The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  “Try the radio, at least,” Pulowski had said.

  “It’s jammed,” Beale had said. “I got nothing.”

  “We got to sit tight,” he had said. “We stick together, it’ll be all right.”

  “We got to get on that roof,” Beale had said. “That’s where the shooter is. There’s a door up ahead. I’m going in.”

  “No,” he had said. “No, just hold on.”

  “What the fuck am I holding on to?” Beale had said. “You?”

  Early on when they’d first started sleeping together at Fort Riley, he and Fowler had talked about Beale quite a bit because he’d been the one soldier in her platoon whom she had the most trouble with—and also the one they had the most pleasure arguing about. Pulowski had still felt adrift in the Army then. As a signal officer attached to Headquarters Company, he was not in charge of a platoon, like Fowler was, and thus had no soldiers under him, no relationship to their day-to-day concerns. Instead, despite the surface activity of the fort, which itself wasn’t all that different from a college campus, he had spent most of his days in a classroom in the back of the battalion headquarters, working to bone up on the command-and-control programs for the computer systems that they would be using when they got to Iraq. None of the equipment actually existed there, physically, at the fort: it was all in Iraq, already installed, and so mostly they worked from manuals and on a few emulators that McKutcheon had managed to wrangle out of the supply chain. The whole thing had felt dry and dead—worse, in its way, than anything he’d done in college. Not to mention the fact that, in a way he’d not considered when in college—in a way that he’d thought he’d be protected from, since he had assumed that the war would be over by the time he graduated—he had for the first time the realization that he’d made a terrible mistake in judgment to join the Army.

  He was not the only person, he figured, who was having this feeling. But it didn’t filter into daily conversation that much except for McKutcheon’s side comments, his tendency to repeat tidbits from the Secretary of Defense’s press conferences in a flat voice, without any clear inflection one way or the other, and then to stare at Pulowski, or some of the other junior intel officers, as if he wondered what they were looking at him for.

  So talking about Beale had become a way of admitting, indirectly, his fear. Or even of really, clearly defining what that fear might be. As a soldier, Beale had been everything that Pulowski wasn’t and hoped never to be. He was brash, he was boastful, he was exceptionally jingoistic, he was constantly disregarding Fowler’s instructions to him—or, if not disregarding them, complaining that their training was not more active, that Fowler wasn’t aggressive enough, that she did things too much by the book. All of this Pulowski had taken as a joke—and Fowler had too, in at least some way, or she wouldn’t have told Pulowski stories about the troubles she’d had with Beale.

  Fowler, of course, had already been through something like this. He assumed that the difficulties she’d had with her brother—his running away, his stealing, his drunk-driving arrest in Texas—were at least part of what made her comparatively cheerful at the prospect of leading a platoon of soldiers into Iraq. He’d learned most of this at the La Quinta Inn in Council Grove, Kansas, about half an hour south of Fort Riley, which was where he and Fowler slept together in order to keep their relationship secret. Maybe if he had been closer to Fowler, if he had made some public commitment to her, they might have been able to find a way through this together. But in the La Quinta Inn, the thing he’d liked most about Fowler was her secrets. There was a darkness in her, which he recognized, and a good strong streak of anger—at her mother, for instance, whenever Pulowski brought her up. (And only if Pulowski brought her up.) She’d believed that she was a poor officer, she fretted that she would not have her platoon properly trained, worried about packing, about what Captain Hartz’s opinion of her was, about her weight, and most frequently about Beale. None of this had been said self-pityingly, which was how it would’ve come out had Pulowski been talking. But naturally, and at intervals—usually after they had made love and were lying in bed watching Leno, naked, and she had her leg draped over his and she would yawn and reach over to pat his chest and deliver whatever concern it was that had troubled her that day in a flat, direct voice.

  He could see Fowler now, through the doorway of a different schoolroom, seated on a folding chair beside Masterson, interviewing the local sheikhs: she looked mannish, not fat, but full in the shoulders, very muscular in the thighs. It had been a violation of the prime directive of being a signal officer, lying there in bed talking to a lieutenant—all of which could not have been more exciting for Pulowski. Not the sex, which was fine, or even excellent—better than you might imagine if you chose girls only from looking at a magazine. But it was the part about lying in bed with her watching Leno, naked, and listening to her worry that had truly excited him, because those worries bore her own private weight. And secondly because Beale’s antics, Hartz’s opinion, the concern about whether she’d measure up as an officer, were exactly the kinds of things that he’d given up worrying about a long time ago. Which meant that whatever was happening now would be worse for her than it would ever be for him.

  “Hey,” Pulowski said, as Masterson’s interpreter stuck his head out of the schoolroom door. “I need you to talk to somebody.” He hustled the ’terp down the hallway to the room where the deaf man had been. What was he expecting? Nothing, he hoped. And what use would that information be to anybody? But when he and Faisal Amar entered the room, the deaf man cowered, went wide-eyed and spooked, jumping up so quickly that his chair tipped over backward, and that sound, the sudden scatter of metal against linoleum, acted as the ground for a high-voltage charge that had been running secretly through the room all along, buzzing, humming, burning just beneath their skin. Pulowski grabbed his arm, shouted uselessly, “Stop!” and then the two soldiers on guard outside swept in and tackled him. The man went down as if he’d been dropped from the ceiling. Pulowski heard his head slap linoleum and in a moment he was trussed, one soldier pinioning his arms behind his back, the other shouting, “Down! Get down!” with the muzzle of his M4 pressed into the man’s ear. This occurred in view of the other Iraqis lined up in the hallway, who craned their necks to see, until Pulowski kicked the door closed, rounded, and found Faisal squatting before the man’s bleeding face.

  “It’s all right, okay, guys, no problem here,” Faisal was saying. “He just freak out a little bit, this guy. Is he crazy? Did he say something?”

  “He’s deaf,” Pulowski said.

  “No weapons,” said the soldier kneeling on the man’s back. “He make a move on you?”

  “No,” Pulowski said. “He just bolted when I came back in.”

  “He tell you what he want?” Faisal asked. He’d picked up a greasy, stained notebook that had fallen out of the man’s pocket.

  “He wanted me to read something,” Pulowski said.

  The man had ceased arching his back in an effort to get free. Instead, his brown irises seemed curiously calm, completely resigned as he gazed up at Pulowski. There was something off there, maybe. But Beale was dead by now. He’d lumbered out from behind that dumpster and run to the open door he’d identified. Once there, he’d glanced back at Pulowski and pointed up, as if to indicate where he was going. There had been nothing hidden in his face. He’d been terrified. He’d known that Pulowski would not help him. And he’d barged into the darkness anyway. The last thing Fowler needed, after all the favors Pulowski had done for her already, was to know how good Beale had been. Or to believe there was any hope of getting him back. In the schoolroom, Faisal whispered quietly and patiently in Arabic, which the deaf man gave no sign of understanding, and then, chuckling to himself, turned to a clean page in the notebook and, his face aping broad emotions of forgiveness, of generous importuning—his thin eyebrows raised, his lips folded into a clownlike moue—wrote something in Arabic and held it down beside the prisoner’s eyes, turn
ing it sideways so that he could read.

  “Well, he can go now, I think,” Faisal said, when the deaf man had finished reading. And when the soldiers holding the man hesitated, looking at Pulowski, who was the ranking officer in the room, he added, “I mean, if you want to let him, of course. These are not my decisions. Unless you want to let him talk to your female lieutenant. Do they allow these things? I admit he’s not all that good-looking, quiet type, I don’t know—but who am I to say what a woman like that would find attractive—”

  “What are you talking about?” Pulowski asked.

  “This guy, he loves your lady officer,” Faisal said. His accent corrupted this phrase into something that sounded slurred and drunken. Pulowski noticed that Masterson’s soldiers—now gently tugging the prisoner into a sitting position, checking his wound, finding a rag to mop the floor where he had bled—grinned in spite of themselves.

  It was possible that even the prisoner, fresh gauze taped to his temple, looking dazed, added a bittersweet and hopeless smirk.

  “No, seriously.” Faisal was on a roll by now, getting laughs, and he continued with all the subtlety of a lounge singer. “He says, ‘Azeezati’—that’s dear woman, okay? ‘I know that you don’t see me but I think that we are a couple made in heaven and I am offering to you the opportunity to be my wife, zawja.’ Yes, well, it’s flattering, I think? No? He says here he has fifteen goats and a 1984 Toyota Camry—”

  “All right, okay, I get the idea,” Pulowski said, flushing. He was still holding the piece of stationery, with the man’s sketched pictures. The unsettling male angel. If he’d had any balls he would’ve thrown it away. Instead, he stuck it in his pocket, which felt like the only truly cowardly thing he’d done all day. “Get him out of here. We’ve had a nice ha-ha, so let’s give Romeo his walking papers and move on.”

  “We could always ask the captain if he has a policy on this,” Faisal said.

  But Pulowski already had the door open, waving the deaf man—now transformed back into a civilian from a prisoner—out the door and into the crowded hallway beyond. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, very funny. Okay, who’s the next case?”

  * * *

  Fowler collapsed against the wall of her trailer at Camp Tolerance, head tilted back, still sweating, having just returned from the schoolhouse and her last, fruitless attempt to find Beale. “It was my fault,” she said.

  Pulowski lay on the floor with his arms winged behind his head, like he did when he was thinking up a line. By now she was ready for one.

  “If you’re going to make me lie here and listen to you say stupid things like that,” he said, “you could at least have the decency to clean the place up.”

  Not bad. Maybe she could work with that.

  “You’re a fucking classic, Pulowski.” She grabbed an old T-shirt from the floor and smacked him in the center of his skinny chest, shaking her head. “The one person in the Army who’d try to fix a disaster like this by cleaning.”

  It was an experiment, she understood that. Some attempt to touch the world as it had been before they’d lost Beale. As it had been when they’d made love here.

  “Controlling your environment,” Pulowski said, doing a passable impersonation of Captain Hartz’s crusty bark, “is the first step on the road to clarity of mind.”

  “I hope not,” she said, gazing around her trailer. The place was a disaster of crap. The tops of her two lockers were cluttered with backup supplies, razors (unused now for a week), her extra soap, her iPod dock, her camera charger, her stacks of toilet paper, baby wipes, bug spray. The top of the fridge where she’d put together a tiny kitchenette, hot plate, coffeemaker, powdered Gatorade. The corner where she’d tossed USPS Priority Mail boxes that contained the rare postings from her dad—never anything from her mother—the plastic bags of trail mix, almonds, the copies of The Kansas City Star, already yellowing. Cleaning up her personal space had been one thing she’d let go since her commission. She’d done enough of it back home with Harris, loads of laundry, the toilets, the showers, not because she liked it, but because it was part of her imitation of what a mother did. The other option was to take about four Tylenol PM and just go dead—except she wasn’t even sure, with the way her head was spinning, that meds would work. “All right, let’s do it. Clarity of mind. I could go for a little bit of that.”

  Pulowski scrounged up a couple of plastic bags from the PX and began stuffing them with papers, the bits of food, and empty soda cans. She went to the closet for a broom and swept and then found somewhere back in her locker one of those dustless mops with the pads that came in a box—she tried looking at the box, at the instructions on it, the brightly photogenic housewife in her jeans, and somehow this terrified her in a way the broom did not. She had to set the box down quickly and walk away.

  She wondered how it could be so simple for Pulowski. He wasn’t like Dykstra or Waldorf, who might look a hell of a lot tougher on the surface but who’d cried like kids once they’d given up the chase. Pulowski was more like a wasp—nervous, always buzzing around about something, attacking to protect his fragility. Once, he’d told her a story about how, after his father had left, he’d come home in tears from the bus, because the kids at school had claimed he threw a ball like a girl. So he’d led his mom out in the front yard, jammed a baseball glove on her hand, and said, “Look, I’m never going to be good at this, okay? I just need you to teach me how not to suck.” So it wasn’t like Fowler had to worry about him treating her like she had leprosy just because she’d committed the worst sin an officer could commit. But he was also not exactly someone you’d expect to keep quiet after a firefight—even if, as he’d said, he’d been too far away from Beale to see what had happened. Still, for a good twenty minutes they strained and encouraged each other toward some objective that had nothing to do with Beale. She opened the door to let in a breeze. Pulowski was squatting on his haunches, thumbing through the back issues of The Kansas City Star, and when she walked back past him, she rubbed his scalp offhandedly, as if stealing something.

  “So what do we do next?” he asked.

  She sat on her bed, unbuttoned her blouse, and stripped apart the Velcro on her shoulder brace. “I don’t know, Dix. You can tell me we’re gonna find him someplace.”

  “You don’t really think he’s alive?”

  She took a long, deep breath. “You can’t not think that,” she said.

  He tucked his chin against his chest. “Look, what you’ve got to realize is that this is just a bad accident. It just fucking feels bigger than that, okay?”

  “You’re kidding me,” she said. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

  “It’s true,” Pulowski said. “You think you’re in the middle of some life-crushing, horrible event. Losing a soldier is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a platoon leader.” When he said this, she felt an electric stab through her entire body, as if it were the first thing he’d said that was true. “Okay? I agree. But that’s not the same as saying you’re to blame. It was Colonel Seacourt’s idea to set those cameras up. I was the one who asked your platoon to take me outside the wire. And your sergeant was the idiot who charged into that building—and got himself shot. Or whatever happened in there.”

  Here was his buzz, coming back. The problem was, she had asked herself all the same questions. Why hadn’t she been there? If she had been there, couldn’t the same thing have happened to her? What would it be like if it was happening to her?

  “I should’ve gotten in the building sooner,” she said.

  “We were getting shot at,” Pulowski said.

  She dropped her head back. “We were all getting shot at.”

  “And you told us specifically not to go into that building without a full team,” Pulowski said. “Didn’t you do that? Wasn’t that the case? Okay, so that was ugly. That was something I never want to see, and I hope I live long enough to forget about it, but I am not going to sit here and let you destroy yourself because you didn’t follow B
eale into doing what was obviously a stupid thing.”

  “You knew that,” Fowler said. “You knew that was a stupid thing.”

  “Sure as fuck turned out that way.”

  She saw the flinch, the darting way his eyes shifted to the dingy trailer window, a quick grope of his armpit. “How were you so sure?” she asked.

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Because the shooter”—Fowler pointed at the trailer’s ceiling—“was on the roof. We missed it. I missed it. But Beale saw it. Beale was trying to protect me, and my soldiers, a twenty-eight-year-old sergeant—”

  “Oh, come on. You are not going to—”

  “A twenty-eight-year-old sergeant,” Fowler said, rising to her feet, “who risks his life to help my team, and meanwhile I’m lying around inside my Humvee, farting around on the radio—”

  To her shock and surprise, as she reached this crescendo, Pulowski laughed in her face. “Oh, man, that is some desperation, Fowler. What do you want me to do? You want me to take the blame? What do you think would’ve happened if I had gone in after Beale?”

  She’d done the same thing with her younger brother, Harris. She could remember it perfectly, as if that moment had been permanently encoded in her memory, waiting to reflower now in this version of her worst self. Meaning she’d found out that Harris had boosted a car—it had been a Mazda, owned by the Ryersons, who’d had a daughter in her class at school. She might be a schlub lieutenant now, who was overweight, who ran a half-assed recovery team—who was fucking scared and terrified, who’d been fucking scared and terrified every second out there in that intersection—but back then she’d been tougher, lean, and she’d had plans for Harris. So she’d been terrifying in her righteousness, ambushing him in the parking lot where he’d hidden it, forcing him to admit where it had come from, rubbing his nose in it. She didn’t want to use anger now—she knew better, or she ought to have known better. Not against Pulowski, especially.