The Anonymous Letter

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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.

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