Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

“Cut it out! ‘Auld Lang Syne’!” Quinn experimented with the piano. He spread his fingers as he had seen others do and pressed to see if it would be a chord. It was not. Part of the choir looked over, brows furrowed. Quinn stood up halfway from the bench, laughed and sat down again. “All right now! Here we go! And a one and a two and a THREE.” He put the end of the saxophone in his mouth and honked it terrifically (Phnoo!) as the singing began, “Should Auld Ac—” and Quinn splashed his hands into the keys, looking up as the singing stopped on a miasma of unlikable groans and nasal flutings. Janey walked thin-lipped out the door. Someone said, “Most amusing” as the group broke up. Stanton said, “Go then!” and the party was soon back to normal. Quinn looked over his piano at Stanton looking over his saxophone at him. “Janey’s gone,” Quinn said. He got up.

“You notice every move she makes, don’t you, cowboy?”

“Each and every one.”

“Isn’t this a gang of spoilsports?”

“A gang.”

“Janey won’t like us for what we’ve done.”

“I don’t blame her,” Quinn said. “We go too far.”

“We have a history of that.”

“Do we ever.”

“I cherish that history, James. Cherish, do you hear me?”

“I don’t intend to let it continue. I may as well say that. I don’t intend to lapse again,” Quinn tried to say conclusively. Stanton laughed.

“Janey thinks that hope lies in your reforming me. I told her that that was a good one all right.”

“I don’t see why that has to be ridiculous.”

“It’s ridiculous because you’re childish.”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

Into Quinn’s head flashed a view of himself before an emergency meeting of the board. A lady from Flint who had formed a controlling coalition of minor stockholders was accusing him of childishness. “J’accuse!” she cried from under her net-covered birdscape hat. “J’accuse!” His father was among the figures at the meeting, fabulously corpulent, employing two chairs to keep his memorable behind off the boardroom floor. His refrain was “Flagrant neglect!” and it was sung counterpoint to “J’accuse!”

“J’accuse!”

“Flagrant neglect!”

“J’accuse!”

“Flagrant neglect!”

His father was wearing a flat West Indian planter’s hat and smoked oval cigarettes in a burnished pewter holder. He sat next to the lady from Flint, in Quinn’s mind, and tormented Quinn until he no longer cultivated the fantasy. Instead, he worried about his absence and about the moist wads of business letters that seemed to pertain to small problems but which may have been the insinuations of vast financial cancers. Only gradually did his mind return to the party which had become quieter and less ridiculous than he had planned. In fact, he and Stanton were the only ridiculous elements in it. All around, darkness enclosed the screen wall, though the yellow interior light was happy and reassuring. Moths and flying beetles beat against the screens and bounced away to beat again in an irregular guitarlike sound. Quinn looked over at Stanton who had rested his chin on the piano, a cigarette in his lips that stretched out perpendicular to the piano’s surface. One of his hands, held invisible, pecked out “Clair de Lune” falteringly. He sang a few lines of the song around the wobbling cigarette, without lifting his head from the piano or removing the cigarette; and now he smiled out at his imaginary audience, his great teeth locking the long white cigarette horizontally. The glow of its end was reflected on the surface of the piano until the ash fell and obscured it.

Quinn was touched from behind. He turned. It was Jack Olson more familiarly dressed in faded work clothes and loggers’ shoes. He confirmed his prediction about the fishing. Quinn put his drink down and looked around to see if he’d left anything. Olson checked again if Stanton were still coming and Quinn nodded and waved him over. Stanton advanced, placing one foot before the other. Quinn explained about the hatch and they agreed to change into waders and meet back of the main lodge.

Fifteen minutes later, Quinn and Olson stood waiting for Stanton. Even on high ground the air was full of duns settling into the trees to oxidize and mature. Olson was switching his rod back and forth and shaking his head; angry, probably, asking himself why he had gotten involved. Olson was a serious sportsman, with rigid and admirable ideas of sporting demeanor. He managed the club, Quinn knew, to put himself onto its thousands of private acres which he had poached all through his youth and continued, more conveniently, to poach as a man.

Quinn knew Olson’s study of problems natural to the taking of trout and bringing grouse to the gun had made him so knowing a woodsman that many of the members whose forebears had formed the association resented him. Quinn had more than once seen their reproachful glimpses of Olson’s old Heddon rod as they unloaded the two-hundred-dollar magic wands from fitted leather cases. They didn’t like the way he shot his brace of partridge out of their woods on his day off and they didn’t like the way he did it over a scruffy working Springer when all their professionally trained Llewellyns, Weimaraners, German Shorthairs, Labradors, Chesapeakes, Goldens and Wirehaired Pointing Griffins ran deer, flushed birds two miles from the gun or collapsed from overeating. During the annual meeting at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, there was always a discussion of whether or not to charge Olson dues. What sustained this annual joke was definitely not its humor; and there were members who weren’t trying to be funny and who regarded Olson as an impudent interloper.

None of this quite got back to Olson. The membership well knew that any hint of it and he’d be gone. No one could replace him. His years of poaching on club property gave him knowledge of it all. He knew where salt licks had to go, what crop had to grow in the open valleys and when it had to be knocked down to make winter-feed for the game birds; he knew how to keep the lake from filling with weeds and reverting to swamp; he knew when herons and mergansers were glutting themselves with trout fry and had to be discreetly bumped off with his twenty-two Hornet; he understood completely how to intimidate professional poachers from the nearby towns who, if they found one chink in his mysterious armor, would run like locusts over the tote roads at night, shining deer with aircraft landing lights and spearing trout on the weed beds. A nest of eagles had been in use for a decade under his management, in spite of glory runs by members of local varsity clubs. The main lodge was calked and varnished at generous intervals; the Bug House screened and shingled. The lake maintained a good head of native-bred trout and the woods sang with life. All of this the Centennial Club got rather cheaply, considering. What they didn’t like was Olson’s primacy in the blood sports. They wanted to be the heroes and Olson made them look like buffoons when accident forced comparison. In short, they wanted to kill as he killed without the hard-earned ritual that made it sane. For Olson, hunting and fishing were forms of husbandry because he guaranteed the life of the country himself. When the members came swarming out of the woods with their guns and high-bred animals and empty hands to find Olson, with his unspeakable Springer spaniel at his feet, turning a pair of effortlessly collected grouse over a small bed of hardwood coals, or when they found him with a creel full of insect-fed trout and had to conceal the seven-inch mud-colored hatchery trout that looked more like a cheap cigar than a fish and that they had nearly smashed the two-hundred-dollar fly rod getting; when all that happened, they wanted to call the annual meeting right then and there and tell this interloper to get off the property before they got a cop. Then they remembered he was the manager and it became more complicated without changing its impulse.