The Sporting Club (11 page)

*   *   *

Representative John Olds, R. Mich., said: “Olson was a useful man. Which of us would deny that? But he was headstrong. He was hard to handle. He was a thorn in our sides. We are pleased to have him out of our hair. All this talk of property degenerating makes me tired. These woods and streams have a natural tendency to maintain themselves. We need a janitor and we've got one from the looks of this Olive. But whoever we have, our children and our children's children will frequent these lands
in perpetuam.
The traditions of the Centennial Club, thanks to its board of directors, will continue
de profundis.
I thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“Yuh, okay.”

*   *   *

Mrs. Enid “Cooky” Silt said: “A wise guy. Someone should have slapped his face. I'm glad he's gone.” Impossible, thought Quinn, could Olson have seduced Mrs. Silt? Very hard to imagine; one thought he had better taste. Quinn was frankly appalled at the thought of those Mamie Eisenhower bangs damp with lascivious sweat, the fly-tying hands of that admirable woodsman busy.

*   *   *

Old Mrs. Newcombe and her husband agreed that times change, off with the old, on with the new. It is written that history is no respecter of persons.

*   *   *

Quinn found Spengler, the chronicler of the Centennial Club, below the spillway of the dam that regulated the level of the lake and kept its constant shoreline. He was sketching the punks that grew in the backwater there. Beside him was a pair of binoculars. He was on the lookout for Kirtland's warbler which lived only in this county and wintered on Abaco island in the Bahamas. The chronicle was to come out on the Fourth of July, the centennial celebration of the club's founding. The chronicle would contain an account of punks, of Kirtland's warbler and of Olson. He wasn't talking till then.

*   *   *

Scott said: “Our ideas of declining fortunes have changed since the seventeenth century. In the Low Countries, Huizinga argued—” He went on, too.

*   *   *

Stanton said: “I'm not qualified to answer, old sport. Unfortunately, Olson has become a non-person for me. He never was. So, how can I tell you whether or not I'm glad he's gone.” Then he grinned. “Isn't the new guy god-awful?”

*   *   *

Two nights later, the shooting began, waking everyone. Five shots rang out in the muggy night from behind the lake. Stanton appeared at Quinn's in the morning. Quinn dressed and they hiked around the back side of the lake, breaking through the swale and basswood tangle. Presently, they came upon a place where the cover had been battered down and trampled. In the middle were a grown doe and a very young buck of fifty or sixty pounds. Whoever had shot them had started to hog-butcher the doe but had got nervous and ripped loins off the two quickly and beat it. So the little buck was nearly whole; while the doe was vented up to the sternum with the glossy spillage of intestines and jellying blood. Since neither animal had been bled, it would be certain that even the meat was spoiled.

*   *   *

Quinn ate dinner at the lodge. He scribbled drafts of business letters beside his plate and when he was finishing the meal, Janey came in and sat opposite him and said, “There you are.” She had caught him unexpectedly and for a moment they conversed very unnaturally. He called for coffee and she put on her dark glasses, doubtless from the same embarrassment; and they cut off her softening eyes so that her nose and cheeks were clear beveling lines around the glasses. Quinn reached across and removed them. He said he hadn't meant to make her nervous. He folded the glasses and pushed the dishes to one side. Janey undid the rubber band from a fresh pack of pictures. “You wanted more,” she declared.

“And I do.”

“Then get the expression off your face. Sometimes my memory fails and I use these to prove I was around last week. Here, let's do it this way. You ask for a particular kind of picture.”

“How do you mean?” Quinn asked and she glanced at the pack.

“Okay, for example, ask me for a ridiculous picture.”

“Right. Give me a ridiculous picture.”

She handed him Stanton's Harvard graduation picture.

“Now you think of one,” she said.

“A sad picture.”

“A sad picture,” she repeated as she went through the pack. “A sad picture.” She looked up. “Well, it turns out … they're all sad.”

“Then give me them all.” She handed him the pack. “Why did you come over here tonight?”

“Because Vernor is giving me a very hard time.”

“What for?”

“Just for drill, he said.”

“All right, let's never mind him and look at pictures. Who's this?” It was her cousin Richard, a rock and roll singer who was killed in a plane crash. He came from a branch of the family that was out of favor for having struck oil enough for them all in East Texas and dissipating the fortune; because of this, Janey said, she herself had been taught all the little economies, a thousand useless tools to be used in the face of squandered fortunes. She said that this ruined branch was the family's most interesting. It had taken its chances and burned hotly for a few years in the thirties when everybody else was lost in the dust bowl. They had thrown up an impressive mansion outside Orange, Texas, that, even though it belonged to them no more, was still there. They had owned three celebrated race horses: Steamboat, Shanty Duchess and Dogdancer who killed his trainer. True, nothing had worked out: the boy dead, the father, summoned for managerial malfeasance, was jailed for fraud. The mother, a poor farm girl at twenty, just as poor at sixty, affected antiquated French lace getups that showed the delicate tanning of the flatiron at home, an unmistakable, though mistaken, impression of down-at-the-heels gentility; she got the modicum of gallantry unaccorded the less romantic poor in the South.

The next picture is of the palmetto, the mother, the father, the artesian well; you still cannot see the house though its shadow has moved farther toward the well and sweeps past the couple who are old enough now that they must have been living in the house some time. The palmetto is larger, miraculously retaining the exact shape of its youth. Though the picture must have been taken ten years after the visit to Independence, Missouri, Quinn imagines that he sees in her face her failure to encounter the former President in his memorial library.

“Are these people still alive?”

“Pretty much.”

Janey sighed and looked out the window. The sun was clear and late and hurtled through the trees, lighting a soup of pollen that thickened gold. It seemed a long way from Texas, a long way from the drill-master nearby who strained under his jokes in this same forest.

*   *   *

Business: the time had come to plan the factory picnic. The very thought threw him back, not unhappily, upon his origins as a man of affairs. His first job after taking over had been to organize the factory picnic. And to have so soon to plan it again gave him an exceedingly unpleasant sense of
déjà vu.
The first time, he had worked carefully, interviewing employees to determine what was wanted. Since the company employed many of the handicapped, the mainstays were out: three-legged races, leapfrog and so on. The emphasis therefore would have to be a sedentary one, and Quinn arranged for the delivery of truckloads of keg beer, and epic quantities of fried food. There would be Bingo with a professional caller and personalized (initialed) Bingo tokens; the prizes were chosen by what was considered uncanny judgment: glass-pack “Hollywood” mufflers for cars, white rubber mud-flaps with safety reflectors, turkeys, porkpie hats, barbecue sets, pink concrete yard flamingos, TV trays, plastic dogs that sat in the rear window of your car and wobbled their heads, plastic lions that sat in the rear window of your car and winked right or left when you used your turn signal, Mohawk bow-and-arrow sets, Chief Pontiac headdresses, risqué place mats, glass shower doors with leaping stags sandblasted onto their surfaces, and many other odds and ends related to automobiles, television, child diversion and sexual insinuation. The band presented a special problem because it had to be able to play both country music and polkas or it would not satisfy. Quinn had to do the auditioning and, here again, it was something of a mudbath of expanding and contracting accordions, broad Middle European faces and long, sidehill Anglo-Saxon, the electric guitars that were played in front of you with one hand plucking and the other manipulating an iron bar that sent undulant notes into the room like sea serpents; occasionally there would be a female lead singer in lacquered beehive hair whose batlike cries aroused Quinn's interest; he would consider for a moment then, like some arbitrary crank, say that he would have to insist on polkas. Finally, as if desire had been made flesh, a quartet from River Rouge materialized in his offices, set up their equipment and with mechanical regularity played first a polka and then a country song. Nonstop. So Quinn had a band; he had prizes, activities, and he rented a small fairground with a copse of knobby, pollard elms and a brown duck pond.

Now for the picnic: the picnic did go well up to the last minutes; and the drinking had already reached a merry peak; but the minute prizes ran out, something saturnalian set in and the fighting began; the band played only when threatened; Quinn pulled grunting, punching men apart; doctored a woman who had got a heavy blow from behind. Once an enormous punch press operator began to lay about him violently with a frozen turkey, sending people screaming toward the duck pond. Quinn, trying his best to keep out of it, had to threaten firing to disarm him and the man went behind the Bingo pavilion and wept like a woman. Gradually, it began to grow calm though; and the most marked sound soon became the chatter of the old ladies at the beer counter. They had heretofore been unable to get to the head of the line; now the beer was almost gone and the great, dull silver kegs wheezed foam and moaned like barrel organs. At that moment, the finale began.

A green Chevy sedan with no one at the wheel came gliding at moderate speed, sending people running and dragging children out from in front of it. It came, stately and carnauba-waxed, pristine with its bullnose, customized hood, bubble skirts, blue-tinted windows, jiggling kewpie in the empty, azure interior, and Augustan rumble of dual exhausts; curved slowly and miraculously away from the duck pond and cracked to a stop against a pollard elm. Now everyone ran. Quinn ran, toward the car nuzzling the tree, its hind wheels churning the grassless fairground soil behind. Quinn pulled open the front door of the car to turn off the ignition and his janitor rolled out blue and vein-laced in a diabetic coma, a tiny, distant scream coming from somewhere behind the locked strenuous jaws, the chest seizing under the printed Miami palms of his sportshirt. Someone pushed in beside Quinn, authoritatively worked upon the jaws until they opened and shoved in the end of a Pepsi-Cola bottle, glass clinking against teeth, and began to pour as his other hand worked the janitor's tongue free. For the others, this was simply the last straw and they began to leave. Quinn, kneeling beside the janitor, watched his eyes come out of their knotting as the Pepsi spilled around his neck and into the holiday shirt, watched the eyes grow clear and apologetic as he saw the retreat.

But Monday, when everyone was back docilely at the machines, Quinn was amazed to find that the party had been a success. “A good time was had by all,” his foreman confided. And behind Quinn's grateful smile was a vision of brawling men, of their elderly mothers and mothers-in-law with somber, ill-concealed cases of beer farts, and the children themselves, all gullet, fighting over prizes and destroying everything in their paths like army ants. Still, Quinn's smile was grateful and it was genuine.

Nevertheless, moving along the production line, which was lubricated to near silence, brought him the sense that these useful, efficient men were right now at their most minatory. The workers placed and removed, placed and removed before the presses, rhythmically; they bowed to the machine, propitiating it with a piece of cold rolled steel or a bright, solar aluminum disc; and the machine returned the bow and returned the gift, now miraculously transformed into something of purest utility. Moments later, these same objects appeared on the other side of the factory, hung on hooks, like ex-votos, and they glided through a bath of neoprene and into the ultraviolet drying rooms. The next day, out the door they went to their numberless destinies.

Yet, re-creating it in his mind, the old party held no lesson for the new; and Quinn saw no way of improving. Clearly, however, while there had been prizes, the fighting was at a minimum; that was a detail: more prizes. If only he could do it all by remote control, program the entire picnic on a punch card and keep himself far, far from their joys. He would wear a black silk tuxedo, a boiled linen shirt whiter than Antarctica, and on their day give them the occasional kindly thought.

*   *   *

He went to the lake to sit on the cutter. Summer was here and there was a portable lifeguard tower with a golden Teuton aloft. Quinn began immediately to run into acquaintances. He met Sheila Derndorff, a pretty girl of twenty with merry teeth, who had broken both legs dancing. Then he met, directly under the lifeguard tower, undulant in flaglike madras, Charles Murray, a gifted trial lawyer from Cincinnati and amateur of literature who had, fifteen years before, in an extravagant gesture of literary Anglo-faggotry, become a Roman Catholic. To have been born a Catholic and lapsed, as Quinn had done, was intolerable to Murray who nevertheless continued to regard Quinn as an accomplice in the international Romish plot. Today, he began by lamenting anew the passing of Pius Twelve, the last, in his view, of the intransigent aristocratical Popes, whose death began an age of unparalleled prole boobery in Rome. He meant, naturally, Pope John, whom he called a “loutish mountain wop.” Yes, Quinn agreed, yes, yes, yes. Murray's left hand was clutched around a pair of tortoise-shell sunglasses. He wore a raw-silk summer blazer and squinted conspiratorially at the sun. Behind him a fat woman herded children, her pocked buttocks lurching with the effort. “Your friend Stanton is going to start a squabble around here,” Murray confided. “And I am anxious to see—
Hi, Janet darling! You better run! Or I'll bite your leg!
—to see how it turns out.”