Free We Are What We Pretend to Be by Kurt Vonnegut Page A

do it again, and they wouldn’t have the heart to keep him from eating ice cream. And so it went; his parents would make terrible threats, but they never carried them out, not one.”
    “So what happened to him finally?” asked the indispensable Annie.
    “He was shot while robbing a bank,” said the General. “And I’ll always say it was his parents who killed him.”
    “I don’t believe it really happened,” Hope objected.
    “Makes no difference whether it really did or not,” said the General, “just as long as it’s logical. So . . .”
    Haley’s hopes for a reprieve twitched and died. The omens had seemed good. The menace of Mr. Banghart had made the General almost genial at times. Hope had suggested that it was the only type of problem that permitted him to use to the fullest his stock solution to every problem. “Worships firepower,” she said.
    However, weeks had passed, and Mr. Banghart had not sailed into the General’s sights like a clay pigeon. Neither was he apprehended by the police. Law-enforcement officers in the town near Ardennes Farm took to crediting him with unsolved purse-snatchings and burglaries, but his face was seen in police circulars and nowhere else. The situation spelled moments of depression for the General, who would surmise gloomily that Banghart had fled the country or had been among the dozens
of unidentified bums killed every month while hopping freight trains.
    Under the General’s urging, the State Police withdrew their sentinel. A visiting neighbor laughed himself hoarse over the jungle of weapons in the sunroom, and on the following morning the bulletin board informed Haley that he was to put a light coat of oil on all of the guns and return them, save two, to their racks. The General kept out the single-shot duck gun, which he leaned against the frame of the back door, and he carried a .45-caliber service revolver slung on his belt whenever he left the farmhouse.
    “You people keep away from this shotgun unless you absolutely have to use it,” he ordered. “Leave Banghart to me. I’d feel safer locked in a phone booth with him than I would knowing one of you was on the prowl with this cannon. Guns and women can make an atom bombing look like an ice-cream social,” he declared. “Only this morning I read a story in the paper about a woman who shot her husband, the cat, and the water-softener because she thought she heard suspicious noises downstairs.” Haley searched the paper for this fascinating item, but he was unable to find anything like it.
    On the afternoon of the same day, Haley came upon the General unexpectedly to find him standing before the closed door of the corncrib. He had his pistol in hand, cocked and pointed at the door. “All right, Banghart,” he was saying, “I’ll give you three to come out. One—”
    “I’ll get the shotgun,” cried Haley.
    The General looked at him quickly, with a trifle of embarrassment, Haley thought. With a gesture that seemed perfectly
reasonable at the time, the General motioned for Haley to be deathly still. “All right, Banghart, come out or it’s curtains,” he said. “Two.” He paused a long while. Haley covered his ears. The General kicked open the crib door and stood poised, ready to shoot.
    Haley inched closer to the General until he was by his side. Sunlight streaming in through the barn door illuminated the crib, which he saw, with a sigh, was vacant.
    “Did you hear something, sir?” Haley asked respectfully.
    The General slipped his pistol back into its holster and grinned foolishly. “Don’t go telling the girls about this, will you now?” he said confidentially. “It wouldn’t do to frighten them.”
    “Nossir.”
    “It’s just that I want to make sure he isn’t hiding on the farm. He might be, you know—a very remote chance, of course. Just checking to be on the safe side.”
    “I see.”
    “Last night, about 3, I thought I saw a cigarette burning out here. Now I find this on