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

camps, and he knew that if his luck held they might stay together through all the separations and re-groupings of the days to come: they might well ship out in the same replacement draft and end up in the same outfit.
    After a day or so at Meade they made a third friend, or at least a third companion, a portly Arkansas farmer of twenty-nine named Sam Rand who had arrived with a detachment from some Texas camp and taken the lower half of the bunk beside theirs. He had looked forbiddingly grim and sour as he went about the business of unpacking his gear; then, still unsmiling, he had stepped across the narrow space between the bunks and held out a hand from which the index finger was missing. “Sam Rand’s my name,” he said. “I’m happy to meet you boys.” He had served for three years in a noncombatant Engineer outfit until a power saw sliced off his finger; when he got out of the hospital he found that his unit had been dissolved and all its members transferred for re-tread training as riflemen. “I thought the finger’d keep me outa th’infantry; didn’t see how I’d be much use to th’infantry without a trigger finger, but they said it didn’t make no difference. Said I could farr with my social finger instead.”
    Quint seemed to take unfailing pleasure in his company, to be consistently amused by his sayings and respectful of his country wisdom; he began at once to call him “Sam,” though he never called Prentice by anything but his last name, and the two of them would sometimes leave the barracks together without asking Prentice to come along, which made Prentice a little jealous. So it happened that Prentice sat alone on the top half of the bunk one afternoon, not knowing where Quint and Sam Rand were and determined not to care. His new equipment was heaped around him in a muddle and he knew he ought to do something about getting it organized, but first he had something more important to do: he was trying to answer a letter from Hugh Burlingame, who had been his roommate in his senior year at school.
    Letters from Burlingame came only about once a month andrequired serious reading, for Burlingame had made it plain that he had no patience with the trivia of ordinary correspondence. “If we’re going to write to each other,” he’d told Prentice when they were still at school, “let’s at least try to
say
things in our letters. If I ever get one from you about what the weather’s like, and hoping I’m well, and making a lot of little dumb-assed jokes, I can guarantee I won’t answer it, and I’ll expect the same from you. Agreed?”
    “Agreed.”
    And the result was that Prentice had spent hours over each of his letters to Burlingame, first in the Air Force and then at Camp Pickett, copying and recopying his manuscript, going to the post library to check his literary references, making sure that each paragraph made its own trenchant point and that the finished product could be read without apology as part of a continuing intellectual dialogue. It was hard work.
    Burlingame was now in the Navy, or rather in something called the V-12 Program, which allowed bright students to attend civilian universities in naval uniform, and he seemed to have plenty of time for prose composition:
     … You speak of your Army comrades as “brutally stupid.” I too am surrounded by the type, and can find little compassion for them. Have you read Farrell’s
Studs Lonigan?
Do so, and you will find the majority of my classmates in its pages. They are without minds; they are without purpose. They think it “Hot shit” to roll in the bed of some downtrodden whore and to talk of it lasciviously afterwards. I am not shocked by their antics – they amuse me – but I find it depressing to realize that these are specimens of the finest America has to offer in her young manhood. And if this is what one encounters in the V-12,I can imagine that the caliber is still lower in a unit such as yours, which must include the