The Kill-Off by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

Once I closed it, it’d be kind of a signal. I might as well paint a bullseye on my butt, and tell ’em all to start kicking.”
    We went on drinking and talking. Talking of things in general, and nothing much in particular. He said that when Kossmeyer came down the three of us ought to get together some night and have us a bull session. I said I’d like that—some time when I was feeling good and didn’t have anything on my mind.
    “I like him,” I said. “He’s a hell of an interesting little guy, and a nice one. But sometimes, y’know, Pete, I get a feeling that he ain’t where I’m seeing him. I mean, he’s right in front of me, but it seems like he’s walking all around me. Looking me over. Staring through the back of my head.”
    Pete laughed. “He gives you that feeling too, huh? Ain’t it funny, Mac? All the people there are in the world, and how many there are you can just sit down and cut loose and be yourself with.”
    I said it certainly was funny. Or tragic.
    “Well, hell,” he said, finally, “and three is seven. Daddy’s gone and went to heaven. Guess you and me ought to be getting some sleep, Mac.”
    We said good-night, and he went off toward town, his chunky body moving in a straight line. I went to my cottage, feeling conscience-stricken and depressed by my failure to help him. By my failures period. Bitch and botch, that was me. In common honesty I ought to start billing myself that way: Bitch And Botch And His Band And Bitch. I could work up a theme song out of it, set it to the melody of—well, Goodie Goodie. Let’s see, now. Tatuh ta ta tum, tatuh…I worked on that for a minute, and then swore softly to myself. I couldn’t do anything right any more. Not the simplest, damnedest ordinary thing.
    Take tonight, for example. My people were new here; there are rows and rows of cottages, all exactly alike. Yet I hadn’t bothered to see that they got to the right ones, to see that they were comfortably settled. I’d just gone my own merry way—thinking only of myself—and to hell with them.
    It didn’t matter, of course, about Danny Lee. She could sleep on the beach for all I cared. But my men, poor bastards, were a different matter. They had enough to bear as it was—those sad, sad bastards. Just barely squeaking by, year after year. Working for the minimum, and tickled to death to get it. Big-talking and bragging, when they know—for certainly they must know—that they were unfitted to wipe a real musician’s tail.
    It must be very hard to maintain a masquerade like that. I felt very sorry for them, my men, and I was very gentle with them. They had no talent, nothing to build on, nothing to give. There can be nothing more terrible, it seems to me, than having nothing to give.
    I unpacked my suitcases, and climbed into bed.
    I fell asleep, slipping almost immediately into that old familiar dream where everyone in the band was me. I was on the trumpet, the sax-and-clarinet. I was on the trombone, at the drums, and, of course, the piano. All of us were me—the whole combo. And Danny Lee–Janie was the vocalist, but she-they were also me. And it was not perfect, the music was not quite perfect. But it was close, so close, by God! All we-I needed was a little more time—time is all it takes if you have it to work with—and…
    I woke up.
    It was a little after twelve, noon. The smell of coffee drifted through my window, along with snatches of conversation.
    It came from the boys’ cabin—they were batching together to save money. They were keeping their voices low, and our cottages, like the others, were thirty feet apart. (“Don’t like to be crowded,” Pete told me, “and don’t figure anyone else does.”) But sound carries farther around water:
    “Did you hear what he said to me, claimin’ I had a lip? Why, goddammit, I been playin’ trumpet…”
    “Hell, you got off easy! What about him asking me if I had rheumatism, and I needed a hammer to close the