“What do you mean?” Murray relinquished his hand and threw his own in the air. “Oh, how should I know, how should I know! So much is happening so fast! My poor brain is no better than a big silly Caesar salad!” His face flushed and he turned into the wall close by and simpered, “Really, it’s insupportable. Well!” He jumped up. Janey came in. “I’ve got to go! I have a date with an angel! Janet Fortescue by name!” He and Janey dodged and feinted in the doorway before Murray got away, Quinn calling out his thanks after. An instant later, farther down the stairs, Stanton could be heard gruffly and rudely putting Murray on. His own approach was not secretive, the drumming of heavy footwear on a hollow staircase, no doubt exaggerated in its regularity; and his entrance, pausing in the doorway, a big grin behind the white linen handkerchief into which he trumpeted majestically; then rolling the cloth, he thrust it into his hind pocket. Quinn suddenly felt their quietude and inactivity in the contrasting presence of Stanton. Stanton was noble in knee-high black Wellingtons and green turtleneck pullover. His mouth opened fiercely and he gave lung to a great elk roar. “Well, sir,” he said softly, “I like to give you what you expect.”
“And thank you.”
“What’s the talk up here? Cultural topics?”
“I’m afraid you were the subject in question.”
“I saw Murray on the way in. What’d he have in mind?”
“He was visting me.”
“Figured on getting a little, did he?”
“The question never came up.”
Stanton’s mouth found its natural downward curve though his eyes continued to hunt in their old trouble-making way. “The rampant Olive struck again last night. He collapsed the tent with the whole club inside—” Quinn began to laugh in childish yelps. Stanton laughed too, then stopped and began to hunt with his eyes again. “Wait, there’s more. I know, Quinn, but shut up, can’t you? Fortescue was adjusting one of the inside lines and he had it around his waist for purchase. When the tent collapsed and the center pole went down, it snatched him forty feet. Fortescue is a madman. He’s shooting everything that moves, sending up flares. He is crazed and he’s got rope burns all over his body. His wife tried to take the riot gun away from him and he slapped her face like a punching bag. It has gone nuts over there. Fortescue screams orders like the D.I. and everyone wants to go home but they’re afraid to. Fortescue won’t let them. He imagines word will leak and the police will be in on it. They’ve propped up the canvas with timber to make a ledge and they’re living under it. Twenty-four-hour watches. On top of that they’re still going to have the centennial celebration on the Fourth and dig up that fucking time capsule. God, Quinn, won’t you join me? Please! We could make it so insane for those bastards!”
“What about Olive?”
“I know, I know, mmmm. In some ways, I’d like to plug him. Would too, if I could be sure of not killing him. Hate to go to the pen over that kind of riffraff. And that’s what Olive and his crew are: riffraff, marginal types, floozies, shabby local farm stock—” This version grated Quinn. Stanton, it seemed, had watched the Olive camp with field glasses. He was an authority.
Janey asked, “What do they do?”
“They serve Olive. He’s forcing the men to build a big lodge out there. He himself does not work. Now and again he drags one of the women off into the bush. You can bet it comes to no good, too.” Quinn imagined the demented bait purveyor demanding his perquisites of Lu, throwing his hairy, bellied person on her little smudged body. Quinn wondered if, peaceful and tired, she whizzed on the ground after Olive had done with her, flicking leaves over the spot with backsweeps of her feet as dogs will do. Quinn saw Lu when she had been his alone, smiling wanly in the half-light with her behind looking like nothing so much as a pair of pale coughdrops or a papier-mâché valentine; and he could share Stanton’s antipathy. “They sing together,” Stanton said with vituperation.
“What kind of songs?”
“Couldn’t make it out. They had a little fire and they swayed and moved their mouths—”
“Vernor,” Quinn said, “what’s the use? It hasn’t anything to do with you.”
“Yes it has, Parson Quinn. What you don’t see is that it’s a moral issue.”
Quinn thought that this time he really had his chin out.
“Don’t give me the business,” Quinn said. “Just tell me why you’re going after everybody.”
“Because I hate it all.”
“You hate it all.”
“I hate it all.”
“And what do you love?” Quinn was sick of Stanton’s spleen.
“Janey and my father. Only he’s dead. And when he was alive he complicated things by staying ninety-nine percent dead drunk. Then there was you. But you became a smug and irritable prick and a cheap bourgeois. I take it back. There, too much talk induces a shooting off of the mouth.”
“Keep it up. Keep talking, God damn you.”
“Aren’t you getting a little imperious in your sickbed?”
“No.”
“Seems your recent years with the Detroit business castrati have made you overconfident. Now don’t get me started, James; because I’m not going to mess with you once I do.” Placid, malevolent tones: Quinn listened to them, felt Stanton’s real strength in laying down the law.
“Don’t hold yourself back,” Quinn said, his mind already gliding from Stanton to Janey to his business to the unopened letters in his lap, to the two armies outside his window; Janey looked on and everything he learned about her saddened him and irritated him. He didn’t want his women, it seemed, to be persistent; he wanted them delicate, frangible, dissolving, unreal. Rapunzel growing her hair to the ground from her high castle window had become in Quinn’s mind bare-bummed behind, invisibly assaulted while she turned false, soulful eyes to the ground and awaited the prince who could clear everything up by using the backstairs.
But the exchange with Stanton reminded him of old days when one of the weekly fights would flare and Stanton would surprise Quinn with real attempts to injure him, times when his eyes were cold and occupied with the task of injury, the estimates of coordination needed to direct injury. And the surprise was always abrupt because the fights grew out of a closeness that made ideas pass between them in assured symbiosis, conversations become long conceits cross-referred to conversations months earlier, overblown, fantastic and serene. An enormous world constructed from within, hermetic as it was reassuring—Quinn had relinquished it slowly and unwillingly as Stanton’s ambitions shaped him beyond expectation.
“Ah, well,” Stanton was talking, “why should we argue about who pushes dis shabby organization obah de cliff. All dem desperate creeps, all dat disposable humanity.”
“Why do you have to cultivate your mean streak,” Janey asked.
“Oh, dat,” said Stanton smiling. “I do dat natchally!”
Stanton left the room and hardly had time to get away from the house when they heard him being shot. A long moment later, he appeared once more in the room and collapsed on his stomach, blood spattering the green turtleneck pullover. When in the midst of suitable confusions the pullover was removed, they saw that his back was speckled with rocksalt, an old and popular stunt by bloody-minded local farmers, more insulting than dangerous. When Stanton learned this, though he writhed nonetheless, he was disgusted he hadn’t followed his original plan. And in a moment, he had rushed out again and been shot again and there was that much more doctoring to be done, disinfecting merely, for the salt would dissolve out, painfully cleaning its own wound. Quinn strained his eyes at the window to see who was doing the shooting, shouted “I see you, now get!” into the darkness and was rewarded by the crack of a shotgun and the rattle of salt against the shingles. “Can’t we please get out of here?” asked Janey sensibly and calmly. “Can’t we?”
“No!” crabbed the prostrate, speckled Stanton from the bed Quinn had occupied so recently. “We cannot.” Quinn noticed the sharply proprietorial air of Stanton now drawin
g beneath his chin the edge of the thick tan blanket and reclining like a stone mortuary figure. It appeared to Quinn that there would be the matter of his finding another place to stay and recuperate because he would not fight for the bed. Still, he felt, completely apart from the events themselves, that he’d been had. Stanton was speaking: “… I said to the man invisible in the dark but doubtless either Olive himself or one of his henchmen, said as clearly as I could, ‘Shoot if you must this old gray head’ and BOWANGO! they ripped into me with a raking broadside! Whiskey.” Janey gave him the bottle from under the window seat and a glass. “What about rubbing alcohol for the afflicted areas.”
“There is none.”
“None? Why not?”
“There never was any—”
“Use it up on Quinn?” he laughed through locked teeth. “What the Christ, every man should have a fifth column in his home. I’m as moderne as anybody. But for God sakes, if a man is to go to the wars he ought at least to be left his medicine. I would think the subject was treated in international agreements.”
Aggressive and ironic, Quinn never knew how to meet this line of Stanton’s. Anyone who sat silent and unobjecting was a victim; anyone who retaliated, a spoilsport, humorless. Quinn, neither one, floated in uncomfortable liberty. “May I sleep downstairs?” he asked.
“Absolutely, absolutely.”
“In the morning, I’ll go to my own place.”
“You be the judge of that. However, don’t count on Janey for any services. She’ll be right busy, understand?”
Quinn wouldn’t even answer this one. He knew that unless he deferred to Stanton on a kind of yassuh-boss basis, it would be necessary to make a run for it to his own house. One look at Stanton’s perforated dorsal, rendered painless though it was through subjugation to larger lunacies, made Quinn fear such a dash and he hesitated before picking up his grip and telling Stanton what a shit-ass he was.
“Scurrile,” replied Stanton. Quinn shot his eyes to Janey, apologetic for his childishness. Her hands and crisscrossed fingers lay in her lap exactly as they had in the photograph of the Cotton Bowl game.
“Let me know,” she said with contrition and more helplessness, “if there is anything I can do. At all.”
“Fine. Thank you. I think I’ll be going to my place.”
“Back to the house is it?” Stanton inquired.
“If I can.”
“You can do it.”
“What’s that?”
“Go back to your house. You can do it.” Stanton’s eyes flickered beneath heavy lids.
“I said that I would. Weren’t you listening?”
“Moral support was all I could offer. I can’t carry you home now.”
“Stay downstairs, why don’t you,” Janey suggested. Quinn wanted to and would have if Stanton’s face swollen with smugness hadn’t challenged even that amenity.
“Drink your Bosco,” Stanton called. “Bye-bye.”
Leaving the house at all, required a couple of familiar ploys. He whistled conspicuously behind the closed porch door a moment and opened it thrusting an overcoat and hat on a broomhandle into the space. These objects were not fired upon and Quinn went on his way home. He went directly through on the path, and around him the tree trunks stood like the ribs of a sunken ship, their spaces exaggerated by the clear moonlight. He stopped. He had no desire to return to his empty house. After the proximity of Janey, the steady sound of their voices still in his mind, the thought of the empty wooden building seemed depressing to the point of being ominous. He began to head crosslots toward the compound. In a moment, he came to the lake and walked to its edge. The sun had baked away much of its foul odor. There was nothing to encourage Quinn’s memory. Even the dock, still standing, seemed unfamiliar. Before, it had lain inches above the unfluctuating surface of the lake; now it towered high on its pilings above half a dozen canoes sprawled morbidly below. Quinn walked on till he came to Stanton’s cutter. He ran his hands over the high runners and tested the flexion of its double-sprung seat with his hand. Then he wandered out onto the lake bed. Long aquatic weeds were stretched upon its surface and dried fast; they looked like the silhouettes of trees and in the moonlight retained a green pallor. The lake bed itself was dried out and its surface deeply fissured, lunar and dead. On a plateau behind the far edge of the lake, Quinn perceived the glow of the club’s lights and made for them. About midway, he came upon the horse, stretched out as Stanton had said, like an arrow: head reaching, legs trailing. The bones were white, almost luminous in the moon, and among the ribs, which stood up far higher from the lake floor than the rest of the skeleton, were metal harness fittings. Quinn sat astride the skeleton, smiling bleakly, and his legs outstretched in front of him as though he were on some outlandish Flexible Flyer; he gripped the short ribs in his hands and could see before him the barrel of the rib cage like white slats in the moonlight, trailing to the single heavy whiteness of the skull which, stretching forward from the streamlined limbs, made Quinn feel already that he was in motion; so much so that when he tilted his vision slightly above the treetops he lost all reference and the stars streamed behind like foam; he unconsciously tightened his grip on the ribs and let his head fall back so far that his mouth opened and the velocity of the stars increased until they overtook themselves in a whitening that became the moon. Quinn tilted his head down to the steadying serration of trees and got up. He crossed the lake bed to the plateau beyond. He went a very short distance from the edge of the plateau and found himself looking down at the unpleasant ventilation sleeve of an automatic rifle. The muzzle and front sight of the weapon were pressed invisibly into his belly. “It’s you, Quinn,” said Spengler, withdrawing the gun.
“What is this?”
“I’m on sentry.”
“Is that loaded?”
“Of course it’s loaded.”
“For what?”
“It’s loaded to shoot. What do you think it’s loaded for? What do you load a gun for?”
“I don’t.”
“Sure you do. What d’you mean? Everybody loads a gun.” Quinn looked at Spengler’s harmless, unlined face, flush with craziness, and asked him how the sentry duty was being administered. Spengler laughed at this word. Fortescue, he said, would point a finger: you’re it. It wasn’t, Spengler insisted, the fairest thing in town. The snivel had become recognizable. “A big boy like you,” Quinn said and thought Spengler would break down.
“Lay off,” he said. Quinn ignored him.
“Well, what’s the plan? Is anybody ever going home?”
“When we clean up here, I guess. When we celebrate the centennial and dig up the time capsule and take care of the Olives—” What did taking care of them mean? Did it mean turning them over to the law as it did not seem to mean? Or did it mean something more direly in the vigilante line? It was too easy to picture Lu, the fat girl, the motorcyclist and their companions, all in a line that began with Olive, strung up on a limb down in the swamp they now inhabited. “What do you mean by taking care of them?”
“I—don’t—know.” Spengler stood firmly by his ignorance. No one ever knew about such things; not completely; maybe a little; enough of them knowing a little but not completely and you had the deed without the consequences; that’s right, gentlemen, no hangover, no morning after. “Quinn, do yourself a favor and get out, would you?”
“I’m a member.”
“What?”
“I’m a member.”
“So what?”
“This is my club. I’m a member and I won’t get out.”
“Kid—”
“I won’t get out.”
“Kid, lissename—” Spengler’s Brooklyn accent was brand new. “There’s a hundred million bums in a world, will ya lissename?”
“Give me that gun.”
“Not on your life.”
“Give me the gun or I’ll take the gun and kill you with it.” Spengler gave him the gun. “I have a good mind to kill you with this.”
“What’d I ever do to you?”
“Stuck it in my belly. I ought to kill you and burn your chronicle.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. I treated you like a Dutch uncle. Honest.”
“I’ve got a good mind to cream your guts all over the bushes.”
“Oh, don’t even talk like that—”
“I’m sick of what’s going on around here.” Quinn was glad to have the gun. Spengler was crazy all right. Maybe now he would go home. Quinn wondered how many of these zanies were similarly armed. He looked over at Spengler, very much down in the mouth, his brief time in the military sun a thing of the past. Quinn gave him a little bump on the shoulder with his fist just to show that it would be fine again one day, that things would turn out like old times. Quinn unloaded the gun and went up. He found Fortescue polishing his boots outside the canvas ledge and lifted his head with the end of the automatic rifle. Fortescue’s expression of cynicism tightened and confirmed itself. “So you’ve gone over—”
“No.” Quinn leaned the gun up against the canvas and hunkered near Fortescue.
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“I had it, see?”
Fortescue’s eyes flicked over it once.
“Just like the ones I got from the National Guard.”
“Well, it’s a common enough gun,” Quinn said sharply.
“Still and all—”
Quinn noticed people beginning to treat him with respect. A heavy woman in desolating, elasticized underwear stepped out from under the ledge and emptied a pot; she paused odiously, her back to them, one hand behind her stretching a rubber strap absentmindedly, then lifted her head to ogle the firmament. There was the harsh scent of the pot’s contents. The light of lanterns, stoves, cooking fires, flashlights, flickered out from under the ledge as Quinn went along. Among the members, Quinn spotted a few old woodsmen, local guides hired on as mercenaries. The guides were doing the cooking and thrusting out sections of the unwieldy canvas on green poles to form flies under which you could be sheltered.
The Sporting Club Page 13
