Calloustown (9 page)

I'll jump ahead and say that I visited Bonita a few times up in West Virginia, her daddy died, she sold the land to one of those mining companies. She moved down to Calloustown soon thereafter and helped me watch my hometown disintegrate into near–ghost town status once the younger kids moved away and the older ones died, once the mill closed, and so on. I'm not complaining or whining.

“It's like 24/6 instead of 24/7 because we won't take children away from their biological parents on a Sunday. We don't want any child growing up and thinking anything bad about Sundays. You know how maybe your momma dies on Arbor Day, and from then on for the rest of your life you hate trees? That's how we feel about taking a kid away from abusive parents on a Sunday. Most parents get caught abusing on Saturdays anyway, and Tuesdays. I don't know why those two days. Someone did a study and concluded, you know,” the social worker said. Her name was Alberta. Bonita had met the woman at one of those kitchen appliance parties. They noticed how they both had names that ended in -ta, and started meeting up at an Applebee's out by the closest interstate on Thursdays and calling each other plain old “Ta,” so that when they encountered one another sometimes you'd hear “Ta-ta,” like that, kind of racy.

“We're ready,” Bonita had said.

Here's the situation: Sometimes children had to be taken away from their parents and sent to a safe place for anywhere from one day to a month. It's called “temporary protective custody,” just like when somebody in prison tattletales on a gang member and the next thing you know the tattletale's got about six thousand death threats in and outside prison. So it should be called something else, if you ask me, but I don't know what. It should be called something else just so children don't feel as though they have something in common with prison tattletales for the rest of their lives.

“You need to have diapers handy at all time, and Gerber's. These kids coming in might be six months old, they might be fifteen. Boys and girls. So you might need to have some tampons in your medicine cabinet, too,” Alberta said.

This conversation took place in our den, in our wooden-framed house, which sat on two acres of land with another twelve across the road where the driving range stood. My father had started Calloustown Driving Range back in the 1960s after he realized that nothing—not corn, soybeans, tomatoes, tobacco—grew in his soil. When Bonita came into my life she said, “Why don't we call it the Calloustown Practice Range? That way it comes out CPR. Get it? That would be cool. People could always say, ‘I need me some CPR,' and then when everyone's sitting around, you know, Worm's Bar and Grill wondering who's going to give mouth-to-mouth, the first guy can say, ‘No, not that kind of CPR—I need to hit me some dimpled balls.'”

It's not like we had a bunch of advertising in the Yellow Pages or weekly coupons in the newspaper. We didn't have either of those things in Calloustown. I went out and repainted the sign that day to CPR and kind of liked it.

Bonita was behind the idea, too, that I let the grass grow higher October through February and allow quail and dove hunters to partake of the landscape. She said they used to kill bears on their driving range in West Virginia, insert joke here.

So the first boy showed up and he was nine years old, named Pine. Alberta drove him over herself, and we showed him to the spare bedroom that we'd painted half pink and half blue. I said, “Pine? Are you sure about that?” I thought maybe Alberta had some kind of odd dialect, that she meant “Payne,” and that the kid was named after the great golfer Payne Stewart, who died a tragic airplane death. What would be the chances of a kid being named Payne coming to live temporarily, under protective custody, with the owners of a driving range?

“Pine,” she said. “Daddy got hooked on oxycodone, and mother got hooked on Lortab. You might've seen it on the news. They went into that Rite-Aid up thirty miles from here and tried to rob the place. Both of them are in jail, and Pine doesn't have any aunts or uncles we can find yet to take care of him.”

Bonita and I hadn't seen it on the news, because we didn't have cable TV or one of those satellite dishes. We got one good channel some days, but mostly watched static and pretended like it snowed on the Weather Channel.

“Well, we'll take good care of Pine,” Bonita said. “This is exciting! You know, we always wanted to have a child, but maybe we met too late in life to have one. We were both thirty.”

It made me happy that we didn't have good television reception or newspaper delivery, because Bonita might hear about how women now had kids halfway into their forties. Sometimes I listened to an NPR station while sitting around CPR's “clubhouse,” which was a metal storage shed filled with buckets of balls, a card table, four chairs, and an ice chest.

Alberta gave us a sheet of paper with some emergency numbers and said she'd be checking in daily to see how Pine fared. She said, “His parents homeschooled him, so you don't need to deal with getting him back and forth to Calloustown Elementary.”

I should mention that this entire conversation took place in a whisper. I thought, I bet a nine-year-old kid is smart enough to realize that some things have changed in his life, and we don't have to be all hush-hush about it. But I didn't want to come off as a bad pre-foster parent.

Bonita said, “Edwin here's good in English, and I'm good in math. We can help out.”

I didn't like for Bonita to say my name ever, because it always reminded me that my ex-wife left an Ed for an Ed, and that if the Venezuelan and I ever became friends we could go Ed-Ed to each other like that, even though it wouldn't be as spectacular and funny as Ta-Ta. I said, “Well I don't know that I'm so great in English. I can read, you know. I read a lot! Sometimes I'll go over and sit around across the road and finish a Mickey Spillane book in a day, if we got customers who don't mind retrieving their own balls.” I said, “Sometimes I give special deals on people who want to go pick up their own balls.”

“Okay,” Alberta and my wife said at the same time.

Alberta said, “So we have his clothes, and we have his books and assignments—though I don't think he really ever follows any kind of schedule, from what we've figured out. I'll call tomorrow.”

She went to walk out the door. I said, “We look forward to hearing from you. Listen, is there any kind of special meal he likes? Like cheeseburgers or hot dogs? Shrimp? Vinegar-based barbecue? Macaroni and cheese? I used to love macaroni and cheese when I was that age. I still do!” I tried to come off as both concerned and gastronomical. To be honest, I was brought up by parents who put a plate in front of me and said, “Feel lucky there's anything, seeing as we can't grow corn, soybeans, tomatoes, or tobacco in the field.”

Bonita said, “That's a good question, Edwin.”

“Well, yes, there is a thing you should know,” Alberta said. “He's a quiet boy. He might have a speech impediment.”

I didn't say, “That tells me nothing about his eating habits.” I didn't say, “We'll try to keep him asking for such things as succotash, cereal, spinach, and syrup, if it was that kind of speech impediment.” I said, “Any kinds of hobbies I might need to know?”

“You take him across the road to play golf and you should be fine,” Alberta said. “Listen, I hate to drop Pine off and run, but I have a kid I need to pick up in Orangeburg whose mother left him straddled to a moped for four hours while she went into a bingo parlor.”

Bonita's friend left. My wife and I stood there and looked at each other. From back in the spare bedroom it sounded like termites ate our molding. It sounded like the kid clicked his tongue over and over. It sounded like an old LP skipping, or one of those bush people clicking and clacking when a pride of lions has surrounded the encampment, or when a pickup truck's not running on all its cylinders, or a pileated woodpecker's intent on making its mark on fiberglass.

I said, “Well, you're not in West Virginia anymore.”

Bonita laughed. She said, “I'm glad our first one doesn't need to breastfeed,” which I thought was kind of a strange first response, but maybe I'd been shielded growing up in Calloustown.

So I would ask the kid a question and he made only those noises—dit, dat, dah, dit, dat, dah. I brought him out to our den on that first night and asked him things like, “Are you scared?” and “Do you know that we're here to protect you from harm?” and “Do you know what the state capital of South Carolina is?” only to get “Dah-di-dah-dah dit di-di-dit” or something like that. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Ptooey, ptooey—those kinds of noises.

Pine looked like a normal nine-year-old kid. He didn't have head lice, which was good. His parents—drugstore robbers—made sure that his bangs weren't crooked, I'll give them that. He owned good posture, wasn't knock-kneed, didn't seem affected by rickets. His ear had healed nicely from where he had a piercing for a day. It looked like only two green freckles on his arm where his father'd gotten the idea that his son should have a tattoo, then reconsidered.

Pine didn't make much eye contact and kind of reminded me of these kids brought down on a field trip to CPR one time from the School for the Blind. That was a catastrophe. A few of them had fine eye-hand coordination—well, except for the “eye” part—but their inner compasses didn't work well and I lost two windows on the house when this one child in particular got turned around on the tee box and smacked a three wood straight across the road the wrong way. I tell you who ought to be placed in temporary protective custody, and it's those good blind kids. They need to be protected from sadist teachers who take them to a driving range, ruining what little self-esteem they possessed.

“We had a boy back home who had a similar speech impediment,” Bonita said. “I did some research on it when I went to college. It was called ‘echolalia,' and he would mimic things that he heard. In the real world, a child with echolalia might just take off singing the theme song to
Gilligan's Island
or
The Addams Family
, 'cause that's what he heard a week or more ago. Back in Buckhannon, this boy made the same noises as Pine because all he heard was the machinery from the coal mines. And his daddy's misfitted false teeth.”

Pine didn't seem either happy or distraught. He sat down and did his homework—I'm not even sure why we did it, but it gave Bonita something to do besides wondering if she made a mistake by leaving West Virginia. She didn't seem obsessed with ordering shoes from catalogs, taking photographs of her feet, then sending the shoes back saying they didn't fit right. Bonita no longer drove fifty miles to the closest Hobby Town store in order to buy decoupage, fake stained glass, or tile mosaic kits in order to sell her wares at the flea market or at the craft shows inherent to local festivals that took place celebrating the importance of pecans, cotton, peaches, Christianity, pumpkins, and tripe.

Bonita brought him over to the Calloustown Practice Range and Pine hit balls, playing like most people do, hitting some solidly, whiffing every sixth shot, topping most of them. His reaction to every swing was about the same, either a series of dits or dots or dats. I concentrated on the kid and tried to figure out if he followed the melody of a song, and sure enough sometimes it sounded like he rocked out on the opening guitar licks of “Sweet Home Alabama,” though Alberta told us over the phone one night that the kid had never left the confines of South Carolina's borders.

“You should take him down to the Invasion of Grenada festival,” Bonita told me ten days into Pine's stay with us. “What the hell? You never have any business on that day 'cause all the locals are over there. Nobody even hunts on that day.”

She spoke the truth. Every year since 1984, Calloustown had hosted the Invasion of Grenada festival—more of a re-enactment than a festival, though Bonita hoped that one day there might be rides and craft shows—because one of Cal-loustown's own, a young Marine named Clarence Reddick, was one of nineteen fatalities. After Clarence's death, some of the more forward-thinking denizens of Calloustown thought it tribute-worthy to reenact the United States's dominance in the military conquest by dressing up people as either Grenadian and Cuban supporters of the New Jewel Movement, or as members of the Marine Amphibious Unit, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 75th Ranger Regiment, Navy SEALs, members of Delta Force, and those others.

There, on a small island in the middle of Lake Calloustown, a couple of skydivers came in to join the reenactors who arrived via pontoon boat. People fired shotguns into the air and shot off Roman candles in a lifelike rendition of the actual invasion. In the end, somebody planted an American flag on the island—though that's probably not what really happened—and then the “body” of Clarence Reddick got brought back to shore on the pontoon boat. It was supposed to be an honor to get picked as Clarence's body, and even women put their names in a bucket in hopes of being selected. Afterward, there was a community-wide covered-dish picnic, square dance, and regular carnival-type games to play.

I said, “I don't know, Bo. You might want to call up Alberta on this one. Do you think exposing an echolaliaridden homeschooled child under temporary protective custody from his drugstore-robbing addicted parents to the horrors of what was also known as Operation Urgent Fury, fully supported by President Ronald Reagan in order to shift Americans' focus from the ten percent unemployment rate, is a wise decision?” I'd done some research. I'd been reading up on U.S. history in case I needed to help out Pine with homework in that area.

“It might make him feel better about his upbringing,” she said. “My father took me one time to a John Brown thing down at Harpers Ferry, and I knew right away that I was better than okay.”