A Special Providence by Richard Yates Page A

bottle he was feeling pleasurably vague: he was ready to decide that this might, after all, be as good and memorable a way as any to spend his last pass, sitting in this strange, squalid bar while John Quint held forth on the larger social and historical aspects of the war. For Quint had broken his moody, pipe-smoking silence and begun to talk – more out of boredom, it seemed, than any real conversational impulse – about economics and politics and world affairs; he was becoming almost as eloquent as on the day of the I. and E. lecture back at Pickett, and the happy difference was that this time he was talking to Prentice alone and allowing Prentice to reply. It was like the old talks with Hugh Burlingame, at school.
    “Well, but look at it this way, Quint,” Prentice heard himself saying, impressed with the timbre of his own voice. “Look at it this way …”
    “… right. You’re absolutely right, Prentice.” And although Prentice could never afterwards remember what it was he had said, he knew he wouldn’t forget the solemn, nodding approbation in Quint’s face. “You’re absolutely right about that.”
    “ ’Scuse me for buttin’ in, fellas,” said a stranger’s voice through the veils of smoke, and they looked up to find a young, drunken sailor hanging unsteadily over their booth. “Here’s the thing. Me’n my buddy got these two li’l gals all loved up, onlywe gotta be back at the base in twenty minutes. Okay if we turn ’em over to you? I mean I figured you fellas looked kinda lonesome here.”
    Prentice looked at Quint for guidance, but Quint was intently picking the wet paper label off his beer bottle.
    “Tell you what,” the sailor said. “Just tell me your first names, so I can introduce you. I mean shit, whaddya got to lose?”
    Quint looked up at him with what struck Prentice as an odd mixture of contempt and bashfulness. “John,” he said.
    “Bob,” said Prentice.
    And in less than a minute, during which Prentice and Quint didn’t quite meet each other’s eyes, the sailor was back. This time he brought his buddy, a huge red-haired boy who seemed to be asleep on his feet, and the two girls. “Hey there, John,” he said heartily. “How’s it going? Hey there, Bob. Fellas, I’d like you to meet a couple friends. This here’s Nancy, and this here’s Arlene. Okay if we join you fellas a minute?”
    The next thing Prentice knew both sailors had gone and left them with the girls. The one called Nancy, plump and talkative with tightly curled black hair, sat chattering cozily beside Quint, and the one called Arlene was pressed into the tremulous circle of his own arm. She was very thin and dead silent, and she was heavily perfumed.
    “… no, but tell me one thing, John,” Nancy was saying. “One thing I still don’t understand. How come you’re friends with Gene and Frank when they’re in the Navy and you’re in the Army?” And Quint made some polite, inaudible reply. He had removed his glasses and was wiping them with Kleenex, blinking at Nancy with his small eyes.
    Then suddenly Arlene became talkative too. “You got a nickel, Bob?” she said. “I want to play that song again, ‘I’ll Walk Alone.’ I love that song.”
    He rose to do her bidding, stamping the pants around his combat boots, and he hoped she was watching as he made his way to the jukebox in his new walk. When he came back she sang the lyrics for him along with the record, sitting erect with her hands in her lap and staring straight ahead to let him admire her profile, which had an oddly sloping forehead and contained several powdered-over pimples.
    “They’ll ask me why,” she sang, “and I’ll tell them – I’d rather. There are dreams I must gather, dreams we fashioned the night – you held me tight …”
    While she sang he had time for some rapid, baffled speculations about these girls. Were they whores? Could it be that the sailors had already had them and taken off without paying