The Sporting Club

3. Centennial Moon

HE OPENED the screen door, bumping his face as he went in, wandering through the wrong rooms on the ground floor of his own house before turning on lights and going upstairs to bed. On his back, his eyes hung from the ceiling light with its seamed, dusty, spilling glass cornucopia. His fingers beat with itching and he wanted to claw them, claw his beaded face and membrane lips. He got up and went to the sink and ran hot water on his hands for relief. Shortly after he lay down again, his view of the light was interrupted by the heads of Stanton and Janey. “What happened to you?”

“I was in the river. I was … knocked down by a wall of water.”

Stanton said Olive had blown the dam and that it had all run down the tributary stream that drained it into the river. With one blast the lake had become a clearing. Dynamite. Stuff for blowing stumps. Stanton wanted to know what it was like, if it was exciting.

“A wall, I told you.”

“You fortunate bastard. That was absolutely the last view of the lake anybody had.” Janey said he looked sick.

“I am. I can’t be brave. I’ve never felt this way before.” He dozed off as though he were hurtling away and woke up a moment later in fear and lay in bed awake, feeling still a pull to hurtle into the night sky that tugged all around him elastically. He realized that the roar outside that seemed like wind was voices and he forced himself to get out of bed, feeling the pressure of his puffy feet run up his legs when his weight was on the floor. Turning the brass levers on the narrow-paned windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, he swung them down and stepped onto the narrow widow’s walk where, in the daylight, the lake used to be visible. Below Quinn, directly in front of the porch, were all the men of the club. They were crowded together in a single unit. Fortescue stood in front of them, Scott behind. Except that the recruits already had guns, it would have looked like an induction center. Their lights and lanterns flashed and glowed and in every hand was a rifle of some kind: carbines, pump guns, doubles, Mausers. It was a manhunt, a posse, and Quinn knew that it was poor Earl Olive, purveyor of live bait, who starred in the show. He studied them unsteadily. They were arguing. Fortescue was plunging an admonitory forefinger downward as though he had found oil, and Stanton, now below too, was cultivating a judicial air that was having no effect beyond irritation. Scott darted through the ranks shaping everyone up, and Murray led a small band in sentimental songs of the forties. Then Fortescue was finished, had forged these men into something of use, and they turned as a man and surged into the darkness with a roar of elation, their lamps flashing and working into the night. Quinn went back to bed, forgetting to turn out the light. He looked at it in despair, unwilling to get up again. When he opened his eyes it was morning and Janey was sitting beside a tall, shocking stripe of sky. Around her neck hung a pair of binoculars. Quinn’s hands had perspired so much the skin felt tender and porous as though he’d been swimming. When Janey saw he was awake, she began to tell him about the night before: Earl Olive had got away.

Quinn remembered the beginning of the man hunt, remembered the rifles, lights, shouting. And through Janey he learned that that’s all there had been, a beginning. The war party fording the first swamp, guns held crossways over their heads as at Parris Island, had, floundering and crying to each other for aid, heard, from behind, the successive dynamitings of each room of the main lodge; each explosion was louder than the one before either because of increasing charges or because the building had grown more sonorous with each gutting blast, each bellowing, plank-shattering cough of dynamite. Scott, according to Spengler, the chronicler, had, running about in confusion chest-deep in ooze, slogged a short way and vanished; dragged to high land, he had been mounted by Charles Murray who, Scott’s fists unavailing, mouth-to-mouth resuscitated the little drenched antiquarian until Fortescue pulled him off and said, “Easy now. That’ll do.” Scott jumped up screaming in a gallinaceous rage that was quelled only by the return march to the compound where they viewed the ruins, the burst walls and tall rooms opened to the sky for the first time in the century. Fortescue walked around in front of his men and addressed them thus: “Gentlemen—” But his speech was precisely interrupted by a single small blast toward the lake. Fortescue, racing along behind the other men, swung his arm in a forward quarter-arc and cried “Follow me!” as they began to outdistance him. When they arrived at the lake, they found someone had dynamited the lifeguard tower; the seat had been blown fifty yards away and sat brightly on the dry lake bed. They decided to convene. They would have to devise some systematic mode of procedure; it was not to be expected that normally sedentary gentlemen should run up and down the countryside indefinitely. Fortescue moved to the fore. “Gentlemen—” he pleaded; but he was interrupted by a very small explosion from the direction they had come from and soon he was outdistanced by his companions. When they arrived again at the compound, they learned that the flagpole had been rather exactly dynamited. This time Fortescue began to screech. And Scott, now wearing a Mae West, tried to talk sense to him. But Fortescue continued to screech about advancing, flanking, fanning out and bivouacking. And when they’d got him under control, they had lost their momentum and began to think of getting some rest.

Quinn stared from the window. Where the blue lake had been in the trees was now a brownish green oval as sore as a roller rink. Clouds of crows whirled and flew, landed and fed on dead fish. Quinn took the field glasses and watched them plod over the lake bottom and pierce bloated trout with sudden thrusts of their heads. At the south end of the lake were the four rearing ponds that from this distance looked like ice trays. They still held water; but scrawny herons waded now and probed for young fish. To the left of Quinn’s field of view, you could normally see the third story of the lodge; now nothing was visible, no wreckage, nothing at all, as though the building had reared up above the surface of trees for a few generations and sounded.

Quinn moved to Stanton’s house, by his own request, where he could be more readily babied. They moved him into the spare room over the porch and he fell asleep instantly. When he awoke hours later, it was raining and Janey was there. The walls were invisible and the windows oblongs of dark-green ragged light. The weather made him daydream about Detroit, rain falling past office windows, rain stinking in the hearty woolens of Mary Beth, that Frankenstein, rain slanting into Woodward Avenue soaking shoppers in front of J. L. Hudson’s, gleaming on Michigan Avenue, Gratiot, Grand River, soaking merchants, strikers, bozos, flaneurs, autodidacts, doughty young executives and hurrying shoppers holding packages to their breasts like praying mantises. Rain that here in the North rinsed dust from trees, in Detroit raised an unseen, mobile filth; it exaggerated the noise of traffic, made the headlights of cars stream and wheel and haunt the crevasses between buildings. But here at least it didn’t seem like the last day there would be, the last emanation of gray light before the world went down gagging. Long spokes of sunlight already shot the clouds. “What are you waiting for?” Quinn asked.

“Nothing. What are you?”

“An older woman with a little something put aside.”

“Really—”

“I don’t know. Waiting for something to change.” Beside him bacon, eggs and broiled tomatoes warmed in a silver chafing dish with a lamp beneath. He lifted the lid and looked in carefully. Janey wouldn’t have any so he served himself on a square-handled salver. After that, Quinn dressed slowly while Janey watched out the window. Then they went to the compound to view the damage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up, Stanton.” Fortescue.

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

“Just passing through.”

“Where were you going?”

“I was going to Tulsa.”

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

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

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

“I thought this was audience participation…”

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

“Mercy!”

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

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

“Dum de da dum,” Stanton hummed aggressively.

“May I go on?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then shut up,” said Stanton.

“Look—”

“Or get out. Pack.”

Janey’s fingers closed around Quinn’s arm.

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

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

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

* * *

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

“Had a lot of jobs.”

“Such as?”

“I was a model, a librarian, a guide in a champagne factory.”

“You were? Where was that?”

“It was the only champagne company in Waco and it wasn’t a good job. I took thirty tours a day and made the same speech over and over. The tour started upstairs where it was usually about a hundred degrees and it ended up in the cellars fifty degrees colder. So, I always had the grippe until I demanded to be put upstairs or down. They put me downstairs. My job was to rotate the bottles so the residue would settle evenly. I had to wear a fencing mask in case a bottle blew up. I got pneumonia and went back to the mineral spring.”

“Do you plan to get married?” Quinn asked, his eyes traveling over slatted, white-painted walls with their streaks of paint beading. Janey was biting her cheek again. Quinn reached and pushed her chin with his forefinger to make her stop.

“Well!” she said. “If I could do it right!”

“What kind of wife would you make?”

“A good one!”

“I’d marry you myself,” Quinn said, wrapped up in his own fraudulence.

“Well, I wouldn’t marry you!”

“Why not?” He was still looking at boards, fixtures and chairs, a real interior decorator. Janey was no longer biting her cheek. And Quinn felt that he had to explain who he was and that he could do it quickest by indirection, by talking about the hats he had worn, cars he had owned, the women he had been with, the fly rods he used, the profits he had made. It worked in the past; why wouldn’t it work now? It wouldn’t work now. He knew that by instinct.

“… then a funny thing happened,” Janey said, still thinking and now smoking and clicking a gold Dunhill lighter in her hand. “Vernor and I would be … I wonder … okay, Vernor and I would be walking in the street…” She went very carefully. Stanton had been getting strange, insisting that people were “cruising” him. They had to leave restaurants before they’d eaten because he had spotted people outside the window cruising him. After that — and this was all after Quinn had last seen him — he got worse. He wrote sarcastic letters to his father who was dead. He started traveling, taking Janey along, at an absurd rate, a country or two a day. One peculiar thing, a rude clerk or some tourist cruising him, as he saw it, and they had to get out. He spent less than five minutes in Spain after seeing a dwarf in a flowerprint sport shirt slumbering with a bright strip of lottery tickets pinned to his chest. “Did you see that?” he had demanded. “Did you?” They were in Gold Beach, Oregon, the next day, where Stanton couldn’t stand the smell of fish because it was an airborne river of lethal botulism. Everywhere they went, the mail mania dominated: he had to have letters. They tried Florence the year before the floods and saw men throwing treble hooks in the swollen Arno for bodies and Stanton screamed at the draggers in bad Italian demanding to know who they thought they were. That one ended with the police and jail, where Stanton couldn’t get the mail without enormous bribes once the local officials had matched his bankroll with his psychosis. Quinn thought of the letters he had planned but never written to Stanton; he saw Stanton before him in the fluorescence of advanced personal decrepitude. Janey handed him a calling card; on one side was Stanton’s name; on the other it said, “No, prisoners of love, I did not begin as a joke.” After Florence, Stanton began to invent conversations which he would write down and then memorize. He made Janey learn cues so that when people were around she could lead him from one recital to the other. She would give him one line and he would talk for five minutes and she’d give him another. Some were about Quinn. Some about Judy, the aunt; some about his father. Quinn asked what the other speeches were: a short history of the exploration of the Nile, a lecture on how the first zippers were made, instructions for building a Bessemer converter or making sourdough bread. When people got bored, he really buried them. One day, they were sitting in a German restaurant in Philadelphia and he leaned over and whispered that he could no longer move his arms and legs. They got him into a clinic right away. He called his mother in Michigan and she told him to pull himself together. He had to be watched every minute. He said his lanyard had snapped. He said his life had gotten to be so funny he couldn’t stand the laughing. He said his spring was running down and that the whole mechanism would have to be returned to Switzerland for adjustment. They carried him into the clinic like a plank and the psychiatrist attending him said that he was exaggerating the little things we all have. Quinn listened and looked on with new regard and a hopelessness that would have cleared the air if he had accepted it.

* * *

The discovery that Earl Olive was a criminal and a fugitive should have surprised nobody; but it surprised Quinn. Fortescue, visiting the ailing young businessman with an eye to enlisting his aid, bent his authoritarian spaniel face to a teletyped dossier and, scanning, gave Quinn a rapid précis of its contents: fraud, arson, assault and battery, breaking and entering, suspicion of armed robbery, suspicion of rape, suspicion of murder, known to be armed, considered dangerous. The fraud conviction began as a rape indictment, Fortescue explained, his eyes scanning another stapled pair of sheets. Earl Olive had been in the habit of calling up girls he didn’t know and representing himself as a social worker; it had been his practice to explain confidentially that they had been established as V.D. carriers and would have to be treated under state supervision. At this point, the girls were willing to accept Olive’s help: he would recommend a friend with rare type-M-positive blood who could stop the disease through sexual intercourse; the girls were eager for this simple cure; and Olive, “the friend,” would soon be at the door. It was only that the girls stayed on for more than the prescribed treatment that forced the disillusioned judge to change the indictment to the charge of fraud. Olive was convicted. He jumped bail and went on with the crimes that continued out there in the woods.

“Why don’t you call the police?” Quinn asked sensibly.

“Why do you think? Because we clean our own house here.”

“Seems pointless.”

“Does it? It doesn’t to me. There are still some of us alive for whom life in the forest means a return to older virtues, not just a vacation.”

“Very well, if you want to make a speech.”

“I mean you and your friend Stanton and the rest of your generation are just a little farther away from the founding years of this country.”

“Mm, being younger.”

“And we’re not sarcastic and we’re not facetious and damn it there are things we call valuable. What I’m saying is that we believe we can clean this Olive business up in a way that will not only be a tribute to the Centennial Club but a tribute to the country as well.”

“It sounds like you have your hands full.”

“So don’t tell me police.”

“I see now I was playing the wrong shot. Gee—”

“I’ve got equipment rolling in now, paid for out of my own pocket, I might add. I got a rack of Winchester riot guns, K-rations, rucksacks, primus stoves, hammocks, a quartermaster’s tent for extended bivouac, compasses, aerial photographs, flares, tracers.”

“Any grommets?”

“Well, the tents have grommets on their corners. What do you mean! Anyhoo, are you with us or agin us?”

“Oh, agin you, I would say.”

“Then stay out of the way. That’s an order.”

* * *

When it was dark, Quinn crept through the compound in his bathrobe, feeling a little sick and unsteady in the night. He went around and around the tent, each time cutting one more strand of the powerful guy ropes that held the tent aloft. In the vague light that came from within, the tent was a glacier. Quinn paused once in this superior task and had a giddy moment of not knowing where he was; when it came to him again, as it did immediately, he saw himself as a resistance fighter, a saboteur with ideals. Then he went on with his cutting until halfway around the tent on perhaps the fifth pass, one of the guy ropes popped; then they all went like a zipper and the great tent slumped. Quinn ran for it, running in a sick blur, as oaths and cries raged from under cloth; and by the time he was well into the woods, the riot guns were barking importantly into the night.

Back in his sickroom, the bed itself seemed to reject him like the trick-shop miniature of King Tut. Quinn thinks: I am in it hand and foot. I have suffered a relapse.

* * *

In the morning, in bed, Quinn still in Stanton’s house and posturing sickly for Janey, Charles Murray appeared. He had a bouquet wrapped in wax paper and a packet of letters. “Yoohoo,” he said, “couldn’t you hear me knocking away? I’ve been to the mail in town today—” He handed Quinn his letters, then shyly, “—these silly old—” Janey got up to get them coffee and Quinn followed her exit with forlorn eyes. He held the flowers now; they were dark orange. “How are you feeling?” Murray asked.

“Oh, all right.”

“You probably have the flu for God sakes.”

“I know, I know. But this was kind.” Quinn waved the flowers awkwardly. Murray brushed off the compliment.

“They’re just tacky nothings. All you can expect up here though. You do look feverish.” He laid his narrow hand on Quinn’s brow.

“I feel pretty much terrific,” Quinn said abruptly.

“After what you’ve been through? How killing!”

“Just a little dunking—”

“A little dunking!” He seized Quinn’s hand in wild laughter. Quinn tugged a tiny bit but was held fast. Murray leaned over. “What the hell?” he squinted.

“What do you mean?” Murray relinquished his hand and threw his own in the air. “Oh, how should I know, how should I know! So much is happening so fast! My poor brain is no better than a big silly Caesar salad!” His face flushed and he turned into the wall close by and simpered, “Really, it’s insupportable. Well!” He jumped up. Janey came in. “I’ve got to go! I have a date with an angel! Janet Fortescue by name!” He and Janey dodged and feinted in the doorway before Murray got away, Quinn calling out his thanks after. An instant later, farther down the stairs, Stanton could be heard gruffly and rudely putting Murray on. His own approach was not secretive, the drumming of heavy footwear on a hollow staircase, no doubt exaggerated in its regularity; and his entrance, pausing in the doorway, a big grin behind the white linen handkerchief into which he trumpeted majestically; then rolling the cloth, he thrust it into his hind pocket. Quinn suddenly felt their quietude and inactivity in the contrasting presence of Stanton. Stanton was noble in knee-high black Wellingtons and green turtleneck pullover. His mouth opened fiercely and he gave lung to a great elk roar. “Well, sir,” he said softly, “I like to give you what you expect.”

“And thank you.”

“What’s the talk up here? Cultural topics?”

“I’m afraid you were the subject in question.”

“I saw Murray on the way in. What’d he have in mind?”

“He was visting me.”

“Figured on getting a little, did he?”

“The question never came up.”

Stanton’s mouth found its natural downward curve though his eyes continued to hunt in their old trouble-making way. “The rampant Olive struck again last night. He collapsed the tent with the whole club inside—” Quinn began to laugh in childish yelps. Stanton laughed too, then stopped and began to hunt with his eyes again. “Wait, there’s more. I know, Quinn, but shut up, can’t you? Fortescue was adjusting one of the inside lines and he had it around his waist for purchase. When the tent collapsed and the center pole went down, it snatched him forty feet. Fortescue is a madman. He’s shooting everything that moves, sending up flares. He is crazed and he’s got rope burns all over his body. His wife tried to take the riot gun away from him and he slapped her face like a punching bag. It has gone nuts over there. Fortescue screams orders like the D.I. and everyone wants to go home but they’re afraid to. Fortescue won’t let them. He imagines word will leak and the police will be in on it. They’ve propped up the canvas with timber to make a ledge and they’re living under it. Twenty-four-hour watches. On top of that they’re still going to have the centennial celebration on the Fourth and dig up that fucking time capsule. God, Quinn, won’t you join me? Please! We could make it so insane for those bastards!”

“What about Olive?”

“I know, I know, mmmm. In some ways, I’d like to plug him. Would too, if I could be sure of not killing him. Hate to go to the pen over that kind of riffraff. And that’s what Olive and his crew are: riffraff, marginal types, floozies, shabby local farm stock—” This version grated Quinn. Stanton, it seemed, had watched the Olive camp with field glasses. He was an authority.

Janey asked, “What do they do?”

“They serve Olive. He’s forcing the men to build a big lodge out there. He himself does not work. Now and again he drags one of the women off into the bush. You can bet it comes to no good, too.” Quinn imagined the demented bait purveyor demanding his perquisites of Lu, throwing his hairy, bellied person on her little smudged body. Quinn wondered if, peaceful and tired, she whizzed on the ground after Olive had done with her, flicking leaves over the spot with backsweeps of her feet as dogs will do. Quinn saw Lu when she had been his alone, smiling wanly in the half-light with her behind looking like nothing so much as a pair of pale coughdrops or a papier-mâché valentine; and he could share Stanton’s antipathy. “They sing together,” Stanton said with vituperation.

“What kind of songs?”

“Couldn’t make it out. They had a little fire and they swayed and moved their mouths—”

“Vernor,” Quinn said, “what’s the use? It hasn’t anything to do with you.”

“Yes it has, Parson Quinn. What you don’t see is that it’s a moral issue.”

Quinn thought that this time he really had his chin out.

“Don’t give me the business,” Quinn said. “Just tell me why you’re going after everybody.”

“Because I hate it all.”

“You hate it all.”

“I hate it all.”

“And what do you love?” Quinn was sick of Stanton’s spleen.

“Janey and my father. Only he’s dead. And when he was alive he complicated things by staying ninety-nine percent dead drunk. Then there was you. But you became a smug and irritable prick and a cheap bourgeois. I take it back. There, too much talk induces a shooting off of the mouth.”

“Keep it up. Keep talking, God damn you.”

“Aren’t you getting a little imperious in your sickbed?”

“No.”

“Seems your recent years with the Detroit business castrati have made you overconfident. Now don’t get me started, James; because I’m not going to mess with you once I do.” Placid, malevolent tones: Quinn listened to them, felt Stanton’s real strength in laying down the law.

“Don’t hold yourself back,” Quinn said, his mind already gliding from Stanton to Janey to his business to the unopened letters in his lap, to the two armies outside his window; Janey looked on and everything he learned about her saddened him and irritated him. He didn’t want his women, it seemed, to be persistent; he wanted them delicate, frangible, dissolving, unreal. Rapunzel growing her hair to the ground from her high castle window had become in Quinn’s mind bare-bummed behind, invisibly assaulted while she turned false, soulful eyes to the ground and awaited the prince who could clear everything up by using the backstairs.

But the exchange with Stanton reminded him of old days when one of the weekly fights would flare and Stanton would surprise Quinn with real attempts to injure him, times when his eyes were cold and occupied with the task of injury, the estimates of coordination needed to direct injury. And the surprise was always abrupt because the fights grew out of a closeness that made ideas pass between them in assured symbiosis, conversations become long conceits cross-referred to conversations months earlier, overblown, fantastic and serene. An enormous world constructed from within, hermetic as it was reassuring — Quinn had relinquished it slowly and unwillingly as Stanton’s ambitions shaped him beyond expectation.

“Ah, well,” Stanton was talking, “why should we argue about who pushes dis shabby organization obah de cliff. All dem desperate creeps, all dat disposable humanity.”

“Why do you have to cultivate your mean streak,” Janey asked.

“Oh, dat,” said Stanton smiling. “I do dat natchally!”

Stanton left the room and hardly had time to get away from the house when they heard him being shot. A long moment later, he appeared once more in the room and collapsed on his stomach, blood spattering the green turtleneck pullover. When in the midst of suitable confusions the pullover was removed, they saw that his back was speckled with rocksalt, an old and popular stunt by bloody-minded local farmers, more insulting than dangerous. When Stanton learned this, though he writhed nonetheless, he was disgusted he hadn’t followed his original plan. And in a moment, he had rushed out again and been shot again and there was that much more doctoring to be done, disinfecting merely, for the salt would dissolve out, painfully cleaning its own wound. Quinn strained his eyes at the window to see who was doing the shooting, shouted “I see you, now get!” into the darkness and was rewarded by the crack of a shotgun and the rattle of salt against the shingles. “Can’t we please get out of here?” asked Janey sensibly and calmly. “Can’t we?”

“No!” crabbed the prostrate, speckled Stanton from the bed Quinn had occupied so recently. “We cannot.” Quinn noticed the sharply proprietorial air of Stanton now drawing beneath his chin the edge of the thick tan blanket and reclining like a stone mortuary figure. It appeared to Quinn that there would be the matter of his finding another place to stay and recuperate because he would not fight for the bed. Still, he felt, completely apart from the events themselves, that he’d been had. Stanton was speaking: “… I said to the man invisible in the dark but doubtless either Olive himself or one of his henchmen, said as clearly as I could, ‘Shoot if you must this old gray head’ and BOWANGO! they ripped into me with a raking broadside! Whiskey.” Janey gave him the bottle from under the window seat and a glass. “What about rubbing alcohol for the afflicted areas.”

“There is none.”

“None? Why not?”

“There never was any—”

“Use it up on Quinn?” he laughed through locked teeth. “What the Christ, every man should have a fifth column in his home. I’m as moderne as anybody. But for God sakes, if a man is to go to the wars he ought at least to be left his medicine. I would think the subject was treated in international agreements.”

Aggressive and ironic, Quinn never knew how to meet this line of Stanton’s. Anyone who sat silent and unobjecting was a victim; anyone who retaliated, a spoilsport, humorless. Quinn, neither one, floated in uncomfortable liberty. “May I sleep downstairs?” he asked.

“Absolutely, absolutely.”

“In the morning, I’ll go to my own place.”

“You be the judge of that. However, don’t count on Janey for any services. She’ll be right busy, understand?”

Quinn wouldn’t even answer this one. He knew that unless he deferred to Stanton on a kind of yassuh-boss basis, it would be necessary to make a run for it to his own house. One look at Stanton’s perforated dorsal, rendered painless though it was through subjugation to larger lunacies, made Quinn fear such a dash and he hesitated before picking up his grip and telling Stanton what a shit-ass he was.

“Scurrile,” replied Stanton. Quinn shot his eyes to Janey, apologetic for his childishness. Her hands and crisscrossed fingers lay in her lap exactly as they had in the photograph of the Cotton Bowl game.

“Let me know,” she said with contrition and more helplessness, “if there is anything I can do. At all.”

“Fine. Thank you. I think I’ll be going to my place.”

“Back to the house is it?” Stanton inquired.

“If I can.”

“You can do it.”

“What’s that?”

“Go back to your house. You can do it.” Stanton’s eyes flickered beneath heavy lids.

“I said that I would. Weren’t you listening?”

“Moral support was all I could offer. I can’t carry you home now.”

“Stay downstairs, why don’t you,” Janey suggested. Quinn wanted to and would have if Stanton’s face swollen with smugness hadn’t challenged even that amenity.

“Drink your Bosco,” Stanton called. “Bye-bye.”

Leaving the house at all, required a couple of familiar ploys. He whistled conspicuously behind the closed porch door a moment and opened it thrusting an overcoat and hat on a broomhandle into the space. These objects were not fired upon and Quinn went on his way home. He went directly through on the path, and around him the tree trunks stood like the ribs of a sunken ship, their spaces exaggerated by the clear moonlight. He stopped. He had no desire to return to his empty house. After the proximity of Janey, the steady sound of their voices still in his mind, the thought of the empty wooden building seemed depressing to the point of being ominous. He began to head crosslots toward the compound. In a moment, he came to the lake and walked to its edge. The sun had baked away much of its foul odor. There was nothing to encourage Quinn’s memory. Even the dock, still standing, seemed unfamiliar. Before, it had lain inches above the unfluctuating surface of the lake; now it towered high on its pilings above half a dozen canoes sprawled morbidly below. Quinn walked on till he came to Stanton’s cutter. He ran his hands over the high runners and tested the flexion of its double-sprung seat with his hand. Then he wandered out onto the lake bed. Long aquatic weeds were stretched upon its surface and dried fast; they looked like the silhouettes of trees and in the moonlight retained a green pallor. The lake bed itself was dried out and its surface deeply fissured, lunar and dead. On a plateau behind the far edge of the lake, Quinn perceived the glow of the club’s lights and made for them. About midway, he came upon the horse, stretched out as Stanton had said, like an arrow: head reaching, legs trailing. The bones were white, almost luminous in the moon, and among the ribs, which stood up far higher from the lake floor than the rest of the skeleton, were metal harness fittings. Quinn sat astride the skeleton, smiling bleakly, and his legs outstretched in front of him as though he were on some outlandish Flexible Flyer; he gripped the short ribs in his hands and could see before him the barrel of the rib cage like white slats in the moonlight, trailing to the single heavy whiteness of the skull which, stretching forward from the streamlined limbs, made Quinn feel already that he was in motion; so much so that when he tilted his vision slightly above the treetops he lost all reference and the stars streamed behind like foam; he unconsciously tightened his grip on the ribs and let his head fall back so far that his mouth opened and the velocity of the stars increased until they overtook themselves in a whitening that became the moon. Quinn tilted his head down to the steadying serration of trees and got up. He crossed the lake bed to the plateau beyond. He went a very short distance from the edge of the plateau and found himself looking down at the unpleasant ventilation sleeve of an automatic rifle. The muzzle and front sight of the weapon were pressed invisibly into his belly. “It’s you, Quinn,” said Spengler, withdrawing the gun.

“What is this?”

“I’m on sentry.”

“Is that loaded?”

“Of course it’s loaded.”

“For what?”

“It’s loaded to shoot. What do you think it’s loaded for? What do you load a gun for?”

“I don’t.”

“Sure you do. What d’you mean? Everybody loads a gun.” Quinn looked at Spengler’s harmless, unlined face, flush with craziness, and asked him how the sentry duty was being administered. Spengler laughed at this word. Fortescue, he said, would point a finger: you’re it. It wasn’t, Spengler insisted, the fairest thing in town. The snivel had become recognizable. “A big boy like you,” Quinn said and thought Spengler would break down.

“Lay off,” he said. Quinn ignored him.

“Well, what’s the plan? Is anybody ever going home?”

“When we clean up here, I guess. When we celebrate the centennial and dig up the time capsule and take care of the Olives—” What did taking care of them mean? Did it mean turning them over to the law as it did not seem to mean? Or did it mean something more direly in the vigilante line? It was too easy to picture Lu, the fat girl, the motorcyclist and their companions, all in a line that began with Olive, strung up on a limb down in the swamp they now inhabited. “What do you mean by taking care of them?”

“I — don’t — know.” Spengler stood firmly by his ignorance. No one ever knew about such things; not completely; maybe a little; enough of them knowing a little but not completely and you had the deed without the consequences; that’s right, gentlemen, no hangover, no morning after. “Quinn, do yourself a favor and get out, would you?”

“I’m a member.”

“What?”

“I’m a member.”

“So what?”

“This is my club. I’m a member and I won’t get out.”

“Kid—”

“I won’t get out.”

“Kid, lissename—” Spengler’s Brooklyn accent was brand new. “There’s a hundred million bums in a world, will ya lissename?”

“Give me that gun.”

“Not on your life.”

“Give me the gun or I’ll take the gun and kill you with it.” Spengler gave him the gun. “I have a good mind to kill you with this.”

“What’d I ever do to you?”

“Stuck it in my belly. I ought to kill you and burn your chronicle.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it. I treated you like a Dutch uncle. Honest.”

“I’ve got a good mind to cream your guts all over the bushes.”

“Oh, don’t even talk like that—”

“I’m sick of what’s going on around here.” Quinn was glad to have the gun. Spengler was crazy all right. Maybe now he would go home. Quinn wondered how many of these zanies were similarly armed. He looked over at Spengler, very much down in the mouth, his brief time in the military sun a thing of the past. Quinn gave him a little bump on the shoulder with his fist just to show that it would be fine again one day, that things would turn out like old times. Quinn unloaded the gun and went up. He found Fortescue polishing his boots outside the canvas ledge and lifted his head with the end of the automatic rifle. Fortescue’s expression of cynicism tightened and confirmed itself. “So you’ve gone over—”

“No.” Quinn leaned the gun up against the canvas and hunkered near Fortescue.

“Where’d you get the gun?”

“I had it, see?”

Fortescue’s eyes flicked over it once.

“Just like the ones I got from the National Guard.”

“Well, it’s a common enough gun,” Quinn said sharply.

“Still and all—”

Quinn noticed people beginning to treat him with respect. A heavy woman in desolating, elasticized underwear stepped out from under the ledge and emptied a pot; she paused odiously, her back to them, one hand behind her stretching a rubber strap absentmindedly, then lifted her head to ogle the firmament. There was the harsh scent of the pot’s contents. The light of lanterns, stoves, cooking fires, flashlights, flickered out from under the ledge as Quinn went along. Among the members, Quinn spotted a few old woodsmen, local guides hired on as mercenaries. The guides were doing the cooking and thrusting out sections of the unwieldy canvas on green poles to form flies under which you could be sheltered.

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

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

“Oh, boy.”

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

“Interrogate him.”

“After that?”

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

“Give him a little of his own.”

“All right.”

“And you think that’s okay.”

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

“A tit for a tat.”

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

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

“What can you do?”

“Turn you over to the authorities.”

“Like who?”

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

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

“I guess you’ve got me.”

“I guess I’ve got you by the nuts.”

* * *

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

“That’s tomorrow.”

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

“I see that we will.”

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You went to jail.”

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

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

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

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because there is no place to start. It doesn’t make a story.” A single strangely shaped shadow revealed the declivity of her cheek and any motion at all made her eyes go from reflecting to bottomless. No wonder she had Stanton under such crazy control as Quinn was now sure she had, dancing like a circus horse, a little out of hand perhaps, but out there on the lead under unreckonable command. Quinn liked this thought: Stanton a little dappled stallion waltzing on a barrel head, jumping through pastel flames; behind, the gallery in regular ascending semicircles of vacuous faces; Stanton’s hoofs muffled in the sawdust as he trots steadily round Janey in silk top hat and tails, her whip curling toward his dappled buttocks like a silk thread. Then, after the last hoop, Stanton fetches up under the big top; there is mechanical applause like seawaves. A tiny car drives up and skids to a stop. Enthusiastic applause as a family of midgets bails out with luggage. The pony begins to go sour. He whinnies aggressively. The midgets stop in trepidation. The booing begins like the groaning of a tree about to fall and rises as the pony rushes among the midgets, striking out with varnished crescent hoofs, the booing rising as the midgets begin to take a beating; then the inscrutable crowd comes out of the bleachers and smothers the pony in sharp downward blows like the branches of a collapsing tree. As it came to Quinn’s mind, he wondered if it was accurate.

Janey said: “One night, in Puerto Rico, Vernor heard a woman crying on the balcony outside his hotel. He went out and saw her leaning against the wall covering her face up with her hands. She was still crying. Vernor asked what happened and she said she had been attacked by a man. Vernor asked her what he looked like and she took her hands down from her face. Vernor asked her what he looked like again and she stared at him just a minute and said, ‘You.’” The woman, Janey said, was her Aunt Judy. Vernor was horrified and fascinated, he fell in love. But she only went out with him and let him stay with her betweentimes: there were others. “I had to console the poor lovesick baby and, oh, me, he was starry-eyed! He offered her the world and everything he had. Now, then, one day he came over in the morning. I think it was on a hunch. Judy was sleeping in the bedroom with a dealer from the El Convento. And Vernor smoked and fussed and tried to talk to me. I can tell you it was tense, boy. I talked my head off. Vernor was puffing his cigarette and squinting at the bedroom door until Judy came out in a peignoir still beautiful but very rundown looking and in a bad mood. Vernor tried too hard to be pleasant and told her she looked mussed up or something, though maybe it was only the unfortunate lighting. Judy said, ‘I just woke up. Get it? I just woke up.’ He began yelling that someone was there. The dealer walked out of the bedroom, fully dressed and said, ‘A for excellent.’ He had a pistol in his hand and he wasn’t waving it around or anything. He just had it. He walked right past Vernor and went over to the mirror and tucked the pistol under his chin and smoothed his hair down with both hands. Then he put the pistol in the top of his pants and squeezed the knot of his tie between his thumbs and put the pistol in his pocket. He asked Vernor how he looked and Vernor said he looked as sharp as a tack. And then the dealer asked how he liked the tie and I thought somebody would get killed but Vernor said that the tie was of the very finest.” Later, Stanton befriended the dealer and took him deep-sea fishing and by some slip or concatenation of circumstances left the dealer in a yellow rubber raft a hundred miles off the Mayaguana Bank. When the police informed Stanton that though the dealer would not let them bring him to justice, they thought he ought to know the man was in the hospital with third degree burns from the sun. “Next time,” Stanton said, “he won’t leave his Coppertone on his beach blanket.” Judy used the police without reserve; she kept a small, gray one at her door with instructions to shoot or arrest Stanton on sight. “He got so desperate he settled for me,” said Janey. “And I couldn’t pass him up.”

Quinn helped her with her coat. It was a dressy, tailored coat with a velvet collar and looked good with the old cotton slacks she wore. Quinn could see that she was feeling what had settled over the club; the apprehension widened her eyes and emphasized the almost foxlike shape of her face. Then his mind wandered from Janey in dejection and replaced her with Mary Beth complete with bagpipes. Doggedly, Quinn watched himself unwind her kilt; but instead of the herring-white Scots flesh he has resigned himself to, he discovers a set of prickly duck-hunters’ underwear. What’s the meaning of this?

“The meaning of what?”

“Talking to myself.”

* * *

What a smell! Anyone would think that people who had as many pretenses as these club members had would have the decency to go a little way from the tent. And the body odor, especially the women, was not the reassuring funk of laborers; this was the smell of people who had been deep in deodorants until a couple of days ago; it was something smarmy, acidic and sour. Quinn made his way along the tent. He recoiled from one odor to another until, in resignation, he accepted and his nose pumped steadily at the single generalized odor that was a meld of everything from axilla to organic debris and smelled like clam soil.

People went to and fro as though in a blackout, with a rather useless air of carrying on. A portable generator ran somewhere and lightbulbs hung in the trees, swung and heaved in the breeze and threw monstrous shadows everywhere. The children were playing in the black rectangle of shadow at the end of the tent and their fierce voices came brokenly. “… no, you can’t!.. Eat it raw!” Then the piping voice of a little girl, “Okay for you, Billy! Now I have to kick you in the noogies!” Quinn was shoved rudely from behind. It was Fortescue carrying the front end of a small platform. “If you can’t help, get out of the way.” Stanton came past carrying the other end. They placed it opposite the center of the collapsed tent, that is, between the tent and the Bug House. Quinn glared after Fortescue. When Fortescue had put his end down he looked back and caught Quinn’s eye. “Go home, Quinn! Please go!”

“Let’s hurry it up,” Stanton said to him. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

“Is this speech going to be long?” Fortescue asked.

“Brief, very brief, very brief.”

“What about a little fireworks first?”

“Okay, give ’em fireworks.”

“The singing though.”

“Give ’em the fucking singing.”

“What about a couple of rockets, see, and then you have the singing coming right in there afterward.”

“Get this: I don’t care. But whatever it is, make it snappy.”

“Sure, okay. We have all the time in the world. Spengler burned his chronicle, you know. So, we’ll have more time for you.”

Quinn approached. “What’d he burn his chronicle for?”

“Come on,” Fortescue said, “get a move on.”

“Said we don’t deserve it,” Stanton said impatiently.

“Everybody together for the fireworks and singing,” Fortescue called. “Charles,” he shouted past Quinn, “Reveille!” Charles Murray materialized looking a little worn but well preserved. He put the bugle to his mouth and took it down again.

“This won’t be terribly good,” he said.

“Blow,” said Fortescue, and Murray raised the bugle to his smiling lips. What came out was nothing like Reveille at all. It was a forlorn sound and reminded Quinn of the noise that must have been made by those animals that were the transitional phase between birds and reptiles. But everyone gathered around and sat crosslegged in front of the platform, behind which Murray now knelt on one knee striking matches. Soon a little string of sparks hung in the air before him and he whirled, ran, then bit the dust as the first rocket, then the second and third shot aloft and burst flowers of color on the sky. Murray sang:

“O-oh, say can you see,

By the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hail,” etc.

People took the song up, standing at attention under trees, canvas and the influence of intoxicants. Children ceased their industrious grubbing to salute our flag. When the singing stopped, more rockets went aloft. One fell over as it was lit and hit Mrs. Scott in the belly without damage. The projectile was covered with a blanket before it went off and when it did, it did so with a cough and writhed like an animal underneath, finally burning its way through in a thousand places. Mrs. Scott, meanwhile, ran through the camp howling. Quinn remarked the quality of her voice which was like the singing tops of his youth: a fluty, metallic sound, cyclical and, for a human voice, quite unacceptable. Stanton cried, “Shut the twat up before she wrecks the party!” This swung unfriendly attention upon himself that was only dissipated by the spectacle of a fiery wheel racing on a guy wire, back and forth between two trees. Then Quinn watched Scott confront Stanton and tell him he didn’t have to put up with this kind of behavior. “Do you realize what could have happened to her?” exclaimed the irate academician. “That could have blown her insides out!”

“No harm there.”

“What—?”

Stanton walked away. The attention of the crowd now flickered between him and the fireworks and their eyes seethed like frogs’ eggs about to hatch. Stanton prowled. When there was a pause in the fireworks, he cried, “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” Stars and stripes appeared, pinwheels and carnations popped on the sky like drops of paint on glass. One rocket went up and exploded with a terrific crack, and since there was no visible display the darkness seemed a picture. Murray ran around with a lighted punk setting things off, rockets that shot from troughs or off sticks, some that whistled and screamed like V-2s and buzz bombs. What was needed was the sound of hordes, real Dino di Laurentiis hordes, Kirk Douglas directing Vandals, Saxons, Celts, Wogs, their women in tailored skins showing a bit of tit. Murray did his best. He raced around setting fire, but it was so incomplete without the sound of hordes, though the steady upward stream of fiery trails, the streaking back and forth of the burning wheel, the whistles, explosions and chemical colors aloft were enough. “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” At the far end of the tent, the children were lofting firecrackers into the group, and when they’d blow and the bits of fiery cardboard flew around, the women screamed and struck at their clothes as though there were spiders on them.

“How about lending a hand for a change,” Fortescue said to Quinn, indicating the antic Murray.

“Right you are,” Quinn said, not moving but winking most agreeably. Quinn went into the tent to get away from the fun. The first thing he noticed were the shapes that the lights threw on the tent from outside, distorted human shapes that moved at unnatural speed, appeared as recognizable silhouettes, then burst out of their forms to blacken the whole end of the improvised tent. Under the canvas ledge, reading a magazine, was the handsome little mother who had caused Quinn to fall down so foolishly at the beach. He wandered toward her as though on a retracting tether, as though he needn’t even move his feet. She put the magazine down and smiled first on one side and then on the other. When he spoke, his voice came from the past. “Nice to see you,” he said, after Scott. She wouldn’t pretend to speak. She smiled now and then arbitrarily and had very white teeth, very white. “I’ve been thinking about you ever since,” Quinn said. He sat down and began to poke and fuss around experimentally. Half an hour later, giddy with foreplay, he thinks, Oh, my god, my god, oh, my god. Can they see me? Quinn looked around to the entire open front of the tent. Oh, my god, I know they could if they wanted to and I don’t care I’m going at it anyway and isn’t she nice. He could see the line of the bathing suit that had confined his view at the beach while her child beat the sand with its little shovel. My god, I am going to score right out of the blue, I am I tell you. Spengler, someone, keep them distracted, tell them this proves it, the West is not declining, or does this prove it is; but give them absolutely any theory that will distract them and I will score if you do; keep them mindful of our country’s origins. The rockets’ red glare. Let them have it. Quinn worked toward the last buttons one-handed; the other did its rooting with an especially scurvy lewdness; she rested on her elbows and the breasts slipped to the sides, then she let down on her back. In a minute I’ll be at it like some hyperthyroid mongoose. She hooked a forefinger in the corner of her pretty mouth, her face rosy with the strange light, the monster show still sweeping over the canvas from outside. Isn’t she lovely. Like some precocious baby, my valentine goo goo. He began to thrash and struggle violently with his own clothes like a pickerel in a bucket. Get these god damned duds off without losing the old momentum. Keep it up someone out there but I don’t care if you don’t. Nothing is to come between me and my febrile plans. Now shall I introduce myself? She doesn’t smell as bad as some of these birds. The bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. There: look at me, naked and glorious, God is a good god in his fashion. That’s it, take the little devil, he’s yours. The forefinger still in the mouth. Then she puts the thumb in the other corner and neatly collapses her face by removing a surprising set of dentures. Ohmygod! Her chin is under that nose. That face is trying to smile. That face thinks this is funny. I don’t care I don’t care. Put a bag and remember the flesh of this flesh. Presently she accommodates him, as a wild Cucaracha howls outside on the loudspeaker. She stares listlessly at a small spot on the canvas. Quinn lost no time. As he did so, he heard a cry, “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” then perceived waggish Stanton, winking, taking a chorus of La Cucaracha and doing an expert Samba in the entranceway. Quinn, expended, could hardly go on. He was now irritable and — he faced up to it — doing little more than lurching. “Keep it upp,” she gummed impassively. Quinn knew that people had been watching by now and he was upset. “They’ve seen my ass!” he whispered harshly.

“I don’t care I don’t care. Keep it upp.”

“But I can’t get going!” He was now outright cranky. She looked at him. Her eye, grave and considerable in its fixity, caught his: venom. She got up and tipped him over.

“Some gwatitude!”

She began to dress, Quinn too. Outside Stanton had begun haranguing informally. Quinn went to the entrance, then turned back. “Why did you let me walk in like that and…” Her jaw worked as she sorted out her clothes. She didn’t bother to look up at his struggle for words. The teeth beside her seemed to have a bleak life of their own and rested on the ground in mechanical hilarity.

“What’th the diff, anyway?”

“A big difference to me!”

“Aw, poopoo, you want to be loffed. Ith that it?”

“Yes!” he said indignantly. When she didn’t actually have her chin pressed under her nose, she managed to retain a woebegone beauty, as if an aging of her former, toothed self. “I want just that.” Quinn got up without a word and went outside. Something was delaying Stanton. Quinn could see Janey nearby, aloof, and hauntingly disconnected from the heated talk around her. Stanton was disagreeing about something and as Quinn wandered toward him, he saw the young woman he had just left talking gaily with a companion and pointing at him. The extinction of decency. She hadn’t troubled to replace her teeth. Even from here Quinn noted the way her slack lips tugged around her mobile tongue when she talked. Stanton was now quarreling behind him and he wanted to avoid it. In the good warm night the sounds of other fireworks from afar were like war: towns going under, divisions, heavy stuff being moved. Before him the tent heaped up white in the light like meringue. Was this really so bad? He felt very even right now and did not believe in decline. He attributed the feeling to having been able to take his pleasure like an animal. That face he didn’t want to see gazing at a spot upon the canvas, the dewy, girlish flesh presented as foursquare as a billboard: just fine, just what was required to keep the spirit intact.

Janet Fortescue walked past, giving him a little wave. She was too heavy in the leg, almost grossly so, and sought to counter it by affecting a startling lightness of head and torso, delicate, floating gestures, gay tossings of the head. It was a little like movies of man’s first hapless attempts at flight when the sodden earth and its gravity were shown to dominate the frailest constructs of wood and lacquered cloth. Her hands fluttered an abandoned greeting to Murray as he labored over a rocket trough; she ran past him like a rhino. He took off after her on wild flapping feet.

“Come on,” Fortescue said, “you’ve got to be good for something. Talk Stanton into letting us dig up the time capsule before he makes his speech.” Quinn marveled at the power and leverage Stanton had acquired.

“I can’t talk him into anything.”

“What can you do? What can you do?”

“Beastly little. My proudest accomplishment is of being no use to you.” Fortescue ambled away, organizing, saying, “The dead weight I have known!”

Dilemmas: Quinn was bored with marshaling and being marshaled; it was how he made his living. For the time being, he preferred, as a spectator, fixed ideas and compulsion: they were picturesque. Stanton’s playing every man for a fool was, right now, fine with Quinn. And this was just the situation for him to perform freely in. The usual rules seemed to have expired. Except for a few holdouts, mostly the kind of men who get more and more dolled up the more uncivilized things become and who now stood around the fire sipping from Martini glasses in spurious gentility, except for these, it could have been the Bronze Age.

On the other hand, maybe it would be exactly this that would constrain Stanton. Heretofore he had relied heavily on the expectations of others for his effects. And when he didn’t find them, he could become dangerously ill-humored. Quitting the only job he had ever had, for example, he had relieved himself in a potted plant in the crowded executives’ lounge. To his great amusement and gratification, many looked with horror at him over their coffee cups. Then his boss, in destructive civility, called from his own crowded table, “Mine’s bigger than yours, Vernor!” And Stanton went unexpectedly surly and had to be turned out by the police. Since he owned the company, no charges were pressed. Was something of this obtaining now? The closer the club moved toward a state of which he would have been expected to approve, the more humorless he became in his stunts. But, from what Janey had to say, the process had begun much earlier.

Someone convinced Stanton to wait until after the time capsule, and the group around him broke up. Everyone began to move toward the flagpole and Fortescue pawed his way through the crowd until he was in front. Quinn, who was no longer the same, skipped alongside him and cried, “Can I dig? Let me dig! I get to dig!” Fortescue stretched out his arms to stop the crowd, fetched a good, ash-handled shovel from the tent and pressed it on him like a rifle, telling him to be his guest. Until now, Quinn had enjoyed their friction but this hostile flattening of the lips he observed now and the closing of wrinkled flesh around diamantine and wicked eyes was something new. Stanton came up, exasperated and happy all at once. “You’re the court digger, is it?” he said. “Well, that’s splendid. Keep the dirty work in the family; and remember this, that you are never so human as when you’re digging a hole.” On close examination, Stanton was quite battered. Most striking was the forefinger of his right hand which was like a radish with swelling. He walked along turning the shovel blade in front of his view, admiring its brightness, the cleanliness of its concave shape, and feeling the murmurous swell of crowd behind him.

“I saw Olive,” Stanton said.

“What did Olive say to you?”

“He threw me out,” Stanton grinned, “for conduct unbecoming a gentleman. He said if I ever returned he would deal with me. I will return tonight at the head of a phalanx of buffoons. See, Olive got the drop on me, for I had become drowsy with my amours. It was pretty spooky too, boy. And I do fear that if it hadn’t been for the dramatically satisfactory pleas of my little piece out there in the bush that Olive would have seen to my ventilation. As it was, he thrashed me with a stick.” Quinn knew instinctively and with resentment that the little piece was Lu. They stopped at the shallow crater. The flagpole lay uprooted, with a ragged circle of concrete clinging to its base. The pole took the light of their lanterns and made a tapering streak outward into the darkness where Olive hid. Quinn stepped in, bending and taking up a handful of sandy loam. “Straight down?” he called.

“Straight down!” they all answered. He could smell the moist soil and severed roots. He got a sight of Fortescue and bent to his work, stepping on the shovel and slipping the bright blade into the earth; then his hands at the end of the handle, he tipped up the load, slid his left hand to the head of the shovel, called, “All clear?” and threw the load in Fortescue’s face.

They grappled. Quinn allowed Fortescue to strangle him a little before saying, “I prithee, take thy fingers from my throat for, though I am not splenetive and rash yet have I in me something dangerous!” He threw the hands away, rising up, fomenting in mockturtle rage. Others jumped into the pit to separate them. “Gentlemen—!”

Quinn continued, “Why, I will fight with him upon this theme until my eyelids no longer wag!” They dragged Fortescue out of the hole, pretending to minister to him.

“There is no dealing with that Quinn,” said Stanton. “Under his Age of Eisenhower exterior is a mindless beast that will stop at nothing.” In Stanton’s voice was a single dominant tone: victory. Quinn, he believed, was backsliding.

“And you?” Quinn asked, deep in the misunderstanding stares of the club.

“The reverse,” Stanton threw off. “A mindless beast with an Age of Eisenhower interior. It makes a disappointing combination.” Quinn began to dig, wondering which of these varieties would admit of sanity. The bright blade scooped through sand and into light gravel and then light clay that let him step up with both feet onto the shovel and sink slowly and cleanly to earth. He grunted at the far end, feeling the powerful flexing of the ash handle in his palms as a heavy wedge of smooth clay lifted from the hole. He worked hard and made a square clean-sided shaft in the ground that went deeper and deeper. He took off his shirt and felt the sweat run off him in rivulets despite the night air. The lanterns were above him in a row like ships’ lights and above the lanterns the faces gazed down with an intense pallor like shamans’ masks. He knew that his muscles were engorged and would be gleaming attractively in their multifold bevelings. The toothless wonder must be up there gumming in lust for this shoveling master man.

All of them heard the shovel ring out. Quinn felt around with its blade: a hard curved surface like a boulder. He took his time, sighting and sizing. He crouched down in the pit and began to scrabble in the confined space, clawing the dirt out around the object. Stones ran back in, aggravating him, and he worked double time to keep ahead of them, finally getting his hands underneath and slowly heaving its weight. His chin strained upward against the tendons of his neck and his navel felt as though it were dilating and would momentarily extrude forty feet of intestine. He heaved the thing out and lights played over its surface. It was a boulder. Quinn waited to catch his breath. He listened for words of sympathy but heard only the waiting silence of the club above him. He touched the shovel to the bottom again, the delicate sacklike bottom any hole has, pushed through it a little with his foot and found the time capsule resting as it had for one century. It was light, a small strongbox, and he climbed out of the hole carrying it, examining it: it was oblong with something very much like asphalt or tar covering it. A lock, thick with verdigris, hung from an ornate hasp. “The way I look at it—” Fortescue was heard to begin, “somebody—” Quinn moved into the light and the people moved with him. “The way I—”

“Who’s got the key?” Quinn asked. Everyone laughed and Quinn did too, as though he had been joking. He was convinced enough of what the club had always prated about its continuity to think that the key would have been handed on. He set the box on its end and whanged the lock off with the shovel. “My own view would be—” Fortescue pressed. “Oh.” He finished, seeing Quinn open it slowly as the lid lifted stiffly on its hinges. The inside of the box was japanned metal. A large rolled sheet of some paper or parchment comprised its sole contents. This was tied about with ribbon that rubbed away to dust under Quinn’s finger. He unrolled what proved to be a huge photograph and pinned its corners with stones and joined the press of heads bent beneath the naphtha lantern and studied it as long as his stunned brain would permit and sat back with a gasp. The others were erect, out of the light. All the sounds of the night stood out around their silence. Stanton’s voice emerged from behind, rigorously suppressed but thick with joy. “Don’t let a little thing like this spoil our party, er, ON WITH THE GIZMOS!”

Quinn had to admit, and not unruefully, that Stanton had the goods on them. The picture was so fantastic, yet so personal a jest from a century ago that suddenly the place did seem to have history, a history that would require denial if these people were to go on in the old way. Surely the question on top of the photograph blaring in gold leaf Dearest Children of the Twentieth Century, Do You Take Such Pleasures as Your Ancestors? could not be answered so forthrightly as it was asked. Surely nothing they could say or do now would flail the eye as this rickety nineteenth century light with which the photographer had recorded so outlandish a sexual circus at full progress. The artifice of obvious poses hardly tempered the fact that every postural permutation and every phase of the spectrum of perversion from fellatio and cunnilingus to sodomy was portrayed. The picture was a rash of the most blatant buggery, among other things, with one distinguished-looking gentleman assaulting a patient Irish setter. Laced through the picture, the younger people including Quinn’s great-grandmother, copulated shyly or abashedly wagged and spread. Exhibitionists and masturbators crowded forward without concealing the Bug House whose screens obscured human contents and made of them vague and suggestive blobs. If anything, the picture had retained a bucolic quality of leaf-dappling light upon mound after mound of gently contorted flesh. Only the bits of mockingly retained clothing — one sodomist wore a derby — reminded you that this was the last century; that and the strange and precise light. Each vignette, if the whole could be so divided, was signed in the unique hands of that era. Quinn wondered what impulse had united these people now scattered through various respectable graveyards in so preposterous an act. But it was impossible to make an imaginary reconstruction. The fact of the photograph and the world it revealed now held an adamant reality that was at once as radiant and cloudy as myth.

They walked as penitents, each, it is certain, with the same picture in mind. Stanton stepped onto the dais. The faithful gathered crosslegged before him. Stanton had the photograph. “Charles,” he said, turning into the dark behind him. “Charles, what about a gizmo or two?” A half-dozen rockets streamed up behind him and burst upon the sky, their dream colors rinsing down the night in fading pastel tracks. “Thank you, Charles, for your rockets, for your gizmos and for just being you.”

“Go to hell, Stanton,” he said quietly and urbanely. “would you do that?”

“I appreciate your suggestions and will try my uttermost to follow them. Now find yourself a place in the peanut gallery and try to relax. This is no clambake. You are among friends who worship the air you walk on.” A snore of ugly laughter arose as Murray sat down. Quinn picked up a handful of the loose garbage that decorated the ground and slung it at Stanton. “Go back where you came from!” he heckled. “It’s a bum act!”

“Okay, old pal,” said Stanton softly, then went on with his address. “My dearly beloved in Christ, I don’t mean to rub anyone’s nose in what should be thrust from us in indignation; but I have before me a filthy, filthy, foul and lubricious photograph which I am only too afraid throws a rather startling light on the history of this old and once venerable club—”

Fortescue: “It’s a fraud and a lie!” Fortescue had a lot riding on this. He yelled as though he would go for broke. “A cheat! A chee-e-et!”

Stanton asked, “Well? Boys and girls? Is it? A cheat?” Perplexity, negative murmurs answered him. Quinn believed the photograph was genuine. “The answer is, it is not a cheat. No, it is, I’m afraid, something else again. Whew! It’s a bit hard to get it into my head that this swinish pack of human refuse from which we all descend has put an end to our little organization by remote control. The end, the end. Finished. Extinction as in dinosaurs, top hats, the great auk—”

“Prove it, you bugger!” snapped the wife of a former Secretary of Defense.

“—the Carolina parakeet, the Everglades kite, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the narwhal. Kiddies, the experiment fails. A hundred years trying to make a single silk purse out of a few hundred sows’ ears went for nothing. My dearly beloved in Yazoo, who were we trying to kid?” Stanton continued to speak on the dais but now inaudible as though he were speaking to himself as he might well have been. He murmured away about its being a barnyard and of his being no better than a forlorn peahen divvying up the chickenfeed with the rest of the animals. All around him the club was somehow at bay, though Quinn could see they wouldn’t listen to Stanton much longer. Stanton implored them to join their country in praying for the bomb it so richly deserved and insisted that vaporization was no barrier in the empire of love, the shining city. “Cherish my molecules as myself,” he demanded; rather seriously off his rocker, Quinn thought. “I intend to be striding the heavenly blast under the reliable auspices of the great Numero Uno in the sky by six A.M. Greenwich time.”

Fortescue gained the dais saying they had had a snootful of speaking in tongues. His face was elongated with rage, the thin Puritan lips like the slit of a razor. “Need I remind you,” he intoned soberly, “that we are at war?” A woeful Andean groan passed over the crowd. No one moved. The hot night seemed to have produced a languor and the meridional temperament had otherwise made gains. The fact was that the group lay around fondling one another, absently as though the photograph had shown them historical duties and an immediate future. Stanton and Fortescue were the only warriors in camp; Quinn was an outsider of some kind; detumescence alone made him that.

Fortescue’s eyes swam with light as they welled with tears. “I intend to go, with you—” he paused a very long time and looked around him, as perfectly tincan a little demagogue as possible “—or without you. And I pray God—” another infuriating pause “—that there may be men among you.” He swiveled, eyes spilling, off the platform, hitched his rifle onto his shoulder and headed into the darkness. Quinn, who thought himself unaffected, wanted to give him the finger. “Come on chirruns,” implored Stanton. “Close de ranks!” They leered at him. Suddenly, he was among them, wading into the first row. “By the light of burning martyrs,” he cried, “let’s make our cause live!” Then they began to stir and were in their places, a single tissue, only a moment longer. It broke: Scott’s wife arose and bolted only to be tackled by an old gentleman who bit her leg while she squealed and the antiquarian himself thrashed the both of them with a switch, giggling and rubbing himself. “We’re coming!” they cried. “We’ll join you! We’ll go anywhere! The whites of their eyes and our flag was still there.” Mere dissembling promises, hardly the thing for an army. They drifted away like Indians into the darkness, squealing and trumpeting. Quinn watched smugly, only a short time before feeling his irony melt off its stick and splatter at his feet: he got up and began to hunt his friend from the tent. Stanton had Janey by the arm and was trying to take her on the manhunt. “Vernor,” she repeated giddily, “I’m silly putty in your hands.” Quinn went hopefully to the tent, then stopped. It sounded like a hog pen; but so fierce and authentic that he for a moment didn’t dare approach; when he did, he went forward to see what manner of heroes were these who braved such a maniacal darkness. From the doorway, the bodies seemed to form a writhing false floor amid which it was impossible to isolate individuals. But near the door, Charles Murray and Janet Fortescue rolled about as Janet yelled, “Make it stand! Make it stand up!” Murray spotted Quinn and took off after him. This was exactly the thing to snap Quinn’s overtasked mind and he ran for his life. He looked over his shoulder and saw Murray gaining on him with a crazy wind-milling of limbs and giddy squealing. Quinn whirled at bay, then caught him by the shirt and held him off. “Charles! Cut it out!” Murray’s lips trumpeted toward Quinn. He was vamping him.

“I kees you all ovair!”

Quinn cuffed him sharply but not unkindly and said there would be no action. “What’s the use?” said Murray, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I admit your opportunities look reduced. But maybe if you moved around in the dark…”

“Yes, all right. I wonder if you could look after Janet.”

“I’ll try. If I can’t, I’ll find someone.” Quinn thought of the Irish setter.

“Appreciate it. Welp, I better get started.” Quinn watched him slip away, already regaining his hysterical bounce as he disappeared, leaving Quinn alone in his own humming lull wondering what had happened not only to this crowd of trusty bourgeoises but to himself that he could go back for seconds on the toothless wonder or a stride or two later advise Murray to try to knock something off in the dark. “Golly,” he thought, “the moral dubiousness of it!”

He completely forgot Janet Fortescue until he crossed back into the lighted center of the compound and saw her on the dais with a megaphone singing.

Goan a take

a sen a men

ull jerny,

Goan a take

a trip for love.

Such a grotesquery, normally tolerable or amusing to him, tonight was a crucifixion. A moment later, he was beside her taking choruses. Cheek to cheek, they barked their lyrics at the chromium ring on the small end of the megaphone.

Seven!

That’s the time

we’ll meet

at seven …

When they finished, they faced each other, holding hands. She was wearing a Pendleton shirt and khakis. Quinn saw where one of the belt loops was distended from the weight of her slide rule. “Take me with you,” she said. Quinn thought that when she wasn’t singing she had a beautiful voice.

“No can do.”

“Why, baby? Prior commitments?”

“That’s the one,” said Quinn. She sighed.

“Well, the song is over—”

“—but the memory lingers on.”

Quinn was away now, sailing across the green, green compound, away from the bug and bat whirling core of light that revealed Janet waving, “Bye, bye…”

“Ta ta,” Quinn said, faking the tone. He was in extremis.

Why did I say that? Is something going on? He expected to come over the crest of the hill to find the moon smeared all over the earth, the color of milk of magnesia but thick as latex, moving and spreading its anarchic power. And he thought, if I could leap into the sky. If I could have ridden that horse skeleton into the sky. If wishes were horses. If all the pieces were a whole. If I could fly into the sky and watch through a spyglass: they’re warring now, now there’s peace, now anarchy, vengeances are loosed, plagues are loosed, flies are loosed and Quinn is away sailing across green into green, his green peeling from its green inside and I must have freedom and it is only that which will do. The swamps breed discontent and therefore bomb all moist places. Wendell Willkie and the clear plastic tears of Mexican virgins implore you to sink giggling beneath consideration until all the beasts of the zodiac raid your poor brain. Remember that help yourself is a novel of please and that if you try too hard you will be seen to the door, your mind belly up and your hat in your hand. Life is a greedy railroad and that’s an end on it. What is the future of man and his religions when scientists in a top-secret laboratory have already constructed the first hydraulic nun? And which came first, the four-minute mile or the three-minute egg? What is the principle of selective bungling? How is it practiced? Quinn could no more answer than he could picture his own unconcern as he sat in this cool woodland listening to the honking and fluting of the unbridled lust of bankers and merchants. It was this, he thought: it was postcoital depression at institutional rates; it was a note from the world of excess; it was the dejected piping of a bourgeois gentilhomme; it was the squeal of the ultima fool, the whimper of a magician with a trick knee; it was the bassoon section of a downhill parade all the way from lower left to the middle distance; men without views, true colors, bulk ambitions and high-speed dreams.

Each time Quinn, a kind of ghoul, sent up one of the rockets, he heard the roar of the horde from the woods toward the lake. By all signs, he was alone in the clearing. The sniveling, honking, fluting and licentious whimpering had stopped. The unmistakable odor of the fluids which excitation brings to the fore had blown away with the breeze of the North Woods and Quinn smelled only that breeze and the agreeable spice of burning rocket fuse. Another went up and showered pistachio green. The roar of the horde followed. Quinn liked this feeling of remote control. Another aloft and this one is … Pock! this one will just be the plain red. (Horde roars.) Now a multicolor followed by the straight exploder that you think leaves black light. A dimmer horde roaring. Quinn lights everything in sight and it is like D-Day. There is no response from the horde.

Quinn circled the high ground, keeping on the far edge of this elevated contour, toward the lake. When he reached the point of its perimeter that was closest to the lake, he could see them below. The illusion was of something under water which made light. You could see a shape of light moving in the trees as through the broken surface of water, and the shape was a marine one, enlarged at one end and tapering like a shark. The light was yellow with a patina of white. It all moved with the muttering of a horde toward the lake bed.

By traveling the downgrading edge of the ridge, Quinn was able to crosscut ahead of them and wait on the hard bed of the lake. He heard them approach now with a steady drone of voice that seemed pitched at some unnerving harmony and was punctuated with the regular tambourine crash of guns and equipment. The nearer they came, the more nervous it made Quinn, and in a moment he was back up on the slope of the ridge watching their progress below. As they came through the last trees at the edge of the lake bed, the broken sheen of lights appeared to be a swarm of fireflies. But when they moved into the open the light solidified into the single slender tapering shape again that undulated gently onto the floor of the lake.

Quinn was filled with horror. He watched their progress. When they reached the far end of the lake, the light closed in upon itself to form a ball and stayed that way for ten minutes throbbing very slightly in the blackness. When it moved off into the trees to become a swarm again and disappear, it left a single still light behind. Quinn headed for it in trepidation.

The expanse of the dry lake seemed endless and the thousands of fissures made his progress slow. As he approached the light, a darker shape like a huge blurred potato stood out beside it. He was hard put to distinguish it though, even standing before it. “Shit fire!” it said unconvincingly. It was Fortescue. He had been tarred and feathered. When Quinn asked, he said the Olives had gotten him. Fortescue sobbed and Quinn stared at him helplessly. The lamp threw a merciless light over him and he was unquestionably out for the duration. He was so heavily covered with tar that his limbs were indistinguishable; and out of the tar protruded a hundred thousand feathers, each with its own blue shadow. Fortescue’s eyes were barbarically fierce spots in the roughly fledged surface. And when he opened his mouth to talk, the unreflecting contrast of feathers made his tongue and the inside of his mouth gleam unnaturally red as though poor Fortescue had been interrupted feeding on a corpse.

“Can you move?” Before he answered, the horde roared out louder than before for a long sustained moment and died away. “Can you walk?”

“No, God damn it, no. Give me a hand though and see if I can stand.” Quinn took his thick roadlike arm and helped him to his feet. He stood in a stoop like a tremendous chicken and fell down again. “They laughed at me!” he bawled.

“Well, you look funny you know—” Fortescue began to pull himself together abruptly.

“Oh, but God damn it, Quinn, I’m going to die, it’s so hot in here. I can’t close my hands. If I blink, my whole scalp moves. I—” He began to cry slightly, then, with a heavy lateral movement, lurched over onto his stomach and sobbed like a child. Quinn felt tears start sympathetically to his own eyes and he laid his hand upon Fortescue’s back. The heavy, feathered surface flexed very slightly from the heaving underneath.

“Did Earl do this to you himself?”

“Yes.” A huge broken sigh expired. “But I don’t blame him. None of this could have been thought up without Stanton.”

“You really blame him for all this—”

“Certainly I do. Here I am crying in front of you. I don’t suppose … I mean you’d never…”

“Not a word.”

“These people have gone haywire tonight.”

“I think so.”

“The world isn’t like this, is it?”

“I think it is.”

“But Quinn, I’m an old man. It isn’t like this.”

“Yes, but I think it is.” By this time, Quinn could see the light of the horde. It moved across the end of the lake toward the river. Once he had made certain that Fortescue would be all right and secure beside the lantern, he headed to intercept them.

At a long clearing in the birches, he found them preparing to duel. They were counting already. Olive moved a step at a time with exact placement of foot while Stanton goose-stepped in mockery. The horde stood back and Quinn crowded in with them where he was assured of what he had already known: lead bullets. Quinn felt a complete and hopeless quietude, as though it were a natural phenomenon. He couldn’t resent what was happening because there was nothing for it, nothing; no flying tackles, nor interferences of authority, nor breakdowns, redemptions or recognitions; no dreams, plasma or miraculous interventions; it was object firing at object, and when that was done, one object would have ceased to operate due to mechanical failure brought about by the penetration of a lead bullet.

At ten, Stanton spun, fired and missed. Quinn saw it. It was deliberate. He stood facing Olive with his chin on his chest, the weapon at his side. Olive held his gun with both hands for steadiness. He had as much time as he wanted and at twenty feet he could explode Stanton’s skull in a shower of meat and bone splinter. Quinn saw that Olive’s face was swollen with minor injuries but his eyes were open and intent. He raised the end of the gun and fired over Stanton’s head. “You bastard!” Stanton roared, as Olive flung the gun into the crowd, running. “Oh, my god, you bastard!” The crowd, now an insane heterogeny of Olive’s gang and the club, rushed around Quinn and past him and into the trees, the lights all around him and the sound of voiceless hurrying. Olive was not far in front of them. He was driving himself into a corner where the steep plateau met the river and they were after him, now that Stanton hadn’t done his work. Quinn kept up and dodged aside when an old white birch cracked and went down onto the sodden ground. He couldn’t see who was leading them and he knew the frontward edge of the horde was well ahead of him. Then they began to pile up in noisy confusion and, deep behind as he was, Quinn realized that they were confronting Earl Olive. Quinn pushed through to where he could see him. He found him, back to the river, transfixed by the beams of all their lights as though he were pierced by them. In his face was a look of transcendent terror and when it was shouted that he was unarmed, they rushed forward. Olive threw himself into the river. The horde rushed down the bank to stay alongside him and kept their lights on his head and the arms that beat the tortuous current around him. Below was a gravel bar and they raced down to it, filing noisily out onto its shallows. Olive floundered helplessly toward them, borne on the fast and gleaming tide. As he neared them, he began to bay that Stanton would make them pay; Stanton wouldn’t let anything happen to him, he bayed abjectly. They caught him at the bar and dragged him to land, all falling upon him, grabbing and punching at him. Quinn saw him go under them, only his feet showing, kicking and flailing the air like a baby’s. Quinn pushed his way in, found Scott striking at Olive with a heavy root. Quinn kicked Scott mightily in the groin and the crowd took no notice when he fell. One of the mercenaries had Olive by the ears and hair and was trying to drag him to his feet when Quinn nailed him and started beating into the crowd with his fists. They made short work of Quinn, and Scott had the pleasure of tying him up.

A minute later, hands tied in front of him, he was being pushed along beside Olive who was slung from a pole by his ankles and wrists. Olive suffered extremely. They had tied him with a striped silk necktie and Quinn had the impression he would be the centerpiece at a banquet. The blue cowboy shirt had pulled out of the top of his pants to reveal an expanse of flaccid white belly and the whole great torso swung from side to side with the motion of the carriers. Olive’s head hung down unexpectedly far as though his neck were too long. He talked brokenly and told Quinn what a letdown this was in his life. He was being treated like a dog. Stanton had treated him like the gent he was by shooting him in a proper duel. Now Quinn knew Stanton had gotten to him. Olive was a believer. He gazed, upside down and ahead, with numb sentimentality and contentment.

They entered the compound, the men and women trudging, the children dancing out ahead with lanterns. They were brought up short. Sitting in the hole where the time capsule had been removed was Stanton. He had set up a tripod-mounted, air-cooled machine gun and he looked set on mayhem. He told them to free Olive, which they did. He and Olive bade goodbye from a distance and Olive leapt crowing into the absolute darkness. As a good measure, they freed Quinn too. Stanton told them to sit down. Anyone who moved, he promised, would be snuffed out. Quinn could see him shaking from here. He was altogether batty now and the machine gun was trained into their midst.

After a couple of hours, they began to fall asleep. Quinn stayed awake for a while thinking that Janey was gone. He could see Stanton, eyes open as though blind, shaking at the grips of the machine gun: the poor man. In a while, Quinn dozed off fitfully. He woke up in the predawn morning and Stanton was still behind the gun like a zombie. He fell asleep again only to wake up a few minutes later to the terrible firing of the gun. Stanton had slumped into the pit and the blazing gun was shuddering with its bursts and explosions of fire. Everyone was bolt upright now as they watched Stanton struggle to train it on them. The belt of ammunition jerked beside the gun and ran into it with terrible slowness. Then Stanton vanished, slumped into the hole again; a long moment later, his hand appeared and hauled on the trigger and the gun raged into the trees over their heads. The belt of ammunition crept, then stopped. There was a long pause; Stanton crawled out of the hole, crazy and confused, and tried to operate the gun. Quinn walked over to him. It was the end.

* * *

The police, five of them, came up the main entrance the next day. Quinn, the only member there who saw nothing to hide or preserve, was cooperative. He answered all questions with an agreeable and efficient air. He watched the cops press around the photograph, making a blue shrine of their bodies. He felt this hermetic, outlandish thing punctured at last, a century of bad air expiring. The publicity and uproar that followed that year produced a decline in Quinn’s business. The feeling in Detroit was that he had sold his own kind down the river.

Item: The following appeared in Judson and Judson, International Real Estate Brokers’ annual:

Gentlemen’s sporting club with a past! Largest private holding in Northern Michigan! 29,000 acres first and second growth pine and many winding miles of trout teeming Pere Marquette River, both banks! See deer, bear, beavers, birds! Reportedly, small basin could be reestablished by construction of dam! Considerable stockpile of hand-adzed timber and period roofing material! A number of buildings provide convention and conference possibilities. Tempting subdivision potential in this water wonderland northwoods vacation paradise. Region beginning to show promising turnover in A-frame sports-chateau sites and holiday farmettes. Ready access via Highway 76 and nearby airfield which handles up to twin-engined craft. Price and brochure on request. Ask for “Club With A Past,” property #1980.

A little thought would have saved the broker’s fee. Stanton bought the Centennial Club the day it was offered.

He generously deeded Quinn’s house to him. They met the following January. Stanton fetched him at the front gate in the cutter between whose restored shafts was a beautiful Morgan gelding, fat as a pullet, and flecked with dark gray in its lighter gray coat. Stanton introduced the stableboy, a cultivated young man in an Icelandic sweater who said he would walk back. Stanton was thinner and Quinn wondered if he himself could have aged so. They rode silently under blankets as the horse picked its way down the path off the plateau and came beneath the ridge that was now a white bluff of snow onto the lake bed. Quinn stole a look at Stanton whose features had clarified impressively under madness and loss of weight. He seemed heroic and at one with his illusions. Stanton threw ripples down the reins and the gelding picked up its stride until the runners hissed and the wind lifted the long winter mane of the horse. Quinn watched him smile up into a sky of no stars whatsoever with a bearing of unspecific mastery. Quinn’s face tightened pleasantly under the cold sting of wind. Stark ridges of pine enclosed their circle of snow. “James, old pal,” Stanton said, “you have outlasted me. Learned persons have expressed doubt that I am ever coming back…” His voice trailed away content.

When they got to the house, the stableboy was somehow waiting for them again with the butler, another keen young man with a clipboard and indeterminate crewcut. This one took their coats impatiently. They passed into the house, the young men sticking close to their elbows. Stanton stopped suddenly in the hallway and said to the two, “Stand back, you bastards, now. I need room to breathe.” They fell away a bit. Stanton started upstairs to change for dinner and the two, hovering under the moose head, watched him ascend. He caught Quinn’s eye with a smile and turned to them again. “Just because none of you can hit the bowl,” he pronounced, “you think everyone should walk barefoot in your pee. I don’t buy it.” He continued up the stairs and the two fluttered into his wake. When they were close, he turned and feinted at them; they fell back and Stanton went up laughing.

Waiting for dinner, Quinn and Janey talked to each other with careful familial heartiness. She had pictures of a visit Stanton had made to Texas the previous year. One showed him standing in front of a parked car with a cloud of alkali dust still hanging in the air behind. The photograph caught him with a wide, blind smile on his face and a wax-paper cone of roses in his hand. The car nudges an adobe barbecue in the sun, miles from the champagne cellars of Waco. Another shows him with Mom and Dad in the hot fog of the mineral spring. They all three wave as if showing written messages on the palms of their hands.

At dinner they had platters of partridge and wild rice, two bottles of cold Traminer. Stanton talked well when he remembered; he never faltered from forgetting but stopped cleanly and waited for Janey to cue him. Afterward, they went downstairs to the gallery. Stanton no longer had his pistols; but he had plywood cutouts that were much the same; and they paced off, turned and said “Bang, bang!” at each other soberly. Then someone invisible upstairs announced Stanton’s bedtime. Quinn went up then too; though it wasn’t until later, in bed and still awake in the big, strangely stilled house, that he felt each of their presences, compromised and happy, each asleep and dreaming, like bees in cells of honey.