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.”
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 BLACKS ONLY 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.