The Sporting Club by Thomas McGuane

Author:Thomas McGuane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

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