Low Country Read online

  “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

  _________

  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 Jack’s was where you went to find all kinds of treasure.

  Like a decent portion of the population, I owe my existence to a bar. My parents met at an upscale Calabash seafood joint off Restaurant Row on King’s Highway in that sticky, druggy summer of 1979, as it is recalled. Dad was the twenty-year-old bartender, born and raised in Myrtle Beach, the youngest son of a family of sons and brothers who owned a portion of the motels, pancake houses, golf courses, and other assorted tourist traps in Horry County. Mom was a waitress, the new girl in a small town who had both beauty-queen looks and novelty to her advantage. Debbie Allen had dropped out of her all-girls’ community college in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her roommate, a woman who would become known to us kids in cruel awe as the Black Widow, after the untimely, strange, and varied deaths of several young husbands. Debbie and her friend set up in an apartment whose bamboo furniture and seashell motifs were evidence to them, as to all inland emigrants, that the fantasy of the beach holiday exists as daily life for coastal residents. They waitressed together first at a diner in Cherry Grove, a strip of inlet beach south of a rusty swing bridge that crosses the same Intracoastal Waterway where farther down the county in Socastee Uncle Jack will kidnap my dad in a few years.

  Mom knew Cherry Grove from childhood vacations with her father, when a post–Korean War boom in middle-class vacationing coincided with a post–Hurricane Hazel construction boom and all-around redrawing of the coastline in 1954. Maps you’ve used your whole life no longer work after big hurricanes. A rickety pier, bait shops, and ice-cream parlors popped up where only crab traps and widows’ walks had been before in the coastal village north of Myrtle Beach. Henry Allen named his three daughters after movie stars and his only son after himself, as blind to his own vanity as most men. Over six feet tall, blond and blue-eyed himself, he had the kind of good luck that makes you wonder if certain gods still play patron to their favorites, and lived at a time when his right to be the best at everything could never be questioned. He talked his way around a story as well as Odysseus, and Southern spirits rewarded his gifts with fortune more valuable than, but certainly including, gold. His wife, my mother’s mother, was no pining Penelope, though. She could not resist her suitors and had exiled herself to her own island far away by the time Henry was taking his four kids to Cherry Grove for summer weekends.

  At the end of these holidays, Henry was perennially unable to wrestle his eldest daughter into the car. There was nothing to do but wait for her to finish splashing and swimming, and then return soaking, sunbaked, and happy in her own good time for a four-hour drive through pine forests, tobacco fields, and peach trees back to the red-clay dirt of Charlotte. Something called to her out beyond the surf. Again I imagine her a mermaid with a tail the same green as her eyes, as I recall the unquestionable existence of mermaids verified in a classroom text, but my schooling is not a part of the story just yet. Around this same time, right around the early 1960s, my dad and his tribe of brothers and cousins would have been diving for sand dollars and conch shells, which they sold for a dollar apiece to old Mrs. Plyler at the Gay Dolphin, for decades billed as the nation’s “largest gift shop” in slanted cursive over Ocean Boulevard. Were they ever in the water at the same moment as children, I wonder, and on the page, I’m inclined toward synchronicity over sense.

  Things were going along according to plan, as they usually are before they aren’t. Mom was counting her tips and enjoying life in general as a full-time vacationer. The Chesapeake House used to offer a view of the ocean over the marsh. Now the restaurant’s windows are filled by high-rise time-shares and stucco-plastered hotels. The restaurant has never had a view of the Chesapeake, that famous bay several states to the north, though it has always been a house and remains done up like a farm, painted in red with white trim. Curtains of matronly lace shade the windows behind the fake Tiffany stained-glass lamps that hang over the bar. The night my parents met, the brackish water may have teased a syrupy shade of dark red wine underneath all that moonlight. It would have been particularly beautiful then, and even the alligators between the reeds would seem under the spell of backwater charm.

  I’d like to pretend, though, that they met at a different bar. One that plays a more consistent role in my family’s history. With permission, we’ll relocate this scene to Drunken Jack’s. The view’s better and the drinks are stronger. Such a well-meaning and convenient move puts us closer to the Grand Strand tradition of laying claim to obscurities. At least I’m being upfront with you. How many of the juke joints along the boardwalk claiming to be the “birthplace of the shag” couldn’t tell you the steps to dance? Forward, to the side, and back till you’re spinning. We must place our feet in the right pattern, in the right time, so the memories can turn into history and the future might hurt a little less from its past.

  Drunken Jack’s opened up in the late 1970s, when Mom moved to the beach, and both my parents wound up working there for longer, anyway. “I still have dreams of polishing the wood on the captain’s wheel,” Mom said the last time we were at Drunken Jack’s, as we walked past its glossy spokes and down the paisley-carpeted stairs into the dining room that looks over Murrells Inlet. As kids, my brothers and I
dressed in our parents’ old uniform T-shirts of teal blue or pale yellow with the matchbook depiction of Drunken Jack himself on the front and the back. Stained and threadbare, they were a glamorous connection to the most famous pirate of all.

  It is a fact that in the late 1600s and into the next century, Blackbeard wore out the Queen Anne’s Revenge ransacking the Carolina coast and then pulling into the inlets around Horry County to hide out. I remember Little River as not much more than a swing bridge, some aboveground pools, boat docks, and roadside fireworks stands, but the town’s history hides as well as any treasure still buried. It is one of the oldest settlements in South Carolina. Right below the North Carolina border, it was, in Blackbeard’s day, the only stop between Cape Fear and Georgetown, and the lone entrance to the undesirable and difficult-to-navigate Long Bay, which was basically the whole stretch of Horry County then. Edward Teach was not the only pirate who favored the hazards of the Low Country for hiding out. Blackbeard’s friend Charles Vane so vexed the merchants of Charleston by stealing their cargo ships coming into port, including ships carrying enslaved Africans, that they engaged privately the pirate-hunting services of a William Rhett, a rice planter and naval commander whose house still stands peachy pink on Hasell Street in Charleston, smack between the City Market built in 1790 and a Harris Teeter grocery mart. Black Bart, who captured as many as four hundred ships and is considered the most successful pirate by the standard of vessels seized, is said to have worn a pluming red feather in his hat during raids. Black Bart is not to be confused with Black Sam Bellamy. Bellamy called himself the Robin Hood of the Sea and is accounted by many as the richest pirate ever to sail, said to have fallen in love with the Witch of Wellfleet and been claimed nonetheless by a hurricane.

  Then there is Stede Bonnet, the genteel English aristocrat who supposedly became a pirate to escape his nag of a wife. He was known as the Gentleman Pirate, but never sounded very gentlemanly to me. All in all, Mrs. Bonnet seemed better off without him. Bonnet tried to befriend Teach, having some things in common, but Teach caught on to Bonnet’s bungling, took him prisoner, and stole his ship and crew. Blackbeard decided that Bonnet was more trouble than he was worth and let him go, while he holed up in Little River. Bonnet was not a very good pirate and was soon caught by the rice planter Rhett, though he managed to escape his jailers by dressing as a high-society lady and walking straight out of the Charleston house where he was held, the story goes. So little have South Carolinians thought of the law, there was no jail across the state well into the 1770s, a full century and a half after the founding of the Charles Towne colony. Aristocratic prisoners were treated as guests in the house of the local lawmen. South Carolinians have long delighted in the words of the statesman James Petigru, from just before the Civil War. “South Carolina is too small for a nation and too large for an insane asylum.” Petigru was ridiculed as the only man in the state who decried secession and supported the Union. I wonder if some residents would be so quick to quote Petigru if they knew he had been a Unionist.

  Between hideouts in Little River, Blackbeard absconded on some adventure with more rum than his trusty galleon could keep afloat. The crew diverted the Revenge to a little island off the coast of Murrells Inlet, where they proceeded to bury the extra casks of rum and gold, feast on whatever seventeenth-century pirates feasted on, probably not what the tourists are fed at Pirate’s Voyage Dinner Show on Restaurant Row, where the Dixie Stampede used to be, and celebrate their bountiful, boozy good fortune. Come sunrise, in a hurry to catch the tide or to get their hangovers out of the sun, the band of pirates forgot to do a head count and set sail one pirate short. By the time they realized Jack was missing, Blackbeard was halfway to Aruba and unwilling to turn the ship around. They came back six months or six years later to find all their rum dug up and Jack’s bare, sun-bleached bones under a palmetto tree, surrounded by jewels and empty casks. You can see Drunken Jack’s island from the bar named for him. It’s called Goat Island these days, as locals used to cart over a family of goats in the summertime to eat the marijuana plants that grow so happily in our climate. In the interest of history, I must disclose that there is another story. That the island is named for a drunk who belonged to a gentlemen’s club of secret repute that met on the island as one of several roaming locations. They’d drink champagne, catch fish for the enslaved to clean and cook and serve to them. I have always preferred one story over the other.

  A fishing boat ride inland from Goat Island, at Drunken Jack’s, Dad was a bartender with a guitar and a few ideas about getting famous, and Mom was filling orders for hush puppies and piña coladas. Dad already had a reputation in the county as a guy who went through girlfriends like packs of cigarettes. The establishments stretching the length of King’s Highway from Little River to Georgetown County were owned or managed by the Joneses at the time, and Dad had just moved out of Uncle Jack’s house, where he’d lived since high school, and into a beachy done-up condo with his two older brothers, Mike and Leslie. “I just couldn’t get along with my old man,” Dad will say when he’s in a soft mood, talking a maze around the brutality his father let flood the house.

  That Ralph Cooper Jones, Granddaddy as we call him, emerges here villainous cannot be helped. The advantages of femininity are few in Horry County, and I didn’t question when graces fell instead of his blows. Perhaps he didn’t know how to handle a girl child—weren’t our bodies supposed to be more delicate? Our worth as the bearers of sons to be preserved?—and I watched my brothers and our first cousins, as good as more brothers, get a belt across their backs every evening when he came home from his office. A belting was a regular part of the day, and we, as children aware only of what we could count on, took such strikes for granted, as normal as afternoon thunderstorms or breakfast cereal, which didn’t mean the hurt wasn’t adding up. We were too young to know what to do with the rage that bloomed under bruises. The first time I saw Granddaddy slap Nana across the face, at four or five, I knew that I hated him, but did not yet know how this baptismal spark of anger bonded us, how it would make me like him, and how it had done the same to my dad. As passively as catching a cold, his disease was activated in my blood, which was partly his, after all.

  By the time they were in elementary school, Dad and his brothers were experienced busboys at any number of restaurants along King’s Highway. Alcohol was halfway illegal in the 1960s in South Carolina and not allowed served in restaurants, but Uncle Leslie recalls making drinks at a bar hidden in the kitchen of the Hawaiian Village. This tropical-themed restaurant-resort on Highway 17 and Thirty-ninth Avenue was managed by Uncle Jack and owned then by his eldest brother, Keith. Guests were invited to “lose your worries in a carefree Polynesian atmosphere,” part of which was the waitresses in grass skirts and coconut bras. The Myrtle Beach police were said to let Keith and Jack know that a raid was on the books for the Hawaiian Village and that they should expect half a dozen men in uniforms ironed neatly and badges shining. After finding only the Coca-Cola and tap water of good Christians on the floor, these men supposedly placed their own drink orders. Waiting in the kitchen were their mai tais and gin fizzes, handed out by only the prettiest waitresses.

  Uncle Jack married the best-looking waitress they had at the Hawaiian Village. Betty was tall with unruly curls as black as Jack’s. That she could hold Jack’s attention was saying something, especially in the Bora Bora room, where hula dancers wearing orchid crowns blew kisses from the stage and shirtless men threw firesticks to one another in streamers of orange afterglow. The night Jack met Betty, Dad and Uncle Leslie were restocking the bar and cleaning tables as if it were any other night, until a guest pulled a gun out of his suit jacket and held it over the room. Dad remembers ducking under a table with an armful of dirty dishes.

  “Why’d you go and marry a woman who’s gonna talk back to you?” the Jones brothers queried their baby brother, fearing that Aunt Betty’s unladylike demands, like fidelity and daughters, might influence their own wives�
�� expectations. Their wives did what a good wife was supposed to do, which is what she was told. Betty was not afraid to interfere, and spoke her mind to all the Jones brothers. When Nana dared talk back to Granddaddy, the best that could happen would be a low rumble, “You’ve been around Betty, I can tell.” Jack and Betty let my dad move in with them as a teenager, after he couldn’t live with his father anymore and took off. Uncle Jack saw something of himself in my dad, another youngest son with the instinct natural performers have for getting away with things on a cocktail of charm and indifference. He saw the bruises, too. Born nearly a decade later than the rest of his five brothers, Jack managed to escape his father’s temper and could give some safety to his nephew. It only takes the faith of one person to bring about a little peace. “My daddy’d let his sons starve before he’d give away a nickel,” Dad has said over and over.

  When it was time for Dad to move out of Jack and Betty’s place, his brothers Mike and Leslie, blond and blue-eyed like Nana, welcomed their dark-headed baby brother, along with his guitar and his shaggy mutt, into their condo on Ocean Boulevard and Thirty-third Avenue. Dad has always connected to dogs easily and with authority, as wounded animals who recognize each other. Stray dogs would follow him home from school as a boy, and when Dad struck up a particular friendship with one and tried to keep it in the backyard, instead of “good night” or “sleep well,” never mind bedtime-story forts, Granddaddy would say as he fell asleep, “I’m gonna kill that dog in the morning.” Dad got up early enough as a busboy for breakfast crowds even during the school year to hide his pets at first light, saving scraps of tourists’ bacon and pancakes to feed them. Not a penny of the household money was allowed on dog food, until Nana, in a burst of either defiance or loneliness, brought home the first in a series of tiny teacup poodles.