Night Gallery 1 (12 page)

Insane, Pierce thought. Stark, raving, stating mad. Non compos mentis. No wonder Archie, Jr., remained silent. You don't remonstrate against a madness that sees singular virtue in killing. Pierce felt sympathy for the boy. His look must have showed it, because Dittman studied him for a long moment, shaking his head back and forth.

"Mr. Pierce," Dittman said, "the elemental eludes you, doesn't it? The fact that my patron saint happens to be firearms—this is incomprehensible, isn't it?"

"It's pretty Goddamn strange," Pierce retorted. The son could walk around tiptoe and in silent agony. This wouldn't be one of his
own
requirements. "You have just finished telling me, Colonel, that unless your son shoots a deer, you'll wipe him out. You'll take what is rightfully his and flush it down a drain someplace. The most charitable surmise I can come up with, Colonel, is that you're eccentric. But in most courts of law, I think that would be pretty damned good grounds for commitment."

Colonel Dittman reached across and tapped Pierce with a forefinger. "I'll tell you now," he said, "what I've told my son on many occasions. This world—from pole to pole is a jungle. It's inhabited by various species of beasts, and one of them happens to be man. He has only one honest-to-God function—and that is to survive. There is no morality, no law, no

imposed manmade dogma that should be allowed to get in the way of that survival. That he survives is the only morality there is. To survive he must be superior. And the only way he can prove that superiority is to be able to put to death any other species that tries to share his living space."

Pierce looked at the animal heads—the lion, the baboon, the gazelle—and they looked back to him with the counterfeit fury of their glass eyes. Those poor, fur-covered, horned, growling, roaring, charging, dumb beasts! They had to go get born in Africa. The Congo. The rain forests. The jungles. They had encroached on Colonel Dittman's eminent domain, and from then on, Pierce thought, those decapitated bastards would roar and charge no more. Pierce's instincts then were to leave it at that; maybe just to walk quietly out of the room and find his bedroom and go to sleep, and then return to Boston in the morning. Then, with his father, he could draw up a court order, and this fanatic in the smoking jacket could be safely ensconced in a rubber room sufficiently far away from his mounted trophies, so that he might ultimately forget his fixation that the proof of superiority lay in cordite and trigger housings.

But it was as if Dittman anticipated the thought. "I'll leave you now," he said to Pierce. "Have a little chat with my son. It'll be like discoursing with a baby blanket, but you may be able to extract a couple of his more heartrending philosophies."

Again silence. Again the crackling logs on the fire. Archie, Jr., walked over to the fireplace and again looked into the flames. He picked up a poker and manipulated the logs, causing a new sheet of fire to rise up between them. He was conscious of Pierce staring at him, and finally turned toward him. "You weren't prepared for anything like this, were you, Mr. Pierce?"

It took a moment for Pierce to speak. "Let me put it this way," he said finally. "I don't think what's needed here is a lawyer. I think a battery of psychiatrists would have their Goddamned work cut out for them."

"That's kind of funny," Archie, Jr., said.

"What is?" Pierce asked, thinking to himself that if there was any minute fragmentary piece of humor floating around there, he'd like to throw a net on it.

"Psychiatrists. I've been to one. My senior year at school I went three times a week."

"Waste of time. Waste of money. It's your father—-"

"My father doesn't believe in psychiatrists."

"I believe you. His idea of a head-shrinker is very likely a pickling process practiced by pygmies with horns through their noses. Now, look, Archie—"

Archie, Jr., put the poker back into its stand. He returned to his seat. His walk, Pierce noted, was boneless. Jointless. Six feet of ganglion and skin; taut, thin, tightly stretched skin. He stood near Pierce. His angle to the fire highlighted the side of his face. There was a thin white scar that extended from the temple to the hairline.

"Whatever else he is"—the boy's voice was soft—"he's not sick. It doesn't make any difference whether or not he believes in psychiatrists. He'll never need one."

Pierce smiled his disbelief. "But you do, huh?"

The boy didn't smile back. "Yeah, Mr. Pierce," he said, "I need one. I'm the sick one."

He looked down at the floor. He was standing on a coarse buffalo hide. Pierce hadn't even noticed it before. But it fit. Death on the walls. Instruments of death across the room, all properly tagged in their glass receptacles. And death on the floor. Every damned thing in the room related to death.

"I am sick, you know, Mr. Pierce."

"No, I don't know that at all."

"If I'm not sick, why do I just stand here and let him castrate me?"

"You won't have to let him do that for much longer. In a couple of weeks you'll be able to pack your bags and move out to the other end of the earth if you want."

Archie, Jr., made a sound like a low laugh. He sat down. "I could simplify all this if I wanted to. I could just go out with him tomorrow morning and kill the deer. That's all it would take."

"It doesn't take
that,
" Pierce said. "You don't have to kill a deer, swat a fly, or step on an ant. You don't have to do
anything.
As a matter of fact, all you have to do is sign your name. And by tomorrow, at lunchtime, I can get a court order in here impounding the trust. My dad's law firm could be named trustee, or a bank—"

"He'd get back at me for that."

"How?" Pierce asked. "There isn't a damned thing he could do about it."

"You don't think so? There isn't a place on earth I could go where he wouldn't follow me. And you know something else, Mr. Pierce? He'd enjoy it. That's what he likes best—stalking. That's his pleasure. To hunt something down. You give him a gun and a scent of the victim—that's the one thing on earth that makes him happy."

Archie, Jr., reached for his brandy glass and drained its contents. "You ought to see his face when he squeezes a trigger. You ought to look at him when his bullet hits home. It's like . . . like an orgasm. It's the purest passion any human being can feel." He turned to look at the flames. "And I'll tell you something else," he said. "He's the twentieth-century man. A predator. And he's right that I'm the minority. I think most human beings would love to kill if they had the chance. I think the whole bloody earth would be a hunting preserve if it could be arranged that way."

"Wrong," said Pierce, suddenly feeling argumentative. "Oh God but you're wrong." Then he stopped, shook his head, and smiled. This colloquy was almost as bizarre as the situation. There he sat arguing abstractions, as if suddenly he was the public defender of predatory man. The animal heads above him were like a jury, listening with silent intensity. "I don't think you can generalize as to man's evil, Archie. He does too much good."

Archie, Jr., smiled. "Sure he does." He held up the brandy glass, turning it around in his fingers. "He gives at the office. Small spasms of contribution." He put the glass down and rose to his feet. "What should I do tomorrow, Mr. Pierce?" he asked. "Shall I knock off a deer and make him happy? Reinstate myself into the company of men? He's really not asking a helluva lot. Just sight along a little old barrel and squeeze on a little old trigger and put a bullet into a little old deer." He turned to look at the animal heads. Their fixed glass eyes seemed to look back at him.

A convocation of victims, Pierce thought. Some mounted, and one standing—but all victims. The wild ones shot to death—the pathetic-looking one on two legs, twisted and pulled out of joint by twenty-one years of intimidation and fear.

Pierce took a deep breath. "I'm going to bed, Archie," he said. "Tomorrow morning you tell me what you want me to do." He turned toward the door.

"Mr. Pierce." Archie Jr.'s voice stopped him. "What would you do?"

Pierce looked at him, halfway to the door. "What would I do?"

Archie, Jr., nodded. "Would you kill a deer for two and a half million dollars?"

Pierce actually found himself weighing the proposition. Two and a half million dollars. Enough money to saw away the umbilical and get the hell out of there, far away from the maniac in the smoking jacket. Incredibly enough, he found himself nodding. "I suppose I would," he said. "I probably would. I'd kill his damned deer, and then I'd take off."

"Would you kill a man for four million? Or two men for eight?"

Pierce frowned. "Nobody's asking you to kill a man."

Archie, Jr., smiled again. "We're talking principle now." He went on before Pierce could answer. "For me to kill an animal—is about the same thing as asking you to kill an infant. Whenever he hands me a gun, Mr. Pierce, I break out into a cold sweat. I get the shakes. I get sick to my stomach. I could tell you a hundred places where it happened. And how he reacted. Once in Nairobi he hit me with a pistol butt." He involuntarily touched the white scar on his face. "Then he left me out in the bush. One of the gun bearers brought me in. And you know what my father said when he saw me?"

Pierce just stared at him.

"He said to the gun bearer—'This is a girl child. You had no business bringing him in.' That's what he said to the gun bearer."

"Jesus, Archie," Pierce said, "that's insane—"

"Maybe in a distinguished Massachusetts law office it's insane. Or on the Boston Common it sounds insane. But out there my father made the rules. He set the standards."

"We're not in Nairobi now," Pierce said. "We're a lot closer to that law office than we are the African bush." He went over to the big double doors and opened them. "I'll see you tomorrow, Archie. We'll get this thing settled." He turned and tried to smile at the boy.

Archie, Jr., stood by the fire, running a fingertip across the scar. "I've decided," he said. "I'll go off on the hunt with him. I'll try to kill the deer." The torment on his face was an incredible thing. "Last chance," Archie, Jr., said. "Last chance for me. If I don't do it tomorrow—I'll never be able to. I've got to get him off my back. I can't take him for another day. For another hour. I'm going to kill a deer. Because if I don't . . . I'll go out of my mind. I'll run a razor blade across my throat. If I had any guts . . . I'd have done it long before now. I really would. I should have. I really should have. Oh, God—the relief . . . just to get him off my back . . . the relief . . ."

Pierce knew at that moment what it was all about. He understood the trips to the psychiatrist. The torrential babble from across the room. The safety valve starting to come apart. The repressions of twenty-one years churning and straining and screaming to be let out.

Then Archie, Jr., closed his mouth. And then he closed his eyes. He just stood there near the fireplace, head down, fists clenched. Only one visible movement—the thin white scar pulsating very slowly. Beat. Beat. Beat. But silence.

"Good night, Archie," Pierce said.

He walked out of the room and closed the door behind him. He crossed the giant entrance hall and started up the steps to the guest room above. He wondered, as he walked, how many other scars Archie, Jr., had engraved on his body. Pistol butts, knuckles, and God knew what else. And then later, lying sleepless in his bed, consciously fending off a nightmare by his wakefidness, he thought of all the bullet holes that Colonel Dittman had left behind in fifty-odd years of killing. The bullet holes. The tom flesh. The punctured bodies. And his son's scars. All the trophies of the kill.

Pierce would remember years afterward (and quite mercifully) fragments of the next day's nightmare. Swatches of the mosaic separated by imposed blackouts. The nightmare had waited through the long night of rain, and began to show itself at breakfast the following morning. Pierce had found hunting clothes draped neatly over a chair in his bedroom. He had put them on, not really knowing why.

At breakfast Colonel Dittman had been thin-lipped, silent, and tactimm. Archie, Jr., had joined them at the last moment for a quick cup of black coffee. Not six words of dialogue were spoken through the silent aftermath of breakfast. And then the hike out into the fields twenty minutes afterward. And this, being part of the nightmare, was never a whole picture in Pierce's memory. Left behind were small shreds of the chronology.

He remembered starting down a ridge, his rifle a strange, foreign, unfriendly accouterment. In front of him Archie, Jr., walked methodically behind his father. He had held his gun at port like an infantryman on patrol. But Colonel Dittman had walked in slow, measured strides, head high, eyes alert. Occasionally he had delivered up tidbits of hunting expertise. After a rain was a great time to hunt. Deer came out to enjoy the good weather, as well as to feed. Down below, in a narrow, winding canyon, was chamiza and wild cherry—favorite food of the intended victim. And deer didn't like wind. It was normal that they would get on the lee of a hill, and whitetails, living as they did in comparatively heavy cover, would often sneak out, move a short distance, then stop to wait you out—or else cut back in a circle behind you.

Every few moments Colonel Dittman would throw out a terse clue—a short machine-gun burst of knowledge. But, Pierce had noted, he would always look at his son—gauging, inventorying, challenging, as if to say, "Sometime soon now."

Twenty minutes later they had seen their deer. A giant-antlered majestic-looking creature standing stock still in a clump of low trees.

Unbidden and with a strange sense of shame, Pierce felt his heart beat faster. What was it? That fundamental primeval excitement that comes to the creature on the hunt? Some ingrained awareness of man's demental pastime—his sovereign right to perform murder under the protection of a state-issued hunting license? Whatever it was, Pierce had known then that there was something about the stalking that sent a little tremor through his body. And the feeling was, God help him, not unpleasant.