by Rod Serling
"I heard what you said," Archie, Jr., responded.
"I want you to kill an animal. All by yourself. With a gun."
Pierce looked at the boy. His fists were clenched. Pierce was suddenly aware of this. The Colonel was also. He looked at the boy's hands and smiled.
"Look at him, Pierce. Look at his hands. By God, he's reacting. Somebody just shot some adrenalin into the body. We're getting a reaction. It may be only a reflexive twitch. Maybe a muscular spasm. But, by God, there is movement." He let out a long, thin stream of cigar smoke, then let his eyes rest on Pierce. "How old are you, Mr. Pierce? Early thirties? Somewhere around there?"
Pierce nodded.
"Not a helluva lot older than my son," Dirtman said, leaning back in the chair. "Now, if your old man had done to you what I'm doing to him—" He pointed to Archie. "Arbitrarily and altogether predatorily tried to screw you out of what was yours—what would you do? How would you react?"
There was a silence in the room, broken sporadically by the sound of the occasional crack of the burning logs in the fireplace.
"The question wasn't rhetorical, Mr. Pierce. What would you do?"
"I don't suppose I'd sit still for it," Pierce answered.
"Of course not. Who would sit still for it? You'd either get up on your two feet and square off against your father, or you'd be on a phone calling a lawyer, or you'd raise holy hell. Now, you'd do that, wouldn't you?"
"Colonel," Pierce began.
Dittman held up his hand, with the cigar in it. "Of course you would," he interrupted. "But I'll tell you what you wouldn't do. You wouldn't just sit there like my son is sitting there clenching his fists. Particularly if your father had just told you to do something that went completely against your grain."
Colonel Dittman rose from his chair and moved over to the fireplace. It was like a pose, Pierce thought. For men of distinction. The thin, erect, white-haired man standing there, one hand lightly touching the mantel. The whole thing, Pierce decided at that moment, was a pose. This was just some kind of ponderous joke, an after-dinner party game that a humorless man finds festive. But Archie Jr.'s hands were shaking. Maybe he'd played this game before. Get on with it, Pierce thought. Something tense was building up in the room. Something explosive.
"My son doesn't take to killing," the Colonel said from the fireplace. "No way, no method, no victim, of any kind. He is a silent minority of one. I've taken him on trips to jungles, hunting preserves— African bush places that most boys would welcome as high adventure. But not my son. Not Archie over there. When a rifle went off, I'd find him hiding in the bushes. Or on the morning of a hunt—he'd have digestive problems—like a pregnant lady." He pointed his cigar at the boy. "He has rather that look about him, wouldn't you say, Mr. Pierce? The look of the pregnant lady? Pale, suffering, that quivering-rabbit look."
Pierce waited for the boy to say something, do something, remonstrate in some way, climb down from the whipping post, and either grab the whip or at least run away. But the boy just sat there. Pierce felt a different kind of nausea, but with it came resolve. This would have to stop right now. Retainers notwithstanding, he didn't have to be a party to this. And he wouldn't be any longer.
"Colonel," Pierce said. "None of this is my business. I'm here on a very specific item. To handle the reversion of a trust fund. That's all. That's all I'm supposed to do. As to any disagreement you may have with your son—"
Dittman interrupted him. "My disagreements with my son, Mr. Pierce, are very much your business. Because they very much relate to that trust. I have no intention of handing a gravy bowl over to a nutless, faggoty, simpering little son of a bitch who dishonors me. I have no intention whatsoever."
"I'm afraid you don't have any choice in the matter, Colonel." Pierce blurted out. He could almost visualize his father's apoplectic face. (Christ on a Cross, Bill. All you had to do was to get his Goddamned signature.) But it was too late. Pierce had taken a look at the two teams and had somehow walked over to stand alongside of Archie Dittman, Jr. Die cast. Bed made and ready to sleep in. Money paid—choice made.
"What would happen"—Dittman's voice was not particularly unfriendly—"if I simply failed to put my signature on whatever it is you've brought with you? What if I simply refused to give him a dime?"
"I'm afraid you don't have that choice," Pierce answered. "First of all, you've been paying fiduciary taxes on—"
"Oh, stop that crap, Mr. Pierce. Don't give me this fiduciary nonsense or your complicated tax language or that ponderous legal crap." He pointed to Archie, Jr. "What the hell can he do to me?"
"He can sue you."
Dittman laughed aloud for the first time. "He can sue me? Honest to God—that cauliflower there can honest to God get himself a battery of lawyers and sue me?" Once again he laughed and shook his head. "That Goddamn vegetable can suddenly get some guts and stand up to me?"
"That would be my advice to him, Colonel." Pierce's voice was icy.
"What would be your advice, huh? Well, I'll tell you something, Mr. Pierce. This would be my advice to you. Go to bed and get a good night's sleep. In the morning the three of us will go out and hunt deer. Now, if you suffer buck fever, you may get a little bored. That's not measles. It isn't catching. It won't affect me in the slightest. But if my son over there won't pick up a gun and bring down a deer, I'll take every piece of security in that trust fund, and by Tuesday morning I'll piss it away on every speculative highrisk wildcat venture currently available on both markets or in the back room of a bookie parlor. By Wednesday morning I can turn that two and a half million dollars into toilet paper. I'm an expert at how that's done."
Pierce just stared at him. "Would you . . . would you really do that?"
"Would and will," Dittman said.
Pierce turned toward Archie, Jr. "You don't have to sit still for this," he said to the boy. "I'm a witness to it. You could start proceedings in the morning in a court of law, and I'd represent you."
Archie, Jr., rose from his chair. If anything, he looked only tired. He looked briefly at his father and then at Pierce. "I don't want that, Mr. Pierce," he said softly. "He can do anything he wants."
"You see, Mr. Pierce?" the Colonel said. "I can do anything I want. I can dress him in a nightie, rob him blind, or put a boot up his butt—and he'll turn his cheek so Goddamn fast you'll think his head was built on a swivel." He flung the cigar into the open fire, looked at it for a moment then turned back to face the other two. "I'm going to bed now," he announced. "Breakfast at seven. We'll be out on the track by a quarter to eight. There'll be a weapon for both of you." He moved over to his son, standing a hand's length away. "I'm going to tell you something now, Archie. You've never done one single thing in your whole life to please me. From cradle to college diploma. You've shamed me. You've dishonored me. You've made me wish a hundred times . . . a thousand times . . . that there was some kind of higher law having to do with the painless eradication of imperfect infants."
Pierce let out a gasp. Involuntary. Unconscious. But audible.
Dittman ignored him. "Or some kind of ultimate computer in a maternity ward," he continued, "which could perceive weakness in an infant and prescribe accordingly."
"Colonel—" Pierce's voice was shaky. "If you keep this up, you won't leave me any alternative. I'll have to place a long-distance call to my father and tell him that you're incompetent."
"Me?" Dittman's voice was ice cold. "You'd have a helluva time proving that thesis, Mr. Pierce. I'm not incompetent." He pointed to the long rows of animal heads. "I happen to be one of the most efficient, deadly hunters, stalkers, and killers of wild game as there is on the Continent."
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," Di
ttman 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.