The Hunting Trip Read Online Free Page B

published forty-odd books (the titles of most of which Phil didn’t understand) and was simultaneously both professor of philosophy and professor of psychiatry at Tulane University in New Orleans.
    Jim was aware of Brunhilde’s problems, and had told Phil there wasn’t much that could be done for her except to wait for nature to take its course. The alternative was for Brunhilde to take mind-altering drugs, which (a) probably wouldn’t work and (b) were liable to be addictive.
    So Phil waited for nature to take its course.
    [ THREE ]
    P hil went from the kitchen to his office, and there photocopied what he had written so far on his current book in progress.
    Twice before when he had been out of town, Brunhilde had, in innocent curiosity, turned on his Dictaphone to find out about his latest work and in the process had somehow erased it. Phil believed this was done innocently, of course, just as he believed in the good fairy and that the earth was flat, but he was determined it would not happen again.
    He put one of the copies into his briefcase and took the other with him to the gun room, a concrete block structure with a steel door that he had built in the rear of the garage when he bought the house. Sometime after Brunhilde had begun to act strangely, he had replacedthe original door to the gun room with one that was both stronger and had a combination lock.
    Phil didn’t think that Brunhilde really would carry through with her threat to go into the gun room, get one of his EXPLETIVE DELETED!! guns and use it to blow the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! off the next EXPLETIVE DELETED!! golfer whose EXPLETIVE DELETED!! ball crashed into the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! windows of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! pool house.
    But, as they say, better safe than sorry.
    Professor Strongmensch had described the gun room as a “miniature arsenal” and his description was accurate. It was full of weapons. One wall held the “long guns,” mostly shotguns, but also a dozen rifles of different calibers. Another held more than twenty-five pistols of all shapes and sizes. Sturdy wooden worktables held rows of shotgun shell reloading machines, and across the room from them were the presses, tools, scales, and other equipment necessary to “reload the brass” of all the calibers of the rifles and handguns hanging on the walls.
    This might suggest to some, especially readers of romance novels, such as this, that Phil was something of a “gun nut” who drooled and breathed deeply as he fondled his instruments of death, or that he was one of those rural boobs “who cling to their guns” for no good reason, to more or less quote a herein unnamed former instructor of constitutional law who later entered politics.
    The truth is far less dramatic. His association with firearms began in his sixteenth year, on the day he was loaded aboard the New York City–bound train of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad by the Reverend James Ferneyhough Fitzhugh, D.D., who had just expelled him from St. Malachi’s School.
    â€œPhilip Wallingford Williams the Third,” Dr. Fitzhugh had told him, “by stealing Miss Bridget O’Malley’s intimate undergarmentsand then hoisting them to the top of our flagpole and then cutting the rope, you have brought shame upon Saint Malachi’s School, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the entire fraternity of Northeastern U.S. boarding schools named after saints. I am left with no alternative but to give you the boot.”
    On the train, Phil had naturally wondered where his life would now take him.
    He considered several possibilities, of course, but it never entered his mind that he would one day become a world-class rifle, pistol, and shotgun marksman. At sixteen, the only firearms he had ever fired in his life had been the .22 caliber rifles with which one could fire at movable little duck targets at Coney Island in the hope of shooting well enough to