A Dwindling Membership

I can still see Wendiger's shining white teeth laughing above his pink polo, his powder blue sweater tossed over his shoulders nearly slipping off as we laughed. Those were the good old days, when we had really come up with something new.

Oh we laughed! Champagne laughter, such as I never experience these dreary days.

Perhaps never so hard as at the dour faces of the police, the State's Attorney, and even our own lawyers' faces when they realized what we were going to get away with...  

There were hundreds of us, simply crowds...  Twee Charlie McGee, with his hole in one on the ninth and his garrote, clean as a whistle despite his claimed 35 victims.  And there was The Gupper, with his imitation of his uncle Tutwiler that had us in tears and his and his knife dances  that had us in gales of laughter (or choking on our own fluids, depending where we sat).   Most of all there was Wendiger, beautiful of eye, flashing of teeth, manly of brow and a true genius of the butterfly blade.  Him I miss most of all.

Oh, the grounds of the club: simply outrageous. And full of so many nooks and crannies people would simply seem to appear next to you out of the air!! And they would laugh, and you would laugh, and the air felt like champagne as the knife whistled and the cranberry blood  arced in the light...  

It always seemed to be that perfect gloaming glow there, on the links. It all seems to blend together into impossible frivolity and joy, montages of memories cycle through my head: of laughter, tan faces, blond hair, gouting arteries, tennis whites, ballroom dancing into the early hours... Endless champagne, endless last gasps.

A murder club! Gosh I'm laughing now thinking how we got away with it... How we proved how much we wanted wanted- needed - each other. 

But all fun and youth fades with time, and ours was not a club that wallowed. It was not two years before the club was down to Wendiger and me, playing the hook of the seventeenth, laughing about God knows what as my knife flashed in between his ribs, time and again.  

Oh I can't talk about it any more, or I'll never stop laughing!