Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

“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.