Read Online A Special Providence by Richard Yates - Free Book Online Page A

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