The Good Lieutenant (22 page)

“Emma,” she said. “You guys getting ready to deploy yet?”

“Few more weeks,” she said. “How'd you guess?”

They reached a table, Fowler seating herself while Susie Wrightman laid out silverware for her, then politely slipped a menu into her hands.

Fowler glanced up at Susie Wrightman, a face that she'd once seen every day for years, pretty, bottle-blond, ex-cheerleader, now getting heavy in the cheeks. On her good days, she still felt a small flare of pride (coupled, in certain ways, with disbelief) that she had listened to their high school recruiter, Captain Morris, rather than ending up carrying around plates for $6.50 an hour plus tips. But on a night like tonight, the uniform felt like a disguise. She wasn't any more qualified to command a platoon in Iraq than Susie Wrightman was. The difference was that Susie Wrightman wasn't arrogant enough to pretend she could. “People talk,” Susie said, shrugging, with a funny expression on her face. “You hear things in a job like this. Plus you look a little stressed.”

“Do I?” Fowler said. She smiled uneasily, stripped her cap off, set it on the table, and ran her fingers over her hair. There was still something odd about Susie's expression, a secret she was holding back. “Yeah, well, I got some personal problems I got to deal with.”

“Like him?” Wrightman nodded toward the back of the restaurant.

Fowler leaned around the corner of her booth and saw Carl Beale grinning at her from an empty table, then swiveled around and laid her head back against the booth's backrest, slumping. “You don't serve beer, do you?” she asked.

“That bad, huh?” Susie Wrightman said, laughing.

“Shit, I don't know.”

“Yeah, well, I'll tell you one thing,” Wrightman said. She knelt down briefly, still with that odd expression on her face. “He's been tipping extra-heavy,” she whispered. “So don't bust his ass too badly, okay?”

Fowler nodded, overcome by the certainty that Beale was, in fact, the absolute last person she wanted to see. And she had no one but herself to blame. He tottered over, grinning, eased his heavy belly in behind the table across from her.

“You mind if I sit?”

“Nope,” she said.

“You expecting anybody?” he asked.

Fowler tried to remember the advice that Pulowski had given her on Beale. Be personal. Don't stand on ceremony. Let him see that you're a human being. Let him know that you can get hurt. Start with posture, Pulowski had said, and don't think about your brother. Beale isn't your brother. She tried to smile, but it felt off-key.

“Look, Beale,” she said. “Let's not sit here and rehash this whole thing with Masterson, okay? You think he's a great commander, that's fine by me. I just don't like being put in a situation where I have to steal federal property. From members of the military. Which I am
in
.”

“I don't know. Seems kind of Old Testament to me.”

“We're not in the Old Testament, Beale. We're in the Army. I don't know about you, but I like the Army.”

“You do?” Beale made a shocked face, his pliable features hunching together in an impression of deep incomprehension. He was leaning forward now across the table. Sloppy. Pushing in on her. She made an effort not to back away. “What're you doing here, anyway?” he asked slyly. “I would've thought that you'd be up there at the colonel's tonight, smoking cigars with Captain Happy.” He nodded at her cell phone, which she'd set on the table. “You still waiting on a call?”

She pocketed the phone. Stared back at Beale openly but without the smile. “There's not going to be a call,” she said. “Captain seems to think I'm not party material. Or maybe officer material at all.”

Beale nodded. “Yeah, well, you're better off with family.”

“You're not my family, Beale.”

“Really?”

“No,” she said. “The Army
isn't
family, okay, Beale? It's a job. And this platoon is not going to work if you keep treating it differently. Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I'm going to clean up your messes for you. Or show up the next time you leave me a lame mix CD.”

“No?”

“No. And if I can't rely on you to follow my orders when I give them, if I can't rely on you to stay inside the rules once we get out there”—she waved her hand at the front window of the Cracker Barrel, the snow swirling in the parking lot lights, as if that were Iraq—“then I can't have you on my team!”

Beale, however, appeared undeterred. To her surprise, he didn't stiffen up or flush, as he usually did when she corrected him.

“So you're saying you're not my family,” he said.

“Do I stutter?”

“Does that mean Dykstra's not family?”

“Oh, come on, Beale.”

This was the moment, she figured, that Pulowski had been warning her about. The mad moment. The moment when you had that very bad feeling that everything you've been trying to escape by joining the Army is exactly the fucking thing that's waiting for you there. “Beale, I'm going to order,” she said. “I had a shitty day.”

“Does that mean Waldorf's not family?”

“I'm going to have the chicken-fried steak. You want anything?”

“Crawford? I mean, he's going to be very, very sad when he hears that.”

“You know what those guys are?” Fowler said. “You know why Crawford's never going to hear a thing like that, Beale? Because he's got his shit together. Because he's not the kind of soldier who comes down to the Cracker Barrel to ride his lieutenant's ass.”

“You're going to have to admit it eventually,” Beale said. He took the menu from her and pretended to examine it, while gazing at her over its top edge.

“Admit what?”

Beale smiled, tossed the menu back down on the table, stared at a spot just beside her ear, broad and childish, with his secretive-kid's face.

“That you saved our fucking asses. Took the hit for us. I wouldn't have thought that Family Values had it in her—”

“I hate that name, Beale. It's not family values that I'm talking about here. Half the guys in the Army are here because their daddy disappeared. Did your family have good rules, Beale? 'Cause mine didn't. You think I want to run my platoon like that? You think I enjoy lying to my CO? We stole Army property, Beale. We busted into trunks stenciled with another company's call letters. I want something better than that.”

“He stole our shit.”

“Who, Masterson? You mean the guy that you've been following around for the past six months, telling me he's the biggest fucking genius in the Army?”

“I might have been wrong about that.”

“Wrong!” she sputtered. And then she could feel that it was on her, the mad moment. “Wrong?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Beale said with his hands out, splayed flat. “Fellas, need a little help here.”

“You pissed her off enough yet, Beale?”

“What?” she said, standing up. When she turned, she could see a door behind their booth, its edge cracked, shadowed faces peering out. “No, you didn't,” she said.

“Oh, no, he didn't!” Beale said, repeating her phrase with a bucktoothed grin. He started waving the dark faces in and the door behind their booth opened and the rest of her platoon came out of it: Dykstra first, in his Philadelphia Flyers jersey, worn over the top of a blue flannel shirt. Crawford in his skinny jeans and sweater. Jimenez in a black hoodie decorated in gold lamé, Waldorf hulking out of the darkness in a starched blue oxford and, of all things, a suit vest buttoned tight around his stomach, and last of all, Pulowski in his Dockers and what she was surprised and pleased to recognize as his version of a “nice shirt”: A long-sleeve, rugby-type jersey in maroon and navy, probably purchased for him by his mother, and the black turtleneck that he tended to refer to as his “geek tie.” Briefly—she was corkscrewed in her seat, her thighs jammed between the table edge and the banquet—he caught her eye, and Pulowski made a twisted, goofy face, wobbling his head on his shoulders, as if to suggest that he was just following along with the crowd and had no idea why he was here.

Then there were hands on her shoulders, forcing her back down into her seat, voices, a press of bodies, everybody shouting simultaneously.

“To the queen of the DRIF, motherfuckers!” Beale said.

“Queen,” Jimenez said. “Who you calling queen, man? We don't need no fucking gender-specific shit like that.”

“What, I got to be politically correct when I hand out compliments?” Beale said.

“Holy shit, did Beale say he was giving somebody a compliment?”

“I didn't hear no compliment.”

“Queen is a compliment, motherfucker.”

“Not in this country, it ain't.”

Mugs were passed. A pitcher of soda came. Everybody was jostling, chanting, giving Beale shit about something indistinct, and in order not to betray her emotion, or to look at Pulowski again, she started examining the Cracker Barrel menu, trying not to look up at any of them, or lose control of herself in an embarrassing way. “We got to have a speech,” Waldorf said from the far end of the table. “Speech! Speech!”

“Get your own speaker, Waldorf,” she said. “I got to eat.”

“I'll say something,” Beale said, standing up.

It was not exactly the kind of place where she'd imagined having her first-ever military success. If at any point during the dinner someone had stood up and accused her of knowing nothing about what they were about to do, what dangers they were about to face, she would've confessed to this immediately. In part she feared this, and in part she wished that it would occur, so that she could get it over with, climb up out of the booth, strip off her ACUs and her lieutenant's bars and go put on a brown apron and get back to waitressing with Susie Wrightman—doing something in which the worst-case scenario was that you got tipped badly, or had to work an extra shift, and nobody ended up dead. In the end, she was rescued from having to say anything further by the advent of the K-State basketball game. One of the servers had set up a portable TV on a table in the corner of the restaurant, below a two-man wood saw that had been nailed to the wall, and the players flickered soundlessly on its screen. Gradually, because she'd started watching it, they all turned that way. She let her eyes linger on the set, the glowing, orderly court, the cheerleaders waving their pom-poms, all of it more magical and electric and satisfyingly vivid compared with the long concrete vistas of the DRIF, the steady brown and tan colors of the base. After a while, she dropped her gaze, in order to pay attention to the food that she'd ordered, and she saw Pulowski watching her instead of the game. He had a sly expression on his face, his eyebrows raised, one that seemed to say that this moment, at this table, proved everything he'd been telling her about her ability to command. Suggesting that she'd made exactly the right call to break the rules and get Beale off. “What're you looking at, Pulowski?” she said. “When did I get so interesting?”

She reached out and palmed the black padded book that Susie Wrightman had brought over, containing their table's tab, brushing his fingers as she did it, briefly but firmly, giving no sign to the rest of the platoon that she had done such a thing.

 

10

“Pulowski.” A winter Sunday night at the Harmony Woods apartment complex on the outskirts of Junction City—known locally as Fort Riley West. Pulowski was reading over an article on Fourier transform pairs describing how certain wave forms naturally correspond to each other despite being in different domains. McKutcheon had switched off his cell, jammed a snowboard into his Subaru, and headed to Colorado for the weekend. Fowler was away, her apartment windows dark across the snowy dimple of the complex yard, probably off doing some sort of extra brown-nose work for Hartz, and so Pulowski had been expecting … well, nothing. No visitors for the evening. He had his sweatpants on, wool socks, a pair of fleece-lined slippers mailed to him by his mother, and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a blanket over his legs, reading and occasionally glancing up at the apartment's flat-screen, which he had, in an attempt to feel adult and responsible, tuned in to the
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
. He shifted his gaze to the sliding black pane of his living room's glass door, seeing a reflection of himself, blanket tucked neatly around his knees, Diet Coke open on the table, and then, looming up just behind his reflection, so that their faces mingled in the glass, Fowler in a black stocking cap and parka, her gloved hands beckoning for him to let her in. “Come on,” she said, her voice still muffled by the glass. “We got to go get Beale. Let me in.”

Beale, as far as he was aware, didn't
need
getting. Still, five minutes later, Fowler stood inside the sliding door, her hair haloed by the static of her removed cap, waiting for him to get dressed. No information on where they were going, except that he was to wear civilian gear: parka, jeans, gloves, hat, boots. No ACUs. There was something mischievous and off-center in the way Fowler made this request—an energy, a confidence. The kind of self he saw in bed. Even so, as he tramped out the back door of his apartment, he'd experienced a small jolt of fear and displacement as if, however much he might have agreed with the spirit of this adventure, he wasn't sure that he belonged with her as a part of it, whatever it might be. “Tunes,” a voice growled as he climbed into Fowler's truck, and he was surprised to see Dykstra lying on his side in the backseat, dressed in a red-and-black checked woodsman's jacket, his jowls caked with camouflage face paint. “Hey, welcome to special operations, Lieutenant,” he said, cuffing Pulowski on the shoulder. “See if you can coax some music out of the LT.”

They pulled through town, past the Casey's General Store, past the strip mall where he and Fowler sometimes ate Chinese, past the mournful city hall, with its wind-stripped tinsel. Then the highway ran straight and flat, eddying with snow beyond the pickup's headlights, and beyond that the white fields glossily and ghostly lit. Pulowski scanned the truck's radio dial, picking up scratchy stations from impossibly far away: WGN in Chicago, a pastor preaching from Vancouver, a weather report from Arlington, Texas, and the news. The signals that brought their voices down through the truck's antenna and into the cab were the very thing he'd been reading about back home, safe in his apartment. At one point, the scanner landed on a velvet-voiced news announcer, who said, “The Department of Defense has confirmed three more deaths in Iraq today. Private William O'Connor died when his Humvee was hit by an improvised explosive device in Anbar Province.” For a moment, this signal sent a chill down his spine, like the snow that had fallen into his collar on his way to the truck, foreign to the warmth that the three of them generated in the small cab. The next channel was country music, and Fowler reached out and punched the button, ended the scan, and they drove together listening to Garth Brooks without complaint.