A Special Providence

by Richard Yates

  But except for the hiss and crackle of timbers in flames the night remained dead silent until they were well past the burning house, enclosed once more in the protection of darkness. Prentice resumed the difficult job of watching Owens’s helmet, until it suddenly came up very close and he realized Owens had stopped. He stopped too, and moved back a few steps. Apparently the whole column had come to a halt.

  Glancing down and to the left, he saw the unmistakable shape of a man lying in the snow. It struck him as odd for a second – what the hell was he lying down for? – until he realized the man was dead. It was impossible to tell whether he was German or French or American. He looked back at Owens’s helmet just in time to see it turn and disclose the pale oval of his face. Owens was whispering something to him, and at first he thought it must be some comment on the dead man. But it wasn’t.

  “What’s that?” he whispered back.

  “Send up the First Platoon; pass it on.”

  And Prentice turned around to face the dark blur of the stranger behind him. “Send up the First Platoon,” he whispered. “Pass it on.”

  Soon, from the rear, there came a scuffle of overshoes and a muted creak and jingle of equipment as the men of the First Platoon moved up to receive their orders.

  Did everyone have better night vision than Prentice? It was all he could do to concentrate on the floating shape of Owens’s helmet, waiting to see if it would turn again.

  It turned. “Send up the Second Platoon; pass it on.”

  He was pleased that he’d heard it right the first time. He turned back and repeated the words, and in a little while the Second Platoon came plodding up past him in the darkness. Then he waited, studying the helmet, for what seemed a very long time. And the next order came as a stunning surprise:

  “Send Prentice up.”

  He went dogtrotting past Owens with his heart in his mouth, past a number of other shadowy figures and on up to Lieutenant Agate, whose anger was visible even in the dark.

  “Damn it, boy, where you been? When I say Second Platoon, that means you.”

  “I know, sir; I’m sorry, I—”

  “All right. Logan, take him and show him where the hell they are. And hurry up.”

  Logan was the communications sergeant, tall and sardonic. “Christ,” he whispered. “Are you gonna start fucking up already? Can’t you stay on the ball? You’re the Second Platoon runner – can’t you get that straight in your head? Now you’re holding up the whole fucking works.”

  “I know; I – I just didn’t think.”

  “Well you better start thinking, kiddo. This is important.”

  He knew it was important, and he stumbled along as fast as he could beside Logan, weak with embarrassment.

  “There,” Logan said. “See that house? That’s where your platoon is. Now for Christ’s fucking sake don’t forget it.”

  And Prentice stared at the dim face of the house for all he was worth. The way he committed it to memory was that its roof, instead of sloping, was built in steps. “Okay,” he whispered, and went loping after Logan, afraid he might lose him as they ran back to the column.

  He was able to recognize Owens because of his shortness, and fell into place behind him again. But the brief run had winded him and he began to cough wretchedly, trying his best to stifle it; he heard someone say, “Shut that bastard up!” but he had to cough again and again, doubled over with his fist in his mouth. The spasms held him blind and crouching for a long time, until time itself seemed to have stopped, and when he straightened up at last and opened his eyes to the whirling darkness, Owens was gone. He took several faltering steps forward, but Owens wasn’t there – and neither was anyone else. There was nothing ahead but snow and blackness. He spun around and looked behind him: nobody; nothing but the empty road and, far in the distance, the glow of the burning house. He was alone.

  He ran forward, the straps biting his neck and the two grenades bouncing heavily on his ribs. He had no idea where he was going, but there seemed to be nothing to do but run. Once he tripped and nearly went sprawling over something that felt like a soft log and proved, when he looked back, to be another corpse. Then finally he made out some movement ahead, across the road, and he ran in that direction. It was a trotting column of four or five men – good God, were they Germans? No; Americans – and he ran up to the first of them, gasping for breath.

  “Is this – is this Headquarters Platoon?”

  The man didn’t answer or even slow down.

  “I said is this Headquarters Platoon?”

  And at that instant the air was split by a high whistling shriek and a tremendous Slam! with a burst of yellow in the road. All the men hit the road on their bellies at once, and Prentice fell with them. Another shriek, another Slam!, and they all scurried to fall again behind the shelter of a big nameless shape several yards away – it seemed to be a truck lying on its side.

  “Mortars …” somebody said, but that was all Prentice could hear except the repeated Shriek – Slam! Shriek – Slam! and the whir and ping of flying fragments. Then from somewhere not far away came a shy, tremulous voice that rose to a frantic childish cry of shock and pain: “Medic? Medic? Oh Jesus – Medic? Oh Je-heesus, Medic! Medic! …”

  Five or six more mortar shells hit the road while Prentice and the others lay behind the fallen truck, which had turned out not to be a truck at all but an armored halftrack; and finally there was an abrupt, ringing silence. One by one the shadowy men rose into a crouch and ran, and Prentice went up to the first man.

  “Where’s Headquarters Platoon?”

  But the man moved past him without a word.

  “Look, excuse me, I – where’s Headquarters Platoon?”

  But the next man ran past him too, and the next, and the next, and then there was only one left.

  “For Christ’s sake tell me. Where’s Headquarters Platoon?” His terrible voice broke into a womanish wail on the “toon” and he knew it sounded as if he were crying, but at least it was enough to make the man turn around, and he was close enough to be recognized: it was Mays, the clown from the boxcar. Prentice tried to atone for his tearful-sounding voice by staggering a little more than necessary, to prove he was really sick.

  “Who do you want? Agate?” Mays said. “Come on, then.”

  Prentice followed him, deeply ashamed both of the “toon” and the fraudulent stagger. The men led him back some fifty yards down the road, turned in between two houses so abruptly that he almost lost them, and went clambering down a flight of pitch-black cellar stairs. A door opened onto a blanket hung as a blackout curtain, and beyond the blanket, inside the cellar, Agate and all the other headquarters men were huddled in the weak yellow light of a single candle.

  Prentice looked quickly around at Mays and his squad, to see if they were laughing at him or looking at him with contempt, but they paid him no attention at all. Mays was talking rapidly now with Agate while the others stood by; then Agate nodded and gave some curt instructions, and they went out again as quickly as they’d come.

  The cellar contained a great deal of mildewed furniture, and several of the men were sitting in chairs; that meant it was all right to sit down. He found a deep upholstered armchair and sank into it as if into a morass of self-abasement, staring tragically into the candlelight. He had fucked up badly, twice. If anyone wanted to give him the upbraiding he deserved, now was the time. He would sit here and take it, however it came.

  But nobody looked at him, and after a while it began to seem that they weren’t ignoring him out of disgust; they simply hadn’t noticed he was there, and possibly they hadn’t noticed he’d been missing in the first place. He glanced furtively at Logan, ready to accept any kind of derision from him, but Logan was wholly absorbed in his hand radio, speaking in a tense monotone, repeating words that Prentice was now dimly aware of having heard ever since his arrival in the cellar.

  “Donkey Nan,” he was saying, “Donkey Nan, this is Donkey Dog, Donkey Dog. Do you read
me? Over.” Then he paused, listening, and started again. “Donkey Nan, Donkey Nan …”

  A soft moan came from the shadows along the far wall, and Prentice made out the figure of a medic crouched over an inert form on the floor: it must have been the wounded man, the man who’d cried out on the road.

  “… this is Donkey Dog, Donkey Dog. Do you read me? Over.” And Logan turned to the lieutenant. “Can’t seem to get ’em, sir.”

  “Shit. Okay, get the runner. Where’s what’s-his-name? The kid?”

  And Prentice bolted clumsily to his feet.

  “Go on over to your platoon,” Agate told him. “Find out why they’re not answering. If their radio’s broken or anything, bring Brewer back to me. Got that?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You know where they are now?”

  “Yessir,” he said, though all he could remember was a house with a stepped roof: he had no idea where it was. As he hurried across the cellar floor the house was jarred by a great Slam! and then another, and another.

  “That’s artillery this time,” somebody was saying. “That’s eighty-eights.”

  “No, it’s both,” somebody else said. “It’s mortars and eighty-eights.”

  Prentice paused near the door and looked back at Agate. Was he supposed to go anyway? In the middle of all this? Or was he supposed to wait until the barrage was over? But Agate had turned away and was talking to someone else.

  Go anyway. At least it was better than going back to ask. A grizzled, old-looking man named Luchek was standing wide-eyed with his back to the wall, beside the blackout curtain. “Jesus, kid,” he said. “You going out now?”

  “Guess I’ve got to,” Prentice said, beginning to feel very much like the hero of a war movie, and he stood with his hand on the blanket, waiting for a pause in the shelling. He looked back once again at Agate, but Agate was still turned away. Then he slipped out around the curtain and ran up the steps.

  There was nothing but silence as he ran down the path to the road, and not until he’d almost gained the road did he fully realize, in a panic, that he didn’t know which way to turn. Right or left?

  He decided desperately on left. But how far away was the house with the stepped roof, and how would he know how far to go before giving it up and trying the other direction? He had just made the turn into the road, heading left, when a rapid fluttering rush of air sent him sprawling heavily on his chest, and Slam! It was louder than the mortar shells: this must be artillery. Then came another fluttering rush and another Slam! and a number of small objects, hard but not heavy, fell across his buttocks and thighs. They couldn’t be shell fragments; they were chunks of broken roof or wall.

  He was up and running again, looking urgently at the dark passing face of each house. Shriek-Slam! Shriek-Slam! Those were mortar shells – he was numbly proud of being able to tell the difference now – and they were clearly so far away that he didn’t even bother to hit the ground. But then came the rush of an eighty-eight so shockingly brief that its huge explosion caught him still on his feet: he felt the jolt and saw the flash of it as he fell headlong on his grenades, and he heard the fragments zip and whine away very close to him. He was still lying there, uncertain whether to wait or get up and run again, when he lifted his helmet away from his eyes and saw the house with the stepped roof, no more than ten or fifteen yards away. He got up and ran.

  “Who’s that? Is that Prentice?” said Sergeant Brewer’s voice from a dark cluster of men standing just inside the door.

  “Yes.” And Prentice went stumbling in among them. Only later did he realize that they probably should have said “Mickey” and “Mouse.”

  “The lieutenant,” he said, and started coughing. “The lieutenant wants to know why you’re not answering the whaddyacallit, the radio. He says – says if it’s broken—”

  But it wasn’t broken: Brewer’s radio man was crouched and fussing with the dials, and before Prentice could finish his sentence he had made contact. “Donkey Dog,” he was saying, “Donkey Dog, this is Donkey Nan, Donkey Nan. I’m reading you loud and clear. Over.”

  Brewer took the radio and started talking into it, probably to Agate; Prentice couldn’t follow the words and wouldn’t have been very interested if he could. He leaned panting against the wall and gave in to a sense of triumph. He had made it.

  The jogging run back to the headquarters cellar was very short and uneventful; only a few mortar shells came in far down the road, probably at the place where the ruined halftrack lay. He hadn’t exactly expected anyone to shake his hand and say, “Nice work, Prentice,” when he got back to the cellar, but still it was faintly disappointing that nobody did, and that nobody even seemed to notice he was back as he dragged himself over to his easy chair and sat down again.

  Then suddenly both Agate and Logan were looking at him with stern faces. “How far away are they, kid?” Agate said, and Prentice felt his chest go tight, as if he were a suspect on a witness stand.

  “About a hundred yards, sir. To the left.”

  “A hundred yards?”

  “A hundred feet, I mean. Thirty yards, something like that. Maybe fifty.”

  They both turned away again, and only after several minutes did he realize that they hadn’t been grilling him: they hadn’t been trying to find out if he’d really made the trip or faked it, or to see if he would exaggerate the distance. They wanted to know how far away it was, for reasons of their own; and this was such a great relief that he felt free to relax for the first time all day. He even felt free to take off his helmet and tenderly finger his scalp, where the roots of his matted hair were sore from wearing the helmet so long.

  The odd coughing noise of American mortars began from somewhere near the cellar: the mortar section of Weapons Platoon had opened up to return the enemy shelling. As he listened, it occurred to him that this was the first time anyone in “A” Company had fired a shot – he hadn’t yet heard any machine guns or rifles. Could this be all that was meant by an “attack”? A duel of mortars and artillery, while you sat in an upholstered chair by candlelight?

  Gradually, sitting there, he became aware of an oddly familiar, civilian smell in his nostrils – a yellow, minty smell – and of a wet glutinous mass that had fastened the left side of his shirt to his chest, under one of the grenades and deep inside the layers of winter clothing. It was the Economy-Size tube of Ipana, crushed and ruptured from his falls on the road.

  There wasn’t much sleep to be had in the cellar that night, and Prentice got almost none. He had to stand his share of guard duty outside the cellar door – more than his share once, when Owens came moaning about having dysentery and having to lie down – and when he wasn’t on guard he lay awake on the floor, coughing and sweating in fever, listening to the intermittent sounds of the shelling. Once, during a lull in the noise, Logan roused him to take the lieutenant over to the platoon for a conference with Brewer; another time, after an incendiary shell had crashed through the roof of the house, he had to join in the general staggering upstairs and help put out the fire.

  Just before dawn he dozed off long enough to have some kind of grotesque, instantly forgotten dream, and the first thing that hit him when he woke up was the smell of frying eggs. Lieutenant Agate had found a stove and a frying pan in the cellar. He had also found three fresh eggs, which he was solemnly cooking for himself, and a bottle of wine from which he took long, relishing swigs as the eggs smoked and spattered in the pan. He had taken off his helmet and all his equipment: he looked cozy and self-indulgent and not at all like a company commander as he went about his breakfast.

  “Donkey Oboe, Donkey Oboe,” Logan was saying into his radio, and then “Donkey Nan, Donkey Nan” and “Donkey Key” and “Donkey Easy.” He was calling all the platoons and telling them that they’d be moving out at oh-six-hundred – and that, according to Prentice’s watch, was five minutes from now.

  The lieutenant stood up, wiped a trickle of egg yolk from his chin, and lobbed the wine bottl
e crashing into a corner. Then he put his helmet on over his dirty hair, buckled himself into his gear, and said, “Okay, let’s get going. No overcoats. Leave ’em here and we’ll send back for ’em later.”

  Prentice hated to leave his overcoat. He knew the idea of not wearing it was to assure greater maneuverability in action, but this seemed hardly to apply in his case: he felt unable to maneuver at all, overcoat or not.

  When they moved cautiously out of the cellar, toward the road, he was grateful for every chance to stop and lean against the wall. The rifle hung heavy in his shaking hands, and the equipment sagging from his shoulders and waist seemed an intolerable weight. Was it possible that he’d run and fallen and gotten up and run again, only last night?

  The early morning light revealed several new and surprising things about the road, or street: that all its houses were maimed, with shattered windows and ragged walls, and that a cluster of three dead Germans lay in shocking stillness directly in front of the headquarters house. They had apparently been dead for days: their hands and faces seemed to be made of putty, and their eyes were like dusty marbles. A little farther on, two or three house away, they came upon a dead American. He was face down at the roadside, partly covered with snow thrown up by passing vehicles, but enough of him was exposed to show that he had curly brown hair and a snub-nosed, full-lipped profile. His skin was the same color as the Germans’, skin that looked incapable of ever having been alive. But it was his uniform that affected Prentice most: how could anyone be dead who wore these terribly familiar clothes and straps, with this terribly familiar canteen against his right buttock?

  There was an intermittent crack and stutter of small-arms fire now in another part of town, probably another company’s sector; and Agate and the other Headquarters men were moving with a stealthiness that showed they expected a burst of fire at any moment. They hugged each wall and hurried, one at a time, across the open spaces between each house. Second Platoon was following close behind them, with equal slowness and care. As they approached the ruined halftrack Prentice saw that its markings were French, and that the body of a very small French soldier, wearing a G.I. field jacket, lay primly on his back six feet away, apparently blown from the wreckage.