Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

“Don’t interfere, James. I won’t pay dues to have him patronize me. He’s done it before and now I want him drummed out of the corps. If Herr Olson wants to undertake contests, he has to take his chances.”

“Patronizing you is not the same as taking over the club. I don’t see why you equate them.”

“Give him a step and he’ll outflank you,” said Fortescue. “It could be a feeler.” Fortescue turned his right hand at an oblique angle to illustrate the flanking maneuver. He illustrated its effectiveness by holding the other hand supinely in place and allowing the right hand to flank it repeatedly, piling up advantages.

Quinn felt that something had to be said; but he knew he had sacrificed his position already by stringing along with the jokes that led up to this juncture. What made circumventing Stanton even trickier was the presence of some not quite visible plan which showed itself in Fortescue’s cooperation. Short of the pieties of woodland life to which the club subscribed so heartily, nothing pleased them more than internecine strife. Stanton knew how to manage this impulse. In the episode with Olson, Quinn saw the beginnings of something catastrophic.

THE next day, after a flash of hatred had kept him awake through half the night, he settled into a state of contempt for Stanton’s motives. He spent the morning expecting him to come down and had prepared a speech, sharply reprehending and corrective; but Stanton never came at all and Quinn’s anger burned away, leaving him, by noontime, relaxed again and comfortable. After making himself a small meal, he decided he would take a long walk and went around the back of his house down the path with its coarse entanglement of peripheral vegetation. He came to a place where the path split up in six directions, scattering high and low through the woods. He halted, undecided, knowing what country each of these paths ran to but unable to decide which to take. So he resorted to sinistrality, the art or practice of turning left.

The first left turn took him below the cottage to a piece of rich bottom land so round and low and free of heavy trees that it must recently have been water. The path skirted the lower end, bearing toward the river, and forked. Quinn turned left. This new path wandered about forty feet and swung up, intersecting the other branch; at the intersection, Quinn turned left and was back on the original path that soared up a brush slope, then glided down the other side into a long frog-roaring oval of standing water with its lid of pads and algae. Quinn went left around the perimeter and crossing its lower end sank halfway to his knees in black stinking muck that launched a cloud of mosquitoes up around his head. He slashed away at them until he regained the path on the other side and climbed a short distance, still striking at the mosquitoes so ineffectively that he could see four of them standing cloudily in his forevision, on one side of his nose. At the end of the last ascent, he was in a close but breezy deciduous woods, strolling on the firm ground wind-freed of insects, when he was confronted by an especially pointless path that went off through heavier going to the left. He hesitated, then took it, following no more than a rod when it opened on the end of a long, hotly sunlit paddock; at one end of it, Janey lay naked on her back in the smoky spring sun, her breathing slumbrous and regular. Quinn’s eyes turned slowly, searching the clearing for Stanton; then his gaze settled upon her again lying in total female repose of lax unresisting limbs. She was below the level of breeze and not even her hair moved. The canyon of light above her was flaked and spinning with motes and insects, the trees too, everything, was in motion but her unmoving form stationed in his path as final as a landmine.

Then Quinn saw how he must get out of there, tumescence and all. There would be no explaining should she awake and find him rooted to the spot like a thief-proof cemetery marker. The retreat alarmed him as much as anything, the fear of her looking up in time to see him scuttling bushward, his polychrome mental picture safely fixed. But he was back on the main path, trudging along toward his cottage again, the brief experiment with sinistrality finished.

For the next two hours, he tried to read Thackeray’s Pendennis, a volume from the sunbleached blue, uniform set that was the porch’s only decoration. Even the weevil tunnel that penetrated Chapter One sent his mind hurtling back to Janey’s bare-assed splendor.

Stanton arrived shortly after four and sat lazily on one of the porch chairs. Quinn upended the book in his lap, looked over and tried to remember his speech of reprehension and correction. Stanton was bored and fidgeting. Plainly, the last thing in his mind was Olson. So Quinn brought it up, asking him if he still planned to go through with his plan to have Olson removed. “That’s what I plan all right,” said Stanton.

“I don’t like it.”

“Don’t you?” said Stanton, bored. He stared at the screens. “Tell me this, what were you doing spying on Janey?”

“I wasn’t spying on Janey. You’ll have to make yourself clearer.”

“She was sunbathing in the woods. You found her. You must have been following.” Quinn’s heart pounded. He wondered if Stanton could see it. But how did Stanton know?

“All right. I stumbled on her out walking. And when I saw her, I turned around and went back the way I had come.”

“That’s not her version.”

“What’s her version?”

“She says you stood there about four hours with your mouth open.”

“I’m not even going to answer you.”

Stanton laughed then.

“I was kidding,” he said, “she told it to me just like you say. And now may I ask a question?”

“What?”

“Isn’t she some piece of ass? Don’t answer that or I’ll break your neck.” He looked away with lazy, bored, intelligent eyes. “I have been figuring on exacting a price for this transgression.”

This time Quinn watched the loading. The exquisite French pistols were to be used again. Stanton poured a charge and a half of ffg Peerless black powder into a graduated brass powder measure and transferred the charge by pouring it through a funnel into the muzzle of the first pistol. He did the same with the second as Quinn held the other upright in his hand and looked into the funnel as the silvery grains sank and vanished. Then Quinn held both pistols upright. Stanton unwrapped a small black cloth that had been twisted into a sack and held it out to Quinn. “Sure you wouldn’t rather use these?” In the sack was a nest of perfect, round lead balls so new they were only slightly darkened with oxidation and each with a single shiny spot like the eye of a pea where the sprue had been cut. These must have been from the stained-glass-window lead. Quinn declined. They loaded the wax balls once again, which were more than sufficient to arouse Quinn’s interest; the extra charge of powder promised the loser something.

Quinn did the counting as he rehearsed the two previous duels. He knew now that he had to turn, sight efficiently and quickly and without rushing, and squeeze off the shot. As he counted, he could feel the gun well fitted in his hand, hanging straight. His thumb and last three fingers were hard around the fluted grip and comfortable. His forefinger curved through the engraved and chased oval trigger guard, the slender, flat, polished trigger in the crevice of the first joint. Quinn knew the trigger was crisp and light, resisting then yielding like a breaking glass rod. All of it seemed, for once, understandable and controlled enough that at Ten! he turned, swung the long pistol up cleanly, the hammer cocked already to expose the sights, and fired. “Wowee!” cried Stanton. “I heard that one under my ear! Now, stay where you are. This is an affair of honor…” The shot rang metallically in the narrow gallery. Quinn fell. A sudden flood of dark red in his mind made him think he had been knocked unconscious. It was his throat this time. He was on the floor, choking there and trying to breathe. His wind seemed restricted to a channel the size of a pinpoint. It was only by violent fetching of his lungs that he enlarged this channel, millimeter by millimeter, until he could breathe again. He sat up, his face bathed in tears of pain, his legs splayed before him and, taking the slender pistol by the barrel in both hands, smashed it repeatedly on the floor until its beautiful, fluted stock and inlaid dragon locks were in pieces around him. He reached up and held his hands to his throat and saw Stanton, standing where he had been, serious, his pistol stuck in the top of his pants, hands plunged in his pockets, watching Quinn get up, look over at him again and mount the stairs. “I’m sorry, James,” he said with unhappiness in his voice. “But I really can’t let you pull that on the girl I love. How else could I make you understand?” Quinn didn’t answer; he was sure he could not have. He felt a little more certain now that Stanton was a madman with unnatural power over him.