Calloustown (10 page)

I don't know how many Civil War reenactments take place yearly both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, but it has to be over eighty-five. I know this because one day before I met Bonita I drove down to Charleston and met a guy in charge of the Fort Sumter Museum, but he kind of scared me all dressed up in regalia and I thought he lied, so I just drove to the closest library and looked things up to count eighty-six of the things, not counting the unsanctioned ones in Hawaii and Alaska and Puerto Rico. Civil War reenactments bring in droves of people, both participants and spectators, so you can imagine how many people drive from afar to witness Calloustown's Invasion of Grenada's reenactment, the only one in the country.

Pine and I got there a good hour before two paratroopers flew in from Fort Jackson outside of Columbia. I doubt that the Air Force used a Cessna in Grenada, but it was still quite exciting to see a skydiver in faux action. Pine looked up from where we sat at a wooden picnic table on the outskirts of the Lake Calloustown Public Swimming Area #2—that had been labeled B
LACKS
O
NLY
up until 1968—surrounded by locals, older veterans wearing their Garrison caps, half-stoned long-haired Vietnam vets, and a couple women who kept yelling, “USO! USO! USO!” as if they were sad, forgotten debutantes.

Pine let off a slew of his noises, and for a second I thought he imitated “Taps,” or a slower version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“You damn right those boys are going to land right on their targets,” this man next to us said. “You got that right, son.”

Of course I looked over at the man. He wore a white curled navy gob on his head, and had his shirtsleeves up to show off two anchor tattoos. I turned my head from watching the pontoon take off and said to the man, “Hey.”

Pine went off on a rant, in his clicky way.

The man next to me said, “Jesus Christ, boy, slow down.” He said, “It's been a long time since I worked as a radioman.” I learned this later, for what I heard went, “Di-di-dat di-dah-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-dah-dah dah-di-dit dah-dah-dah-di-dah-dah dah-dit,” which came out “Slow down,” and then he went into all the rest of that stuff about his days as a petty officer.

Pine fucking beamed. That's the only way I can explain it. He broke out into a smile that would've made Miss America look toothless.

I said to the man, “Hey, hey, what's going on?” and introduced myself and my near-foster child. I said, “Is he talking in a language that no one can understand?”

The skydivers came down. Shotguns sounded. People who came by my driving range to hit scarred and damaged range balls whooped and hollered a couple hundred yards offshore. “I'm retired Radioman Petty Officer Ronald Landry, and I haven't been able to keep up with my Morse code since retiring,” the man said in English. I think he must've said the same thing in code to Pine right afterwards, for the radioman went off ditting and dotting until they saluted each other.

I looked at Pine, who nodded. Oh, he understood the English language just fine, but made a pledge not to speak it for some reason. I said to Pine, “Is this part of your homework? Are you taking Morse code for a foreign language and need to practice? You can tell your answer to retired Radioman Petty Officer Ronald Landry, and he can translate to me.”

Pine took off coding away, gesticulating with his hands. He looked like some kind of foreigner with a stutter. Landry nodded and laughed. I got bored after about ten minutes—it seems to me that the armed forces could come up with a quicker form of communication, like plain calling up people and speaking Pig Latin—and watched as the American flag went up on Lake Calloustown Island, then this year's Clarence Reddick got shoved onto a raft and pushed with the help of reenacting Navy SEALs toward the spectators on shore.

Presently there would be a celebratory three-legged race made up solely of Purple Heart–awarded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, all of whom teamed up to have left prosthetic and right prosthetic legs in the sack. Those vets could still run the hundred-yard dash in something like eleven seconds.

“It's a long story,” Landry finally said to me. “It all boils down to Pine here having an imaginary friend. His name is Di-dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah dit, which comes out to ‘Joe.' Listen, I used to be an adjunct professor of Morse code over at Eminent Domain College on the edge of the Savannah River Nuclear Site before the place self-imploded. If you want, I'd be glad to come over and do some translating, plus give you a crash course in the code. I'll do it for minimum wage. And beer. Dah-di-di-dit dit dit di-dah-dit. That means ‘beer.'”

Pine nodded and smiled, rubbed his stomach in circles like a 1950s kid overacting in a TV commercial for whole milk. Then he ran off to partake in the bobbing for grenades contest. I made a mental note to tell him not to mention this part of the day to Alberta or Bonita, seeing as it would mean the end of our pre-foster days. They weren't real grenades, but miniature finials. Still, social workers and wives frown upon toy guns, too.

A handful of women wailed, reenacting how one mourns the death of a Marine, when Clarence Reddick's body got transferred to a pine coffin, then placed up on a stage where, later, a John Philip Sousa tribute band would play two hours' worth of marches and people would try to do-si-do.

I don't know why I said, “That's a kind offer,” and asked for retired Radioman Petty Officer Ronald Landry's phone number. I had no intention of calling him. My theory went thus: Let's say I became fluent in Morse code. By that time, Pine would be back living with relatives or bona fide foster parents. Even if Bonita and I took in another emergency child, what would be the chances that the child communicated only in dits and dahs? What would be the chances that I'd have a field trip of military personal at CPR who would find it amusing to speak in Morse code? Hell, I would be better off filling my head up learning Hindi, or Gullah.

I walked over to where Pine stood, his head dripping, a wooden pineapple in his jaws. I said, “Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah,” just jabbering, not knowing that I had looked at him and said, “Zero.”

We got home and I told Bonita everything that I learned. She said, “Is that true? Six hundred thirty-eight Cubans were captured in the real invasion? Where did they go?”

I said, “That's not what I want you to focus on. We met an old guy from the Navy. He communicated with Pine just fine, because that noise he's been making has actually been Morse code. There's an imaginary friend involved named Joe. Maybe it's G.I. Joe. And if it is, that would be even more worrisome. I think you need to call up Alberta and tell her this isn't working out.”

Bonita shook her hair out. She laughed. “Are you serious? I had an imaginary friend in West Virginia named Charlie. As in Charles Manson. Who was brought up in foster homes in West Virginia, insert joke here, when his mom was off in prison and whatnot.”

Pine had walked straight back to his room. I looked over my shoulder to make sure he didn't stand in the doorway. To Bonita I whispered, “I think Pine's parents damaged him in ways we're not capable of handling. I'm serious.”

“Pine! Come on in here, Pine! I got to get to the bottom of something!” Bonita yelled out. He came running. She spoke in a voice I'd not heard before, with really hard long “I” sounds, and Ts that came out Ds. She said, “Why's your head wet? Back where you come from you walk around with a wet head all the time? You know who walks around with a wet head all the time? Fish. You just a fish, Pine? That what you consider yourself to be? A fish ain't come out of the water yet to join the rest of us humans on dry land?”

I looked at Pine and noticed how he teared up. I said, “Goddamn, Bonita. Ease up. It's my fault about letting him bob for apples.”

“You can speak in English, and you're about to do it pronto, Pine. I don't care about your mom and dad sitting around in their trailer letting you say dit dot dit dot all the time with your head and shoulders wet. This is a whole new ballgame here, where you got to interact with us in a polite and honest procedure.”

I'd never seen my wife get so wound up. In a way it made me wish we had had children of our own, but in another way I saw it as a blessing that she didn't go all mountain girl on our kid—yelling, speaking in a way not that much different than Morse code, not blinking, and looking like she could pull out her own teeth and use them in a mosaic portrait of her father in mid-hack, bent over a bucket of balls on the edge of a cliff.

I walked around my wife, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out two cans of ginger ale. I handed one to Pine. We pulled our tabs open within a half second of each other, to make a dit-dit sound. And then fucking Pine said, in a voice that came out as gravelly as the oldest cigarette-smoking, bourbon-swilling, black blues singer of all time, “I'll dry off in time. It wasn't apples. I bobbed hand grenades.”

I said, “Hey, you talked,” and Bonita said, “What?”

I said, “Okay, Pine, good job. Don't wear yourself out in one day. Go on back to your room and take a nap. Later on we can go across the road and hit some pitching wedges at doves flying up.”

“They bob for hand grenades at the Invasion of Grenada reenactment? No goddamn wonder we got problems with the youth of today,” Bonita said. “What else did y'all do, play ring toss on severed heads? Enter a hollering contest see who can yell ‘Kill!' the loudest?”

“Dah-di-dah di-dit di-dah-di-dit di-dah-di-dit,” Pine said, which Bonita and I knew spelled out K-I-L-L.

She said, “No. You are not going to be having any secret language with a secret invisible friend from this point on.” She pointed at the telephone on the wall and said, “You want me to call up the Department of Social Services and have them come pick you back up and take you to a family might try to exorcise you? That what you want, Pine?”

“Okay, let's just settle down. It's only been a couple weeks. Things will smooth out,” I said. I drank my ginger ale and burped accidentally, which made Bonita glare at me.

Pine shook his head. He said in that ancient voice—just a grating rasp off of being that of an old-school tracheotomy victim—“I'd like to go visit that drugstore my parents tried to hold up. I got me some money. I'd like to go to that drugstore, maybe buy me a Timex watch.”

Bonita held a self-satisfied smile I'd not seen since she found some kind of study that ranked West Virginia ahead of my home state in regards to education and quality of living. I felt pretty sure she wrote it herself, sent it to a friend somewhere, and had that person post it on the Internet. I said, “Well, then let's go to that drugstore.”

I loaded Pine into the car and off we went. We drove past the remnants of the Invasion of Grenada reenactment to see straggling “Cubans,” “Grenadians,” and “Americans” laugh and clink beer cans, gauze wrapped around their heads. We drove by Old Man Reddick's nursery, and the defunct bus station where men still met mornings in order to think up ways to resurrect Calloustown. Out on Old Charleston Road we passed children selling used golf balls—under normal circumstances I would've stopped to make sure they weren't stolen from me—and then another group of children selling sweet potatoes.

Pine made his noises off and on, I assumed spelling things out in Morse code. I didn't have it in me to tell him to stop, that he should speak English. Little steps, I thought, kind of like spreading democracy whether Third World nations wanted it or not. I said, “Is there a reason you have to go to this particular Rite-Aid?” I didn't say, “I understand how you might want to apologize for your parents, that it's a healing process,” that sort of thing. I didn't even think about it until later that night, when Alberta came to pick Pine up and take him out of our home.

Pine shook his head. We got there. The saleswoman took a small key and opened the rotating Timex display case. Pine chose a regular, old man's silver wind-up wrist-watch with a stretchy flexible band that caught arm hairs too much, in my opinion. He shoved it all the way up his arm past his elbow, stuck his ear to it, and said, “Tick tick tick tick tick.”

The woman said, “I bet we can find you a watch with a band that'll fit better.”

Pine shook his head. “I'm going to use it to make a bomb anyway,” he rasped away. The woman stepped back a bit. “Y'all took my parents away from me after they came in here to get what they needed. I'm going to make a bomb.”

Maybe there's a reason Bonita and I never had children of our own. I didn't know what to say or do. My father would've beaten me with a nine iron right there next to the perfume counter, but I knew that kind of behavior no longer found acceptance. Should I have laughed and said the boy was kidding? Should I have told the woman she should feel honored that he didn't say that entire monologue in Morse code? I guess, in retrospect, I should've waited thirty minutes in line for the pharmacist and asked him or her to explain to Pine how scared everyone gets when a robbery takes place, and how a nation cannot be considered civilized until its citizens stop attacking each other with little provocation. Evidently the wrong thing to say was, “You got that right, son. I don't blame you.”

Sonny Boy Williamson for Dinner

Normally I don't answer the side door if a man's knocking outside while holding a shotgun in his crooked arm. I don't even have guns in the house. It's not like I tell everyone around here—that could only lead to break-ins, and talk that I was truly queer, capricious, unpatriotic, and/or nonresistant—but I don't keep guns, rope, safety razors, gas stoves, tall kitchen plastic garbage bags, garden hoses, or pills around. There's a chance that my DNA makeup isn't the same as my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents on both sides, and some stray cousins, sure, but I don't want to take the chance. Because I might have what microbiologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, and palm readers haven't yet discovered—the suicide gene. I won't marry, I won't have children, I'll barely have a pet unless it's a shelter dog over the age of nine. I'll drive on occasion, but always attempt to take routes without bridges or thick roadside trees seeing as I might become manically depressed and veer. I've been thinking about moving to one of those southwest deserts—no rivers to cross, and most cacti are probably no match for my pickup—but the boredom there might, of course, send me outside to juggle vipers in a careless fashion.