days to live.
2
Roy Dillon's mother was from a family of backwoods white trash. She was thirteen when she married a thirty-year-old railroad worker, and not quite fourteen when she gave birth to Roy. A month or so after his birth, her husband suffered an accident which made her a widow. Thanks to the circumstances of its happening, it also made her well-off by the community's standards. A whole two hundred dollars a month to spend on herself. Which was right where she meant to spend it.
Her family, on whom she promptly dumped Roy, had other ideas. They kept the boy for three years, occasionally managing to wheedle a few dollars from their daughter. Then, one day, her father appeared in town, bearing Roy under one arm and swinging a horsewhip with the other. And he proceeded to demonstrate his lifelong theory that a gal never got too old to whip.
Since Lilly Dillon's character had been molded long before, it was little changed by the thrashing. But she did keep Roy, having no choice in the matter, and frightened by her father's grim promises to keep an eye on her, she moved out of his reach.
Settling down in Baltimore, she found lucrative and undemanding employment as a B-girl. Or, more accurately, it was undemanding as far as she was concerned. Lilly Dillon wasn't putting out for anyone; not, at least, for a few bucks or drinks. Her nominal heartlessness often disgruntled the customers, but it drew the favorable attention of her employers. After all, the world was full of bimboes, tramps who could be had for a grin or a gin. But a smart kid, a doll who not only had looks and class, but was also
They used her, in increasingly responsible capacities. As a managing hostess, as a recruiter for a chain of establishments, as a spotter of sticky-fingered and bungling employees; as courier, liaison officer, fingerwoman; as a collector and disburser. And so on up the ladder… or should one say down it? The money poured in, but little of the shower settled on her son.
She wanted to pack him off to boarding school, only drawing back, indignantly, when the charges were quoted to her. A couple thousand dollars a year, plus a lot of extras, and just for taking care of a kid! Just for keeping a kid out of trouble! Why, for that much money she could buy a nice mink jacket.
They must think she was a sucker, she decided. Nuisance that he was, she'd just look after Roy herself. And he'd darned well keep out of trouble or she'd skin him alive.
She was, of course, imbued with certain ineradicable instincts, eroded and atrophied though they were; so she had her rare moments of conscience. Also, certain things had to be done, for the sake of appearances: to stifle charges of neglect and the unpleasantness pursuant thereto. In either case, obviously, and as Roy instinctively knew, whatever she did was for herself, out of fear or as a salve for her conscience.
Generally, her attitude was that of a selfish older sister to an annoying little brother. They quarreled with each other. She delighted in gobbling down his share of some treat, while he danced about her in helpless rage.
'You're mean! Just a dirty old pig, that's all!'
'Don't you call me names, you snot!'-striking at him. 'I'll learn you!'
'Learn me, learn me! Don't even have enough sense to say teach!'
'I do, too! I did say teach!'
He was an excellent student in school, and exceptionally well-behaved. Learning came easily for him, and good behavior seemed simply a matter of common sense. Why risk trouble when it didn't make you anything? Why be profitlessly detained after school when you could be out hustling newspapers or running errands or caddying? Time was money, and money was what made the world go around.
As the smartest and best-behaved boy in his classes, he naturally drew the displeasure of the other kind. But no matter how cruelly or frequently he was attacked, Lilly offered only sardonic condolence.
'Only one arm?' she would say, if he exhibited a twisted and swollen arm.
Or if a tooth had been knocked out, 'Only one tooth?'
And when he received an overall mauling, with dire threats of worse to come, 'Well, what are you kicking about? They may kill you, but they can't eat you.'
Oddly enough, he found a certain comfort in her backhanded remarks. On the surface they were worse than nothing, merely insult added to injury, but beneath them lay a chilling and callous logic. A fatalistic do- or-be-damned philosophy which could accommodate itself to anything but oblivion.
He had no liking for Lilly, but he came to admire her. She'd never given him anything but a hard time, which was about the extent of her generosity to anyone. But she'd done all right. She knew how to take care of herself.
She showed no soft spots until he was entering his teens, a handsome, wholesome-looking youth with coal-black hair and wide-set gray eyes. Then, to his secret amusement, he began to note a subtle change in her attitude, a softening of her voice when she spoke to him and a suppressed hunger in her eyes when she looked at him. And seeing her thus, knowing what was behind the change, he delighted in teasing her.
Was something wrong? Did she want him to clear out for a while and leave her alone?
'Oh, no, Roy. Really. I-I like being together with you.
'Now, Lilly. You're just being polite. I'll get out of your way right now.'
'Please, h-honey…' Biting her lip at the unaccustomed endearment, a shamed flush spreading over her lovely features. 'Please stay with me. After all, I'm-I'm y-your rn-mother.'
But she wasn't, remember? She'd always passed him off as her younger brother, and it was too late to change the story.
'I'll leave right now, Lilly. I know you want me to. You just don't want to hurt my feelings.'
He had matured early, as was natural enough. By the time he was seventeen-going-on-eighteen, the spring that he graduated from high school, he was as mature as a man in his twenties.
On the night of his graduation, he told Lilly that he was pulling out. For good.
'Pulling out…?' She'd been expecting that, he guessed, but she wasn't resigned to it. 'B-but-but you can't! You've got to go to college.'
'Can't. No money.'
She laughed shakily, and called him silly; avoiding his eyes, refusing to be rejected as she must have known she would be.
'Of course, you have money! I've got plenty, and anything I have is yours. You-'
''Anything I have is yours,' 'Roy, eyes narrowed appreciably. 'That would make a good title for a song, Lilly.'
'You can go to one of the really good schools, Roy. Harvard or Yale, or some place like that. Your grades are certainly good enough, and with my money-our money…'
'Now, Lilly. You know you need the money for yourself. You always have.'
She flinched, as though he had struck her, and her face worked sickishly, and the trim size-nine suit seemed suddenly to hangon her: a cruel moral toa life that had gotten her everything and given her nothing. And for a moment, he almost relented. He almost pitied her.
And then she spoiled it all. She began to weep, to bawl like a child, which was a silly, stupid thing for Lilly Dillon to do; and to top off the ridiculous and embarrassing performance, she threw on the corn.
'D-don't be mean to me, Roy. Please, please don't. Y-you-you're b-breaking my heart…'
Roy laughed out loud. He couldn't restrain himself.
'Only one heart, Lilly?' he said.
3
