John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

I drove straight to Chicago, barely stopping to eat and sleep a little. In Chicago I noticed a cheap hotel and took a bottle of brandy up to my room. I planned to sleep all day and get back to work the next morning. To be able to sleep after driving seven hundred miles at one stretch the last leg of my trip, I had to get a little tanked. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear and drank raw brandy out of the bathroom tumbler while I thought over the talks I had had with the crew members. I didn’t blame Dan’s parents and Dorothy for getting discouraged. I was discouraged. There didn’t seem to be any crack I could get my fingers into and widen into a definite clue. Something wasn’t right about it all. I shrugged and tossed off some more brandy. No skin off me. On the following day I could go back to work and forget it — or try to forget it.

I remembered the time that Dan and I had sat in a duck blind and ignored the ducks while we drank half the brandy in the world to keep off the chill. He had been a great guy. Suddenly I stopped moving, almost stopped breathing. I snapped my fingers softly.

I waited for about ten minutes after I placed the call to Dorothy. At last she came on the line, misty with sleep, a yawn in her voice.

“Hello, Howard. What’s the matter?”

“Just thinking, Dorothy. Maybe I got something. I want to know something. You see Dan tight very often?”

“Couple of times. Why? You sound tight yourself, Howard.”

“Maybe I am, a little. Look, Dorothy, what happens to him when he gets tight? Physically, I mean. How does he react?”

“He never shows it — I mean showed it. Why do you have to use the present tense, Howard? It hurts.”

“How did he show it?”

“His legs just gave out on him. He’d sit looking as sober as a bishop, and the only thing would be that he couldn’t get up, couldn’t stand. Please tell me why you want to know.”

“Did that happen every time?”

“Every time I know of. Why can’t you forget it, Howard?”

“Not now, baby. I’ve got a lead and I’m going away and track it down, and look, Dorothy... uh”

“What is it?”

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck, Howard.” Her voice was soft, and the phone clicked in my ear as she hung up. I drank the rest of the brandy and went to bed.

The passport problem was cleaned up in a week. I wired for reservations on the Siam Express from Los Angeles. She was due out in six days for a twenty-eight-day run to Rangoon. That gave me time to get out to L.A. and sell the heap for fifty bucks more than I paid for it.

I loaded a big suitcase with clothes, brandy, cigarettes, and paperbacks. I walked up the gangplank in the morning and found my tourist-class stateroom. I met my roommate, a sly citizen named Duckwood, who claimed he was going to Rangoon to head a sales agency for one of the big motion picture studios. He had peppery hair, wattles under his thin chin, and a violent case of halitosis. I decided to leave him strictly alone for the rest of the trip. I bought a chair, forward and starboard, and settled down for twenty-eight days of boredom.

We hauled out in the afternoon. It took three days to settle into the routine of eating, sleeping, reading, and exercising. I didn’t avoid people, but neither did I enter into any casual conversations of my own accord. Thus I was left pretty well alone. It was a good ship, with a slight tendency to corkscrew in choppy weather. The food was good, and I ate my share of it. There were four at my table, myself, Duckwood, and two well-stuffed schoolteachers from Kansas who had been penned up in the States for five years by the war. They were taking a year off. They both had the fetching trait of chewing with their mouths open. I loved them both, dearly. I never did catch their names.

At the end of ten days I was bored. At the end of twenty days I was too lethargic to even be bored. I tried to nap as much as possible.

On the twenty-fifth day, in the morning, I found that we were going to be late getting into Rangoon. We were going to make a stop at Trincomalee on the northeast shore of Ceylon. I went to see the purser. He was difficult. He said that it would be impossible.

I went to the cabin and packed my bag. At two in the afternoon we floated slowly into the great British naval base of Trincomalee. Wooded hills sloped steeply down to the blue harbor. A trail wound up from the dock buildings, and a dusty truck rocked down it. I carried my bag out onto the deck. I set it down near the passenger gangplank on B deck. The sailor manning the unlowered gangplank looked at me oddly. I carefully ignored him. I had to take a chance on their nuzzling the big ship up to a dock. They did.

When the gangplank was lowered, I brushed by the man on the deck and hurried down it. Men on the dock and on the ship stared at me stupidly. Someone shouted, “Stop that man!” I guessed that it was my friend, the purser.

I walked along the dock toward the shore. I heard steps hurrying along behind me. I stopped and turned. It was the purser and a fat sailor. They stopped, too.

“Now listen to me,” I said, “I’ve got a visa for Ceylon, and if either of you monkeys lays a hand on me I’ll sue the line for a hundred thousand and you’ll both be out of a job.”

I stepped onto land while the two of them were still screaming at each other. I looked back. The purser was waving his arm toward me and the sailor was waving his arm toward the ship. Their noses were a half inch apart.

There was no American consular representative in Trincomalee. I wired the notification of my presence on the island to the American consul in Colombo. The British were very pleasant about searching my baggage and changing some dollars into Ceylonese rupees. I thanked them and they thanked me and I thanked them again. Small bows and brief handshakes, All very pleasant. They smiled and asked me what I was doing on the island. I smiled and told them that I was a tourist who was thinking of writing a book. When they smiled and asked me the title, I smiled and said, “British Spheres of Influence, or, the Mailed Fist Around the World.” They stopped smiling and bowing and I left.

I had to stay overnight in Trincomalee. It cost me a hundred rupees to hire a car to drive me to Kandy in the morning. It was a bone-shattering road, narrow, winding upward through the jungle. The asphalt was dotted with holes a foot wide and six inches deep. I sat on the leather back seat of the ancient touring car and bit my tongue by accident twice on the way down. The driver kept his bare brown foot on the gas and ignored the condition of the road. After every particularly bad bump, he would look around at me with a shy grin splitting his face. He wore a pale green European shirt and a flowered sarong. The road smoothed out just outside of Kandy. The driver let me off in front of the Queen’s Hotel. I had a curry lunch and took a taxi to the station to catch the Colombo train.

Before arriving on the island, everything had seemed simple. All I wanted was to contact O’Dell and Constance Severance and find out what had actually happened. During the long days on the ship I had imagined how the interviews would go. In my imagination they all seemed to take place in discreet hotel rooms, with the other persons putting me on the track of an answer to why Dan had died.

On the island, it was different. I sat in my compartment and looked out at the towering mountains as the little train screeched around the downhill curves. I hadn’t thought of the island and how it fitted into the picture. There was something warm and green and lush about the island that made intrigue and indirection a natural response. The clean-limbed natives were so different from the ones I had grown used to in India. It was an island of spice, gems, and color. My serious practical interviews with O’Dell and Severence faded out of my mind. I lost my certainty. All the old doubts came back. I wondered what I was doing back in the East.