The Sporting Club by Thomas McGuane Read Free Book Online Page A

could get to it.
    â€œThe true Quinn!” yelled Stanton in an opening bid, as Quinn entered briskly. “I feel certain that he can tell you.” Five faces turned to the door quizzically. Quinn knew them all right. “Tell how you touched down in that crop-dusting plane and tore up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” Quinn pulled the door shut behind him, perplexed at having to whip something together so soon. Janey leaned in repose on the piano beside Stanton. Quinn wondered what fatality obliged him to continue. The five had moved around him and he addressed himself to them.
    â€œPicture me,” he said, “in my Steerman biplane dusting away, as it were. Suddenly, I touch down and tear up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” This seemed a suitably inane place to stop. Stanton was delighted. One of the five coughed.
    â€œTell them what happened when you returned to the airport many months later,” said Stanton slithering onto the piano. This would be difficult to play.
    â€œMany months later,” Quinn began, ransacking his brain.
    â€œWhen you returned to the airport—” One of the five, Fortescue by name, assisted.
    â€œThat’s right, and the Steerman biplane had been left neglected out in the field. I couldn’t find it. ‘Where’s my Steerman biplane?’ I asked a farmer. ‘Out there,’ he said. ‘Out where?’ ‘Out there in the turnip patch.’” Quinn considered this merely an escape maneuver; but Stanton was much affected. He fell off the piano, for one thing, and could be heard more or less barking from the floor. Quinn went over to the table and made himself a drink. Purely on the basis of Stanton’s response, he awarded himself a certain number of points. He looked around. The five were still standing, not having yet broken the crescent they had formed. Then, two at the right end, Sturtevant and Olds, looked at each other and began to move. This precipitated a general movement among the others who, yes, they were beginning to move now, mostly just turning in their tracks, but there was sign of life here, the play of expression on the faces like shadows on glass; and before long they had become part of the crowd of thirty who talked and leaned into each other’s smoke. Quinn joined them and ingratiated himself by starting up a conversation with Fortescue about his collection of military miniatures, the largest in the country. “… my point being,” Fortescue concluded, “that such quantities of horse are scarcely imaginable at Ypres—” he was talking about a competitors’ collection “—and therefore this fool had made the whole battle implausible to me. I don’t expect perfection. After all, I have displayed hussars with paint bubbles on their chests and artillerymen divided by the seams of sloppy casting. But I find a historical lapse like this abhorrent.” Quinn said that he was putting it mildly.
    Meanwhile, another member named Scott, an obsequious professor to whom the academic life had given an avid taste for the outside world, greeted everyone who came through the screen door—many were entering for the third and fourth time—with the phrase, “Nice to see you.” Quinn’s main fear all along was Stanton and that is why he buried himself in this group. Spengler, the chronicler of the club, was explaining his race against time to finish his account of the club’s first hundred years by the centennial on the Fourth. “Nice to see you,” said Scott, looking past them with his diluted eyes. There were under twenty-five hairs in his moustache. “My account,” said Spengler, “is very thorough and does not quail before realities.”
    â€œNice to see you.”
    â€œWhere have you gotten your information?” Quinn asked.
    â€œLetters and diaries mostly. There was an early account, done around the turn of the