The Sporting Club (21 page)

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.”

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.

Quinn circled the high ground, keeping on the far edge of this elevated contour, toward the lake. When he reached the point of its perimeter that was closest to the lake, he could see them below. The illusion was of something under water which made light. You could see a shape of light moving in the trees as through the broken surface of water, and the shape was a marine one, enlarged at one end and tapering like a shark. The light was yellow with a patina of white. It all moved with the muttering of a horde toward the lake bed.

By traveling the downgrading edge of the ridge, Quinn was able to crosscut ahead of them and wait on the hard bed of the lake. He heard them approach now with a steady drone of voice that seemed pitched at some unnerving harmony and was punctuated with the regular tambourine crash of guns and equipment. The nearer they came, the more nervous it made Quinn, and in a moment he was back up on the slope of the ridge watching their progress below. As they came through the last trees at the edge of the lake bed, the broken sheen of lights appeared to be a swarm of fireflies. But when they moved into the open the light solidified into the single slender tapering shape again that undulated gently onto the floor of the lake.