The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

  Someone convinced Stanton to wait until after the time capsule, and the group around him broke up. Everyone began to move toward the flagpole and Fortescue pawed his way through the crowd until he was in front. Quinn, who was no longer the same, skipped alongside him and cried, “Can I dig? Let me dig! I get to dig!” Fortescue stretched out his arms to stop the crowd, fetched a good, ash-handled shovel from the tent and pressed it on him like a rifle, telling him to be his guest. Until now, Quinn had enjoyed their friction but this hostile flattening of the lips he observed now and the closing of wrinkled flesh around diamantine and wicked eyes was something new. Stanton came up, exasperated and happy all at once. “You’re the court digger, is it?” he said. “Well, that’s splendid. Keep the dirty work in the family; and remember this, that you are never so human as when you’re digging a hole.” On close examination, Stanton was quite battered. Most striking was the forefinger of his right hand which was like a radish with swelling. He walked along turning the shovel blade in front of his view, admiring its brightness, the cleanliness of its concave shape, and feeling the murmurous swell of crowd behind him.

  “I saw Olive,” Stanton said.

  “What did Olive say to you?”

  “He threw me out,” Stanton grinned, “for conduct unbecoming a gentleman. He said if I ever returned he would deal with me. I will return tonight at the head of a phalanx of buffoons. See, Olive got the drop on me, for I had become drowsy with my amours. It was pretty spooky too, boy. And I do fear that if it hadn’t been for the dramatically satisfactory pleas of my little piece out there in the bush that Olive would have seen to my ventilation. As it was, he thrashed me with a stick.” Quinn knew instinctively and with resentment that the little piece was Lu. They stopped at the shallow crater. The flagpole lay uprooted, with a ragged circle of concrete clinging to its base. The pole took the light of their lanterns and made a tapering streak outward into the darkness where Olive hid. Quinn stepped in, bending and taking up a handful of sandy loam. “Straight down?” he called.

  “Straight down!” they all answered. He could smell the moist soil and severed roots. He got a sight of Fortescue and bent to his work, stepping on the shovel and slipping the bright blade into the earth; then his hands at the end of the handle, he tipped up the load, slid his left hand to the head of the shovel, called, “All clear?” and threw the load in Fortescue’s face.

  They grappled. Quinn allowed Fortescue to strangle him a little before saying, “I prithee, take thy fingers from my throat for, though I am not splenetive and rash yet have I in me something dangerous!” He threw the hands away, rising up, fomenting in mockturtle rage. Others jumped into the pit to separate them. “Gentlemen—!”

  Quinn continued, “Why, I will fight with him upon this theme until my eyelids no longer wag!” They dragged Fortescue out of the hole, pretending to minister to him.

  “There is no dealing with that Quinn,” said Stanton. “Under his Age of Eisenhower exterior is a mindless beast that will stop at nothing.” In Stanton’s voice was a single dominant tone: victory. Quinn, he believed, was backsliding.

  “And you?” Quinn asked, deep in the misunderstanding stares of the club.

  “The reverse,” Stanton threw off. “A mindless beast with an Age of Eisenhower interior. It makes a disappointing combination.” Quinn began to dig, wondering which of these varieties would admit of sanity. The bright blade scooped through sand and into light gravel and then light clay that let him step up with both feet onto the shovel and sink slowly and cleanly to earth. He grunted at the far end, feeling the powerful flexing of the ash handle in his palms as a heavy wedge of smooth clay lifted from the hole. He worked hard and made a square clean-sided shaft in the ground that went deeper and deeper. He took off his shirt and felt the sweat run off him in rivulets despite the night air. The lanterns were above him in a row like ships’ lights and above the lanterns the faces gazed down with an intense pallor like shamans’ masks. He knew that his muscles were engorged and would be gleaming attractively in their multifold bevelings. The toothless wonder must be up there gumming in lust for this shoveling master man.

  All of them heard the shovel ring out. Quinn felt around with its blade: a hard curved surface like a boulder. He took his time, sighting and sizing. He crouched down in the pit and began to scrabble in the confined space, clawing the dirt out around the object. Stones ran back in, aggravating him, and he worked double time to keep ahead of them, finally getting his hands underneath and slowly heaving its weight. His chin strained upward against the tendons of his neck and his navel felt as though it were dilating and would momentarily extrude forty feet of intestine. He heaved the thing out and lights played over its surface. It was a boulder. Quinn waited to catch his breath. He listened for words of sympathy but heard only the waiting silence of the club above him. He touched the shovel to the bottom again, the delicate sacklike bottom any hole has, pushed through it a little with his foot and found the time capsule resting as it had for one century. It was light, a small strongbox, and he climbed out of the hole carrying it, examining it: it was oblong with something very much like asphalt or tar covering it. A lock, thick with verdigris, hung from an ornate hasp. “The way I look at it—” Fortescue was heard to begin, “somebody—” Quinn moved into the light and the people moved with him. “The way I—”

  “Who’s got the key?” Quinn asked. Everyone laughed and Quinn did too, as though he had been joking. He was convinced enough of what the club had always prated about its continuity to think that the key would have been handed on. He set the box on its end and whanged the lock off with the shovel. “My own view would be—” Fortescue pressed. “Oh.” He finished, seeing Quinn open it slowly as the lid lifted stiffly on its hinges. The inside of the box was japanned metal. A large rolled sheet of some paper or parchment comprised its sole contents. This was tied about with ribbon that rubbed away to dust under Quinn’s finger. He unrolled what proved to be a huge photograph and pinned its corners with stones and joined the press of heads bent beneath the naphtha lantern and studied it as long as his stunned brain would permit and sat back with a gasp. The others were erect, out of the light. All the sounds of the night stood out around their silence. Stanton’s voice emerged from behind, rigorously suppressed but thick with joy. “Don’t let a little thing like this spoil our party, er, ON WITH THE GIZMOS!”

  Quinn had to admit, and not unruefully, that Stanton had the goods on them. The picture was so fantastic, yet so personal a jest from a century ago that suddenly the place did seem to have history, a history that would require denial if these people were to go on in the old way. Surely the question on top of the photograph blaring in gold leaf Dearest Children of the Twentieth Century, Do You Take Such Pleasures as Your Ancestors? could not be answered so forthrightly as it was asked. Surely nothing they could say or do now would flail the eye as this rickety nineteenth century light with which the photographer had recorded so outlandish a sexual circus at full progress. The artifice of obvious poses hardly tempered the fact that every postural permutation and every phase of the spectrum of perversion from fellatio and cunnilingus to sodomy was portrayed. The picture was a rash of the most blatant buggery, among other things, with one distinguished-looking gentleman assaulting a patient Irish setter. Laced through the picture, the younger people including Quinn’s great-grandmother, copulated shyly or abashedly wagged and spread. Exhibitionists and masturbators crowded forward without concealing the Bug House whose screens obscured human contents and made of them vague and suggestive blobs. If anything, the picture had retained a bucolic quality of leaf-dappling light upon mound after mound of gently contorted flesh. Only the bits of mockingly retained clothing—one sodomist wore a derby—reminded you that this was the last century; that and the strange and precise light. Each vignette, if the whole could be so divided, was signed in the unique hands of that era. Quinn wondered what impulse had united these people now scattered through various respectable graveyards in so pr
eposterous an act. But it was impossible to make an imaginary reconstruction. The fact of the photograph and the world it revealed now held an adamant reality that was at once as radiant and cloudy as myth.

  They walked as penitents, each, it is certain, with the same picture in mind. Stanton stepped onto the dais. The faithful gathered crosslegged before him. Stanton had the photograph. “Charles,” he said, turning into the dark behind him. “Charles, what about a gizmo or two?” A half-dozen rockets streamed up behind him and burst upon the sky, their dream colors rinsing down the night in fading pastel tracks. “Thank you, Charles, for your rockets, for your gizmos and for just being you.”

  “Go to hell, Stanton,” he said quietly and urbanely. “would you do that?”

  “I appreciate your suggestions and will try my uttermost to follow them. Now find yourself a place in the peanut gallery and try to relax. This is no clambake. You are among friends who worship the air you walk on.” A snore of ugly laughter arose as Murray sat down. Quinn picked up a handful of the loose garbage that decorated the ground and slung it at Stanton. “Go back where you came from!” he heckled. “It’s a bum act!”

  “Okay, old pal,” said Stanton softly, then went on with his address. “My dearly beloved in Christ, I don’t mean to rub anyone’s nose in what should be thrust from us in indignation; but I have before me a filthy, filthy, foul and lubricious photograph which I am only too afraid throws a rather startling light on the history of this old and once venerable club—”

  Fortescue: “It’s a fraud and a lie!” Fortescue had a lot riding on this. He yelled as though he would go for broke. “A cheat! A chee-e-et!”

  Stanton asked, “Well? Boys and girls? Is it? A cheat?” Perplexity, negative murmurs answered him. Quinn believed the photograph was genuine. “The answer is, it is not a cheat. No, it is, I’m afraid, something else again. Whew! It’s a bit hard to get it into my head that this swinish pack of human refuse from which we all descend has put an end to our little organization by remote control. The end, the end. Finished. Extinction as in dinosaurs, top hats, the great auk—”

  “Prove it, you bugger!” snapped the wife of a former Secretary of Defense.

  “—the Carolina parakeet, the Everglades kite, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the narwhal. Kiddies, the experiment fails. A hundred years trying to make a single silk purse out of a few hundred sows’ ears went for nothing. My dearly beloved in Yazoo, who were we trying to kid?” Stanton continued to speak on the dais but now inaudible as though he were speaking to himself as he might well have been. He murmured away about its being a barnyard and of his being no better than a forlorn peahen divvying up the chickenfeed with the rest of the animals. All around him the club was somehow at bay, though Quinn could see they wouldn’t listen to Stanton much longer. Stanton implored them to join their country in praying for the bomb it so richly deserved and insisted that vaporization was no barrier in the empire of love, the shining city. “Cherish my molecules as myself,” he demanded; rather seriously off his rocker, Quinn thought. “I intend to be striding the heavenly blast under the reliable auspices of the great Numero Uno in the sky by six A.M. Greenwich time.”

  Fortescue gained the dais saying they had had a snootful of speaking in tongues. His face was elongated with rage, the thin Puritan lips like the slit of a razor. “Need I remind you,” he intoned soberly, “that we are at war?” A woeful Andean groan passed over the crowd. No one moved. The hot night seemed to have produced a languor and the meridional temperament had otherwise made gains. The fact was that the group lay around fondling one another, absently as though the photograph had shown them historical duties and an immediate future. Stanton and Fortescue were the only warriors in camp; Quinn was an outsider of some kind; detumescence alone made him that.

  Fortescue’s eyes swam with light as they welled with tears. “I intend to go, with you—” he paused a very long time and looked around him, as perfectly tincan a little demagogue as possible “—or without you. And I pray God—” another infuriating pause “—that there may be men among you.” He swiveled, eyes spilling, off the platform, hitched his rifle onto his shoulder and headed into the darkness. Quinn, who thought himself unaffected, wanted to give him the finger. “Come on chirruns,” implored Stanton. “Close de ranks!” They leered at him. Suddenly, he was among them, wading into the first row. “By the light of burning martyrs,” he cried, “let’s make our cause live!” Then they began to stir and were in their places, a single tissue, only a moment longer. It broke: Scott’s wife arose and bolted only to be tackled by an old gentleman who bit her leg while she squealed and the antiquarian himself thrashed the both of them with a switch, giggling and rubbing himself. “We’re coming!” they cried. “We’ll join you! We’ll go anywhere! The whites of their eyes and our flag was still there.” Mere dissembling promises, hardly the thing for an army. They drifted away like Indians into the darkness, squealing and trumpeting. Quinn watched smugly, only a short time before feeling his irony melt off its stick and splatter at his feet: he got up and began to hunt his friend from the tent. Stanton had Janey by the arm and was trying to take her on the manhunt. “Vernor,” she repeated giddily, “I’m silly putty in your hands.” Quinn went hopefully to the tent, then stopped. It sounded like a hog pen; but so fierce and authentic that he for a moment didn’t dare approach; when he did, he went forward to see what manner of heroes were these who braved such a maniacal darkness. From the doorway, the bodies seemed to form a writhing false floor amid which it was impossible to isolate individuals. But near the door, Charles Murray and Janet Fortescue rolled about as Janet yelled, “Make it stand! Make it stand up!” Murray spotted Quinn and took off after him. This was exactly the thing to snap Quinn’s overtasked mind and he ran for his life. He looked over his shoulder and saw Murray gaining on him with a crazy wind-milling of limbs and giddy squealing. Quinn whirled at bay, then caught him by the shirt and held him off. “Charles! Cut it out!” Murray’s lips trumpeted toward Quinn. He was vamping him.

  “I kees you all ovair!”

  Quinn cuffed him sharply but not unkindly and said there would be no action. “What’s the use?” said Murray, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I admit your opportunities look reduced. But maybe if you moved around in the dark…”

  “Yes, all right. I wonder if you could look after Janet.”

  “I’ll try. If I can’t, I’ll find someone.” Quinn thought of the Irish setter.

  “Appreciate it. Welp, I better get started.” Quinn watched him slip away, already regaining his hysterical bounce as he disappeared, leaving Quinn alone in his own humming lull wondering what had happened not only to this crowd of trusty bourgeoises but to himself that he could go back for seconds on the toothless wonder or a stride or two later advise Murray to try to knock something off in the dark. “Golly,” he thought, “the moral dubiousness of it!”

  He completely forgot Janet Fortescue until he crossed back into the lighted center of the compound and saw her on the dais with a megaphone singing.

  Goan a take

  a sen a men

  ull jerny,

  Goan a take

  a trip for love.

  Such a grotesquery, normally tolerable or amusing to him, tonight was a crucifixion. A moment later, he was beside her taking choruses. Cheek to cheek, they barked their lyrics at the chromium ring on the small end of the megaphone.

  Seven!

  That’s the time

  we’ll meet

  at seven …

  When they finished, they faced each other, holding hands. She was wearing a Pendleton shirt and khakis. Quinn saw where one of the belt loops was distended from the weight of her slide rule. “Take me with you,” she said. Quinn thought that when she wasn’t singing she had a beautiful voice.

  “No can do.”

  “Why, baby? Prior commitments?”

  “That’s the one,” said Quinn. She sighed.

  “Well, the song
is over—”

  “—but the memory lingers on.”

  Quinn was away now, sailing across the green, green compound, away from the bug and bat whirling core of light that revealed Janet waving, “Bye, bye…”

  “Ta ta,” Quinn said, faking the tone. He was in extremis.

  Why did I say that? Is something going on? He expected to come over the crest of the hill to find the moon smeared all over the earth, the color of milk of magnesia but thick as latex, moving and spreading its anarchic power. And he thought, if I could leap into the sky. If I could have ridden that horse skeleton into the sky. If wishes were horses. If all the pieces were a whole. If I could fly into the sky and watch through a spyglass: they’re warring now, now there’s peace, now anarchy, vengeances are loosed, plagues are loosed, flies are loosed and Quinn is away sailing across green into green, his green peeling from its green inside and I must have freedom and it is only that which will do. The swamps breed discontent and therefore bomb all moist places. Wendell Willkie and the clear plastic tears of Mexican virgins implore you to sink giggling beneath consideration until all the beasts of the zodiac raid your poor brain. Remember that help yourself is a novel of please and that if you try too hard you will be seen to the door, your mind belly up and your hat in your hand. Life is a greedy railroad and that’s an end on it. What is the future of man and his religions when scientists in a top-secret laboratory have already constructed the first hydraulic nun? And which came first, the four-minute mile or the three-minute egg? What is the principle of selective bungling? How is it practiced? Quinn could no more answer than he could picture his own unconcern as he sat in this cool woodland listening to the honking and fluting of the unbridled lust of bankers and merchants. It was this, he thought: it was postcoital depression at institutional rates; it was a note from the world of excess; it was the dejected piping of a bourgeois gentilhomme; it was the squeal of the ultima fool, the whimper of a magician with a trick knee; it was the bassoon section of a downhill parade all the way from lower left to the middle distance; men without views, true colors, bulk ambitions and high-speed dreams.