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

very dregs of society. Well,
C’est la guerre
.
    With regard to religion, I suppose this will startle you (remembering our talks at school about Schopenhauer, etc.) but I am no longer an atheist. In the past several months I have taken honest stock of my philosophical attitudes, and have found to my surprise that Christianity is no longer the anathema I once thought it to be. I can understand now why the greatest thinkers, the most enlightened minds in all of our Western culture have propounded the Christian ideal and the Christian ethic in one form or another …
    It went on for several more pages, but Prentice felt he had read enough. He carefully wiped his fountain pen and went back to work on his partially finished reply. “As for Christianity,” he wrote, “I continue to distrust it, as I distrust all dogma and all moral and/or spiritual certainties.” That sounded right – it had the right tone – but he would have to compose three or four more sentences in the same vein before he earned the right to copy out his final paragraph, which he had already scribbled in a burst of inspiration: “I don’t imagine you’ll be hearing from me for a while because I’m in the process of being shipped to Europe, where I expect we’ll all be rather busy for some time – the dregs of society, Studs Lonigan, and me.”
    He was still working over the intermediate sentences when Quint and Sam Rand came clumping up to the bunk, smelling of beer. “Prentice, old buddy,” Quint said, “if you ever got out of that sack and looked at the bulletin board, you’d have found out we’ve got eight-hour passes tonight. We’re going to Baltimore. How about getting off your ass?”
    And Hugh Burlingame was instantly forgotten. It was the firsttime Prentice could remember Quint’s calling him “old buddy,” even in sarcasm, and it was pleasing to know that he and Rand had come back to the barracks to get him before taking off. As they started down the snow-blown company street, turning up their overcoat collars against the wind, he felt uncommonly jaunty. His new uniform seemed to fit much better than his old one, and he was delighted with the new-style “combat boots” they had been issued at Meade: he had already learned how to darken their tawny color by singeing them with a flame and then applying many coats of polish. They made his legs less spindly and put a new, manly authority into his walk. Neither Quint nor Sam Rand had bothered to darken their boots and they walked as if their feet hurt; for that reason, as the three of them set off for what promised to be a rollicking night on the town, Prentice felt he looked much the most trim and soldierly of the group. And he allowed his rising sense of camaraderie to embrace Sam Rand as well as Quint, for he could see now that Rand posed no serious threat: there was reassurance in the very fact that Rand was so simple and unschooled, so “colorful,” like a character actor in the movies. He could serve both Prentice and Quint as a kind of homely, comic relief from the more serious aspects of their friendship, and in that way could safely be welcomed. In combat, when Sam Rand lay wounded, Prentice might run out under heavy fire to bring him back and carry him all the way to the aid station, as Lew Ayres had done with the other man in
All Quiet on the Western Front
, not realizing he was already dead. And Quint, unashamed of the tears in his eyes, would say, “You did all you could for him, Prentice” (or better still, “Bob”). But in the meantime he had to ask them both to stop and wait for him at the PX near the bus station while he called his mother; and when he was folded into the phone booth, dialing for long distance, he didn’t feel soldierly at all.
    “Oh,
dear,
” she said when he had explained that the pass woudn’t give him time to get to New York and back. “Well, but do you think they’ll give you any leave from the other place? The one near here?” She