Free We Are What We Pretend to Be by Kurt Vonnegut

The General’s got enough guns for a regiment—all loaded.”
    “O.K.,” laughed the trooper. “Just don’t go potshotting everything that moves. Remember, we’ve got a man posted out front. We’d hate to lose our boy Dave. Keep your eyes open,” he added seriously. “A switchman in town said he thought he saw someone drop off a slow freight on its way through.”
    “If he does show up, he’ll look like a piece of Swiss cheese before he gets within five hundred yards of the front door,” said Annie, unimpressed. She thanked the trooper for his trouble and
marched the sullen Haley into the sunroom. Haley was repeating to himself the speech he had prepared during the long trip back from Chicago.
    The General did not look up when Haley walked into his presence. He was wearing an oily undershirt and khaki trousers and was swabbing the cavernous bore of a single-barreled duck gun. Haley looked about the room and saw that every surface was cluttered with firearms and ammunition. “Sir,” Haley began, “I guess we’ve both been pretty childish, and I, for one, am willing to—”
    The General looked up from his shotgun as though he were surprised to see Haley standing before him. “Well, sir,” he interrupted, “and what sunshine are you going to bring into our lives today? Shall we poison the well or burn the house down?”
    Haley swallowed hard, turned, and shuffled upstairs to his room, past the darkened, closed door of Kitty’s room, where Kitty was mumbling in her sleep, and the open door of the room of the beloved Hope. He paused for a moment to listen to her breathing.
    Pinned to his bedsheet was a typewritten note signed by Annie. There was a certain sweetness in his slumber, for before he closed his eyes, he concluded that insofar as disciplinary measures went, the General must have reached the limits of his imagination. He even managed a soft chuckle as he bunched his shirt under his head. “No pillow for three months,” the note had said.
    Haley’s conclusion was an accurate one, apparently, for nothing new in the way of punishments was forthcoming during the next two weeks. True, Haley was reminded again that his defections
had killed his opportunities in the world of music; Hope was ordered to fill out application papers for a Miss Dingman’s School for Ladies, located on an inaccessible ridge in the White Mountains; and Haley’s, Hope’s, and Kitty’s pillows remained under padlock in the basement fruit locker—but no more devastation seemed likely.
    Kitty flounced and pined about the house, but without conviction. She hadn’t the wit to camouflage the fact that her twenty hours with Roy and his motorcycle had been something less than a string of pearls. This was disturbing to Hope and Haley, for the General took it as a demonstration of his infallible judgment. “Whatever became of that nice Flemming boy and his gasoline bicycle?” he would chortle at mealtimes. “Never seems to show his intelligent face around here anymore.” Kitty offered no rebuttal.
    As the time for Hope’s incarceration in the New Hampshire highlands drew near, she abandoned her stoicism to plead with the General to relent. It was after dinner one night, and Haley listened with excitement, for if Hope could win leniency, then so might he.
    The General gave her his thoughtful attention, nodding now and then at her more salient arguments. “Are you through?” he asked.
    “Yes, I guess so.”
    “Uh huh, very moving,” he said. He looked seriously from Hope to Haley and back again. “I once knew a man, grew up with him, in fact,” said the General. “When he was a boy, his parents would threaten to take away his bicycle if he did something bad.
Well, sir, he’d go right ahead and do whatever bad thing it was, and they’d let him keep his bicycle anyway. They didn’t have the heart to take it away. Instead, they’d tell him if he did it again, they wouldn’t let him have any ice cream for a year. He’d