The Sporting Club Read online

  A month after he took over the company, it was on the edge of bankruptcy. This fact alone brought him to life. Four hundred and fifty men were faced with the loss of their jobs. It was their pitiable luck, Quinn thought, to find themselves with a bored only child dabbling at the controls in ennui. But conscience had unlocked his energy. In Detroit, where the contemplative philosophies had made few inroads, the loss of so many livelihoods could still be seen as serious. At the same time—though his own more or less rentier position made his problems look theoretical—the thought alone that he could have wrecked a fifty-eight-year-old business in one month flat gave him an acute sense of his own powers. He began to abandon his nostalgia for the life of freedom, began to admit how really bored he had been at it, and he began to take an interest. Within a short time he found himself working like one possessed.

  * * *

  A light rain made the pine barrens bleary and the river dull. It fell for two solid days. Quinn stayed indoors and read thick wet periodicals. Most of them were his mother’s fashion magazines, with page after page of epicene models writhing on lava flows in mortal constipation, or gazing at a crazy and unfriendly sun as if this were it unless we find water. He didn’t see anybody for a while and looked up from time to time at the rain rippling over the windows.

  When the weather broke and cleared, he came out squinting. Snails had crawled halfway up the door and were stuck in the sunshine, horns retracted, tracks dry as varnish. Quinn flicked them away and went back inside to dress for fishing. He dressed warmly because the river was still full of snow melt. He carried his waders over his shoulder and went down the hill in back that was so steep you had to grab poplar saplings to keep your footing. At the bottom was a plank walk that crossed the marshy ground behind the river. After that, he saw the Pere Marquette clear and fast and very slightly coffee-colored between its banks. Straight in front, he could see the details of the bottom behind the imperceptible surface. Downstream, it mirrored sky and trees, curled like molten silver at a fallen spruce and made a pool. Opposite Quinn was a high, steep bank, bare of large trees, called Harrison’s Rollway, where lumbermen had rolled skinned logs into the river. He could see a half dozen good trout rising now in the pool and began to move toward it. The air was full of mayflies, females with yellow egg sacs that Quinn knew could be imitated with the Lady Beaverkill. They touched his face lightly and their wings flickered in the peculiar light as he worked to string the heavy, bellied line through the rod’s guides and attach the long platyl leader. Now the rises were breaking out in the slicks behind the boulders and in the small tongues of current that ran between them. He put on the waders and carried the rod butt first through the woods to get below the pool. The cold bog smell of spring came very strong the minute before he stepped into the river. He crossed a few yards to get a casting angle and felt the cool, round pressure of river on his legs. By the time he was in position, eight fish were feeding steadily in a line, facing upstream as always.

  He made his false casts carefully, the lengthening line up high on the sunlight and the rod beginning to flex its full length into his hand. With his left hand holding the free line below the reel, he adjusted the tension of the cast so that the bow of line was correct and satisfactory. He finished the cast. The line straightened before him. The fly floated down and touched the water. It glided, then vanished. The line went tight when he lifted the rod. The rod was now bowed toward the straight line that swung out of the pool to the main stream in the middle where it was furrowed and marked with the silver arrows of the suntrack. Quinn held the rod high. He felt the curve of it lose rigidity. The fish broke and so began to lose ground. When it broke again it was splashy and without violence and came slowly to the net. At the net, it bolted once more and swung around behind but a moment later was in hand, a trout of two pounds that Quinn, with his thumb securely under the gill covers, held first against the trees and then against the sky before he put it in his creel. He rinsed the crushed fly in the water to rid it of slime which would sink it, blew hard on it until its hackles were upright and the false wings of feather stood out from the hook. He began his casting once again. He shortened the timing of his first cast so that the line cracked very slightly like a whip and there was a small cloud of vapor in the air where the fly had been. The fly was now absolutely dry and when it landed on the water it stood high on its sharp hackles and floated the way an insect does.

  When the mayfly hatch was finished and the fish had quit feeding, he had five good trout. On the way back to his cottage, he paused four times to open the wicker creel and look in at the trout he had put in wet ferns and arranged in a hierarchy of magnitude.

  Quinn saw the back of Stanton’s head bent to the open creel. “You can’t do this. I want all details.” He straightened up and Quinn glimpsed the fish bright and spotted in the ferns. He closed the wicker lid.

  “I have no secrets,” he said simply.

  “You’re just better than I am?”

  “Now you’re talking,” Quinn said. He saw the truculence coming on, blunting Stanton’s features.

  “You’ve had to deal with me once,” Stanton said hopefully.

  “Yes, yes, I remember. Would again too.”

  “You would—?”

  “Oh, sure.” Quinn was eager to get his own back. The welt on his chest, now the color of plum, reminded him. But when they were in the dueling gallery, his nerves came back with the sudden memory of his last experience. He didn’t want to be hit again. On the other hand, he wanted to stick Stanton if he possibly could. Then Stanton’s wife came down the stairs, three at a time and, out of breath, introduced herself as Janey. “How do you do?” said Quinn, pleased with her. She wasn’t what he expected. He expected something off Palm Beach with a lot of jaw, Jax slacks and attitudes. Instead, this girl had a fine, open-eyed ingenuousness that would have been poison to the kind of arm-pumping good sport Quinn had expected. Her mouth, by an almost invisible margin, did not close and its shape was clarified by the dark line. Her cheekbones were distinct, either broad or high, he wasn’t sure; his study was making her jumpy. Quinn could have followed her around admiring her for a long time before actually wanting to lay hands on her.

  Stanton took down a new set of pistols. These were percussion guns of the nineteenth century, made in Charleston, South Carolina, and had not been fired before. Janey said it was too bad to shoot them after so many years; couldn’t they sword fight? Stanton looked over at her and went on loading the pistols. When he was finished, he presented Quinn with his choice. Janey counted this time, in Old Church Slavonic she called it, though Quinn suspected. Stanton said she could count to ten in nineteen major languages including Tel Aviv. It threw Quinn off. He at first thought it was funny in a nervous-making way. But by the time they got toward ten, he was fingering the trigger nervously, not knowing what number they were on and having to turn when the counting stopped to find Stanton already facing him. He fired a bad shot and at the same time received an indescribably painful hit in the center of his upper lip. Tears sprang to his eyes. Stanton smiled with the placidity of an Annunciation. Quinn handed him the discharged pistol with its sulphurous odor and hammer closed tight on the uselessly spent percussion cap, and went out of the house without a word.

  By nightfall, the Stantons had lured him back for dinner. He swiftly drank too much and then finished half a pot of coffee to clear his head. His lip was swollen in a uniform protuberance so much like an auto bumper that Stanton giggled and held the sides of his seat.

  “What about another chance?” Quinn said hotly.

  “It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Let me judge.”

  “Not a chance. I’ve come to think of you as a sitting duck.” Stanton’s mouth was poised, ready to start into laughter. Next to him the bride dusted her strawberries with sugar from a small silver spoon.

  So Stanton had this minute victory of refusal. But Quinn felt that he had stymied him on the larger issue simply by refusing to play
, to fall into the old habit of scheming against the other members of the club, to see what was funny about the sign hanging over the stairway. Quinn felt that for once he held a subtle advantage. Stanton spoke. “How is your business, may I be so bold to ask?” Was this a lead shot or just a question?

  “It’s all right,” Quinn said, cards very close now, almost not sporting.

  “You realize that I don’t work.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Janey said, “It’s like having a child in the house.” Her voice was low and sweet. “He swarms.” She had some kind of accent.

  “You do just fine with me, sugar.”

  “I know I do, Vernor,” she explained. He wasn’t listening to her. “But you do seem to … swarm.”

  “Okay, Janey, time to hang up the jock,” Stanton said to Quinn.

  “Vernor fails to work, you see.”

  “Hang it up, Janey. Hang up the old jock.” Stanton was patient and instructive. Then he turned completely to Quinn in order to exaggerate what he pretended to ignore. “Well! You’ve done right smart since you took over that firetrap factory of yours, have you not?”

  “I’ve done well.”

  Janey flattered Quinn by looking at him with interest. She was so balanced and her gazing, slate eyes so serene that she made Stanton next to her look as overgrown as a Swiss Guard or an Alaskan vegetable; but, in fairness, he hadn’t found his brilliant and destructive pitch yet and Quinn himself was rancorous for having been shot in the lip. So the game had stalemated prematurely.

  “But still the solution seemed to you to direct your attention to Papa’s company store.” This was unfair of Stanton; it had become impossible without any kind of refereeing. Quinn spoke slowly.

  “The company store makes an excellent punching bag for my frustrations and it appears that I am to be frustrated. Every time I slug it, it gets more profitable.”

  “What amazes me is your bravery, walking in cold.” Stanton was trying to make it up; but with Janey watching, Quinn liked this bit of characterization.

  “I learned. I made a lot of mistakes.”

  “Seems you learned all too well,” said Stanton. “You’re caught.” Smug, he sipped his brandy conclusively.

  “I know I am. I want to be.” Quinn couldn’t beat him at wit; but he thought he had a chance on the honesty count.

  “Is it very dull?” Janey asked.

  “Hang it up,” said Stanton, deliberately misinterpreting. “You needle my friends and I’ll kick your ass.” She turned to him and Quinn studied her. She wasn’t there any more. Very discreetly, she had departed. But hadn’t Stanton been joking?

  “Vernor’s inactivity makes his mind run wild,” she said from afar.

  “Hang the sonofabitch up,” said Stanton, dropping ringed, ominous hands to the table. Quinn knew that she couldn’t be very safe around him. And because of that her remote backtalk had gallantry.

  * * *

  Saturday morning. Quinn walked to the main lodge for his breakfast. The midweek quiet was gone. Cars were parked under dusty pines and overdressed children in dresses and Eton suits circled the compound and ran in and out of the Bug House. The sun was high and lifted a square of hot light from the roof of the shed. The cars, too, even under their trees, were soaked with heat. Quinn walked through the kitchen entrance to the coolness of the dining rooms. He sat down at one of the linen-covered tables and surveyed. There was still the unnecessary number of china cabinets along the far wall. Overhead, the painted pressed-tin ceiling of nymphs and satyrs had the same prettiness and the same humorous light fixture bursting from one tin satyr groin. The walls were circled with pictures of early days, logging operations and sporting feats. Surmounting these were the stuffed trout and the stuffed heads of deer and bear; the multiplicity of unfocused glass eyes did as much as anything else to establish the mortuary atmosphere. On either side of the kitchen were two punt guns, poachers’ weapons that could bring down a flight of ducks with a shot. These were fired on the Fourth of July. The wall whose window overlooked the Pere Marquette river was bare and on it were printed two clear pentagrams of sunlight. The room smelled of cedar shavings like a schoolhouse and the distant sounds of children made the quiet emphatic.

  He read his mail as he ate and came across a letter that caused him to let a forkful of egg cool in midair: Mary Beth had taken it upon herself to supply price quotations for a small die-cast part that the company made; the price she quoted for the finished part was somewhat less than half the manufacturing cost, and the company was therefore swamped with orders. Quinn managed to finish his breakfast anyway before calling the office and telling Mary Beth what his feelings were, generally, about what she had done. He left her on the phone laughing and crying and telling him, “I hate you I hate you I hate you.” Why me? Quinn inquired of himself.

  He stopped outside at the edge of the compound. There was now a flag on the tall flagpole, standing out from its distant top like a new postage stamp. Behind the screens of the Bug House the small bandstand was visible with its chairs, its piano, its music stands and its shadowy, disused jukebox. The grass all around was brown in the exposure. From behind the main lodge came the same children’s voices, the sound of chopping, and then heavy hands seized his ears. A falsetto cry came from behind: “Mumma! Mumma!” It was Stanton. He made Quinn guess over and over what day it was. Quinn couldn’t do it. It was the day the Mackinac Bridge was to be dedicated.

  “I don’t want to go,” said Quinn.

  “I have my boat there.”

  “I don’t want to go and I won’t go.”

  “You’re going.”

  “What’ll we do? No, really, I don’t want to go.”

  “This is an important day in our state’s history you god damned loser and you’re going to go.”

  “You and Janey go. Take pictures so that we can all pore over them ardently at some unspecified later date.”

  “If you don’t go I’ll spend considerable time and money to make your life a living hell.”

  “I’m telling you, Vernor. It isn’t going to be the same this year. There is going to be no clowning.”

  Stanton looked at him. “I don’t believe you,” he said, looking.

  The view of the water from the Mackinac dock was blocked at intervals by the tall steamers, all cleanly painted in gun-metal gray and white; and the glass panes of the great cabins and staterooms picked up the light of the very cold blue straits beyond. They walked the length of the dock, and the tall pilings next to them that were faced with strips of fire hose heaved and took up the slow shock of the steamers’ movement. The private boats were moored beyond the steamers. The three of them stopped before a tall Matthews yacht that was heavily equipped with Rybovitch blue-water fishing modifications: outriggers, a tuna tower, gin pole and harpoon stand. The boat was covered with a fitted duck tarpaulin drawn tight as a trampoline at its grommets. The tarp stretched between the transom and the flying bridge; the radio direction finder was covered by a small fly of canvas that matched the tarpaulin. It was Stanton’s boat and the name was on the transom in brass: Lusitania. Underneath that, the home port: Ponce, Puerto Rico. Quinn was thinking of the last time he had seen Stanton, helplessly and pathetically out of his mind in front of the Detroit Athletic Club. Afterwards, Stanton had headed south and this was how he’d gone.

  They left the dock, passed a row of green highway department trucks and walked until they were at the thronged middle of Mackinac City with its weathered concrete and false territorial buildings. Stanton led and Quinn followed Janey through streets full of people who had come for the bridge dedication. The bridge itself was cordoned off by the state police. The three were balked; then Stanton led a retreat without explanation, downtown again to a dry-cleaning establishment. When he came out, he had three paper tags that he pinned to their chests; the tags read PRESS ONLY. They looked at each others’ tags unconvinced.

  Squinting past the great concrete fan of the entrance and past the toll
gates, Quinn could see the bridge climbing, its towers and cables strewn against the sky, holding the vast and absurd booby trap together. Where the approach was closed off, black limousines with tinted windows began the ascent to the bridge’s crown, and from behind those windows the myriad muted faces of nabobs gazed at the riffraff. These limousines were followed by a small parade of open convertibles, each with a queen seated on the furled top. There was a peach queen, a gasket queen, a celery queen, a lumber queen and finally, a slender, dark girl passed waving to the crowd, the smoked pickerel queen. A number of people tried to follow the queens onto the bridge. They were stopped by the police and howled in near-demented rage. Quinn, Stanton and Janey moved on to the entrance as though to walk straight through. A trooper stepped sideways into their path and Stanton said, “Detroit Free Press, officer. Will you get the hell out of our way, officer?” They walked through the unoccupied toll gates and onto the bridge where the concrete apron fell away to open grating through which the water of the straits was visible.

  The bridge rose away in front of them, up between the two great towers that slung cables thicker than trees; and under his feet Quinn saw the dark water ticked with whitecaps fade to solid blue as they climbed. At first he saw nothing ahead except the smooth, ascending grate surface of the bridge. But after a short time, the dedication party was visible, its flags, buses, limousines and platforms gathered between towers like a distant hill town. Someone was talking over a loudspeaker, the voice indistinct on the wind. A lake freighter passing under the bridge, tremendously diminished beneath them, poured smoke from its oval stack that you could smell as it came up through the grating. As they went, not talking, figures began to resolve themselves out of the cluster between the towers. They approached and saw the dedication party, a crowd of perhaps a hundred. On the platform a man was making a speech in Canadian French into a wall of smiling, upright, uncomprehending Michigan burghers who smiled at him while they talked to each other. The speaker’s hair was tossing and the sheaf of papers he held rustled uncontrollably in his hand. When his speech began to stumble, he looked down at this sheaf and his eyes widened with real ferocity.