Calloustown by George Singleton Page B

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?
    â€œPine,” 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.
    â€œWell, 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