Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

The gun Quinn held was slender and heavy. The stock was oiled, dark walnut, the barrel long and octagonal. A pair of small, silver-chased dragons held the lock in place; and their flaming tongues curled around the hammer.

“Come on,” Stanton said, “provoke me. We’ll have a duel.”

“All right. I disapprove of the stupid waste of money.”

“That will do nicely.” He took out a work glove from his sweaty hind pocket and flipped Quinn in the face with it. “I tell you, Pablo, I am provoked. Let’s load the guns. Vamonos! ” He took Quinn’s weapon and charged it, seating the patched bullet with a small ramrod that slipped down the barrel making a half turn with the rifling. He loaded the second pistol in the same way, then primed the two guns with finer powder and held them out to Quinn next to each other, the knurled, acorn butts pointed in opposite directions. Quinn took one with amusement and cocked it with the solid complicated click of more than one thing falling into place, took a few steps and set his heels on the single line that divided the gallery in two. “One of us will have to count the paces.”

“I will,” Quinn said. “Otherwise we’ll get foul play.”

Stanton lined up behind him, heel to heel, and Quinn could feel Stanton’s back radiate moistly through his shirt. They were alike in height though Stanton was much more heavily built. He was left-handed and the two pistols clicked together once.

“Ready?”

“I’m ready,” said Stanton.

Quinn counted. At ten he turned on his heel and raised the dueling pistol. He looked down the clean plane of its barrel, saw Stanton’s head quaver upon the blade of its front sight and bleed away in the slight glare of light. He began to feel the weight of the gun in his upper arm. He saw Stanton standing sideways, one hand on his hip, tilting slightly back from the waist, the head tilted back too and the narrowed eyes; Quinn thought that this was what a real duelist must look like. Then there was the flash and report of Stanton’s pistol. Quinn went down feeling the pain open like a talon in his chest. He was on his back. He held himself upright on his elbows as Stanton ran whooping toward him, the row of electric bulbs streaming out of his head behind him. When he got to Quinn, Quinn raised his own gun with a seizure of hatred and fired. Stanton disappeared in the flash, bellowing, “Good God!” He snatched away Quinn’s pistol. “Get off your backside, you candy ass! Wax bullets! Order of the day for dueling practice! Strictly order of the day!” Stanton was disgusted and Quinn looked at him, feeling the slow draining of hatred from his brain. He got to his feet gritting his teeth from side to side and peeled up his shirt. Over his heart was a circular welt, red at the edges and very white at the center, like a great wasp sting. He still felt frightened and, now that it was over, unnaturally light. This was a time when he would have liked to have shown himself quite solidly but he knew his eyes still moved with excessive speed and his hands trembled: Stanton never missed such things.

“Everyone told me you were slipping, Quinn, and I’m beginning to believe it.”

“I’m not slipping,” Quinn breathed. Stanton began to calm down. Quinn tucked in his shirt. “You scared me shitless.”

“I see that I did. You look chastened. The fire is out in your great bunny’s eyes. Well, you’ll have a chance to recoup your emotional losses. This is a great spiritual exercise.”

“Where did you ever get the idea?” Quinn asked blandly.

Stanton took the question seriously: “Where? Puerto Rico. A professional twenty-one dealer had just paraded around me with a revolver and I lost such a terrific amount of face in front of a girl I was in love with that I considered defenestration. In my emotional exhaustion I decided that the only thing which could save me would be to always be prepared for the duel.”

“How did I figure into this?”

“I thought if I blasted you once good I would get a couple more challenges out of you. Practice is not at all the same on a paper target.”

Quinn wanted to go. They went up and into the living room again. “Head of moose,” said Stanton; then, indicating the stairway asked, “See my sign?” Quinn looked; a metal placard read POST NO COITUS. He recognized this as another of Stanton’s tests and waited patiently for the question. It came right away: “What do you think of it?” Quinn had a violent feeling of not requiring Stanton’s tests, but he was alert enough to think: Probably it begins here. He answered that he thought it was in bad taste and was not at all moved when Stanton told him he would have laughed at it before.

* * *

He went through the woods to his own place, fingering the raised circle through his shirt, gently because it was quick to hurt. Son of a bitch, he thought; after all this time, this was more of the same; it had begun long ago with a punch in the face from Stanton that removed a tooth and lacerated his tongue badly enough that the tooth, presumed lost, floated out a day later from the cut — all because Quinn had said, purely on speculation, that there was no God. Nevertheless, Quinn had been caught napping again; and that is why, afterward, Stanton thought he looked chastened. He was.

He came into view of his house and it revealed anew its unwarranted glory. The house had been built by his great-grandfather and his grand-uncles and though it was well made, it had required considerable repair and attention since before the Second World War. Doing things in a hurry was by now a tradition in Quinn’s family and there was some suspicion that green wood had been used in its construction. It was full of otherwise unexplainable gaps in its joining and invited the weather if it wasn’t constantly attended. Still, Quinn was unable to imagine any kind of gradual decline of the house. Because he was so sure that it stayed together by some subtle, frangible system, he imagined that it would go all at once — collapse, the roof coming in like an enormity, blasting sunlight and dust from every opening and crevice.

Inside, the house was clear, sunny, its seven rooms swept and polished. A current International Harvester calendar hung on the wall of the living room; underneath were fifteen more, the latest showing a male model in tool-jeans mounting a combine. The crystal cabinet still held his arrowhead collection. The rooms were all under-furnished as is usual with summer places. The spare and unupholstered furniture suggested the house’s long use as an operational center. Whatever sentiment it held could as easily have collected around the polished bars of a jungle gym or the packed sand of a bear garden. Anyway, it pleased him to see it and he went into his old bedroom and lay down.

The minute his face touched the nubbed cotton chenille spread and he tried to doze off, his mind began to operate at full speed, thrusting him, against his will, back into his office on a recent day, a Monday, when his secretary, Mary Beth Duncan, was to have been on vacation and he had looked forward to a day in the empty office, undoing her more odious mistakes, refusing to answer the phone, smoking and talking graciously into the dictaphone, drafting letters of supply and demand, request and compliance — shapely paragraphs of clean business prose. But Mary Beth had given up a day of her vacation to take care of back work. Quinn was more than bitter at seeing her and tried to go quietly into his own office. “You don’t see me, Mr. Quinn!” she sang as he entered, “I’m on vacation!”

“Right you are, Mary Beth. And get this: if you bring me the recent paperwork on American Motors, I won’t pay any attention to you at all.”

Mary Beth closed her eyes and shook her head. When he was finished, she cried, “You don’t see me! I’m on vacation! You can’t even see me!”