The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

  Quinn headed for the river, not undertaking this fishing lightly. The night was warm and creaky, the round spring moon figured with bats and moths. He anticipated the hunting owls and raccoons rinsing mussels in the shallows; and the green luna moths of the spring fishing. He remembered how the long hours of staring at the mutable silky river often left him dazed for a day after. He wondered if this accounted for the seasonal drownings, fishermen turning up lodged under bridges or in log jams and having to be brought ashore with a boat hook; or those that simply vanished in still backwaters to rotate a couple of days before sinking. Such considerations dallied with his nerves when he was night fishing. Sometimes it only required a momentary loss of balance, the sound of feral dogs running deer or the whistle of the Pere Marquette railroad, and Quinn scrambled out of the river with a galloping case of the creeps to race up the grassy slopes to his house.

  Quinn stepped into the dark river, already concentrating and beginning to sort out the sounds around him and to distinguish the musical splash of frogs from the slash of feeding trout and the careless splashy rises of young trout from the heavier, pulling rise of big fish; it all had to be done by ear. The darkness encouraged his dreaming and replaced Stanton’s lunacies with heavy trout that threshed the smooth and moon-yellowed water. So far, there was no hatch of any kind; a few moths barged around and young trout slapped at mosquitoes. Raccoons hunted in the shallows and a black watersnake went by, carried sideways downstream, the head pointing steadily to the far bank while the tail drove. A good brown trout would eat a watersnake.

  The river here was a hundred feet wide, fast and channeled along either bank. In the middle, two overlapping currents had built a gravel bar. Quinn was standing on this bar when he heard the blast. And because there is no part of the natural environment more constant than the sonic boom, he thought of that. But then he saw that this was denser and closer. It was dynamite. The silence in the blast’s wake was severe. He waited instinctively. Then the water began to rise quickly around his knees and ahead of him he saw a low, glassy ledge hurtling in the moonlight toward him. An instant later, he was knocked flat under a cold swell of water that tore his rod from his hand and turned him hard against the cold gravel bottom helpless in his waders and off the end of the bar into the deep water of one of the channels where he shot along far beneath the surface, raked by the ends of sunken logs. He struggled with the waders, hauling them down around his knees, then fighting erect toward the surface for air and trying again until the waders were free of his legs and he thrust toward the top. But where the surface was to have been was only more water, black and intervening, and he compulsively filled his lungs and stopped struggling. The current ceased its swelling pressure and he hung a moment in black suspension feeling himself turn in some backwater. Then spasmodically he fought, punching and kicking into the blackness that yielded to him, deferred to him, until he found himself unexpectedly surfaced, then on a low ledge of mud that sank deeply under his hands and knees. He seemed to be reaching into the earth. He knelt sinking and expelled gouts of lung-warmed water in seizures of his chest. He lay down in the foul mud. A thick cloud of mosquitoes rose singing around him and settled again, covering him. He didn’t resist, though he sensed dimly that they covered him and that the singing had stopped. He could feel, too, his lips pull away from his teeth in a grin, and a song repeat sonorously in his head as though sung in a culvert: “Dat ole black magic has me in its spell, dat ole black magic dat I know so well—” It was Stanton’s voice. A few feet from Quinn’s head the river hissed past. But where had that water come from, that whistling, glassy ledge of racing water? There was no flow control here as on the Manistee. He hadn’t the energy to pursue it or to lift his limbs or resist the burning in his lungs. He couldn’t wave away the mosquitoes that buried him.

  Some time passed, probably hours, and Quinn awoke. It was very dark. The moon was invisible though its cold, chalky light hung over the trees. Quinn lifted his hands to his face. It was swollen and enormous. Bites had made its surface pebbly. He touched his lips and found them taut as the skin of a balloon. The sides of his finger pressed apart just as his mouth seemed to press open. Every move sent clouds of saclike mosquitos rising from his flesh and oscillating around him in soft waves of high-pitched sound. The river had fallen to normal and whispered past. Quinn got to his feet, sinking halfway to his knees in the mud, launching new clouds of mosquitoes up and streaming against the moonlight. He looked around himself. Everything was gone. His good rod was gone; he thought with helpless absurdity what a time he was having and how he had rewarded himself for a year’s stupid labor. He felt solitary and ashamed at this moment of saurian floundering, muckbound helplessness and stupidity. All present hopes of pleasure were extinct and in their absence he thought he could make out the few, clear lines that kept himself, Stanton, Janey, everybody, precisely separated. The thought was subtle and insistent. Calamity had deprived him of his bland vacation. What remained, the accretion of the last weeks, was knowledge as clear as a simple geometric pattern, a few lines: final and sad.

  3

  Centennial Moon

  HE OPENED the screen door, bumping his face as he went in, wandering through the wrong rooms on the ground floor of his own house before turning on lights and going upstairs to bed. On his back, his eyes hung from the ceiling light with its seamed, dusty, spilling glass cornucopia. His fingers beat with itching and he wanted to claw them, claw his beaded face and membrane lips. He got up and went to the sink and ran hot water on his hands for relief. Shortly after he lay down again, his view of the light was interrupted by the heads of Stanton and Janey. “What happened to you?”

  “I was in the river. I was … knocked down by a wall of water.”

  Stanton said Olive had blown the dam and that it had all run down the tributary stream that drained it into the river. With one blast the lake had become a clearing. Dynamite. Stuff for blowing stumps. Stanton wanted to know what it was like, if it was exciting.

  “A wall, I told you.”

  “You fortunate bastard. That was absolutely the last view of the lake anybody had.” Janey said he looked sick.

  “I am. I can’t be brave. I’ve never felt this way before.” He dozed off as though he were hurtling away and woke up a moment later in fear and lay in bed awake, feeling still a pull to hurtle into the night sky that tugged all around him elastically. He realized that the roar outside that seemed like wind was voices and he forced himself to get out of bed, feeling the pressure of his puffy feet run up his legs when his weight was on the floor. Turning the brass levers on the narrow-paned windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, he swung them down and stepped onto the narrow widow’s walk where, in the daylight, the lake used to be visible. Below Quinn, directly in front of the porch, were all the men of the club. They were crowded together in a single unit. Fortescue stood in front of them, Scott behind. Except that the recruits already had guns, it would have looked like an induction center. Their lights and lanterns flashed and glowed and in every hand was a rifle of some kind: carbines, pump guns, doubles, Mausers. It was a manhunt, a posse, and Quinn knew that it was poor Earl Olive, purveyor of live bait, who starred in the show. He studied them unsteadily. They were arguing. Fortescue was plunging an admonitory forefinger downward as though he had found oil, and Stanton, now below too, was cultivating a judicial air that was having no effect beyond irritation. Scott darted through the ranks shaping everyone up, and Murray led a small band in sentimental songs of the forties. Then Fortescue was finished, had forged these men into something of use, and they turned as a man and surged into the darkness with a roar of elation, their lamps flashing and working into the night. Quinn went back to bed, forgetting to turn out the light. He looked at it in despair, unwilling to get up again. When he opened his eyes it was morning and Janey was sitting beside a tall, shocking stripe of sky. Around her neck hung a pair of binoculars. Quinn’s hands had perspired so much the skin felt tender and porous as though
he’d been swimming. When Janey saw he was awake, she began to tell him about the night before: Earl Olive had got away.

  Quinn remembered the beginning of the man hunt, remembered the rifles, lights, shouting. And through Janey he learned that that’s all there had been, a beginning. The war party fording the first swamp, guns held crossways over their heads as at Parris Island, had, floundering and crying to each other for aid, heard, from behind, the successive dynamitings of each room of the main lodge; each explosion was louder than the one before either because of increasing charges or because the building had grown more sonorous with each gutting blast, each bellowing, plank-shattering cough of dynamite. Scott, according to Spengler, the chronicler, had, running about in confusion chest-deep in ooze, slogged a short way and vanished; dragged to high land, he had been mounted by Charles Murray who, Scott’s fists unavailing, mouth-to-mouth resuscitated the little drenched antiquarian until Fortescue pulled him off and said, “Easy now. That’ll do.” Scott jumped up screaming in a gallinaceous rage that was quelled only by the return march to the compound where they viewed the ruins, the burst walls and tall rooms opened to the sky for the first time in the century. Fortescue walked around in front of his men and addressed them thus: “Gentlemen—” But his speech was precisely interrupted by a single small blast toward the lake. Fortescue, racing along behind the other men, swung his arm in a forward quarter-arc and cried “Follow me!” as they began to outdistance him. When they arrived at the lake, they found someone had dynamited the lifeguard tower; the seat had been blown fifty yards away and sat brightly on the dry lake bed. They decided to convene. They would have to devise some systematic mode of procedure; it was not to be expected that normally sedentary gentlemen should run up and down the countryside indefinitely. Fortescue moved to the fore. “Gentlemen—” he pleaded; but he was interrupted by a very small explosion from the direction they had come from and soon he was outdistanced by his companions. When they arrived again at the compound, they learned that the flagpole had been rather exactly dynamited. This time Fortescue began to screech. And Scott, now wearing a Mae West, tried to talk sense to him. But Fortescue continued to screech about advancing, flanking, fanning out and bivouacking. And when they’d got him under control, they had lost their momentum and began to think of getting some rest.

  Quinn stared from the window. Where the blue lake had been in the trees was now a brownish green oval as sore as a roller rink. Clouds of crows whirled and flew, landed and fed on dead fish. Quinn took the field glasses and watched them plod over the lake bottom and pierce bloated trout with sudden thrusts of their heads. At the south end of the lake were the four rearing ponds that from this distance looked like ice trays. They still held water; but scrawny herons waded now and probed for young fish. To the left of Quinn’s field of view, you could normally see the third story of the lodge; now nothing was visible, no wreckage, nothing at all, as though the building had reared up above the surface of trees for a few generations and sounded.

  Quinn moved to Stanton’s house, by his own request, where he could be more readily babied. They moved him into the spare room over the porch and he fell asleep instantly. When he awoke hours later, it was raining and Janey was there. The walls were invisible and the windows oblongs of dark-green ragged light. The weather made him daydream about Detroit, rain falling past office windows, rain stinking in the hearty woolens of Mary Beth, that Frankenstein, rain slanting into Woodward Avenue soaking shoppers in front of J. L. Hudson’s, gleaming on Michigan Avenue, Gratiot, Grand River, soaking merchants, strikers, bozos, flaneurs, autodidacts, doughty young executives and hurrying shoppers holding packages to their breasts like praying mantises. Rain that here in the North rinsed dust from trees, in Detroit raised an unseen, mobile filth; it exaggerated the noise of traffic, made the headlights of cars stream and wheel and haunt the crevasses between buildings. But here at least it didn’t seem like the last day there would be, the last emanation of gray light before the world went down gagging. Long spokes of sunlight already shot the clouds. “What are you waiting for?” Quinn asked.

  “Nothing. What are you?”

  “An older woman with a little something put aside.”

  “Really—”

  “I don’t know. Waiting for something to change.” Beside him bacon, eggs and broiled tomatoes warmed in a silver chafing dish with a lamp beneath. He lifted the lid and looked in carefully. Janey wouldn’t have any so he served himself on a square-handled salver. After that, Quinn dressed slowly while Janey watched out the window. Then they went to the compound to view the damage.

  The destruction of the lodge was total. Only the plumbing stood out of the wreckage, white fixtures on pipe legs like mangrove hummocks. The cellar hole had begun to fill with water. The quantity of shattered lumber was astounding. In the compound there stood a huge carnival tent, now quite dark from rain. Around the entrance many club members were smoking and talking. The men were unshaven and disheveled. Quinn went inside with Janey. The rest of the membership was in here, their sleeping bags strewn over an acre or so of interior ground. There was a queer relaxation, a locker room air, people standing around in underwear, picking, fingering and itching at themselves. Something had gone with the buildings.

  Quinn and Janey continued to walk through the tent even after the others had gone out to listen to Spengler read the prologue to his lecture. A man from the company that had supplied the tent was draining two great rain puddles that had formed overhead by incising them with a razor on the end of a twenty-foot bamboo pole. These dark ponds hung like blisters until the cut was made; then they vanished in a leaf of silver that hurtled to the floor where he mopped it up. Later, he would go aloft and stitch up the incisions.

  They went outside and sat down. Quinn smelled the soaked ashes and embers, the clean pitch that had boiled out of the timbers of the lodge and been slaked with cold water. Spengler announced that he would in this time of crisis review the acquisition of club lands and summarize its social history with a view toward highlighting that spirit which went to make it the great institution which it was today. Stanton was heard to say, rather too audibly for comfort, “This ought to be good.” The review began, the dreary account of acquiring the miles of both banks of the Pere Marquette that they had today. It soft-pedaled the succession of magnificent bribes that had been necessary (two greedy Presidents had clamored for ample lacings of this payola) to uproot the homesteaders and loggers who had settled in the area; when these hardheaded Scandinavians refused to move, no matter what papers or signatures were shown them, a feeling grew among the original club members that the intransigence of the hayseeds was criminally uncalled for; and that if they wanted to play rough, then play rough it was. Moreover, the founders decided, if, when push came to shove, these hicks tried to wave the Homestead Act of 1862 in their faces, then the founders would be obliged to sic the law on them. Open conflict set in and when the farmers appealed to decency, it was regarded as being neither here nor there, rather a canny bumpkin subterfuge not only not to be honored but not to be countenanced. Therefore, the reward of these farmers was entailment succeeded by dispossession. They were driven from the land, their minor prosperity undone and, to this day, unrecovered. They resettled close beyond club boundaries and their progeny and heirs produced the poachers and vandals that plagued the club today; they had produced Jack Olson for one.

  They had land; now they needed buildings. At this time there was great interest in Indian life on the eastern seaboard and it was carried inland to Michigan through the efforts of a French scholar, secretary of the Choctaw Club of Lyons, who dressed in Indian garb and traveled about the U.S.A. after the Civil War, lecturing, drumming and dancing at fees that small communities could scarcely afford. These communities, therefore, began to interest themselves in local Indians, to collect “relics” and read romances of Indian life. The founders of the Centennial Club were not unaffected and they decided that the lodge would be built with Indian labor. They enl
isted the aid of an Indian from Grayling who had been a sergeant in the Civil War and who had served as labor boss on many projects here in the North. He was an efficient and almost scrupulous foreman: he built the lodge in jig time, though his gang of Chippewa laborers, dressed by request in loin cloths and war bonnets, contained a number of white friends in disguise. This discovery was not made until the whites had done a certain amount of work which was impossible to isolate. So the main lodge went up incorporating a spiritual impurity which Spengler interpreted as a wedding of white and Indian traditions in the wilderness. He touched on the salient points of this tradition, the natural nobility of the savage, Shakespeare, Homer and whatnot; the rise of the American nation in the hands of such bush tycoons as the founders was accompanied by a kind of temps perdu of wigwam life. “Do you mean to tell me,” Stanton inquired, “that all this gave way to make room for the Centennial Club?”

  “That’s what he means,” said the still invisible Fortescue.

  “Holy mackerel!” Against the northern sky the great lodge had taken shape. Swamp was made lake.

  Was made swamp. (Stanton.) There was shelter, Indians, northern lights; in the beginning wolf and lynx challenged women, children, picnic tables. The founders dreamt of a better life, a place in the forest that would be safe for their own kind, for their hopes, their hibachi dreams. The forests flowed to the cities and financed such dreams. Timber cruisers goggled through white pine forests buying upland stands at swamp prices; not, mind you, the avaricious scuttling of unscrupulous lummoxes but straight Yankee ingenuity, a matter of being at the right place at the right time. The Centennial Club’s lines thickened along the Pere Marquette. A lady wrote a three-thousand-line epic about it, now unhappily forgotten, called Bogwhistle, a Song of the North; it was in rhymed fourteeners with prose interludes that were read by her husband who played accompaniment on the concertina and passed the hat—“and put the blocks to her at night.”