The Sporting Club (3 page)

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.

Stanton beckoned. He was standing next to a bus designated STATE LEGISLATURE over its windshield. It was surrounded by parked limousines. Beyond the bus there was nothing but sky and lake. They followed Stanton as he pushed the folding door and climbed in. It was quiet and pleasant inside. They were out of the wind and no longer had to shout to each other. The French Canadian was silenced on his platform. His lengthy printed speech whirred decoratively in his hand. His curious mouth made interesting shapes in the air like a cooky cutter. And the sun shone hard upon everything. Quinn could see down the far slope of the bridge to the town of St. Ignace and beyond to the forests of the Upper Peninsula. Then Stanton found the liquor and the box lunches and they sat down. Quinn was hungry. Janey asked for the first time if they could go home now please, that is back to the club please, she didn't, if no one minded, want to go to jail. She was ignored by Stanton, and Quinn didn't know what to say to her. The players can't be expected to talk to the spectators.

“Have you served your country?” Stanton asked, indicating Quinn with the point of his sandwich.

“No,” Quinn said, “I take, take, take and never give.”

“Never been in the army?” Stanton knew he hadn't.

“No, have you?” Quinn knew that Stanton had been, of course. But it was expected that he should let Stanton rehearse this obsession.

“Just a little. I was found unfit for general consumption. Whenever I was in the barracks with a crowd of soldiers, my blood pressure climbed so high it distorted my vision. They had to let me go. Military hearts were broken. I couldn't see, Mr. Quinn, I couldn't see.”

They tried to talk about other things, but Stanton smothered any incipient conversation not related to the trial he seemed to be conducting.

“I think they're starting to move,” said Janey. She was looking out of the back of the bus. Quinn tried to see. “Wait, he's going on with the speech. This is our chance.”

“No,” said Stanton. Quinn wanted to get out too. He would even have agreed to run for it; but at the same time—and this is where he began to feel it—he recognized that there was something to be lost or recorded depending upon who first moved to escape. So he vacillated between numbing himself to their peril and searching the group outside for signs of restiveness. Looking at those faces beyond the window, he thought of stampede. “Why don't we bust open some of these other lunches?” he said.

“Why don't we get out of here?”
Janey asked. The two men stared at her with disapproval. Stanton asked if she was complaining about the food and she told him that he wasn't funny. He reminded her that it was free and nourishing too. Quinn asked, “Anybody want any more—what is this?—pâté?”

“Please.”
She hid her face, then uncovered it quite suddenly to say angrily, “I'm scared!” Quinn was unconvinced by this and wondered for the first time if she was in it too.