The Sporting Club (15 page)

The destruction of the lodge was total. Only the plumbing stood out of the wreckage, white fixtures on pipe legs like mangrove hummocks. The cellar hole had begun to fill with water. The quantity of shattered lumber was astounding. In the compound there stood a huge carnival tent, now quite dark from rain. Around the entrance many club members were smoking and talking. The men were unshaven and disheveled. Quinn went inside with Janey. The rest of the membership was in here, their sleeping bags strewn over an acre or so of interior ground. There was a queer relaxation, a locker room air, people standing around in underwear, picking, fingering and itching at themselves. Something had gone with the buildings.

Quinn and Janey continued to walk through the tent even after the others had gone out to listen to Spengler read the prologue to his lecture. A man from the company that had supplied the tent was draining two great rain puddles that had formed overhead by incising them with a razor on the end of a twenty-foot bamboo pole. These dark ponds hung like blisters until the cut was made; then they vanished in a leaf of silver that hurtled to the floor where he mopped it up. Later, he would go aloft and stitch up the incisions.

They went outside and sat down. Quinn smelled the soaked ashes and embers, the clean pitch that had boiled out of the timbers of the lodge and been slaked with cold water. Spengler announced that he would in this time of crisis review the acquisition of club lands and summarize its social history with a view toward highlighting that spirit which went to make it the great institution which it was today. Stanton was heard to say, rather too audibly for comfort, “This ought to be good.” The review began, the dreary account of acquiring the miles of both banks of the Pere Marquette that they had today. It soft-pedaled the succession of magnificent bribes that had been necessary (two greedy Presidents had clamored for ample lacings of this payola) to uproot the homesteaders and loggers who had settled in the area; when these hardheaded Scandinavians refused to move, no matter what papers or signatures were shown them, a feeling grew among the original club members that the intransigence of the hayseeds was criminally uncalled for; and that if they wanted to play rough, then play rough it was. Moreover, the founders decided, if, when push came to shove, these hicks tried to wave the Homestead Act of 1862 in their faces, then the founders would be obliged to sic the law on them. Open conflict set in and when the farmers appealed to decency, it was regarded as being neither here nor there, rather a canny bumpkin subterfuge not only not to be honored but not to be countenanced. Therefore, the reward of these farmers was entailment succeeded by dispossession. They were driven from the land, their minor prosperity undone and, to this day, unrecovered. They resettled close beyond club boundaries and their progeny and heirs produced the poachers and vandals that plagued the club today; they had produced Jack Olson for one.

They had land; now they needed buildings. At this time there was great interest in Indian life on the eastern seaboard and it was carried inland to Michigan through the efforts of a French scholar, secretary of the Choctaw Club of Lyons, who dressed in Indian garb and traveled about the U.S.A. after the Civil War, lecturing, drumming and dancing at fees that small communities could scarcely afford. These communities, therefore, began to interest themselves in local Indians, to collect “relics” and read romances of Indian life. The founders of the Centennial Club were not unaffected and they decided that the lodge would be built with Indian labor. They enlisted the aid of an Indian from Grayling who had been a sergeant in the Civil War and who had served as labor boss on many projects here in the North. He was an efficient and almost scrupulous foreman: he built the lodge in jig time, though his gang of Chippewa laborers, dressed by request in loin cloths and war bonnets, contained a number of white friends in disguise. This discovery was not made until the whites had done a certain amount of work which was impossible to isolate. So the main lodge went up incorporating a spiritual impurity which Spengler interpreted as a wedding of white and Indian traditions in the wilderness. He touched on the salient points of this tradition, the natural nobility of the savage, Shakespeare, Homer and whatnot; the rise of the American nation in the hands of such bush tycoons as the founders was accompanied by a kind of
temps perdu
of wigwam life. “Do you mean to tell me,” Stanton inquired, “that all this gave way to make room for the
Centennial Club?”

“That's what he means,” said the still invisible Fortescue.

“Holy mackerel!” Against the northern sky the great lodge had taken shape. Swamp was made lake.

Was made swamp. (Stanton.) There was shelter, Indians, northern lights; in the beginning wolf and lynx challenged women, children, picnic tables. The founders dreamt of a better life, a place in the forest that would be safe for their own kind, for their hopes, their hibachi dreams. The forests flowed to the cities and financed such dreams. Timber cruisers goggled through white pine forests buying upland stands at swamp prices; not, mind you, the avaricious scuttling of unscrupulous lummoxes but straight Yankee ingenuity, a matter of being at the right place at the right time. The Centennial Club's lines thickened along the Pere Marquette. A lady wrote a three-thousand-line epic about it, now unhappily forgotten, called
Bogwhistle, a Song of the North;
it was in rhymed fourteeners with prose interludes that were read by her husband who played accompaniment on the concertina and passed the hat—“and put the blocks to her at night.”

“Shut up, Stanton.” Fortescue.

Janey said, “Have you ever been to Texas?”

“Just passing through.”

“Where were you going?”

“I was going to Tulsa.”

The speech went on. Quinn gazed at the distant back of Stanton's head, at its streaked sandy hair growing long; thought: Stanton experimented with haircuts, wore outfits, caught himself and paused at mirrors, dark windows; once asked people who they thought he was. At thirteen he bought rumba lessons with his allowance and wrote Captain Cousteau requesting citizenship in the first underwater city. What was he doing here?

Janey held out two hands together to match oval, pearly, imperfect nails as Spengler said that the general adaptation of the V8 by GM in '55 was a real shot in the arm for club revenues. “Good night!” said Stanton, bringing pause.

“You can't stop interrupting, can you?” said Fortescue getting to his feet visibly. “Can you?”

“I thought this was audience participation…”

“Let me give you a little feedback here,” said Fortescue. “You're a creep, Stanton. Have you got that? A creep.”

“Mercy!”

What was Spengler starting now? He had pulled out a fresh load of notes, wrinkling them vertically and reflectively between his two hands as he looked across the tops of heads. Behind him a great panel of the tent filled and heaved with breeze. Stanton turned toward Quinn from up front, his face infuriatingly pear-shaped with mock solemnity. Quinn felt the jokes ricocheting obliquely away from him. His guilty preoccupations were all around. His company throbbed somewhere nearby, its buildings and offices linked like organs; behind, his mother gardened and his father fidgeted obesely in the Antillean sunlight; Stanton of course burned out there like an incendiary bomb. Then he thought of Earl Olive; or rather Olive appeared to him, coming up Stanton's darkened cellar stairs, his body rising through shadows like a smear, the scream whirling behind compressed lips as he came into the living room, his body shedding the darkness of the stairwell, assuming detail, the smudge that had been everything of him save his face becoming the chevron pockets of his western shirt, the five buttons at each wrist slit, the stylized mother-of-pearl horns on the plastic-eyed steerhead of his belt buckle; the buckle itself, embossed EARL, the size of a saucer; then from outside, past the knocking, open door, Olive's gnashing, reiterate howl of lunacy.

All of them—Spengler with his foul chronicle, Earl Olive sucking his paws in the woods, Stanton pouring salt in every handy wound, Fortescue leading his squad up and down the hill between explosions like Pavlov's dogs, Quinn and Janey soft-shoeing it around one another—all of them seemed to move away from each other like lines on a globe that would converge invisibly beyond. But maybe too that point of convergence would be a fantastic dogfight or Western-movie saloon debacle replete with screaming frontier twats, bloodied heads, breakaway chairs, collapsing shelves of bottles. Why not? Already the physical ruin of the club was past comprehension. A lake over seventy years old that had become part of the general memory of the county's wildlife was a suppurating mudbowl. And it was Quinn who had seen the lake last, moving like an express train on its glassy trajectory down the Pere Marquette. But what still astonished him was the readiness for calamity there had been in the air. Even the shed with its compact wooden boxes of dynamite lying waxed and fuseless in rows convenient to the land must have longed for use. Then the aftermath was a hangover; indulgence shrunk away to nothing; everyone was stopped, wooden; only Earl Olive was at large, functional, decisive and arbitrary as a child or goblin. Quinn reflected upon Olive, calling up only a few traits: his considerable size, his wide cheekbones, the mouth the distant corners of which each indicated a small, low ear; and of course the hair, long but close like the hair of a puppet. “… the assignment of club finances to professional management in the late fifties…”

“Dum de da dum,”
Stanton hummed aggressively.

“May I go on?”

“If you can,” Fortescue said to Stanton who looked at him, raised open palms and silently mouthed the word, “Me?” This small gesture struck Fortescue in the face like a blow. A suffusion of red flashed and the perimeter of white around his eyes grew wide. Quinn fought to keep from awarding Stanton points for this precise and economical shot.

When Spengler finished what was only the prologue of his chronicle, he asked for comments from the floor; and Scott said he hoped that in his final treatment Spengler would “flesh out” what had merely been suggested in the introduction. Spengler answered, “Clearly,” and Scott rising to the tacit challenge and in fact getting himself into something of a snit suggested that the prose could stand a little “pruning” too, a little “cleaning up” if not actual “reworking” from “stem to stern.”

“You could pay attention,” Stanton said to Spengler; “this man is a pro and he's good.”

“I thought I made it clear that this was an early draft.”

“Darn it, you did,” said Stanton, turning to Scott. “Professor Scott, I would have thought your experience down there at Moo U., if you'll pardon the expression, would have taught you a little flexibility. What say you give old Spengler a fighting chance?” Fortescue interrupted Scott's reply.

“We don't need a moderator,” he said. “We can do without one.”

“Then shut up,” said Stanton.

“Look—”

“Or get out. Pack.”

Janey's fingers closed around Quinn's arm.

“
What
do you mean?” Fortescue said after a minute. One felt behind the mad spaniel face legions of tiny soldiers.

“I mean simply this: in a larger and more irritating sense you've been moderating this whole club and I for one am bored with it. The solutions I have indicated have been shutting up or getting out. I don't know how much clearer I can make it, Mister Fortescue. But I'll say this: I won't be interrupted by you again. You're a bore, you're a professional phony and for the twenty years I've watched you strut around here it has been all I could do to keep from booting you right in the seat of your smug and comfortable pants.” Spengler and Scott were gone. The others, folding blankets, broke up too and were gone. Fortescue turned undamaged on his heel and vanished into the black pentagram of the tent's entrance. More would be heard from that quarter. Stanton followed unhappily after. Quinn wondered what was changing him. This had been the painful fetching up of purest bile; and if that was so, why did he do it? Was it an airing of old resentments, as he said; or had he linked these activities too with abstractions? Because it wasn't funny and because it could be seen as the beginning of a new and more menacing form of irresponsibility, Quinn used it to imagine himself intervening to protect Janey, then taking her away for her own good.

A cycle of these ran through Quinn's mind: he bolts with her in a car, an airplane, a Pullman; then she is before him as she had been in the clearing that afternoon; now, he himself stands over her with rifle and bowie knife, eyes thinned by the line of horizon, slowly shifting like radar, without carnal inclination. The girl at his feet could be a piece of precious statuary. Suddenly the vision is replaced by one of Lu, pissing in the weeds then wandering off, butt aloft and splayed like that of a plucked turkey. Toying with himself like this was deliciously painful. Janey had become a sweet emotional abscess; it was exquisite to touch the knife to it.

*   *   *

Back in the room in Stanton's house, he gazed weakly and bravely through the high window. He was in bed now, his hands crossed on his chest. Janey had made a sick boy's meal for him of sandwiches and bouillon with a pot of strong black tea. He nipped at the sandwich's delicate edge and thought, Am I the one? A plastic transistor radio on the windowsill whispered
“I'm a hog for you, baby”
to the solid oink and snuffle of a Detroit blues band. He studied her, studied the perfect lateral movement of her eyes. He wondered if he moved his own as characteristically; he had learned making faces in the mirror that you never saw your own eyes move; this crucial detail was forever a mystery to the narcissist. Too bad. It explained a lot; for instance, in Janey it showed her care as a listener: in that lateral motion was attention and consideration. Quinn was pleased to have isolated it. He looked around the room that seemed as fresh as a newly drained spring. What was all this glee about? He sat straight upright, heedless of the headboard. “Did you ever have a job?” he asked.