A Special Providence (7 page)

“Look,” she said. “It’s getting kind of late. You want to take me home?”

She lived so many miles from the center of town that her home could be reached only by riding a bus for great, winding distances and then transferring to another bus. He was uneasy about finding his way back and made her repeat the directions several times, until she began to look tired and bored with him as they jolted along in the second bus. Her boredom made a light sweat break out inside the woolen slant of his overseas cap; he pictured her giving him one limp hand to shake at her door and saying something awful – “So long, stupid; it’s been real,” or something like that – and in an all-out effort to avert such a disaster he settled his arm more closely around her, bravely working his hand up and somehow around inside her open coat until it held the meager shape of her breast. This caused her to nestle against him with a little purring sound, rearranging her coat to hide his hand; and after bending to touch his lips to her powdery forehead, he rode on into the
Baltimore night feeling like the very devil of a soldier.

But his boldness fled him when they got off the bus at last to walk up a silent block of looming, close-set, ominously dark frame houses. “You live with your parents?” he inquired, and he suddenly hoped the evening might end in a family kitchen scene: a jovial father in suspenders who would want to tell him about the last war and a soft, smiling mother who would thank him for bringing Arlene home safely, who would wish him luck and kiss his cheek and send him on his way with a warm paper bag full of homemade cookies.

“Yeah,” she said. “But it’s okay. My father works the night shift and my mother sleeps like the dead. Here, it’s this next one. Now for God’s sake be quiet.” She led him down an alley and through a side door, up a creaking flight of stairs, and down a linoleum hall to the door of her family’s apartment. Her key scraped in the lock, and then, saying “Sh-sh!”, she led him into a room and turned on a light switch.

There was flowered wallpaper, an ornate sofa of green velvet, and a cold fireplace containing a clay-filament gas grill. There were several religious pictures on the walls, as well as a dark reproduction of “The Reaper,” and on the mantelpiece were a number of knicknacks including a paperweight model of the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World’s Fair and a big kewpie doll with feathers. Arlene stepped out of her shoes and left him alone while she padded out another door, whispering that she’d only be a minute. He took off his overcoat and cap and sat experimentally on the sofa. He started to light a cigarette but decided against it: he would wait until she came back so that he could put two cigarettes in his lips, light them both and then slowly remove one and hand it to her, looking at her with narrowed eyes, the way Paul Henreid had done with Bette Davis in the movie called
Now, Voyager
.

“It’s okay,” Arlene said, closing the door behind her. “She’s out cold.” And she came to the sofa bringing a quart bottle of beer and two glasses. “You got a cigarette, Bob?”

He went carefully through the Paul Henreid trick, but she was pouring the beer and didn’t notice. “Thanks,” she said. “Here, let me put this thing on.” And squatting ungracefully she set a match to the gas fireplace, which popped and hissed. Then she turned off the lights and sat beside him in the soft orange glow.

Could you just start necking with a girl, without saying anything first? He guessed you could, and he was right. Once he broke away to stand up and take off his stifling tunic, and when he came back he avoided her while he reached out and swigged at his beer, as if he were an interestingly jaded alcoholic who absolutely had to have a drink or else be bored to death with the whole idea of sex; then, having drained his glass, he tried the
Now, Voyager
business again with two more cigarettes, though their first two were lying almost untouched in the ashtray, but again she didn’t notice. She was unhooking her brassiere for him. He wondered if he could say, “Look, Arlene, let’s not; you’re too nice a girl for this,” and if she might then weep in his arms and say, “Oh, Bob, you’re the first boy who’s ever really respected me,” and if then they might cling romantically together at the door with tender goodbyes and promises to write. The trouble was that her tongue was in his mouth and her little naked breasts were in his hands, and her fingers, with their high-school ring, were expertly unfastening the buttons of his fly. Only then did he remember the pack of Army condoms that had ridden in his wallet for weeks; he struggled to get one of them out but wasn’t at all sure if he knew how to put the damned thing on until Arlene helped him. She helped him, in fact, to do everything else that was required: she positioned their two bodies on the sofa and gravely, carefully
guided him into herself with both hands. He knew it was supposed to take a long time, but it was frantically over in almost no time at all.

“You done already?” she asked, not exactly in irritation but in something dangerously close to it; and so by way of reply, instead of apologizing, he buried his face in her neck with what he hoped would sound like the deepest possible groan of satisfaction. And the surprising thing was that she then seemed as eager as he was to pretend it had been a success: she stroked his back and nibbled at his ear. Could it be that she was used to settling for this kind of performance? He could only hope so.

Then they were sitting up, while she put her clothes and her hair in order. “God,” she said. “Look at all those cigarettes. Did you light all those cigarettes?”

Quint and Sam Rand were heavily asleep when he crept back into the barracks, and he took that sleepily to heart as a point of pride, a suggestion that he’d made out better than either of them.

But there was no chance to mention it in the morning, or even to drop sly hints about it, because it was their last morning at Meade and was filled with hectic activity: packing and inspections and roll calls by short-tempered noncoms.

Well before noon they were marched out into the snow – many hundreds of them, well over a thousand – and herded into a northbound train. In the cramped, overheated day-coach Prentice had ample opportunity for letting it be known that he’d made out last night, but he couldn’t find the words and wasn’t at all sure he would say them if he could. He was afraid that Sam Rand might say something like, “Well, I guess that makes you a big man now, don’t it, Prentice?” And Quint might only draw his mouth to one side and shake his head in mild, derisive amusement. Maybe all Quint had done with the other girl,
Nancy, was to pay for her beer and put her on the bus for home; maybe that was all you were
supposed
to do with girls like that, if you had any pride. And now he allowed his mind to dwell on another, uglier aspect of the thing. Hadn’t the V.D. movies all made it clear that a rubber was never really enough protection? Shouldn’t he have gone to a pro station afterwards? He hadn’t even – Jesus! – hadn’t even taken a shower. He felt naked and tender under all the layers of winter clothing and long underwear, crawling with loathsome germs. And how long did it take for the first symptoms to show?

Camp Shanks, deep in the woods northwest of New York, turned out to be a maze of long, low tarpaper huts whose air was heavy with coal smoke from pot-bellied stoves and with the sweet smell of cosmoline in which the factory-new rifles came embedded. Once you had cleaned and oiled your rifle at Shanks there was nothing to do but sit around and talk, or listen to the talk, and almost all the talk was of despair.

“… hell, I wouldn’t mind if I was
trained
. Get your full sixteen weeks’ basic, join a regular outfit for your advanced training, get to know your job and your buddies, and
then
go over. I mean that’s soldiering, you know what I mean? This way, shit – grab your ass and throw you into the line with a bunch of goddam strangers and use you for cannon fodder; that’s all they’re doing. I don’t mind telling you, I’m scared shitless.”

“Who ain’t, buddy? You know anybody who ain’t?”

“… shit, though, why
not
go over the damn hill? What’s the worst they’d give a man? Ten years in Leavenworth, and then get it commuted to six months when the war’s over? That ain’t so bad.”

“Leavenworth, my ass. You’d never see no Leavenworth, buddy. M.P.’s ‘ud shove your ass on the next boat, that’s all they’d do.”

“… fella over in the next barracks, he was tellin’ me they got this one ole boy over there put his foot up on a stump? Just like ‘at? Put his foot up on a stump and commenced askin’ fellas to hit his leg with a rifle? And you know, that’s pretty smart? Get your leg broke here, you’d sure as hell save yourself a mess of trouble later on.”

“She-it. Put
your
foot up on a stump, Reynolds! I’d like to see
you
have guts enough to let me hit your leg with a rifle.”

“I never
said
I would!
Damn
, you get things twisted around! I never
said
I would! …”

Everyone seemed determined to outdo everyone else in boastful claims of cowardice, and Prentice found it disheartening. He stayed as close as possible to Quint and Sam Rand, who avoided the talk, and he spent most of his time trying to finish the letter to Hugh Burlingame. But he couldn’t make the paragraphs work out right, and in the end he tore it up and dropped the pieces into the coal stove.

On the second day a harassed little buck sergeant came storming into the hut to announce that he personally didn’t give a pig’s shit whether anybody paid attention to him or not, but that anybody who didn’t, and who missed the boat, would find his sweet little ass up for a general God damned court-martial. He then chalked numerals on each of their steel helmets and told them all to stand by because they’d be moving out any minute. But they didn’t move out until long after dark; when they did, it was to become part of an endless column slipping and sliding down an ice-covered hillside that seemed to fall away for miles, and despite the cold they were soaked with sweat by the time they filed into another train that took them to the Weehawken ferry slip, from which they were borne out into the gentle midnight silence of the Hudson. They floated downtown, heading east across the river, and the ferryboat drew up beneath
the enormous gray hull of the
Queen Elizabeth
. Then they labored up into the pier and onto the ship, where tired British voices guided them down curving, tilting corridors and stairways until they found the impossibly small canvas bunks, hung in vertical tiers of four, whose numbers matched the numbers on their helmets. And when they woke up in the morning – when they struggled out half seasick to stand with their mess kits in the freezing wind of the open deck, waiting for breakfast – there was no land in sight.

“Only you don’t call it the Clyde River,” Quint explained as they stood at a railing of the stilled ship, six days later. “You call it—” and here he broke into a prolonged coughing fit. Both he and Prentice had chest colds that were getting worse. “You call it the Firth of Clyde,” he said when he’d recovered. “I don’t know what the hell ‘Firth’ means, but that’s what you call it. It’s supposed to be the biggest shipbuilding center in the world, or something.”

“Don’t look like much,” said Sam Rand. “Them hills is real pretty, though.”

It took them all night and most of the next day to ride through Great Britain on a train that pleased Prentice because it was exactly like the trains in British movies, a series of cozy compartments with a connecting corridor. He had a window seat, and long after the other men were asleep he stared with fascination at the dark passing landscape of Scotland and then of England. Being in England made him think of a man whose name hadn’t crossed his mind in years – Mr. Nelson, Mr. Sterling Nelson; a man who had once said, “I’ll expect you to take good care of your mother while I’m gone” – and for a little while he could almost feel his mother riding beside him (“Oh, isn’t this exciting, Bobby?”) so that it came as a little shock
when the person who slumped heavily against his shoulder, groaning in sleep, turned out to be John Quint.

In the morning, along with the passing out of cold K rations, bright rumors flew up and down the corridor to the effect that this particular trainload of replacements wasn’t heading for combat at all. The battle of the Ardennes, which everyone by now had learned to call “the Bulge,” was virtually won. The war in Europe would soon be over, and there were enough men now on the Continent to finish the job. Their own destination was to be a camp in the south of England, near Southampton, where they would join a new division in training for service as occupation troops in Germany. All afternoon there was a holiday mood on the train as they sped through the English countryside – there was talk of English girls and English beer and furloughs in London – but there were several skeptics, too.

“Hell, it’s the old story,” said Sam Rand. “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see. I say we’re goin’ straight to Belgium.”

“Sam, old man,” said Quint, “I hate to say it, but I’ve got a feeling you’re right.”

And he was. When they walked heavy-laden through the streets of Southampton it was still possible to believe the rumors – their camp was supposed to be
near
Southampton, wasn’t it? – but no Army trucks were there to meet them and no jeep drove up with orders to turn them away from the waterfront. The hike went on, past numberless English civilians whose stares made it plain that they were bored half to death with the sight of Americans, and it didn’t end until they had filed aboard a British troopship that smelled of fish and vomit. And the ship, under conditions of strict blackout and radio silence, crept out into the Channel that night.

Then they were in Normandy, rolling eastward in a train of
shuddering French boxcars, the floors of which were thickly embedded with straw that caused a good deal of sneezing and complaint until it proved to be comfortable. Prentice woke up coughing and feverish soon after dawn and squirmed around to lie with his head near the partly opened door, even though he knew it probably wouldn’t be good for his cold. He wanted to see the snow-covered fields and hedgerows where all the fighting had taken place last summer. Again it seemed that his mother was riding with him – “Oh, look at the
colors
, dear; aren’t they lovely?” – but he fell back to sleep and awoke much later to sounds that would certainly have baffled and distressed her: the clamor of commercial bargaining. They had come to a stop near some town, and a number of ragged men and boys were swarming under the boxcar with offers of money and wine in exchange for cigarettes.