The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

  “Shut up, Stanton.” Fortescue.

  Janey said, “Have you ever been to Texas?”

  “Just passing through.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “I was going to Tulsa.”

  The speech went on. Quinn gazed at the distant back of Stanton’s head, at its streaked sandy hair growing long; thought: Stanton experimented with haircuts, wore outfits, caught himself and paused at mirrors, dark windows; once asked people who they thought he was. At thirteen he bought rumba lessons with his allowance and wrote Captain Cousteau requesting citizenship in the first underwater city. What was he doing here?

  Janey held out two hands together to match oval, pearly, imperfect nails as Spengler said that the general adaptation of the V8 by GM in ’55 was a real shot in the arm for club revenues. “Good night!” said Stanton, bringing pause.

  “You can’t stop interrupting, can you?” said Fortescue getting to his feet visibly. “Can you?”

  “I thought this was audience participation…”

  “Let me give you a little feedback here,” said Fortescue. “You’re a creep, Stanton. Have you got that? A creep.”

  “Mercy!”

  What was Spengler starting now? He had pulled out a fresh load of notes, wrinkling them vertically and reflectively between his two hands as he looked across the tops of heads. Behind him a great panel of the tent filled and heaved with breeze. Stanton turned toward Quinn from up front, his face infuriatingly pear-shaped with mock solemnity. Quinn felt the jokes ricocheting obliquely away from him. His guilty preoccupations were all around. His company throbbed somewhere nearby, its buildings and offices linked like organs; behind, his mother gardened and his father fidgeted obesely in the Antillean sunlight; Stanton of course burned out there like an incendiary bomb. Then he thought of Earl Olive; or rather Olive appeared to him, coming up Stanton’s darkened cellar stairs, his body rising through shadows like a smear, the scream whirling behind compressed lips as he came into the living room, his body shedding the darkness of the stairwell, assuming detail, the smudge that had been everything of him save his face becoming the chevron pockets of his western shirt, the five buttons at each wrist slit, the stylized mother-of-pearl horns on the plastic-eyed steerhead of his belt buckle; the buckle itself, embossed EARL, the size of a saucer; then from outside, past the knocking, open door, Olive’s gnashing, reiterate howl of lunacy.

  All of them—Spengler with his foul chronicle, Earl Olive sucking his paws in the woods, Stanton pouring salt in every handy wound, Fortescue leading his squad up and down the hill between explosions like Pavlov’s dogs, Quinn and Janey soft-shoeing it around one another—all of them seemed to move away from each other like lines on a globe that would converge invisibly beyond. But maybe too that point of convergence would be a fantastic dogfight or Western-movie saloon debacle replete with screaming frontier twats, bloodied heads, breakaway chairs, collapsing shelves of bottles. Why not? Already the physical ruin of the club was past comprehension. A lake over seventy years old that had become part of the general memory of the county’s wildlife was a suppurating mudbowl. And it was Quinn who had seen the lake last, moving like an express train on its glassy trajectory down the Pere Marquette. But what still astonished him was the readiness for calamity there had been in the air. Even the shed with its compact wooden boxes of dynamite lying waxed and fuseless in rows convenient to the land must have longed for use. Then the aftermath was a hangover; indulgence shrunk away to nothing; everyone was stopped, wooden; only Earl Olive was at large, functional, decisive and arbitrary as a child or goblin. Quinn reflected upon Olive, calling up only a few traits: his considerable size, his wide cheekbones, the mouth the distant corners of which each indicated a small, low ear; and of course the hair, long but close like the hair of a puppet. “… the assignment of club finances to professional management in the late fifties…”

  “Dum de da dum,” Stanton hummed aggressively.

  “May I go on?”

  “If you can,” Fortescue said to Stanton who looked at him, raised open palms and silently mouthed the word, “Me?” This small gesture struck Fortescue in the face like a blow. A suffusion of red flashed and the perimeter of white around his eyes grew wide. Quinn fought to keep from awarding Stanton points for this precise and economical shot.

  When Spengler finished what was only the prologue of his chronicle, he asked for comments from the floor; and Scott said he hoped that in his final treatment Spengler would “flesh out” what had merely been suggested in the introduction. Spengler answered, “Clearly,” and Scott rising to the tacit challenge and in fact getting himself into something of a snit suggested that the prose could stand a little “pruning” too, a little “cleaning up” if not actual “reworking” from “stem to stern.”

  “You could pay attention,” Stanton said to Spengler; “this man is a pro and he’s good.”

  “I thought I made it clear that this was an early draft.”

  “Darn it, you did,” said Stanton, turning to Scott. “Professor Scott, I would have thought your experience down there at Moo U., if you’ll pardon the expression, would have taught you a little flexibility. What say you give old Spengler a fighting chance?” Fortescue interrupted Scott’s reply.

  “We don’t need a moderator,” he said. “We can do without one.”

  “Then shut up,” said Stanton.

  “Look—”

  “Or get out. Pack.”

  Janey’s fingers closed around Quinn’s arm.

  “What do you mean?” Fortescue said after a minute. One felt behind the mad spaniel face legions of tiny soldiers.

  “I mean simply this: in a larger and more irritating sense you’ve been moderating this whole club and I for one am bored with it. The solutions I have indicated have been shutting up or getting out. I don’t know how much clearer I can make it, Mister Fortescue. But I’ll say this: I won’t be interrupted by you again. You’re a bore, you’re a professional phony and for the twenty years I’ve watched you strut around here it has been all I could do to keep from booting you right in the seat of your smug and comfortable pants.” Spengler and Scott were gone. The others, folding blankets, broke up too and were gone. Fortescue turned undamaged on his heel and vanished into the black pentagram of the tent’s entrance. More would be heard from that quarter. Stanton followed unhappily after. Quinn wondered what was changing him. This had been the painful fetching up of purest bile; and if that was so, why did he do it? Was it an airing of old resentments, as he said; or had he linked these activities too with abstractions? Because it wasn’t funny and because it could be seen as the beginning of a new and more menacing form of irresponsibility, Quinn used it to imagine himself intervening to protect Janey, then taking her away for her own good.

  A cycle of these ran through Quinn’s mind: he bolts with her in a car, an airplane, a Pullman; then she is before him as she had been in the clearing that afternoon; now, he himself stands over her with rifle and bowie knife, eyes thinned by the line of horizon, slowly shifting like radar, without carnal inclination. The girl at his feet could be a piece of precious statuary. Suddenly the vision is replaced by one of Lu, pissing in the weeds then wandering off, butt aloft and splayed like that of a plucked turkey. Toying with himself like this was deliciously painful. Janey had become a sweet emotional abscess; it was exquisite to touch the knife to it.

  * * *

  Back in the room in Stanton’s house, he gazed weakly and bravely through the high window. He was in bed now, his hands crossed on his chest. Janey had made a sick boy’s meal for him of sandwiches and bouillon with a pot of strong black tea. He nipped at the sandwich’s delicate edge and thought, Am I the one? A plastic transistor radio on the windowsill whispered “I’m a hog for you, baby” to the solid oink and snuffle of a Detroit blues band. He studied her, studied the perfect lateral movement of her eyes. He wondered if he moved his own as characteristically; he had learned making faces in the mirror that you never sa
w your own eyes move; this crucial detail was forever a mystery to the narcissist. Too bad. It explained a lot; for instance, in Janey it showed her care as a listener: in that lateral motion was attention and consideration. Quinn was pleased to have isolated it. He looked around the room that seemed as fresh as a newly drained spring. What was all this glee about? He sat straight upright, heedless of the headboard. “Did you ever have a job?” he asked.

  “Had a lot of jobs.”

  “Such as?”

  “I was a model, a librarian, a guide in a champagne factory.”

  “You were? Where was that?”

  “It was the only champagne company in Waco and it wasn’t a good job. I took thirty tours a day and made the same speech over and over. The tour started upstairs where it was usually about a hundred degrees and it ended up in the cellars fifty degrees colder. So, I always had the grippe until I demanded to be put upstairs or down. They put me downstairs. My job was to rotate the bottles so the residue would settle evenly. I had to wear a fencing mask in case a bottle blew up. I got pneumonia and went back to the mineral spring.”

  “Do you plan to get married?” Quinn asked, his eyes traveling over slatted, white-painted walls with their streaks of paint beading. Janey was biting her cheek again. Quinn reached and pushed her chin with his forefinger to make her stop.

  “Well!” she said. “If I could do it right!”

  “What kind of wife would you make?”

  “A good one!”

  “I’d marry you myself,” Quinn said, wrapped up in his own fraudulence.

  “Well, I wouldn’t marry you!”

  “Why not?” He was still looking at boards, fixtures and chairs, a real interior decorator. Janey was no longer biting her cheek. And Quinn felt that he had to explain who he was and that he could do it quickest by indirection, by talking about the hats he had worn, cars he had owned, the women he had been with, the fly rods he used, the profits he had made. It worked in the past; why wouldn’t it work now? It wouldn’t work now. He knew that by instinct.

  “… then a funny thing happened,” Janey said, still thinking and now smoking and clicking a gold Dunhill lighter in her hand. “Vernor and I would be … I wonder … okay, Vernor and I would be walking in the street…” She went very carefully. Stanton had been getting strange, insisting that people were “cruising” him. They had to leave restaurants before they’d eaten because he had spotted people outside the window cruising him. After that—and this was all after Quinn had last seen him—he got worse. He wrote sarcastic letters to his father who was dead. He started traveling, taking Janey along, at an absurd rate, a country or two a day. One peculiar thing, a rude clerk or some tourist cruising him, as he saw it, and they had to get out. He spent less than five minutes in Spain after seeing a dwarf in a flowerprint sport shirt slumbering with a bright strip of lottery tickets pinned to his chest. “Did you see that?” he had demanded. “Did you?” They were in Gold Beach, Oregon, the next day, where Stanton couldn’t stand the smell of fish because it was an airborne river of lethal botulism. Everywhere they went, the mail mania dominated: he had to have letters. They tried Florence the year before the floods and saw men throwing treble hooks in the swollen Arno for bodies and Stanton screamed at the draggers in bad Italian demanding to know who they thought they were. That one ended with the police and jail, where Stanton couldn’t get the mail without enormous bribes once the local officials had matched his bankroll with his psychosis. Quinn thought of the letters he had planned but never written to Stanton; he saw Stanton before him in the fluorescence of advanced personal decrepitude. Janey handed him a calling card; on one side was Stanton’s name; on the other it said, “No, prisoners of love, I did not begin as a joke.” After Florence, Stanton began to invent conversations which he would write down and then memorize. He made Janey learn cues so that when people were around she could lead him from one recital to the other. She would give him one line and he would talk for five minutes and she’d give him another. Some were about Quinn. Some about Judy, the aunt; some about his father. Quinn asked what the other speeches were: a short history of the exploration of the Nile, a lecture on how the first zippers were made, instructions for building a Bessemer converter or making sourdough bread. When people got bored, he really buried them. One day, they were sitting in a German restaurant in Philadelphia and he leaned over and whispered that he could no longer move his arms and legs. They got him into a clinic right away. He called his mother in Michigan and she told him to pull himself together. He had to be watched every minute. He said his lanyard had snapped. He said his life had gotten to be so funny he couldn’t stand the laughing. He said his spring was running down and that the whole mechanism would have to be returned to Switzerland for adjustment. They carried him into the clinic like a plank and the psychiatrist attending him said that he was exaggerating the little things we all have. Quinn listened and looked on with new regard and a hopelessness that would have cleared the air if he had accepted it.

  * * *

  The discovery that Earl Olive was a criminal and a fugitive should have surprised nobody; but it surprised Quinn. Fortescue, visiting the ailing young businessman with an eye to enlisting his aid, bent his authoritarian spaniel face to a teletyped dossier and, scanning, gave Quinn a rapid précis of its contents: fraud, arson, assault and battery, breaking and entering, suspicion of armed robbery, suspicion of rape, suspicion of murder, known to be armed, considered dangerous. The fraud conviction began as a rape indictment, Fortescue explained, his eyes scanning another stapled pair of sheets. Earl Olive had been in the habit of calling up girls he didn’t know and representing himself as a social worker; it had been his practice to explain confidentially that they had been established as V.D. carriers and would have to be treated under state supervision. At this point, the girls were willing to accept Olive’s help: he would recommend a friend with rare type-M-positive blood who could stop the disease through sexual intercourse; the girls were eager for this simple cure; and Olive, “the friend,” would soon be at the door. It was only that the girls stayed on for more than the prescribed treatment that forced the disillusioned judge to change the indictment to the charge of fraud. Olive was convicted. He jumped bail and went on with the crimes that continued out there in the woods.

  “Why don’t you call the police?” Quinn asked sensibly.

  “Why do you think? Because we clean our own house here.”

  “Seems pointless.”

  “Does it? It doesn’t to me. There are still some of us alive for whom life in the forest means a return to older virtues, not just a vacation.”

  “Very well, if you want to make a speech.”

  “I mean you and your friend Stanton and the rest of your generation are just a little farther away from the founding years of this country.”

  “Mm, being younger.”

  “And we’re not sarcastic and we’re not facetious and damn it there are things we call valuable. What I’m saying is that we believe we can clean this Olive business up in a way that will not only be a tribute to the Centennial Club but a tribute to the country as well.”

  “It sounds like you have your hands full.”

  “So don’t tell me police.”

  “I see now I was playing the wrong shot. Gee—”

  “I’ve got equipment rolling in now, paid for out of my own pocket, I might add. I got a rack of Winchester riot guns, K-rations, rucksacks, primus stoves, hammocks, a quartermaster’s tent for extended bivouac, compasses, aerial photographs, flares, tracers.”

  “Any grommets?”

  “Well, the tents have grommets on their corners. What do you mean! Anyhoo, are you with us or agin us?”

  “Oh, agin you, I would say.”

  “Then stay out of the way. That’s an order.”

  * * *

  When it was dark, Quinn crept through the compound in his bathrobe, feeling a little sick and unsteady in the night. He went around and around the tent, each time cutti
ng one more strand of the powerful guy ropes that held the tent aloft. In the vague light that came from within, the tent was a glacier. Quinn paused once in this superior task and had a giddy moment of not knowing where he was; when it came to him again, as it did immediately, he saw himself as a resistance fighter, a saboteur with ideals. Then he went on with his cutting until halfway around the tent on perhaps the fifth pass, one of the guy ropes popped; then they all went like a zipper and the great tent slumped. Quinn ran for it, running in a sick blur, as oaths and cries raged from under cloth; and by the time he was well into the woods, the riot guns were barking importantly into the night.

  Back in his sickroom, the bed itself seemed to reject him like the trick-shop miniature of King Tut. Quinn thinks: I am in it hand and foot. I have suffered a relapse.

  * * *

  In the morning, in bed, Quinn still in Stanton’s house and posturing sickly for Janey, Charles Murray appeared. He had a bouquet wrapped in wax paper and a packet of letters. “Yoohoo,” he said, “couldn’t you hear me knocking away? I’ve been to the mail in town today—” He handed Quinn his letters, then shyly, “—these silly old—” Janey got up to get them coffee and Quinn followed her exit with forlorn eyes. He held the flowers now; they were dark orange. “How are you feeling?” Murray asked.

  “Oh, all right.”

  “You probably have the flu for God sakes.”

  “I know, I know. But this was kind.” Quinn waved the flowers awkwardly. Murray brushed off the compliment.

  “They’re just tacky nothings. All you can expect up here though. You do look feverish.” He laid his narrow hand on Quinn’s brow.

  “I feel pretty much terrific,” Quinn said abruptly.

  “After what you’ve been through? How killing!”

  “Just a little dunking—”

  “A little dunking!” He seized Quinn’s hand in wild laughter. Quinn tugged a tiny bit but was held fast. Murray leaned over. “What the hell?” he squinted.