The Sporting Club (9 page)

“This rather redeems me as a treasure hunter, what?” asked Stanton.

“How do you mean?”

“The Mormon boat I told you about was raised a century ago, a few hours after it sank.”

“By who?”

“By its crew.”

“What will you do with this?”

“Buy a horse for it. Run wild like some intolerably picturesque Ukrainian. You're invited. Bring sable coat.”

“I won't be there at all.”

“Probably not.” He got to his feet. “More's the pity. Now I have an appointment with Herr Olson as per your suggestion.”

“Do the right thing.”

“I have my own ideas about what that is.”

“You're hedging,” said Quinn, seeing too late that the fears of Fortescue, Spengler and Scott might have been justified.

“I'm not hedging. I am not a germ. I am not a coward. I have every intention of comporting myself as a gentleman.”

“Never mind the medieval stuff. Do the right thing.”

“What is this? What are you, a Dominican friar?”

“You're hedging,” Quinn interrupted; but Stanton went right on; he would not be dissuaded.

“We get all the correction and fun-spoiling from you but where is the fucking benediction? Where is it?”

“I don't know what I've done with it.”

“No—”

“But I have it somewhere.”

“You do not. You're in the service of my enemies, trying to spoil my innocent pleasures.”

“Innocent pleasures.”

“They are. I haven't nosed around your domestic arrangements the way you have mine. And I'll bet mine are comparatively innocent. I have a feeling you've got closets full of whips and black capes, all the deviationist impedimenta.” Quinn didn't answer. He reached and touched one of the runners sweeping up in front of them; the runners pressed below into the heavy June grass that swept up the hill to the black trees, beyond which Quinn's house stood barely invisible. “What are you doing to me, Quinn?” Stanton wouldn't look at him.

“Not anything bad for you.”

“This has been a disappointment,” Stanton said. Quinn had forgotten what his serious voice was like. Free of irony, it seemed maybe less distinguished.

“We couldn't keep up the old thing. That was insanity. If you don't outgrow it, the world leaves you holding the bag.”

“That's all very good, since you want to get philosophical, if the world is very good. But it's not. It's bad. However, with surprising common sense, the world is building the bombs it deserves, and until such a time as those bombs are used, I intend to treat it like the shit it is.” The speech fell from Stanton's mouth phrase after phrase, in complete readiness. He meant it, evidently; but Quinn told him he didn't. This seemed to irritate Stanton profoundly and he wouldn't have said anything more, even if Scott hadn't come up the lakeshore and tried to slip by in his characteristically abject fashion. He saw himself seen and said, “What's that thing?”

“A one-horse open sleigh,” Stanton said. “What in the hell does it look like.”

“Oh, boy,” said Scott.
“Oh, boy.”
He disappeared up the path.

“I've got to be rough with these buggers,” Stanton said quite seriously. “Otherwise they run all over me and I have to drive them back with banknotes.”

“The thing is, Vernor, this shouldn't have been a disappointment to you.”

“No, God damn it, I know that, I'm not a moron; but you're sandbagging is the point. This time three years ago—”

“—We'd been jailed.”

“That's right.”
Stanton was downright truculent. Quinn started to make a speech about the life of work and its virtues and rewards; but it caught in his throat and left a vision of Detroit with its artifact buildings, one of which held his offices, slabs, markers, a poison sky and a river that stank and curled sipping at its perimeters—in fine, the last place in the world to send a friend or start a utopian colony. Unusable and contradictory thoughts filled Quinn's mind with almost physical duress as though his poor head were a golf ball which, slashed open, shows its severed rubber filaments snapping and racing about in confusion. Stanton climbed down and went on with what he was saying. “I want pleasure, do you hear me? And not necessarily at the expense of others, smart ass. I can carry all expenses personally. But God damn it, if I want to pack my colon with beluga caviar I don't want any cool, assessing stares from you. You helped get me into this a long time ago and now you don't like the consequences because you change horses every time you get sick of one and call it growing up. The man of business. And don't imagine I haven't noticed the exchange of brain waves between you and Janey. I'm aware of these particular vapors—” he raised his wide hand quickly to prevent a reply. “Enough said. But I know you, Quinn. When you've got your nature up I wouldn't walk past you with a roast suckling pig for fear you'd violate it.”

“Much less Janey,” Quinn said. Nothing came of it though. Stanton went up. Quinn remained on the cutter, the antagonistic talk leaving him ragged. But they were two temperaments and there was nothing new in it. When they were young, Quinn simply wanted to be a sportsman of gentlemanly cast and had modeled himself on the old trout fishermen of the Catskills and Adirondacks, Hewitt and Gordon and LaBranche, who wore plus fours and rode carriages to their stretches on the Esopus or Beaverkill. He had tried to include Stanton; but all Stanton's heroes were Comanches and his sole pleasure was in raiding or terrorizing the cottages and their inhabitants. Quinn always ended putting his rod away and joining the reckless episodes, often finally leading them until it began to get out of hand and he and Stanton competed for the controls. It began when they were twelve or thirteen; it reached acute, maybe eloquent pitch in an end-over-end trip across a back country farm in an Oldsmobile Starfire, Quinn driving, Carl Perkins yelling
“Honey don't”
all the way from East St. Louis, Missouri.

A man walked past him, along the shore of the lake, making maladroit casts with a stubby fishing rod into the water at his feet. He wore only a bathing suit, pulled over his stomach in front; when he passed, carrying all that weight on the balls of his feet, matched arcs of pink flesh writhed over his kidneys with each step. It was Congressman John Olds, R. Mich. He waved without looking or interrupting the darting of the lure at his feet. “Nice to see you,” Quinn called.

He sunned another hour, then started back through unlit woods to his house with its afternoon cap of light working its way across the front; by five it would slither off altogether and knot up in shadow at the north end, skate through the trees and disappear. Quinn thought about his conversation with Stanton and wondered how he could help him. Quinn was sentimental enough about their friendship as it had been. And though more had passed between them than he now cared to remember, their friendship seemed a necessary part of the future.

He heard a knocking at the door and went through the living room cautiously. He opened the door; it was Janey. She wanted Quinn to come over and try to console Stanton. He had been to see Olson and had come back despondent. He wouldn't say what had happened. Would Quinn please come?

Stanton was sitting up. He had a tray of food beside him and a pile of books on the end table. Tears were streaming down his face which was otherwise slack and drunken. Quinn knew he would be throwing himself into it; Stanton regarded himself, when drunk, as a third person for whom he was not responsible. The sky was the limit.

“You didn't mention the drinking,” Quinn said to Janey in a clear conversational voice.

“Never mind that!” Stanton called. “You don't get off so easy!”

“What happened when you went to see Olson?”

“There was little fraternity or egality.”

“Okay—”

“Rather, mistreatment.”

“I'm going back.”

“Don't! No fair—”

“This isn't fun for us, Vernor. We're all sober, you see.”

“I pay a handsome price for my small pleasures,” Stanton said slackly. “You can't come in here with your prayerbook—”

“All right, I don't have to—”

“May as well let him talk,” Janey said.

“Let the spoilt priest talk,” said Stanton. “Quinn, you've gone back on me. And Janey won't let me marry her. She won't do it. Commit any offense to nature. But simple Christian marriage? Not on your life.”

“I would marry you if you were human,” she said.

“Simple Christian marriage?” he asked. “Oh ho, no.”

“Listen,” Quinn started.

“Christian little ceremony?”

“Vernor—”

“Marriage?”

“Vernor—”

“Are you kidding? What? Her?” He clambered out from under the covers on all fours, wearing only his pajama top, his behind directed at the window. “God damn it, I want decent treatment around here! I want consideration and the rest of what was lost in the French Revolution! I want dreams, space, Listerine! I want … I want! GAAGH!” He flung himself over on his back, revealing a perfectly despicable and unwarranted erection; arms across his eyes, wallowing and blubbering spuriously. Janey backed away toward the door, wide-eyed. Suddenly she ran forward and began to hit Stanton on the chest. Stanton looked into the doorway at Quinn, his expression of hopeful surprise and wonder only occasionally flinching into a grimace. Finally, she stopped and went to the side of the room and slumped into a chair. “My!” said Stanton.

“I could have been a guide at the UN,” said Janey, agonized. Quinn continued to stare at Stanton. Behind this devilish picture of Stanton many pictures receded into memory, bright and framed like the windows of a train. Without knowing what he was doing, Quinn resolved to act. He went to see Olson.

There was something not absolutely perpendicular about Olson. He slung himself in his doorway and his lower lip made an ample curve beneath his lengthy lower teeth. “Evening, Jack.”

“What's … evening about it?”

“Yes, very good,” Quinn said. Olson began patting his pockets in search of something he didn't find. “Have you and Stanton been talking?”

“Oh, hell, not really I wouldn't think. He rooted his-self about half through my year's liquor supply—”

“Jack, you're stewed, aren't you?”

Olson danced about, shadow boxing. “Put up your dewks—!”

“Jack—”

“Put them up!”

“Jack—”

“Put them!”

“Have you and Vernor Stanton had a nice talk?”

“Put them up!” He danced a moment more and fell.

“Get up, Jack.”

“I took a spill.”

“I saw you did.”

Olson dragged at Quinn's clothes getting to his feet. “What are you so interested for?”

“No reason.” Quinn was extremely uncomfortable.

“I know they're getting rid of me, if that's what you mean. I know that—” He stopped. “But Stanton wasn't here about that, was he?”

“Well, yes, indirectly, he was.”

“He was, ay. Sonofabitch. That clears your head. Is that what it was all about. I thought we was just going to tie one on.” Quinn watched him shake off his inebriation. He walked up and down in front of his house with his hands on his head, looking now at Quinn and then into space with an immense question in his movements: he was overwhelmed and offended. “I'll be a sonofabitch,” was all he could say. He looked over his shoulder at Quinn, amused and offended. “I've got to hand it to him. The bastard knows how to go after you. I've got to give him credit.” Quinn left him. He would return when Olson's head had cleared and the information sunk in.

*   *   *

Look: Janey is packing on the first floor. Quinn stands and doesn't speak. From above, Stanton, up and shaving, sings “Fa, la, la!” with unique brutality. Quinn thinks, I must talk her out of it, she has nowhere to go, I have to make up for that swine. “Where are you going?”

“God, I don't know. Away.”

“Where to?”

“Just away.” She stands erect now in a sleeveless blue pullover and her arms are very slightly tanned. Quinn sees that she doesn't want to go and that now that he has begun to talk her out of it, she won't go. Still it is lamentable, Stanton rioting in his bed, yet served like a prince; and Janey down here with her bag on the floor and two or three pieces of clothing thrown in.

“Where will you go?”

She sat on the bag. “I don't know.”

“What about Vernor?”

“I don't know, I don't know.”

“Fa, la! Fa, la!” came the brutal voice. Stanton knew they were down here. Quinn wondered how he could let things get to such a sorry state. Worse, he suspected it was intentional. But to what end? To some end, that much was certain. Stanton was a deliberate man and knew how he got his effects. It used to be that behind all of his deliberate acts were abstract principles he could name, like courage, attainment, persistence; or irritation, interference, degradation. Quinn no longer knew how insistent Stanton was about this system; but he had a powerful suspicion that behind certain activities, the dueling or the episode on the bridge or at the Bug House, lingered these abstractions. The most unexpected of Stanton's deeds had always had such words behind them. Always before, when Quinn had been the victim, he had wondered helplessly what words Stanton linked with his aggressive efforts: antagonism? defeat? menace? And right now, he wondered what word hovered behind himself and behind Janey and what word linked Stanton to them; was it diversion? was it domination? was it revenge? Or none of these?

It was evening again. Quinn walked out onto his porch and sat down. The late sun, summery and vegetable, rotted in the trees before him. He felt that he had found something.