Night Gallery 1 by Rod Serling

Author:Rod Serling [Serling, Rod]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Clean Kills and Other Trophies

"After dinner," Colonel Dittman said to his son, sitting at the far end of the long, thirty-foot oaken table, "we'll show Mr. Pierce my Hunting Room."

Dittman, Jr., pale, silent, simply nodded.

Pierce, sitting halfway between the two, called on his poor stretched tired mouth to smile once again, as he'd been smiling all through the painful evening. The venison, tough, gamy, stringy, sat heavy inside of him, shoveled down with effort. The wine was a flinty Moselle—tart and too warm, but he'd had five glasses of it—and he felt his eyes heavy-lidded, his attention wandering out of sight. He looked from his host to his host's son and wondered vaguely about the genetic vagaries that produced offspring so different from their fathers.

Colonel Archie Dittman sat there at the head of the table, lean and erect, white hair cropped over a long-jawed patrician face. He wore a smoking jacket, baroque, but perfectly tailored. Throughout the two-hour dinner he had kept the conversation moving—directing it like traffic—short sporadic thrusts into conversational areas, jabbed at, then left behind. Taxes. (They were confiscatory.) Campus dissent. (Kick those spoiled, self-indulgent weirdos in the ass and draft them.) Race relations. (The mistake had not been slavery—the black bastards shouldn't have been brought over here in the first place.) And through it all Pierce had sat there with a fixed, strained smile—as befitting the youngest member of a law firm that handled Colonel Dittman's legal affairs at fifty thousand dollars a year retainer. Pierce then turned to look in the opposite direction at the son. Dittman, Jr., had his father's lankiness, but there was no other resemblance. That he deferred to the father was altogether obvious. Only when the older Dittman used the word "nigger" did Dittman, Jr., seem to flinch perceptively, but he had not uttered a word during the entire meal. Earlier, Pierce had tried to draw him out, asking him about his graduation from college that spring, his plans, his interests. The pale, washed-out blue eyes simply fixed on Pierce—the broad but bony shoulders shrugging as if to say to Pierce that any and all decisions came from the other end of the table. Dittman, Sr., verified this. What was his son planning to do? They would think about this. What was his interest? He, Dittman, Sr., was currently taking that under advisement. How had he liked college? Colonel Dittman had allowed that college nowadays was obviously a monumental waste of time.

"Your average university nowadays, Mr. Pierce," Colonel Dittman had said, "produces a somewhat formless mass of jellied consomme; a generation of social workers, better equipped to play a tambourine at a Salvation Army soup kitchen than to roll up their sleeves and do an honest-to-God day's work, turning an honest profit."

Dittman had glared across the table at his son—not just in anger, Pierce noted, but with naked dislike that was beginning to turn a painful evening into an unbearable one. But the boy had not responded. Those pale, spiritless blue eyes looked downward to his plate like flags dipped in surrender.

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