A Special Providence

  And this seemed to have an especially depressing effect on Walker. He would sit through the discussions with a glum, petulant look, clearly resentful that he hadn’t seen enough of the war to talk about and that his performance in it had been inept. That at least was what Prentice saw in his face, and it was so much like the way he felt himself that several times he had to turn away from Walker’s eyes in embarrassment.

  Then, before the first week in the new town was over, Walker did something that made him a laughing stock. The company clerk broke the news, and within an hour it had become general knowledge, setting off little bursts of incredulous laughter wherever it was told.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No! I swear to God! That’s what he did!”

  Walker had gone to Captain Agate and made a formal request that he be allowed to volunteer for service in the C.B.I. The rest of the story was that the captain hadn’t taken him seriously – “Old Agate just looks at him, says, ‘What’s your problem, soldier?’ ” – and that the interview had collapsed in the derisive laughter of everyone in the C.P., from which Walker had stolen away with a crimson face.

  Prentice laughed with the others when he heard about it, but he knew he was laughing in relief that it had been Walker, instead of himself, who had made such a foolish mistake.

  If he’d taken little part in the storytelling before, Walker stayed away from it altogether in the day or two following his disgrace. And it wasn’t more than two days later, just before noon, when the conversation took an unexpected, pleasurable turn for Prentice. The talk, for once, was about the Ruhr:

  “ ’member the day they turned the anti-aircraft gun on us? On the railroad tracks, where old Drake caught it in the leg?”

  Finn and Rand and Mueller and Bernstein were all there, and Prentice felt his stomach tighten in fear that the account of that day might soon lead to his own disastrous performance that night – a fear that was intensified when Sam Rand took up the story.

  “Jesus, I remember old Prentice that time,” he began, already starting to laugh through his words so that the listening faces smiled in readiness. “We was about halfway acrost the tracks when the gun opened up, remember? And we each of us had to get behind one of them brick pillars? Damn things weren’t but about an inch wider than your shoulders? I remember old Prentice standin’ there like this—” and getting to his feet, Sam stood stiffly at attention, holding an invisible rifle at order arms. “He’s standin’ there like this with the damn anti-aircraft shells comin’ in, and Cap’n Agate yells out, ‘Hey Prentice! Par-rade – rest!’ ”

  A thunderclap of laughter broke around him – even Finn was laughing; even Bernstein – and it seemed to Prentice that never in his life had he heard a sweeter sound. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and the pleasure of it carried him out of the house and down to the factory mess hall with a buoyancy he hadn’t known in a long time. He lingered over his schnapps, which sent a fine warmth through his veins, and then he moved along into the savory smells of the serving counter. They were having fried chicken, a special meal, and he carried his heaped and steaming mess kit over to a place at one of the tables beside Owens, the little headquarters man he’d known last winter, and with whom he’d been evacuated that day in Horbourg.

  “Hi. How you doing, Prentice?”

  “Pretty good. This place free?”

  “Sure. Sit down.”

  He’d had only a few very brief talks with Owens since coming back to the company, but now, in the liquor- and wine-flavored leisure of this excellent lunch, they sat chatting as amiably as buddies. They even stayed to talk over coffee and cigarettes, after they’d finished eating, and they took their time about getting up, slinging their rifles, and strolling over to join the line of men waiting to wash their mess kits.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” Owens was saying, “I’m not too happy about all this chickenshit we’ve been getting lately.”

  And Prentice agreed. “Matter of fact,” he said, “if they keep this up I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more than one guy volunteering for the C.B.I.”

  And he would have thought nobody but Owens was listening until, from the corner of his eye, he saw a figure detach itself from the crowd moving past on the right. Even before he could turn and see who it was, the man had taken him roughly by the arm. It was Walker.

  “How’s that, Prentice?” he said, “What’s all this shit about the C.B.I.?”

  It was such a surprise that Prentice could only smile like a fool. “Huh?”

  “You heard me.” Walker was stiff and trembling. “Whadda you got to say about the C.B.I.?”

  Prentice pulled his arm free, which jogged his mess kit and sent the chicken bones dancing in the greasy pan. He felt a warm flush in his face, and it seemed to his startled ears that all the reverberating noise of the high, wide mess hall had stopped. “Look, Walker. This is none of your business.”

  The silence around him was no illusion now – everybody had stopped talking – and Walker couldn’t have asked for a quieter stage on which to enact the passion of his next words: “How come you don’t volunteer for the C.B.I.? Huh? You know why? Because you’re yella, that’s why!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Walk—” But he got no further than that before everything went red and spun around in his vision. Walker had taken his face in one hand and shoved it; with the other hand he had grabbed his arm and swung him around, so that Prentice went reeling across the factory floor and hit the wall in a whirl of flying chicken bones, his rifle flailing at his elbow and his helmet liner bouncing away. It took him only an instant to get free of his rifle sling, to gather himself in a crouch against the wall and spring forward with both fists cocked in what he hoped was an approximation of fighting stance, but before he could take a swing he felt his arms being clamped from behind, and Walker was being pulled back by two other men. Instead of silence now there was pandemonium ringing from the walls:

  “Hey!”

  “Yeeow!”

  “Fight! Fight!”

  Owens was holding one of Prentice’s arms, saying, “Easy, Prentice, take it easy,” and Mueller had the other one. For several seconds he and Walker strained at each other, five feet apart, with only their eyes locked in combat. Prentice was greatly relieved to be in bondage but he knew it was important to keep struggling, for the sake of appearances.

  “Just what the hell is going on here? Quiet, everybody.” It was Loomis’s authoritative voice: he had appeared from nowhere and was looking from Prentice to Walker with righteous eyes. “Where the hell do you kids think you are?”

  Someone in the crowd said, “Walker started it, Loomis. He just”

  “You’re fuckin’ A I started it,” Walker said, curling back his lips to display his clenched teeth, “and I ain’t finished it yet, either.”

  “All right, quiet,” Loomis said. “I don’t care who started it and I don’t care what it’s about. You’re acting like a couple of babies. Christ’s sake, if you want to fight, fight, but take it out of the mess hall. Walker, get on outa here and back up to your billet. That’s an order. Prentice, you get back in the wash line. Everybody else, as you were.”

  Somebody handed Prentice his rifle and helmet liner, and somebody else collected his scattered eating utensils. Mueller began to laugh, shaking his head at the absurdity of the whole thing, and others were laughing too. By the time Prentice reached the washing pails the men around him had found other things to talk about. It was as if nothing had happened. But in bending to the ritual of cleaning his mess gear he was tense with fright, and he started to tremble as he walked through the corridor and out into the sunshine of the factory yard. Owens and Mueller were somewhere behind him now, and Loomis was even farther back in the crowd. The view ahead was blocked by the high wall that surrounded the factory. As he approached the gate that opened onto the street he knew Walker would be waiting for him on the other side, so he was able to keep from registering any surprise, let a
lone any fear, when he passed through the opening and found Walker blocking his path.

  Walker had propped his rifle against the wall and laid his mess kit and helmet liner neatly beside it. His feet were set well apart. His thumbs were hooked in his cartridge belt, but he slowly removed them as Prentice came closer. And there was a smiling audience – six or eight men walking backwards up the street, lingering to see what would happen.

  Prentice put his own equipment down beside Walker’s. Then he squared off and joined Walker in a circling, shuffling, awkward little pugilistic dance. None of the watchers yelled “Fight!” – they didn’t want to risk its being broken up again – so there was silence except for the fighters’ breathing and the scuffing of their boots on the street. Walker was upright and bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, both fists held in close to his neck; Prentice’s stance was more classical – crouching, sidling, leading with his left – but that was only because he was so much less confident. He tried what he hoped would be a left jab, but he misjudged the distance and Walker had only to pull in his chin to avoid the weak flick of it; then he stepped in and tried to follow through with a right, but Walker blocked it and caught him with a quick right to the ear that stopped his hearing on that side. He broke away and danced out of range for a second or two, trying to look alert and menacing; then, because he knew the audience would laugh unless he moved in again, he moved in and got clubbed again on the same ear. Where the hell was Loomis? Why didn’t somebody break this thing up? He backed clumsily out of range again, and then, in panic, he rushed at Walker with a wild looping right that never had a chance to land because somebody had grabbed his belt from behind and pulled him back – Loomis – and at the same time Walker’s arms were caught and held by another man.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Loomis was shouting. “Can’t you kids obey orders?”

  Prentice was so relieved that he was barely able to listen to Loomis’s upbraiding: all he could do was stand there moistening his dry mouth and trying to control his breathing. Loomis’s objection this time was that they were fighting in the street. He’d told them to take it out of the mess hall, for Christ’s sake, but any idiot ought to know he hadn’t meant here, in front of all these German civilians. Only then did Prentice see that there were indeed some civilians watching from across the street: several old men, a young one-legged man on elbow crutches, and a woman who had clutched her apron to her mouth at the spectacle.

  “Walker, you go on back to the house, like I told you. Report to my office and wait for me. Prentice, you stay twenty-five yards behind. I want to see you in my office as soon as I’m finished with Walker. All right, get going, Walker.”

  On the long, slow trip back to the Second Platoon house, keeping his distance of twenty-five yards, Prentice gave all his attention to retaining his dignity. Loomis was walking ahead of him, Owens and Mueller were somewhere behind him, and all the other witnesses of the abortive fight were strung out in twos and threes along the street. He knew his face was red and was afraid it might look, from a distance, as though he were in tears. To dispel that impression he smoked a cigarette.

  The sense of being under everyone’s amused and curious scrutiny was even worse as he sat in the living room outside Loomis’s “office,” waiting for the interview with Walker to end. Klein sat nearby, cleaning his fingernails. Mueller was on a sofa across the room, thumbing through a copy of Yank magazine that he didn’t seem to be reading. In the hallway, just out of sight, were Finn and Sam Rand, who must by now have heard about the fight and were talking quietly together. Once Prentice thought he heard Finn saying “C.B.I.”

  The office door opened and Walker came out, looking neither to right nor left as he strode past everyone’s eyes.

  “All right, Prentice,” Loomis called.

  He was sitting behind the heavy carved table that he had appropriated as his desk, and he looked very solemn and official. “Shut the door,” he said. “Now, suppose you tell me your version.”

  “I was just talking with Owens, and—”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I said I was talking with Owens.” His voice sounded high and far away, and this was only partly because of his boxed, ringing ear; it was mostly because of a warm and terrible constriction in his throat. Of all the shameful events of his life so far, surely the worst would be to start crying here, under the stare of Sergeant Loomis. He wanted to say, “And we weren’t even talking about Walker, that’s the ridiculous part. I just happened to say, kind of as a joke—” but he couldn’t trust his voice for any lengthy explanation. “And then Walker came over and started fighting,” he said. “That’s all.”

  Loomis lowered his eyes. He spread his big hands on the table, palms down, and studied them as if they were the scales of justice. “All right,” he said. “Tell me this, Prentice. Don’t you think that if a man wants to volunteer for the C.B.I., that’s his own business?”

  And again the trouble was that Prentice couldn’t trust his voice. He took a deep breath and said, “Yes. I do. But when a man calls me yellow, that’s my business.”

  That seemed to please Loomis’s theatrical sense. “I see your point,” he said, nodding. “I see your point. All right. I’ll tell you what I suggested to Walker, and he’s agreed to it. If you agree too, that’s the end of it.”

  “The end of it” had a hopeful, peaceful sound – the plan might be to bring Walker back into the office and have them shake hands, man to man; but that wasn’t it.

  There was, Loomis explained, a small field behind the barn up on the hill, well away from the sight of anyone in town – Americans, Germans, or Russians. Tomorrow morning, before breakfast, Prentice and Walker would proceed to that field – just the two of them – and “have it out.” They would be excused from Reveille for the purpose. Would Prentice agree to that?

  It wasn’t until after he’d said “Yes,” left Loomis’s gratified eyes, and walked back through the living room, that fear began to crawl in his bowels. From the speculative, quizzical looks he received during the rest of day it was clear that the news of Loomis’s arrangement had spread throughout the platoon. But nobody spoke to him about it until late that night, when he was walking his post in the Russian D.P. area with Mueller.

  “You really going through with that business in the morning?” Mueller asked him.

  “Looks that way.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know much about fighting?”

  “Not much, no.” And that was certainly true. Except for the formless and tearful playground pummelings of childhood he had had only three real fistfights in his life, all of them in his first year of prep school, and he’d lost them all. It troubled him now, looking back, that he hadn’t really tried to win them, any more than he had really tried to hurt Walker on the street today while waiting to be rescued. He had gone into each of those fights with the sole purpose of surviving, of proving that he could take it and that he wouldn’t quit until some self-appointed referee came in to stop the thing. And tomorrow morning there would be no referee.

  “Well,” Mueller said, hitching up the sling of his B.A.R. “I know I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. I mean for one thing, he must outweigh you by a good thirty pounds. If I were you I’d be scared shitless.”

  And if anyone else had said this it might not have mattered much; but this was Mueller, the plump, soft-looking boy who had astonished everyone by riddling an armed German and saving the lives of Finn and Sam Rand, so his words had a considerable effect. For the rest of his rounds that night Prentice walked with a stately tread and bearing. He had resolved now that he would do more than endure the fight: he would do his best to win it.

  It seemed very important to be up and ready before Walker in the morning, so he was up and ready before anyone else in the house. He sat alone in the living room, with its stale smell of last night’s beer and cigarettes, and to prove that hi
s hands weren’t shaking he paged through several of the magazines that lay strewn on the floor.

  As one man after another came clumping downstairs for Reveille, he felt he was on display. Whether they looked at him squarely or not he knew he was being examined for signs of panic, and he took pride in making his face wholly expressionless. Then very suddenly he had to go to the bathroom – his bladder seemed about to burst – and when he came back he found Walker waiting for him. Everyone else had gone.

  “You ready?” Walker said.

  “Any time you are.”

  The path leading up to the hidden field was steep, and they were both short of breath before they were halfway there. Prentice hoped there would be no talk; he needed silence to maintain his anger and his determination. But, “Tell you what, Prentice,” Walker said. “As long as there’s just the two of us, we better agree on a couple of rules. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean let’s keep it fair. If one of us gets knocked down, we break until the man’s back on his feet. Right? And then do you want to agree that a certain number of knockdowns wins the fight, or do you want to fight until one of us quits?”

  “Fight until one of us quits.”

  “Okay.”

  They leaned their rifles against the barn and removed their helmet liners, cartridge belts, and field jackets. They stood facing each other, and at Walker’s nod they moved out into the dewy grass in the approximate center of the meadow, where they turned to face each other again.

  “Okay, kid,” Walker said. “This is it.”

  And it was the absurdity of that phrase – nobody said “This is it” except in the movies, unless they were phony bastards like Loomis – that roused Prentice to his first real anger of the morning. He wanted to smash and break the head of anyone stupid enough to say a thing like that; he wanted to kill all the posturing fraudulence in the world, and it was all here before him in this big, dumb, bobbing face.