The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

  “Boss man!”

  “Give me the news.”

  “I’ve got you booked solid as of July one.”

  “What’s happening July one?”

  “You’re coming back…”

  “How do you know?”

  “Boss man!”

  Business had windrowed nastily. Every sale or renewal marked a new all-time high. The factory picnic was coming up in two weeks, which affair marked the cycle of Quinn’s business life: he had begun it by directing and producing the factory picnic of the year before. Mary Beth had taken the matter of customer gifts into her own hands and had subscribed to a service, run by canny New England sharpers, which shipped live lobsters at five times their real value in containers shaped like tricorn hats and decorated with facsimile signatures of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

  “I’ll never come back,” said Quinn, “you can’t make me.” He thought of the containers opened, dying lobsters crawling over his calling card.

  Mary Beth had more surprises: he was now a charter subscriber to the Hamtramck Polish war memorial; he had bought twenty tickets to the Fourth of July Arc Welders’ Ball; he had agreed to speak before the Dexter Jaycees; he had become a member of the Society of Production Consultants, whatever that was; his tax lawyer had made him chairman of the board instead of president, and so on. Quinn’s interest flagged with these permutations and he grew wan. Mary Beth sensed his lassitude. She became assertive and seemed to swagger. Quinn was glad that they were separated by hundreds of miles of insulated wire. If he were in the office, she would make one of her outlandish bids for sex by hitching around the place in a way that aroused Quinn’s scientific interest rather than his ardor.

  Mary Beth was a Canadian and affected rugged Windsor tweeds that seemed to carry the stench of the highlands in them. She had pink cheeks too and sandy hair, genetically wind-tossed. Sometimes she brought Quinn presents from Ontario, cases of smuggled Moulson’s ale or Cincinnati Cream or a small wheel of Black Diamond cheddar with a rind that cut away as cleanly as apple peel. This was a real service, unlike her secretarial work; and when Quinn saw the fine gold upright bottles of ale in his refrigerator next to the cloth-wrapped wheel of cheddar, he sometimes vowed to spread-eagle Mary Beth in the office and prong her devoutedly. But when he considered how he would get on with the day’s work afterward, he reneged; because the vision of Mary Beth, rumpled and wearing a bonny, sated, pioneer grin was too bright on his mind. So he kept taking the cheese, the ale and, one fall, an oppressive, oily Indian sweater, thick and environmental; and Mary Beth remained doughty, vigorous, inefficient. She wrote “cheque” for “check” like an incorrigibly mandarin stylist and said “hoose,” “roond” and “broon” for “house,” “round” and “brown.” Eventually, when she was sure that Quinn would be only considerate, she began to entertain callers, salesmen, accountants, file clerks; at first a great many, most of them in blue serge suits, the kind of shoes issued for parade dress in the armed services, and discreet crew cuts of indeterminate color. Then a steady repeating few took Mary Beth out for long lunch hours from which she returned with the sated look Quinn had been obliged once to visualize for himself. Things got quiet and Quinn found he could go to his office and get his work done, though he sometimes met strangers in the hall or found condoms hovering in the toilet. He learned at last to live with it all.

  Quinn left Mary Beth on the phone today with instructions to make a priority list of things he had to do and send it with appropriate files. He issued this directive precisely but with a sense of fighting back boredom. “Count on me,” Mary Beth told him.

  * * *

  He had given Olson time to sober up. He walked to the small house to learn what had come of Stanton’s visit. He cautioned himself against giving anything away if Stanton had said nothing. Olson’s pride was a touchy and complicated matter. When he got there, he found the gate ajar and a cat slumbering in the yard and the Springer spaniel nowhere in sight. Then from the interior of the porch a man materialized in a white T-shirt, its right sleeve rolled around a pack of Lucky Strikes whose red spot showed as though staring. The man was heavy, maybe thirty-five.

  “Is Jack in?”

  “Jack is retired.” The man came down the steps linking his fingers behind his head and thus revealing a bevel of flaccid belly.

  “Retired? To where?”

  “He mentioned Florida.”

  “Florida—”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’d he want to go to Florida for?”

  “He heard about an opening for an alligator wrestler.”

  “What?”

  “The man always wins. The alligator doesn’t know they’re wrestling. He allows himself to be tied in knots.”

  “I’m not interested in alligator wrestling as such. I—”

  “All I can tell you is that he looked like he could wrestle alligators when he left. He was that mad.”

  “But you say Florida—”

  “Oh, I don’t know for sure. I’m taking a wild guess. I don’t see anything wrong with Florida. Hot in the summer they say.”

  “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean?” He was suspicious.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m the new manager. My name is Earl Olive.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Jack Olson!”

  Quinn stopped to take this in, swallowing it like a horse pill.

  “What did you do before this?” Quinn asked.

  “What do you want to know for?” The man leaned on the fence. His black hair was swept back on both sides and a few heavy strands fell down below his ears. The stretched T-shirt formed clean and square around the Luckies and the red spot now looked like a wound under the cloth. “Let me put it this way, I was in the live bait business.”

  “Like what kind of live bait?” Quinn asked; something quite intense had fallen over the conversation.

  “Worms.”

  Quinn was conscious of the sound of the trees around them breathing in the wind.

  “Worms? How did you get the worms?”

  “Like everybody else,” said the man after a pause. “I got the worms like everybody else. Okay?”

  “I want something more specific than that.”

  “Look, you get a old crank telephone and cut off the phone part so all you got left is the box and crank. Then there is two wires and onto each one you hook a rod. Okay, you go out in a field and put the rods into the ground, right? And give the crank a turn, am I right? Then what happens?”

  “Worms…”

  “Worms pop out of the ground, big nightcrawlers, wrigglers, red worms, the whole bit. Now do you believe I was in the bait racket?”

  “I never said I didn’t believe … you.”

  “Listen to me: here is how you work the grasshoppers. First, build you a frame onto the front of an old car. Next, make you a cheesecloth net for the frame which is longer on the bottom than on the top. Then drive across a field with the whole apparatus at top speed. Do you follow? It can get dangerous. Check the net ever couple passes, are you with me? Sometimes there is a ton of hoppers. Now I see you are looking for the dangerous part: oncet I was collecting hoppers when the car lit into a enormous chuck hole and I pitched over the hood and buried myself in about four feet of them slimy hoppers. If I had of been knocked unconscious I would have smothered under them bugs. As it was, it near spoilt the live bait business for my part.—Now do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “See how it was dangerous and could of kilt me?”

  “You bet I do, Earl.”

  “I handled frogs and frog harness, crickets, June bugs and hellgrammites. I was in the live bait business hand and foot. I had to cater to every live bait need. One fella would fish for bass with nothing but live baby mice. I had to have them. Another fella made a paste out of fireflies which he used to fish for brook trout. I had to have fireflies.” He looked to Quinn as thou
gh for a long expected question.

  Quinn didn’t know what it might be but asked, uncertainly, “Where was this?”

  “Boy you are full of queshtons. Okay, this was a few mile north of Ishpeming on the Yellow Dog river.”

  “Was that … a good location?”

  “A bad location.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “What was wrong with it? Nobody knew where I was at. How was they to know where I was at?”

  “I don’t know; but these people that wanted all these different baits…”

  “Oh, God! They was steady customers! That ain’t a living!” Quinn, buffaloed, felt compelled to say he was sorry. Earl Olive took it in good grace.

  “I was sorry too. I had a ton of live bait I couldn’t sell and I had to fish it all myself. I fished the Yellow Dog, the Escanaba, the Ontanagon, the Two Heart, come down here and fished the Pigeon, the Black, the Au Train, the Jordan and the Pere Marquette where, guess who I met?”

  Cautiously, “Who?”

  “Jack Olson! I was fished out. I had fished bugs, frogs, hellgrammites, mice and worms. I hit the Jordan in the middle of the Caddis hatch and must have killed every trout in the river. I ran into your Jack Olson up to the tavern in Manton and told him all about it. I thought he fit to kill me. He said he hated any a man who would fish a trout with bait. I said it was all meat to me and he walked out the tavern. Next time I seen him was last night in the same tavern and he asked me did I want this job. Well, I had got so I couldn’t look at a trout nor a piece of live bait; so I told him God damn right I wanted the job. So, then!” He went suddenly bashful. “Here I am!”

  * * *

  Representative John Olds, R. Mich., said: “Olson was a useful man. Which of us would deny that? But he was headstrong. He was hard to handle. He was a thorn in our sides. We are pleased to have him out of our hair. All this talk of property degenerating makes me tired. These woods and streams have a natural tendency to maintain themselves. We need a janitor and we’ve got one from the looks of this Olive. But whoever we have, our children and our children’s children will frequent these lands in perpetuam. The traditions of the Centennial Club, thanks to its board of directors, will continue de profundis. I thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Yuh, okay.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Enid “Cooky” Silt said: “A wise guy. Someone should have slapped his face. I’m glad he’s gone.” Impossible, thought Quinn, could Olson have seduced Mrs. Silt? Very hard to imagine; one thought he had better taste. Quinn was frankly appalled at the thought of those Mamie Eisenhower bangs damp with lascivious sweat, the fly-tying hands of that admirable woodsman busy.

  * * *

  Old Mrs. Newcombe and her husband agreed that times change, off with the old, on with the new. It is written that history is no respecter of persons.

  * * *

  Quinn found Spengler, the chronicler of the Centennial Club, below the spillway of the dam that regulated the level of the lake and kept its constant shoreline. He was sketching the punks that grew in the backwater there. Beside him was a pair of binoculars. He was on the lookout for Kirtland’s warbler which lived only in this county and wintered on Abaco island in the Bahamas. The chronicle was to come out on the Fourth of July, the centennial celebration of the club’s founding. The chronicle would contain an account of punks, of Kirtland’s warbler and of Olson. He wasn’t talking till then.

  * * *

  Scott said: “Our ideas of declining fortunes have changed since the seventeenth century. In the Low Countries, Huizinga argued—” He went on, too.

  * * *

  Stanton said: “I’m not qualified to answer, old sport. Unfortunately, Olson has become a non-person for me. He never was. So, how can I tell you whether or not I’m glad he’s gone.” Then he grinned. “Isn’t the new guy god-awful?”

  * * *

  Two nights later, the shooting began, waking everyone. Five shots rang out in the muggy night from behind the lake. Stanton appeared at Quinn’s in the morning. Quinn dressed and they hiked around the back side of the lake, breaking through the swale and basswood tangle. Presently, they came upon a place where the cover had been battered down and trampled. In the middle were a grown doe and a very young buck of fifty or sixty pounds. Whoever had shot them had started to hog-butcher the doe but had got nervous and ripped loins off the two quickly and beat it. So the little buck was nearly whole; while the doe was vented up to the sternum with the glossy spillage of intestines and jellying blood. Since neither animal had been bled, it would be certain that even the meat was spoiled.

  * * *

  Quinn ate dinner at the lodge. He scribbled drafts of business letters beside his plate and when he was finishing the meal, Janey came in and sat opposite him and said, “There you are.” She had caught him unexpectedly and for a moment they conversed very unnaturally. He called for coffee and she put on her dark glasses, doubtless from the same embarrassment; and they cut off her softening eyes so that her nose and cheeks were clear beveling lines around the glasses. Quinn reached across and removed them. He said he hadn’t meant to make her nervous. He folded the glasses and pushed the dishes to one side. Janey undid the rubber band from a fresh pack of pictures. “You wanted more,” she declared.

  “And I do.”

  “Then get the expression off your face. Sometimes my memory fails and I use these to prove I was around last week. Here, let’s do it this way. You ask for a particular kind of picture.”

  “How do you mean?” Quinn asked and she glanced at the pack.

  “Okay, for example, ask me for a ridiculous picture.”

  “Right. Give me a ridiculous picture.”

  She handed him Stanton’s Harvard graduation picture.

  “Now you think of one,” she said.

  “A sad picture.”

  “A sad picture,” she repeated as she went through the pack. “A sad picture.” She looked up. “Well, it turns out … they’re all sad.”

  “Then give me them all.” She handed him the pack. “Why did you come over here tonight?”

  “Because Vernor is giving me a very hard time.”

  “What for?”

  “Just for drill, he said.”

  “All right, let’s never mind him and look at pictures. Who’s this?” It was her cousin Richard, a rock and roll singer who was killed in a plane crash. He came from a branch of the family that was out of favor for having struck oil enough for them all in East Texas and dissipating the fortune; because of this, Janey said, she herself had been taught all the little economies, a thousand useless tools to be used in the face of squandered fortunes. She said that this ruined branch was the family’s most interesting. It had taken its chances and burned hotly for a few years in the thirties when everybody else was lost in the dust bowl. They had thrown up an impressive mansion outside Orange, Texas, that, even though it belonged to them no more, was still there. They had owned three celebrated race horses: Steamboat, Shanty Duchess and Dogdancer who killed his trainer. True, nothing had worked out: the boy dead, the father, summoned for managerial malfeasance, was jailed for fraud. The mother, a poor farm girl at twenty, just as poor at sixty, affected antiquated French lace getups that showed the delicate tanning of the flatiron at home, an unmistakable, though mistaken, impression of down-at-the-heels gentility; she got the modicum of gallantry unaccorded the less romantic poor in the South.

  The next picture is of the palmetto, the mother, the father, the artesian well; you still cannot see the house though its shadow has moved farther toward the well and sweeps past the couple who are old enough now that they must have been living in the house some time. The palmetto is larger, miraculously retaining the exact shape of its youth. Though the picture must have been taken ten years after the visit to Independence, Missouri, Quinn imagines that he sees in her face her failure to encounter the former President in his memorial library.

  “Are these people still alive?”
>
  “Pretty much.”

  Janey sighed and looked out the window. The sun was clear and late and hurtled through the trees, lighting a soup of pollen that thickened gold. It seemed a long way from Texas, a long way from the drill-master nearby who strained under his jokes in this same forest.

  * * *

  Business: the time had come to plan the factory picnic. The very thought threw him back, not unhappily, upon his origins as a man of affairs. His first job after taking over had been to organize the factory picnic. And to have so soon to plan it again gave him an exceedingly unpleasant sense of déjà vu. The first time, he had worked carefully, interviewing employees to determine what was wanted. Since the company employed many of the handicapped, the mainstays were out: three-legged races, leapfrog and so on. The emphasis therefore would have to be a sedentary one, and Quinn arranged for the delivery of truckloads of keg beer, and epic quantities of fried food. There would be Bingo with a professional caller and personalized (initialed) Bingo tokens; the prizes were chosen by what was considered uncanny judgment: glass-pack “Hollywood” mufflers for cars, white rubber mud-flaps with safety reflectors, turkeys, porkpie hats, barbecue sets, pink concrete yard flamingos, TV trays, plastic dogs that sat in the rear window of your car and wobbled their heads, plastic lions that sat in the rear window of your car and winked right or left when you used your turn signal, Mohawk bow-and-arrow sets, Chief Pontiac headdresses, risqué place mats, glass shower doors with leaping stags sandblasted onto their surfaces, and many other odds and ends related to automobiles, television, child diversion and sexual insinuation. The band presented a special problem because it had to be able to play both country music and polkas or it would not satisfy. Quinn had to do the auditioning and, here again, it was something of a mudbath of expanding and contracting accordions, broad Middle European faces and long, sidehill Anglo-Saxon, the electric guitars that were played in front of you with one hand plucking and the other manipulating an iron bar that sent undulant notes into the room like sea serpents; occasionally there would be a female lead singer in lacquered beehive hair whose batlike cries aroused Quinn’s interest; he would consider for a moment then, like some arbitrary crank, say that he would have to insist on polkas. Finally, as if desire had been made flesh, a quartet from River Rouge materialized in his offices, set up their equipment and with mechanical regularity played first a polka and then a country song. Nonstop. So Quinn had a band; he had prizes, activities, and he rented a small fairground with a copse of knobby, pollard elms and a brown duck pond.