Double Whammy

"Think you'd best get him over to the hospital in Melbourne," Jim Tile said. "Nobody here in town can fix that jawbone."

Ozzie nodded glumly. "I gotta go by the house and fetch Momma." He got in the truck and started the ignition.

Jim Tile leaned in the driver's window and said, "Ozzie, you understand what happens if I have to arrest you."

"Culver goes to jail," Ozzie said wanly.

"For the rest of his natural life. When he gets to feeling better, please remind him, would you?"

"I will," said Ozzie. "Sir, I swear I don't think he meant to shoot you."

"Of course he did," said Jim Tile, "but I'm inclined to let the whole thing slide, long as you boys stay out of my way for a while."

Ozzie was so relieved that he nearly peed his pants. He didn't even mind that the black man had called themboys. Basically Ozzie was happy to still be alive. The trooper could have killed them both and gotten away with it, yet here he was, being a true Christian and letting them go.

"Just one favor,' Jim Tile said, resting a coal-black arm on the door of the truck.

"Sure," Ozzie said.

"Where can I find Thomas Curl?"

Richard Clarence Lockhart was buried on January 25 at the Our Lady of Tropicana cemetery outside Harney. It was a relatively small turnout, considering Dickie's fame and stature in the county, but the low attendance could be explained easily enough. By unfortunate coincidence, the day of the funeral was also opening day of the Okeechobee Bass Blasters Classic, so almost all Dickie's friends and colleagues were out fishing. Dickie would certainly forgive them, the preacher had chuckled, especially since the tournament required a nonrefundable entry fee of two thousand dollars per boat.

Dickie Lockhart was buried in a handsome walnut coffin, not a bass boat. The hearse bearing the coffin was escorted to Our Lady of Tropicana by three police cars, including a trooper's cruiser driven, none too happily, by Jim Tile. Dickie Lockhart's casket was closed during the eulogy, since the mortician ultimately had been frustrated in his cosmetic efforts to remove the Double Whammy spinnerbait from Dickie's lip; in the clammy New Orleans morgue the lure's hook had dulled, while Dickie's skin had only toughened. Rather than further mutilate the facial features of the deceased, the mortician had simply advised Dickie's sisters to keep the coffin closed and remember him as he was.

Ozzie Rundell was extremely grateful. He couldn't have borne another glimpse of his murdered idol.

Culver Rundell did not attend the funeral, since he was hospitalized with thirty-nine linear feet of stainless-steel wire in his jaws. On Culver's behalf, the bait shop had ordered a special floral arrangement topped by a ceramic jumping fish. Unfortunately the ceramic fish was a striped marlin, not a largemouth bass, but no one at the funeral was rude enough to mention it.

The Reverend Charles Weeb also did not attend the funeral, but on behalf of the Outdoor Christian Network he sent a six-foot gladiola wreath with a white ribbon that said: 'Tight Lines, Old Friend." This was the hit of the graveside service, but the best was yet to come. The next morning, at the closing of the regular Sunday broadcast of Jesus in Tour Living Room,Charlie Weeb offered a special benediction for the soul of his dear, dear friend Dickie Lockhart, the greatest bass fisherman in the history of America. Then Dickie's face appeared on the big screen behind the pulpit, and the assembled flock lip-synched to a Johnny Cash recording of "Nearer, My God, to Thee." At the end of the song everybody was weeping, even Charlie Weeb, the man who had so often privately referred to Dickie Lockhart as a shiftless pellet-brained cocksucker.

Twenty-five minutes after the church show was over and the audience was paid, the Reverend Charles Weeb strolled into a skybox in the Superdome, which had been rented for the big press conference. If Charlie Weeb was disappointed in the sparse turnout of media, he didn't show it. He wore his wide-bodied smile and a cream-colored suit with a plum kerchief in the breast pocket. At his side stood a rangy tanned man with curly brown hair and a friendly, toothy smile. Right away the man reminded some of the photographers of Bruce Dern, the actor, but it wasn't. It was Eddie Spurling, the fisherman.

"Gentlemen," said Charlie Weeb, still in character, "am I a happy man today! Yes indeed, I am. It is my pleasure to announce that, beginning this week, Eddie Spurling will be the new host of Fish Fever."

There were only two print reporters in the room, but Weeb politely waited for them to jot the big news in their spiral notebooks.