The Sporting Club (8 page)

He only went as far as his porch. The pain in his throat was settled in one spot and throbbed. His feelings were hurt enough that, in his way, he wanted no retaliation. Stanton's unkindness seemed conclusive. He wished to put his mind off it and wondered if his voice was affected. He would say something. He picked up
Pendennis
and opened to the first page. He began to read aloud, “One fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis came over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a certain club in Pall Mall.” The speaking soothed the bruised tissue of his throat. He read thirty pages more aloud, conscious of the silence around him, and found himself engrossed in the novel's progress. He read until dark.

When the sun fell, he went inside and put on a sweater. He turned on every light in every dark room. He made himself a whiskey and water, then gathered his letters from the office and answered each of them, clipping the answers to the originals and enclosing them in a manila envelope to return to Mary Beth for typing and sending. When he had done this, he had the illusion of a place in the outside world once more, a world untouched by the mania of boredom.

It turned cold during the night. In the morning he went out and was splitting kindling when Janey came. She wore a heavy blue sweater and narrowed her shoulders in the chill. She struck her hands together and shivered. Quinn said, “Is it that cold?”

“It is to me. I'm not chopping wood.” Quinn wondered what she wanted; she came from his house. He put up the axe.

“How are you?” he asked.

“
I'm
fine. What about you? Vernor said you got … plugged.”

“That's right.”

“How terrible that must be. Can we go in? I'm cold. Or would you mind?”

“I would mind.”

“But why?”

“I don't want to inspire Vernor to some new feat of aggression.”

“Yes? Well, he'll be along soon.”

“Say it isn't so.”

She ignored his sarcasm.

“You smashed that French pistol—” she said.

“Sure did.”

“It was worth a lot, you know.”

“It was worth a lot to me smashed.”

“I suppose. But it was a pair, you know, hundreds of years old. Can I go in and you stay outside?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because to Vernor it will be indisputable evidence that I have just seduced you and have run out to clear my head.”

“You know, he's not a lunatic.”

“How can you tell?”

She didn't answer. Her pretty face became pretty in another way and she was now indifferent again and splendidly vacant. Only her energy betrayed the impression. “You surely get a two-bit spring in Michigan,” she said distantly, “not that I intend to see another.”

A moment later, Quinn blurted in unreasonable disconnection, “You realize, don't you, that I know you're not married?” But Stanton came before she could reply. He clowned up the path, improvising a little dance of pathos and hopeful apology. “The throat?”

“Sore.”

“Next time we'll use milder loads and a little cheaper grade of pistol.”

“You will discover that that was the last time I'll be going for the dueling.”

“You think so?” The apologetic tone was gone. “Well, okay. Number two in the batting box is the matter of Olson. How do you advise?” Now he was actually turning the knife.

“I advise you to drop it.”

“We're beyond that now. Reality comes to bear. The turning of wheels. Fortescue came by my place. He says I hit on an ideal time to let Olson go. Summertime is strictly housekeeping around here. We can get a temporary until we find someone to do Olson's job.”

“You won't find anybody who will do it as well as he can.”

“Well, there again, we may have hit on a plan. You know how honest and thoroughgoing he is—” Quinn agreed. “Well, I hit on the idea of letting him suggest or even hire his successor. I mean, that strikes me as honorable.”

“Why don't you try this for honor: why don't you go discuss this plan with him before you make another move?”

“We're talking about an employee, old pal.”

“I know who we're talking about.”

“All right. I'll do it. But let me pick the moment.”

When they were gone, Quinn started on an angry cross-country hike to the west. He had to have a neutral corner. Shortly after he left the old club boundaries, he was out of the woods, on newer acquisition, cleared ground. This was the first of the farms now owned by the Centennial Club and represented the steady encroachment upon the lands of people whose antecedents had been expelled from the original grounds. He walked in the deep weeds toward the house, with meadowlarks and the small June grasshoppers showering around him. He could see the barn now. In this country unpainted wood weathered almost black. The barn doors had collapsed forward and lay out flat from the entrance which from this distance was only an oblong hole of darkness; swallows poured from it incessantly like smoke. The front door was unlocked and he went in. Shattered glass in quantity and empty sky-filled window frames; nests were cemented into every crevice. The frequent entrances and exits of the birds were like the pluckings of a stretched rubber band. In the kitchen was an infantryman's jacket with a long column of World War Two duty stripes of the European theater. He went outside. In the southwest corner was a wasp's nest the size of a medicine ball; under its entrance five or six wasps hung as if in suspension. He wondered if the name of the former tenant would mean anything to him. When farmers hereabout went broke, the club served as a way station where, badly paid, they awaited jobs in Detroit. A long list of names came to Quinn's mind. Half of the surnames were Olson and the bulk of these were related by marriage to the other half. Quinn wondered if Olson would end up in Detroit.

*   *   *

He woke up late the next morning, stiff from his hike; and because Stanton jumped into his head first off, he decided his holiday was in full decline. He slashed out from under the covers, got to his feet and, looking down at his white thin nude self, said, “I am Spider.” It would be hard to say what he meant exactly. He hunted in his suitcase, stirring its contents like a stew, for his bathing suit, and found it but could not find his supporter. So he put on his suit without it and then found it impossible to accustom his parts to any one side of the cold, hard, dividing crotch. He cried, “No starch I said!” and reheated some coffee. While drinking it, he sought his bath clogs. They were gone too. He breathed through his teeth. These bath clogs had been his friends. In the end, he was obliged to put on hiking shoes without socks. They seemed odd. He found a towel without any trouble and headed for the lake.

The lake was blue and still and empty save for a single, double-ended rowboat, apparently adrift. Three men stood out at the end of the canoe dock, looking at the empty boat. They turned to look at Quinn as he arrived in his bathing suit, ready for a swim. His great shoes were loud on the hollow dock. They were Fortescue, the military man, Spengler, the historian, and Scott, the sometime investigator of seventeenth-century topics. “Wind get the boat?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Spengler said, “Stanton.”

“Stanton—?”

“He's skin-diving,” said Scott in his sneeping Ohio voice. “Troubling the trout, disturbing the redds.” He waited futilely for someone to ask him what redds were.

“What's he after?”

“Treasure.” Suddenly, timorous Spengler burst out: “His jokes and his money and his—” There was a great moist gasp beneath their feet like the sighing of a dugong and then somber and hollow and unmistakably Stanton the voice came, “God's wounds!” Silence again. Spengler was sleekit, timorous. Off the end of the dock, in the undisturbed water, and only barely visible against the dark bottom, a wobbly, undulant anthropoid form shot away and disappeared in the depths.

“What more do we require?” sneeped Scott to Spengler, turning then to Fortescue. He emphasized the significance of his question by letting his mouth drop open and shifting his jaw to one side. “What more?” He had short teeth and he wrinkled his nose.

“He's pressing all right,” said Fortescue, principally to Quinn. Quinn looked up wordlessly at this collector of military miniatures.

“He's not all bad,” Quinn said, stringing along.

“We know that,” Scott said correctively, cocking his jaw again as though now to receive a blow, squinting. “We also know that he wishes to destroy our club and that for which it stands.”

“What are you getting at?” Quinn wanted his swim.

“What we're getting at,” Fortescue began firmly, then came to so helpless a halt that Spengler had to recover.

“The point is we want to fire Olson but we want to know if that is part of Stanton's plan to destroy our club—”

“—and that for which it stands,” Scott added.

“Why don't you really outfox him,” said Quinn, “and keep Olson on.”

“Don't give us that,” said Scott's averted face, “we're on to it.” At that moment, Stanton appeared in the anchored boat, head thrown back, one arm crooked behind his head, a grotesquely muscled merman, the sun standing in the water around him like blossoms, glittering and collecting toward the shore where it cooled and disappeared.

“There he is again,” Spengler cried as though he'd wanted to grab a harpoon and jump into a whaleboat. His eyes were wide and his light hair swam nervously in the wind.

“The point is,” Scott thrust in suddenly, another of his academic surprise strategies, “that you seem to have a modicum of sense even if your
confrere
doesn't. You're the only possible mediator and we figure you're essentially on our team.”

“Oh, no,” Quinn said, “that's completely wrong. I'm afraid you misjudge me.” Fortescue laughed his sanguine nobleman's war laugh.

“We've been outflanked,” he said.

“Somewhat,” Quinn said, “in any case.”

“You're playing it real wrong,” Spengler insisted.

“Oh, no,” Quinn said in surprise. “You've got it all mixed up again. I'm not playing anything.
I'm on vacation.”

“So are we!” enthused Fortescue, playing the good old sport. But in his eyes, so much like those of an unsuccessful spaniel, was something furtive. From the boat came the sound of Stanton imitating an air-raid siren. They all looked over. What appeared to be the head of an enormous pink baby was rising over the gunwale—Stanton's naked buttocks. Each of them, for his own reasons, was stunned by this gratuity. Quinn, sharply resisting his first impulse, admired Stanton's expertise in showing only his ass from such a lowslung craft. Nothing could have been more singular than the marionette-like rising of this fleshy dome from the rocking stage of the boat. But Quinn's memory was taking over.

“Jeepers Christmas,” Spengler said. The others were talking and going off; Quinn didn't hear them. History had crowded his skull that instant and he could have cried. He sat down and dangled now shoeless feet in the chill water and watched trout fry dart through the flat green weed as Stanton coursed toward him on sharp strokes of the oars, his cathedral back making regular hydraulic movements forward and back. Presently, he was beside the dock, the double-ender still as though it had never moved.

“What are you doing?” Quinn had collected himself.

“Seeking treasure.”

“You horrified them.”

“Child's play. Get in. I found a wreck. Help me raise it and we split the take.” Quinn climbed aboard and sat in one end. The boat settled unevenly; Stanton was in the middle seat. As he began to row toward the middle of the lake, Quinn felt the boat lift slightly with each stroke. A wake of bubbles poured from the stem and Quinn imagined he was an officer in a blue tricorn, a brass telescope clapped shut in his lap, rowed to a defeated vessel by a piratic mate; then distant cannon reports over a steamy green sea. Stanton swung the boat around a floating Clorox bottle, tethered at its handle by an anchor line. He uncoiled a rope from under the seat and tied one end to the bow cleat, then without putting on the aqualung or even the mask, dove over the side with one end of the rope into the clear water that allowed his progress to be followed into a bluish, bubbled distance where he shrank from sight. He was gone a full minute before he rocketed into view and blew free of the surface. “The bends!” He rolled over the side. He sat down, took a hold of the rope and pulled it taut. Quinn got his hands on it too and they began to haul. At first, the boat heaved over but Quinn moved to the high side and they hauled more slowly until gradually Quinn began to feel something give and then let go altogether as they pulled, becoming only weight to be raised; they lifted hand over hand, no more than thirty feet of hard finished rope when Stanton said it was enough and took two turns around the oar lock. “Move carefully now and have a look.”

Quinn leaned over the side and saw, about eight feet below them, suspended in the clear and dimensionless water, a sleigh, a single-horse cutter, as delicate as a scroll, hanging by the thin rope tied between the high curling runners. Stanton said that he had had to leave the horse behind, the skeleton that is, of a small horse, all four legs fallen directly beneath and pointing behind, the skull stretched forward like an arrowhead, as though the horse had been drawing the sleigh. They towed the sleigh behind and the rope rubbed and ground upon the stern with unseen motions. When they got to shore, they beached the rowboat, waded out, untied the sleigh and, carrying it between them, brought it ashore, upright and streaming with water, to set it high in the sunlight and on the grass. It was perfect. It might have been put to use. Then Stanton sat upon its narrow seat and it slung a little with his weight. Quinn carefully got on beside him.