6

 

 

That night, Ben Oswald took his announcer crew out to dinner. I got a call in my room at about five thirty inviting me to join them.

Outside the hotel’s entrance was a big white bus-like vehicle, with green lettering along the side reading Lowcountry Tours. There was no one sitting inside, so I went back into the hotel and checked the lobby bar. Three of the guys were standing at the bar, feet resting on the brass rail, sipping cocktails while the TV set behind the bar showed the day’s sports highlights.

“Hack-man!” one of the guys at the bar called out to me when I walked in.

“Hey, Jimmy,” I said, and went over to greet Jimmy Williams, the main color announcer at IBS. Jimmy had played on the Tour for about fifteen years before a shoulder injury sent him up to the booth. He had won a PGA Championship along with a handful of Tour events and had starred in a couple Ryder Cups. He worked the booth on the 18th hole along with his TV announcer partner, Van Collins, who was standing next to Jimmy at the bar.

“Hacker, you know Van, right?” Jimmy said, nodding at the man next to him, “And this is Billy Fairfield, the Voice of the Par Threes.”

I shook hands all around. Jimmy Williams was now in his late forties but still had that flatbelly look of the former professional golfer. He also had a bushy head of blond hair cut improbably in an old mullet, which had been popular back before he starting playing on the Tour. I was surprised no one had ever told him he looked dated and stupid, but then again, it was only a haircut. His do must cost a fortune at the salon—because who does mullet cuts anymore?—but then, he could probably write it off as a tax deduction.

Van Collins was maybe twenty years older. He had been announcing sports for IBS for a generation at least. His familiar baritone had called college football, professional baseball and hockey games for the network before he moved over to handle the golf broadcasts some ten years ago. He was known as a pro’s pro…always hitting his marks, seamlessly moving the telecasts between commercials, promos and live action. He was dressed in golf casual, a sweater tossed over his shoulders and his hair turned mostly to white. He had been nursing a tall Scotch at the bar, and after a desultory handshake and wan smile, he went back to it.

Billy Fairfield was tall and wiry with rimless glasses and eyes that never stopped darting around the room. He, too, smiled and shook my hand, but held back a bit. He seemed to be taking his cues from whatever Van Collins did.

“When did you get into town?” Jimmy asked me.

“Couple days ago,” I said. “I’ve been scouting the town.”

“Well, shit,” Jimmy said. “You shoulda called me. I could have used a better partner today than old Van here. Jeezus, Collins, how many three-putts did you have?”

“Kiss my ass,” Van said, not turning away from his Scotch, as if he were worried it would run away and hide if he took his eyes off it.

“Where’s the rest of the motley crew?” I asked.

“Oh, they’ll be down,” Jimmy said. “Oswald likes to be fashionably late.”

“Up yours, Williams,” said a brash voice at the door, and we all turned to see the Assassin, Ben Oswald himself, standing there. “How many goddam drinks you had already?”

“Not enough, Ben, not nearly enough,” Williams said.

Oswald was wearing black jeans, a white Oxford shirt open at the collar and a pair of cowboy boots. He stared at me through his thick glasses. “I see you got the message,” he said to me. “You know all these guys?”

Before I could answer, someone came around from behind Oswald. She was short, she was rounded in all the right places and she was quite blond, in a color not usually found in nature. She tossed her locks back with a flip of her head and came walking right over to me, hand extended.

“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” she said. “I’m Kelsey Jenkins. Nice to meet you, Hacker.”

I shook her hand, and didn’t mention that we had met some years ago that weekend I covered the LPGA event down in Miami. The weekend that ended with the murder and suicide of Big Wynnona Stilwell and her husband Harold. I figured Kelsey had been so traumatized by those events that she had forgotten meeting a stud muffin like myself.

Kelsey had joined the IBS crew a couple of years ago. And while some of the old timers thought adding a female voice to the weekend broadcasts of men’s golf was sacrilegious, the viewers got used to watching her work. Oswald most of the time sent her out to follow one of the leading groups and do the fairway reporting—checking the lie, checking the distance, predicting the shots to come. Other times, he sent her to work one of the towers on the concluding holes. Either way, she had turned out to be a competent and interesting announcer.

“We all here?” Oswald said, looking around.

“Waiting on Parker,” Jimmy said with a laugh. The others all smiled. He looked at me. “There’s always one straggler,” he said, “And ours is Parker Long.”

“Is Kenny Craig not coming?” Van Collins piped up from the bar.

“Oh, yeah, the Professor,” Oswald chortled. “Can’t forget him.”

“I’m right here,” said another voice, and Craig walked in. Short and a bit on the pudgy side, Craig was the main swing analyst, the master of slo-mo, the guy who could dissect someone’s swing right down to the toenails. In addition to his work with the network, Kenny Craig worked as a swing coach with a half dozen or so Tour players. He knew a lot about the golf swing, hence his moniker.

“OK, everyone into the bus,” Oswald said. “If Parker doesn’t show up in five minutes, we’re leaving him.”

The guys at the bar settled their tab and we all walked back outside. Kelsey Jenkins fell in next to me and whispered “He always says that, but he’s never left anyone behind for dinner.”

We filed into the bus and everyone took a seat. The bus held about forty seats, so there was plenty of room. Once we were all seated, the bus driver cranked up the engine and revv’ed it a few times. As if on cue, Parker Long came out of the hotel, looking a bit rushed, and swiftly got on board. We all rewarded him with a round of derisive applause. The driver pulled the door closed and pulled away.

“Right,” Oswald called out. “I hope you all like seafood, ‘cause we’re going to a place that serves the best in the South. It ain’t fancy, but, well, you’ll see.”

The bus driver followed Abercorn through the heart of the historic district, passed by Forsythe Park and its huge, multi-layered fountain spewing white foamy water, and took a left to the east on Victory Drive. There were still some large brick mansions facing on Victory, but the houses in the neighborhoods behind looked more like normal-sized suburban ranches.

We drove past an area filled with the usual mix of big box stores, through a few more suburban neighborhoods and then, just before the road crossed a bridge over the Wilmington River, turned hard right down a narrow little road on a bluff above the river. A little bit further down, we passed a sign that said Welcome to Pinpoint.

“Anybody know the most famous person who hails from Pinpoint, Georgia?” Ben Oswald called out from the front of the bus. “How about you, history boy?”

He was, of course, referring to me. Luckily I knew the answer.

“Unless you’re thinking of someone else, I’d say it has to be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,” I said.

“Give that man a cigar!” Oswald said.

The bus slowed down to a crawl. The street was barely wide enough for the bus and the verges were covered in white beach sand mixed with crushed oyster shells. To the right, we passed some scruffy looking one-story houses, shaded by the trees, yards encased in chain link. To the left, the greenish water of the river seemed still. Along the bank in the distance were some weathered wooden docks crowded with working shrimp boats, their derrick arms raised upright and their nets hanging neatly. Looking out over the marshes from the road, I felt I was in central Kansas: the horizon stretched out endlessly over the brown and green grasses, broken here and there by collections of trees that indicated where higher land had survived amid the eternal tidal flows.

“This is a workingman’s town,” Oswald said. “The open ocean is maybe five miles thataway…” he pointed to the east, “…but to get there, the boats gotta run about ten miles through the marshes, following the green snake. But be glad they do, because the shrimp and crabs they serve at this place probably arrived at the docks an hour or so ago.”

The bus pulled up in front of a gray house with a sign that announced it as Fiona’s Seafood Shack. It looked kinda shacky, with some white plastic tables and chairs set on a patio in front.

“Don’t look like much,” Oswald said. “But just wait.”

We climbed off the bus and went inside. The cinder-block room was filled with plywood tables with square holes cut in the middle. Underneath each hole was a fifty-five gallon plastic trash can. Customers sat around the tables and huge trays of boiled crabs and shrimp were brought out, along with wooden blocks and small wooden hammers: you used the hammer to crack the shells of the crabs, dug out the meat and tossed the empty shells into the hole in the table.

“Mistah Ben,” called out a large black women standing behind the counter at one end of the room. “Bless your heart!”

“Hiya, Fiona,” Oswald said, waving at her. “We got about eight, and everyone’s hungry.”

“Y’all done come to the right place, then,” Fiona said. “Sit yourself down and we’ll get you fed right up!”

We seated ourselves around one of the large tables. Some of Fiona’s crew brought out some pitchers of iced tea, plastic glasses filled with ice and the hammers and planks. The floor was poured concrete, the cinder block walls were painted lime green, the lighting overhead was fluorescent and there was a jukebox against one wall that flashed colors. I went over and pumped in a few quarters and pushed the right buttons and the doleful opening chords of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” echoed through the room. Some of the other diners, mostly black folk, nodded their approval.

“Righteous,” said one old man sitting near the juke box. He was wearing a paper bib and his face and fingers all seemed to be coated in crab juice. But he was smiling.

It wasn’t long before the rest of us were similarly decked in seafood detritus. Fiona brought us several large metal trays loaded with boiled blue crab, several more with boiled shrimp and dishes full of cole slaw, french fries and hush puppies, cocktail sauce and drawn butter. For a long time, there was nothing but silence from our table, except for the sounds of wooden hammers cracking crabs open and humans sucking the delectable meat into their gaping maws.

Ben Oswald finally sat back with a deep sigh of contentment and looked around the table proudly.

“Best goddam food south of DC,” he said. “And I’ll kick the ass of anyone who says different.”

That kind of narcissistic pronouncement was like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull to me, but I decided to let it pass. One, I was too full of fresh shrimp to argue, and two, I realized that being the boss-man was important to The Assassin. He was, of course, just another dipshit who happened to know how to make good golf TV, but so what? I kept my trap shut and thought that Mary Jane, at least, would have approved of my newfound maturity.

Oswald turned his gaze on me.

“Whaddya think, Hacker?” he said. “Best seafood you ever had?”

“Best seafood of its kind,” I said, borrowing the qualifying phrase from what Gary Player always says about whatever golf course he’s standing on. “Bar none.”

“Goddam right,” Ben growled. “Kelsey? You had enough?”

“Way too much, Ben,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Goddam right.” He took a few sheets from the carton of wet wipes that Fiona’s crew placed on the table and wiped down his hands, arms and face, then passed it around.

“OK,” he said as the rest of us hosed ourselves down. “I want everyone at the course tomorrow at one p.m.,” he said. “Which means those of you going off golfing need to leave early and get back in time. You got that, pro?” He was looking right at Jimmy Williams, who just smiled that 100-watt smile of his and nodded.

“Meeting at one, rehearsal at two,” Oswald continued, looking around the table. “We’re just three weeks from the Masters. We gotta start handicapping these fuckers, y’know? Tell the folks who’s playing good, who’s not. Van, you got all that?”

Van Collins, the head announcer, nodded solemnly. He was staring at his tall plastic glass which was filled with ice, water and what I suspected was Scotch that had come from Van’s own hip flask. Van seemed to be a big fan of Scotch.

Oswald went on. “Billy, you’re on seventeen. Parker, sixteen. Kelsey and Kenny are the rovers. Any questions?”

I raised my hand.

“Hacker?”

“They got dessert here?”