The Sporting Club

1. Northern Gentlemen

BLUCHER’S Annals of the North (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1919) which perforce omits the human element and which minces the few words at its disposal, has this to say:

Centennial Club (formerly the Shiawasee Rod and Gun Club): Grandest of the original sporting clubs of the Northern Lower Peninsula, founded by the barons of lumbering who logged off the white pine stands of the Saginaw Country. Its charter was written in 1868 while the big timber was being converted to pioneer houses on the treeless prairies of the West. The operations of the Centennial Club are shrouded in well-guarded mystery. Nothing is known of its procedures but that membership is handed from fathers to eldest sons. The vastness of the Centennial land holdings is widely known: they extend from the Pere Marquette to the Manistee. A mounting body of evidence has pointed to the club’s large influence in state and local politics. The grounds include many buildings of interest, principally the MAIN LODGE***** which is a distinguished early example of G. K. Truax’s “country style” though much modified both by the capricious architectural tastes of early-time lumber barons and by the use of amateur Indian labor. Nearby are some smaller club buildings worth the visitor’s attention. These include the GAZEBO**** and a well-constructed TOOL-SHED.* Tours are occasionally arranged during winter months.

Blucher is a little misleading (there has never been a tour); and like so many clubs, the Centennial Club has suppressed an accessible luxury in favor of roughing it. Anyone looking for splendor would find it plain. Even the tool-shed disappoints.

This morning, two men rode along the sandy miles between the front gate and the upland slope upon which the club had located its buildings. Jack Olson, the manager of the club, drove the jeep with certitude over the disrepair of the road. James Quinn sat beside him and studied the woods. Behind the two, just unloaded from the club’s twin-engined Beechcraft, loomed Quinn’s gear. Quinn was here to rest and that always seemed to require a lot of equipment; though if Vernor Stanton was here no amount of it would save him. A sharpshin hawk wheeled low into the blue strip of sky over the road, its long legs trailing a brown curve of mouse, flew ahead of them for a moment and swung into the woods again. Quinn was beginning to see how he could be chiseled out of his recuperation and he was afraid to ask about Stanton. He knew he would have to ask; but it was a minute before he could go through with it.

“All right,” Quinn said, “tell me.”

“He’s here.”

“Is he.”

They drove on. Quinn stared at the double gearshifts of the transmission and transfer box.

“He has his wife with him, you know,” Olson said.

“So you think that will help.”

“Well, so much of the old trouble started—”

“Yes—” Quinn encouraged.

“With women, right?”

“That’s your boy. Whew. That’s what I was thinking.”

“And if he could just—” Olson began anew, encouraged.

“Say it, Jack. If he could just—?”

“Get his ashes hauled about sixty times a day—”

“Easy now. You think that would quiet him? Well, I do too. That would quiet most anything, wouldn’t it? After all?”

“I guess.” Olson was lost in thought.

“I mean just what kind of a girl is this?”

“Oh, no. Just a girl. But I mean, something, right? Wouldn’t you think? Nobody sees him. He’s been very quiet.” Quinn agreed. He gazed out upon the familiar savannahs and stands of pine slashing. Then they turned onto a narrower road so frequently marked with rain-pools that Olson engaged the four-wheel drive. Now cedars were around them and the road was very slightly flooded so that when they hit clay and the rear end swam a little, Olson accelerated to bring it back in line. The ferns made their false floor in the woods and every shaft of sun was whirling with insects. They climbed again slowly.

“One other thing though. He built this dueling gallery in his basement.” Quinn looked at Olson. They were coming now along the last climb to the plateau.

“For what?” he asked. Olson turned his thin, intelligent face against the light and looked away from Quinn as though this were the first time he was giving it real consideration. The jeep bucked under them lightly.

“Eventualities,” Olson said as if picking up the word in his hand. Quinn recognized Stanton in this. God help us, he thought. They stopped in front of the main lodge.

“I’ll go see for myself.” Behind the lodge was the forest. In front of it was a wide, manicured green compound encircled by a cliff of heavy pine. The main lodge was an immense three-story building with a bleached and shallow blue-gray mansard roof. In the middle of the compound was an octagonal screened gazebo called the Bug House, and beside it a tall metal flagpole with its slack ropes hitting musically. Quinn made arrangements for his place to be aired and swept and for his mail to be brought down. Then he headed down the dry, beaten trail that led out of the compound to Stanton’s place. In a minute, he stopped for a nervous easing of his bladder, then went on where trees crowded, tall sunless pines blown out of the ground like jets of dark gas. Stanton’s house was virtually without a yard. Quinn walked out of the woods three feet and was against the first step of the porch. He had gotten just this far when Stanton stepped, or rather thrust, out onto the top step. His muscular frame was covered only by the pleated linen shorts he wore and sweat ran down his chest. In his right hand hung a dueling pistol. “The true Quinn,” he said in his heroic manner; “this is an ugly surprise.” Quinn ascended the steps.

“I’ve come to meet your new wife since you never troubled me with a wedding invitation.”

“Well, come on in and introduce yourself to her.” He turned back into the darkness. “Dat’s what I do all de day long. — Janey!” he called. “Janey!” He led Quinn down the hall. “Off on one of her peerless nature jaunts.” Quinn plunged his hands in his pockets and followed the barefoot and sweating Stanton. “Head of moose,” Stanton said with a rotary movement of his left hand as he passed the trophy. They crossed the big, timbered living room. “Doorway to improved cellar.”

Quinn followed Stanton down headlong steps to a lighted cellar. Odors of fresh paint, fiber insulation and dampness combined strangely. The first room was a bar and library with books, many of them good editions, swollen with moisture and neglected. Stanton made drinks and led Quinn into the next room, the dueling gallery. This was a serious place, painted like a ship’s boiler room and lit like a surgical theater with a long row of egg-crate nonglare lights. They filled the room with a delicate electrical hum. At either end of the room were human silhouettes. Each had a red circle around the heart that enclosed the numeral ten. The other regions of the body were similarly defined with black perimeters that enclosed smaller numbers. Quinn considered it a stroke of surprising romanticism to award the heart ten points. A modern target would indicate a grand slam for the straight shot, from behind, to the skull, or perhaps a combination parlay for a disabler to the spine and finishing shot through the roof of the mouth. These targets had faces which were serene and Mediterranean and their eyes followed you around the room waiting to be shot.

“Admit I’ve improved the cellar,” said Stanton, and Quinn felt he was stalling. Next to the entrance was a cabinet and he pulled open its door. “Come look here.” Inside, on small felt-covered hooks, a dozen pairs of dueling pistols hung upside down by their trigger guards. Stanton took down a pair and handed one to Quinn. “French and without price. Made by Jean Baptiste Laroche, Paris, middle eighteenth century. They came with jasper flints which were purely decorative and had to be replaced. There is a fitted case for the convenience of the seconds who carry the instruments to the scene of the crime as if it were no more than a Dopp kit; a powder flask of the thinnest possible gold, instruments for cleaning and a mold that casts six perfect bullets at a throw.”

The gun Quinn held was slender and heavy. The stock was oiled, dark walnut, the barrel long and octagonal. A pair of small, silver-chased dragons held the lock in place; and their flaming tongues curled around the hammer.

“Come on,” Stanton said, “provoke me. We’ll have a duel.”

“All right. I disapprove of the stupid waste of money.”

“That will do nicely.” He took out a work glove from his sweaty hind pocket and flipped Quinn in the face with it. “I tell you, Pablo, I am provoked. Let’s load the guns. Vamonos!” He took Quinn’s weapon and charged it, seating the patched bullet with a small ramrod that slipped down the barrel making a half turn with the rifling. He loaded the second pistol in the same way, then primed the two guns with finer powder and held them out to Quinn next to each other, the knurled, acorn butts pointed in opposite directions. Quinn took one with amusement and cocked it with the solid complicated click of more than one thing falling into place, took a few steps and set his heels on the single line that divided the gallery in two. “One of us will have to count the paces.”

“I will,” Quinn said. “Otherwise we’ll get foul play.”

Stanton lined up behind him, heel to heel, and Quinn could feel Stanton’s back radiate moistly through his shirt. They were alike in height though Stanton was much more heavily built. He was left-handed and the two pistols clicked together once.

“Ready?”

“I’m ready,” said Stanton.

Quinn counted. At ten he turned on his heel and raised the dueling pistol. He looked down the clean plane of its barrel, saw Stanton’s head quaver upon the blade of its front sight and bleed away in the slight glare of light. He began to feel the weight of the gun in his upper arm. He saw Stanton standing sideways, one hand on his hip, tilting slightly back from the waist, the head tilted back too and the narrowed eyes; Quinn thought that this was what a real duelist must look like. Then there was the flash and report of Stanton’s pistol. Quinn went down feeling the pain open like a talon in his chest. He was on his back. He held himself upright on his elbows as Stanton ran whooping toward him, the row of electric bulbs streaming out of his head behind him. When he got to Quinn, Quinn raised his own gun with a seizure of hatred and fired. Stanton disappeared in the flash, bellowing, “Good God!” He snatched away Quinn’s pistol. “Get off your backside, you candy ass! Wax bullets! Order of the day for dueling practice! Strictly order of the day!” Stanton was disgusted and Quinn looked at him, feeling the slow draining of hatred from his brain. He got to his feet gritting his teeth from side to side and peeled up his shirt. Over his heart was a circular welt, red at the edges and very white at the center, like a great wasp sting. He still felt frightened and, now that it was over, unnaturally light. This was a time when he would have liked to have shown himself quite solidly but he knew his eyes still moved with excessive speed and his hands trembled: Stanton never missed such things.

“Everyone told me you were slipping, Quinn, and I’m beginning to believe it.”

“I’m not slipping,” Quinn breathed. Stanton began to calm down. Quinn tucked in his shirt. “You scared me shitless.”

“I see that I did. You look chastened. The fire is out in your great bunny’s eyes. Well, you’ll have a chance to recoup your emotional losses. This is a great spiritual exercise.”

“Where did you ever get the idea?” Quinn asked blandly.

Stanton took the question seriously: “Where? Puerto Rico. A professional twenty-one dealer had just paraded around me with a revolver and I lost such a terrific amount of face in front of a girl I was in love with that I considered defenestration. In my emotional exhaustion I decided that the only thing which could save me would be to always be prepared for the duel.”

“How did I figure into this?”

“I thought if I blasted you once good I would get a couple more challenges out of you. Practice is not at all the same on a paper target.”

Quinn wanted to go. They went up and into the living room again. “Head of moose,” said Stanton; then, indicating the stairway asked, “See my sign?” Quinn looked; a metal placard read POST NO COITUS. He recognized this as another of Stanton’s tests and waited patiently for the question. It came right away: “What do you think of it?” Quinn had a violent feeling of not requiring Stanton’s tests, but he was alert enough to think: Probably it begins here. He answered that he thought it was in bad taste and was not at all moved when Stanton told him he would have laughed at it before.

* * *

He went through the woods to his own place, fingering the raised circle through his shirt, gently because it was quick to hurt. Son of a bitch, he thought; after all this time, this was more of the same; it had begun long ago with a punch in the face from Stanton that removed a tooth and lacerated his tongue badly enough that the tooth, presumed lost, floated out a day later from the cut — all because Quinn had said, purely on speculation, that there was no God. Nevertheless, Quinn had been caught napping again; and that is why, afterward, Stanton thought he looked chastened. He was.

He came into view of his house and it revealed anew its unwarranted glory. The house had been built by his great-grandfather and his grand-uncles and though it was well made, it had required considerable repair and attention since before the Second World War. Doing things in a hurry was by now a tradition in Quinn’s family and there was some suspicion that green wood had been used in its construction. It was full of otherwise unexplainable gaps in its joining and invited the weather if it wasn’t constantly attended. Still, Quinn was unable to imagine any kind of gradual decline of the house. Because he was so sure that it stayed together by some subtle, frangible system, he imagined that it would go all at once — collapse, the roof coming in like an enormity, blasting sunlight and dust from every opening and crevice.

Inside, the house was clear, sunny, its seven rooms swept and polished. A current International Harvester calendar hung on the wall of the living room; underneath were fifteen more, the latest showing a male model in tool-jeans mounting a combine. The crystal cabinet still held his arrowhead collection. The rooms were all under-furnished as is usual with summer places. The spare and unupholstered furniture suggested the house’s long use as an operational center. Whatever sentiment it held could as easily have collected around the polished bars of a jungle gym or the packed sand of a bear garden. Anyway, it pleased him to see it and he went into his old bedroom and lay down.

The minute his face touched the nubbed cotton chenille spread and he tried to doze off, his mind began to operate at full speed, thrusting him, against his will, back into his office on a recent day, a Monday, when his secretary, Mary Beth Duncan, was to have been on vacation and he had looked forward to a day in the empty office, undoing her more odious mistakes, refusing to answer the phone, smoking and talking graciously into the dictaphone, drafting letters of supply and demand, request and compliance — shapely paragraphs of clean business prose. But Mary Beth had given up a day of her vacation to take care of back work. Quinn was more than bitter at seeing her and tried to go quietly into his own office. “You don’t see me, Mr. Quinn!” she sang as he entered, “I’m on vacation!”

“Right you are, Mary Beth. And get this: if you bring me the recent paperwork on American Motors, I won’t pay any attention to you at all.”

Mary Beth closed her eyes and shook her head. When he was finished, she cried, “You don’t see me! I’m on vacation! You can’t even see me!”

“Only this small—”

“You don’t see me! I’m on vacation! You don’t see me!” Quinn flung shut his office door, spilling papers, aghast. Mary Beth’s sourceless cries continued to come through the door and lodge in his head. He sat down in his chair in an attempt to restrain himself. If she hadn’t come, he could have spent the day like the businessman-savant he knew he could be; it was worse than that, too, the voice of that ass outside more like a steam whistle than anything human. He knew he should have fired her long ago. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t have fired Lizzie Borden from the same position. He saw things from too close up. He would have liked above all things to pare this trait away. A businessman who saw employees as people was finished. Meanwhile, Mary Beth’s voice died away to, “All right, Mr. Quinn, all right for you! See if I care.” Quinn calmed down. He asked himself how the day might be resurrected without his resorting to medication. He called Mary Beth on the interoffice phone. He told her that this was a place of business and that he wasn’t going to have another of her Halloweens. Therefore, get to work or get out. The inevitable enraged weeping began an instant later, directed, he knew, at the resonant heart of his door. He yelled, “I have my life to live, too, you know! Do you know that?” He got no answer.

There was work to do. He was close enough to his success to be spurred on by amazement. The stacks and inquiries that piled up every day were food for the company that had acquired an almost animal life in his mind. The factory was an organism that must be fed by the sales department; the expensive and periodical retooling that kept the factory up to date was a necessary medical expense. The thought, even in mockery, would have struck him as absurd a year before. He would not have been able to imagine the sensitivity with which this great animal could respond to his ministrations. The company had seemed beyond human control and he had not been interested. Now the four connected Quonset buildings that held the heavy machinery, punch presses and forklifts seemed delicate enough to be tuned like musical instruments. There were rules of supply and storage that had visible effect; man hours, overhead and production soon became palpable facts.

A month after he took over the company, it was on the edge of bankruptcy. This fact alone brought him to life. Four hundred and fifty men were faced with the loss of their jobs. It was their pitiable luck, Quinn thought, to find themselves with a bored only child dabbling at the controls in ennui. But conscience had unlocked his energy. In Detroit, where the contemplative philosophies had made few inroads, the loss of so many livelihoods could still be seen as serious. At the same time — though his own more or less rentier position made his problems look theoretical — the thought alone that he could have wrecked a fifty-eight-year-old business in one month flat gave him an acute sense of his own powers. He began to abandon his nostalgia for the life of freedom, began to admit how really bored he had been at it, and he began to take an interest. Within a short time he found himself working like one possessed.

* * *

A light rain made the pine barrens bleary and the river dull. It fell for two solid days. Quinn stayed indoors and read thick wet periodicals. Most of them were his mother’s fashion magazines, with page after page of epicene models writhing on lava flows in mortal constipation, or gazing at a crazy and unfriendly sun as if this were it unless we find water. He didn’t see anybody for a while and looked up from time to time at the rain rippling over the windows.

When the weather broke and cleared, he came out squinting. Snails had crawled halfway up the door and were stuck in the sunshine, horns retracted, tracks dry as varnish. Quinn flicked them away and went back inside to dress for fishing. He dressed warmly because the river was still full of snow melt. He carried his waders over his shoulder and went down the hill in back that was so steep you had to grab poplar saplings to keep your footing. At the bottom was a plank walk that crossed the marshy ground behind the river. After that, he saw the Pere Marquette clear and fast and very slightly coffee-colored between its banks. Straight in front, he could see the details of the bottom behind the imperceptible surface. Downstream, it mirrored sky and trees, curled like molten silver at a fallen spruce and made a pool. Opposite Quinn was a high, steep bank, bare of large trees, called Harrison’s Rollway, where lumbermen had rolled skinned logs into the river. He could see a half dozen good trout rising now in the pool and began to move toward it. The air was full of mayflies, females with yellow egg sacs that Quinn knew could be imitated with the Lady Beaverkill. They touched his face lightly and their wings flickered in the peculiar light as he worked to string the heavy, bellied line through the rod’s guides and attach the long platyl leader. Now the rises were breaking out in the slicks behind the boulders and in the small tongues of current that ran between them. He put on the waders and carried the rod butt first through the woods to get below the pool. The cold bog smell of spring came very strong the minute before he stepped into the river. He crossed a few yards to get a casting angle and felt the cool, round pressure of river on his legs. By the time he was in position, eight fish were feeding steadily in a line, facing upstream as always.

He made his false casts carefully, the lengthening line up high on the sunlight and the rod beginning to flex its full length into his hand. With his left hand holding the free line below the reel, he adjusted the tension of the cast so that the bow of line was correct and satisfactory. He finished the cast. The line straightened before him. The fly floated down and touched the water. It glided, then vanished. The line went tight when he lifted the rod. The rod was now bowed toward the straight line that swung out of the pool to the main stream in the middle where it was furrowed and marked with the silver arrows of the suntrack. Quinn held the rod high. He felt the curve of it lose rigidity. The fish broke and so began to lose ground. When it broke again it was splashy and without violence and came slowly to the net. At the net, it bolted once more and swung around behind but a moment later was in hand, a trout of two pounds that Quinn, with his thumb securely under the gill covers, held first against the trees and then against the sky before he put it in his creel. He rinsed the crushed fly in the water to rid it of slime which would sink it, blew hard on it until its hackles were upright and the false wings of feather stood out from the hook. He began his casting once again. He shortened the timing of his first cast so that the line cracked very slightly like a whip and there was a small cloud of vapor in the air where the fly had been. The fly was now absolutely dry and when it landed on the water it stood high on its sharp hackles and floated the way an insect does.

When the mayfly hatch was finished and the fish had quit feeding, he had five good trout. On the way back to his cottage, he paused four times to open the wicker creel and look in at the trout he had put in wet ferns and arranged in a hierarchy of magnitude.

Quinn saw the back of Stanton’s head bent to the open creel. “You can’t do this. I want all details.” He straightened up and Quinn glimpsed the fish bright and spotted in the ferns. He closed the wicker lid.

“I have no secrets,” he said simply.

“You’re just better than I am?”

“Now you’re talking,” Quinn said. He saw the truculence coming on, blunting Stanton’s features.

“You’ve had to deal with me once,” Stanton said hopefully.

“Yes, yes, I remember. Would again too.”

“You would—?”

“Oh, sure.” Quinn was eager to get his own back. The welt on his chest, now the color of plum, reminded him. But when they were in the dueling gallery, his nerves came back with the sudden memory of his last experience. He didn’t want to be hit again. On the other hand, he wanted to stick Stanton if he possibly could. Then Stanton’s wife came down the stairs, three at a time and, out of breath, introduced herself as Janey. “How do you do?” said Quinn, pleased with her. She wasn’t what he expected. He expected something off Palm Beach with a lot of jaw, Jax slacks and attitudes. Instead, this girl had a fine, open-eyed ingenuousness that would have been poison to the kind of arm-pumping good sport Quinn had expected. Her mouth, by an almost invisible margin, did not close and its shape was clarified by the dark line. Her cheekbones were distinct, either broad or high, he wasn’t sure; his study was making her jumpy. Quinn could have followed her around admiring her for a long time before actually wanting to lay hands on her.

Stanton took down a new set of pistols. These were percussion guns of the nineteenth century, made in Charleston, South Carolina, and had not been fired before. Janey said it was too bad to shoot them after so many years; couldn’t they sword fight? Stanton looked over at her and went on loading the pistols. When he was finished, he presented Quinn with his choice. Janey counted this time, in Old Church Slavonic she called it, though Quinn suspected. Stanton said she could count to ten in nineteen major languages including Tel Aviv. It threw Quinn off. He at first thought it was funny in a nervous-making way. But by the time they got toward ten, he was fingering the trigger nervously, not knowing what number they were on and having to turn when the counting stopped to find Stanton already facing him. He fired a bad shot and at the same time received an indescribably painful hit in the center of his upper lip. Tears sprang to his eyes. Stanton smiled with the placidity of an Annunciation. Quinn handed him the discharged pistol with its sulphurous odor and hammer closed tight on the uselessly spent percussion cap, and went out of the house without a word.

By nightfall, the Stantons had lured him back for dinner. He swiftly drank too much and then finished half a pot of coffee to clear his head. His lip was swollen in a uniform protuberance so much like an auto bumper that Stanton giggled and held the sides of his seat.

“What about another chance?” Quinn said hotly.

“It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Let me judge.”

“Not a chance. I’ve come to think of you as a sitting duck.” Stanton’s mouth was poised, ready to start into laughter. Next to him the bride dusted her strawberries with sugar from a small silver spoon.

So Stanton had this minute victory of refusal. But Quinn felt that he had stymied him on the larger issue simply by refusing to play, to fall into the old habit of scheming against the other members of the club, to see what was funny about the sign hanging over the stairway. Quinn felt that for once he held a subtle advantage. Stanton spoke. “How is your business, may I be so bold to ask?” Was this a lead shot or just a question?

“It’s all right,” Quinn said, cards very close now, almost not sporting.

“You realize that I don’t work.”

“Yes, I do.”

Janey said, “It’s like having a child in the house.” Her voice was low and sweet. “He swarms.” She had some kind of accent.

“You do just fine with me, sugar.”

“I know I do, Vernor,” she explained. He wasn’t listening to her. “But you do seem to … swarm.”

“Okay, Janey, time to hang up the jock,” Stanton said to Quinn.

“Vernor fails to work, you see.”

“Hang it up, Janey. Hang up the old jock.” Stanton was patient and instructive. Then he turned completely to Quinn in order to exaggerate what he pretended to ignore. “Well! You’ve done right smart since you took over that firetrap factory of yours, have you not?”

“I’ve done well.”

Janey flattered Quinn by looking at him with interest. She was so balanced and her gazing, slate eyes so serene that she made Stanton next to her look as overgrown as a Swiss Guard or an Alaskan vegetable; but, in fairness, he hadn’t found his brilliant and destructive pitch yet and Quinn himself was rancorous for having been shot in the lip. So the game had stalemated prematurely.

“But still the solution seemed to you to direct your attention to Papa’s company store.” This was unfair of Stanton; it had become impossible without any kind of refereeing. Quinn spoke slowly.

“The company store makes an excellent punching bag for my frustrations and it appears that I am to be frustrated. Every time I slug it, it gets more profitable.”

“What amazes me is your bravery, walking in cold.” Stanton was trying to make it up; but with Janey watching, Quinn liked this bit of characterization.

“I learned. I made a lot of mistakes.”

“Seems you learned all too well,” said Stanton. “You’re caught.” Smug, he sipped his brandy conclusively.

“I know I am. I want to be.” Quinn couldn’t beat him at wit; but he thought he had a chance on the honesty count.

“Is it very dull?” Janey asked.

“Hang it up,” said Stanton, deliberately misinterpreting. “You needle my friends and I’ll kick your ass.” She turned to him and Quinn studied her. She wasn’t there any more. Very discreetly, she had departed. But hadn’t Stanton been joking?

“Vernor’s inactivity makes his mind run wild,” she said from afar.

“Hang the sonofabitch up,” said Stanton, dropping ringed, ominous hands to the table. Quinn knew that she couldn’t be very safe around him. And because of that her remote backtalk had gallantry.

* * *

Saturday morning. Quinn walked to the main lodge for his breakfast. The midweek quiet was gone. Cars were parked under dusty pines and overdressed children in dresses and Eton suits circled the compound and ran in and out of the Bug House. The sun was high and lifted a square of hot light from the roof of the shed. The cars, too, even under their trees, were soaked with heat. Quinn walked through the kitchen entrance to the coolness of the dining rooms. He sat down at one of the linen-covered tables and surveyed. There was still the unnecessary number of china cabinets along the far wall. Overhead, the painted pressed-tin ceiling of nymphs and satyrs had the same prettiness and the same humorous light fixture bursting from one tin satyr groin. The walls were circled with pictures of early days, logging operations and sporting feats. Surmounting these were the stuffed trout and the stuffed heads of deer and bear; the multiplicity of unfocused glass eyes did as much as anything else to establish the mortuary atmosphere. On either side of the kitchen were two punt guns, poachers’ weapons that could bring down a flight of ducks with a shot. These were fired on the Fourth of July. The wall whose window overlooked the Pere Marquette river was bare and on it were printed two clear pentagrams of sunlight. The room smelled of cedar shavings like a schoolhouse and the distant sounds of children made the quiet emphatic.

He read his mail as he ate and came across a letter that caused him to let a forkful of egg cool in midair: Mary Beth had taken it upon herself to supply price quotations for a small die-cast part that the company made; the price she quoted for the finished part was somewhat less than half the manufacturing cost, and the company was therefore swamped with orders. Quinn managed to finish his breakfast anyway before calling the office and telling Mary Beth what his feelings were, generally, about what she had done. He left her on the phone laughing and crying and telling him, “I hate you I hate you I hate you.” Why me? Quinn inquired of himself.

He stopped outside at the edge of the compound. There was now a flag on the tall flagpole, standing out from its distant top like a new postage stamp. Behind the screens of the Bug House the small bandstand was visible with its chairs, its piano, its music stands and its shadowy, disused jukebox. The grass all around was brown in the exposure. From behind the main lodge came the same children’s voices, the sound of chopping, and then heavy hands seized his ears. A falsetto cry came from behind: “Mumma! Mumma!” It was Stanton. He made Quinn guess over and over what day it was. Quinn couldn’t do it. It was the day the Mackinac Bridge was to be dedicated.

“I don’t want to go,” said Quinn.

“I have my boat there.”

“I don’t want to go and I won’t go.”

“You’re going.”

“What’ll we do? No, really, I don’t want to go.”

“This is an important day in our state’s history you god damned loser and you’re going to go.”

“You and Janey go. Take pictures so that we can all pore over them ardently at some unspecified later date.”

“If you don’t go I’ll spend considerable time and money to make your life a living hell.”

“I’m telling you, Vernor. It isn’t going to be the same this year. There is going to be no clowning.”

Stanton looked at him. “I don’t believe you,” he said, looking.

The view of the water from the Mackinac dock was blocked at intervals by the tall steamers, all cleanly painted in gun-metal gray and white; and the glass panes of the great cabins and staterooms picked up the light of the very cold blue straits beyond. They walked the length of the dock, and the tall pilings next to them that were faced with strips of fire hose heaved and took up the slow shock of the steamers’ movement. The private boats were moored beyond the steamers. The three of them stopped before a tall Matthews yacht that was heavily equipped with Rybovitch blue-water fishing modifications: outriggers, a tuna tower, gin pole and harpoon stand. The boat was covered with a fitted duck tarpaulin drawn tight as a trampoline at its grommets. The tarp stretched between the transom and the flying bridge; the radio direction finder was covered by a small fly of canvas that matched the tarpaulin. It was Stanton’s boat and the name was on the transom in brass: Lusitania. Underneath that, the home port: Ponce, Puerto Rico. Quinn was thinking of the last time he had seen Stanton, helplessly and pathetically out of his mind in front of the Detroit Athletic Club. Afterwards, Stanton had headed south and this was how he’d gone.

They left the dock, passed a row of green highway department trucks and walked until they were at the thronged middle of Mackinac City with its weathered concrete and false territorial buildings. Stanton led and Quinn followed Janey through streets full of people who had come for the bridge dedication. The bridge itself was cordoned off by the state police. The three were balked; then Stanton led a retreat without explanation, downtown again to a dry-cleaning establishment. When he came out, he had three paper tags that he pinned to their chests; the tags read PRESS ONLY. They looked at each others’ tags unconvinced.

Squinting past the great concrete fan of the entrance and past the toll gates, Quinn could see the bridge climbing, its towers and cables strewn against the sky, holding the vast and absurd booby trap together. Where the approach was closed off, black limousines with tinted windows began the ascent to the bridge’s crown, and from behind those windows the myriad muted faces of nabobs gazed at the riffraff. These limousines were followed by a small parade of open convertibles, each with a queen seated on the furled top. There was a peach queen, a gasket queen, a celery queen, a lumber queen and finally, a slender, dark girl passed waving to the crowd, the smoked pickerel queen. A number of people tried to follow the queens onto the bridge. They were stopped by the police and howled in near-demented rage. Quinn, Stanton and Janey moved on to the entrance as though to walk straight through. A trooper stepped sideways into their path and Stanton said, “Detroit Free Press, officer. Will you get the hell out of our way, officer?” They walked through the unoccupied toll gates and onto the bridge where the concrete apron fell away to open grating through which the water of the straits was visible.

The bridge rose away in front of them, up between the two great towers that slung cables thicker than trees; and under his feet Quinn saw the dark water ticked with whitecaps fade to solid blue as they climbed. At first he saw nothing ahead except the smooth, ascending grate surface of the bridge. But after a short time, the dedication party was visible, its flags, buses, limousines and platforms gathered between towers like a distant hill town. Someone was talking over a loudspeaker, the voice indistinct on the wind. A lake freighter passing under the bridge, tremendously diminished beneath them, poured smoke from its oval stack that you could smell as it came up through the grating. As they went, not talking, figures began to resolve themselves out of the cluster between the towers. They approached and saw the dedication party, a crowd of perhaps a hundred. On the platform a man was making a speech in Canadian French into a wall of smiling, upright, uncomprehending Michigan burghers who smiled at him while they talked to each other. The speaker’s hair was tossing and the sheaf of papers he held rustled uncontrollably in his hand. When his speech began to stumble, he looked down at this sheaf and his eyes widened with real ferocity.

Stanton beckoned. He was standing next to a bus designated STATE LEGISLATURE over its windshield. It was surrounded by parked limousines. Beyond the bus there was nothing but sky and lake. They followed Stanton as he pushed the folding door and climbed in. It was quiet and pleasant inside. They were out of the wind and no longer had to shout to each other. The French Canadian was silenced on his platform. His lengthy printed speech whirred decoratively in his hand. His curious mouth made interesting shapes in the air like a cooky cutter. And the sun shone hard upon everything. Quinn could see down the far slope of the bridge to the town of St. Ignace and beyond to the forests of the Upper Peninsula. Then Stanton found the liquor and the box lunches and they sat down. Quinn was hungry. Janey asked for the first time if they could go home now please, that is back to the club please, she didn’t, if no one minded, want to go to jail. She was ignored by Stanton, and Quinn didn’t know what to say to her. The players can’t be expected to talk to the spectators.

“Have you served your country?” Stanton asked, indicating Quinn with the point of his sandwich.

“No,” Quinn said, “I take, take, take and never give.”

“Never been in the army?” Stanton knew he hadn’t.

“No, have you?” Quinn knew that Stanton had been, of course. But it was expected that he should let Stanton rehearse this obsession.

“Just a little. I was found unfit for general consumption. Whenever I was in the barracks with a crowd of soldiers, my blood pressure climbed so high it distorted my vision. They had to let me go. Military hearts were broken. I couldn’t see, Mr. Quinn, I couldn’t see.”

They tried to talk about other things, but Stanton smothered any incipient conversation not related to the trial he seemed to be conducting.

“I think they’re starting to move,” said Janey. She was looking out of the back of the bus. Quinn tried to see. “Wait, he’s going on with the speech. This is our chance.”

“No,” said Stanton. Quinn wanted to get out too. He would even have agreed to run for it; but at the same time — and this is where he began to feel it — he recognized that there was something to be lost or recorded depending upon who first moved to escape. So he vacillated between numbing himself to their peril and searching the group outside for signs of restiveness. Looking at those faces beyond the window, he thought of stampede. “Why don’t we bust open some of these other lunches?” he said.

“Why don’t we get out of here?” Janey asked. The two men stared at her with disapproval. Stanton asked if she was complaining about the food and she told him that he wasn’t funny. He reminded her that it was free and nourishing too. Quinn asked, “Anybody want any more — what is this? — pâté?”

“Please.” She hid her face, then uncovered it quite suddenly to say angrily, “I’m scared!” Quinn was unconvinced by this and wondered for the first time if she was in it too.

The floor was littered with sandwich wrappers and Stanton had thrown food. Ice cubes stood in small pools of melted water on the rubber aisle mat. Through the tinted windows of the Greyhound, Quinn could see lake gulls wheeling and screaming. He looked again toward the audience where G. Mennen Williams of the soap industry had replaced the French Canadian. The governor stood at the podium, his head turned to his predecessor. The Frenchman’s eyes were directed toward the governor’s bow tie, admiring its spotted surface. The governor looked at the Frenchman’s hairline. All the mouths of the audience opened and closed in cries of spasmodic, unhearable laughter. The governor allowed himself a grin. Behind the podium the cars of the queens were parked in a semicircle and all of the queens huddled together for warmth and opened their mouths to laugh as the others did.

“Please please please.”

“All right, can it!”

“For someone who was in the army such a short time,” she said miserably, “you picked up so many of the expressions.”

“Quinn, we live in a world wracked with strife.”

“They’re starting to move!” Janey cried.

“They’ve stopped again,” said Quinn, making a grandstand play. Janey looked at him with surprise and disappointment. Before she could say anything, and Quinn dreaded what it would be, two women in wind-damaged picture hats stepped onto the front of the bus. Quinn thought this must be the end.

“We’re not ready for you yet, ladies!” Stanton called; any reservations Quinn had fell away, and the admiration flooded in. When he glimpsed Janey, he saw that her eyes too reflected an unexpected pleasure. The two women retreated, Quinn supposed for reinforcements; they didn’t look as if they had been taken in. Stanton, meanwhile, was talking about a plan he had for raising a Mormon shipwreck off Beaver Island. But Quinn allowed his eyes to fasten upon the door in a point-sacrificing manner; therefore, he was the first to descry the entrance of three gentlemen of the order of Shriners. They all three wore the headgear of their fraternity, the fez. Stout gentlemen, they suggested that Shriner life suited them to a T. Visible behind them were the two women who had appeared earlier.

“Say!” said the first of the gentlemen in the fezzes. His face had gone beef red at the sight of the three and the untidiness which they had created.

“Out out out,” said Stanton, hurrying the first gentleman, and in turn the others, by pushing his chest. “Not another word if you’re going to thrust yourselves in here like that. Not one more word.” He pushed them out the door, shut it with a rubbery clatter and returned.

Quinn was awestruck. He wanted Stanton’s signature on his infielder’s mitt. Stanton went on about his shipwreck. He said it was a small steamer and was carrying a printing press. A multitude looked in the windows of the bus. “Shall I open another box lunch?” Quinn asked, trying to regain his self-respect in the face of Stanton’s tour de force. But he saw only the commonplaceness of his suggestion reflected in Stanton’s eyes.

“I’m full, thank you,” Stanton said. Quinn was ashamed of himself. He should have refused to play; but now that he was, he was ashamed for playing so poorly. How could he become a tycoon and a savant or even tell people what to do when he behaved like this? People were pounding on the windows. “Let’s get the show on the road,” Stanton said and walked forward to the door. The three gentlemen of the fraternal order were standing just outside. They had been joined by the lieutenant-governor and by the smoked pickerel queen who had lost her elusive prettiness in indignation. Stanton opened the door and looked upon them like a censorious bishop. “What is it?” He had become this bishop. “Yes?”

“Look, you!” It was the first Shriner once more, his fez drolly askew.

“Do you have tickets?” Stanton asked. He was stern with these people.

A roar: “Tickets!”

Stanton closed the door and latched it. Quinn could feel nothing around him. He floated in his seat. Stanton pulled down the microphone and held its button. His voice was loud outside as he spoke. “Regular bus service begins—” here he consulted his watch “—in about thirteen months. Now I know that’s a long wait and I would like to suggest to those of you who didn’t bring just an awful lot of camping equipment that you spend the interim building shelters of a simple, utilitarian kind and gathering essential foodstuffs.” He released the button, replaced the microphone and drove away. When the shouting of the canaille died behind, there was only Quinn’s helpless, rueful applause.

Stanton hired an off-duty patrolman to deliver the bus to the Otsego County grange hall for their annual VFW picnic. The officer hesitated until Stanton hinted that there would be something in it for him at the other end. “Keep money in front of these bozos if you want action.” They went to the boat where Stanton popped the tarp off its grommets and gathered it in his arms to stow belowdecks. Quinn lent a hand, trying to size up Stanton’s intentions. Stanton opened the hatches and ran the ventilation blowers before starting the engines. They cast off, reversed out of the slip and moved toward the bridge steadily. When they drew under it, Stanton shifted the engines into neutral and got out the glasses. Directly above them, the crowd they had just left straggled south toward Mackinac City. “We bitched them good,” said Stanton, pushing the outermost levers forward. The yacht began to move again on the brilliant chop. Stanton pulled up the hinged seat in front of the controls, fixed its support rod and sat down. Quinn leaned against the shelf under the windshield, seeing over the front of the boat the flat breaking of water at the bows. The deck tapered forward with its narrow consecutive planks of holystoned teak; and on this surface, like some sculptural display, were the polished horns and big knuckled-over searchlights.

“Janey isn’t fond of boats, are you?”

“Not very.”

“And since she is a social do-gooder, she figures it’s childish to have such expensive playthings. Is that accurate?”

“Pretty much.”

“I once recommended Janey to Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross Rescue Relief. I said here is a girl who can rescue and relieve. James, old sport, I’ve had the boredom around my neck more than once and I haven’t been ashamed to scream. I screamed like a Bedouin. What’s the matter with me, Mr. Quinn. I have what men dream of. I’m free, white and twenty-one with sixty zillion dollars billowing in a green cloud out of my asshole and I am obliged to scream like a Bedouin. Explain that to me, Cedric, and I’ll buy you a new Slazenger.”

“I can’t explain.”

“It comes up around my throat like a cold ring and I find I am a pagan with less energy than an odalisque and there is no God. Why?” Quinn thought of the tooth that had floated out of his tongue.

“I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

“If God will show himself, I will buy him a new Slazenger.” They drove leisurely in the boat that rolled along at the cost of fifty-six gallons an hour. Stanton continued to introduce the usual topics: the Dreyfus Affair, the Papist conspiracy in America, the eruptions of Popocatepetl, Shakespeare, the Monomoy Indians, freeze-dried food, jai alai. Suddenly he shook Quinn’s hand. “Help me,” he said, “I need your help. No tips, please. Women will not wear shorts or halters in town. I need your assistance.”

“He drinks, he swarms…”

They were still a distance from the bridge at this point and Stanton swung the boat back in a sharp bank that was a reply to Janey. When they were a short distance from the bridge, Stanton cut the engines. The boat continued to drift, swinging slowly sideways. Stanton hurried below and came up with a megaphone, thrusting it out to Quinn’s vision. As they glided now, turning sideways toward the bridge, he lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes, hung them around his neck, raised the megaphone and called, “What’s the trouble? What are you walking for, you people?” The crowd overhead was distant, silhouetted against the gibbous, china sky. Answering voices came but couldn’t be made out. “I can’t hear you!” Stanton called and the indistinct voices came again. The group above had stopped and looked down at them. “Look, take my advice: regular bus service begins in thirteen months; stay where you are!” A speck appeared against the sky, enlarging very rapidly to splash beside the boat, disappear and bob up again, a lady’s shoe. Stanton contemplated it. “Ah, well,” he said, tired. He threw the megaphone down the companionway and started the engines, which once again began their heavy, fuel-devouring drone.

Years had passed since they were here together. As boys, they had lived for such trips. The last one had been ruined by the oppressive and ridiculous presence of Stanton’s father who wandered over the property with hunched, lugubrious shoulders, stopping people on paths, people with fishing rods and picnic lunches, to tell them what an ungrateful handful his son was; what a nasty little ingrate, his mother chimed in, not to know what side of his bread the butter was on. Quinn remembered the gentlemen, the women too, stopping in their green sportsman’s kingdom to consider a series of rhetorical questions put to them by the boozy couple. The strange fact was that because Stanton at seventeen stayed sober, the deteriorated pair felt he was trying to be superior, to be condescending. And until the time they threw him out of the house to go to college, they skulked around and drank on the sly.

Stanton nosed the boat to the front of the dock; then, reversing its engines so that a heavy churn of disturbed water revolved away and under the pilings, he swung the stern up snug and shut off the ignition. “The boat came in handy once. We made a fast exit from the El Convento Hotel in San Juan where I had been lewdly handled by Janey’s Aunt Judy, who is younger than she is.”

“Vernor, don’t do that,” Janey said.

“What were you escaping?” Quinn asked.

“Turpitude.”

“Ah, then.”

“This Aunt Judy was the love of my life, such as it is.”

“We believe you, darling; but do shut up.”

“No wantum to.”

“Do anyway.”

“I lived on the boat and made a regular appearance at the El Convento, walking up from the dock through San Juan memorably dressed in a white linen suit made for me in Martinique—”

“Why don’t you stop talking, darling?”

“Because I am obliged to recognize the great pleasure that it brings to others. Anyhow, brilliantly attired in this suit and wearing a chest protector constructed entirely of Yankee dollars, I went to the El Convento where as a matter of ritual I blew fifteen hundred at chemin de fer and ascended to the third-floor workshop of my two lady friends.”

“I’m not Cinderella.”

“No, ma’am.”

Janey said to Quinn, “In Vernor’s simple world, women are either Cinderellas or professionals.”

“That’s right!” said Stanton happily. Janey looked at him.

“I am not either one,” she said.

“My world is a horse opera. You know that. Where was I?” he asked Quinn.

“Going up the stairs.”

“Okay, and it was a question of whether or not someone had gotten at Judy before I could get at her. I considered it a good week when I batted, so to speak, five hundred. It was usually much—” he cleared his throat “—worse. Nevertheless, I fell in love. And we had a dry-run honeymoon.”

“Oh, Vernor, what’s the point?”

He went on, “We sailed away, away, over the sea. Judy and Vernor. Hearts and flowers. Away. The moon rose in hugeness over the Caribbean with a single wind-bent palm courtesy of Eastman Kodak in the foreground. Judy and Vernor, somewhat closer in the foreground, scuffled hectically and made love like … monsters.” He paused and said, “Oink.”

“Do you want to see his vaccination?” Janey asked Quinn.

“No, but you’re kind to offer.”

“It didn’t work out. Judy packed and left me and Janey in the hotel and we just got sort of real attached. Didn’t we, sugar? Hm? — Oh, look, you’re the one I love now! That was before, the monster stuff.”

“You be the judge,” she said. This seemed to make him nervous and Quinn therefore welcomed it.

“You’re coming down a little hard, aren’t you, darling? Where’s your sense of humor?”

She lit another of her innumerable cigarettes, dragged on it, throwing the match away, and said, exhaling smoke, “No, you weren’t trying to be funny, I guess.” She waved the smoke away with the hand that held the cigarette.

* * *

Early the next morning, Stanton appeared in Quinn’s doorway with a globe of iced orange juice which he put with a glass next to Quinn’s bed. “The first Bug House party is tonight,” he said. “There’d be no living here if we missed it.”

“Thanks,” Quinn said, pointing at the juice. He poured a glassful of it. “Yes, I’ll go.”

“All the old turds have arrived for long stays too. Jensen, Fortescue, Spengler, both Van Duzens, Jaycox, Laidlaw, Scott. All the people that hate us.”

“Okay, I’ll go.”

“I’m glad you’re willing. This is now my residence and I’m afraid it will need a little softening up before it’s much of a place to live in.” Quinn stiffened. “That’s where you would be some help to me.” Quinn thought that this must be the measure of how thoroughly he had succumbed at the bridge yesterday: Stanton’s consideration of him as an automatic accomplice was restored.

Stanton lit a cigarette, looked upward and blew white smoke into the morning sun. “Why don’t you cut out this business baloney?” he asked. Quinn didn’t want to answer. He was susceptible and he didn’t want ridicule.

“Because I like it,” he answered anyway.

“You love it.”

“I like it. A lot.”

“Hire a manager, why don’t you, and join me in making the world tense. We’ll foment discord.”

“That was before. Besides, you’re a married man now.”

“Not so,” said Stanton, “Janey won’t marry me.”

“She won’t?” asked Quinn lamely.

“Under your hat. We get wedding presents.”

“Why won’t she marry you?” This embarrassed Stanton.

“Says I’m too mean and crazy. She says she’s sorry she loves me and I don’t blame her. I think it’s bad luck for her too. I’m not domestic.”

By the time Stanton left, it was almost noon. Quinn made himself lunch and got his fishing gear together and went to the river above the woodcock marsh. It was too bright. His floating line threw a beaded shadow along the bottom; and though Quinn worked hard for nearly an hour and a half and until his eyes ached from the concentration, he failed to raise a single fish. He put on his Polaroid glasses and kept wading until he came to a turning cutbank that terminated in a round, flowing pool, deep and alder-rimmed. Right away, he saw the silver, dull flashes of nymphing trout in its depths. He tried combination after combination on them without success until the perspiration ran off him. On a hunch, he tied on a small green nymph and caught four good rainbows in a row before he put the rest off their feed.

As he waded back, he saw that the sun had changed its angle and the river had gone quite metallic. Quinn was suffering a not unusual loss of faith and believed that all the trout were in his creel, that the river held no more. He went back through the marshland hoping to put up a woodcock. Not a sign. Nothing flew or swam when his belief failed.

As he circled beneath the plateau the top of which was the compound, he heard the adult, braying voices of the deadly offspring of the founding generation. He remembered the party tonight.

Janey was on the porch. “Isn’t Vernor with you?”

“He left before lunch,” Quinn said, stripping off his waders and stepping into his shoes. Janey said that he must be in the gallery then. When Quinn asked if she wouldn’t have heard him, she said that he wasn’t going to shoot; he was going to make bullets out of some stained-glass-window lead he had bought: it had the right tin content or something. “Well, come in,” Quinn said. “I have to clean these.” He patted the creel. He pushed the wicker chair over by the entrance to the kitchen and Janey sat down. He handed her the issue of Vogue with the farting moon women and went in and put the three trout in the sink. He liked to see trout in a porcelain sink. He liked to see them on a newspaper almost as well, though not as much as the sink. It wasn’t the same with game birds. A grouse bleeding on the newspaper could be disturbing, for example; while in the sink, it had the quality of rare foodstuff. Quinn picked up the largest fish, gripped it under the gill plates and opened it with his pen knife from the vent all the way up to the point of the lower jaw, detaching the gills there and at the base of the skull and pulling the entrails away in a piece. In the middle was the whitish translucent stomach and its dark contents showed through. Quinn split it carefully, spreading the insides with the blade of his knife on the porcelain: hundreds of undigested nymphs. The second, smaller trout contained the same plus a bright minnow and a few red ants, some of which had eaten into the stomach lining. There was one brown honeybee in the third. Quinn removed the dark blood along the spine of each fish because it made the meat bitter, rinsed them, wrapped them in wax paper and put them in the icebox.

“I’m nervous about tonight.”

“It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Vernor said they do this every Saturday. But what do they do? The thing is, they must be so practiced up. I mean what goes on?”

“At the Bug House? Drink a lot. Talk about years past. It’s sometimes touching and usually boring. The worst of it is the singing. The rest shouldn’t bother you. But the singing can be a mudbath—” Quinn stopped. He had just found a packet of sixty or seventy business letters which, on quick examination, proved to be half junk mail. The covering letter from Mary Beth began, to his special disgust, “Dear Boss Man.”

“When Vernor and I were kids, we listened in on those Bug House parties. We thought all that boozy talk was Roman oratory. But my mother hated the parties and wouldn’t let me go near them when she could help it.”

“Why did she hate them?” Janey asked, as if the point of view of another woman would make her see it.

“My father always stopped off there when he came up for weekends. And when he came in, still dressed in his sharkskin suit from the office, and his face was ballooning under a narrow-brimmed Borsolino, she knew that he was in no condition, as they say. Sometimes he brought his pals and they drank and crashed around and cried and sent my mother fluttering upstairs to polish her driftwood collection. And you should have seen the stuff; it all shone like agate.”

Janey kept asking questions. She couldn’t imagine that someone who had known Stanton as long as Quinn had, worked; and she asked how his father had come to give him his business and when. “All right,” he said. He liked the story. He told how his father had discussed arrangements on the golf course. The prospect of retiring had upset him so much, he drove the electric cart recklessly and finally turned it over, breaking his leg in three places. Quinn stood next to him, helpless to remove the thousand-pound cart upside down on his father’s legs. A greenskeeper tried to help and tipped the cart up halfway before dropping it back on his father, who brought the ambitious idiot to earth with a single blow of his Cary Middlecoff weighted brass putter. Eventually, they loaded his father, fussy and upset as a baby, into a sod wagon drawn by a tractor and took him to the clubhouse and called an ambulance. Quinn was covered with spilt battery acid from the electric cart, and as he waited in the pro shop his Bermuda shorts melted off him, leaving him standing in ventilated underwear that was going very fast too. Quinn helped his father into the ambulance. His father’s hair was filled with Kentucky blue-grass seed and shone like an aureole of gold. Quinn remembered his gasping from the stretcher, “And they call golf a sissy’s game!” Afterward, when friends told stories of danger on the African veldt or the Guatemalan highlands, Quinn’s father told a golf story and showed scars. He said no man needed to go to the wilderness.

Janey seemed amused by the account. She leaned on her hand, hiding her smiles. But then, when it passed, she looked off to one side, at nothing, the eyes slate and very clear, the straight nose, the mouth now slightly compressed, expressionless, vacant and fine.

“Have you ever hit Vernor?” she asked.

“No.”

“Has he ever hit you?”

“Once.”

“What for?”

“I said there was no God.”

“I often think he’s fairly crazy,” she said. “Sometimes he talks such foolishness that I imagine him blowing up in front of my eyes. It doesn’t seem you can talk crazy for so long and stay in one piece.” Strange how apt this seemed to Quinn. He saw how she must have her hands full with Stanton, helping him while he vilified her publicly, then swamped her with affection. Quinn had the same sense she had that Stanton held some unfathomable capacity for wrecking himself. He might very well blow apart, as Janey thought, doing it as he would in his unique way, but exploding still, a nova, as Quinn imagined, blazing arms, legs, torso, head, away from the center, each part trailing flames in the sky, the head raving in a military fashion: now hear this, can it, the order of the day is that an army at rest will not profit, Napoleon did not profit, mount up men and get the show on the road as I am losing my head, my mistress, my bank account, my charm, my hair. Quinn thought of Janey trying to contain this corrosive silliness and she seemed so much in danger that he thought of himself as the rescuer. She lit a cigarette, inhaled and then exhaled as though trying to get the smoke away from her. She moved her seat out of the direct afternoon sun slanting across the room from the tall rolled-glass windows that were violet from years of strong light.

“Well, I hope you still like him,” she said.

“Can’t you tell I do?”

“Not really, no. I guess I had a different idea of things. Vernor talked about you all the time. Then when you were, I don’t know, cold to him…” She couldn’t have been expected to understand. And though it bothered him to have given such an impression, he knew Stanton would remember and get it right. Quinn’s refusal to cooperate with Stanton had a number of sides. Quinn knew that if you played patty cake with Stanton he would soon be all over you.

* * *

Quinn hung back. He could see the green compound on its ineffable mound darkening in the evening. He could see the trees merge to a dark wall around the compound and the sky deepen above it. He could hear many a silly voice. In the compound the Bug House glowed yellow and hummed like a hive, and even at this distance he could hear the screen door clatter as another club member went in. He could see the people inside, a dark moving spot in the center of the surrounding screened light like the yolk of an egg. He went forward. He went back. He wondered if a grotesque fuss were to be made of him. Supercilious questions about his long absence. He pressed his hair down on top with the flat of his hand, adjusted his silk ascot, ran his thumb behind the lapels of his jacket and stepped out of the bushes. Leaving his house, he had felt suitably dressed, his outfit comfortably integrated; by now, however, he felt ensnared in his clothes, as though he might have to slash his way out. He walked toward the Bug House and could hear the sounds of the night, the frogs chirping below, the steady woodland throb of the generator. The Bug House with its light was a tall oval in the night and delicate barn swallows dove through the tapering top after armored bugs that were the color of varnish. Overhead, you could feel rain hanging in the warmth of the night; and Quinn knew that there would be hatches of insects and good fishing if he could get to it.

“The true Quinn!” yelled Stanton in an opening bid, as Quinn entered briskly. “I feel certain that he can tell you.” Five faces turned to the door quizzically. Quinn knew them all right. “Tell how you touched down in that crop-dusting plane and tore up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” Quinn pulled the door shut behind him, perplexed at having to whip something together so soon. Janey leaned in repose on the piano beside Stanton. Quinn wondered what fatality obliged him to continue. The five had moved around him and he addressed himself to them.

“Picture me,” he said, “in my Steerman biplane dusting away, as it were. Suddenly, I touch down and tear up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” This seemed a suitably inane place to stop. Stanton was delighted. One of the five coughed.

“Tell them what happened when you returned to the airport many months later,” said Stanton slithering onto the piano. This would be difficult to play.

“Many months later,” Quinn began, ransacking his brain.

“When you returned to the airport—” One of the five, Fortescue by name, assisted.

“That’s right, and the Steerman biplane had been left neglected out in the field. I couldn’t find it. ‘Where’s my Steerman biplane?’ I asked a farmer. ‘Out there,’ he said. ‘Out where?’ ‘Out there in the turnip patch.’” Quinn considered this merely an escape maneuver; but Stanton was much affected. He fell off the piano, for one thing, and could be heard more or less barking from the floor. Quinn went over to the table and made himself a drink. Purely on the basis of Stanton’s response, he awarded himself a certain number of points. He looked around. The five were still standing, not having yet broken the crescent they had formed. Then, two at the right end, Sturtevant and Olds, looked at each other and began to move. This precipitated a general movement among the others who, yes, they were beginning to move now, mostly just turning in their tracks, but there was sign of life here, the play of expression on the faces like shadows on glass; and before long they had become part of the crowd of thirty who talked and leaned into each other’s smoke. Quinn joined them and ingratiated himself by starting up a conversation with Fortescue about his collection of military miniatures, the largest in the country. “… my point being,” Fortescue concluded, “that such quantities of horse are scarcely imaginable at Ypres—” he was talking about a competitors’ collection “—and therefore this fool had made the whole battle implausible to me. I don’t expect perfection. After all, I have displayed hussars with paint bubbles on their chests and artillerymen divided by the seams of sloppy casting. But I find a historical lapse like this abhorrent.” Quinn said that he was putting it mildly.

Meanwhile, another member named Scott, an obsequious professor to whom the academic life had given an avid taste for the outside world, greeted everyone who came through the screen door — many were entering for the third and fourth time — with the phrase, “Nice to see you.” Quinn’s main fear all along was Stanton and that is why he buried himself in this group. Spengler, the chronicler of the club, was explaining his race against time to finish his account of the club’s first hundred years by the centennial on the Fourth. “Nice to see you,” said Scott, looking past them with his diluted eyes. There were under twenty-five hairs in his moustache. “My account,” said Spengler, “is very thorough and does not quail before realities.”

“Nice to see you.”

“Where have you gotten your information?” Quinn asked.

“Letters and diaries mostly. There was an early account, done around the turn of the century, which I take issue with. This was written by a local boy who resented the club and who was not a member. The name of his account was Hellfire in the Woods and tried to prove that the club was founded for disreputable reasons. I take issue, Quinn.”

“Nice to see you, Bob.”

“As well you should,” said Quinn. He could see Stanton craning his neck. He was after Quinn.

“And I put it right on the line. Everybody asks me if I am afraid to write my chronicle before I see what is in the time capsule and I answer that thorough research has no fears. The thing is this, the first ten years are terra incognita and my job is to reconstruct them. I do not quail, Quinn.” Stanton had the scent now. He was moving. Quinn’s stomach got colder.

“Nice to see you.”

Olson came in. Thin, intelligent Jack Olson, native of this Northern country, was wearing an apron and carrying a tray, holding the tray aloft on his left hand and with the other unloading snacks, bonbons and party favors. As Stanton went in one end of the group, Quinn squeezed out the other and went over to Olson. “Why aren’t you fishing?” Olson asked. Quinn liked the quiet sanity of his voice.

“I don’t know why,” he confessed.

“The big duns will be on the water. I got a handful of nymphs out of the feeder creek and the shuck was all dark, almost black on the top where the wings show. Why don’t you pass this up?” Olson said contemptuously of the party. He knew Quinn wouldn’t misunderstand him.

“What about you?”

“Tell you what, I’ll have a look at the river. If I got it right about the hatch, I’ll come get you.”

“That’d be good. I’d love to go. What about Vernor?” Olson looked over at Stanton who made his way from conversation to conversation toward them. He didn’t conceal the hesitation before saying, “Why not.” Quinn nodded, then turned hopelessly back toward the group to find Stanton opposite him, having sandwiched some of the older members between himself and the unwitting Quinn. He was encouraging them in sentimental reminiscence. “Autumn boulevards,” he was saying. “A leaf falls slowly to the sidewalk, right?”

“That’s what happens,” said an old gentleman sadly.

“How about when you first found that old portrait of Mummy in her wedding gown?” Assenting murmurs. “And the portrait is in an oval frame?” More of them. “Now, what about this: the summer house is boarded up. The luggage is out on the porch. The refreshment stand is closed for the winter. Already, the ocean just isn’t as blue—”

“Oh, gawd!” said one of the women morosely. Stanton seized the moment to begin singing softly and in the most cloying voice possible, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot—Come on, won’t you join me, fellows!” The others, staring and unwilling, began. Stanton stopped them priggishly. Quinn saw Janey a short distance away, watching and talking to no one. By this time, Stanton had gathered most of them in front of the piano. He was running back and forth with a purely imaginary choirmaster’s scuttle, adjusting shoulders and making people stand up straight. The others began to look on. “Come, ladies!” Stanton cried joyously. “You join us, too, won’t you?” Some of the women who had stood aside piled in behind. “James!” he called, letting his eye fall horribly on Quinn. “Do us the honors on the piano!”

“No, I—”

“James!” The contemptuous disappointment that Quinn had seen when he offered the box lunches at Mackinac began to spread on Stanton’s face.

“I may as well,” Quinn said, overpowered. Stanton bent to the storage box beside the bandstand. He stood up with a tuberous, corroded saxophone in his hands, the reed of which he inspected earnestly. He pulled up a folding chair next to the piano where Quinn was now seated and sat down. Quinn watched his useless fingering of the rigid keys. “Now! On three, you all begin to sing and Quinn and I begin to play!”

“Sing what!” any number of people asked at once, and angrily too. They were not happy with this.

“Cut it out! ‘Auld Lang Syne’!” Quinn experimented with the piano. He spread his fingers as he had seen others do and pressed to see if it would be a chord. It was not. Part of the choir looked over, brows furrowed. Quinn stood up halfway from the bench, laughed and sat down again. “All right now! Here we go! And a one and a two and a THREE.” He put the end of the saxophone in his mouth and honked it terrifically (Phnoo!) as the singing began, “Should Auld Ac—” and Quinn splashed his hands into the keys, looking up as the singing stopped on a miasma of unlikable groans and nasal flutings. Janey walked thin-lipped out the door. Someone said, “Most amusing” as the group broke up. Stanton said, “Go then!” and the party was soon back to normal. Quinn looked over his piano at Stanton looking over his saxophone at him. “Janey’s gone,” Quinn said. He got up.

“You notice every move she makes, don’t you, cowboy?”

“Each and every one.”

“Isn’t this a gang of spoilsports?”

“A gang.”

“Janey won’t like us for what we’ve done.”

“I don’t blame her,” Quinn said. “We go too far.”

“We have a history of that.”

“Do we ever.”

“I cherish that history, James. Cherish, do you hear me?”

“I don’t intend to let it continue. I may as well say that. I don’t intend to lapse again,” Quinn tried to say conclusively. Stanton laughed.

“Janey thinks that hope lies in your reforming me. I told her that that was a good one all right.”

“I don’t see why that has to be ridiculous.”

“It’s ridiculous because you’re childish.”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

Into Quinn’s head flashed a view of himself before an emergency meeting of the board. A lady from Flint who had formed a controlling coalition of minor stockholders was accusing him of childishness. “J’accuse!” she cried from under her net-covered birdscape hat. “J’accuse!” His father was among the figures at the meeting, fabulously corpulent, employing two chairs to keep his memorable behind off the boardroom floor. His refrain was “Flagrant neglect!” and it was sung counterpoint to “J’accuse!”

“J’accuse!”

“Flagrant neglect!”

“J’accuse!”

“Flagrant neglect!”

His father was wearing a flat West Indian planter’s hat and smoked oval cigarettes in a burnished pewter holder. He sat next to the lady from Flint, in Quinn’s mind, and tormented Quinn until he no longer cultivated the fantasy. Instead, he worried about his absence and about the moist wads of business letters that seemed to pertain to small problems but which may have been the insinuations of vast financial cancers. Only gradually did his mind return to the party which had become quieter and less ridiculous than he had planned. In fact, he and Stanton were the only ridiculous elements in it. All around, darkness enclosed the screen wall, though the yellow interior light was happy and reassuring. Moths and flying beetles beat against the screens and bounced away to beat again in an irregular guitarlike sound. Quinn looked over at Stanton who had rested his chin on the piano, a cigarette in his lips that stretched out perpendicular to the piano’s surface. One of his hands, held invisible, pecked out “Clair de Lune” falteringly. He sang a few lines of the song around the wobbling cigarette, without lifting his head from the piano or removing the cigarette; and now he smiled out at his imaginary audience, his great teeth locking the long white cigarette horizontally. The glow of its end was reflected on the surface of the piano until the ash fell and obscured it.

Quinn was touched from behind. He turned. It was Jack Olson more familiarly dressed in faded work clothes and loggers’ shoes. He confirmed his prediction about the fishing. Quinn put his drink down and looked around to see if he’d left anything. Olson checked again if Stanton were still coming and Quinn nodded and waved him over. Stanton advanced, placing one foot before the other. Quinn explained about the hatch and they agreed to change into waders and meet back of the main lodge.

Fifteen minutes later, Quinn and Olson stood waiting for Stanton. Even on high ground the air was full of duns settling into the trees to oxidize and mature. Olson was switching his rod back and forth and shaking his head; angry, probably, asking himself why he had gotten involved. Olson was a serious sportsman, with rigid and admirable ideas of sporting demeanor. He managed the club, Quinn knew, to put himself onto its thousands of private acres which he had poached all through his youth and continued, more conveniently, to poach as a man.

Quinn knew Olson’s study of problems natural to the taking of trout and bringing grouse to the gun had made him so knowing a woodsman that many of the members whose forebears had formed the association resented him. Quinn had more than once seen their reproachful glimpses of Olson’s old Heddon rod as they unloaded the two-hundred-dollar magic wands from fitted leather cases. They didn’t like the way he shot his brace of partridge out of their woods on his day off and they didn’t like the way he did it over a scruffy working Springer when all their professionally trained Llewellyns, Weimaraners, German Shorthairs, Labradors, Chesapeakes, Goldens and Wirehaired Pointing Griffins ran deer, flushed birds two miles from the gun or collapsed from overeating. During the annual meeting at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, there was always a discussion of whether or not to charge Olson dues. What sustained this annual joke was definitely not its humor; and there were members who weren’t trying to be funny and who regarded Olson as an impudent interloper.

None of this quite got back to Olson. The membership well knew that any hint of it and he’d be gone. No one could replace him. His years of poaching on club property gave him knowledge of it all. He knew where salt licks had to go, what crop had to grow in the open valleys and when it had to be knocked down to make winter-feed for the game birds; he knew how to keep the lake from filling with weeds and reverting to swamp; he knew when herons and mergansers were glutting themselves with trout fry and had to be discreetly bumped off with his twenty-two Hornet; he understood completely how to intimidate professional poachers from the nearby towns who, if they found one chink in his mysterious armor, would run like locusts over the tote roads at night, shining deer with aircraft landing lights and spearing trout on the weed beds. A nest of eagles had been in use for a decade under his management, in spite of glory runs by members of local varsity clubs. The main lodge was calked and varnished at generous intervals; the Bug House screened and shingled. The lake maintained a good head of native-bred trout and the woods sang with life. All of this the Centennial Club got rather cheaply, considering. What they didn’t like was Olson’s primacy in the blood sports. They wanted to be the heroes and Olson made them look like buffoons when accident forced comparison. In short, they wanted to kill as he killed without the hard-earned ritual that made it sane. For Olson, hunting and fishing were forms of husbandry because he guaranteed the life of the country himself. When the members came swarming out of the woods with their guns and high-bred animals and empty hands to find Olson, with his unspeakable Springer spaniel at his feet, turning a pair of effortlessly collected grouse over a small bed of hardwood coals, or when they found him with a creel full of insect-fed trout and had to conceal the seven-inch mud-colored hatchery trout that looked more like a cheap cigar than a fish and that they had nearly smashed the two-hundred-dollar fly rod getting; when all that happened, they wanted to call the annual meeting right then and there and tell this interloper to get off the property before they got a cop. Then they remembered he was the manager and it became more complicated without changing its impulse.

With no apologizing, Stanton said, “Lead me to fish.”

“Let’s go,” Olson said shortly. They started down. All three men had flashlights and played them about the path at their feet that sloped down to one end of the woodcock marsh. The duns now seemed to hang in the air like gauze and Quinn continually brushed them away from his face and hair, squinting downward to the small disc of light that skimmed the path in front of him. Stanton hung back until Olson was well in front and whispered to Quinn, “Is Herr Olson impatient with me?”

“I was impatient with you.”

“Mister Quinn, I never wear my Bug House clothes to the river.” Quinn noticed Stanton’s multi-pocket vest and brush pants in the penumbra of his flashlight. They went on down as the angle of the path’s decline began to flatten out and they could feel the coolness of the low ground rising about their legs. Quinn heard Stanton behind him swear to himself bitterly. In front of them now, the river rattled in its hard bed. “Vernor,” said Olson at the bank, “why don’t you wade up to the rollway pool from here. Stay to this shore and you will have hard gravel all the way. When you can’t hear the river running so hard you’ll know you’re at the pool.”

“I know where the pool is,” Stanton said.

“Okay. What fly have you got on?”

“Let me worry about that. Goodbye. I’ll meet you back here.” Stanton got in the river. The pines at the far side were completely black; the sky above lighter and the river below a sheen, also lighter. Stanton soon disappeared but they could hear him wading, a deeper note than the river made without him. Olson turned to Quinn. His green suit made everything but his face disappear. It seemed to float, rounder because his hair was thinning.

“Why don’t you drop down a ways and fish the off bank back to here,” he said. “You know the river.”

“Fine with me.”

“I’ll fish below the creek outlet.”

“I think you’re giving me the break,” Quinn said.

“Plenty of river for us all. Does Stanton know how to find that pool?”

“I think so.”

“He knows all the answers, doesn’t he?”

“You must make allowances,” Quinn said.

“Shit too,” said Olson. A sample of the talk that brought his name to the fore every year at the Book-Cadillac. “Anyway, catch a fish.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Quinn got in the river and waded to the far bank where he knew the current had deposited enough gravel to leave a safe walking ledge. It was never comfortable wading at night though; he could see the water around his waist shine so that he knew where it was. But the sight of bottom that was so reassuring when wading in fast water was lost. As he waded, he switched out line from the end of his rod, working it gradually into the air. The big wind-resistant night fly was hard to move until he had thirty feet of line up and then it began to carry and hiss as it passed overhead. He began to fish automatically, taking his exercise, thinking. He was just beginning to be able to fish as he wanted to. It would always be a week until he could relax and bear down and fish with exactitude. But the hatch now was passing already. Too bad. Olson would feel responsible. The nighthawks that crossed back and forth above him were disappearing with the duns. Otherwise the spring uproar was at a peak, the forest as raucous as a one-man band. The river here was narrow with stable banks that let the trees grow close. Above his head they left a corridor of stars obscuring with streamers of cloud. Quinn knew Stanton was at the foot of his pool swearing and flogging water, wanting at any cost to come up with the best catch. Stanton was a competitive fisherman; that is, an odious apostate. He tried to beat fish out of the river. When successful, he challenged you with them. Olson who, as a fisherman, was his opposite number, fished deferentially and awaited his occasions. There were none of the streamside brawls between man and fish that grace the covers of the sporting periodicals. Olson had his unique alchemy and fished for sport. He kept only the fish he needed.

The sky had grown heavy and Quinn stopped casting and reeled up. The air seemed dense and he stood where he was and waited in the steady rush of water. The first thunder came and a hot seam of lightning opened across the southwestern sky. He knew it was dangerous to be in the river and he turned to wade back. Grape-size drops of rain started to fall and take the sheen off the river. He was dry only a moment more and then he was soaked through to his underwear. His hair clung to his skull. Unnerving drops ran down from the base of his neck and the sky overhead kept fracturing with livid fissures of light. He had to be careful going downstream. The tendency to trip on obstructions was increased with the current behind. When he could see Olson silhouetted on the far bank, he crossed over. Olson gave him a hand and he clambered up. They sat down and watched the river for Stanton. Olson had no fish either. Both men watched the sky, hoping the lightning would stay to the south and that Stanton would know enough to hurry. They waited another twenty minutes until the storm was tossing the tops of the trees and lightning was forking skeins of white light in the sky, then flashing afterward, soundless, like the retina of a camera. Stanton appeared on the far side and began to wade carelessly across, not strategically, but walking across the stream until, fifteen feet from their bank, he went down. Olson skidded in and told Quinn to stay where he was. Quinn saw Stanton in the darkness, floundering and trying to get his feet under as Olson reached him. Their struggle made the water-reflected light shatter and curl away. They started again toward the bank, Stanton having maintained his fishing rod somehow; they went slowly and Quinn knew Stanton’s waders held a tremendous weight of water. When he got to the bank, Quinn took the rod from him. He could hear Stanton’s stertorous breathing. There was no hope of getting up the bank with the waders on and he had to shed them. Quinn helped him. Olson emptied the boots and flung them up on the bank and climbed out behind. “Give me some light, Jack,” Stanton gasped. Olson turned on his flashlight and Stanton pulled up a heavy brown trout from his creel. He held it under the jaws and tail so that the butter-colored belly hung in a curve and all of the black and orange spots showed. “Take that,” said Stanton with a wild and unexpected laugh. Olson was going.

“I’ll see you boys in the morning,” he said. He started up the path and soon was invisible to them.

“Is Olson miffed?” Stanton asked. “Or need I even ask?”

“We were damned nervous about the lightning.”

“He was patronizing me, old Quinn.”

“I don’t think so. We were both pleased to see you picked up such a good fish.”

“It is a good fish, isn’t it. I’m not sure I remember seeing you or Herr Olson with such a trout, for all the celebrated expertise.”

“That’s right, Vernor. There has never been a fisherman like you.”

They crossed the compound again. Quinn was determined to go back to his place, read and begin a program of avoiding Stanton. But there was still activity and the group had moved just outside the Bug House. Stanton and Quinn walked over. “Nice to see you,” said Scott. There was a clamor as Stanton strutted with his trout aloft like a bullfighter with the ears of a bull. They were all gathered around a barrel of oysters that Spengler had flown in from Delaware. There was a basket of thin-skinned, almost translucent limes. Quinn borrowed one of the irons and a plate, then pried open a half dozen of the chalky, small oysters, revealing interiors as smooth as the inside of a skull. He squeezed lime over all of them and, lifting them one by one, sipped off the juice and with the surreptitious aid of his forefinger slipped each oyster from its moorings and into his mouth. Then he began again with the iron. He joined Stanton, carrying six new oysters. Stanton was talking to Fortescue who was once president of the club. Quinn had a better chance to observe him than he had had during their discussion of horse at Ypres. Fortescue wore military twill pants and an English hacking jacket; he had the face of a crazy spaniel. Quinn moved in to listen. Stanton was telling Fortescue that Jack Olson was trying to take over the club and turn it into a private shooting preserve. Quinn said, “That’s not true.” Stanton went red.

“Don’t interfere, James. I won’t pay dues to have him patronize me. He’s done it before and now I want him drummed out of the corps. If Herr Olson wants to undertake contests, he has to take his chances.”

“Patronizing you is not the same as taking over the club. I don’t see why you equate them.”

“Give him a step and he’ll outflank you,” said Fortescue. “It could be a feeler.” Fortescue turned his right hand at an oblique angle to illustrate the flanking maneuver. He illustrated its effectiveness by holding the other hand supinely in place and allowing the right hand to flank it repeatedly, piling up advantages.

Quinn felt that something had to be said; but he knew he had sacrificed his position already by stringing along with the jokes that led up to this juncture. What made circumventing Stanton even trickier was the presence of some not quite visible plan which showed itself in Fortescue’s cooperation. Short of the pieties of woodland life to which the club subscribed so heartily, nothing pleased them more than internecine strife. Stanton knew how to manage this impulse. In the episode with Olson, Quinn saw the beginnings of something catastrophic.