The Sporting Club (10 page)

*   *   *

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

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

*   *   *

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

“Boss man!”

“Give me the news.”

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

“What's happening July one?”

“You're coming back…”

“How do you know?”

“Boss man!”

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

“Is Jack in?”

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

“Retired? To where?”

“He mentioned Florida.”

“Florida—”

“That's right.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“But you say Florida—”

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

“Who are you?”

“What do you mean?” He was suspicious.

“What are you doing here?”

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

“Who hired you?”

“Jack Olson!”

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

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

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

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

“Worms.”

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

“Worms? How did you get the worms?”

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

“I want something more specific than that.”

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

“Worms…”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“You bet I do, Earl.”

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

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

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

“Was that … a good location?”

“A bad location.”

“What was wrong with it?”

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

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

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

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

Cautiously, “Who?”

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