Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

They entered the compound, the men and women trudging, the children dancing out ahead with lanterns. They were brought up short. Sitting in the hole where the time capsule had been removed was Stanton. He had set up a tripod-mounted, air-cooled machine gun and he looked set on mayhem. He told them to free Olive, which they did. He and Olive bade goodbye from a distance and Olive leapt crowing into the absolute darkness. As a good measure, they freed Quinn too. Stanton told them to sit down. Anyone who moved, he promised, would be snuffed out. Quinn could see him shaking from here. He was altogether batty now and the machine gun was trained into their midst.

After a couple of hours, they began to fall asleep. Quinn stayed awake for a while thinking that Janey was gone. He could see Stanton, eyes open as though blind, shaking at the grips of the machine gun: the poor man. In a while, Quinn dozed off fitfully. He woke up in the predawn morning and Stanton was still behind the gun like a zombie. He fell asleep again only to wake up a few minutes later to the terrible firing of the gun. Stanton had slumped into the pit and the blazing gun was shuddering with its bursts and explosions of fire. Everyone was bolt upright now as they watched Stanton struggle to train it on them. The belt of ammunition jerked beside the gun and ran into it with terrible slowness. Then Stanton vanished, slumped into the hole again; a long moment later, his hand appeared and hauled on the trigger and the gun raged into the trees over their heads. The belt of ammunition crept, then stopped. There was a long pause; Stanton crawled out of the hole, crazy and confused, and tried to operate the gun. Quinn walked over to him. It was the end.

* * *

The police, five of them, came up the main entrance the next day. Quinn, the only member there who saw nothing to hide or preserve, was cooperative. He answered all questions with an agreeable and efficient air. He watched the cops press around the photograph, making a blue shrine of their bodies. He felt this hermetic, outlandish thing punctured at last, a century of bad air expiring. The publicity and uproar that followed that year produced a decline in Quinn’s business. The feeling in Detroit was that he had sold his own kind down the river.

Item: The following appeared in Judson and Judson, International Real Estate Brokers’ annual:

Gentlemen’s sporting club with a past! Largest private holding in Northern Michigan! 29,000 acres first and second growth pine and many winding miles of trout teeming Pere Marquette River, both banks! See deer, bear, beavers, birds! Reportedly, small basin could be reestablished by construction of dam! Considerable stockpile of hand-adzed timber and period roofing material! A number of buildings provide convention and conference possibilities. Tempting subdivision potential in this water wonderland northwoods vacation paradise. Region beginning to show promising turnover in A-frame sports-chateau sites and holiday farmettes. Ready access via Highway 76 and nearby airfield which handles up to twin-engined craft. Price and brochure on request. Ask for “Club With A Past,” property #1980.

A little thought would have saved the broker’s fee. Stanton bought the Centennial Club the day it was offered.

He generously deeded Quinn’s house to him. They met the following January. Stanton fetched him at the front gate in the cutter between whose restored shafts was a beautiful Morgan gelding, fat as a pullet, and flecked with dark gray in its lighter gray coat. Stanton introduced the stableboy, a cultivated young man in an Icelandic sweater who said he would walk back. Stanton was thinner and Quinn wondered if he himself could have aged so. They rode silently under blankets as the horse picked its way down the path off the plateau and came beneath the ridge that was now a white bluff of snow onto the lake bed. Quinn stole a look at Stanton whose features had clarified impressively under madness and loss of weight. He seemed heroic and at one with his illusions. Stanton threw ripples down the reins and the gelding picked up its stride until the runners hissed and the wind lifted the long winter mane of the horse. Quinn watched him smile up into a sky of no stars whatsoever with a bearing of unspecific mastery. Quinn’s face tightened pleasantly under the cold sting of wind. Stark ridges of pine enclosed their circle of snow. “James, old pal,” Stanton said, “you have outlasted me. Learned persons have expressed doubt that I am ever coming back…” His voice trailed away content.

When they got to the house, the stableboy was somehow waiting for them again with the butler, another keen young man with a clipboard and indeterminate crewcut. This one took their coats impatiently. They passed into the house, the young men sticking close to their elbows. Stanton stopped suddenly in the hallway and said to the two, “Stand back, you bastards, now. I need room to breathe.” They fell away a bit. Stanton started upstairs to change for dinner and the two, hovering under the moose head, watched him ascend. He caught Quinn’s eye with a smile and turned to them again. “Just because none of you can hit the bowl,” he pronounced, “you think everyone should walk barefoot in your pee. I don’t buy it.” He continued up the stairs and the two fluttered into his wake. When they were close, he turned and feinted at them; they fell back and Stanton went up laughing.

Waiting for dinner, Quinn and Janey talked to each other with careful familial heartiness. She had pictures of a visit Stanton had made to Texas the previous year. One showed him standing in front of a parked car with a cloud of alkali dust still hanging in the air behind. The photograph caught him with a wide, blind smile on his face and a wax-paper cone of roses in his hand. The car nudges an adobe barbecue in the sun, miles from the champagne cellars of Waco. Another shows him with Mom and Dad in the hot fog of the mineral spring. They all three wave as if showing written messages on the palms of their hands.

At dinner they had platters of partridge and wild rice, two bottles of cold Traminer. Stanton talked well when he remembered; he never faltered from forgetting but stopped cleanly and waited for Janey to cue him. Afterward, they went downstairs to the gallery. Stanton no longer had his pistols; but he had plywood cutouts that were much the same; and they paced off, turned and said “Bang, bang!” at each other soberly. Then someone invisible upstairs announced Stanton’s bedtime. Quinn went up then too; though it wasn’t until later, in bed and still awake in the big, strangely stilled house, that he felt each of their presences, compromised and happy, each asleep and dreaming, like bees in cells of honey.