The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  Or at least it seemed stupid, until she had waited on the bench long enough for the second thought to occur to her: That’s exactly what you did with Harris. You cut him out when he was weak.

  “Let’s try it my way once,” Masterson said. He ambled over to the squat station and, lifting the bar one-handed, carried it out from the frame that surrounded it and set it on the rubber-padded floor. Yet again, Fowler wasn’t sure whether he was referring to his command style or to the weights. “I think you are a practical woman, Fowler. And I don’t think you’re all as goody-goody as you play. So I tell you what. Every guy in my unit is required to be able to squat at minimum twice their weight. I think you can do it. Moreover, I think you want to do it. I don’t think you have any interest at all in being weak. And I think you understand exactly why I’ve got your Sergeant Beale out at my camp and have been abusing him like a lame puppy.”

  “One-thirty,” Fowler lied, standing up. “That’s what I weigh.”

  “How about we say one-fifty and you don’t have to get on a scale?” Masterson said, grinning. He peeled two of the largest plates off the weight rack and added them to the bar’s end. “Peer pressure, it’s a wonderful thing.”

  “One lift,” Fowler said. “Two-eighty. What do I get out of it?”

  “You do it, you get your shackles back.” He’d finished adding weights by then. The bar had three forty-five-pound weights and a five-pounder on each side. It looked like something from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. “Hey, fellas,” Masterson shouted to the entire free-weight section of the gym, fifteen guys, all of whom, she would’ve guessed, could’ve qualified for Mr. Fort Riley, and all of whom, she was sure, were infantry. “We got a bet here. Lieutenant Fowler here believes that we have committed the grave sin of stealing some of her platoon’s shackles, which I know is a deeply offensive accusation for all of you honorable Christian men.” Laughter now, more clearly audible. Even Fowler thought the line wasn’t so bad—made a note of it, as if it might be something that she herself could use. “So, because I am committed to the principle of equal opportunity as much as the next guy, I’m going to bet the lieutenant that if she lifts twice her body weight”—here Fowler heard what sounded like a lowing sound, deep and guttural, which caused her to flush and focus on the shiny textured grip of the bar between her feet—“then I will give her all the shackles she could ever want.”

  With her head bowed and her knees bent, Fowler lifted her hands up beside her shoulders and allowed Masterson and another soldier to set the bar into them, until its full weight rested against her back. She could feel the full horizontal press of it along the vertebrae of her neck and both shoulders, as if the wall of a building had been set down there. She almost fell forward once, light-headed, but Masterson was right about one thing: the mooing had helped her focus, the opposition and scorn and distrust of the soldiers in the room did give her something solid to press against. She blew out a breath, focused all her energy, and drove up, huffing and groaning—sounding, she was sure, completely idiotic, but at this point who gave a shit—until her vision blurred and she felt her legs extend and lock at the knees and she stood there quivering and triumphant, hearing nothing but the silent defeat of Delta Company. Then she blinked once, twice, and saw that the free-weight room was empty, the barbells still out at their stations, but the soldiers gone, including Masterson, and she was stuck, without a spotter, unable to take a step. With great effort she managed to turn her head to the racks of elliptical trainers and stationary bikes at the far end, where a few other support soldiers like herself were pedaling quietly, none of them in the slightest bit interested in looking her way. “Little help here?” she said.

  12

  “I can’t believe that my own platoon sergeant would let another officer waltz right into our equipment locker and steal our shit,” Fowler said.

  “Maybe Beale didn’t think of it as stealing,” Pulowski said. “Maybe he figured that Masterson would bring the stuff back.”

  Fowler didn’t answer this. “I fucked up,” she said. “My whole life, my whole career, the most relentless suck-up you’ve ever met. Oh, jeez, I want to be a good officer, sir. Please like me. And then, when I gotta make an actual decision, I gook on my shoes. I fucking can’t take care of people. I can’t protect these guys. I’m good at pretending that I can take care of people, that I know what I’m doing, but I don’t, okay? Maybe Harris is right. We are two months out from going to Iraq. I think we’re trained. But maybe all I’m doing is checking off boxes of what I think I’m supposed to do, Pulowski. I don’t have any convictions! Beale at least has some convictions. Masterson has convictions! They’re fucked-up convictions, but they still exist. Even Seacourt and Hartz, they at least presumably believe in the way we’ve been getting trained!”

  “But you don’t?” Pulowski said.

  “No, that’s your conviction, Pulowski.”

  “Hah, that’s just my pose.”

  “Oh, really?” Fowler propped herself up on her elbow. Pulowski was spread-eagled atop the motel bed’s sheets with a bag of potato chips on his chest, a small flap of coverlet flipped over his groin. “I thought this was your pose,” she said.

  Pulowski glanced down at his own body wryly, his head cocked at an angle by a folded pillow. He wriggled his toes where they rose up into the lower corner of the TV, where they obscured the legs of Tom Hanks as he sat talking to Jay Leno. Then he reached out and gently cupped a hand beneath her breast.

  “How do you suppose you can tell the difference?” he asked.

  “What, between a conviction and a pose?”

  Pulowski rumpled his lips and shrugged, as if this were a choice that she had defined on her own, rather than something he’d led her to—though of course he hoped he had. “That’s a pose,” he said, nodding at Jay Leno, and then, rolling onto his side, he kissed her breast, right atop the nipple. “And this is a conviction,” he said.

  How the hell did he come up with crap like this? He’d had a knack for it ever since Fowler had first crossed the lawn between their apartments, knocked on his door, and stood there, looking actually angry as she said, “Would you like to go to lunch?” and he’d said—he’d somehow known to say—“Well, if you’re going to ask me out, you could at least look like you think I might say yes.” He’d never specifically said that self-doubt was a bad habit of hers, but every time she tried to get him to admit to some flaw that she had—as opposed to discussing his flaws—he’d twist and turn and evade the question, turning it into a joke, as if there couldn’t be anything more ridiculous than taking such talk seriously in any way. Part of her appreciated that. He felt it, a little click.

  Fowler reached down and circled his penis with her fist. Click. “Yeah? And what kind of conviction do we have here?”

  “That’s a tired conviction,” Pulowski said.

  “So you do have them,” Fowler said.

  “Horniness, love of beautiful women, love of television.” He held up the bag of chips. “Ruffles. These are the things that make our society great.”

  “You forgot baseball,” she said.

  “I suck at baseball,” he said. “Remember that.”

  “So, what, you can only have convictions about things you enjoy?”

  “I think convictions are the things you enjoy,” Pulowski said.

  “Those are called temptations,” Fowler said.

  “Really?” This time it was Pulowski’s turn to sit up in bed. “You seriously believe that?”

  “That’s what I always told Harris,” she said.

  “We’re skipping that,” Pulowski said firmly. “You raised a sociopath. Welcome to America!—where, by the way, you started parenting at age eight. It’s not some life lesson you’re doomed to repeat.”

  “That’s your conviction.”

  “It is.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “You got plenty of convictions, Fowler. Don’t short yourself.”

  “Yeah? What the hell
are they?”

  “Convictions are the things that you do without thinking about it.”

  After they made love, he lay on his back in the dark, with his arm curled beneath her neck. He would’ve liked to point out that that was one area where Fowler did fine without thinking. But he could feel her thinking now, their prior conversation drifting back down over them like a mist, lighter, he hoped, than the way that her brother, Harris, talked to her—though in essence, he and her brother were recommending similar things. Ease up. Stop worrying about the rules so much.

  “I cannot believe Masterson stole those shackles,” she said. “Right there. Right in my face. He stood there and told me that I didn’t know what I was seeing.”

  “But you did see it.”

  “Yup.”

  “Sounds like a conviction to me.”

  “Yeah, well, the problem is that Captain Hartz’s conviction is that there’s nothing more important in the Army than chain of command. Know your place. Keep your head down. And if you’re a support lieutenant, don’t fuck with the infantry. All of which I can live with, so long as somebody convinces Beale to do the same thing with me.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “I don’t know, Pulowski,” she said. “That’s how we started this whole conversation, okay? I don’t have any convictions, that’s the problem with me. I thought that I joined the Army because it was going to clarify shit. Make things simpler. You got rules, you got responsibilities. One person owes another a certain respect. You don’t have to define how things are supposed to work. It’s all clear. There’s rules for how to cut your toenails, for chrissake. You’re not supposed to sit around and worry about convictions. Right? Beale disobeyed my orders. He screwed up. So forget him—let him pay.”

  Jesus, how could he be so nuts about a woman who was such a mess? Maybe because he had a conviction that she wasn’t, really. He lay there grinning in the darkness, enjoying this. “I don’t think that’s your conviction,” he said.

  “No? Why not?”

  “If it was, you wouldn’t spend so much time explaining it to me.”

  13

  The motor pool hangar was a lonely place, far from the parade grounds, or the firing range, or anything that seemed remotely immediate in a way that Fowler, over the past few months, had come to appreciate. Thorny locust trees had been left to grow along the edges of its vast parking lot, filled with rows and rows of vehicles, the boring and forgotten kinds: front-end loaders, diesel container trucks, backhoes, even a road grader—along with her favorite, the Hercules, which she’d tucked back into the shade of a cottonwood. Which was why, as she parked her Ford, she was surprised to see Captain Masterson pushing out the hangar exit into the pallid sunlight, a pair of lieutenants flanking him on either side, lugging duffel bags that clanked and seemed oddly heavy. Though Fowler saluted, he did not salute her back. “Too nice a day for the office, Lieutenant,” he said. “We’re going to have a turn in the weather here just about any second. I’ve been out here three straight years, and once that cold air starts pouring across the mountains, it’s game on. So enjoy it now, that’s what I say.”

  “I grew up here, sir,” Fowler said.

  “Oh.” Masterson seemed unflustered by this correction, or at least uninterested, his eyes a bit vague and out of focus, as if smiling through Fowler at his Humvee. “Well, congratulations on that.”

  “You guys find what you need?” she asked. The storage lockers at the motor pool generally held a company’s most valuable and delicate electronics equipment. Not stuff that clanked, like these bags did. Not stuff you’d want to put in a bag.

  “This?” Masterson waggled one of the bags in front of her nose, as if inviting her to sniff it. “This is our baseball gear. Isn’t that right, fellas? We’re going to head out and take advantage of this last little bit of warm weather. You want to come, you can.”

  “Naw, I got to work,” Fowler said. She glanced back regretfully at the hangar. “I’m the unit movement officer. I need to get all our vehicles and containers inspected and ready for staging at the railhead. We’ve only got another week.”

  She felt proud of herself saying that. Proud and official. You almost never got to talk to infantry commanders about supply work, especially not one who’d nearly screamed her off the training course six months back.

  “Excellent,” Masterson said. He opened his Humvee’s door and gave her a smart salute. “Hell of a job, isn’t it?”

  “We got to move this whole lot,” Fowler said. “Plus a bunch more, sir. I timed it out. We’ve got to be able to load a vehicle on a railcar in thirty minutes. You count up every vehicle on our list, and you look at the window we’ve got to do the work, you want to make sure everything’s inspected and squared away. No time for snags.”

  She flushed. Why was she talking so much? Probably because she’d been staying up till all hours of the night, running through spreadsheets listing every vehicle they needed to prepare, where their tools had to be packed, how their containers should be loaded—none of which she’d been given even thirty seconds of training on, either in ROTC or at Fort Lee. And so it was painfully satisfying, like having a deep, unreachable itch scratched, to have an actual company commander like Masterson notice that she had done this. Masterson whistled between his teeth and surveyed the motor-pool yard.

  “All this stuff?” he asked.

  “Well, sir,” she said, “everything that belongs to our company. Of course, I’m not going to be bringing my truck. Or any of the other civilian vehicles you see here.”

  “And why the hell not?” Masterson asked. “If I was the unit movement officer, I’d sure as hell pack up my truck. Maybe strap on a couple of ATVs.”

  “I guess, you know, I could think about it,” Fowler said, squinting and surveying the motor pool, happy to play along with Masterson’s banter. “Those railcars do carry a lot of weight.We could probably figure out how to add a little old two-ton pickup. It’d be like the cherry on top.”

  She was well aware that her answers had gone on too long, that she’d been geeking out on details—exactly the kind of thing that Beale tended to hate.

  “Fascinating,” Masterson said. “Fascinating stuff, Lieutenant. Nothing like Army logistics, huh?” He gave a sideways glance at his lieutenants, who might have been derisive, but when his expression returned to meet Fowler, it seemed harmlessly amused. With her, not at her. “Keep it up,” he said. “I’m sure you’re doing just great.”

  * * *

  Inside the hangar, she found McWilliams driving a forklift with a cigarette clenched between his teeth while Beale balanced on the lift’s front tines, clutching a half-inflated basketball against his chest. “Let’s go, White Chocolate!” McWilliams shouted. “Throw it down!” Immediately the glow of Masterson’s words curdled—he hadn’t been complimenting her. He’d been laughing at the goofballs under her command. Like Beale, who at the moment clutched the ball against his overly ample belly, as McWilliams steered him toward the basketball rim that had been erected at the hangar’s end. Fowler judged that he had never dunked—or even probably played organized ball. It was a fantasy. A dream. By then, still hooting and hollering—and being too stupid to notice that their commanding officer was present—McWilliams had swung the unsteady Beale, with his bright red hair and his flushed face, by the basketball hoop, and Beale, setting up for his dunk, slipped at the last minute and came up short, the ball jamming against the rim, and the entire basket tipping over, its metal pole banging against the hangar floor with an enormous thongg! “Beale? McWilliams?” she shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  McWilliams, at least, seemed mildly ashamed of himself. He was high-cheekboned, with long sideburns, the top of his crew cut platinum blond—a pretty boy with rough and brutal edges, a fairly heavy drinker, but not a soldier troubled by any grand illusions of what he might be. “Um, shooting hoops, ma’am?” he said. Beale, however, was another matter. Even if he wasn’t what you’d co
nsider an athletic specimen, Beale was at once bigger and more boyish. And the smirk on his face—he’d pulled his upper lip down over his teeth, his green eyes bright—destroyed every good feeling Fowler had taken from her encounter with Masterson. “You think that’s funny?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Beale said. “Nothing is ever funny. We know that.”

  “Did you see Captain Masterson walking through here? Do you think he was particularly impressed with watching you play grab-ass?”

  “No, ma’am,” Beale said sullenly.

  “Because I was just out front talking to Captain Masterson and he was telling me how much he appreciated the work we’re doing here.”

  She immediately regretted admitting her pride in this, seeing the ripple of amusement that passed over Beale’s features. “I’m glad to hear it,” Beale said.

  “Are you?” she asked. “Because I don’t know about you, Beale, but I take some pride in what I do. This is my platoon. I am not embarrassed to be organized. I am not embarrassed to do things right. That’s why we’re here. And if you don’t think that this job is important enough to take seriously, then why don’t you go right up the chain of command and check? Ask Captain Hartz if he doesn’t care if we do things right. Ask Captain Masterson. Ask the colonel. And what they’re going to tell you is that the Army is not about acting cool. It’s about getting the job done. It’s about being precise. It’s about completing your mission, okay? You get no points for style.”

  * * *

  A fantasist, a dreamer. That’s what Beale was. Somebody imitating what it meant to be a soldier—Pulowski had been right about that, at least. Not long after Beale had been assigned to her platoon, she’d met his mother at a battalion-wide “family weekend” picnic on post. Beale had been off playing horseshoes and smoking a cigar and Fowler had sat in the wilted food tent with his mother—a small, fretful woman with ragged blond hair, dressed in jeans, with tiny, oddly delicate ballet slippers on her feet. What it was that caused this woman to begin speaking so frankly about her son, Fowler couldn’t say. Maybe it was a warning, or maybe Beale’s mother had believed that this was information that could be exchanged only female-to-female, as if Fowler’s sex put her more in the category of a chaplain, rather than of Beale’s boss. Whatever it was, the woman had begun a vague discussion of her son’s childhood that quickly found its focus in her ex-husband and the effect his departure had on Beale. Her son had been a risk taker ever since. And she had always, in some ways, thought that Carl’s interest in joining the service (this was how she’d phrased it, as if the word “Army” frightened her too much to say) had been in a sense a way for him to find another father, or at least a different series of fathers—first his high school Army recruiter, then the sergeant who’d put him through basic. And that (so Beale’s mother said) Carl had been deeply disappointed, after his vocational aptitude test, that he’d graded out as a fuel handler, rather than infantry. Meaning, Fowler knew, he’d scored incredibly poorly. So, she had thought, giving the woman her best party smile, in other words, your son is a reject.