Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/299259
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 3 9 I suppose there was a time when the Captain and I did not know one another, when he did not call me a smart ass, but neither of us can recall when that might have been. We are about half senile now, or at least we pretend to be whenever it suits. Deaf too for the same reasons. I'd bring my shotgun to junior high, a single barrel Harrington and Richardson 20 gauge, a box or two of low brass No. 8s, cheapest I could find. We'd ride the school bus to his daddy's farm. He'd break out his Winchester Model 12, another 20 gauge, and we'd shoot us a mess of doves for supper. We'd walk the railroad back home and full of devilment, bridge the rails with our gun barrels, dropping the cross arms and stopping traffic on US 21. A boy could do such things back then without getting ventilated by Homeland Security. But we inherited our own precarious world. No VHF, no GPS, no EMS, no DSS or Child Protective Services, thank God for all of it. We hunted, we fished, we were cast adrift and cast ashore. We were marooned, harried by waterspouts, windblown, sunburned, But they smelled so good, Edwards five and dime perfume and the seawind in their hair on full moon nights, a boy might promise them anything. H e wasn't Captain and I wasn't a writer back then, we were just a couple of smart ass kids from the tidewater, scared half to death at what the world was fixing to throw at us. But we wouldn't let on, no sir, no ma'am. He wanted an appointment to the Naval Academy but settled for second choice, an ROTC scholarship at Ole Miss. I wanted to be left alone, and I settled for second choice too, a rocky farm in northern Minnesota, a log house and barn at the end of a five mile dead-end road. We did not see each other again for almost 20 years. But I heard tell of his comings and goings. He was at Pearl Harbor, roaring the coastal roads in a rag-top Mustang. He was a gunnery officer on a destroyer in the South China Sea, shelling hell out of the North Vietnamese. He was engineering he author and retired U.S. Navy Captain Eddie Bellamy celebrated their reunion with this Lowcountry whitetail. T o r i z o n s H Roger Pinckney Fifty years later, the old men were boys once again. lit up by lightning, shot at, but Praise Jesus, never hit. We killed deer, wild hogs, quail, ducks, rails and damn near ourselves but not quite. But then there were the women, and I really should not complain. We double dated in his 1956 Packard Clipper, a boudoir of a back seat and a 200-horsepower V-8. "Hey Captain, thing got only two speeds – idling or wide-ass open?" "Smart ass!" The girls gobbled our oysters and swilled our beer and conspired amongst themselves in the pisser. Aggravating wenches, they would never give it up without some sort of ring, and a pop-top peeled off a Colt 45 Malt Liquor would not suffice.