The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

  Everyone visible seemed weary. Of these, the most voluptuously weary was Charles Murray. His weariness was of the staring, fixed variety that one associates with trench warfare on the old Western Front; you saw in his eyes the blind light of phosphor and star shells over a barbed-wire no man’s land; you saw night raids that featured the bayonet and its use. But instead of sappers and subalterns you saw cranky children on a hot July night with mothers and fathers throwing themselves into sudden squalor with slackness that would have appalled Gypsies. Fortescue caught up with him again. “Naturally the camp is in confusion. You might say that at this stage of the proceedings confusion is necessary and desirable. Strategic even. Operationally, we’re right on schedule.”

  “I didn’t ask you to explain yourself.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “What do you want with Earl Olive anyway? What are you going to do with him?”

  “Interrogate him.”

  “After that?”

  “First we’re going to interrogate him and then we’re going to interrogate him.”

  “Give him a little of his own.”

  “All right.”

  “And you think that’s okay.”

  “All right, sure. We think it’s okay.”

  “A tit for a tat.”

  “There you go,” said Fortescue emphatically. “Now you’re getting real close to what we have in mind.”

  “Well, here’s one from left field: I won’t allow it.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Turn you over to the authorities.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like the sheriff of Pere Marquette,” Quinn said promptly. “The sheriff of Pere Marquette—” It was sonorous.

  “I can be of some use there,” said Fortescue. “I am his deputy.” He showed the card in its plastic panel, the wallet fanned with celerity. “Why don’t you call on me? I am deputy or assistant chief to every law enforcement officer in this part of the state of Michigan. Why not call on me and see if I can’t solve your problem?”

  “I guess you’ve got me.”

  “I guess I’ve got you by the nuts.”

  * * *

  Stanton answered: “I am always ready to present Mr. Earl Olive, address unknown, with his choice of weapons. Only fair thing to be done. I perhaps overcredit Sir Olive. That is to say that I don’t think he would do the same for me. In fact, I’m confident that something in the back would be more his line of products. Not that I would fear that. When a man’s up to his blowhole in the higher virtues, he cannot be stopped by weaponry. I expect to be among those savages within the hour, a trusted if shopworn student of their revolution.” He was repacking his rucksack now and sat on his heels before it. He pressed into it skillfully a lightweight sleeping bag, a nested aluminum cook kit, an assortment of freezedried food, brown rice, fruit salad, vitamin supplements, Milky Way candy bars, a compass with a rotating dial, a pint of cognac, a pair of dueling pistols, a pair of dirks, a pair of short swords, On Your Own in the Wilderness by Bradford Angier and a manual of guerrilla tactics by Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “I’ll see you on the Fourth of July.”

  “That’s tomorrow.”

  “So it is. Let’s do our club and country proud.”

  “I see that we will.”

  * * *

  Quinn went to see Janey. He believed that if he kept showing up, something would break, an old delusion that substituted exposure for action. He took his time. It seemed so quiet. The old generator at the main lodge was silent now and it made an extraordinary difference. It had dominated a thousand acres of forest like a rhythm section. Now he felt the difference between this place and the world he lived in. It had taken a long time to shed Detroit; but once shed, it seemed uncannily remote. Not that he had forgotten the disaster that awaited him for failing to arrange the factory picnic or for ignoring the accounts Mary Beth was antagonizing; but still Detroit seemed remote enough that Quinn had to use his imagination to believe that any other life than this transpired; he didn’t altogether believe that his punch presses and toolmaking machines still cavorted in their mechanical ecstasies, that his employees shuffled beside them, that Mary Beth still typed away between lunch hour assignations. He was not now even sure that his father snuffed cigarettes with sausage fingers in the blind West Indian sun, that his mother shook her head four times a year over his father’s cardiogram and tried to talk him out of raiding back to Detroit to bully, wheedle and cajole the company into spasms of output and profit; for Quinn, it had all stopped; there was only this life and its details: he had adapted as animals adapt when they learn to live in a zoo, to eat, sleep and breed under a shower of peanuts and popsicle wrappers.

  He looked up to see Janey in the highest window. She beckoned and he trotted toward the house thinking, What in the name of God, can this be it? The steps sailed by three at a time and he was in the room. Janey waved him past to the window. He took the binoculars from her in disappointment and looked, moving them back and forth. Rivers of green poured into each eye. He elevated the glasses to the fissured brown of the lake. There he was. He was dancing on the lake bed with great seriousness, his jaw pressed against his chest, his underlip thrust out; he flapped his arms with a slow condor motion while his feet carried his scurrying in widening gyres. Suddenly, he threw his head back and Quinn was sure he imitated the cry of some raptorial bird. Then he put the rucksack back on and moved away with the heavy fluency of a prizefighter. The man’s a loony, thought Quinn as he turned to Janey; will that clear the air? Scarcely. She thought it was funny. Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn’t live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.

  * * *

  Whatever, Stanton was what Quinn and Janey had in common. So he talked to her now about everything that seemed to bear upon Stanton’s present conduct. Once Stanton told him that he liked it when the tension was up and that was all right; he said that there were a few occasions when his entire brain was in full function and that it was for these moments he lived. Quinn could believe that too; trouble came through the means he chose to achieve this end. Coming back from Bermuda, the daughter of a mountain states beer baron told him that he was using his fruit fork on his fish course; Stanton bellowed a filthy rejoinder. Then, rising in a silence that seemed to expose the noise of air molecules colliding, he said, to the entire contents of the first-class dining room, “You have guessed it. I am a drug fiend,” walked to the door, said, “Why should I hide it any longer? I’m on the stuff. It is as a sickness.” He turned to the door—it was the service door—passed through anyway, tested sauces, frostings, a soufflé batter, plucked the chef’s cheek and complimented him for being a wizard, a wizard, went up on deck and apostrophized the sea in stentorian tones. He then returned quietly to the first-class dining room, where his under-pressure charm dissuaded the captain from a ship’s arrest, and ruefully assured his companions at table that opium was an ancient vice to which he was congenitally liable; certainly his mother’s family, the De Quinceys, should answer for that.

  Other officials had been less easy to convince than the captain. His many jailings had forced Harvard to redefine its relationship with civil law; the problem was exercised first at large among the undergraduates, then at the law school and finally in the offices of those who directed the institution. “I’m on pins and needles!” Stanton was heard squealing and the phrase had a resurgence of popularity. Finally, it was ruled the civil standing of a hooligan or petty criminal would have nothing to do with his academic standing; and Stanton remained to graduate.

  When he was young, Stanton was most insistent about matters of right and wrong; of this there is a prime example: The members discovered that they couldn’t wallow voluptuously in stocks and shares all week and break brush to grouse-shoot in the northern thicket on the weekend. So, it occurred to them that the really great thing would be to shoot driven game as Harold Macmillan did. Local boys were hired for the dangerous work. C
hildren of members were forbidden as being a more valuable commodity than the native weed. Quinn and Stanton surreptitiously joined the line of beaters to drive the birds out of the swamps to the elegant sports waiting on high ground. Grouse began to fly in low trajectories before them. Sometimes they heard only the dense burr of wingbeat; more often the birds were visible too, brown and boreal, heavy on short blurred wings. There were more than twenty boys with pine boughs as switches, threshing rhythmically through the tugging underbrush and by now the birds were going off everywhere like bits of firecracker, buzzing, going off singly or in coveys and pairs but always forward toward the sports. The shooting started and the beaters got spattered with pellets. The younger boys sat down to cry. Stanton got stung on the face but kept going until he found the gunners. He gathered weapons; at first, by surprise and then at gunpoint.

  But as time went by, the justice of his more extreme actions, though he retained his moral tone, became obscure. As a young man, the popularity of the “Gotcha” (derives from “Got you!”) served to spotlight Stanton’s virtues of nerve, craft and originality; such words, anyway, stood behind the deeds of that epoch in Stanton’s life. During the archaic period, any dropping of one’s pants in a public place under any circumstance qualified so long as the principal shouted “Gotcha!” to attract attention to the act. Later, the so-called Multiple Gotcha, commonly employing a speeding convertible, attracted the most approval. Then the “Press,” which involved pressing the exposed buttocks to the rear window of a slow-moving vehicle was admired. Predictably, a point system sprang up, reputations were made and extenuating circumstances honored. “Throwing” a Gotcha while pursued by the police was a maneuver that brought one young competitor (Quinn) near permanent fame. Too, the nature of the victims sometimes necessitated a corresponding raising or lowering of point awards; thus, it was fair to expect a bonus increment for throwing an amazingly explicit or unexampled Gotcha at religious personnel. On the other hand, sly Gotchas, ones that were not forthright in any way, or ones directed at the very old or otherwise unalert, would frequently encounter a docking of points. Who were the competitors and who the judges? They were self-appointed; a moment’s notice would do. Each competitor carried his own lifetime scorecard with a brief description of the play and, opposite, a point award initialed by the witnessing judge, usually another competitor, or “thrower.” For example, an entry might read: “Slow moon hangover shot from right front at nuns and children. 5 pts. v.s.” In this, the Gotcha (the exposed view of naked buttocks was known as “the moon”) had been thrown at a slow rate of speed from a car, the behind actually appearing to hang out of the right front window, at a group of nuns and children. Simple? One more: “Spread-eagle moon from back of reversing convertible directed from extreme close range at opera star Lucia Schifosa (screams). 20 pts. v.s.” Self-explanatory. A historical note is in order: this was the first of Quinn’s competitive maneuvers in the New Year’s mano a mano with Vernor Stanton; in this, the two young men acted as judges for one another (see Stanton’s initials). In passing, it will be noticed that the term “moon” gradually came to be used as a verb; and indeed the whole process was finally called “mooning” and did not at all mean “to pass time in a listless manner” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it.

  The New Year’s mano a mano was never finished. Quinn led with the moon above. Stanton countered with a weak shot on foot at, in turn, a druggist, a young couple and a mounted policeman who lashed his horse in futile pursuit. Quinn confirmed his lead with a nice Standing Press against a restaurant window with a point-escalating Narrow Escape. Stanton’s next shot restored the tie and in any other circumstance would have been match point: after a ten-minute delay during which they smoked nervously and silently, Stanton invited Quinn, now judge, back into the restaurant. They sat down unrecognized. Soup was ordered. An instant after it was served, Stanton was pointing from his position atop his chair at the hypothetical fly in the soup; his pants of course were around his ankles while he contrived by an imperceptible movement of his feet to present a “Full Moon,” that is, a 360-degree view; needless to say, the “dark side of the moon” horrified the multitude!

  The escape this time was so close that they were actually caught; and Stanton, whose position was somewhat worse, being pantless, got a bit of work with the nightstick. The policeman grunted “I hate an exhibitionist!” between the blows. They went to jail.

  Quinn tried to think. This was all pouring through his mind very fast now. How much of it was getting to Janey? He tried, “Where was I?”

  “You went to jail.”

  “Did I tell you how the jailbirds tried to initiate us?” Vernor had, she said. Quinn remembered Stanton as being invincible. The jailbirds made a practice of “stomping” sex offenders, which is what they were in the purblind eyes of the law. Quinn remembered Stanton, his shirt around him in strips like Captain Blood, the heavy fists snaking out and making clean resonant connections with chins. Like a sporty club fighter, his feet were light, shuffling, gripping only to set up a lead or a finishing shot. Stanton danced between the built-in benches, never bumping anyone or anything, just unleashing these long, snaky calamities. Afterward, there was peace, finger-paints and byplay with the sheriff, Fredson W. Brown, the arresting officer who, after two weeks of heavy bribing, tried to get the book thrown at them anyway. With the fingerpaints, Stanton did a series of panels illustrating the sheriff committing unnatural acts upon livestock. The last panel purported to be a quote from Fredson Brown: “I like boys and girls,” it said. “but a goat is numero uno.” Quinn and Stanton were found guilty of indecent exposure. The sentence was commuted. They had records. Prints went to the FBI and both would forever afterward be suspects in any sex crime committed in their neighborhoods. Quinn had been interrogated six times, Stanton more often. Stanton was once grilled in connection with the rape and murder of an infant. A year afterward, he was tipped off that he would be questioned about his possible role in a pornography ring. A detective soon appeared camouflaged as a Southern racetrack tout in a Haspel drip-dry madras and summer straw. Working fast, Stanton had the complete works of Jane Austen rebound in separate volumes under the titles of Lewd Awakening, Emma, Businessman’s Lunch, She Let Him Continue and Persuasion. The clever maneuver produced a false arrest; Stanton sued for harassment, collected a clean ten grand he didn’t need and used it to start a wine cellar.

  It would be hard to say how long after that, he and Quinn met in the D-Day Bar and Grill, a mock bunker filled with war materials, bombs painted to look like happy fishes, land mines, howitzers, portable field toilets. Stanton was still depressed about the interrogations, Quinn amused; amused, that is, until he got an idea of Stanton’s ungodly depression. Stanton said that they were right, he deserved the worst. He had gotten some very convincing anonymous calls, one person calling him the “lowest form of human refuse.” “And what is that?” Stanton had asked, his humor intact. He confessed they were getting to him. And Quinn could see he was in distress. It assumed the familiar atrabilious humor at the start (“Fuck the Magna Carta in the ass”). By the time they left the bar and headed for the D.A.C., Stanton’s face had become a stone mask of thwarted rebellion. Quinn babbled at him and to him, from the heart and as best he could. They sat in the balcony over the pool, looking down at the empty green rectangle with its white water-polo backboards and undulant racing lanes. They swam and did cannonballs off the low board for which they were already too old. They went into the gym and Quinn got a basketball, dribbled preoccupied and did halfhearted lay-ups as Stanton bounced somberly on a nearby trampoline. They strolled naked except for medicated paper slippers and talked about the fathers-and-sons days they had attended, diving for silver dollars in the pool and afterward listening to Eddie Peabody in the auditorium. It was no use. Stanton’s face remained pinched, a congestion of nerve ends. He challenged Quinn to a game of billiards and no more than got started before he slapped his cue stick across the table with a small cry and
suggested dinner. Quinn watched him try to eat his way out of his depression. Consuming mechanically tournedos de boeuf and a thirty-dollar bottle of Château Margaux, he scribbled his number on the check and jumped up. Quinn went with him to the lobby where he bought a fistful of cigars and stuck them in his vest pocket. Out front he pressed a bill pointlessly into the doorman’s hand and waited for his car to be brought. It was a winter night, black and cold to silence. When the car came, Stanton pressed another bill. “The thing is,” he said to Quinn and stopped, something racing behind his eyes. He went around the driver’s door. Quinn followed and said that it had been unfair to drag him around from one build-up to another and drive off. Stanton replied combatively from inside the car, “Well, that may be what I’ll do, old pal…” and trailed off. He rested the bridge of his nose on the steering wheel and said, “It’s nothing. I’m boxed in, is all. Nothing.” He sat up and drove away. The next time Quinn saw him was a few weeks ago, standing in his linen shorts, sweat runneling off him: the heroic manner.

  Interim reports, less somber than expected, suggested furious play, operating out of his boat down South. Quinn had a letter describing tarpon fishing at Big Pine Key, Florida. Then a newspaper article from Key West: Stanton and friends had stormed the naval installation there; on capture, they had tried to pass themselves off as Castro partisans. For a while, cards and letters: gambling at Grand Bahama, pig shooting at Abaco, tarpon again at Andros, whoring at Nassau, partying at Eleuthera. On Grand Turk Island he was persuaded to put up twenty thousand dollars to investigate the possibility of celestial navigation in sea turtles. News of him began to abate in the Antilles proper. He was charged with espionage in Haiti quite arbitrarily and he was convinced by the Tonton Macoute that it would be clever to fly out and leave the boat. He bought another from an English yacht broker in Antigua and wrote Quinn to tell him he was going to Puerto Rico because of his love for beisbol. Quinn didn’t hear from him again. Throughout these letters, though he had little to go on, Quinn got an impression of metallic insensibility that approached stupefaction, like letters from someone in shell shock. The rest was from Janey on; and she, it seemed, wasn’t talking. “Are you?”