A Special Providence (36 page)

“Hey!”

“Yeeow!”

“Fight! Fight!”

Owens was holding one of Prentice’s arms, saying, “Easy, Prentice, take it
easy,
” and Mueller had the other one. For several seconds he and Walker strained at each other, five feet apart, with only their eyes locked in combat. Prentice was greatly relieved to be in bondage but he knew it was important to keep struggling, for the sake of appearances.

“Just what the hell is going
on
here?
Quiet
, everybody.” It was Loomis’s authoritative voice: he had appeared from nowhere and was looking from Prentice to Walker with righteous eyes. “Where the hell do you kids think you
are?
”

Someone in the crowd said, “Walker started it, Loomis. He just”

“You’re fuckin’ A I started it,” Walker said, curling back his lips to display his clenched teeth, “and I ain’t finished it yet, either.”

“All right,
quiet,
” Loomis said. “I don’t care who started it and I don’t care what it’s about. You’re acting like a couple of babies. Christ’s sake, if you want to fight,
fight
, but take it out of the mess hall. Walker, get on outa here and back up to your billet. That’s an order. Prentice, you get back in the wash line. Everybody else, as you were.”

Somebody handed Prentice his rifle and helmet liner, and somebody else collected his scattered eating utensils. Mueller began to laugh, shaking his head at the absurdity of the whole thing, and others were laughing too. By the time Prentice reached the washing pails the men around him had found other things to talk about. It was as if nothing had happened. But in bending to the ritual of cleaning his mess gear he was tense with fright, and he started to tremble as he walked through the corridor and out into the sunshine of the factory yard. Owens and Mueller were somewhere behind him now, and Loomis was even farther back in the crowd. The view ahead was blocked by the high wall that surrounded the factory. As he approached the gate that opened onto the street he knew Walker would be waiting for him on the other side, so he was able to keep from registering any surprise, let alone any fear, when he passed through the opening and found Walker blocking his path.

Walker had propped his rifle against the wall and laid his mess kit and helmet liner neatly beside it. His feet were set well apart. His thumbs were hooked in his cartridge belt, but he slowly removed them as Prentice came closer. And there was a smiling audience – six or eight men walking backwards up the street, lingering to see what would happen.

Prentice put his own equipment down beside Walker’s. Then he squared off and joined Walker in a circling, shuffling, awkward little pugilistic dance. None of the watchers yelled “Fight!” – they didn’t want to risk its being broken up again – so
there was silence except for the fighters’ breathing and the scuffing of their boots on the street. Walker was upright and bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, both fists held in close to his neck; Prentice’s stance was more classical – crouching, sidling, leading with his left – but that was only because he was so much less confident. He tried what he hoped would be a left jab, but he misjudged the distance and Walker had only to pull in his chin to avoid the weak flick of it; then he stepped in and tried to follow through with a right, but Walker blocked it and caught him with a quick right to the ear that stopped his hearing on that side. He broke away and danced out of range for a second or two, trying to look alert and menacing; then, because he knew the audience would laugh unless he moved in again, he moved in and got clubbed again on the same ear. Where the hell was Loomis? Why didn’t somebody break this thing up? He backed clumsily out of range again, and then, in panic, he rushed at Walker with a wild looping right that never had a chance to land because somebody had grabbed his belt from behind and pulled him back – Loomis – and at the same time Walker’s arms were caught and held by another man.

“What the hell’s the
matter
with you?” Loomis was shouting. “Can’t you kids obey orders?”

Prentice was so relieved that he was barely able to listen to Loomis’s upbraiding: all he could do was stand there moistening his dry mouth and trying to control his breathing. Loomis’s objection this time was that they were fighting in the street. He’d told them to take it out of the mess hall, for Christ’s sake, but any idiot ought to know he hadn’t meant here, in front of all these German civilians. Only then did Prentice see that there were indeed some civilians watching from across the street: several old men, a young one-legged man on elbow crutches, and a woman who had clutched her apron to her mouth at the spectacle.

“Walker, you go on back to the house, like I told you. Report to my office and wait for me. Prentice, you stay twenty-five yards behind. I want to see you in my office as soon as I’m finished with Walker. All right, get going, Walker.”

On the long, slow trip back to the Second Platoon house, keeping his distance of twenty-five yards, Prentice gave all his attention to retaining his dignity. Loomis was walking ahead of him, Owens and Mueller were somewhere behind him, and all the other witnesses of the abortive fight were strung out in twos and threes along the street. He knew his face was red and was afraid it might look, from a distance, as though he were in tears. To dispel that impression he smoked a cigarette.

The sense of being under everyone’s amused and curious scrutiny was even worse as he sat in the living room outside Loomis’s “office,” waiting for the interview with Walker to end. Klein sat nearby, cleaning his fingernails. Mueller was on a sofa across the room, thumbing through a copy of
Yank
magazine that he didn’t seem to be reading. In the hallway, just out of sight, were Finn and Sam Rand, who must by now have heard about the fight and were talking quietly together. Once Prentice thought he heard Finn saying “C.B.I.”

The office door opened and Walker came out, looking neither to right nor left as he strode past everyone’s eyes.

“All right, Prentice,” Loomis called.

He was sitting behind the heavy carved table that he had appropriated as his desk, and he looked very solemn and official. “Shut the door,” he said. “Now, suppose you tell me your version.”

“I was just talking with Owens, and—”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“I said I was talking with Owens.” His voice sounded high and far away, and this was only partly because of his boxed,
ringing ear; it was mostly because of a warm and terrible constriction in his throat. Of all the shameful events of his life so far, surely the worst would be to start crying here, under the stare of Sergeant Loomis. He wanted to say, “And we weren’t even
talking
about Walker, that’s the ridiculous part. I just happened to say, kind of as a joke—” but he couldn’t trust his voice for any lengthy explanation. “And then Walker came over and started fighting,” he said. “That’s all.”

Loomis lowered his eyes. He spread his big hands on the table, palms down, and studied them as if they were the scales of justice. “All right,” he said. “Tell me this, Prentice. Don’t you think that if a man wants to volunteer for the C.B.I., that’s his own business?”

And again the trouble was that Prentice couldn’t trust his voice. He took a deep breath and said, “Yes. I do. But when a man calls me yellow, that’s my business.”

That seemed to please Loomis’s theatrical sense. “I see your point,” he said, nodding. “I see your point. All right. I’ll tell you what I suggested to Walker, and he’s agreed to it. If you agree too, that’s the end of it.”

“The end of it” had a hopeful, peaceful sound – the plan might be to bring Walker back into the office and have them shake hands, man to man; but that wasn’t it.

There was, Loomis explained, a small field behind the barn up on the hill, well away from the sight of anyone in town – Americans, Germans, or Russians. Tomorrow morning, before breakfast, Prentice and Walker would proceed to that field – just the two of them – and “have it out.” They would be excused from Reveille for the purpose. Would Prentice agree to that?

It wasn’t until after he’d said “Yes,” left Loomis’s gratified eyes, and walked back through the living room, that fear began
to crawl in his bowels. From the speculative, quizzical looks he received during the rest of day it was clear that the news of Loomis’s arrangement had spread throughout the platoon. But nobody spoke to him about it until late that night, when he was walking his post in the Russian D.P. area with Mueller.

“You really going through with that business in the morning?” Mueller asked him.

“Looks that way.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know much about fighting?”

“Not much, no.” And that was certainly true. Except for the formless and tearful playground pummelings of childhood he had had only three real fistfights in his life, all of them in his first year of prep school, and he’d lost them all. It troubled him now, looking back, that he hadn’t really tried to win them, any more than he had really tried to hurt Walker on the street today while waiting to be rescued. He had gone into each of those fights with the sole purpose of surviving, of proving that he could take it and that he wouldn’t quit until some self-appointed referee came in to stop the thing. And tomorrow morning there would be no referee.

“Well,” Mueller said, hitching up the sling of his B.A.R. “I know I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. I mean for one thing, he must outweigh you by a good thirty pounds. If I were you I’d be scared shitless.”

And if anyone else had said this it might not have mattered much; but this was Mueller, the plump, soft-looking boy who had astonished everyone by riddling an armed German and saving the lives of Finn and Sam Rand, so his words had a considerable effect. For the rest of his rounds that night Prentice walked with a stately tread and bearing. He had resolved now
that he would do more than endure the fight: he would do his best to win it.

It seemed very important to be up and ready before Walker in the morning, so he was up and ready before anyone else in the house. He sat alone in the living room, with its stale smell of last night’s beer and cigarettes, and to prove that his hands weren’t shaking he paged through several of the magazines that lay strewn on the floor.

As one man after another came clumping downstairs for Reveille, he felt he was on display. Whether they looked at him squarely or not he knew he was being examined for signs of panic, and he took pride in making his face wholly expressionless. Then very suddenly he had to go to the bathroom – his bladder seemed about to burst – and when he came back he found Walker waiting for him. Everyone else had gone.

“You ready?” Walker said.

“Any time you are.”

The path leading up to the hidden field was steep, and they were both short of breath before they were halfway there. Prentice hoped there would be no talk; he needed silence to maintain his anger and his determination. But, “Tell you what, Prentice,” Walker said. “As long as there’s just the two of us, we better agree on a couple of rules. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I mean let’s keep it fair. If one of us gets knocked down, we break until the man’s back on his feet. Right? And then do you want to agree that a certain number of knockdowns wins the fight, or do you want to fight until one of us quits?”

“Fight until one of us quits.”

“Okay.”

They leaned their rifles against the barn and removed their helmet liners, cartridge belts, and field jackets. They stood facing
each other, and at Walker’s nod they moved out into the dewy grass in the approximate center of the meadow, where they turned to face each other again.

“Okay, kid,” Walker said. “This is it.”

And it was the absurdity of that phrase – nobody said “This is it” except in the movies, unless they were phony bastards like Loomis – that roused Prentice to his first real anger of the morning. He wanted to smash and break the head of anyone stupid enough to say a thing like that; he wanted to kill all the posturing fraudulence in the world, and it was all here before him in this big, dumb, bobbing face.

He swung and missed, swung and missed again, and the next thing he knew the sky had spun around and he was lying on the grass. He had been hit on the side of the jaw, but now as he scrambled back upright it was clear that he hadn’t really been knocked down: he had simply lost his balance; if he’d been braced right he could have absorbed the punch. It had been an unnecessary fall, an awkward, tangle-assed fall, and it only increased his rage as he rushed at Walker again, crouching and trying to put all his strength behind a blow to the belly that was supposed to double him over, to be followed by an uppercut that was supposed to straighten him out. But the first punch seemed to hurt his own wrist more than Walker – he had hit a rib instead of the soft part of the belly – and the uppercut missed. He tried dancing out of range but his boots were extraordinarily heavy in the wet grass. He couldn’t possibly be nimble, and the worst problem now was his breathing. How the hell did prizefighters breathe? Air was rushing in and out of his throat in great gasps that took all the moisture out of his mouth and made it hang open, blubber-lipped. He stepped in again and caught one on the ear – the same ear that had taken all the punishment yesterday – and then without quite knowing how it happened he felt
the knuckles of his right hand make a sharp, solid connection with Walker’s front teeth. He saw Walker’s eyes go blank with pain and surprise, but then, at the very moment when he should have hit him again, Walker took two or three backward steps and said: “Pretty good one, kid.” At least he was rattled enough to say it twice, wincing and blinking – “Pretty good one, kid” – but his recovery was so quick that the moment of triumph was over almost before it began. Walker came back and punched him hard on the nose and then even harder on the point of the chin, and this time there was no doubt about his being knocked down.

He rolled over and got to his hands and knees, watching warm drops of blood spill out of his nose into the grass. When he got up he staggered, and Walker said, “Had enough?”