Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

town, even if hidden in the woods, it wouldn’t cut it on the south end, whither we return presently to tally up the Jones men, the sons of Harvey and Ol’ Mama. Granddaddy has a picture of all his brothers lined up in middle age along the side of one of their daddy’s turquoise Thunderbirds. From left to right in this photograph, the six Jones brothers all wear golf pants in various patterns of checkers and pastels. First we have Keith, who ran the construction company built on moonshine money and who died in a car accident rumored to have been caused by either the mob or the FBI. Then Wilbur, who, before dying of lung cancer at Myrtle Beach Hospital the same summer we expected Granddaddy to die from a mysterious head injury just one floor below, once sued the very same hospital for operating on the wrong leg. Next we have Granddaddy, then Wendell and Herman, and finally Jack. Not pictured is their only sister, Doll, whose real name was Dorothy. As women among men are playthings and novelties, she was only ever called Doll her whole life. I knew Aunt Doll only a little better than I did my great-uncles, half of whom were dead by the time I came around, but recognized her as another woman raised among men. She kept a neon-green parrot, that we knew as not just mean, but a snitch. It would squawk if my brothers and I ever tried to sneak up her staircase to the forbidden and irresistible second floor, which was every time we were at her house. My second cousin Kay keeps the bird still, and if I were her, I’d have let it fly long ago. In the early 1970s, upon receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer and dealt two years to live, Harvey hopped in his tomato-red T-bird, picked up his mistress, and drove to Mexico without a word wasted on wife or family. From south of the border, he called Keith, the undoubtedly visionary eldest son, with instructions for the business and no fewer sentimentalities than “Don’t fuck anything up.” At the end of those two years, when it was clear he was not long for this world, his lady love drove him back up to Ocean View Hospital, which I can’t help imagining as the only hospital that matters to us, Myrtle Beach Hospital, and from there, summoned his sons and their sons. These patriarchs with their designs and their dreams of sons. Upon their turn to see their grandfather for the last time, Dad and Les remember sitting in the parking lot, after high school got out but before their shift waiting tables at one of their uncle Herman’s seafood joints, smoking Camels, and talking only about what a bastard Harvey had been. Every generation gets a little better, leaves a stitch or two behind to close the open family wounds a little at a time. Their own daddy never up and fled the country for a few years with his mistress, at least. Even considering such a brazen desertion, Ol’ Mama did not act too fussed. To notice his leaving would not have brought him back. Women must not only tend to the wound but conceal the scar.

Granddaddy had millions of his own secreted away through investments both known and unknown. He and his brothers had moved up from small-time motels to high-rise hotels and golf courses, had a stake in Holiday Inns from Virginia to Florida. Keith, before he went on the run, from both more hardened criminals than himself and the lawmen after the whole lot, as the family stories go, bought one of the first hotels operating in Myrtle Beach, right next door to the very first. He and his wife turned the Yachts Club into the first high-rise hotel along the Grand Strand, the Yachtsman, which is still there, and while not as nice as it once was, cannot be beat for location, at the mouth of the pier at Fourteenth Avenue North and only a few blocks up from the SkyWheel. The Ferris wheel dreamed up and constructed after I left spins over Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which was built during my childhood beside the Pavilion at Ninth Avenue. The Pavilion was the most beloved eleven acres in South Carolina. There bloomed the antiquated rainbow lightbulbs around names of carnival rides spelled out in mosaic mirror tiles. GALAXI and MIND SCRAMBLER twinkled between echoes of roller-coaster laughter and descending screams and the nearby crash of ocean waves for sixty years. The Pavilion is gone, but Ripley’s has recently expanded to include a Haunted Adventure that is open year-round, no longer just at Halloween, and a Maze of Mirrors. The man himself, more popular than President Roosevelt and known as the “biggest liar in the world,” drew his fame as a cartoonist for William Randolph Hearst during the Depression. He illustrated oddities he claimed to have seen that were called “fairy tales for grown-ups.” Twice a day, tickets are available for tourists to watch bored mermaids with zippered pink tails twirl around an aquarium tank before drying off to catch a shift waiting tables.

My great-uncle Keith might have had a touch of clairvoyance when newly christened Myrtle Beach amounted to a few raised shacks, a handful of hotels, some stray cows and goats ambling on the sand. Does not the very word inspiration herald direct and immediate influence from the gods? If such a reach provokes discomfort, then let us call it a prediction. A dream. A bet. A place in time where my imagination meets his. Framed by the dunes, I see his black hair, the same as his brothers’, my dad’s, my brothers’, mine, parted to the side and blown out of place by a breeze that ruffles his tie, nearly the shape and width of a child’s kite. As is the style of the time, he wears alligator-skin loafers, and they sink in the