A Special Providence (12 page)

“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 bottle 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.

When they came to the corner of an intersection Agate stopped, motioning for his men to stop too and stay close to the wall. Then he beckoned for the Second Platoon to come forward: evidently the platoon would brave it into the new street while the command group held back. Sergeant Brewer held back too, crouched against the wall with Agate, while his rifle squads moved on around the corner. Only after the last of the squads was out of sight – a group that included the portly figure of Sam Rand – only then did he go after them, followed by his radio man and his platoon medic, and this troubled Prentice a little. Weren’t platoon leaders supposed to lead? But then, company commanders were supposed to lead too, and so were battalion commanders, and so were generals; it was too confusing to think about. He lowered his rifle and allowed the butt to rest on the ground, which brought a small relief to the muscles of his right arm, and he looked down at the trampled snow with longing, wishing he could let his knees go slack, slide forward against the wall, and lie down in it.

From around the corner came a stunning sound straight out of the movies: the
B-d-d-rapp! B-d-d-rapp
! of a German burp gun. There was silence, then shouting, then the slower, louder, chugging fire of an American B.A.R. and the irregular crack of several rifles. The burp gun opened up again, or maybe it was another one, and an instant later it was impossible to pick out the separate sounds: the whole street had become a solid uproar of gunfire and spanging, whining ricochets.

Prentice brought his rifle up to a trembling port arms and fixed his eyes on the lieutenant. What the hell was he going to do now? Just stand here? He just stood there, and it wasn’t long before the noise was over. Then he moved on around the corner and led Prentice and the others into the new street, which was lightly filled with smoke and brick dust. Riflemen were
crouched in doorways or running in both directions and shouting at each other, their faces pink with excitement; halfway down the block the medic knelt beside a man who sat smiling against the wall with his pants leg torn open to expose a red blotch high on his thigh. And nearer, across the street, three German soldiers were slowly approaching with their hands locked over their bare heads, followed by a B.A.R. man who held his weapon pointed at their backs. One of the prisoners, with very long blond hair that hung against his cheeks, was bleeding from the face.

Apparently, for all the noise, it had been only a minor skirmish, a token resistance by the Germans before they surrendered; and the man with the leg wound – a “million-dollar wound,” somebody called it – was the platoon’s only casualty.

“Donkey Oboe,” Logan was chanting, “This is Donkey Dog, Donkey Dog …”

Riflemen, working in twos, were forcing their way into houses now, smashing doors open with their rifle butts: apparently the idea was to search each house on the block for enemy soldiers. But that was as much of the logic of the morning as Prentice could follow. Agate and the other headquarters men were moving back and around to another block now, evidently to check on the progress of another platoon; and as Prentice swayed in their wake, repeatedly stopping to cough, he grew less and less able to make sense of the sights and sounds around him. Things seemed to happen out of sequence, as in a movie that someone has mindlessly cut and scrambled and spliced together at random. The only continuity was the problem of keeping up, and this soon became a matter of studying Agate’s overshoes as they rose and fell in the snow, sometimes slowly, sometimes flying into a run, sometimes stopping for long, long waits.

Once, when they stopped for a while in a little courtyard,
Prentice let his head sink against the wall to rest, and he didn’t realize he’d gone to sleep on his feet until a distant burst of machine-gun fire made his eyes pop open to see a German soldier coming straight at him, less than five yards away. It took him a second of dodging back and fumbling with his rifle before he saw that the German was unarmed: he was another prisoner, flushed from one of the houses, and behind him came four or five more, under the guard of a rifleman who chuckled in passing at Prentice’s surprise.