John D. MacDonald

The Anonymous Letter

When Dick Reals slopped me on the street it took me quite a few seconds to realize who he was. Part of it might have been due to my never having seen him out of uniform before. Something about him made me uncomfortable. I don’t like people putting their hands on me. He held onto my arm lightly, but that wasn’t enough to give me that little germ of distaste which made me want to pull away. His mouth looked slack instead of firm the way it had been, and his lips looked too damp. He had lost weight and his too gay suit hung on him. Maybe it was his eyes. He held them open very wide and as he talked to me I got the impression that he was looking beyond me, looking at something suspended in the air beyond my shoulder.

Dick and I had first met at Jorhat, a hot dusty air strip in North India. It was one of the freight stations for shipment of supplies over the Hump into China. I was a driver in a Quartermaster truck outfit assigned to the field. We were losing men all the time with malaria, dengue, amoebic dysentery and strange disorders that some of the boys picked up in the native quarter in the nearest down. Dick was a replacement. He came up from Calcutta on the fourteen-day railroad, a buck private.

In a month he was as sick of the heat, the stench and the lazy wogs as the rest of us. We cut the monotony with some raw foul local brews called Lilly Brand Gin and Fighter Brand Whisky. Dick was good man. Eight of us lived in the same basha. The captain liked Dick because he was always fairly cheerful and you could depend on him to do a job. He was a big, open-faced kid, and he took on a coat of tan that was the envy of the post where most of us were a fine shade of mahogany.

When it was too hot to sleep, we would lie under the nets in the basha, the sweat running down our naked bodies and kick around all of the old home subjects — girls, post-war jobs, politics, North versus South and California as a place to live.

After a month we found out that when the subject of girls at home came up, Dick would go into a monologue that was as sincere a hymn of praise as any of the passages in Omar Khayyam.

We couldn’t kid him about it. He would say, “You unmarried guys have it tough. I got hitched to Margaret before I left. We had a week together on the Cape. I wish you could see her. The pictures I got don’t do a thing for her. She’s a little blonde, about five two and weighs a hundred and two. But she’s not skinny. Every bit of her is soft and curved and sweet. I was almost afraid to touch her at first, but she’s a husky kid for all her littleness. We have fun together. She writes every day. I can shut my eyes and remember just how she looks, her blonde hair all ruffled, looking up at me out of those dark eyes, with her lips moist and kind of half opened...”

Then one of the other guys would tell him to lay off, he was driving us all nuts, and we would all be quiet for a time, pawing through the lonesome thoughts that men must have when they’re fourteen thousand miles from home.

The dull hot days went by and the stock piled up in the godowns. The big forty-sixes and forty-sevens would circle and sit down on the strip, shimmering heat waves rising from their scabbed and battered hide. They’d load up and take off, disappearing into the misty hills for the high cold ride to Kunming.

But that was before the anonymous letter came. The letter that told Dick that Margaret was unfaithful to him.

When Dick changed, we thought the heat had him. The captain figured it might be cerebral malaria and had the laboratory at the station hospital take a slide. He was okay in his body. It was his mind that had changed. He got sullen and violent and disagreeable. The captain couldn’t trust him on lone runs into Chabua and up to Ledo. He could only send him out in convoy.

Dick was with us in the basha long enough for us to get a pretty good idea of what was wrong. He bad a packing crate beside his charpoy bed. Unopened letters from his wife piled up on the crate, the ink address smearing into the fillers of the paper made damp by the humidity.

He didn’t go over to the day room and write, after he got the anonymous letter. When he wasn’t working, he stayed in his bunk. We all got fed up with him. It took about a month for our previous liking to wear off. At the end of that time, any one of us would have enjoyed an excuse to beat the hell out of him.

The payoff came when he nearly kicked a wog to death. We had a new circular from headquarters posted on the day room which raised hell about any of us slugging an Indian.

It was early evening just after chow and we were waiting for the PX to open. We were parked on our tails outside the basha when Dick came slouching along from the direction of the Captain’s quarters. He ignored us and went into the basha. One of the guys looked through the door and whispered to us that Reals was packing his gear. I heard somebody else say flatly, “Damn good thing.”

When he walked out, sweating under the load of stuff, I said, “Where you going, Dick?”

“Transfer to another outfit,” he mumbled as he struggled up the path toward headquarters.

I had completely forgotten about him until he grabbed me by the arm in the street. I couldn’t recall any fragment of the previous liking which I had had for him.

It’s far too easy for me to say yes. I let him take me along to a cheap dingy cocktail lounge where we perched at the end of the bar. He laid a crumpled dollar on the bar and we both ordered a rye and soda.

He took a hearty gulp, wiped off his mouth and grinned at me. “That sure was a hell of a place, that Jorhat, wasn’t it Bob?”

I agreed and wondered how I could get away from him. Like most guys, I got sick enough of my theater so that talking about it is no pleasure.

I sat and drank and grunted while he talked about the bugs and the dust and the wogs and the smells. We each had two more drinks, on me, before he got talked out. As he talked he kept bobbing his head and smiling at me as though he wanted terribly for me to appreciate him. His eyes still stared at a spot beyond my head. I noticed that his hands and nails were filthy and his bright suit was spotted.

I was halfway through the fourth drink when he ran down, so I asked him, “What outfit did you get your transfer to?”

“They stuck me in a replacement pool down in Calcutta and then I got sent to station hospital near Delhi. Became a nurses aid, a pan handler.” He laughed too long and too loud at his own joke.

“How did you like it?” I asked him.

“Pretty good, Bob. I learned a lot. Studied about the human body in my spare time. Here, you take your own pulse a second or so.”

It didn’t matter to me. I took my own pulse and the beat was steady. He reached his left hand around my back and squeezed on a spot on the back of my neck. To my amazement my pulse definitely slowed down. It alarmed me. When he took his hand away, it resumed normal tempo.

I stared at him. “Nerve center,” he explained, “Pressure point. I learned all of ’em. Darn interesting stuff.”

The conversation died slowly and I was able to pull away. We stood for a few moments out in the sun in front of the place, promising to look each other up again. I knew I’d never look him up.

I wanted to satisfy ray curiosity about Margaret, so I asked him how his wife was.

His eyes focused on me slyly and he said, “Didn’t you hear about that? That was the town tragedy last year. It was in all the papers. I came back and she met me. I put my arms around her and maybe I was too rough or something. She slumped in my arms. The pathologist said that momentary pressure on a nerve center in her neck caused paralysis of the lungs and heart.”

When I looked back at him, he was still standing there, bobbing his head and smiling at me, and on his face was the expression of a man who wants desperately to be liked and appreciated.

I gasped. I realized what he had done...

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Anonymous Letter