Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

“They’re just tacky nothings. All you can expect up here though. You do look feverish.” He laid his narrow hand on Quinn’s brow.

“I feel pretty much terrific,” Quinn said abruptly.

“After what you’ve been through? How killing!”

“Just a little dunking—”

“A little dunking!” He seized Quinn’s hand in wild laughter. Quinn tugged a tiny bit but was held fast. Murray leaned over. “What the hell?” he squinted.

“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?”