Take This Job and Shove It.” The next morning, he left with a signed publishing contract and a promise to set him up to write with any writer he’d ever admired. Dad has made it through the door, and his house has yet to burn down. What a weight lifted from a back bent low when you are recognized for what you know you are supposed to do. When he used to say that Conway was famous in Nashville, he was saying that he was, and that when the publishing house hosted his fiftieth birthday a few years later, after writing and selling a string of hits, the publisher took down an urn from the mantel at the office on Music Row, stuck a finger into the ashes of a country-music legend, and drew a cross across my dad’s forehead, a baptism that turned him into what he knew he was all along.
Let’s take a breath on a moment of triumph. We will soon need our strength and must bask in the restorative powers of victory. Like pushpins in a hurricane map, I have left wobbling pins charting a path out of
the South altogether, to study books and writing in New York.
One stormy spring about a decade later, when a new complex called the Swamp Fox Entertainment Complex stood where the Amphitheater would have, I walked down a wide, leafy Brooklyn block, skyscraper steel and brownstone separating me from a past that seemed a world away, when Mom called to say there had been an accident at Nana’s house. Granddaddy had fallen some days ago and had either forgotten about his concussion and scalp cut wide open, or kept his injuries a secret. By the time Leslie happened to stop by and find his father also at home, he couldn’t remember who he was even though he was driving back and forth between Nana’s house and his office. He fell unconscious in the ambulance up to Myrtle Beach Hospital. When could I fly down?
Granddaddy had become obsessed with regaining his fortune since the Amphitheater, and had once even asked for my Social Security and bank account numbers. He knew a guy who could double whatever was in it. I held his hand and smiled while not knowing what to do, seeing him as not only the tyrant of my childhood, but newly as a frail old man desperate to recover his self-worth, which was always in his money. That was the most plausible of his get-rich quick schemes. Where he found them is still a mystery. There was the emerald mine in Italy that needed investors to free hostage jewels owned by the pope. A man from Texas had invented a machine that cures cancer and kept it on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, he just needed a little money because the government had covered it up and was after him, though it was a sure investment. Then there was the earthworm farm, which he could not explain properly but still elicits wide eyes and head shakes. The car that runs on sand instead of gasoline. In a newfound spirit of generosity, a sign of his declining mental state, he was trying to spread the wealth and get us to invest, too.
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