The Kill-Off by Jim Thompson Page A

bluffly amiable, give-me-approval laugh of his.
    It was a hearty laugh, but one that he was ready to immediately modulate. His face was flushed with high good humor: a mask of good-fellowish hilarity which could, at the wink of an eye, with practiced effortlessness, become the essence of gravity, sobriety, seriousness.
    I laughed along with him. With him, and at myself. Our laughter filled the room, flowed out through the windows into the night; echoing and reechoing, sending endless ripples on and on through the darkness. It remained with us, the laughter, and it departed from us. Floating out across the town, across hill and dale, across field and stream, across mountain and prairie, across the night-lost farm houses, the hamlets and villages and towns, the bustling, tower-twinkling cities. Across—around—the world, and back again.
    We laughed, and the whole world laughed.
    Or should I say jeered?
    Suddenly I got up and went to the window. Stood there unseeing, though my eyes were wider than they had ever been, my back turned to him.
    And where there had been uproar, there was now silence. Almost absolute silence.
    He could not stand that, of course. After almost twenty years, it dawned on me that he could not. Whenever there is silence, he must fill it. With something. With anything. So, after he had regained his guffaw-drained breath, after he had achieved a self-satisfactory evaluation of my mood, he spoke again. Went back to the subject of our conversation.
    “Well, anyway, Jim. As I was saying, I’m eternally grateful to you. I hate to think what might have happened if we hadn’t had that talk.”
    I winced, unable to answer him for a moment. Immediately his voice tightened, notched upward with anxiety.
    “Jim…Jim? Don’t you look at it that way, too, Jim? Don’t you kind of hate to think—”
    “Oh, yes—” I found my voice. “Yes, indeed, Hank. On the other hand…”
    “Yeah? What were you going to say, Jim?”
    “Nothing,” I said. “Just that I doubt that it would have changed anything. Not with men like us.”

6
Marmaduke “Goofy” Gannder (Incompetent)
    W hen I awakened it was morning, and I was lying on the green pavement of The City of Wonderful People, and a hideous hangover held me in its thrall.
    I sat up by degrees, shaking and shuddering. I massaged my eyes, wondering, yea, even marveling, over the complete non-wonderment of the situation. For lo! I invariably have a hangover in the morning, even as it is invariably morning when I awaken: and likewise, to complete the sequence of non-marvelousness, I invariably awaken in The City of Wonderful People.
    â€œHell,” I thought (fervently); “the same today, yesterday and— Ouch! ”
    I said the last aloud, adding a prayerful expletive, for the sunlight had stabbed into my eyes, speared fierily into my head like a crown of thorns. In my agony, I rocked back and forth for a moment; and then I staggered to my feet and stumbled over to Grandma’s bed.
    It was not a very nice bed, compared to those of the City’s other inhabitants. Untended, except for my inept ministrations, it was protected only by an oblong border of wine bottles, which seemed constantly to be getting broken. And it was sunken in uncomfortably: and the grass was withered and brown—yeah, generously fertilized as it obviously was by untold numbers of dogs, cats and rodents. The headboard of the bedstead was of weathered, worm-eaten wood, a dwarfed phallus-like object bearing only her name and the word “Spinster”: painfully, or perhaps, painlessly, free of eulogy.
    I studied the bleak inscription, thinking, as I often do when not occupied with other matters, that I should do something about it. I had considered substituting the words “Human Being,” with possibly a suffixed “Believe It Or Not.” But Grandma had not liked that: she had considered it no compliment. And she had made no bones—no pun