The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  “No,” she said. “Hold on, hold on—let me walk that back.”

  “Fuck you, Fowler!” Pulowski said. He was crying then, which was the last thing that she’d intended, the last thing she wanted to see. “You think you’re going to be able to walk this back? What are you, some kind of idiot? Don’t you know what happened out there? What are you, fucking blind?”

  The last words had been a howl. It had been the same way with Harris when she’d confronted him about the car: sarcasm, anger, contempt—goading, which she’d never been that good at handling. And then when she pushed back—which she did way too hard, she knew that—there was nothing there when you broke the shell. “Know?” she said. “Know? Fuck, yes, I know what happened. I was in command and I lost a soldier. Do you have some kind of different take on this, Pulowski? What the hell else happens when somebody disappears? You try to get them back.”

  “Aha!” Pulowski said, jabbing a finger at her. “We’re going to start in on this. Fowler’s sad story of her brother.”

  “Because I’ll tell you what happens when you lose somebody and don’t try to get them back. You end up lost too. That’s it.”

  “I am not going to sit here and discuss your family.”

  “It’s not my family,” Fowler said. “It’s me. That’s me, okay? If that had been you out there, wouldn’t you want me to get you back? You don’t think your fucking mom would expect me to make an effort?”

  Something had shifted ever so slightly in the conversation. “Yeah, well, good for you,” Pulowski said, his angular face becalmed, as it usually was when he’d won an argument. “But I was there. I was with Beale in the alley. He wanted to go in the building and find the shooter and I wouldn’t. I bailed on him and lied about it and I’m not sorry about it and I’d fucking do it again. That’s it. Okay? That’s me.”

  The feeling was like stepping into an air shaft that had been gaping there in the middle of the conversation from the beginning. On the way down, in the loose, falling sensation that accompanied the drop, she did the math. Not only had Pulowski failed to help Beale. But if he had tried to help, she’d probably be looking for him. That was all there, present in his face—and had been, probably, from the minute they’d come into the trailer. Instead, she’d fucked it up, exactly as she had with Harris. She could never back off, never shut up. “I’m an ass,” she said. “I’m sorry, Pulowski. I didn’t see.”

  There was a deliberation in his movements that she recognized, as if some decision had been made whose terms she hadn’t been informed of. He gave a shaky laugh. “Yeah, well, at least his mom’ll know who to blame, huh? You can write that to her: Your son Carl is dead because Lieutenant Pulowski sat on his fucking ass. I guess they can write that on my epitaph.”

  “Dixon.” She propped herself up on her elbow and gave him her best version of her father’s icy glare, wanting to contradict him in some way. “No.”

  Pulowski paled and began waving his hand as if to wipe out any further sentiment. He’d reached down into his pocket and produced a folded scrap of beige paper. “I get it, okay? I am not saying that you’re wrong. You got to look for Beale. I understand. It’s just that I’m out. But before I get out, you’re gonna want to see this, okay? I don’t know if it means anything—”

  He unfolded the paper and handed it to her. There were two sketches, one of the Iraqi, another of an unknown man with wings. The one who looked like Beale.

  “An Iraqi gave this to me at the schoolhouse,” he said. “I think you should go to Masterson’s patrol base, find his interpreter, ask him about it. If you get a bite, if there’s something there, you don’t walk it back.”

  5

  It was nearly June when Faisal Amar stood on the roof of Ayad al-Tayyib’s house and offered Ayad twenty dollars a week American for the use of his property and the fields surrounding it. The offer was not completely insane, not completely unexpected. Previous to that spring, it had been possible to switch on the Al-Iraqiya network, watch the jarring, bumpy footage of a bombing’s aftermath, mangled bodies being carted off on stretchers, or the wailing crush around a casket, and then walk outside and feel none of the same tension in the surrounding air. Breathe in eucalyptus, watch a flock of crows dance in unison over the date palm trees. But since the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra that winter, Ayad had begun to feel a constriction reaching out from the city, tightening the air of the surrounding fields. There were rumors now. Mysterious flyers in the markets in Bini Ziad. Gunfire occasionally at night. He did not frequently agree with his mother’s assessment of local politics, particularly when it came to the Shi’ites. (Seeing televised footage of the shrine’s exploded golden dome, his mother, dressed in the brocaded jacket she had once worn for trips into the city, had texted his phone crisply from across the living room, Now they’ll have an excuse to do anything.) And yet, recently, from this spot here on his roof—shielded by the spaceship that he and Faisal had built—he’d seen headlights out across the fields, winking, disappearing, with no practical explanation for their presence except that, following their visits, their old Sunni neighbors tended to move away. Even he might define those convoys as a they.

  The money, which Faisal flourished now from his suit pocket, would’ve been useful. If it had come from Faisal himself, he would’ve been less concerned, since he viewed Faisal as a we. But instead, it came from Raheem al-Najafi, the Shi’ite mechanic who worked in town, whose identity, once fixed and stable, beneath Ayad’s mother’s notice, had been mutated and altered by the invasion, until nobody knew what, exactly, he should be named. Ayad’s mother would’ve called him takfiri, or unbeliever (which really meant uppity Shi’ite). The word in Bini Ziad was that he was a member of the Grand Brotherhood of the Golden Dome, whose angry flyers papered the marketplace. But Ayad’s main concern was with how the Americans defined Raheem. Insurgent being the worst case. Explain this to me again, Ayad wrote in his notebook, jabbing it back at Faisal. Why would Raheem al-Najafi want to use my house? When did he get so rich?

  Raheem’s objective is not an issue. You will not be involved in it.

  You’re involved in it.

  I know you, so Raheem has asked me to make the contact.

  What does he want to use the house for?

  It would be better if you did not ask.

  I thought you were working with the Americans? Can’t they protect you?

  I am working with the Americans. But I can’t be with them all the time.

  Why don’t you tell them that you’re in danger?

  I am not in danger, Faisal wrote. You are in danger.

  I am not in danger if I do not have a side. If anything, I am in favor of the Americans. None of them have bothered me.

  Are you saying that you would support a group of infidels against your own countrymen? Do you have no pride in your religion?

  Ayad laughed at this last note when he read it. You are not a religious person, he scribbled. You don’t fool me.

  Faisal considered this, stone-faced. Then responded: You don’t know what I am.

  Ayad had had long arguments with his mother about what, exactly, Faisal was back in the day. A shape-shifter. A user. That was what she called him. According to her, the only reason a Shi’ite like Faisal played with him was that the other Sunni kids ignored him. That and the fact that what Faisal really wanted was to marry Ayad’s cousin Hanan, who’d been living at Ayad’s house then. Admittedly, there had been afternoons when Ayad could remember his friend sitting out at the wooden picnic table just below him, in his mother’s rose garden, doing voices to make Hanan laugh. On the other hand, the other Sunni kids ignored Ayad too. So maybe there had been some using, but it had gone both ways. Normal using, if there was such a thing. So Ayad had worked out a compromise: Faisal could still play up on the roof, in the spaceship, which he’d helped build. And which Ayad considered to be the best avatar of his friend, a physical manifestation of his desire to escape who he was consigned to be.

&nbs
p; The spaceship as a whole had always been a frivolous project. Its blueprints had been drawn up loosey-goosey—the word Faisal had preferred was mu’wajj, or literally “crooked”—on bits of paper; then it was constructed from scraps. And yet despite its absurdity, its impracticality, there had never been a moment during its conception and assembly, executed on this very same gravel-covered rooftop more than a decade ago, when Faisal had dropped the extraordinarily grave and deadpan seriousness that he adopted when consulting his friend over aspects of design.

  Unlike you, I am on all sides, Faisal wrote. Especially the side that wins.

  Which side is that?

  I don’t know yet.

  As the two men crouched beside the rusting remains of their old toy, Ayad could still remember Faisal’s expression, his exact method of nodding and running a thumbnail through his eyebrow, as he pored over one of Ayad’s drawings, or picked up a pen and responded to one of his notes on their pad. He mentally cleared the present from the rooftop and relit the roof with the daylight of the past, revealing the palomino speckles of its pebbles interseeded with doomed eucalyptus shoots (he could summon these familiar things as casually as a photo in a book), and then—though this took a bit more concentration—he disassembled the spaceship into its constituent pieces, hoisted the great geared wheel that served as its floor back out into the open air, and balanced it atop two sawhorses.

  Faisal’s father had retrieved the wheel from a grain works in Ramadi and hauled it onto the roof. A quiet, sepulchral man, he’d rented a house from Ayad’s family, done odd jobs for Raheem al-Najafi, for whom Ayad had worked too. But it was Faisal who’d imagined the spaceship. Faisal who’d bartered for the American comics that they’d read, secretly, inside its shadowed cockpit. Faisal who’d brought his old telescope out, charting the stars, and convinced Ayad to draw the worlds they would see. Ayad’s mother had disliked the spaceship, largely because she had disliked Faisal. But in Ayad’s opinion, the shape-shifting quality that allowed Faisal to recast the two of them as astronauts had been Faisal’s strength, the very thing that allowed them to be friends. In that sense, it had seemed natural when Faisal applied to work with the Americans. Translating paid one hundred dollars a day—a gigantic sum. In almost no time, Faisal had a better cash flow than Ayad’s family, especially after their government pension payments dropped away. And so it unnerved Ayad that Faisal was standing here on the same roof where they’d played as children, asking for help. But not exactly asking either—more like telling Ayad what he should do, as if he didn’t have a choice, while at the same time pacing about so nervously that it seemed clear that maybe it was Faisal himself who didn’t have a choice.

  Ayad wasn’t going to rent him his property. That was for sure. On the other hand, he had no power to enforce his refusal, so he was going to have to find some other appeal. Downstairs, Ayad made chai in the kitchen, offered it. They sat alone in the living room, Faisal casting his gaze about the environs, as if trying to match it up with the past.

  They had once watched movies here, before Faisal had gotten himself banned. Faisal had always been the better actor, but in the silence that was between them—a silence that Faisal had always accepted better than anybody else—Ayad tottered over to him, imagining a pantomime. What should he act out? A hug? An embrace? Fall to his knees and beg? He paused and squatted before his old friend. Nothing so dramatic; Faisal had never been a fan of sentimentality. Over the past two weeks he’d watched the headlights gradually work their way in, stopping sometimes in a field all night, other times a steady crisscrossing to the south until, two nights ago, a small patrol, two vehicles, had cruised the road outside their gate. They’d stopped, the twinned white lights of reverse blinking on, and jolted up the driveway for a sniff. Then he’d seen Faisal’s blue sedan come speeding up, heard an angry shout, and their brights had flared, whitening the walls of his father’s house, as the patrol pulled away.

  I am afraid I cannot sell the spaceship, Ayad wrote. He reached across and held Faisal’s hand, his expression (he hoped) as grave and deadpan as his friend’s had been when he’d built the spaceship. The world is not prepared for such advanced technology.

  Stay here was what he meant. Hide with me.

  * * *

  Pulowski tucked his hands beneath his nuts. He was in the back of Fowler’s Humvee; Fowler and her driver, Carl Beale, occupied the front. The thing that he was processing was how much smarter he’d felt in Tennessee. Leafy streets? Regis and Kathy in the morning? A coffee shop called the Ethical Bean? The whole town had seemed a kind of cartoon invitation to irony: Hey, guess what, these people don’t care about your soldiering. It crossed his mind that maybe the exact thing that had comforted him about being home was that America seemed designed for the easy take: Regis Philbin, clown. New England Patriots, arrogant. Even Bill Moyers, his mother’s favorite, didn’t do much more than hit gassed-up Republican piñatas off a tee. While Iraq, rolling past Fowler’s Humvee window, left him slack-jawed and empty. Looted rows of strip malls. A lot filled with pureed bricks. A string of trash-roofed garages. Then the blocky quad of the University of Baghdad Agricultural College, identified by a neat roadside sign in English. “First time I came out,” Fowler said, pointing to the college, “the thing that surprised me the most was the architecture. For an Arab country, it seems pretty sixties.”

  It was the fourth or fifth cheerful thing she’d said to him since they’d left the gate, a fact that made no sense, given how he’d treated her recently. But his nuts tingled anyway, appreciatively. “What were you expecting, minarets?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Fowler said. “I guess, when we were back at Riley, I used to imagine I’d be dead in sixty seconds if I ever came out here at all. Like it’d be the surface of the moon or some real bleak thing—”

  “Who says it ain’t?” Beale asked.

  Fowler punched her driver in the shoulder, then swiveled around, a plastic bottle of Mountain Dew clutched in her right fist. “Don’t listen to Beale, he doesn’t know shit. And forget McKutcheon’s doubts about your camera system—I appreciate you asking us along, okay? It took some balls to do that. Not a crazy amount of balls, ’cause we’re gonna be fine. But some balls, a decent amount of balls. Pulowski on patrol. That’s high speed. High speed.” She reached back and hit his knee with her fist. “Trust me—McKutcheon’s wrong on this one. You did the grown-up thing.”

  This was less a take than a Disney fantasy. Doubt was the core principle of the camera system, whose batteries, encoder boxes, and D-link switches were stowed beside him on the Humvee’s backseat. Doubt had been the point—that and staying the hell away from places like the Muthanna intersection, where they were headed currently.

  “You know where I saw a lot of grown-ups while I was on leave?” He dug his hands out from his crotch and laid them tentatively atop his thighs. “Malls.”

  “Funny, that’s not where I would have gone.”

  “You wanna know specifically what I thought about? I thought about all those women—or not just women, all those people, sucking up designer ice cream. Back there walking around Nordstrom’s where their biggest concern is, I don’t know, buying panties, and you’re”—he gestured out the window—“here. Doing this.”

  Fowler blew air out past her lower lip and turned to him with a wrinkled grin. “Beale can get you all the panties you want at the PX.”

  “Thongs,” Beale grumbled. “I like thongs.”

  “He’s very adult,” Fowler said.

  “Yeah,” Pulowski said. “Well, you know, hey, I’m just saying I shouldn’t have blamed you for this mission. I’m sorry. It’s taking me a while to get back in the groove.”

  Speaking of easy takes. This, he understood, was where he was having problems adjusting, where he felt out of step and quavery, like some newborn colt, in the face of Fowler’s perkiness. Hadn’t he dumped this woman four weeks ago, right before he’d gone on leave? And now, five days after he’d come back, he’d ask
ed her to help him install his cameras at the Muthanna intersection. The old Fowler would’ve had a take on that kind of hypocrisy. And if that wasn’t enough, what had he called her? A “cow-eyed innocent.” Because here’s the thing he hadn’t said about the women at the mall: fucking beautiful creatures. Coeds, with nails done and dainty flip-flops on their feet. Legs as trim and taut as an airplane fuselage. Are you single? If you’re asking, I am. Oh, yes, I am free. And also not stupid, not chained down to a war that you could already tell was about as popular as a canceled Lifetime series—and so his honesty with Fowler had been a form of fairness, as he’d seen it. If he was totally direct and honest that he still wouldn’t be getting back with her even if she helped him bring the cameras out to Muthanna, well, then it was on her if she was stupid enough to take the mission anyway.

  But this Fowler, the Fowler whom he’d expected to be angry and bitter with him, instead turned in her seat and chortled. “There it is! You hear that, Beale? You two are the worst! The worst motherfucking malcontents I’ve ever seen!”

  “Malcontent?” Beale said. “Is that show still on TV?”

  “Fox, I think,” Pulowski said.

  “Malcontent in the Middle pretty much describes every soldier in all of Iraq, if you’re talking about how people think this place ain’t worth a shit.”

  “Aw, fuck!” Fowler said, beating the roof of the Humvee with her fist. “Here we go. I can see it now: one compliment to these guys, and they shit the bed immediately. Come on, Beale, bring it on!”