The Sporting Club (7 page)

“I'll do my best.”

Quinn got in the river and waded to the far bank where he knew the current had deposited enough gravel to leave a safe walking ledge. It was never comfortable wading at night though; he could see the water around his waist shine so that he knew where it was. But the sight of bottom that was so reassuring when wading in fast water was lost. As he waded, he switched out line from the end of his rod, working it gradually into the air. The big wind-resistant night fly was hard to move until he had thirty feet of line up and then it began to carry and hiss as it passed overhead. He began to fish automatically, taking his exercise, thinking. He was just beginning to be able to fish as he wanted to. It would always be a week until he could relax and bear down and fish with exactitude. But the hatch now was passing already. Too bad. Olson would feel responsible. The nighthawks that crossed back and forth above him were disappearing with the duns. Otherwise the spring uproar was at a peak, the forest as raucous as a one-man band. The river here was narrow with stable banks that let the trees grow close. Above his head they left a corridor of stars obscuring with streamers of cloud. Quinn knew Stanton was at the foot of his pool swearing and flogging water, wanting at any cost to come up with the best catch. Stanton was a competitive fisherman; that is, an odious apostate. He tried to beat fish out of the river. When successful, he challenged you with them. Olson who, as a fisherman, was his opposite number, fished deferentially and awaited his occasions. There were none of the streamside brawls between man and fish that grace the covers of the sporting periodicals. Olson had his unique alchemy and fished for sport. He kept only the fish he needed.

The sky had grown heavy and Quinn stopped casting and reeled up. The air seemed dense and he stood where he was and waited in the steady rush of water. The first thunder came and a hot seam of lightning opened across the southwestern sky. He knew it was dangerous to be in the river and he turned to wade back. Grape-size drops of rain started to fall and take the sheen off the river. He was dry only a moment more and then he was soaked through to his underwear. His hair clung to his skull. Unnerving drops ran down from the base of his neck and the sky overhead kept fracturing with livid fissures of light. He had to be careful going downstream. The tendency to trip on obstructions was increased with the current behind. When he could see Olson silhouetted on the far bank, he crossed over. Olson gave him a hand and he clambered up. They sat down and watched the river for Stanton. Olson had no fish either. Both men watched the sky, hoping the lightning would stay to the south and that Stanton would know enough to hurry. They waited another twenty minutes until the storm was tossing the tops of the trees and lightning was forking skeins of white light in the sky, then flashing afterward, soundless, like the retina of a camera. Stanton appeared on the far side and began to wade carelessly across, not strategically, but walking across the stream until, fifteen feet from their bank, he went down. Olson skidded in and told Quinn to stay where he was. Quinn saw Stanton in the darkness, floundering and trying to get his feet under as Olson reached him. Their struggle made the water-reflected light shatter and curl away. They started again toward the bank, Stanton having maintained his fishing rod somehow; they went slowly and Quinn knew Stanton's waders held a tremendous weight of water. When he got to the bank, Quinn took the rod from him. He could hear Stanton's stertorous breathing. There was no hope of getting up the bank with the waders on and he had to shed them. Quinn helped him. Olson emptied the boots and flung them up on the bank and climbed out behind. “Give me some light, Jack,” Stanton gasped. Olson turned on his flashlight and Stanton pulled up a heavy brown trout from his creel. He held it under the jaws and tail so that the butter-colored belly hung in a curve and all of the black and orange spots showed. “Take
that,
” said Stanton with a wild and unexpected laugh. Olson was going.

“I'll see you boys in the morning,” he said. He started up the path and soon was invisible to them.

“Is Olson miffed?” Stanton asked. “Or need I even ask?”

“We were damned nervous about the lightning.”

“He was patronizing me, old Quinn.”

“I don't think so. We were both pleased to see you picked up such a good fish.”

“It is a good fish, isn't it. I'm not sure I remember seeing you
or
Herr Olson with such a trout, for all the celebrated expertise.”

“That's right, Vernor. There has never been a fisherman like you.”

They crossed the compound again. Quinn was determined to go back to his place, read and begin a program of avoiding Stanton. But there was still activity and the group had moved just outside the Bug House. Stanton and Quinn walked over. “Nice to see you,” said Scott. There was a clamor as Stanton strutted with his trout aloft like a bullfighter with the ears of a bull. They were all gathered around a barrel of oysters that Spengler had flown in from Delaware. There was a basket of thin-skinned, almost translucent limes. Quinn borrowed one of the irons and a plate, then pried open a half dozen of the chalky, small oysters, revealing interiors as smooth as the inside of a skull. He squeezed lime over all of them and, lifting them one by one, sipped off the juice and with the surreptitious aid of his forefinger slipped each oyster from its moorings and into his mouth. Then he began again with the iron. He joined Stanton, carrying six new oysters. Stanton was talking to Fortescue who was once president of the club. Quinn had a better chance to observe him than he had had during their discussion of horse at Ypres. Fortescue wore military twill pants and an English hacking jacket; he had the face of a crazy spaniel. Quinn moved in to listen. Stanton was telling Fortescue that Jack Olson was trying to take over the club and turn it into a private shooting preserve. Quinn said, “That's not true.” Stanton went red.

“Don't interfere, James. I won't pay dues to have him patronize me. He's done it before and now I want him drummed out of the corps. If Herr Olson wants to undertake contests, he has to take his chances.”

“Patronizing you is not the same as taking over the club. I don't see why you equate them.”

“Give him a step and he'll outflank you,” said Fortescue. “It could be a feeler.” Fortescue turned his right hand at an oblique angle to illustrate the flanking maneuver. He illustrated its effectiveness by holding the other hand supinely in place and allowing the right hand to flank it repeatedly, piling up advantages.

Quinn felt that something had to be said; but he knew he had sacrificed his position already by stringing along with the jokes that led up to this juncture. What made circumventing Stanton even trickier was the presence of some not quite visible plan which showed itself in Fortescue's cooperation. Short of the pieties of woodland life to which the club subscribed so heartily, nothing pleased them more than internecine strife. Stanton knew how to manage this impulse. In the episode with Olson, Quinn saw the beginnings of something catastrophic.

2

Native Tendencies

 

 

 

T
HE
next day, after a flash of hatred had kept him awake through half the night, he settled into a state of contempt for Stanton's motives. He spent the morning expecting him to come down and had prepared a speech, sharply reprehending and corrective; but Stanton never came at all and Quinn's anger burned away, leaving him, by noontime, relaxed again and comfortable. After making himself a small meal, he decided he would take a long walk and went around the back of his house down the path with its coarse entanglement of peripheral vegetation. He came to a place where the path split up in six directions, scattering high and low through the woods. He halted, undecided, knowing what country each of these paths ran to but unable to decide which to take. So he resorted to sinistrality, the art or practice of turning left.

The first left turn took him below the cottage to a piece of rich bottom land so round and low and free of heavy trees that it must recently have been water. The path skirted the lower end, bearing toward the river, and forked. Quinn turned left. This new path wandered about forty feet and swung up, intersecting the other branch; at the intersection, Quinn turned left and was back on the original path that soared up a brush slope, then glided down the other side into a long frog-roaring oval of standing water with its lid of pads and algae. Quinn went left around the perimeter and crossing its lower end sank halfway to his knees in black stinking muck that launched a cloud of mosquitoes up around his head. He slashed away at them until he regained the path on the other side and climbed a short distance, still striking at the mosquitoes so ineffectively that he could see four of them standing cloudily in his forevision, on one side of his nose. At the end of the last ascent, he was in a close but breezy deciduous woods, strolling on the firm ground wind-freed of insects, when he was confronted by an especially pointless path that went off through heavier going to the left. He hesitated, then took it, following no more than a rod when it opened on the end of a long, hotly sunlit paddock; at one end of it, Janey lay naked on her back in the smoky spring sun, her breathing slumbrous and regular. Quinn's eyes turned slowly, searching the clearing for Stanton; then his gaze settled upon her again lying in total female repose of lax unresisting limbs. She was below the level of breeze and not even her hair moved. The canyon of light above her was flaked and spinning with motes and insects, the trees too, everything, was in motion but her unmoving form stationed in his path as final as a landmine.

Then Quinn saw how he must get out of there, tumescence and all. There would be no explaining should she awake and find him rooted to the spot like a thief-proof cemetery marker. The retreat alarmed him as much as anything, the fear of her looking up in time to see him scuttling bushward, his polychrome mental picture safely fixed. But he was back on the main path, trudging along toward his cottage again, the brief experiment with sinistrality finished.

For the next two hours, he tried to read Thackeray's
Pendennis,
a volume from the sunbleached blue, uniform set that was the porch's only decoration. Even the weevil tunnel that penetrated Chapter One sent his mind hurtling back to Janey's bare-assed splendor.

Stanton arrived shortly after four and sat lazily on one of the porch chairs. Quinn upended the book in his lap, looked over and tried to remember his speech of reprehension and correction. Stanton was bored and fidgeting. Plainly, the last thing in his mind was Olson. So Quinn brought it up, asking him if he still planned to go through with his plan to have Olson removed. “That's what I plan all right,” said Stanton.

“I don't like it.”

“Don't you?” said Stanton, bored. He stared at the screens. “Tell me this, what were you doing spying on Janey?”

“I wasn't spying on Janey. You'll have to make yourself clearer.”

“She was sunbathing in the woods. You found her. You must have been following.” Quinn's heart pounded. He wondered if Stanton could see it. But how did Stanton know?

“All right. I stumbled on her out walking. And when I saw her, I turned around and went back the way I had come.”

“That's not her version.”

“What's her version?”

“She says you stood there about four hours with your mouth open.”

“I'm not even going to answer you.”

Stanton laughed then.

“I was kidding,” he said, “she told it to me just like you say. And now may I ask a question?”

“What?”

“Isn't she some piece of ass? Don't answer that or I'll break your neck.” He looked away with lazy, bored, intelligent eyes. “I have been figuring on exacting a price for this transgression.”

This time Quinn watched the loading. The exquisite French pistols were to be used again. Stanton poured a charge and a half of ffg Peerless black powder into a graduated brass powder measure and transferred the charge by pouring it through a funnel into the muzzle of the first pistol. He did the same with the second as Quinn held the other upright in his hand and looked into the funnel as the silvery grains sank and vanished. Then Quinn held both pistols upright. Stanton unwrapped a small black cloth that had been twisted into a sack and held it out to Quinn. “Sure you wouldn't rather use these?” In the sack was a nest of perfect, round lead balls so new they were only slightly darkened with oxidation and each with a single shiny spot like the eye of a pea where the sprue had been cut. These must have been from the stained-glass-window lead. Quinn declined. They loaded the wax balls once again, which were more than sufficient to arouse Quinn's interest; the extra charge of powder promised the loser something.

Quinn did the counting as he rehearsed the two previous duels. He knew now that he had to turn, sight efficiently and quickly and without rushing, and squeeze off the shot. As he counted, he could feel the gun well fitted in his hand, hanging straight. His thumb and last three fingers were hard around the fluted grip and comfortable. His forefinger curved through the engraved and chased oval trigger guard, the slender, flat, polished trigger in the crevice of the first joint. Quinn knew the trigger was crisp and light, resisting then yielding like a breaking glass rod. All of it seemed, for once, understandable and controlled enough that at
Ten!
he turned, swung the long pistol up cleanly, the hammer cocked already to expose the sights, and fired. “Wowee!” cried Stanton. “I heard that one under my ear! Now, stay where you are. This is an affair of honor…” The shot rang metallically in the narrow gallery. Quinn fell. A sudden flood of dark red in his mind made him think he had been knocked unconscious. It was his throat this time. He was on the floor, choking there and trying to breathe. His wind seemed restricted to a channel the size of a pinpoint. It was only by violent fetching of his lungs that he enlarged this channel, millimeter by millimeter, until he could breathe again. He sat up, his face bathed in tears of pain, his legs splayed before him and, taking the slender pistol by the barrel in both hands, smashed it repeatedly on the floor until its beautiful, fluted stock and inlaid dragon locks were in pieces around him. He reached up and held his hands to his throat and saw Stanton, standing where he had been, serious, his pistol stuck in the top of his pants, hands plunged in his pockets, watching Quinn get up, look over at him again and mount the stairs. “I'm sorry, James,” he said with unhappiness in his voice. “But I really can't let you pull that on the girl I love. How else could I make you understand?” Quinn didn't answer; he was sure he could not have. He felt a little more certain now that Stanton was a madman with unnatural power over him.