Calloustown by George Singleton Page A

me. I’ll be the first to admit, psychologically-wise, that maybe I married Bonita just because she sounded like she might be Venezuelan, too. She’s not. She’s from West Virginia, insert joke here. When I met Bonita—at the Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America trade show up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, inside the old racetrack—that’s how she introduced herself: “I’m from West Virginia, insert joke here.” When I told her I lived 127 miles from Myrtle Beach you’d’ve thought I asked her to move in with me to a five-bedroom mansion in some place like Orlando, or Knoxville.
    For what it’s worth, her West Virginia daddy owned a driving range outside Buckhannon, but he couldn’t make it to Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Ranger Owners of America because of a bout of black lung he contracted from just breathing in the vicinity of coal mines, so he sent Bonita.
    She and I had no other choice but to fall in love, what with all the complimentary range balls, hand towels, ball markers, and divot repair tools handed out, not to mention the free symposiums that involved everything from fescue to front wheel pickers to tee-line turf. By the time she and I wandered toward a man about to speak about the importance of ball washers we couldn’t take it anymore and retired to my motel room where I had a good bottle of Smirnoff’s.
    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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œWe’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.
    â€œYou 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