Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

“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!”

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 preposterous 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.”