The Kill-Off Read Free Page B

than a woman’s. What they call a contralto, or what they would call a contralto if she wasn’t a pop singer. Because they don’t seem to classify pop vocalists like they do the other kind. Rags was kidding when he said it—he used to kid around a lot—but he told me that Janie was the only girl singer in the country who wasn’t a coloratura. Or, at least, a lyric soprano. He didn’t know where the hell they all came from, he said, since there didn’t used to be a coloratura come along more than once every ten years. Well, anyway, he can’t say that any more; I mean, about Janie being the only girl who isn’t a coloratura. Because Danny Lee isn’t one either. She’s got the same kind of voice that Janie had—only, well, kind of different—and she even kind of looks like Janie; only Rags gets sore when you say so, so I’ve never done it but once. Rags is awfully funny in some ways. Nice, you know, but funny. Now, me, when you like a person, when you think a lot of ’em, I think you ought to show it. I mean if you’re me, you have to. You can’t do anything else, and you wouldn’t think of saying or doing anything to hurt them. But a lot of people are different, and Rags is one of them. Take with Janie. I know he thought the world of Janie, but he was all the time jumping on her. Always accusing her of something dirty. She couldn’t look at anyone cross-eyed, just being pleasant, you know, without him saying she was running after the guy or something like that. And it just wasn’t so. You wouldn’t find a nicer girl than Janie in a month of Sundays. Oh, she drank a little, I guess. These last few years, she drank quite a bit. But—well, we’ll leave that go a while.
    Now, I was saying that I’d thought about killing Luane that first day of the season. But that isn’t really the way it was. I mean, I didn’t actually think about killing her. What I thought about was how it would be maybe if she wasn’t there. I didn’t want her not to be there exactly—to be dead—but still, well, you know. I started off wondering how it would be if she was, and then after a while I began kind of half-wishing that she was. And then, finally, I thought about different ways that she might be. Because if she wasn’t—dead, I mean—I didn’t know what I was going to do. And you put yourself in my place, and I don’t think you’d have known either.
    Usually—during the winter, anyway—I lay around in bed until five-thirty or six in the morning. But that day was the first of the season, so I was up at four. I dressed in the dark, and slipped out into the starlight. I did the chores, sort of humming and grinning to myself, feeling as tickled as a kid on Christmas morning. I felt good, I’ll tell you. It was dark and the air was pretty nippy at that hour of the morning, but still everything seemed bright to me and I had that nice warm feeling inside. It was like I’d been buried in a cave, and I’d finally managed to get out. And that was kind of the way it was, too, in a way. Because this last winter had really been a bad one. Take the engineer’s job at the courthouse, firing the boilers; now that’s always been my job—an hour morning and evening and an hour on Saturday morning—but last winter it wasn’t mine. And the school custodian job—four hours a day and two days once a month—that had always been mine, too, and now it wasn’t. I talked to the head of the county commissioners, and he sent me to the county attorney. And the way he explained it—about the boilers—was that the commissioners could be held liable for any money they spent in excess of what was necessary. So automatic boilers were being installed, and that was that. I tried to argue with him, but it didn’t do any good. It didn’t do any good when I talked to the president of the school board, Doctor Ashton. They were dividing my job up among some of the vocational students. I wouldn’t be needed now or at any time in the future,