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

his beat-up pickup truck, the one Hank Williams Jr. sings about getting repossessed on the radio. Just about to the old-fashioned turn-bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, where the riverboat casino docks, a white Cadillac appears in his rearview mirror, getting closer and closer until the headlights disappear into his bumper, and he is run off the road. In a cloud of dust and mosquitos—so mad he doesn’t even bother to check for water moccasins, as he taught us to do so close to the water—Dad jumps out of the car with more than cussing on his mind. “What in the hell do you think you’re doin’?” he starts to yell. You see, he knows the car and its driver. His uncle, Jack Jones, looks at him from behind the wheel and smiles. “Mark, get in the car” is all he has to say. Getting in the car with Jack means conceding to a trip over state lines and possibly breaking at least state, if not federal laws, according to nearly every story passed around the family. Dad protests at first, but there’s not much use in saying no to Jack. He can’t lose his job, he says. He can’t leave Debbie alone with the kids, he says. He’s broke and doesn’t have any business leaving the county, he says. And what is he supposed to do with his truck? “Jack was the most fun, but I hated to see his face at the door,” Mom will remember now.

In this scene, Jack is dressed like one of the gangsters people said he knew. A friend of my dad’s, on seeing Jack around town wearing a large gold medallion and nothing else for a shirt, said to him in the utmost seriousness, “I didn’t know your uncle was in the Olympics.” When Jack runs you off the road and says get in the car, well, there really isn’t anything to do except leave your own truck where it is on the side of the road and get in the car. So Dad climbs into the Cadillac, and notes, for storytelling purposes, the velour tracksuit with the jacket’s zipper wide open to show off the gold medallion that hangs atop his rolls of opulent, browned fat and the coils of more gold chains piled around his neck. Jack made more money than just about anybody in Myrtle Beach and didn’t have to get up out of his recliner to do it, they say. In his obituary, Jack is described as “having a financial mind like no other,” which could not be argued with. Among his closest friends, continues the newspaper, was a state Supreme Court justice called Bubba.

“Where are we going?” Dad asks a few times, and on the south side of Georgetown, ninety minutes past Conway, Jack finally answers.

“We’re going to Miami.” He elongates his words even more than usual for emphasis, letting the last i in Miami pull up the corners of his Cheshire grin. When Mom answers the phone, barefoot on our parquet kitchen floor, she knows right away from my dad’s tone. “Lord, you didn’t get into the car with Jack, did you?”

Jack drives them down to a casino in Florida that he is thinking of buying. He is always thinking of buying a casino in Florida. They hole up in a couple of motel rooms for a week, and my dad is a very well-kept hostage who’s probably not having that bad a time as they drink, gamble, and flirt their way in the general direction of Cuba. One morning a week or so into their road trip, Dad decides that enough is enough, he wants the car keys or a bus ticket home. He finds his uncle’s motel-room door unlocked, creeps past the bed where Jack and a young lady who is not his wife are asleep. He starts pawing at pants pockets and opening drawers looking for Jack’s keys or his wallet. Eventually, he notices something else of value beside the nightstand lamp. “Jack,” he says as he kicks the bed, which jiggles all manner of flesh let loose during the course of the night. “You either give me some cash for a bus ticket home, or you ain’t never gonna see your teeth again.” At this he holds aloft the set of pink-and-white dentures swiped for ransom.

“You’d steal the teeth out of your own family’s mouth?” Jack said, remembers my dad.

To which he replied, Dad recollects, and here it is my turn to repeat those words in no less an act of outright theft, “It’s time for me to go home.”

2

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Treasure Maps

AT THIS MOMENT, WE ARE PULLING BACK THE tangled kudzu curtains on 1979 to set the scene for my parents to meet so that I might appear. Live oaks sprawl, and Spanish moss seeps from their gray limbs into the watercolor pastels of a vacation sunset. A salty ocean breeze surfs the sour marsh air beside the tang of margarita mix blended with summer sweat and spit laced with snuff on the back patio of a new bar in Murrells Inlet named for the pirate Drunken Jack. Cigarette smoke coils like fat water moccasins around branches of groping hands and through wisps of feathered hair. It is not impossible that a boat smuggling cocaine has just unloaded straight from Escobar’s equatorial empire due south, after a journey that skirted the Atlantic’s seasonal squalls and a final cruise to safety through the labyrinth of rice fields abandoned but for the alligators and tidal islands that lie in wait under black marsh water to strand outsiders who don’t know where to round a bend or skirt a sandbar. The boat might pass Sandy Island, the Gullah community descended from the enslaved Africans who labored the surrounding rice plantations. Let us imagine the captain of this unnamed vessel pulling from his pocket a book of matches designed with an image of Drunken Jack, the smiling, one-eyed pirate, on the back flap. Drunken