The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

  As he waded back, he saw that the sun had changed its angle and the river had gone quite metallic. Quinn was suffering a not unusual loss of faith and believed that all the trout were in his creel, that the river held no more. He went back through the marshland hoping to put up a woodcock. Not a sign. Nothing flew or swam when his belief failed.

  As he circled beneath the plateau the top of which was the compound, he heard the adult, braying voices of the deadly offspring of the founding generation. He remembered the party tonight.

  Janey was on the porch. “Isn’t Vernor with you?”

  “He left before lunch,” Quinn said, stripping off his waders and stepping into his shoes. Janey said that he must be in the gallery then. When Quinn asked if she wouldn’t have heard him, she said that he wasn’t going to shoot; he was going to make bullets out of some stained-glass-window lead he had bought: it had the right tin content or something. “Well, come in,” Quinn said. “I have to clean these.” He patted the creel. He pushed the wicker chair over by the entrance to the kitchen and Janey sat down. He handed her the issue of Vogue with the farting moon women and went in and put the three trout in the sink. He liked to see trout in a porcelain sink. He liked to see them on a newspaper almost as well, though not as much as the sink. It wasn’t the same with game birds. A grouse bleeding on the newspaper could be disturbing, for example; while in the sink, it had the quality of rare foodstuff. Quinn picked up the largest fish, gripped it under the gill plates and opened it with his pen knife from the vent all the way up to the point of the lower jaw, detaching the gills there and at the base of the skull and pulling the entrails away in a piece. In the middle was the whitish translucent stomach and its dark contents showed through. Quinn split it carefully, spreading the insides with the blade of his knife on the porcelain: hundreds of undigested nymphs. The second, smaller trout contained the same plus a bright minnow and a few red ants, some of which had eaten into the stomach lining. There was one brown honeybee in the third. Quinn removed the dark blood along the spine of each fish because it made the meat bitter, rinsed them, wrapped them in wax paper and put them in the icebox.

  “I’m nervous about tonight.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Vernor said they do this every Saturday. But what do they do? The thing is, they must be so practiced up. I mean what goes on?”

  “At the Bug House? Drink a lot. Talk about years past. It’s sometimes touching and usually boring. The worst of it is the singing. The rest shouldn’t bother you. But the singing can be a mudbath—” Quinn stopped. He had just found a packet of sixty or seventy business letters which, on quick examination, proved to be half junk mail. The covering letter from Mary Beth began, to his special disgust, “Dear Boss Man.”

  “When Vernor and I were kids, we listened in on those Bug House parties. We thought all that boozy talk was Roman oratory. But my mother hated the parties and wouldn’t let me go near them when she could help it.”

  “Why did she hate them?” Janey asked, as if the point of view of another woman would make her see it.

  “My father always stopped off there when he came up for weekends. And when he came in, still dressed in his sharkskin suit from the office, and his face was ballooning under a narrow-brimmed Borsolino, she knew that he was in no condition, as they say. Sometimes he brought his pals and they drank and crashed around and cried and sent my mother fluttering upstairs to polish her driftwood collection. And you should have seen the stuff; it all shone like agate.”

  Janey kept asking questions. She couldn’t imagine that someone who had known Stanton as long as Quinn had, worked; and she asked how his father had come to give him his business and when. “All right,” he said. He liked the story. He told how his father had discussed arrangements on the golf course. The prospect of retiring had upset him so much, he drove the electric cart recklessly and finally turned it over, breaking his leg in three places. Quinn stood next to him, helpless to remove the thousand-pound cart upside down on his father’s legs. A greenskeeper tried to help and tipped the cart up halfway before dropping it back on his father, who brought the ambitious idiot to earth with a single blow of his Cary Middlecoff weighted brass putter. Eventually, they loaded his father, fussy and upset as a baby, into a sod wagon drawn by a tractor and took him to the clubhouse and called an ambulance. Quinn was covered with spilt battery acid from the electric cart, and as he waited in the pro shop his Bermuda shorts melted off him, leaving him standing in ventilated underwear that was going very fast too. Quinn helped his father into the ambulance. His father’s hair was filled with Kentucky blue-grass seed and shone like an aureole of gold. Quinn remembered his gasping from the stretcher, “And they call golf a sissy’s game!” Afterward, when friends told stories of danger on the African veldt or the Guatemalan highlands, Quinn’s father told a golf story and showed scars. He said no man needed to go to the wilderness.

  Janey seemed amused by the account. She leaned on her hand, hiding her smiles. But then, when it passed, she looked off to one side, at nothing, the eyes slate and very clear, the straight nose, the mouth now slightly compressed, expressionless, vacant and fine.

  “Have you ever hit Vernor?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Has he ever hit you?”

  “Once.”

  “What for?”

  “I said there was no God.”

  “I often think he’s fairly crazy,” she said. “Sometimes he talks such foolishness that I imagine him blowing up in front of my eyes. It doesn’t seem you can talk crazy for so long and stay in one piece.” Strange how apt this seemed to Quinn. He saw how she must have her hands full with Stanton, helping him while he vilified her publicly, then swamped her with affection. Quinn had the same sense she had that Stanton held some unfathomable capacity for wrecking himself. He might very well blow apart, as Janey thought, doing it as he would in his unique way, but exploding still, a nova, as Quinn imagined, blazing arms, legs, torso, head, away from the center, each part trailing flames in the sky, the head raving in a military fashion: now hear this, can it, the order of the day is that an army at rest will not profit, Napoleon did not profit, mount up men and get the show on the road as I am losing my head, my mistress, my bank account, my charm, my hair. Quinn thought of Janey trying to contain this corrosive silliness and she seemed so much in danger that he thought of himself as the rescuer. She lit a cigarette, inhaled and then exhaled as though trying to get the smoke away from her. She moved her seat out of the direct afternoon sun slanting across the room from the tall rolled-glass windows that were violet from years of strong light.

  “Well, I hope you still like him,” she said.

  “Can’t you tell I do?”

  “Not really, no. I guess I had a different idea of things. Vernor talked about you all the time. Then when you were, I don’t know, cold to him…” She couldn’t have been expected to understand. And though it bothered him to have given such an impression, he knew Stanton would remember and get it right. Quinn’s refusal to cooperate with Stanton had a number of sides. Quinn knew that if you played patty cake with Stanton he would soon be all over you.

  * * *

  Quinn hung back. He could see the green compound on its ineffable mound darkening in the evening. He could see the trees merge to a dark wall around the compound and the sky deepen above it. He could hear many a silly voice. In the compound the Bug House glowed yellow and hummed like a hive, and even at this distance he could hear the screen door clatter as another club member went in. He could see the people inside, a dark moving spot in the center of the surrounding screened light like the yolk of an egg. He went forward. He went back. He wondered if a grotesque fuss were to be made of him. Supercilious questions about his long absence. He pressed his hair down on top with the flat of his hand, adjusted his silk ascot, ran his thumb behind the lapels of his jacket and stepped out of the bushes. Leaving his house, he had felt suitably dressed, his outfit comfortably integrated; b
y now, however, he felt ensnared in his clothes, as though he might have to slash his way out. He walked toward the Bug House and could hear the sounds of the night, the frogs chirping below, the steady woodland throb of the generator. The Bug House with its light was a tall oval in the night and delicate barn swallows dove through the tapering top after armored bugs that were the color of varnish. Overhead, you could feel rain hanging in the warmth of the night; and Quinn knew that there would be hatches of insects and good fishing if he could get to it.

  “The true Quinn!” yelled Stanton in an opening bid, as Quinn entered briskly. “I feel certain that he can tell you.” Five faces turned to the door quizzically. Quinn knew them all right. “Tell how you touched down in that crop-dusting plane and tore up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” Quinn pulled the door shut behind him, perplexed at having to whip something together so soon. Janey leaned in repose on the piano beside Stanton. Quinn wondered what fatality obliged him to continue. The five had moved around him and he addressed himself to them.

  “Picture me,” he said, “in my Steerman biplane dusting away, as it were. Suddenly, I touch down and tear up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” This seemed a suitably inane place to stop. Stanton was delighted. One of the five coughed.

  “Tell them what happened when you returned to the airport many months later,” said Stanton slithering onto the piano. This would be difficult to play.

  “Many months later,” Quinn began, ransacking his brain.

  “When you returned to the airport—” One of the five, Fortescue by name, assisted.

  “That’s right, and the Steerman biplane had been left neglected out in the field. I couldn’t find it. ‘Where’s my Steerman biplane?’ I asked a farmer. ‘Out there,’ he said. ‘Out where?’ ‘Out there in the turnip patch.’” Quinn considered this merely an escape maneuver; but Stanton was much affected. He fell off the piano, for one thing, and could be heard more or less barking from the floor. Quinn went over to the table and made himself a drink. Purely on the basis of Stanton’s response, he awarded himself a certain number of points. He looked around. The five were still standing, not having yet broken the crescent they had formed. Then, two at the right end, Sturtevant and Olds, looked at each other and began to move. This precipitated a general movement among the others who, yes, they were beginning to move now, mostly just turning in their tracks, but there was sign of life here, the play of expression on the faces like shadows on glass; and before long they had become part of the crowd of thirty who talked and leaned into each other’s smoke. Quinn joined them and ingratiated himself by starting up a conversation with Fortescue about his collection of military miniatures, the largest in the country. “… my point being,” Fortescue concluded, “that such quantities of horse are scarcely imaginable at Ypres—” he was talking about a competitors’ collection “—and therefore this fool had made the whole battle implausible to me. I don’t expect perfection. After all, I have displayed hussars with paint bubbles on their chests and artillerymen divided by the seams of sloppy casting. But I find a historical lapse like this abhorrent.” Quinn said that he was putting it mildly.

  Meanwhile, another member named Scott, an obsequious professor to whom the academic life had given an avid taste for the outside world, greeted everyone who came through the screen door—many were entering for the third and fourth time—with the phrase, “Nice to see you.” Quinn’s main fear all along was Stanton and that is why he buried himself in this group. Spengler, the chronicler of the club, was explaining his race against time to finish his account of the club’s first hundred years by the centennial on the Fourth. “Nice to see you,” said Scott, looking past them with his diluted eyes. There were under twenty-five hairs in his moustache. “My account,” said Spengler, “is very thorough and does not quail before realities.”

  “Nice to see you.”

  “Where have you gotten your information?” Quinn asked.

  “Letters and diaries mostly. There was an early account, done around the turn of the century, which I take issue with. This was written by a local boy who resented the club and who was not a member. The name of his account was Hellfire in the Woods and tried to prove that the club was founded for disreputable reasons. I take issue, Quinn.”

  “Nice to see you, Bob.”

  “As well you should,” said Quinn. He could see Stanton craning his neck. He was after Quinn.

  “And I put it right on the line. Everybody asks me if I am afraid to write my chronicle before I see what is in the time capsule and I answer that thorough research has no fears. The thing is this, the first ten years are terra incognita and my job is to reconstruct them. I do not quail, Quinn.” Stanton had the scent now. He was moving. Quinn’s stomach got colder.

  “Nice to see you.”

  Olson came in. Thin, intelligent Jack Olson, native of this Northern country, was wearing an apron and carrying a tray, holding the tray aloft on his left hand and with the other unloading snacks, bonbons and party favors. As Stanton went in one end of the group, Quinn squeezed out the other and went over to Olson. “Why aren’t you fishing?” Olson asked. Quinn liked the quiet sanity of his voice.

  “I don’t know why,” he confessed.

  “The big duns will be on the water. I got a handful of nymphs out of the feeder creek and the shuck was all dark, almost black on the top where the wings show. Why don’t you pass this up?” Olson said contemptuously of the party. He knew Quinn wouldn’t misunderstand him.

  “What about you?”

  “Tell you what, I’ll have a look at the river. If I got it right about the hatch, I’ll come get you.”

  “That’d be good. I’d love to go. What about Vernor?” Olson looked over at Stanton who made his way from conversation to conversation toward them. He didn’t conceal the hesitation before saying, “Why not.” Quinn nodded, then turned hopelessly back toward the group to find Stanton opposite him, having sandwiched some of the older members between himself and the unwitting Quinn. He was encouraging them in sentimental reminiscence. “Autumn boulevards,” he was saying. “A leaf falls slowly to the sidewalk, right?”

  “That’s what happens,” said an old gentleman sadly.

  “How about when you first found that old portrait of Mummy in her wedding gown?” Assenting murmurs. “And the portrait is in an oval frame?” More of them. “Now, what about this: the summer house is boarded up. The luggage is out on the porch. The refreshment stand is closed for the winter. Already, the ocean just isn’t as blue—”

  “Oh, gawd!” said one of the women morosely. Stanton seized the moment to begin singing softly and in the most cloying voice possible, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot—Come on, won’t you join me, fellows!” The others, staring and unwilling, began. Stanton stopped them priggishly. Quinn saw Janey a short distance away, watching and talking to no one. By this time, Stanton had gathered most of them in front of the piano. He was running back and forth with a purely imaginary choirmaster’s scuttle, adjusting shoulders and making people stand up straight. The others began to look on. “Come, ladies!” Stanton cried joyously. “You join us, too, won’t you?” Some of the women who had stood aside piled in behind. “James!” he called, letting his eye fall horribly on Quinn. “Do us the honors on the piano!”

  “No, I—”

  “James!” The contemptuous disappointment that Quinn had seen when he offered the box lunches at Mackinac began to spread on Stanton’s face.

  “I may as well,” Quinn said, overpowered. Stanton bent to the storage box beside the bandstand. He stood up with a tuberous, corroded saxophone in his hands, the reed of which he inspected earnestly. He pulled up a folding chair next to the piano where Quinn was now seated and sat down. Quinn watched his useless fingering of the rigid keys. “Now! On three, you all begin to sing and Quinn and I begin to play!”

  “Sing what!” any number of people asked at once, and angrily too. They were not happy with this.

  “Cut it out! �
�Auld Lang Syne’!” Quinn experimented with the piano. He spread his fingers as he had seen others do and pressed to see if it would be a chord. It was not. Part of the choir looked over, brows furrowed. Quinn stood up halfway from the bench, laughed and sat down again. “All right now! Here we go! And a one and a two and a THREE.” He put the end of the saxophone in his mouth and honked it terrifically (Phnoo!) as the singing began, “Should Auld Ac—” and Quinn splashed his hands into the keys, looking up as the singing stopped on a miasma of unlikable groans and nasal flutings. Janey walked thin-lipped out the door. Someone said, “Most amusing” as the group broke up. Stanton said, “Go then!” and the party was soon back to normal. Quinn looked over his piano at Stanton looking over his saxophone at him. “Janey’s gone,” Quinn said. He got up.

  “You notice every move she makes, don’t you, cowboy?”

  “Each and every one.”

  “Isn’t this a gang of spoilsports?”

  “A gang.”

  “Janey won’t like us for what we’ve done.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Quinn said. “We go too far.”

  “We have a history of that.”

  “Do we ever.”

  “I cherish that history, James. Cherish, do you hear me?”

  “I don’t intend to let it continue. I may as well say that. I don’t intend to lapse again,” Quinn tried to say conclusively. Stanton laughed.

  “Janey thinks that hope lies in your reforming me. I told her that that was a good one all right.”