The Hunting Trip Read Online Free Page A

would have arisen and be in the kitchen having her breakfast. He went there to see if that was the case.
    It was.
    Brunhilde was sitting at the kitchen table with “Miss Grace,” full name Mrs. Grace Hail, the septuagenarian African-American woman who had been in their employ since they had come to Foggy Point twenty-odd years before.
    They had not lived on the grounds of the Foggy Point CountryClub then, but in a nice, much simpler home in the adjacent town of Goodhope, Mississippi, to which they had moved when Phil had been discharged from the United States Army Advanced Marksmanship Unit at Fort Benning, Georgia.
    That house, on Creek Drive in Goodhope, had been purchased on a No Money Down thirty-year mortgage guaranteed by the Veterans Administration. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a one-car garage, and in the backyard, instead of a swimming pool, a shallow stream that flowed eventually into Muddiebay Bay, and thus the source of the street name.
    â€œGood morning,” Phil said, when he walked into the kitchen of 102 Country Club Road, the French doors of which opened upon the swimming pool, the pool house, and the gazebo that sheltered the gas-flamed barbecue grill, and the fairways beyond of the Foggy Point Country Club.
    â€œGood morning,” Miss Grace replied. “Can I fetch you a cup of coffee?”
    Brunhilde said nothing.
    Brunhilde was blond, five feet six, weighed 135 pounds, and was nine months older than her husband. There was a dancer’s grace about her, which was not surprising, as she had begun the study of ballet when she was six years old, and given up the art only when she became pregnant with their first child, also named Brunhilde.
    â€œNo, thanks, Grace,” Phil said. “I’m already coffee’d-up.”
    Phil looked at his wife.
    She looked away.
    â€œRandy wants me to go to Scotland for ten days with him next week to shoot pheasants with Bertie,” Phil said. “Is that all right with you?”
    â€œI don’t give a good EXPLETIVE DELETED!! where you go,” Brunhilde said.
    â€œYou ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking to Mr. Phil like that,” Miss Grace said.
    â€œ EXPLETIVE DELETED!! him,” Brunhilde said.
    â€œI’ll take that to mean I can go,” Phil said.
    Brunhilde snorted.
    Phil walked out of the kitchen.
    Brunhilde had become increasingly difficult over the last several years or so, something Phil attributed primarily to two things. First, she had entered “the change of life.” As one of the corollaries of that, she had put on some weight, and that to a ballet dancer is akin to having leprosy.
    Second, Brunhilde was suffering from Nearly Empty Nest Syndrome.
    Brunhilde Williams, their oldest child, had eloped two years before to marry Robert Brown, whom she had met when he was the editor of
Mississippi Traveler
, the university newspaper, the day after he graduated.
    â€œBrownie,” as he was called, had accepted a job as a reporter on the Jackson
Afternoon Gazette
and Brunhilde, who could not bear the thought of being separated from him, had married Brownie, even though she knew this would probably drive both of her parents up the wall.
    Although the marriage seemed to be working well—Brownie had become assistant state editor, and Brunhilde was now assistant society editor—Brunhilde remained terribly unhappy about her daughter.
    Little Phil was of course now in Dallas.
    And only Franz Josef—named after Brunhilde’s late father and also after the former head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—remained at home. “Franzel,” as Brunhilde called her baby, spent just about all of his time, depending on the season, on the tennis courts or at the swimming pool of Foggy Point’s Grand Hotel.
    One of Phil’s unlikely friends was Professor James K. Strongmensch, who, although he had never graduated from college, had twenty-seven honorary doctorates. Strongmensch had