Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

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.

Each time Quinn, a kind of ghoul, sent up one of the rockets, he heard the roar of the horde from the woods toward the lake. By all signs, he was alone in the clearing. The sniveling, honking, fluting and licentious whimpering had stopped. The unmistakable odor of the fluids which excitation brings to the fore had blown away with the breeze of the North Woods and Quinn smelled only that breeze and the agreeable spice of burning rocket fuse. Another went up and showered pistachio green. The roar of the horde followed. Quinn liked this feeling of remote control. Another aloft and this one is … Pock! this one will just be the plain red. (Horde roars.) Now a multicolor followed by the straight exploder that you think leaves black light. A dimmer horde roaring. Quinn lights everything in sight and it is like D-Day. There is no response from the horde.