The Sporting Club

2. Native Tendencies

THE next day, after a flash of hatred had kept him awake through half the night, he settled into a state of contempt for Stanton’s motives. He spent the morning expecting him to come down and had prepared a speech, sharply reprehending and corrective; but Stanton never came at all and Quinn’s anger burned away, leaving him, by noontime, relaxed again and comfortable. After making himself a small meal, he decided he would take a long walk and went around the back of his house down the path with its coarse entanglement of peripheral vegetation. He came to a place where the path split up in six directions, scattering high and low through the woods. He halted, undecided, knowing what country each of these paths ran to but unable to decide which to take. So he resorted to sinistrality, the art or practice of turning left.

The first left turn took him below the cottage to a piece of rich bottom land so round and low and free of heavy trees that it must recently have been water. The path skirted the lower end, bearing toward the river, and forked. Quinn turned left. This new path wandered about forty feet and swung up, intersecting the other branch; at the intersection, Quinn turned left and was back on the original path that soared up a brush slope, then glided down the other side into a long frog-roaring oval of standing water with its lid of pads and algae. Quinn went left around the perimeter and crossing its lower end sank halfway to his knees in black stinking muck that launched a cloud of mosquitoes up around his head. He slashed away at them until he regained the path on the other side and climbed a short distance, still striking at the mosquitoes so ineffectively that he could see four of them standing cloudily in his forevision, on one side of his nose. At the end of the last ascent, he was in a close but breezy deciduous woods, strolling on the firm ground wind-freed of insects, when he was confronted by an especially pointless path that went off through heavier going to the left. He hesitated, then took it, following no more than a rod when it opened on the end of a long, hotly sunlit paddock; at one end of it, Janey lay naked on her back in the smoky spring sun, her breathing slumbrous and regular. Quinn’s eyes turned slowly, searching the clearing for Stanton; then his gaze settled upon her again lying in total female repose of lax unresisting limbs. She was below the level of breeze and not even her hair moved. The canyon of light above her was flaked and spinning with motes and insects, the trees too, everything, was in motion but her unmoving form stationed in his path as final as a landmine.

Then Quinn saw how he must get out of there, tumescence and all. There would be no explaining should she awake and find him rooted to the spot like a thief-proof cemetery marker. The retreat alarmed him as much as anything, the fear of her looking up in time to see him scuttling bushward, his polychrome mental picture safely fixed. But he was back on the main path, trudging along toward his cottage again, the brief experiment with sinistrality finished.

For the next two hours, he tried to read Thackeray’s Pendennis, a volume from the sunbleached blue, uniform set that was the porch’s only decoration. Even the weevil tunnel that penetrated Chapter One sent his mind hurtling back to Janey’s bare-assed splendor.

Stanton arrived shortly after four and sat lazily on one of the porch chairs. Quinn upended the book in his lap, looked over and tried to remember his speech of reprehension and correction. Stanton was bored and fidgeting. Plainly, the last thing in his mind was Olson. So Quinn brought it up, asking him if he still planned to go through with his plan to have Olson removed. “That’s what I plan all right,” said Stanton.

“I don’t like it.”

“Don’t you?” said Stanton, bored. He stared at the screens. “Tell me this, what were you doing spying on Janey?”

“I wasn’t spying on Janey. You’ll have to make yourself clearer.”

“She was sunbathing in the woods. You found her. You must have been following.” Quinn’s heart pounded. He wondered if Stanton could see it. But how did Stanton know?

“All right. I stumbled on her out walking. And when I saw her, I turned around and went back the way I had come.”

“That’s not her version.”

“What’s her version?”

“She says you stood there about four hours with your mouth open.”

“I’m not even going to answer you.”

Stanton laughed then.

“I was kidding,” he said, “she told it to me just like you say. And now may I ask a question?”

“What?”

“Isn’t she some piece of ass? Don’t answer that or I’ll break your neck.” He looked away with lazy, bored, intelligent eyes. “I have been figuring on exacting a price for this transgression.”

This time Quinn watched the loading. The exquisite French pistols were to be used again. Stanton poured a charge and a half of ffg Peerless black powder into a graduated brass powder measure and transferred the charge by pouring it through a funnel into the muzzle of the first pistol. He did the same with the second as Quinn held the other upright in his hand and looked into the funnel as the silvery grains sank and vanished. Then Quinn held both pistols upright. Stanton unwrapped a small black cloth that had been twisted into a sack and held it out to Quinn. “Sure you wouldn’t rather use these?” In the sack was a nest of perfect, round lead balls so new they were only slightly darkened with oxidation and each with a single shiny spot like the eye of a pea where the sprue had been cut. These must have been from the stained-glass-window lead. Quinn declined. They loaded the wax balls once again, which were more than sufficient to arouse Quinn’s interest; the extra charge of powder promised the loser something.

Quinn did the counting as he rehearsed the two previous duels. He knew now that he had to turn, sight efficiently and quickly and without rushing, and squeeze off the shot. As he counted, he could feel the gun well fitted in his hand, hanging straight. His thumb and last three fingers were hard around the fluted grip and comfortable. His forefinger curved through the engraved and chased oval trigger guard, the slender, flat, polished trigger in the crevice of the first joint. Quinn knew the trigger was crisp and light, resisting then yielding like a breaking glass rod. All of it seemed, for once, understandable and controlled enough that at Ten! he turned, swung the long pistol up cleanly, the hammer cocked already to expose the sights, and fired. “Wowee!” cried Stanton. “I heard that one under my ear! Now, stay where you are. This is an affair of honor…” The shot rang metallically in the narrow gallery. Quinn fell. A sudden flood of dark red in his mind made him think he had been knocked unconscious. It was his throat this time. He was on the floor, choking there and trying to breathe. His wind seemed restricted to a channel the size of a pinpoint. It was only by violent fetching of his lungs that he enlarged this channel, millimeter by millimeter, until he could breathe again. He sat up, his face bathed in tears of pain, his legs splayed before him and, taking the slender pistol by the barrel in both hands, smashed it repeatedly on the floor until its beautiful, fluted stock and inlaid dragon locks were in pieces around him. He reached up and held his hands to his throat and saw Stanton, standing where he had been, serious, his pistol stuck in the top of his pants, hands plunged in his pockets, watching Quinn get up, look over at him again and mount the stairs. “I’m sorry, James,” he said with unhappiness in his voice. “But I really can’t let you pull that on the girl I love. How else could I make you understand?” Quinn didn’t answer; he was sure he could not have. He felt a little more certain now that Stanton was a madman with unnatural power over him.

He only went as far as his porch. The pain in his throat was settled in one spot and throbbed. His feelings were hurt enough that, in his way, he wanted no retaliation. Stanton’s unkindness seemed conclusive. He wished to put his mind off it and wondered if his voice was affected. He would say something. He picked up Pendennis and opened to the first page. He began to read aloud, “One fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis came over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a certain club in Pall Mall.” The speaking soothed the bruised tissue of his throat. He read thirty pages more aloud, conscious of the silence around him, and found himself engrossed in the novel’s progress. He read until dark.

When the sun fell, he went inside and put on a sweater. He turned on every light in every dark room. He made himself a whiskey and water, then gathered his letters from the office and answered each of them, clipping the answers to the originals and enclosing them in a manila envelope to return to Mary Beth for typing and sending. When he had done this, he had the illusion of a place in the outside world once more, a world untouched by the mania of boredom.

It turned cold during the night. In the morning he went out and was splitting kindling when Janey came. She wore a heavy blue sweater and narrowed her shoulders in the chill. She struck her hands together and shivered. Quinn said, “Is it that cold?”

“It is to me. I’m not chopping wood.” Quinn wondered what she wanted; she came from his house. He put up the axe.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’m fine. What about you? Vernor said you got … plugged.”

“That’s right.”

“How terrible that must be. Can we go in? I’m cold. Or would you mind?”

“I would mind.”

“But why?”

“I don’t want to inspire Vernor to some new feat of aggression.”

“Yes? Well, he’ll be along soon.”

“Say it isn’t so.”

She ignored his sarcasm.

“You smashed that French pistol—” she said.

“Sure did.”

“It was worth a lot, you know.”

“It was worth a lot to me smashed.”

“I suppose. But it was a pair, you know, hundreds of years old. Can I go in and you stay outside?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because to Vernor it will be indisputable evidence that I have just seduced you and have run out to clear my head.”

“You know, he’s not a lunatic.”

“How can you tell?”

She didn’t answer. Her pretty face became pretty in another way and she was now indifferent again and splendidly vacant. Only her energy betrayed the impression. “You surely get a two-bit spring in Michigan,” she said distantly, “not that I intend to see another.”

A moment later, Quinn blurted in unreasonable disconnection, “You realize, don’t you, that I know you’re not married?” But Stanton came before she could reply. He clowned up the path, improvising a little dance of pathos and hopeful apology. “The throat?”

“Sore.”

“Next time we’ll use milder loads and a little cheaper grade of pistol.”

“You will discover that that was the last time I’ll be going for the dueling.”

“You think so?” The apologetic tone was gone. “Well, okay. Number two in the batting box is the matter of Olson. How do you advise?” Now he was actually turning the knife.

“I advise you to drop it.”

“We’re beyond that now. Reality comes to bear. The turning of wheels. Fortescue came by my place. He says I hit on an ideal time to let Olson go. Summertime is strictly housekeeping around here. We can get a temporary until we find someone to do Olson’s job.”

“You won’t find anybody who will do it as well as he can.”

“Well, there again, we may have hit on a plan. You know how honest and thoroughgoing he is—” Quinn agreed. “Well, I hit on the idea of letting him suggest or even hire his successor. I mean, that strikes me as honorable.”

“Why don’t you try this for honor: why don’t you go discuss this plan with him before you make another move?”

“We’re talking about an employee, old pal.”

“I know who we’re talking about.”

“All right. I’ll do it. But let me pick the moment.”

When they were gone, Quinn started on an angry cross-country hike to the west. He had to have a neutral corner. Shortly after he left the old club boundaries, he was out of the woods, on newer acquisition, cleared ground. This was the first of the farms now owned by the Centennial Club and represented the steady encroachment upon the lands of people whose antecedents had been expelled from the original grounds. He walked in the deep weeds toward the house, with meadowlarks and the small June grasshoppers showering around him. He could see the barn now. In this country unpainted wood weathered almost black. The barn doors had collapsed forward and lay out flat from the entrance which from this distance was only an oblong hole of darkness; swallows poured from it incessantly like smoke. The front door was unlocked and he went in. Shattered glass in quantity and empty sky-filled window frames; nests were cemented into every crevice. The frequent entrances and exits of the birds were like the pluckings of a stretched rubber band. In the kitchen was an infantryman’s jacket with a long column of World War Two duty stripes of the European theater. He went outside. In the southwest corner was a wasp’s nest the size of a medicine ball; under its entrance five or six wasps hung as if in suspension. He wondered if the name of the former tenant would mean anything to him. When farmers hereabout went broke, the club served as a way station where, badly paid, they awaited jobs in Detroit. A long list of names came to Quinn’s mind. Half of the surnames were Olson and the bulk of these were related by marriage to the other half. Quinn wondered if Olson would end up in Detroit.

* * *

He woke up late the next morning, stiff from his hike; and because Stanton jumped into his head first off, he decided his holiday was in full decline. He slashed out from under the covers, got to his feet and, looking down at his white thin nude self, said, “I am Spider.” It would be hard to say what he meant exactly. He hunted in his suitcase, stirring its contents like a stew, for his bathing suit, and found it but could not find his supporter. So he put on his suit without it and then found it impossible to accustom his parts to any one side of the cold, hard, dividing crotch. He cried, “No starch I said!” and reheated some coffee. While drinking it, he sought his bath clogs. They were gone too. He breathed through his teeth. These bath clogs had been his friends. In the end, he was obliged to put on hiking shoes without socks. They seemed odd. He found a towel without any trouble and headed for the lake.

The lake was blue and still and empty save for a single, double-ended rowboat, apparently adrift. Three men stood out at the end of the canoe dock, looking at the empty boat. They turned to look at Quinn as he arrived in his bathing suit, ready for a swim. His great shoes were loud on the hollow dock. They were Fortescue, the military man, Spengler, the historian, and Scott, the sometime investigator of seventeenth-century topics. “Wind get the boat?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Spengler said, “Stanton.”

“Stanton—?”

“He’s skin-diving,” said Scott in his sneeping Ohio voice. “Troubling the trout, disturbing the redds.” He waited futilely for someone to ask him what redds were.

“What’s he after?”

“Treasure.” Suddenly, timorous Spengler burst out: “His jokes and his money and his—” There was a great moist gasp beneath their feet like the sighing of a dugong and then somber and hollow and unmistakably Stanton the voice came, “God’s wounds!” Silence again. Spengler was sleekit, timorous. Off the end of the dock, in the undisturbed water, and only barely visible against the dark bottom, a wobbly, undulant anthropoid form shot away and disappeared in the depths.

“What more do we require?” sneeped Scott to Spengler, turning then to Fortescue. He emphasized the significance of his question by letting his mouth drop open and shifting his jaw to one side. “What more?” He had short teeth and he wrinkled his nose.

“He’s pressing all right,” said Fortescue, principally to Quinn. Quinn looked up wordlessly at this collector of military miniatures.

“He’s not all bad,” Quinn said, stringing along.

“We know that,” Scott said correctively, cocking his jaw again as though now to receive a blow, squinting. “We also know that he wishes to destroy our club and that for which it stands.”

“What are you getting at?” Quinn wanted his swim.

“What we’re getting at,” Fortescue began firmly, then came to so helpless a halt that Spengler had to recover.

“The point is we want to fire Olson but we want to know if that is part of Stanton’s plan to destroy our club—”

“—and that for which it stands,” Scott added.

“Why don’t you really outfox him,” said Quinn, “and keep Olson on.”

“Don’t give us that,” said Scott’s averted face, “we’re on to it.” At that moment, Stanton appeared in the anchored boat, head thrown back, one arm crooked behind his head, a grotesquely muscled merman, the sun standing in the water around him like blossoms, glittering and collecting toward the shore where it cooled and disappeared.

“There he is again,” Spengler cried as though he’d wanted to grab a harpoon and jump into a whaleboat. His eyes were wide and his light hair swam nervously in the wind.

“The point is,” Scott thrust in suddenly, another of his academic surprise strategies, “that you seem to have a modicum of sense even if your confrere doesn’t. You’re the only possible mediator and we figure you’re essentially on our team.”

“Oh, no,” Quinn said, “that’s completely wrong. I’m afraid you misjudge me.” Fortescue laughed his sanguine nobleman’s war laugh.

“We’ve been outflanked,” he said.

“Somewhat,” Quinn said, “in any case.”

“You’re playing it real wrong,” Spengler insisted.

“Oh, no,” Quinn said in surprise. “You’ve got it all mixed up again. I’m not playing anything. I’m on vacation.”

“So are we!” enthused Fortescue, playing the good old sport. But in his eyes, so much like those of an unsuccessful spaniel, was something furtive. From the boat came the sound of Stanton imitating an air-raid siren. They all looked over. What appeared to be the head of an enormous pink baby was rising over the gunwale — Stanton’s naked buttocks. Each of them, for his own reasons, was stunned by this gratuity. Quinn, sharply resisting his first impulse, admired Stanton’s expertise in showing only his ass from such a lowslung craft. Nothing could have been more singular than the marionette-like rising of this fleshy dome from the rocking stage of the boat. But Quinn’s memory was taking over.

“Jeepers Christmas,” Spengler said. The others were talking and going off; Quinn didn’t hear them. History had crowded his skull that instant and he could have cried. He sat down and dangled now shoeless feet in the chill water and watched trout fry dart through the flat green weed as Stanton coursed toward him on sharp strokes of the oars, his cathedral back making regular hydraulic movements forward and back. Presently, he was beside the dock, the double-ender still as though it had never moved.

“What are you doing?” Quinn had collected himself.

“Seeking treasure.”

“You horrified them.”

“Child’s play. Get in. I found a wreck. Help me raise it and we split the take.” Quinn climbed aboard and sat in one end. The boat settled unevenly; Stanton was in the middle seat. As he began to row toward the middle of the lake, Quinn felt the boat lift slightly with each stroke. A wake of bubbles poured from the stem and Quinn imagined he was an officer in a blue tricorn, a brass telescope clapped shut in his lap, rowed to a defeated vessel by a piratic mate; then distant cannon reports over a steamy green sea. Stanton swung the boat around a floating Clorox bottle, tethered at its handle by an anchor line. He uncoiled a rope from under the seat and tied one end to the bow cleat, then without putting on the aqualung or even the mask, dove over the side with one end of the rope into the clear water that allowed his progress to be followed into a bluish, bubbled distance where he shrank from sight. He was gone a full minute before he rocketed into view and blew free of the surface. “The bends!” He rolled over the side. He sat down, took a hold of the rope and pulled it taut. Quinn got his hands on it too and they began to haul. At first, the boat heaved over but Quinn moved to the high side and they hauled more slowly until gradually Quinn began to feel something give and then let go altogether as they pulled, becoming only weight to be raised; they lifted hand over hand, no more than thirty feet of hard finished rope when Stanton said it was enough and took two turns around the oar lock. “Move carefully now and have a look.”

Quinn leaned over the side and saw, about eight feet below them, suspended in the clear and dimensionless water, a sleigh, a single-horse cutter, as delicate as a scroll, hanging by the thin rope tied between the high curling runners. Stanton said that he had had to leave the horse behind, the skeleton that is, of a small horse, all four legs fallen directly beneath and pointing behind, the skull stretched forward like an arrowhead, as though the horse had been drawing the sleigh. They towed the sleigh behind and the rope rubbed and ground upon the stern with unseen motions. When they got to shore, they beached the rowboat, waded out, untied the sleigh and, carrying it between them, brought it ashore, upright and streaming with water, to set it high in the sunlight and on the grass. It was perfect. It might have been put to use. Then Stanton sat upon its narrow seat and it slung a little with his weight. Quinn carefully got on beside him.

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

“How do you mean?”

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

“By who?”

“By its crew.”

“What will you do with this?”

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

“I won’t be there at all.”

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

“Do the right thing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No—”

“But I have it somewhere.”

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

“Innocent pleasures.”

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

“Not anything bad for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“—We’d been jailed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened when you went to see Olson?”

“There was little fraternity or egality.”

“Okay—”

“Rather, mistreatment.”

“I’m going back.”

“Don’t! No fair—”

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

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

“All right, I don’t have to—”

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

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

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

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

“Listen,” Quinn started.

“Christian little ceremony?”

“Vernor—”

“Marriage?”

“Vernor—”

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

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

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

“What’s … evening about it?”

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

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

“Jack, you’re stewed, aren’t you?”

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

“Jack—”

“Put them up!”

“Jack—”

“Put them!”

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

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

“Get up, Jack.”

“I took a spill.”

“I saw you did.”

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

“No reason.” Quinn was extremely uncomfortable.

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

“Well, yes, indirectly, he was.”

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

* * *

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

“God, I don’t know. Away.”

“Where to?”

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

“Where will you go?”

She sat on the bag. “I don’t know.”

“What about Vernor?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

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

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

* * *

Janey removed the rubber band from the pack of photographs. She went through three or four and buried them in the deck before handing one to Quinn. It was of a middle-aged man standing as though on a wire between a small, defensive palmetto and an artesian well. “That is Daddy when he was in the mineral springs business. That well looks harmless enough but it smelled to high heaven. The water was used to manufacture a nutritious sodapop that induced vomiting every time. It was also used to make taffy and that wasn’t so bad, although it changed the flavors a little. The cherry taffy tasted like bloodwurst. The lemon taffy tasted like chicken liver. Anyway, the mineral springs business? — it failed. Luckily, Daddy has a pension from the Civil Service and he has built a small house on the property. It is tremendously hot there and the only shade comes from that palmetto you see and there is the smell. There is that. Whenever I visit, the smell gets into my clothes and even my skin. But they use it for everything, cooking and washing included.” She handed him another photo. It was of herself, younger, sitting in a crowd of seated people, young men all around her. The picture showed her the single still spot in a crowd of enthusiasts rising from, or falling back onto, bleachers. She was seated, fingers crisscrossed around the stems of wired carnations, abstracted. “Cotton Bowl, 1960.” The next picture was a single shot of the palmetto followed by one of the artesian well, which had new poignancy for Quinn. Then the mother (Quinn by this time feeling privileged), as faceless as one of the thousands of mid-American roadside picnickers, stout, the backs of her arms full and long as thighs. Mother is standing before the Truman Memorial Library in Independence, Missouri, where she is fresh from failing to run into the former President browsing in the stacks. The next picture, snatched by Quinn, is of Janey sunbathing in a two-piece bathing suit in front of a monster vehicle that turns out to be a dune buggy. She is a goddess. Quinn’s head shudders with recollection of his afternoon of sinistrality. In the background of the picture is the Gulf which, as it is out of focus, is overexposed in discs of whiteness; among them stand men in white crescents of overexposed foam: this is the S.M.U. outing on Padre Island, near Corpus Christi. The photographer is an All-Conference single-wing halfback. He can do poor imitations of Ferlin Husky and Johnny Cash but cannot play a musical instrument. Then Janey hands Quinn a picture probably taken from a rooftop; looking down, it shows the artesian well, center, and the palmetto, lower left; between the two is an indistinct expanse of naked, sandy soil; Quinn believes he sees the shadow of the photographer appended to the long triangle of the roof’s shadow. Is it Janey? He doesn’t ask.

Janey stopped selecting pictures from the pack and Quinn, with plenty to think about, didn’t request another. But he did ask if he could see more later and she answered that she carried a load of stuff with her in these little cases, everything from coral jewelry she bought in Puerto Rico to more pictures to lavaliers to catalogues of the Prado, the Pitti and the Uffizi galleries; and that he was welcome to look through it all; there was nothing she liked better than going through other people’s belongings; nor Quinn, who intended in his gratitude to tell something about Stanton that would be admirable. He had intended so the minute he saw her today, but couldn’t; not that there wasn’t anything to tell, or that it wouldn’t be understood. He didn’t want to.

* * *

He went up to the club to call the office. He had neglected to check in and knew things would have piled up by now. The telephone was in the storage closet. On the shelf beside the phone there was a stack of old Pere Marquette directories which had grown in twenty years since the Second World War from nine to seventeen pages; and from five pages of Olsons to eleven. There was a chest of narrow, sectioned drawers, containing the flies that Jack Olson tied during the winter. The drawers were labeled with tape. Quinn pulled open the drawers and smelled the camphor. Inside each square section the flies were clustered new and perfect and infinitely more consequential-looking than the gross castings and fittings and flanges Quinn’s factory produced. Next to the phone was a pencil sharpener with a rotating ring perforated with various-sized pencil holes, only one of which showed a graphite stain; on the floor below was a cone of fine shavings that Quinn for some reason wanted to put a match to and up would go flies, telephone directories, Centennial Club and Quinn of Quinn Industries. “Mary Beth?”

“Boss man!”

“Give me the news.”

“I’ve got you booked solid as of July one.”

“What’s happening July one?”

“You’re coming back…”

“How do you know?”

“Boss man!”

Business had windrowed nastily. Every sale or renewal marked a new all-time high. The factory picnic was coming up in two weeks, which affair marked the cycle of Quinn’s business life: he had begun it by directing and producing the factory picnic of the year before. Mary Beth had taken the matter of customer gifts into her own hands and had subscribed to a service, run by canny New England sharpers, which shipped live lobsters at five times their real value in containers shaped like tricorn hats and decorated with facsimile signatures of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

“I’ll never come back,” said Quinn, “you can’t make me.” He thought of the containers opened, dying lobsters crawling over his calling card.

Mary Beth had more surprises: he was now a charter subscriber to the Hamtramck Polish war memorial; he had bought twenty tickets to the Fourth of July Arc Welders’ Ball; he had agreed to speak before the Dexter Jaycees; he had become a member of the Society of Production Consultants, whatever that was; his tax lawyer had made him chairman of the board instead of president, and so on. Quinn’s interest flagged with these permutations and he grew wan. Mary Beth sensed his lassitude. She became assertive and seemed to swagger. Quinn was glad that they were separated by hundreds of miles of insulated wire. If he were in the office, she would make one of her outlandish bids for sex by hitching around the place in a way that aroused Quinn’s scientific interest rather than his ardor.

Mary Beth was a Canadian and affected rugged Windsor tweeds that seemed to carry the stench of the highlands in them. She had pink cheeks too and sandy hair, genetically wind-tossed. Sometimes she brought Quinn presents from Ontario, cases of smuggled Moulson’s ale or Cincinnati Cream or a small wheel of Black Diamond cheddar with a rind that cut away as cleanly as apple peel. This was a real service, unlike her secretarial work; and when Quinn saw the fine gold upright bottles of ale in his refrigerator next to the cloth-wrapped wheel of cheddar, he sometimes vowed to spread-eagle Mary Beth in the office and prong her devoutedly. But when he considered how he would get on with the day’s work afterward, he reneged; because the vision of Mary Beth, rumpled and wearing a bonny, sated, pioneer grin was too bright on his mind. So he kept taking the cheese, the ale and, one fall, an oppressive, oily Indian sweater, thick and environmental; and Mary Beth remained doughty, vigorous, inefficient. She wrote “cheque” for “check” like an incorrigibly mandarin stylist and said “hoose,” “roond” and “broon” for “house,” “round” and “brown.” Eventually, when she was sure that Quinn would be only considerate, she began to entertain callers, salesmen, accountants, file clerks; at first a great many, most of them in blue serge suits, the kind of shoes issued for parade dress in the armed services, and discreet crew cuts of indeterminate color. Then a steady repeating few took Mary Beth out for long lunch hours from which she returned with the sated look Quinn had been obliged once to visualize for himself. Things got quiet and Quinn found he could go to his office and get his work done, though he sometimes met strangers in the hall or found condoms hovering in the toilet. He learned at last to live with it all.

Quinn left Mary Beth on the phone today with instructions to make a priority list of things he had to do and send it with appropriate files. He issued this directive precisely but with a sense of fighting back boredom. “Count on me,” Mary Beth told him.

* * *

He had given Olson time to sober up. He walked to the small house to learn what had come of Stanton’s visit. He cautioned himself against giving anything away if Stanton had said nothing. Olson’s pride was a touchy and complicated matter. When he got there, he found the gate ajar and a cat slumbering in the yard and the Springer spaniel nowhere in sight. Then from the interior of the porch a man materialized in a white T-shirt, its right sleeve rolled around a pack of Lucky Strikes whose red spot showed as though staring. The man was heavy, maybe thirty-five.

“Is Jack in?”

“Jack is retired.” The man came down the steps linking his fingers behind his head and thus revealing a bevel of flaccid belly.

“Retired? To where?”

“He mentioned Florida.”

“Florida—”

“That’s right.”

“What’d he want to go to Florida for?”

“He heard about an opening for an alligator wrestler.”

“What?”

“The man always wins. The alligator doesn’t know they’re wrestling. He allows himself to be tied in knots.”

“I’m not interested in alligator wrestling as such. I—”

“All I can tell you is that he looked like he could wrestle alligators when he left. He was that mad.”

“But you say Florida—”

“Oh, I don’t know for sure. I’m taking a wild guess. I don’t see anything wrong with Florida. Hot in the summer they say.”

“Who are you?”

“What do you mean?” He was suspicious.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m the new manager. My name is Earl Olive.”

“Who hired you?”

“Jack Olson!”

Quinn stopped to take this in, swallowing it like a horse pill.

“What did you do before this?” Quinn asked.

“What do you want to know for?” The man leaned on the fence. His black hair was swept back on both sides and a few heavy strands fell down below his ears. The stretched T-shirt formed clean and square around the Luckies and the red spot now looked like a wound under the cloth. “Let me put it this way, I was in the live bait business.”

“Like what kind of live bait?” Quinn asked; something quite intense had fallen over the conversation.

“Worms.”

Quinn was conscious of the sound of the trees around them breathing in the wind.

“Worms? How did you get the worms?”

“Like everybody else,” said the man after a pause. “I got the worms like everybody else. Okay?”

“I want something more specific than that.”

“Look, you get a old crank telephone and cut off the phone part so all you got left is the box and crank. Then there is two wires and onto each one you hook a rod. Okay, you go out in a field and put the rods into the ground, right? And give the crank a turn, am I right? Then what happens?”

“Worms…”

“Worms pop out of the ground, big nightcrawlers, wrigglers, red worms, the whole bit. Now do you believe I was in the bait racket?”

“I never said I didn’t believe … you.”

“Listen to me: here is how you work the grasshoppers. First, build you a frame onto the front of an old car. Next, make you a cheesecloth net for the frame which is longer on the bottom than on the top. Then drive across a field with the whole apparatus at top speed. Do you follow? It can get dangerous. Check the net ever couple passes, are you with me? Sometimes there is a ton of hoppers. Now I see you are looking for the dangerous part: oncet I was collecting hoppers when the car lit into a enormous chuck hole and I pitched over the hood and buried myself in about four feet of them slimy hoppers. If I had of been knocked unconscious I would have smothered under them bugs. As it was, it near spoilt the live bait business for my part. — Now do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“See how it was dangerous and could of kilt me?”

“You bet I do, Earl.”

“I handled frogs and frog harness, crickets, June bugs and hellgrammites. I was in the live bait business hand and foot. I had to cater to every live bait need. One fella would fish for bass with nothing but live baby mice. I had to have them. Another fella made a paste out of fireflies which he used to fish for brook trout. I had to have fireflies.” He looked to Quinn as though for a long expected question.

Quinn didn’t know what it might be but asked, uncertainly, “Where was this?”

“Boy you are full of queshtons. Okay, this was a few mile north of Ishpeming on the Yellow Dog river.”

“Was that … a good location?”

“A bad location.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“What was wrong with it? Nobody knew where I was at. How was they to know where I was at?”

“I don’t know; but these people that wanted all these different baits…”

“Oh, God! They was steady customers! That ain’t a living!” Quinn, buffaloed, felt compelled to say he was sorry. Earl Olive took it in good grace.

“I was sorry too. I had a ton of live bait I couldn’t sell and I had to fish it all myself. I fished the Yellow Dog, the Escanaba, the Ontanagon, the Two Heart, come down here and fished the Pigeon, the Black, the Au Train, the Jordan and the Pere Marquette where, guess who I met?”

Cautiously, “Who?”

“Jack Olson! I was fished out. I had fished bugs, frogs, hellgrammites, mice and worms. I hit the Jordan in the middle of the Caddis hatch and must have killed every trout in the river. I ran into your Jack Olson up to the tavern in Manton and told him all about it. I thought he fit to kill me. He said he hated any a man who would fish a trout with bait. I said it was all meat to me and he walked out the tavern. Next time I seen him was last night in the same tavern and he asked me did I want this job. Well, I had got so I couldn’t look at a trout nor a piece of live bait; so I told him God damn right I wanted the job. So, then!” He went suddenly bashful. “Here I am!”

* * *

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

“You’re welcome.”

“Yuh, okay.”

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

“And I do.”

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

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

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

“Right. Give me a ridiculous picture.”

She handed him Stanton’s Harvard graduation picture.

“Now you think of one,” she said.

“A sad picture.”

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

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

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

“What for?”

“Just for drill, he said.”

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

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

“Are these people still alive?”

“Pretty much.”

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

“I am too.”

“Look, will you excuse me?”

“Of course.” Murray didn’t hear. He was chasing Janet, a great-thighed girl in pedal pushers. She ran enticingly from Murray who pursued, holding both hands in the air, one retaining the cigarette, the other the tortoiseshell glasses. Janet wasn’t making cases. And Quinn suspicioned Murray thought of orthodox domestic arrangements, sensibly made. It happened that Janet, Fortescue’s sole heir, was a highly successful engineer. Quinn entertained himself with visions of the arrangement, Murray advancing, Janet retreating; Janet advancing, Murray retreating; and before his eyes they did so, cutting and swerving in the dark lake sand, the still lake behind in the hot sun, throwing its single, wobbling flash of light. The golden lummox on the lifeguard tower gazed pitiless and hieratic upon the crescent of sunbathers with their towels and oils and paperback books. Across the lake, in deep bays of shadow, a canoe floated without movement. A fisherman cast peacefully with a rod that was a shiny filament at that distance. As Quinn walked along, the mothers rose up from towels, oiled and gleaming like seals, and glared into the sky before letting down again. Quinn browsed, hands behind, checking out the younger women, imagining giving them the old one-two; remembered newspaper accounts of infidelity among young marrieds and love rackets in the suburbs; why not shocking sex bash at exclusive trout club? One young woman lay before him, between him and the Teuton; she was even more golden than the latter with long brown legs and well-shaped feet; she lay upon her stomach, her face turned to one side, apparently asleep; the opening of her pretty mouth in that incandescently sunlit face seemed to Quinn the blackest stripe of pure void; and he stared at her until it made her sit up, return his look with hot distraction, and pour sun lotion down her cleavage; the oil emerged from under the bra of the bathing suit and sought her navel in slim, golden progress. Beside her was the child, an imperious infant who beat the sand with the flat of a little shovel and said, “Garbo! Garbo!” Quinn was embarrassed by her gaze. He snapped his fingers, consulted his watch, started off purposefully and fell. He pushed his hands through the sand as though sampling its warmth, hummed as if satisfied and, with beating face, looked over at the mother. Now she looked straight into him. The sun upon her and upon the infant ignited them savagely, and the lifeguard never moved. The woman’s eyes followed him, hung on him, as he got to his feet. He stood a moment, then went off. When he looked back, mother and child were as still as graven images and, like the lifeguard, didn’t move. Quinn made his way, his retreat, up the path, glancing back at the woman, the others too on the dark sand or wading in the lake’s sunlit, transparent margin.

* * *

Quinn thought: The hell with these unreckonable quantities. I’m a businessman. Besides, the lake was for women and children. If you didn’t want to shoot, drink or fish you were to have joined the Y. He went to the lodge, called the factory and talked to his manager. The manager assured him that things weren’t completely out of control but that they were tough, that’s all, tough. Material shortages were slowing production. This was Quinn’s clue. Material shortages in this case were always unnecessary, and Quinn saw that this trip was a mistake. This lapse was going to mean an inexcusable loss of orders. He saw now that the resonance and responsiveness of the company to his ministrations was matched by a mirror-image potential for decline. He couldn’t set it up and let it run as he had planned. It was like a bicycle and when he stopped pedaling, it stopped.

In his mind’s eye, a character that looked like Blind Pew was nailing up a sign that read BANKRUPT. By turns, Quinn holds his hammer for him, the sign, the nails, grows voluble and offers to buy him a drink.

* * *

Stanton was wearing the linen shorts of the first day.

“Been practicing in the gallery?” Quinn asked.

“Count on it. Air heavy with eventualities. Gin and tonic?”

“Just tonic would be fine. Hello, Janey.”

“Hello.”

“How are you…”

“She’s fine. Why no gin? Here.” He gave him the drink.

“It spoils the essential purity of the tonic.”

“That so.”

The porch was made like the room of a ship. The screened panels were held in place by half-round strips and brass screws; the strips had been imprecisely painted and the pores of the screen were filled for an uneven inch or so around their perimeters. Overhead, narrow varnished rafters divided the roof into regular strips of coarser wood. And above the screen were rolled canvas awnings. Quinn sat in one Hong Kong wicker chair, Janey in another; her arm hung in repose; her forefinger rested on the floor. Stanton strode on reliable, earth-gripper feet with their high tan arches and said, “Do you know, I didn’t fire Olson?” Quinn sensed a prepared question and tried to dodge it.

“What’s the new fellow’s name?”

“Earl something or something Earl. I forget. But I didn’t fire Olson and I didn’t hire what’s his name.”

“I talked to this guy actually. He used to be in the bait business—”

“I want to set the record straight about Olson—”

“—live bait.”

“The older members got hot around the collar and figured Olson had to go. And I didn’t like the sight of those two little deer. That also is for the record.”

“Don’t be coy. You made a move that was just extra stupid. Your speech the night we fished — it finished Olson.”

“James, you seem to have a backlog of bad feeling going for you—”

“You played up to the kind of stupidity we always hated, which is unedifying enough. But then this cutesie stuff after—” Stanton had to cut in.

“Be firm with me, father, I have sinned. My last confession was invalid.”

The new manager was at the door.

“We’re talking about you. What’s your name?”

“Earl Olive.” Olive came in and looked the place over like a demolitionist. He was wearing flamboyant cowboy clothes. “Just a couple questions,” he said, eyes sweeping over and around everything, including Janey, but seeing nothing to boost, settling on Stanton. “What do you know about these two deer?”

“Both dead.”

“Notice anything unusual?”

“Only you, Earl.”

“Have any clues? Or suspicions?” Earl pushed his Stetson back on his head with one finger under its frontmost edge.

“Yeah,” said Stanton, “Jack Olson or friends of Jack Olson.”

“He has an alibi,” said Olive.

“In the nature of what?”

“In the nature of drunk as a skunk,” Olive said. Quinn saw that this conversation was pleasant to Stanton in its contentiousness. “You know, Earl,” Stanton said, “Jack Olson was a real manager. He was a champ in his own way. Now around here the word is that you’re no more than a janitor.”

“You don’t say.”

“Well, don’t you have any feelings about that?”

“My only feelings is that these folks’t say I’m no more than a janitor might find themselves settling for a sight worse than that.” This was nearly the last thing he said. He was having a barbecue to celebrate his new job and had to be off. A few minutes after he left, Quinn was wondering about this barbecue and so were Stanton and Janey.

* * *

In the beginning, they watched from a distance. Earl Olive had a washtub full of coals on a metal stand and he stood before it in a huge white puff of a chef’s hat, turning meat. His friends sat on the stoop of his porch or swigged quart bottles of beer with their girl friends. One tanned and heavily lined man in an azure shirt that let you see through to his sleeveless undershirt and whose hair was as black as cinders and curled up into a sculptural pompadour, trapped a fat lady between a tree and his desperately pumping pelvis while Earl Olive, without watching him, yelled, “What the hell, Lucy? What the hell?” In front of the low fence that Olson had made were the cars and a few Harley-Davidson motorcycles with automobile-size tires, enormous saddles shaped like sections of a pie and more chrome fixtures than a motel bathroom. Earl Olive forked a piece of the cooking meat and held it out toward the trees, what looked like just trees, and said, “You wont some? Come own, you hungry? Say so and Earl Olive will feed you.” Beyond the party and before the trees, others could be discriminated in the shadows. This group included Fortescue, Krauss, Edith Terrell, Jensen, Van Duzen, Murdock, Spengler, Laidlaw and Scott. This was a different group from Earl Olive’s; for one thing, it was quieter and showed more solidarity; and they stood in dense, composite order, reminding Quinn of opening a can of sardines and finding, from left to right, a row of heads, a row of triangles, a row of diamonds, and a row of tails: unity. In contradistinction, Earl Olive’s group was disunited. Some were drinking, some talking, some trying to breed. Also, they were quite loud while the club group was very quiet. And they moved more; it was pointed out, for example, that at least one chap, the one in the see-through shirt, had a woman against a tree and was making a recognizably filthy motion against her. In fact, this same fellow yelled to Earl Olive that he was going to “do” her. The others in Earl’s group made a good deal of inchoate noise and Earl himself occasionally spoke directly to the club group, offering food, beer, or asking rhetorical questions. On the other hand, the group from the club said not one thing.

Earl Olive’s group seemed to have fun. The Centennial Club seemed to have none at all. Between the two there was something like a magnetic field. Two horseshoes faced each other and in between were many wavy lines. Perhaps it wasn’t a magnetic field between the two groups. But there was a strong sensation of these wavy lines.

Then Fortescue stepped forward, forthright in his twills, and called, “Earl?” Quinn wondered who would get Fortescue’s tin soldiers when he died.

“Howdy.”

“What about keeping the noise down?”

“Let’s keep the noise down!”

“And, oh, Earl—”

“Can I help you?”

“This other business—” He indicated the couple at the trees. “We’ve got ladies here.” Fortescue turned an open hand behind him to draw attention to the club’s womenfolk, lined behind Fortesque like a cabinet of fire-axes in an institutional boiler room. The man in the see-through shirt stepped up his activity and was now a veritable dervish at the tree.

“Bobby, best cut it out. You’re making these folks horny.”

“What you got’s better,” the man called, gone quite mad in his threshing.

“Earl!” Fortescue’s reproach was no longer a secret.

“Caint stop, Earl! Caint stop!”

“Lucy!” Earl Olive called, pointing with a meat fork. “Can’t you make an escape?” He turned to Fortescue’s group. “He has been happy cuffin it for some many years we had no idea this could happen—” Scott took the lead.

“All right, kids,” he said to the club group. “This is a little rank. Desmond? Edith? Let’s go. Maureen, Janet? A little rank. Let’s go, kids. I’ll handle this.”

“Winkin?” said Earl Olive. “Blinkin, let’s go. Nod, are you coming?”

“I will want to talk to you,” said Fortescue.

“You are talking to me,” Olive said complacently.

Then Charles Murray, the Cincinnati lawyer, disengaged himself from the retreat and came back to the ring, and his short rapid stride seemed determined. He stepped before Earl Olive and, with his feet close together, rose slightly on his toes, at the same time holding up the folded tortoise-shell glasses as though they were a writing instrument and he were going to make a single, clear mark on a sheet of paper. “You,” he said, “shall feel the full weight of my displeasure. I will remember this.” Earl Olive looked at him, delighted.

“Okay, Heidi,” he said, “you do that.” Quinn tried to comprehend how it was that Charles Murray went away; but it wasn’t quite like anything he had ever seen before. Without turning from Earl Olive, all of him seemed to rise in a low rearward arc, rising on his toes, retreating hands rising too as though they would sustain him in some low batward menace of going off. He was only walking away.

“Gee,” said Janey, “that looks bad.”

* * *

At his rare best, Stanton had the uncomplicated goodness of those who can talk to strangers. One knew that at his worst he was a joker and, to that extent, demonic. But at his best he had a simplicity that was not Quinn’s and that Quinn envied, an ability to walk into the middle that Quinn, the calculator, lacked.

So Stanton led and Quinn followed with Janey on his arm. Stanton introduced himself all around, smoothly overriding country reticences, and then introduced Quinn and Janey to each of them flawlessly. He began, after that, to quip with Earl Olive as though from acquaintanceship immemorial.

“Where’s my dinner, Earl?”

“Shit.”

“What you done with my God damn dinner?”

“Sheeyit.” Earl looked over his shoulder from the fire. “Bobby, these folks wont some fuckin beer.” Bobby brought three cold Pabst Blue Ribbon beers.

“Thank you,” said Janey in a high voice. Now the others approached the fire warily. One girl stared at the side of Quinn’s face until he looked over; and her smile which had been halfway up went all the way up. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Quinn swigged back half his Pabst Blue Ribbon. He hadn’t been introduced to this girl. Now Earl was smiling at him.

“Good, huh?”

“You bet,” said Quinn, smacking his lips just like in the advertisement: Say! That’s good! And! It doesn’t fill me up!

“Gimme a sip,” said the girl, her yummies making rather a good thing of her short-sleeved pink sweater. Quinn gave her the can. She tilted it to her mouth a moment and handed it back. It was empty.

“All kidding aside,” Stanton was saying, “we already ate, Earl. You just go on and make pigs of yourselves. We don’t mind.” Earl’s arms fell to his sides, his chin to his chest; he commenced to jiggle all over.

“You tickle me,” he managed, “I swear you do!”

* * *

“Jim,” Quinn answered. “Jim Quinn. What’s yours?”

“Lu.”

“Hi, Lu.”

“Hi.”

Lu had a short little skirt of aniline blue that exposed the dimply legs. She wore low, fur-lined après-ski boots that Quinn ignored: the ski shops introduced a misunderstood element into the North.

The sun going off took the color out of Earl Olive’s fire and it burned pale as frost under the skewered meat. Earl had one hand plunged far into his pocket while the other delicately rotated the skewer. Stanton told him the only way he’d eat anything he cooked was if it was drowned in ketchup and if he could chase it with a quick fifth of Pepto-Bismol so it wouldn’t repeat on him. Earl Olive heaved all over and said my God you tickle me, oh Jesus.

“So what is it you do anyway?” Lu asked.

“I make parts for cars.”

“Like what kind of parts for cars.”

“Triangular ones with holes in them.”

“Yeah? Wow. Is it hard?”

“Not at the moment.”

“You guys sure,” Earl called, “that you don’t want any meat?”

“Positive.”

Janey came up. “Would you get me a beer?” she whispered. “Vernor drank mine.”

“What? Oh, sure. Here—” Quinn went to an open cardboard box and fished out two more Pabst Blue Ribbons.

Bobby stepped over, a beer in his hand curled up close to his chest. “Lemme crack them bastards for you.” He had an opener on a long silvery cable attached to one of his belt loops. He opened the two beers and gave them to Quinn. Quinn thanked him and handed one to Janey.

“Thank you,” she whispered, made one slice of her eyes toward Lu and rejoined Stanton. Quinn thought: what does she see? What does Janey see?

Meanwhile, Bobby and the fat girl got on the Harley-Davidson and began driving through trees and brush. Lu explained that this was called “gardening,” tearing up the earth, a sport developed during the war by teenagers who specialized in the highspeed wiping out of victory gardens by the skillful use of the power slide. Quinn nodded, listening first to her and then to the snarl of the motorcycle working its way up and down the hill through the ferns herbivorously, making purposeful back-and-forth casts so that when it wasn’t on top of the hill and quite dark against the sky, it was below and all that was visible were the twin ovals of flame at its tailpipes. Still, above the rude exhaust came the fat girl’s wild, loony cackle. Stanton came over. “How do you like that?” he asked. The motorcycle was now swiveling and skidding up the hill toward them.

“I guess I don’t.”

“What! Where is your sense of history? The bumpkin is motorized. It could have been exactly the same in the beloved Middle Ages where everything begins, dueling, everything. Look: you still have the peasant in his leather jerkin. Only now he’s on a motorcycle instead of his wife’s ass—” Janey looked up at him and he didn’t return her glance.

“Hey!” said Lu. “There’s ladies present!” She smiled at Janey and Janey smiled back with delicate strain. Quinn opened another beer.

“Piggy,” said Stanton, “I’ve watched you.”

“I’ve watched you,” Quinn said, “through an unrewarding month.”

“Come own,” said Earl, joining them. “Eat something!”

“I couldn’t possibly, Earl,” Stanton said. Earl had a substantial gobbet on the end of his cooking fork. He looked upon Stanton with devotion. “I have to watch Quinn and see that he doesn’t get artificially elated.” Lu giggled and pushed her baby fingers into Quinn’s ribs. Stanton looked at her and Janey turned away.

Five minutes later, when the sound of the motorcycle had stopped without the machine’s reappearing, Quinn tilted the can up precisely so that the acrid beer ran thinly over his teeth. He could see Lu over the arc of the can. He tried: “You want to see if we can find Bobby and the other one?” One of those timed silences that try the heart followed.

“Okay.”

The spoor of the Harley was clear down the face of the hill; feather-shaped blades of earth turned up, smashed twigs and ferns down to a broad skid mark in soft ground and a place where the rear wheel had dug in half a foot and the exhaust had scorched and withered the foliage behind. Lu made downhill use of Quinn’s arm and when he kissed her hotly she ran her hands up and down him in three-foot swipes saying, “Darling!” But when he tried to delay she insisted they press on. Quinn wasn’t interested. So Lu took the lead, scouting forward into the brush ahead where the trail was still clear, bulled and busted through the tag alders downward. Now the light was quite diminished because the trees behind were west of them. The trail leveled into dried-out lowlands and a meadow of dead cattails waving stiffly in the slight wind. It looked as if the motorcycle would have been easy to manage here; the soil was flat and the cattails easy to batter down. But as though from violent impatience, the skid marks had become reckless, prolific and the cattails were slashed and battered in every direction. Twenty feet along this trail and they began hearing voices. Lu going ahead waved for silence from the already silent Quinn. He closed in alongside her and they went along Indian fashion, choosing their footing among the dry and broken stalks. In a moment, the twilight glinting of the huge motorcycle was visible through the vegetation and there was the smell of leaking gasoline harsh and unnatural in the decay of the lowland, the smell of which was sweet as yeast. Five more feet brought them the scene: the motorcycle slouched in chromium enormity, its wedge of finned cylinder heads in a calligraphy of shadow, exhausts sweeping back to the goiter bulge of mufflers and stopping at clean, beveled ends. On the great seat the fat girl knelt, naked, and holding the handlebars. Her throat was a curving arch, her face which was that of a sympathetic Irish policeman, implored the sky in silence. Her breasts were small but her stomach, full and pendant, hung toward the mirroring fuel tank of the machine. Bobby stood to one side of the clearing, also naked, smoking a cigarette and squinting in thought, holding the cigarette up close in front of his face. Presently, he stooped and rubbed it out, walked to the motorcycle and crouching on its footpegs behind her, sexually assaulted his companion who managed to keep her balance holding on only one-handed while the other hand was plunged deep into her full head of hair. She nickered.

“Now!” said Bobby, and she swung down one enormous leg adroitly, thrust the kickstarter and, as the machine roared, swung the leg back to kneel on the seat and, letting the engine return to idle calmly, crooned into the treetops.

“Now razz the pipes!” The fat girl twisted the throttle, the engine raged and Bobby’s bony frame flailed in an uncanny hucklebuck. “Now first gear!” She moved a lever, crooning. Bobby flailed. “Now pop the clutch!” Two great tulips of flame expanded suddenly and the motorcycle lurched into the brush with its strange burden, roared maniacally and died, presumably crashed or fallen over. Quinn hadn’t the heart to follow. Lu was sitting on the ground rocking back and forth and moaning. Quinn intuited that the performance had not been inspirational for her; and, perhaps, that was it: no kisses! The redeeming thing to do, he thought, would be to give her a small, fond, almost sibling, kiss. He did so and her jaw seemed to fall open a foot. Lu’s little dimpled hand was in his fly, jerking his private adroitly until it was revealed and mouthed swiftly as an hors d’oeuvre. A moment later her outer garments were in a pile and the plump little highschooler sat in real stag magazine underwear, French thrust bra and net panties with sewed-on dominoes. Then, even these were gone too. She had small, smeared breasts and, legs apart, slight ridges of flesh gathered at her hips. She hauled Quinn in, already drawing and counterthrusting with a learned voracity that caused in the confused young businessman an orgasm he thought would roll his spine like a cloth window shade. Afterward, when he sat staring, he saw Lu behind a low bush ten feet away. Only her face showed smiling sleepily; he heard a delicate whiz in the leaves. When she came back he watched her dress.

“Jimmy,” she said, bending over insanely and feeling the ground for something misplaced, “I have something to tell you.”

“You weren’t a virgin,” Quinn said.

She stood up. “Why did you know that? You can’t always tell that.”

“I was just talking,” Quinn said in the same stunned voice.

“My mother always told me to sit tight until Mr. Right popped the question.”

“I sure didn’t pop any questions.” Quinn laughed.

“Who said you were Mr. Right?” Lu tied the angora collar around her neck. She gave Quinn a little hug and said “Darling!” peremptorily. They headed for the barbecue again.

* * *

“James,” Stanton said, “you be second.”

“What for?” Bobby and the fat girl were eating grilled meat with lazy stupefied movements, both sitting on the motorcycle. Quinn wondered how they beat him back.

“Earl here called me a raunchy mother and I had to challenge him to a duel.”

“I’m ready to roll!” said Earl Olive. “Come own.”

“Don’t fall for it,” Quinn told Earl. “I’ve been shot in the face, in the chest, in the throat. He never loses.”

“He’ll lose this time.”

“No he won’t. I promise you.”

“I have handled virtually every type of pistols. Come own.”

He started off, Stanton skipping beside him. Quinn followed. Janey passed him and joined Stanton, glancing back reproachfully at Quinn who wondered if it was for not having been more effective against Stanton. Then suddenly Lu took his hand in her baby fingers. She looked up with yearning and said, “Before, I was down in the dumps. Now I feel real excellent.”

“That makes me feel good,” Quinn said. She pressed her face to his arm a moment.

“Know what else? You’re cute. Know that? You’re cute as a bug!”

* * *

Quinn watched the loading of the guns, a pair of drab English horse pistols of the eighteenth century. When Stanton said that the wax bullets were only to indicate the winner, Quinn went into details; and when Stanton poured double charges Quinn argued. Olive was not impressed. Quinn warned Olive to protect himself and then began the counting. At ten, Earl Olive whirled into a gunfighter’s posture, feet wide apart, crablike, left arm crooked out parallel to the ground, the gun low and forward and the face thrust toward the elegant Stanton in fatal invitation. He fired just an instant before Stanton who, Quinn now well knew, held his fire. Stanton, left hand on his hip, was untouched; he then shot and connected with Earl Olive who screamed and whirled, holding his face. The pistol slipped from between his hands and fell onto the floor spinning. Earl’s hand came down from his face. His nose was broad and bleeding. He began to stalk Stanton who, without looking at him, carefully hung the horse pistol in the cabinet, turned back as Earl Olive swung wide, missing him, lunged and missed again as Stanton danced away. When Earl Olive recovered himself, Stanton jabbed out flat, leaning very slightly forward at the waist, the right hand crimped up close, and centered Earl Olive’s face with a terrible sound. Olive groaned and swung wildly. Stanton stepped into the blow, taking it on the shoulder in order to swing deeply and heavily into Earl’s stomach so that he went right down onto the hard floor, his wind knocked out, making his lungs rake to regain it. Earl Olive lay in complete physical defeat, the side of his face pressed against the floor, his knees drawn up, his hair splashed out from his still head. Quinn’s ears rang and he went to the stairs. He looked back at Vernor’s wondering face, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. He felt then that Stanton was only bad.

He sat down upstairs and lit a cigarette. He looked around the empty living room and gnawed at his lip. An instant later, Earl Olive crashed the door open as he went out, making a strained, humming noise that broke as soon as he was invisible in the darkness to a harsh reiterated howl of animal rage. Quinn sat straight upright; even his nervousness was gone; everything but his attention was gone, until the howling stopped. When that happened, his composure left him and he started gnawing the lip again.

Stanton came up. He looked into the darkness where Olive had gone. “I hardly know what to say,” he said, his tongue lingering on the consonants as though he was about to stutter. “The scene seems to have had its origins in the epics of the Wild West. I never, never imagined … That nice bait purveyor and likable peasant. But no, shooting at me and hunting me is not to be allowed. M-my position here is well, essentially that of the nobleman.” Quinn groaned. Stanton went on, averting his face. “In any event, I pay bills here. I do not, repeat, do not collect a salary and will not be patronized or stalked by those who do.” He stopped and reflected. “Let’s look at the good side. Let’s notice how this polarizes things. Olive’s dealings with me and the other members make him the enemy within. May I predict that this is not going to be the usual boring, phlegmatic summer? May I predict that it is going to be a little more … athletic? I have to make this place livable and the old low-key razzmatazz just doesn’t do it. When I arrived I did everything I could to make things interesting. I told jokes. I did imitations. I wore funny hats — I had one with windows, decorated with birds’ nests, road maps, calling cards, menus, watch springs, swamp marigolds, spherical paper wasps’ nests, flounder skeletons, cat bones, little rubber horses, photographs of mine shafts and skyscrapers. A printed pamphlet introducing the spectacle was available on request. No dice. They sat around and picked each other’s noses and read the Wall Street Journal. I even tried to improve club relations with the farmers around here. I still had the Ferrari so I could get to a lot of farms in a day. I would pull up alongside a farmer, introduce myself as a member of the Centennial Club and say, ‘The earth is good, gentlemen. Only the soil prevails.’ Then I would demonstrate eleven thousand revolutions in all five gears just to keep their attention, becoming as a tiny dot upon the green horizon. What more could you ask? A living diplomat. I played Teresa Brewer and Perez Prado records in the dining room. Nothing. I gave away free ball-point pens and trained Olson’s dog to shake hands. I killed a rat. No response. Then I saw that rats and hats and ball-point pens weren’t what it takes to electrify twenty-six thousand acres of forest and make it habitable. What it takes is tension and constant menace. And nothing overt would do. These birds can snuff out anything conventional with their various bribed public officials. My task has been to show them the grace and dignity of self-reliance through dueling so that they will think in terms of settling their own problems intramurally. Next I give them a problem. That’s where Olive comes in and I expect he’ll work out just right. Unless I miss my guess, he’s raging around the forest like a rabid dog right now. That is a role Olson couldn’t have fulfilled. He’s too realistic. Now if they settle Olson’s hash on their own they will have taken the first step in cutting themselves off from the outside, and the first step toward setting up a tiny enclave on the sensible systems of the Middle Ages.”

“Who will be king?” Quinn said.

“Oh, come on. String along.”

“I am. But who will be king.”

“No king. It couldn’t get that far. You can’t run a single acre on the principles of the Middle Ages, much less twenty-six thousand. It would be a step toward destruction. That would suit me. I am sentimentally attached to these lands. And I have learned to be the enemy of the people that inherit them. That is what this club hasn’t figured on—”

“What do you mean, Vernor? Come on, will you. Talk plain.”

“Naw, suh! Dat’s enuff. Ah has spoken.”

* * *

Rather than dote on the latest Stanton pronunciamento, Quinn elected to spend the night fishing. As he prepared his tackle and made coffee for the thermos, he involuntarily thought of Stanton’s insolent dream world and the cockeyed dramas that proceeded from it, commonly embroiling everyone around him.

Quinn headed for the river, not undertaking this fishing lightly. The night was warm and creaky, the round spring moon figured with bats and moths. He anticipated the hunting owls and raccoons rinsing mussels in the shallows; and the green luna moths of the spring fishing. He remembered how the long hours of staring at the mutable silky river often left him dazed for a day after. He wondered if this accounted for the seasonal drownings, fishermen turning up lodged under bridges or in log jams and having to be brought ashore with a boat hook; or those that simply vanished in still backwaters to rotate a couple of days before sinking. Such considerations dallied with his nerves when he was night fishing. Sometimes it only required a momentary loss of balance, the sound of feral dogs running deer or the whistle of the Pere Marquette railroad, and Quinn scrambled out of the river with a galloping case of the creeps to race up the grassy slopes to his house.

Quinn stepped into the dark river, already concentrating and beginning to sort out the sounds around him and to distinguish the musical splash of frogs from the slash of feeding trout and the careless splashy rises of young trout from the heavier, pulling rise of big fish; it all had to be done by ear. The darkness encouraged his dreaming and replaced Stanton’s lunacies with heavy trout that threshed the smooth and moon-yellowed water. So far, there was no hatch of any kind; a few moths barged around and young trout slapped at mosquitoes. Raccoons hunted in the shallows and a black watersnake went by, carried sideways downstream, the head pointing steadily to the far bank while the tail drove. A good brown trout would eat a watersnake.

The river here was a hundred feet wide, fast and channeled along either bank. In the middle, two overlapping currents had built a gravel bar. Quinn was standing on this bar when he heard the blast. And because there is no part of the natural environment more constant than the sonic boom, he thought of that. But then he saw that this was denser and closer. It was dynamite. The silence in the blast’s wake was severe. He waited instinctively. Then the water began to rise quickly around his knees and ahead of him he saw a low, glassy ledge hurtling in the moonlight toward him. An instant later, he was knocked flat under a cold swell of water that tore his rod from his hand and turned him hard against the cold gravel bottom helpless in his waders and off the end of the bar into the deep water of one of the channels where he shot along far beneath the surface, raked by the ends of sunken logs. He struggled with the waders, hauling them down around his knees, then fighting erect toward the surface for air and trying again until the waders were free of his legs and he thrust toward the top. But where the surface was to have been was only more water, black and intervening, and he compulsively filled his lungs and stopped struggling. The current ceased its swelling pressure and he hung a moment in black suspension feeling himself turn in some backwater. Then spasmodically he fought, punching and kicking into the blackness that yielded to him, deferred to him, until he found himself unexpectedly surfaced, then on a low ledge of mud that sank deeply under his hands and knees. He seemed to be reaching into the earth. He knelt sinking and expelled gouts of lung-warmed water in seizures of his chest. He lay down in the foul mud. A thick cloud of mosquitoes rose singing around him and settled again, covering him. He didn’t resist, though he sensed dimly that they covered him and that the singing had stopped. He could feel, too, his lips pull away from his teeth in a grin, and a song repeat sonorously in his head as though sung in a culvert: “Dat ole black magic has me in its spell, dat ole black magic dat I know so well—” It was Stanton’s voice. A few feet from Quinn’s head the river hissed past. But where had that water come from, that whistling, glassy ledge of racing water? There was no flow control here as on the Manistee. He hadn’t the energy to pursue it or to lift his limbs or resist the burning in his lungs. He couldn’t wave away the mosquitoes that buried him.

Some time passed, probably hours, and Quinn awoke. It was very dark. The moon was invisible though its cold, chalky light hung over the trees. Quinn lifted his hands to his face. It was swollen and enormous. Bites had made its surface pebbly. He touched his lips and found them taut as the skin of a balloon. The sides of his finger pressed apart just as his mouth seemed to press open. Every move sent clouds of saclike mosquitos rising from his flesh and oscillating around him in soft waves of high-pitched sound. The river had fallen to normal and whispered past. Quinn got to his feet, sinking halfway to his knees in the mud, launching new clouds of mosquitoes up and streaming against the moonlight. He looked around himself. Everything was gone. His good rod was gone; he thought with helpless absurdity what a time he was having and how he had rewarded himself for a year’s stupid labor. He felt solitary and ashamed at this moment of saurian floundering, muckbound helplessness and stupidity. All present hopes of pleasure were extinct and in their absence he thought he could make out the few, clear lines that kept himself, Stanton, Janey, everybody, precisely separated. The thought was subtle and insistent. Calamity had deprived him of his bland vacation. What remained, the accretion of the last weeks, was knowledge as clear as a simple geometric pattern, a few lines: final and sad.