Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

He only went as far as his porch. The pain in his throat was settled in one spot and throbbed. His feelings were hurt enough that, in his way, he wanted no retaliation. Stanton’s unkindness seemed conclusive. He wished to put his mind off it and wondered if his voice was affected. He would say something. He picked up Pendennis and opened to the first page. He began to read aloud, “One fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis came over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a certain club in Pall Mall.” The speaking soothed the bruised tissue of his throat. He read thirty pages more aloud, conscious of the silence around him, and found himself engrossed in the novel’s progress. He read until dark.

When the sun fell, he went inside and put on a sweater. He turned on every light in every dark room. He made himself a whiskey and water, then gathered his letters from the office and answered each of them, clipping the answers to the originals and enclosing them in a manila envelope to return to Mary Beth for typing and sending. When he had done this, he had the illusion of a place in the outside world once more, a world untouched by the mania of boredom.

It turned cold during the night. In the morning he went out and was splitting kindling when Janey came. She wore a heavy blue sweater and narrowed her shoulders in the chill. She struck her hands together and shivered. Quinn said, “Is it that cold?”

“It is to me. I’m not chopping wood.” Quinn wondered what she wanted; she came from his house. He put up the axe.

“How are you?” he asked.

“ I’m fine. What about you? Vernor said you got … plugged.”

“That’s right.”

“How terrible that must be. Can we go in? I’m cold. Or would you mind?”

“I would mind.”

“But why?”

“I don’t want to inspire Vernor to some new feat of aggression.”

“Yes? Well, he’ll be along soon.”

“Say it isn’t so.”

She ignored his sarcasm.

“You smashed that French pistol—” she said.

“Sure did.”

“It was worth a lot, you know.”

“It was worth a lot to me smashed.”

“I suppose. But it was a pair, you know, hundreds of years old. Can I go in and you stay outside?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because to Vernor it will be indisputable evidence that I have just seduced you and have run out to clear my head.”

“You know, he’s not a lunatic.”

“How can you tell?”

She didn’t answer. Her pretty face became pretty in another way and she was now indifferent again and splendidly vacant. Only her energy betrayed the impression. “You surely get a two-bit spring in Michigan,” she said distantly, “not that I intend to see another.”

A moment later, Quinn blurted in unreasonable disconnection, “You realize, don’t you, that I know you’re not married?” But Stanton came before she could reply. He clowned up the path, improvising a little dance of pathos and hopeful apology. “The throat?”

“Sore.”

“Next time we’ll use milder loads and a little cheaper grade of pistol.”

“You will discover that that was the last time I’ll be going for the dueling.”

“You think so?” The apologetic tone was gone. “Well, okay. Number two in the batting box is the matter of Olson. How do you advise?” Now he was actually turning the knife.

“I advise you to drop it.”

“We’re beyond that now. Reality comes to bear. The turning of wheels. Fortescue came by my place. He says I hit on an ideal time to let Olson go. Summertime is strictly housekeeping around here. We can get a temporary until we find someone to do Olson’s job.”

“You won’t find anybody who will do it as well as he can.”

“Well, there again, we may have hit on a plan. You know how honest and thoroughgoing he is—” Quinn agreed. “Well, I hit on the idea of letting him suggest or even hire his successor. I mean, that strikes me as honorable.”

“Why don’t you try this for honor: why don’t you go discuss this plan with him before you make another move?”

“We’re talking about an employee, old pal.”

“I know who we’re talking about.”

“All right. I’ll do it. But let me pick the moment.”

When they were gone, Quinn started on an angry cross-country hike to the west. He had to have a neutral corner. Shortly after he left the old club boundaries, he was out of the woods, on newer acquisition, cleared ground. This was the first of the farms now owned by the Centennial Club and represented the steady encroachment upon the lands of people whose antecedents had been expelled from the original grounds. He walked in the deep weeds toward the house, with meadowlarks and the small June grasshoppers showering around him. He could see the barn now. In this country unpainted wood weathered almost black. The barn doors had collapsed forward and lay out flat from the entrance which from this distance was only an oblong hole of darkness; swallows poured from it incessantly like smoke. The front door was unlocked and he went in. Shattered glass in quantity and empty sky-filled window frames; nests were cemented into every crevice. The frequent entrances and exits of the birds were like the pluckings of a stretched rubber band. In the kitchen was an infantryman’s jacket with a long column of World War Two duty stripes of the European theater. He went outside. In the southwest corner was a wasp’s nest the size of a medicine ball; under its entrance five or six wasps hung as if in suspension. He wondered if the name of the former tenant would mean anything to him. When farmers hereabout went broke, the club served as a way station where, badly paid, they awaited jobs in Detroit. A long list of names came to Quinn’s mind. Half of the surnames were Olson and the bulk of these were related by marriage to the other half. Quinn wondered if Olson would end up in Detroit.

* * *

He woke up late the next morning, stiff from his hike; and because Stanton jumped into his head first off, he decided his holiday was in full decline. He slashed out from under the covers, got to his feet and, looking down at his white thin nude self, said, “I am Spider.” It would be hard to say what he meant exactly. He hunted in his suitcase, stirring its contents like a stew, for his bathing suit, and found it but could not find his supporter. So he put on his suit without it and then found it impossible to accustom his parts to any one side of the cold, hard, dividing crotch. He cried, “No starch I said!” and reheated some coffee. While drinking it, he sought his bath clogs. They were gone too. He breathed through his teeth. These bath clogs had been his friends. In the end, he was obliged to put on hiking shoes without socks. They seemed odd. He found a towel without any trouble and headed for the lake.

The lake was blue and still and empty save for a single, double-ended rowboat, apparently adrift. Three men stood out at the end of the canoe dock, looking at the empty boat. They turned to look at Quinn as he arrived in his bathing suit, ready for a swim. His great shoes were loud on the hollow dock. They were Fortescue, the military man, Spengler, the historian, and Scott, the sometime investigator of seventeenth-century topics. “Wind get the boat?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Spengler said, “Stanton.”

“Stanton—?”

“He’s skin-diving,” said Scott in his sneeping Ohio voice. “Troubling the trout, disturbing the redds.” He waited futilely for someone to ask him what redds were.

“What’s he after?”

“Treasure.” Suddenly, timorous Spengler burst out: “His jokes and his money and his—” There was a great moist gasp beneath their feet like the sighing of a dugong and then somber and hollow and unmistakably Stanton the voice came, “God’s wounds!” Silence again. Spengler was sleekit, timorous. Off the end of the dock, in the undisturbed water, and only barely visible against the dark bottom, a wobbly, undulant anthropoid form shot away and disappeared in the depths.