The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

  Now for the picnic: the picnic did go well up to the last minutes; and the drinking had already reached a merry peak; but the minute prizes ran out, something saturnalian set in and the fighting began; the band played only when threatened; Quinn pulled grunting, punching men apart; doctored a woman who had got a heavy blow from behind. Once an enormous punch press operator began to lay about him violently with a frozen turkey, sending people screaming toward the duck pond. Quinn, trying his best to keep out of it, had to threaten firing to disarm him and the man went behind the Bingo pavilion and wept like a woman. Gradually, it began to grow calm though; and the most marked sound soon became the chatter of the old ladies at the beer counter. They had heretofore been unable to get to the head of the line; now the beer was almost gone and the great, dull silver kegs wheezed foam and moaned like barrel organs. At that moment, the finale began.

  A green Chevy sedan with no one at the wheel came gliding at moderate speed, sending people running and dragging children out from in front of it. It came, stately and carnauba-waxed, pristine with its bullnose, customized hood, bubble skirts, blue-tinted windows, jiggling kewpie in the empty, azure interior, and Augustan rumble of dual exhausts; curved slowly and miraculously away from the duck pond and cracked to a stop against a pollard elm. Now everyone ran. Quinn ran, toward the car nuzzling the tree, its hind wheels churning the grassless fairground soil behind. Quinn pulled open the front door of the car to turn off the ignition and his janitor rolled out blue and vein-laced in a diabetic coma, a tiny, distant scream coming from somewhere behind the locked strenuous jaws, the chest seizing under the printed Miami palms of his sportshirt. Someone pushed in beside Quinn, authoritatively worked upon the jaws until they opened and shoved in the end of a Pepsi-Cola bottle, glass clinking against teeth, and began to pour as his other hand worked the janitor’s tongue free. For the others, this was simply the last straw and they began to leave. Quinn, kneeling beside the janitor, watched his eyes come out of their knotting as the Pepsi spilled around his neck and into the holiday shirt, watched the eyes grow clear and apologetic as he saw the retreat.

  But Monday, when everyone was back docilely at the machines, Quinn was amazed to find that the party had been a success. “A good time was had by all,” his foreman confided. And behind Quinn’s grateful smile was a vision of brawling men, of their elderly mothers and mothers-in-law with somber, ill-concealed cases of beer farts, and the children themselves, all gullet, fighting over prizes and destroying everything in their paths like army ants. Still, Quinn’s smile was grateful and it was genuine.

  Nevertheless, moving along the production line, which was lubricated to near silence, brought him the sense that these useful, efficient men were right now at their most minatory. The workers placed and removed, placed and removed before the presses, rhythmically; they bowed to the machine, propitiating it with a piece of cold rolled steel or a bright, solar aluminum disc; and the machine returned the bow and returned the gift, now miraculously transformed into something of purest utility. Moments later, these same objects appeared on the other side of the factory, hung on hooks, like ex-votos, and they glided through a bath of neoprene and into the ultraviolet drying rooms. The next day, out the door they went to their numberless destinies.

  Yet, re-creating it in his mind, the old party held no lesson for the new; and Quinn saw no way of improving. Clearly, however, while there had been prizes, the fighting was at a minimum; that was a detail: more prizes. If only he could do it all by remote control, program the entire picnic on a punch card and keep himself far, far from their joys. He would wear a black silk tuxedo, a boiled linen shirt whiter than Antarctica, and on their day give them the occasional kindly thought.

  * * *

  He went to the lake to sit on the cutter. Summer was here and there was a portable lifeguard tower with a golden Teuton aloft. Quinn began immediately to run into acquaintances. He met Sheila Derndorff, a pretty girl of twenty with merry teeth, who had broken both legs dancing. Then he met, directly under the lifeguard tower, undulant in flaglike madras, Charles Murray, a gifted trial lawyer from Cincinnati and amateur of literature who had, fifteen years before, in an extravagant gesture of literary Anglo-faggotry, become a Roman Catholic. To have been born a Catholic and lapsed, as Quinn had done, was intolerable to Murray who nevertheless continued to regard Quinn as an accomplice in the international Romish plot. Today, he began by lamenting anew the passing of Pius Twelve, the last, in his view, of the intransigent aristocratical Popes, whose death began an age of unparalleled prole boobery in Rome. He meant, naturally, Pope John, whom he called a “loutish mountain wop.” Yes, Quinn agreed, yes, yes, yes. Murray’s left hand was clutched around a pair of tortoise-shell sunglasses. He wore a raw-silk summer blazer and squinted conspiratorially at the sun. Behind him a fat woman herded children, her pocked buttocks lurching with the effort. “Your friend Stanton is going to start a squabble around here,” Murray confided. “And I am anxious to see—Hi, Janet darling! You better run! Or I’ll bite your leg!—to see how it turns out.”

  “I am too.”

  “Look, will you excuse me?”

  “Of course.” Murray didn’t hear. He was chasing Janet, a great-thighed girl in pedal pushers. She ran enticingly from Murray who pursued, holding both hands in the air, one retaining the cigarette, the other the tortoiseshell glasses. Janet wasn’t making cases. And Quinn suspicioned Murray thought of orthodox domestic arrangements, sensibly made. It happened that Janet, Fortescue’s sole heir, was a highly successful engineer. Quinn entertained himself with visions of the arrangement, Murray advancing, Janet retreating; Janet advancing, Murray retreating; and before his eyes they did so, cutting and swerving in the dark lake sand, the still lake behind in the hot sun, throwing its single, wobbling flash of light. The golden lummox on the lifeguard tower gazed pitiless and hieratic upon the crescent of sunbathers with their towels and oils and paperback books. Across the lake, in deep bays of shadow, a canoe floated without movement. A fisherman cast peacefully with a rod that was a shiny filament at that distance. As Quinn walked along, the mothers rose up from towels, oiled and gleaming like seals, and glared into the sky before letting down again. Quinn browsed, hands behind, checking out the younger women, imagining giving them the old one-two; remembered newspaper accounts of infidelity among young marrieds and love rackets in the suburbs; why not shocking sex bash at exclusive trout club? One young woman lay before him, between him and the Teuton; she was even more golden than the latter with long brown legs and well-shaped feet; she lay upon her stomach, her face turned to one side, apparently asleep; the opening of her pretty mouth in that incandescently sunlit face seemed to Quinn the blackest stripe of pure void; and he stared at her until it made her sit up, return his look with hot distraction, and pour sun lotion down her cleavage; the oil emerged from under the bra of the bathing suit and sought her navel in slim, golden progress. Beside her was the child, an imperious infant who beat the sand with the flat of a little shovel and said, “Garbo! Garbo!” Quinn was embarrassed by her gaze. He snapped his fingers, consulted his watch, started off purposefully and fell. He pushed his hands through the sand as though sampling its warmth, hummed as if satisfied and, with beating face, looked over at the mother. Now she looked straight into him. The sun upon her and upon the infant ignited them savagely, and the lifeguard never moved. The woman’s eyes followed him, hung on him, as he got to his feet. He stood a moment, then went off. When he looked back, mother and child were as still as graven images and, like the lifeguard, didn’t move. Quinn made his way, his retreat, up the path, glancing back at the woman, the others too on the dark sand or wading in the lake’s sunlit, transparent margin.

  * * *

  Quinn thought: The hell with these unreckonable quantities. I’m a businessman. Besides, the lake was for women and children. If you didn’t want to shoot, drink or fish you were to have joined the Y. He went to the lodge, called the factory and talked to his manager. The manager assure
d him that things weren’t completely out of control but that they were tough, that’s all, tough. Material shortages were slowing production. This was Quinn’s clue. Material shortages in this case were always unnecessary, and Quinn saw that this trip was a mistake. This lapse was going to mean an inexcusable loss of orders. He saw now that the resonance and responsiveness of the company to his ministrations was matched by a mirror-image potential for decline. He couldn’t set it up and let it run as he had planned. It was like a bicycle and when he stopped pedaling, it stopped.

  In his mind’s eye, a character that looked like Blind Pew was nailing up a sign that read BANKRUPT. By turns, Quinn holds his hammer for him, the sign, the nails, grows voluble and offers to buy him a drink.

  * * *

  Stanton was wearing the linen shorts of the first day.

  “Been practicing in the gallery?” Quinn asked.

  “Count on it. Air heavy with eventualities. Gin and tonic?”

  “Just tonic would be fine. Hello, Janey.”

  “Hello.”

  “How are you…”

  “She’s fine. Why no gin? Here.” He gave him the drink.

  “It spoils the essential purity of the tonic.”

  “That so.”

  The porch was made like the room of a ship. The screened panels were held in place by half-round strips and brass screws; the strips had been imprecisely painted and the pores of the screen were filled for an uneven inch or so around their perimeters. Overhead, narrow varnished rafters divided the roof into regular strips of coarser wood. And above the screen were rolled canvas awnings. Quinn sat in one Hong Kong wicker chair, Janey in another; her arm hung in repose; her forefinger rested on the floor. Stanton strode on reliable, earth-gripper feet with their high tan arches and said, “Do you know, I didn’t fire Olson?” Quinn sensed a prepared question and tried to dodge it.

  “What’s the new fellow’s name?”

  “Earl something or something Earl. I forget. But I didn’t fire Olson and I didn’t hire what’s his name.”

  “I talked to this guy actually. He used to be in the bait business—”

  “I want to set the record straight about Olson—”

  “—live bait.”

  “The older members got hot around the collar and figured Olson had to go. And I didn’t like the sight of those two little deer. That also is for the record.”

  “Don’t be coy. You made a move that was just extra stupid. Your speech the night we fished—it finished Olson.”

  “James, you seem to have a backlog of bad feeling going for you—”

  “You played up to the kind of stupidity we always hated, which is unedifying enough. But then this cutesie stuff after—” Stanton had to cut in.

  “Be firm with me, father, I have sinned. My last confession was invalid.”

  The new manager was at the door.

  “We’re talking about you. What’s your name?”

  “Earl Olive.” Olive came in and looked the place over like a demolitionist. He was wearing flamboyant cowboy clothes. “Just a couple questions,” he said, eyes sweeping over and around everything, including Janey, but seeing nothing to boost, settling on Stanton. “What do you know about these two deer?”

  “Both dead.”

  “Notice anything unusual?”

  “Only you, Earl.”

  “Have any clues? Or suspicions?” Earl pushed his Stetson back on his head with one finger under its frontmost edge.

  “Yeah,” said Stanton, “Jack Olson or friends of Jack Olson.”

  “He has an alibi,” said Olive.

  “In the nature of what?”

  “In the nature of drunk as a skunk,” Olive said. Quinn saw that this conversation was pleasant to Stanton in its contentiousness. “You know, Earl,” Stanton said, “Jack Olson was a real manager. He was a champ in his own way. Now around here the word is that you’re no more than a janitor.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Well, don’t you have any feelings about that?”

  “My only feelings is that these folks’t say I’m no more than a janitor might find themselves settling for a sight worse than that.” This was nearly the last thing he said. He was having a barbecue to celebrate his new job and had to be off. A few minutes after he left, Quinn was wondering about this barbecue and so were Stanton and Janey.

  * * *

  In the beginning, they watched from a distance. Earl Olive had a washtub full of coals on a metal stand and he stood before it in a huge white puff of a chef’s hat, turning meat. His friends sat on the stoop of his porch or swigged quart bottles of beer with their girl friends. One tanned and heavily lined man in an azure shirt that let you see through to his sleeveless undershirt and whose hair was as black as cinders and curled up into a sculptural pompadour, trapped a fat lady between a tree and his desperately pumping pelvis while Earl Olive, without watching him, yelled, “What the hell, Lucy? What the hell?” In front of the low fence that Olson had made were the cars and a few Harley-Davidson motorcycles with automobile-size tires, enormous saddles shaped like sections of a pie and more chrome fixtures than a motel bathroom. Earl Olive forked a piece of the cooking meat and held it out toward the trees, what looked like just trees, and said, “You wont some? Come own, you hungry? Say so and Earl Olive will feed you.” Beyond the party and before the trees, others could be discriminated in the shadows. This group included Fortescue, Krauss, Edith Terrell, Jensen, Van Duzen, Murdock, Spengler, Laidlaw and Scott. This was a different group from Earl Olive’s; for one thing, it was quieter and showed more solidarity; and they stood in dense, composite order, reminding Quinn of opening a can of sardines and finding, from left to right, a row of heads, a row of triangles, a row of diamonds, and a row of tails: unity. In contradistinction, Earl Olive’s group was disunited. Some were drinking, some talking, some trying to breed. Also, they were quite loud while the club group was very quiet. And they moved more; it was pointed out, for example, that at least one chap, the one in the see-through shirt, had a woman against a tree and was making a recognizably filthy motion against her. In fact, this same fellow yelled to Earl Olive that he was going to “do” her. The others in Earl’s group made a good deal of inchoate noise and Earl himself occasionally spoke directly to the club group, offering food, beer, or asking rhetorical questions. On the other hand, the group from the club said not one thing.

  Earl Olive’s group seemed to have fun. The Centennial Club seemed to have none at all. Between the two there was something like a magnetic field. Two horseshoes faced each other and in between were many wavy lines. Perhaps it wasn’t a magnetic field between the two groups. But there was a strong sensation of these wavy lines.

  Then Fortescue stepped forward, forthright in his twills, and called, “Earl?” Quinn wondered who would get Fortescue’s tin soldiers when he died.

  “Howdy.”

  “What about keeping the noise down?”

  “Let’s keep the noise down!”

  “And, oh, Earl—”

  “Can I help you?”

  “This other business—” He indicated the couple at the trees. “We’ve got ladies here.” Fortescue turned an open hand behind him to draw attention to the club’s womenfolk, lined behind Fortesque like a cabinet of fire-axes in an institutional boiler room. The man in the see-through shirt stepped up his activity and was now a veritable dervish at the tree.

  “Bobby, best cut it out. You’re making these folks horny.”

  “What you got’s better,” the man called, gone quite mad in his threshing.

  “Earl!” Fortescue’s reproach was no longer a secret.

  “Caint stop, Earl! Caint stop!”

  “Lucy!” Earl Olive called, pointing with a meat fork. “Can’t you make an escape?” He turned to Fortescue’s group. “He has been happy cuffin it for some many years we had no idea this could happen—” Scott took the lead.

  “All right, kids,” he said to the club group. “This is a little ra
nk. Desmond? Edith? Let’s go. Maureen, Janet? A little rank. Let’s go, kids. I’ll handle this.”

  “Winkin?” said Earl Olive. “Blinkin, let’s go. Nod, are you coming?”

  “I will want to talk to you,” said Fortescue.

  “You are talking to me,” Olive said complacently.

  Then Charles Murray, the Cincinnati lawyer, disengaged himself from the retreat and came back to the ring, and his short rapid stride seemed determined. He stepped before Earl Olive and, with his feet close together, rose slightly on his toes, at the same time holding up the folded tortoise-shell glasses as though they were a writing instrument and he were going to make a single, clear mark on a sheet of paper. “You,” he said, “shall feel the full weight of my displeasure. I will remember this.” Earl Olive looked at him, delighted.

  “Okay, Heidi,” he said, “you do that.” Quinn tried to comprehend how it was that Charles Murray went away; but it wasn’t quite like anything he had ever seen before. Without turning from Earl Olive, all of him seemed to rise in a low rearward arc, rising on his toes, retreating hands rising too as though they would sustain him in some low batward menace of going off. He was only walking away.