When you return from wherever you are Bob and I will most likely be married. I felt that I owed you this letter and I am truly sorry that I led you on before you left. Hoping you understand and with sincerest apologies, Mary."
He stared at me angrily. "YOU," He said, "Are Bob Simpson. And this time you're after my daughter instead of my wife. But this time you won't have her."
I licked my lips and took a deep breath. "Tell me about Bob Simpson." I said.
"What's to tell?" He asked. "He's you. Why should I have to tell you about the kind of person you are?"
"Obviously," I said, ignoring his categorization of me, "Mr. Simpson didn't marry your wife."
"Of course he didn't!" Mr. Blackmore yelled. "Mary was a good-looking, confused girl who's intended was away fighting the war. He wasn't interested in Mary's love. He was interested in her body!"
"Tell me about him." I repeated.
He swallowed the last of his beer and set the empty down on the table. "Do you have another?" He asked.
Wordlessly I got up, retrieved the empties and carried them to the kitchen. I tossed them into the garbage can and retrieved two more from the refrigerator. I carried them back to the living room and handed one to Mr. Blackmore. He popped it open and took a drink.
"Tell me about him." I said again, opening my own beer.
He sighed. "Bob Simpson was one of those kids that was real popular in school. He always said the right thing to whoever was talking to him, always said whatever that person wanted to hear. He was like a commission salesman, in fact that's what he became later on in life, selling used cars down at Zed Viermore's car lot. Did real well at it too.
"He was two years ahead of me in school. He graduated in 1942, when the war was really gearing up but he didn't enlist in the service. Oh no, not Bob. He stayed at home and took over the jobs that those who left to fight had vacated. He seemed to have no interest in going off to fight and the men in the town used to make fun of him, call him names about this but Bob paid them no heed. Bob had a high lottery number in the draft and just counted on the fact that the war would probably be over before they ever got around to sending him off.
"Bob you see, had discovered a situation that he could take to his advantage. He'd found that with the war going on there was a distinct shortage of men his age around while there was a distinct advantage to the amount of women that were lonely and scared. He used to make friends with them and eventually seduce them, leaving them like yesterday's trash once he got what he wanted from them. The same thing that YOU apparently discovered."
I had nothing to say to him. I couldn't deny what he was accusing me of.
"To tell you the truth, I used to envy Bob before I shipped off. It never occurred to me that he would one day be after MY girl and you couldn't help but be impressed by someone who could have the experiences that he was having. He never told anyone what he was doing, mind you, he was very discreet about it, but we all knew all the same. He did it with married women twice his age whose husbands were off in Europe or Japan. He did it with the fiances of younger men or even their wives after their husband's had shipped out. God knows how many he did but it was a lot. Some of them, usually the older ones, knew it was just a physical thing, a replacement until their husbands came home, but the younger ones sometimes fell in love with him. And he never tried to convince them that was a bad thing either. He broke more hearts than can probably be counted during World War II, marking off those he'd conquered on a little list somewhere."
"While I was off in England preparing to drop into France and witness the majority of my company getting slaughtered, Bob turned his attention to Mary. And why not? She was a beautiful, auburn-haired girl in the prime of her life. He worked on her for nearly a month, at first befriending her and then finally making her fall in love with him, all the time pretending he was in love with her. That was the thing back then you see. A girl would never consent to sex before marriage if she didn't think the guy was in love with her. There was no casual sex like there is these days. If you did the unthinkable and had sex before marriage, it damn sure meant you were going to get married soon. So that was Bob's scheme, he would turn on the charm and make them think he intended to marry him, he would make them think they were so in love that sex wouldn't seem like a big deal since they were going to get married eventually anyway.
"That's what he did to Mary. He seduced her over the space of about a month and finally got what he wanted from her. He took her virginity from her one night in his apartment building after telling her he loved her and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
"The next day, thinking that she was in love, thinking that she'd found what she wanted from him, she wrote me that letter.
"Bob continued to have sex with her for about a month, as much as he could get away with. When she finally started trying to pin down a date for the wedding, when she started asking too much about when she could tell her parents about the announcement, he dumped her. Of course being the person he was he had a speech already pre-planned. He gave it to her, telling her that he'd THOUGHT he'd been in love with her but that it had been simple youthful exuberance. She left his apartment that day knowing she'd been destroyed, knowing that she'd lost everything. She never even wrote me again after that. We never even communicated through the rest of the war.
"I jumped out of airplanes time and time again before Germany finally surrendered in April of 1945. I helped take bridgeheads, railheads, and every other kind of head in advance of the infantry troops. Friends were shot down left and right until I stopped making friends. I even jumped across the Rhine itself just before the end of the war. I didn't care whether I lived or died anymore. Mary was gone. What more did I have to live for?
"Somehow I made it to the end. A bullet or an artillery fragment never had my name on it. I came home in October of 1945 to Spokane to find my life destroyed, my hopes shattered by Bob Simpson."
He grinned a little. "Sometimes there is justice in the world. When I got home I found that someone like me had been there before me. A young man my age by the name of Jeff Zand had received a similar letter while he was fighting the Japanese. Jeff got himself a million dollar wound on Okinawa, shot in the knee, and they sent him home. His first act upon getting back was to find himself a pistol and shoot Bob Simpson to death in his apartment. He shot him twelve times, having to reload his pistol once in order to do it. Jeff was given the electric chair of course and he sat in it less than a year later. His last words were to the effect that it had been worth it."
"Not too many people turned out for Bob's funeral I heard, but there was damn near a thousand at Jeff's. I was one of 'em. I gave his coffin a sharp salute before they lowered it into the ground."
"But you and your wife did eventually marry." I said.
"Eventually." He told me, nodding. "I knew what Bob was like you see so I knew long before I got back that she wasn't gonna be Mrs. Simpson. But she was tainted you see, I couldn't take her back and she couldn't ask. Both of our lives were destroyed by what Bob had done to her. You see, despite his discretion, everyone knew what he was doing and everyone knew whom he was doing it to. It amazed me how so many women fell for him with the reputation he had; hell, even Mary had to have heard the rumors before she started up with him. He must've been one smooth talker indeed.