Read The Kill-Off for Free Online Page B

course!) because her mother was awfully sick—a sick mother, no less!—and she had a couple of younger brothers to support, and her father was dead and crops had been awfully bad on this farm she came from. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The only thing she spared me was the fine-old-Southern-family routine. If she’d pulled that I think I would have killed her.
    I took a couple of twenties out of my wallet and riffled them.
    She simpered around a little more, and then she went back to my hotel with me.
    I looked at her, and suddenly I turned and ducked into the bathroom. I hunched over, hugging my stomach, feeling my guts twist and knot themselves, wanting to scream with the pain. I puked, and wept silently. And it was better, then. I washed my face, and went back into the bedroom.
    I told her to get her clothes on. I told her what I could and would do for her.
    All the clothes she’d need; good clothes. A year’s contract at two hundred dollars a week. Yes, two hundred dollars a week. And a chance to make something of herself, a chance eventually to make two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand. More than a chance, an absolute certainty. Because I would make something of her; I would not let her fail.
    She believed me. People usually do believe me if I care to make the effort. Still, she hung back, apparently too shocked by the break I was offering her to immediately accept it. I gave her twenty dollars, promised her another twenty to meet me at the club in the morning. She did so—we had the place to ourselves except for the cleaning people—and I gave her a sample of what I could do for her.
    A good sample, because I wanted her firmly hooked. With what I had in mind, the two hundred a week might not be enough to hold her. That invalid mother and two brothers et cetera, notwithstanding. I wanted to give her a glimpse of the mint, boost her high enough up the wall so that even a whoring moron such as she could see it.
    And I did.
    I worked with her a couple hours. At the end of that time, she was no longer terrible, but merely bad. Which to her, of course, seemed nothing less than wonderful.
    She was beaming and bubbling, and the sun seemed to have risen behind her eyes.
    “I can hardly believe it!” she said. “It seems kind of like magic—like a beautiful dream!”
    “The dream will get better,” I said. “It will come true. Assuming, that is, that you want to accept my offer.”
    “Oh, I do! You know I do,” she said. “I don’t know how to thank you, Mr. McGuire.”
    I told her not to bother; she didn’t owe me any thanks. We went back to my room, and I closed and locked the door.
    She seemed to crumple a little, grow smaller, and the sun went out of her eyes. She stammered, that she wouldn’t do it, then that she didn’t want to. Finally, as I waited, she asked if she had to.
    “I’ve never done anything like that before. Honestly, I haven’t, Mr. McGuire! Only once, anyway, and it wasn’t for money. I was in love with him, this boy back in my home town, and we were supposed to be married. And then he went away, and I thought I was pregnant so I left, and—”
    “Never mind,” I said. “If you don’t want to…”
    “And it’ll be all right?” She looked at me anxiously. “You’ll still—s-still—?”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “W-Will it? Will it, Mr. McGuire? Please, please! If you only knew…”
    If I only knew, believed, that she was really a good girl. If I only knew how much she wanted to sing, how much this meant to her. You know.
    I shrugged, remained silent. But inside I was praying. And what I was praying was that she would tell me to go to hell. I could have got down and kissed her feet for that, if she had insisted on being what the good Lord had meant her to be or being nothing; keeping the music undefiled or keeping it silent where it was. If only it had meant that much to her, as much as it meant to me—
    And it didn’t. It never means as much, even a