A Special Providence (29 page)

There was a long silence, during which the sound of laughter floated up from the kitchen and died away: someone had evidently told a joke.

“Real sorry, Prentice,” Sam said. “I know you and him was good friends.” He probed inside a pocket of his woolen shirt and brought out a pack of cigarettes. He gave one to Prentice and took one for himself, and he ponderously lit them both with a tiny, expensive-looking lighter that he’d probably looted from a German home. Then he shifted his weight in the creaking chair and blew a long jet of smoke at the floor between his boots. “I saw him only a day or so before it happened,” he said. “I told him about you bein’ hit; he felt real bad about that.”

“You told him I was
hit?
Jesus, Sam, I wasn’t hit. I went back with pneumonia, that’s all.”

And Sam looked up in mild surprise. “That so? Well, I must of had the wrong information, then. I heard you was hit in Horbourg.” There was another silence, and then Sam got up from the chair and mumbled that he would see him later.

“Wait a second.” Prentice was suddenly in terror of being left alone. He wanted to say: Wait a second. Listen. Do you know he would have gone back even before Horbourg, if it hadn’t been for me? I talked him out of it! And do you realize I went
back the next day without even telling him? Without even
telling
him? And do you see how awful it is that he thought I’d been hit? Sam, for Christ’s sake, do you realize I killed him?

But he didn’t say any of those things. Instead he said, “Wait a second. I – I’ve—” he rummaged in his bag until he found the four packages of Bond Street tobacco, but he didn’t bring them out until after he’d torn off the red ribbon and the tag. “You smoke a pipe sometimes, don’t you?” he said.

“Sometimes, yeah. Well, that’s – that’s real nice of you, Prentice. I ’predate it.” And Sam Rand stood there holding the stack of packages in both hands, straightening their edges with his social finger.

Then he was gone, and Prentice was alone in a silence that rang with all his shrill, unspoken words. He was so alone that the only thing to do was lie back on the bed and roll over and draw up his knees like an unborn baby, staring with dry eyes at a cluster of pink flowers on the wallpaper, knowing he had never been so alone in his life.

After a while he rolled off the bed and got to his feet, gazing at the ceiling as if beseeching God for punishment; then he let his head fall forward and clasped his temples with both hands – a gesture as melodramatic as any that Alice Prentice had ever achieved – and he was still doing that when the door burst open and a husky boy in a top hat stood staring at him.

The only thing to do was reshape his tragic features into a wince of discomfort and begin scratching his scalp with all ten fingers, as if he were a man bedeviled with dandruff who could sure as hell use a good shampoo.

“You Prentice?” The boy’s big face was so expressionless that Prentice couldn’t tell if the scalp-scratching ruse had worked or not. “Here’s your mail. It just come over from the C.P.” And he slung a thick, twine-bound sheaf of letters onto Prentice’s bed.

“Oh,” Prentice said, still scratching and wincing. “Thanks.” Then he smoothed his hair, shook his fingers as extra proof of dandruff, and hooked his thumbs manfully into his belt.

“My name’s Walker,” the boy said. “I got the other sack in here.”

“Oh. Glad to meet you.”

But Walker only mumbled something about being on duty and having to haul ass. He snatched up his web equipment from the bed and buckled it on, exchanged his top hat for a helmet, picked up his rifle, and was gone as quickly as he’d come, leaving an almost visible trail of unfriendliness.

It was the first mail Prentice had received since coming overseas. The letters were mostly from his mother – she seemed to have written three or four a week – and he sorted out the one with the most recent postmark and opened it first, to make sure she was all right.

He let his eyes slide down the lines of her big, impassioned handwriting until they came to rest on another paragraph: …

And then he put it back in its envelope. There was a letter from Hugh Burlingame, too, and two others from lesser of his
school friends, but he didn’t feel like reading them now. The one letter that claimed all his attention, the one he held and stared at for a long time without opening, had not been intended for him. It was very new-looking, written on Red Cross stationery in his own shamefully familiar hand, addressed to Pfc. John R. Quint, and it bore the company mail clerk’s pink rubber stamp:
RETURN TO SENDER
.

Being “on duty” at this position on the Rhine meant walking out across the flatland, twice a day and twice a night, to sit in a foxhole overlooking the mild, surprisingly narrow river. You sat there for two hours on an improvised wooden bench, with a field telephone close at hand, watching for any sign of movement on the opposite shore, until another man came out to relieve you. From half a mile away to the north came the faint, wavering sounds of Engineers at work on a pontoon bridge.

Prentice welcomed his two-hour sittings because they gave him a chance to be as alone as he felt, and only when he was alone could he savor the full enormity of his guilt.

It would have been so easy! If only he had said “Okay” when Quint first suggested their going back – and what, after all, would it have cost him to say that? Or later, in the talk they’d had over the window sill in Horbourg, if only he had said he was ready to go back then. Or later still, after he’d fallen on that mattress under Logan’s cursing: how much strength would it have taken, after all, just to have roused himself and gone to find Quint again and said, “Look, I’m ready now; I’m going back.” Why
hadn’t
he done that one, last, tremendously important thing? Was it really because he’d been too sick to get off the mattress? Or was it – this was the most galling thought of all – was it because of all the God damn wine he had drunk that day?

Once, walking back to the platoon house at midnight, he began to compose a difficult letter in his mind:

And when he was in bed, huddled with a flashlight under the tent of a blanket so as not to disturb Walker’s sleep, he tried to commit it to paper. But all the sentences had to be crossed out and reworked and crossed out again, until, an hour later, he abandoned the job. What could he hope to accomplish with a letter like that? All he’d get back, if anything, would be some formal, kindly words from the grieving parents.

He crumpled it up, turned off the flashlight, and tried to sleep. Then half an hour later he was up and writing again, trying a different kind of letter.

But he couldn’t finish that one, either.

At last he put the flashlight away and lay still, flexing the writer’s cramp out of his fingers, listening to Walker’s heavy snore and to the shallow sound of his own breathing. It was hopeless. The only way he could ever make amends was with action, not words – with whatever action might still be possible on the dangerous land beyond this river – and he put himself to sleep with daydreams of heroic combat and rescue and self-sacrifice.

In the meantime there was the daily problem of how to fit in
with the men of the Second Platoon, and especially with those of his own rifle squad. More than once he was tempted to walk up to Finn and say: “Look, Sergeant: there’s something I want to get straightened out with you. The point is, I think you must have confused me with the kid that took sick in the factory, back in—” But he was never able to do so, and Finn’s narrow gaze seemed never to include him except with mild disdain.

And Sam Rand wasn’t much of a comfort. With Quint gone, it soon became clear that the two of them had very little in common; besides, it wasn’t easy to talk to Sam now without seeming to be currying favor with the assistant squad leader.

Only two of the squad were veterans of the Bulge – Finn himself and a noisy, flat-faced little man named Krupka, who looked seventeen but was in fact twenty-three. It was Krupka who made the first friendly overtures; one morning when Prentice was waiting his turn at the platoon’s extra latrine – a straight chair with a knocked-out seat that straddled a slit trench in the back yard (the original latrine, a civilian outhouse, had become too full and foul to use). Krupka was taking his time on the chair, allowing his bowels to move with an unforced animal rhythm, gesturing with a clutched wad of K-ration toilet paper to emphasize the points of his one-way conversation.

“You was with us down in Colmar, right? Well listen, don’t let nobody shit you – you ain’t missed nothin’ since then. All we done since then was go to Holland in a holdin’ position; then we come up here and since then we just been quiet. Some a these guys’ll try to give you a big line a bullshit; don’t listen to ’em. Part of the States you from, Prentice?”

He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he’s probably an outcast himself. As it turned out, Krupka was not exactly an outcast – he was
apparently too good and reliable a soldier for that – but he was nobody’s favorite: despite his lack of any discernible sense of humor he was a tireless kidder and teaser, a wounder of feelings. Once when one of the other squad leaders came into the kitchen to speak with the lieutenant – a tall, stooped, scholarly-looking man named Bernstein – Krupka greeted him with, “Hey there, Suicide? How’s Suicide today?” Sergeant Bernstein ignored him, though little flecks of pink appeared in his cheeks, and somebody else said, “Ah, blow it out your ass, Krupka.” But Krupka couldn’t leave it alone: he kept it up throughout whatever business it was that Bernstein had with the lieutenant, and the minute Bernstein was gone – “So long, Suicide” – he nudged Prentice heavily in the ribs. “Know why I call him that? Back in the Bulge, when Brewer had the platoon. We hadda go acrost this ridge one time; old Bernstein chickens out and starts yellin’ at Brewer. He says, ‘I won’t
take
my men acrost there’ ” – and here Krupka rolled his eyes in a cruelly accurate imitation of hysteria – “He says, ‘It’s suicide! It’s suicide!’ Turns out there wasn’t nothin’ on the other side of the ridge – no Jerries or nothin’. Anyway, that’s why I call him that. Makes him sore as hell; he don’t let on, though.”

The other five men in the squad (it was a nine-man squad as opposed to the regulation twelve) were all newcomers who had joined the outfit in Holland. All five were Prentice’s age or younger, and the husky, top-hatted Walker, Prentice’s room-mate, was clearly their spokesman. He and two taciturn, squint-eyed country boys, Drake and Brownlee, were inseparable companions, and it was with these three that Sergeant Finn chose to spend most of his time. He accompanied them on foraging trips down the road for eggs and wine, he sat up late to drink and play cards with them, and he continually looked out for their welfare. It was as if he had decided that these
three were the only members of the squad worth bothering with. He seemed to have decided that Sam Rand was all right but that Sam was older and could shift for himself, that Krupka was all right but that Krupka was a pain in the ass; as for the others, though it might be his duty to lead them, his every glance and muttering made it clear that as far as he was concerned they were on their own.

And these others, in addition to Prentice, were two: a small, sad-eyed, homesick boy named Gardinella who constantly tried to ingratiate himself with Finn and constantly failed, and another very young-looking soldier named Mueller, who was so quiet and so rarely in evidence that Prentice at first thought he must belong to another squad. He was middle-sized and stocky, though his weight was more baby fat than brawn, and he had small, tapered, weak-looking hands with dimpled fingers. The surprising thing about Mueller was that he was the B.A.R. man – he would theoretically control the major firepower of the squad – but Prentice hadn’t been in the house more than three days before hearing the story of how Mueller had come to be assigned to that job. In Holland, there had been some kind of battalion lecture or briefing after which, in the confusion of reforming ranks and getting back into trucks, Mueller had left his rifle behind. And Finn, after chewing him out – “You mean you lost your
rifle?” –
had said: “Okay, Buster. From now on you’re the B.A.R. man.” It was a punishment: the B.A.R. weighed twice as much as an ordinary rifle and required the wearing of a special belt heavy with sagging ammunition magazines. It was generally assumed that when the squad went into action Finn would assign the B.A.R. to some more competent man – Walker, for instance – but in the meantime Krupka gave Mueller a merciless kidding about it. “Hey, you gonna get yourself a buncha Jerries with that B.A.R., Mueller?
You gonna stop a coupla Tiger tanks? Hey fellas, let’s get Mueller some armor-piercing ammo, so he can stop a coupla Tiger tanks – okay, Mueller?” The carrying of the B.A.R. was Mueller’s cross, and he bore it with a fortitude that Prentice could only admire.

But there seemed to be no way for Prentice to relax among these men – even with Gardinella and Mueller. He kept to himself, and he looked forward to his two-hour sittings in the riverbank foxhole. And it was there, late one afternoon, that he decided to do the thing he had put off for too many days: make a visit to Weapons Platoon. He walked there as soon as he was free.

The first few men he spoke to were of no help – they were new replacements – but then he found a haggard-looking staff sergeant with the dimly remembered name of Rolls who had been with the outfit all along.