The Sporting Club (20 page)

“How about lending a hand for a change,” Fortescue said to Quinn, indicating the antic Murray.

“Right you are,” Quinn said, not moving but winking most agreeably. Quinn went into the tent to get away from the fun. The first thing he noticed were the shapes that the lights threw on the tent from outside, distorted human shapes that moved at unnatural speed, appeared as recognizable silhouettes, then burst out of their forms to blacken the whole end of the improvised tent. Under the canvas ledge, reading a magazine, was the handsome little mother who had caused Quinn to fall down so foolishly at the beach. He wandered toward her as though on a retracting tether, as though he needn't even move his feet. She put the magazine down and smiled first on one side and then on the other. When he spoke, his voice came from the past. “Nice to see you,” he said, after Scott. She wouldn't pretend to speak. She smiled now and then arbitrarily and had very white teeth, very white. “I've been thinking about you ever since,” Quinn said. He sat down and began to poke and fuss around experimentally. Half an hour later, giddy with foreplay, he thinks, Oh, my god, my god, oh, my god. Can they see me? Quinn looked around to the entire open front of the tent. Oh, my god, I know they could if they wanted to and I don't care I'm going at it anyway and isn't she nice. He could see the line of the bathing suit that had confined his view at the beach while her child beat the sand with its little shovel. My god, I am going to score right out of the blue, I am I tell you. Spengler, someone, keep them distracted, tell them this proves it, the West is not declining, or does this prove it is; but give them absolutely any theory that will distract them and I will score if you do; keep them mindful of our country's origins. The rockets' red glare. Let them have it. Quinn worked toward the last buttons one-handed; the other did its rooting with an especially scurvy lewdness; she rested on her elbows and the breasts slipped to the sides, then she let down on her back. In a minute I'll be at it like some hyperthyroid mongoose. She hooked a forefinger in the corner of her pretty mouth, her face rosy with the strange light, the monster show still sweeping over the canvas from outside. Isn't she lovely. Like some precocious baby, my valentine goo goo. He began to thrash and struggle violently with his own clothes like a pickerel in a bucket. Get these god damned duds off without losing the old momentum. Keep it up someone out there but I don't care if you don't. Nothing is to come between me and my febrile plans. Now shall I introduce myself? She doesn't smell as bad as some of these birds. The bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. There: look at me, naked and glorious, God is a good god in his fashion. That's it, take the little devil, he's yours. The forefinger still in the mouth. Then she puts the thumb in the other corner and neatly collapses her face by removing a surprising set of dentures. Ohmygod! Her chin is under that nose. That face is trying to smile. That face thinks this is funny. I don't care I don't care. Put a bag and remember the flesh of this flesh. Presently she accommodates him, as a wild Cucaracha howls outside on the loudspeaker. She stares listlessly at a small spot on the canvas. Quinn lost no time. As he did so, he heard a cry, “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” then perceived waggish Stanton, winking, taking a chorus of La Cucaracha and doing an expert Samba in the entranceway. Quinn, expended, could hardly go on. He was now irritable and—he faced up to it—doing little more than lurching. “Keep it upp,” she gummed impassively. Quinn knew that people had been watching by now and he was upset. “They've seen my ass!” he whispered harshly.

“I don't care I don't care. Keep it upp.”

“But I can't get going!” He was now outright cranky. She looked at him. Her eye, grave and considerable in its fixity, caught his: venom. She got up and tipped him over.

“Some gwatitude!”

She began to dress, Quinn too. Outside Stanton had begun haranguing informally. Quinn went to the entrance, then turned back. “Why did you let me walk in like that and…” Her jaw worked as she sorted out her clothes. She didn't bother to look up at his struggle for words. The teeth beside her seemed to have a bleak life of their own and rested on the ground in mechanical hilarity.

“What'th the diff, anyway?”

“A big difference to me!”

“Aw, poopoo, you want to be loffed. Ith that it?”

“Yes!” he said indignantly. When she didn't actually have her chin pressed under her nose, she managed to retain a woebegone beauty, as if an aging of her former, toothed self. “I want just that.” Quinn got up without a word and went outside. Something was delaying Stanton. Quinn could see Janey nearby, aloof, and hauntingly disconnected from the heated talk around her. Stanton was disagreeing about something and as Quinn wandered toward him, he saw the young woman he had just left talking gaily with a companion and pointing at him. The extinction of decency. She hadn't troubled to replace her teeth. Even from here Quinn noted the way her slack lips tugged around her mobile tongue when she talked. Stanton was now quarreling behind him and he wanted to avoid it. In the good warm night the sounds of other fireworks from afar were like war: towns going under, divisions, heavy stuff being moved. Before him the tent heaped up white in the light like meringue. Was this really so bad? He felt very even right now and did not believe in decline. He attributed the feeling to having been able to take his pleasure like an animal. That face he didn't want to see gazing at a spot upon the canvas, the dewy, girlish flesh presented as foursquare as a billboard: just fine, just what was required to keep the spirit intact.

Janet Fortescue walked past, giving him a little wave. She was too heavy in the leg, almost grossly so, and sought to counter it by affecting a startling lightness of head and torso, delicate, floating gestures, gay tossings of the head. It was a little like movies of man's first hapless attempts at flight when the sodden earth and its gravity were shown to dominate the frailest constructs of wood and lacquered cloth. Her hands fluttered an abandoned greeting to Murray as he labored over a rocket trough; she ran past him like a rhino. He took off after her on wild flapping feet.

“Come on,” Fortescue said, “you've got to be good for something. Talk Stanton into letting us dig up the time capsule before he makes his speech.” Quinn marveled at the power and leverage Stanton had acquired.

“I can't talk him into anything.”

“What
can
you do? What can you do?”

“Beastly little. My proudest accomplishment is of being no use to you.” Fortescue ambled away, organizing, saying,
“The dead weight I have known!”

Dilemmas: Quinn was bored with marshaling and being marshaled; it was how he made his living. For the time being, he preferred, as a spectator, fixed ideas and compulsion: they were picturesque. Stanton's playing every man for a fool was, right now, fine with Quinn. And this was just the situation for him to perform freely in. The usual rules seemed to have expired. Except for a few holdouts, mostly the kind of men who get more and more dolled up the more uncivilized things become and who now stood around the fire sipping from Martini glasses in spurious gentility, except for these, it could have been the Bronze Age.

On the other hand, maybe it would be exactly this that would constrain Stanton. Heretofore he had relied heavily on the expectations of others for his effects. And when he didn't find them, he could become dangerously ill-humored. Quitting the only job he had ever had, for example, he had relieved himself in a potted plant in the crowded executives' lounge. To his great amusement and gratification, many looked with horror at him over their coffee cups. Then his boss, in destructive civility, called from his own crowded table, “Mine's bigger than yours, Vernor!” And Stanton went unexpectedly surly and had to be turned out by the police. Since he owned the company, no charges were pressed. Was something of this obtaining now? The closer the club moved toward a state of which he would have been expected to approve, the more humorless he became in his stunts. But, from what Janey had to say, the process had begun much earlier.

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, “
some
body—” 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!”