The Sporting Club (2 page)

“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!”

“Only this small—”

“You don't see me! I'm on vacation! You don't see me!” Quinn flung shut his office door, spilling papers, aghast. Mary Beth's sourceless cries continued to come through the door and lodge in his head. He sat down in his chair in an attempt to restrain himself. If she hadn't come, he could have spent the day like the businessman-savant he knew he could be; it was worse than that, too, the voice of that ass outside more like a steam whistle than anything human. He knew he should have fired her long ago. But he couldn't do it. He couldn't have fired Lizzie Borden from the same position. He saw things from too close up. He would have liked above all things to pare this trait away. A businessman who saw employees as people was finished. Meanwhile, Mary Beth's voice died away to, “All right, Mr. Quinn, all right for you! See if I care.” Quinn calmed down. He asked himself how the day might be resurrected without his resorting to medication. He called Mary Beth on the interoffice phone. He told her that this was a place of business and that he wasn't going to have another of her Halloweens. Therefore, get to work or get out. The inevitable enraged weeping began an instant later, directed, he knew, at the resonant heart of his door. He yelled, “I have my life to live, too, you know! Do you know that?” He got no answer.

There was work to do. He was close enough to his success to be spurred on by amazement. The stacks and inquiries that piled up every day were food for the company that had acquired an almost animal life in his mind. The factory was an organism that must be fed by the sales department; the expensive and periodical retooling that kept the factory up to date was a necessary medical expense. The thought, even in mockery, would have struck him as absurd a year before. He would not have been able to imagine the sensitivity with which this great animal could respond to his ministrations. The company had seemed beyond human control and he had not been interested. Now the four connected Quonset buildings that held the heavy machinery, punch presses and forklifts seemed delicate enough to be tuned like musical instruments. There were rules of supply and storage that had visible effect; man hours, overhead and production soon became palpable facts.

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.