The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  * * *

  When Masterson’s foot patrol started into the field—a line of thirteen soldiers holding their arms out for spacing—Fowler stood next to the captain and brushed his fingertips. They were nearly black, the dirt ground into deep half-moons beneath his fingernails, and he wore several days’ growth of beard. But the spackled, deformed skin between his glasses and his chin seemed less drawn and fearful, a tiny flicker of his frat-boy cheekiness coming back, and though she believed he deserved his fear, she also found its absence a relief. On either side of them were soldiers with metal detectors strapped to their forearms, waving their black disks over the furrows. “Worth a try,” Masterson said. “If he’s got a gun down there, they’ll get a beep. Faisal says he hears they put the body down in a well or something. For what that’s worth. Says he’s not sure he can find the actual place. But if Beale’s been down there since, what, Tuesday?”

  Masterson waved a hand in front of his face and she realized that he was trying to warn her that the body might stink. She breathed in deeply through her nose, but all she could smell were the smells of the living: Masterson’s perspiration, which was sharper and more acrid than her own. The sweet ammonia of the dip the soldier beside them was chewing. “You trust him?” she said, nodding to Faisal.

  The interpreter was upright now and walking several spots over in the line, hands cuffed behind his back. His lithe, handsome features appeared mushy, like a smashed melon, and there were scabbed patches on his scalp where he was missing chunks of hair. He wore his familiar rotten suit jacket over a gold Lakers jersey. No body armor.

  “Hell, no,” Masterson said cheerfully. “But I’ve tried to make it clear to him that it would be a bad idea to lie.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “Killed your soldier?” Masterson grinned. “No, no—he was with me that day, I checked my battle journal.”

  “But he could have been involved.”

  “It’s the usual crazy Iraqi business. You ask one question, you get a thousand and one answers.”

  “And the current one is?”

  “The current one is that a couple guys ‘showed up’ at his house with Beale’s body. Asked Faisal for a place to hide the goddamn thing, and he sent them here.”

  “He was already dead?”

  “If you believe Faisal.”

  “That’s a relief.” Fowler said the words, but she did not in fact feel this. As soon as she’d seen the interpreter’s wounds, the good feeling she’d had back in the Humvee with Pulowski had started to fade. “My guys were real upset about the possibilities.”

  “The possibilities of what?”

  “The possibilities of what might happen to a guy who’s left alone with a bunch of Iraqis. To do whatever they want.”

  “Which are?”

  “Which are bad enough to make my guys really pissed. We were mostly fobbits, you know. Before we lost Beale at that intersection, these guys were happy as hell to be working inside the wire, putting up walls for the general’s bowling alley.”

  “So that’s how you got them to step up, huh?” Masterson said.

  “It definitely helped,” Fowler said. She squinted, staring at the gauzy far end of the field. “I’m not going to say I didn’t use that information motivationally.”

  * * *

  They found nothing on the first pass. They’d gone down the wrong side of the field, Faisal claimed, weaving more and more Arabic into his sentences, though she knew his English was perfectly good—explaining that he hadn’t been in the field since he was ten. Then that he’d only been in it when it was dark. When he started in on his third explanation, one of Masterson’s soldiers drove a rifle butt into his ribs.

  * * *

  There was a canal at the field’s end, broached by a single corrugated drainage pipe. Masterson wobbled heel-toe back over the culvert, consulted with the Bradleys waiting there, then returned, snapping his chin strap back in place, and signaled his men to head back up the field’s east side. “How’s your kid brother doing?” he asked.

  “My who?”

  A fishhook twisted in her gut, but then Masterson’s smile relieved her—just fucking around. A crinkle of amusement. “We just got a call from your signal guy.”

  Oh, Jesus, Fowler thought.

  “Says he’s got a mad dog to check out up ahead of us.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “No, no—a little unauthorized air usage, but no. I said we’d meet them there.”

  She tried to scrub her face of meaning, aware of his scrutiny off to her left side, the nosy wetness of his curiosity. “So you take shit seriously, don’t you?” he said. “Fucking tell Fowler you’ve got a tip, and she calls out the cavalry.”

  A strange dry heat spread over her scalp with this remark, like a powder. It was meant to be a compliment, but the aftertaste was ugly, like she’d done something desperate and needy. “Was I not supposed to?” she said.

  * * *

  The radio chatter was interrupted by a calming, booming bass that Pulowski recognized as belonging to Waldorf, the somber black sergeant who commanded Fowler’s second team. “Hey, boys, we got a target. I need Charlie and Delta to go right at him, straight through the field. Dykstra and I are gonna swing around to the tree line, just in case he’s got buddies.” The rest was broken up by the sudden seasick jolting of the Humvee as Crawford accelerated through the field, and Pulowski, after his helmet ricocheted twice off the Humvee’s roof, scrambled to secure both his computer bag and the camera system’s wireless receiver, which tumbled and banged around the cabin like a brick in a washing machine. By the time the computer was clamped between his knees, there were several unexpected things happening, all in such a rough jumble that he found it hard to keep track. First, he was impressed by the speed and precision of the platoon, a speed and precision that Fowler—he could see her, or at least the line of soldiers that included her, hurrying up from the bottom of the field—no doubt had taught them. They circled like wolves around the “target,” Crawford charging in directly, flanked by the tank-like recovery vehicle they called the Hercules, while the other two Humvees, containing Waldorf and Dykstra, flared out to the right, one of them, apparently, finding a back road on his Blue Force Tracker and punching through the trees—out of sight but still in radio contact—while the other swerved along the field’s edge in case the target tried to run away. This was, he supposed, what the camera system really was—a hunting device. A target finder. It had been completely idiotic to imagine that it would be used in any other way.

  The real shocker, though, was seeing the target in reality: a shirtless, hobo-type figure in an oversize blue jacket, his front lip lifted rabbitlike over a pair of jutting teeth. He shifted in and out of focus as the Humvee bounded across the furrows of the field like a buoy out at sea—but his presence, at least to Crawford and McWilliams, seemed to change everything, to be like an electric charge, amplifying and overriding reality. “Get down, motherfucker! Get down!” Crawford was shouting. “Wave at the motherfucker, Mickey. Come on, you shithead. Please!” But each time the prow of the Humvee nosed down, there he would be again, like some kind of drifter or clown, flapping his arms at them, waving them away, his urgency mimicking Crawford’s urgency, the whole thing tightening up in what seemed like a bad way. Pulowski had wanted there to be a target, he supposed. At least that would prove his case. But now, seeing the target live, he found himself wishing that the Iraqi would escape. He wished desperately to warn him, had to literally cover his mouth to prevent himself from screaming, Watch out! Watch out! We’re coming! You have to—

  * * *

  The screaming voice Pulowski heard when he woke up was high-pitched, piercing, but he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It definitely wasn’t Crawford, who was leaning forward in the driver’s seat, his body suspended against the thickly woven strap of his shoulder belt, as if he’d been trying to lunge out his side door. He had light, walnut-colored skin and pale olive
eyes, and what Pulowski saw in his expression, when he pulled Crawford’s body back toward him, wasn’t blame or even anger but some sort of outraged plea for sympathy: You see what I’m doing? Isn’t this ridiculous? I can’t believe you caught me doing such a stupid thing! and then when Pulowski propped himself up on an elbow, and he saw that the dash, the steering column, and the heavy metal cabin that held the vehicle’s electronics had swallowed up Crawford’s legs and that behind him McWilliams, the gunner, had no right ear or cheek and the blood from the dark hole that had replaced them was currently staining his pants at the knee. For a moment, Pulowski gathered himself and tried to push himself free, his thighs flexing, but his left leg was pinned and a bright current of pain flared up his thigh, and then finally he quit screaming and lay back into the quiet wilderness of the front seat.

  “You think you can get out?” he said to Crawford. The door on Crawford’s side was missing.

  Crawford clenched his jaw so tightly that the ridged skin of his lips disappeared and his mouth seemed only a nubby seam. The gold-framed glasses that he wore beneath his goggles had fractured and swiveled down along his cheek and he thrashed against the shoulder belt, lunging toward the open door, and the field beyond, in a way that reminded Pulowski of a fish flopping on dirt, or on a parking lot, on some completely foreign piece of asphalt, the water miles and miles away.

  “Okay, I get it, I get it. Chill out for a second.” Pulowski tried to open the door on his side of the Humvee but it wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t crawl over Crawford to get out. So finally he jabbed at the broken windshield, clearing away bits of glass as best he could with what appeared to have once been an air-conditioning vent, then stared out over the exploded engine, the axle, the soft, four-foot-deep hole where the bomb had been. Beyond it, he saw the Iraqi who’d waved at them. He was maybe twenty yards off and lay facedown in the dirt, his feet toward Pulowski, as if he’d been spun around by the shock wave. He was alive—that Pulowski could clearly see. He was crawling on his belly, moving with a painful, almost ridiculous slowness, his jacket covered with chaff and one of his legs folded sideways over the other at a wrong angle, like an insect’s. “Hey!” Pulowski shouted. “Somebody! There’s a guy here moving. He’s still alive! He’s trying to go someplace!” Then Pulowski heard the crunching sound of boots running across a chaff-strewn field and, at the same moment, saw Fowler approaching with an M4 at her shoulder. “Get down! Get down!” she shouted. And then, in a different tone, “Stop! Stop! Stop moving now!” Her face was familiar beneath her helmet, flushed, darkly tan, the blond-brown wisps of her hair plastered all around, then fading out pale into the curve of her cheek, but her expression was all wrong, blunt and explicit, terrifying in its intensity. “No,” he said. “Wait!” He raised his arms. “Down!” she shouted, and then he huddled quickly behind the ruined dashboard of the Humvee and he heard a flat burst of fire, and when he sat up again, the Iraqi had rolled over onto his side and curled up, as if he’d decided to go to sleep.

  Pulowski definitely recognized his face.

  * * *

  When Fowler wrenched open the Humvee’s door, Pulowski struck at her, knocking her hands away, as if he had a train to catch. Fowler did not particularly care. He was alive. That was the cure for the black cape of badness that was swarming around the back of her head. “Settle! Settle!” she said, grabbing him, her thumbs on either side of his sweating nose, fingers curled around his cheeks. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” he said.

  “Where’s Crawford?” She was craning her neck, trying to see inside the cab.

  “Crawford,” Pulowski bleated. “He’s bad.”

  She ran around the Humvee. Crawford’s body was leaning halfway out of the cab, at an angle that seemed impossible not to be causing him pain, and she lifted him back into the seat. He was dead. Standing up, she saw that two of Masterson’s soldiers were working slowly back the way they’d come, away from them, out of the field. In the other direction was a rough half circle composed of the vehicles from her platoon: Waldorf’s Humvee over by the edge of the field, then Jimenez’s, then the Hercules, which also had been hit and had thrown a track but was not on fire. Eggleston, the driver, was pulling Halt, the gunner, from his turret, and Halt, just based on body language, was not injured seriously. “Sergeant, my radio’s out here,” she shouted. “Can you communicate?” And when Eggleston gave the thumbs-up, she ordered, “You’re going to have to run comms for me. Call the TOC, make sure we’ve got medevac. Call Waldorf on the other side. Follow your own tracks back out. Do you got me?”

  So, good: there was that. All this time she was avoiding the sight of the Iraqi’s body. The one she’d just shot. It was on Pulowski’s side of the Humvee, in the no-man’s-land between the Hercules and Masterson’s soldiers, and she kept her eyes averted so she wouldn’t see the dead Iraqi’s face. Instead, she checked on McWilliams—dead—dug out the Humvee’s med kit, and circled back to Pulowski, who was shaking his hands loosely in front of his chest, and pried open his ruined door. “You’re okay,” she said, opening the kit. “It’s going to be okay. You couldn’t have known what the guy was going to do. It’s not your fault, Dix. You can’t—”

  “Not my fault!” Pulowski hissed.

  And now, here, she was granted full, unfettered access to his pale eyes, his direct gaze. She’d made love to him like this, this close, her fingers running over the pores of his skin, his beaky nose, the acne that sometimes rose up around his eyebrows—and her favorite spot, the soft skin beneath his ear, leading down to his boy’s neck.

  “Do you want it to be? I could think something up.”

  It all checked out. No spinal damage. Nothing destroyed, except for down below, where the Humvee’s dash bit down on his legs. “Try me,” Pulowski said.

  “You could’ve sat in back.”

  “I could’ve stayed in bed.”

  “Well, that goes without saying.”

  “I’m pretty decent in bed. I know you have a hard time admitting it.”

  “Try me,” Fowler said.

  “Did you check my junk?”

  She was straightening him up, trying to judge the angles on getting him out, and her chin was down in that territory.

  “I’m serious. I want to make absolutely sure, when we get out of here, that you check my junk over carefully.”

  She tugged his belt. “What for?” she asked. “Brass?”

  But it didn’t work quite exactly right, the old banter thing. The skin tightened shiny along his temples, a simulacrum of amusement, but then, after a couple of seconds, he rolled his head. “What a shit show,” he said. “Look at what we did.”

  “It was the fucking hadji’s fault,” she said.

  “I saw him, the guy you wasted,” Pulowski said. “I saw his face. It’s the same guy who wrote that note. He was trying to wave us away—”

  “He was guilty,” Fowler said, though she felt a sickness crawl across her skin like sweat. “He was guilty.”

  Pulowski backhanded his nose to clear it of snot. “No,” he said. “No. If he was a bad guy, he wouldn’t have waved us away.”

  “Pulowski.” She’d found the right tone finally. Not a lover’s voice, a commander’s voice. Masterson’s fuckup erasing confidence. “Tie it off. Okay? We got the paperwork on this guy. You found him. You did the right thing—” Without warning, she braced and tried to lift him from the cab. Pulowski stared bug-eyed, as if he were slowly being inflated with air, and then when she tried to tear his leg out from beneath the dash, he began to thrash and claw, making a deep horrible humming sound in his throat, and she had to set him down again, resting her cheek against the sweaty chest of his fatigues. “Okay. We’re going to need a better plan.”

  Pulowski rallied, just marginally. “Ya think?”

  She didn’t talk after that. The floorboard was wet with blood, and she lifted his right leg so it lay across her back and grabbed his left ankle where it disapp
eared into the dash. When she touched it, the bone inside was loose and wobbly and Pulowski clawed at her helmet and she grabbed the cuff of his fatigues and jerked hard and the leg came free and she dragged him out into the grass. “Hey! Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! We need some help here. Somebody help me with Pulowski, okay?” But the field was as silent as it had been from the roof of the house, only this time aggressively so, a nullity of silence, bodies moving, sun, grass, but the sound track shut off, and there seemed to be something very private that this nullity was speaking to her, irradiating her like a gamma ray so gently and so confidently that she was frightened of it more than Pulowski’s injuries, and so she propped his leg up and cut the pant to his thigh and pulled a Velcro tourniquet from the Humvee’s medical kit. The foot and boot were gone and she could see gristle and flayed bone and she put a compress on and held it tight, counting to sixty, and when this failed she strapped the tourniquet above his knee and tightened it, screwing down hard, and then fit the plastic windlass beneath the Velcro strap, and then waved to Eggleston and Halt and pointed back at the house and shouted, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Follow your vehicle’s tracks,” and then picked Pulowski up with one arm under his thighs and another under his back and said, “Come on, Dix, we got to go,” and began walking as quickly as she could out of the field, feeling the blood rush to her head, keeping her eyes fixed on the target’s house. Twice Pulowski gagged, and she set him down and banged his chest with the ball of her hand and then, muttering in embarrassment, “All right, all right,” put her lips over Pulowski’s and blew in, hating and clinging to the salt there, the sweat, the staleness of his tongue, his dirty teeth, his awful breath.