Russell counted up in his head how many nights had passed since he had last been able to practice his unique hobby. Was it eight? Maybe it was nine. Russell had never felt that it was an addiction. Hadn’t there been periods in the past — three, four, five weeks at a time — that had gone by without his having terrorized even a single person?
And yet he missed it terribly, longed for the thrill of holding the lives of total strangers in his hands. Because the gun was always loaded. Because the safety was always off. There was power and authority in Russell’s trigger finger — a power and authority that stimulated and excited him both in the moment of the potentially deadly encounter and later in the sordid, orgasmic recall of it.
Tonight he wanted desperately to go out and yet he could not. Quietly, he opened the front door. What faced him was the white wall of a snowdrift, like something out of a cartoon.
He stepped back from the imposing barrier. He closed the door and stumbled to Bud’s bedroom. Trudy had turned down the sheets for him, perhaps thinking that he might later regain consciousness and want a more comfortable place to spend the balance of the night.
He stripped down to his underwear and slipped under the sheets. The house was cold. Trudy’s father liked to turn the thermostat down at night. Miraculously, the electrical current to the house hadn’t gone out. The power lines were still holding their own against the brutal assault of snow and ice. Just in case, though, Mr. House and his son had gone out that morning and brought in more wood for the fireplace. Russell had volunteered to help, but Mr. House knew that his guest had worn himself out trying to shovel the front walk, and declined the offer.
Russell closed his eyes. He wanted this night to be over. He tried to think of anything that might relax him. He remembered the last man he had engaged in the night. The man had been an especially timid fellow and there was a pitiful dog-like whimper to his voice that sometimes, when Russell was alone, he liked to try to emulate. Russell wished that he’d had some way to record those pathetic, yet thoroughly entertaining pleadings from his victims, so that he could listen to them over and over again the way one replays a favorite record.
“Please don’t kill me.”
“You’ll have to do better than that, milquetoast. Your life is in your own hands. Beg or die. Beg or die, little man.”
“Russell?”
Russell opened his eyes. At that same moment the lamp on the little table between the two single beds clicked on. Bud was sitting up in bed. He had Russell’s notebook.
“What is this?” Bud was holding the notebook by one corner as if he were pinching the tail of a dead rat.
“Just some of my scribblings. May I have it?”
“Why do you write this stuff?”
“The better question is, why are you in possession of something that doesn’t belong to you?” Russell grabbed for the book but Bud jerked it out of reach.
“This is twisted shit.”
“You had no business reading it.”
“Does my sister know that you write this kind of stuff?”
“No. And why don’t you be a good little brother and not tell her? Look, my head is killing me. Give me the book and let’s go to sleep.”
Bud shook his head. “Is this for a movie? Are you writing a movie script?”
“Yeah. I’m writing a movie script,” said Russell with sere sarcasm.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe whatever you want to.”
“I found the notebook under your mattress. I found this—” Bud pulled the revolver out from under his pillow. “—stuffed in the back of your suitcase. What are you doing bringing a loaded gun into my parents’ house?”
Russell didn’t have an answer. Even if he could concoct some halfway plausible explanation, his head was too cloudy to be able to deliver it successfully. He was caught. He had to fess up. Maybe the kid was like him. Maybe Bud had an interesting dark side of his own. Some people did. Sometimes Russell thought that maybe everybody did. He remembered the old man he had stopped near the lake in Euclid. Right behind a noisy polka palace. “Beg for your life,” he had told the man, whom he feared at first was too intoxicated to effectively play the game. But the man was sober. Cold sober. “Go ahead and kill me, hoodlum,” the old man spat. “I was about to drown myself in the lake anyway. You’ll save me the trouble.” Russell had ended the encounter with a few murmured epithets. “I should have obliged him,” he thought as he walked away. Then he laughed to himself. “‘Hurt me! Hurt me!’ cried the masochist. ‘No!’ returned the sadist with a leer.”
“I’m not going to ask you again,” said Bud in a voice suddenly devoid of all youthful innocence.
“I use the gun, Bud. I put the muzzle to people’s heads and I make them think that I’m going to kill them. It’s a game I play.”
“Why do you play this game?”
“It excites me. Aren’t there things that excite you? Things that you keep to yourself? Everybody has their dark corners, their little pockets of depravity.”
The gun had been resting on Bud’s palm. Now he took it into a proper grip so that he could aim it at Russell’s head.
“Have you ever killed anybody with this gun?” asked Bud.
“Not with that gun or any other gun. I just told you: it’s only a game.”
“If it’s just a game, why is the gun loaded?”
“It heightens the stakes. It makes it more exciting.” Russell swallowed. “Is that what you want to do, Bud? Do you want to play the game with me?”
“I don’t want you marrying my sister. I don’t want you to even see my sister again. You need to be put into a padded room.”
Russell licked his lips nervously. “I’ve thought that myself, on occasion.”
“All those people out there. I’ve read in your little book what you make them say. They’re going to carry this around with them for the rest of their lives.”
“You’re very perceptive for a kid.”
“I’m not a kid. I’m a freshman at Carnegie Mellon.”
“All right. Point taken. Just — could you just point that thing away from me?”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you to shoot me.”
“But I’m not like you, Russell — or should I call you ‘Stark Raving Lunatic’?”
“You can call me whatever you want to. And I’ve come to the conclusion that you are in no way whatsoever like me.”
“That’s right,” said Bud. “You never pull the trigger.” Bud fired. The discharge was loud and seemed to shake the walls of the small bedroom. “I just did.”
The bullet lodged in Russell’s left arm. There was a great deal of blood for Trudy (who assumed full responsibility for the mess) to have to clean up. It took a long time to get Russell to the hospital on account of the severe weather.
Trudy later confessed to her parents and to Bud that she had no idea that the man she thought she loved was a…was a…
“Was a stark raving lunatic,” said Mrs. House helpfully. She was sitting with her daughter, running loving, maternal fingers through her hair.
“As insane as he was,” said Mr. House, “at least he never killed anybody. So far as we know.”
Everyone agreed with a nod. The House family was gathered around the fireplace drinking cocoa. The storm had finally let up. The Thanksgiving Blizzard of 1950 had come to an end. The long dig-out was about to begin.
“Did you mean to shoot him, Bud?” asked Trudy of her quiet and reflective brother.
“In that moment I did. I guess your lunatic boyfriend was right. We’ve all got a little something screwy about us. For example: I put several hundred dollars on Ohio State.”