Slowly, like a cortege, the vehicles pulled out of the clubhouse driveway in a line and departed. Jordan stood by his car and watched them go over the hill and down, until they had disappeared from sight. Finally, he turned and, startled, saw that the manager of the club, Russell Kendall, was standing next to him.
“Oh, hello, Kendall,” he said.
“Mr. Groves, you should leave now.”
“So you remember my name after all.”
“Yes. And I know all about last night. You and your airplane at the Second Lake. You are not welcome here, sir. You should leave at once.”
“I should leave at once, eh?” He could hear his blood roaring in his ears and knew that trouble was coming. “Well, you know, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to leave yet. I’ve got my two little boys here, and I was thinking of showing them this grand historic structure and taking a good look at it myself. I’ve never been up here before. I might want to become a member someday, you know.” He swung open the rear door of his car and said to his sons, “C’mon out, boys. We’re going to take the tour.”
The boys, sensing something wrong in their father’s voice, hesitated. The dogs, Dayga and Gogan, did not. They scrambled over the boys’ laps, leaped from the car, and happily took off across the broad lawn. Like hounds in wild pursuit of a fox, they galloped in ever widening, intersecting loops through flower beds, across the manicured bowling green, and onto the adjacent eighth fairway of the golf course, where last night half the town had sat on the grass waiting to watch the fireworks when Vanessa flew Jordan’s airplane across the night sky above and aimed it at Sentinel Mountain and Goliath.
Kendall shouted at Jordan, “Call those dogs! We can’t have unleashed dogs!”
Jordan gazed at the sky, as if half expecting to see his airplane return. What a pretty sight it must have been from here, he thought. He wished he could keep thinking about that and could ignore what was happening here. He wished he could somehow avoid what he knew was about to happen.
“Mr. Groves, call those dogs!”
“Daddy, we’ll get them,” Bear said and got out of the car. He called, “C’mon, Wolf!” and his younger brother followed, and the two boys ran up the slope of the fairway after the dogs. A party of golfers waved angrily at the dogs and the boys and shouted at them and sent their caddies loping over the grassy bluffs after them, which only kept the dogs happily running in more elaborate and widening circles. On the veranda a half dozen of the clubhouse staff — waiters and the two desk clerks — had stepped outside to see what was happening, several with barely concealed smiles on their faces, cheered by the slightest sign of disorder. A groundsman came around from the rear of the building, stopped, folded his arms, and took in the scene.
Jordan recognized most of the crew — local folks. Friends of his, neighbors. And they recognized him. It was the artist, Jordan Groves, from over in Petersburg in a row with Mr. Kendall. They liked the sight of the artist towering over the manager, seeming cool and calm and apparently unfazed by the little man’s rage. They were used to Kendall’s tirades. The artist they believed was a good man and meant well. But he was a troublemaker and didn’t seem to be aware of it. They hoped he wasn’t trying to organize some kind of workers’ union again, not here at the Tamarack club, like he did a year ago at the paper mill in Tamarack Forks. It was Roosevelt’s Wagner Act that had given him the idea that it was legal. Two months later the mill closed its doors and moved to one of those states down South. The Tamarack Club was practically the only private employer left in the region, and if you got hired here for the summer — despite the low wages, the long hours, and the rough treatment by the members and management — you counted yourself lucky. Except for the eight weeks of July and August when the Club was open, most people in town, unless they were able to hook on to one of the WPA projects or the Civilian Conservation Corps, stayed unemployed year-round and, as much as you could in this climate, lived off the land.
Kendall turned to his staff and ordered them to catch those damned dogs, and a pair of busboys and a waiter obeyed, jogging across the lawn and onto the golf course. Then, a moment later, Jordan’s sons came over the rise, each boy leading a dog by its collar, with the three club employees and the golfers’ caddies trooping along behind. The boys led the dogs to the car, opened the door on the far side and put them into it, and got in themselves.
Jordan, still standing a few feet from the manager, put a feeble smile on his face and tried to appear amused by the whole thing. But he was not amused. He was very angry. He could not quite say yet what had angered him, however. Not Vanessa, certainly. And not the dogs. And not even Kendall, who was only doing his job, enforcing the rules of the Reserve.
“If you don’t leave the grounds at once,” Kendall said to Jordan, “I’ll have you physically restrained. I’ll have you arrested.”
“For what? I’m not doing anything illegal.”
“For trespassing!”
Jordan leaned in on him. “I’m not sure you can have me physically restrained. Not you, certainly, and not these fellows here, whom I know. These men are friends of mine. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you somehow manage to have me restrained. Then you’d be holding me against my will, and I’d hardly be guilty of trespassing. No, I’ll leave in my own good time.”
Kendall turned to the waiters and the groundsman, who stood a few feet behind him, listening. They were unsure about what was expected of them. They were only waiters and a groundsman, after all, not security officers or bouncers. “Put him in his car,” Kendall ordered. “I’m going inside to call the sheriff.” He turned and stalked up the wide veranda steps and disappeared into the clubhouse, leaving four men and a teenage boy to face Jordan Groves, who gave no sign of moving.
The groundsman, Murray Bigelow, said, “Prob’ly oughta do like he says, Groves. We got nothing against you, but…” He shrugged helplessly and shoved his hands into his pockets and looked away, as if embarrassed. Bigelow was a ruddy, ex-lumberjack in his fifties who had worked all his life for the Brown Paper Company. Three years ago the company had sold most of its eastern Adirondack holdings to the Reserve, and Bigelow had come in from the woods and gone to work for the Club.
“When Kendall goes off like that, he makes it hell for the rest of us, Jordan,” a second man, Buddy Eastman, said. He was one of the waiters and had once been a plumber and five years ago had helped the artist put in his well. “Do us a favor and go home.”
“Fellows, there’s no way I’m going to let Kendall or anyone else talk to me that way.”
“That’s just how he is,” Eastman said. “He talks to everyone that way.”
“I doubt it,” the artist said. “Look, if out of ignorance I broke one of his Club rules by landing my plane on his goddamn lake water, or my dogs got loose and ran across his goddamn golf course, then I’ll say sorry and pay the fine or whatever. But that’s it. It doesn’t give him the right to talk to me like I’m a bum and put me off the place. You agree with that?”
“Yeah, I suppose I do. But, hell, Jordan, give us a break here,” Eastman said.
The artist leaned back against the fender of his car and folded his arms across his chest. A number of members and guests had gathered on the veranda to watch, and more were coming from the dining room and from the tennis courts as word of the quarrel spread.
Inside the car, Bear moved close to the open window and said, “Papa, can we go now?”
“In a few minutes. I’ve got to settle something first.”
“Please, Papa?”
“In a few minutes, I said.”
Kendall came back out of the clubhouse and stood glowering at the top of the steps. “You men!” he called to them. “I told you men to put him in his car!”