The Sporting Club (19 page)

It would be hard to say how long after that, he and Quinn met in the D-Day Bar and Grill, a mock bunker filled with war materials, bombs painted to look like happy fishes, land mines, howitzers, portable field toilets. Stanton was still depressed about the interrogations, Quinn amused; amused, that is, until he got an idea of Stanton's ungodly depression. Stanton said that they were right, he deserved the worst. He had gotten some very convincing anonymous calls, one person calling him the “lowest form of human refuse.” “And what is that?” Stanton had asked, his humor intact. He confessed they were getting to him. And Quinn could see he was in distress. It assumed the familiar atrabilious humor at the start (“Fuck the Magna Carta in the ass”). By the time they left the bar and headed for the D.A.C., Stanton's face had become a stone mask of thwarted rebellion. Quinn babbled at him and to him, from the heart and as best he could. They sat in the balcony over the pool, looking down at the empty green rectangle with its white water-polo backboards and undulant racing lanes. They swam and did cannonballs off the low board for which they were already too old. They went into the gym and Quinn got a basketball, dribbled preoccupied and did halfhearted lay-ups as Stanton bounced somberly on a nearby trampoline. They strolled naked except for medicated paper slippers and talked about the fathers-and-sons days they had attended, diving for silver dollars in the pool and afterward listening to Eddie Peabody in the auditorium. It was no use. Stanton's face remained pinched, a congestion of nerve ends. He challenged Quinn to a game of billiards and no more than got started before he slapped his cue stick across the table with a small cry and suggested dinner. Quinn watched him try to eat his way out of his depression. Consuming mechanically
tournedos de boeuf
and a thirty-dollar bottle of Château Margaux, he scribbled his number on the check and jumped up. Quinn went with him to the lobby where he bought a fistful of cigars and stuck them in his vest pocket. Out front he pressed a bill pointlessly into the doorman's hand and waited for his car to be brought. It was a winter night, black and cold to silence. When the car came, Stanton pressed another bill. “The thing is,” he said to Quinn and stopped, something racing behind his eyes. He went around the driver's door. Quinn followed and said that it had been unfair to drag him around from one build-up to another and drive off. Stanton replied combatively from inside the car, “Well, that may be what I'll do, old pal…” and trailed off. He rested the bridge of his nose on the steering wheel and said, “It's nothing. I'm boxed in, is all. Nothing.” He sat up and drove away. The next time Quinn saw him was a few weeks ago, standing in his linen shorts, sweat runneling off him: the heroic manner.

Interim reports, less somber than expected, suggested furious play, operating out of his boat down South. Quinn had a letter describing tarpon fishing at Big Pine Key, Florida. Then a newspaper article from Key West: Stanton and friends had stormed the naval installation there; on capture, they had tried to pass themselves off as Castro partisans. For a while, cards and letters: gambling at Grand Bahama, pig shooting at Abaco, tarpon again at Andros, whoring at Nassau, partying at Eleuthera. On Grand Turk Island he was persuaded to put up twenty thousand dollars to investigate the possibility of celestial navigation in sea turtles. News of him began to abate in the Antilles proper. He was charged with espionage in Haiti quite arbitrarily and he was convinced by the Tonton Macoute that it would be clever to fly out and leave the boat. He bought another from an English yacht broker in Antigua and wrote Quinn to tell him he was going to Puerto Rico because of his love for
beisbol.
Quinn didn't hear from him again. Throughout these letters, though he had little to go on, Quinn got an impression of metallic insensibility that approached stupefaction, like letters from someone in shell shock. The rest was from Janey on; and she, it seemed, wasn't talking. “Are you?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because there is no place to start. It doesn't make a story.” A single strangely shaped shadow revealed the declivity of her cheek and any motion at all made her eyes go from reflecting to bottomless. No wonder she had Stanton under such crazy control as Quinn was now sure she had, dancing like a circus horse, a little out of hand perhaps, but out there on the lead under unreckonable command. Quinn liked this thought: Stanton a little dappled stallion waltzing on a barrel head, jumping through pastel flames; behind, the gallery in regular ascending semicircles of vacuous faces; Stanton's hoofs muffled in the sawdust as he trots steadily round Janey in silk top hat and tails, her whip curling toward his dappled buttocks like a silk thread. Then, after the last hoop, Stanton fetches up under the big top; there is mechanical applause like seawaves. A tiny car drives up and skids to a stop. Enthusiastic applause as a family of midgets bails out with luggage. The pony begins to go sour. He whinnies aggressively. The midgets stop in trepidation. The booing begins like the groaning of a tree about to fall and rises as the pony rushes among the midgets, striking out with varnished crescent hoofs, the booing rising as the midgets begin to take a beating; then the inscrutable crowd comes out of the bleachers and smothers the pony in sharp downward blows like the branches of a collapsing tree. As it came to Quinn's mind, he wondered if it was accurate.

Janey said: “One night, in Puerto Rico, Vernor heard a woman crying on the balcony outside his hotel. He went out and saw her leaning against the wall covering her face up with her hands. She was still crying. Vernor asked what happened and she said she had been attacked by a man. Vernor asked her what he looked like and she took her hands down from her face. Vernor asked her what he looked like again and she stared at him just a minute and said,
‘You.'
” The woman, Janey said, was her Aunt Judy. Vernor was horrified and fascinated, he fell in love. But she only went out with him and let him stay with her betweentimes: there were others. “I had to console the poor lovesick baby and, oh, me, he was starry-eyed! He offered her the world and everything he had. Now, then, one day he came over in the morning. I think it was on a hunch. Judy was sleeping in the bedroom with a dealer from the El Convento. And Vernor smoked and fussed and tried to talk to me. I can tell you it was tense, boy. I talked my head off. Vernor was puffing his cigarette and squinting at the bedroom door until Judy came out in a peignoir still beautiful but very rundown looking and in a bad mood. Vernor tried too hard to be pleasant and told her she looked mussed up or something, though maybe it was only the unfortunate lighting. Judy said, ‘I just woke up. Get it? I just woke up.' He began yelling that someone was there. The dealer walked out of the bedroom, fully dressed and said, ‘A for excellent.' He had a pistol in his hand and he wasn't waving it around or anything. He just had it. He walked right past Vernor and went over to the mirror and tucked the pistol under his chin and smoothed his hair down with both hands. Then he put the pistol in the top of his pants and squeezed the knot of his tie between his thumbs and put the pistol in his pocket. He asked Vernor how he looked and Vernor said he looked as sharp as a tack. And then the dealer asked how he liked the tie and I thought somebody would get killed but Vernor said that the tie was of the very finest.” Later, Stanton befriended the dealer and took him deep-sea fishing and by some slip or concatenation of circumstances left the dealer in a yellow rubber raft a hundred miles off the Mayaguana Bank. When the police informed Stanton that though the dealer would not let them bring him to justice, they thought he ought to know the man was in the hospital with third degree burns from the sun. “Next time,” Stanton said, “he won't leave his Coppertone on his beach blanket.” Judy used the police without reserve; she kept a small, gray one at her door with instructions to shoot or arrest Stanton on sight. “He got so desperate he settled for me,” said Janey. “And I couldn't pass him up.”

Quinn helped her with her coat. It was a dressy, tailored coat with a velvet collar and looked good with the old cotton slacks she wore. Quinn could see that she was feeling what had settled over the club; the apprehension widened her eyes and emphasized the almost foxlike shape of her face. Then his mind wandered from Janey in dejection and replaced her with Mary Beth complete with bagpipes. Doggedly, Quinn watched himself unwind her kilt; but instead of the herring-white Scots flesh he has resigned himself to, he discovers a set of prickly duck-hunters' underwear. What's the meaning of this?

“The meaning of what?”

“Talking to myself.”

*   *   *

What a smell! Anyone would think that people who had as many pretenses as these club members had would have the decency to go a little way from the tent. And the body odor, especially the women, was not the reassuring funk of laborers; this was the smell of people who had been deep in deodorants until a couple of days ago; it was something smarmy, acidic and sour. Quinn made his way along the tent. He recoiled from one odor to another until, in resignation, he accepted and his nose pumped steadily at the single generalized odor that was a meld of everything from axilla to organic debris and smelled like clam soil.

People went to and fro as though in a blackout, with a rather useless air of carrying on. A portable generator ran somewhere and lightbulbs hung in the trees, swung and heaved in the breeze and threw monstrous shadows everywhere. The children were playing in the black rectangle of shadow at the end of the tent and their fierce voices came brokenly. “… no, you can't!… Eat it raw!” Then the piping voice of a little girl, “Okay for you, Billy! Now I have to kick you in the noogies!” Quinn was shoved rudely from behind. It was Fortescue carrying the front end of a small platform. “If you can't help, get out of the way.” Stanton came past carrying the other end. They placed it opposite the center of the collapsed tent, that is, between the tent and the Bug House. Quinn glared after Fortescue. When Fortescue had put his end down he looked back and caught Quinn's eye. “Go home, Quinn! Please go!”

“Let's hurry it up,” Stanton said to him. “I've got stuff to do.”

“Is this speech going to be long?” Fortescue asked.

“Brief, very brief, very brief.”

“What about a little fireworks first?”

“Okay, give 'em fireworks.”

“The singing though.”

“Give 'em the fucking singing.”

“What about a couple of rockets, see, and then you have the singing coming right in there afterward.”

“Get this: I don't care. But whatever it is, make it snappy.”

“Sure, okay. We have all the time in the world. Spengler burned his chronicle, you know. So, we'll have more time for you.”

Quinn approached. “What'd he burn his chronicle for?”

“Come on,” Fortescue said, “get a move on.”

“Said we don't deserve it,” Stanton said impatiently.

“Everybody together for the fireworks and singing,” Fortescue called. “Charles,” he shouted past Quinn, “Reveille!” Charles Murray materialized looking a little worn but well preserved. He put the bugle to his mouth and took it down again.

“This won't be terribly good,” he said.

“Blow,” said Fortescue, and Murray raised the bugle to his smiling lips. What came out was nothing like Reveille at all. It was a forlorn sound and reminded Quinn of the noise that must have been made by those animals that were the transitional phase between birds and reptiles. But everyone gathered around and sat crosslegged in front of the platform, behind which Murray now knelt on one knee striking matches. Soon a little string of sparks hung in the air before him and he whirled, ran, then bit the dust as the first rocket, then the second and third shot aloft and burst flowers of color on the sky. Murray sang:

“O-oh, say can you see,

By the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hail,” etc.

People took the song up, standing at attention under trees, canvas and the influence of intoxicants. Children ceased their industrious grubbing to salute our flag. When the singing stopped, more rockets went aloft. One fell over as it was lit and hit Mrs. Scott in the belly without damage. The projectile was covered with a blanket before it went off and when it did, it did so with a cough and writhed like an animal underneath, finally burning its way through in a thousand places. Mrs. Scott, meanwhile, ran through the camp howling. Quinn remarked the quality of her voice which was like the singing tops of his youth: a fluty, metallic sound, cyclical and, for a human voice, quite unacceptable. Stanton cried, “Shut the twat up before she wrecks the party!” This swung unfriendly attention upon himself that was only dissipated by the spectacle of a fiery wheel racing on a guy wire, back and forth between two trees. Then Quinn watched Scott confront Stanton and tell him he didn't have to put up with this kind of behavior. “Do you realize what could have happened to her?” exclaimed the irate academician. “That could have blown her insides out!”

“No harm there.”

“What—?”

Stanton walked away. The attention of the crowd now flickered between him and the fireworks and their eyes seethed like frogs' eggs about to hatch. Stanton prowled. When there was a pause in the fireworks, he cried, “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” Stars and stripes appeared, pinwheels and carnations popped on the sky like drops of paint on glass. One rocket went up and exploded with a terrific crack, and since there was no visible display the darkness seemed a picture. Murray ran around with a lighted punk setting things off, rockets that shot from troughs or off sticks, some that whistled and screamed like V-2s and buzz bombs. What was needed was the sound of hordes, real Dino di Laurentiis hordes, Kirk Douglas directing Vandals, Saxons, Celts, Wogs, their women in tailored skins showing a bit of tit. Murray did his best. He raced around setting fire, but it was so incomplete without the sound of hordes, though the steady upward stream of fiery trails, the streaking back and forth of the burning wheel, the whistles, explosions and chemical colors aloft were enough. “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” At the far end of the tent, the children were lofting firecrackers into the group, and when they'd blow and the bits of fiery cardboard flew around, the women screamed and struck at their clothes as though there were spiders on them.