But the body parts, the chunks of bone that they had bagged and iced at the Muthanna intersection (the cleaned and emptied coolers were stacked by the back door, red chunky Gotts, which nobody touched anymore), were a different kind of secret. It was like the Muthanna bombing contained within itself everything that was both great and ugly about who she was and what she did. Her platoon had been drawn closer to each other by it, had given in and cleaned it up—even Beale. And yet she was unwilling to talk about the details with Pulowski in part because she couldn’t find even a scrap of language to explain what had happened at the Muthanna intersection. Instead, the story of what might have caused it lurked above her shoulder, like a Warthog jet she knew was there but couldn’t see. She had her laptop on her desk. She had her paperwork spread out in front of her, fuel requisition slips, leave requests. She had her email open and blinking, and she could see Halt and Crawford bullshitting around over by the coffee machine. But her head was filled with things that were true and could never be admitted into this space.
The TOC, where she spent the next two days, was not designed for this. It was a cross between a nest and a clubhouse: plywood-floored, with a swaybacked velour couch along one wall, a scale, a map of their AO, and a whiteboard on which Fowler wrote the instructions and maxims for the day. Her desk was front and center in the main room, which was how she liked it—and there were side offices for Captain Hartz and for Operations Sergeant Simpson, who manned the radio. But where she worked there were no doors, no partitions, and she could see everybody who came in or out—an open shop, in its way. Professional, organized, and clean: that was how she liked to keep the TOC, but not so clean that it drove her soldiers away.
Which meant she allowed herself certain personal touches. On the whiteboard, next to the maintenance duties her platoon had on tap that day, she kept a list of movies available for checkout. In her desk drawer, antibiotics she’d wrangled for bronchitis. Traffic in the TOC was always heavy. You could easily forget, just by the sheer stream of incident, anything bad that you might have to worry about. Here was Waldorf, pretending to read the Stars and Stripes, but really just waiting until the room was clear to ask her, sternly, if she’d heard any news about his wife, who was a supply sergeant up at Camp Speicher, near Tikrit.
Here was Corporal Halt, unlacing his boot and showing her, shyly, a blister on his girlish, rosy heel. Here was Eggleston, the Hercules operator, who had spent too much time alone down in the motor pool and wanted to talk about the Jets. Did she know that the dumbshits over in Alpha Company had recovered an actual flintlock musket during a cordon-and-search? She did not, but she speculated on the meaning of this development with Jimenez and Dykstra, who had become, over the past six months, a pair just as tightly matched as her and Pulowski. If they’d invaded Philadelphia, Dykstra believed, they would’ve found sawed-off shotguns, nunchuks, and throwing stars—whereas from Jimenez’s point of view, among his people, all they’d want was papers.
Three straight days like that. Then five. She plowed through paper in the office, with side trips to the motor pool, where Beale, Dykstra, and Waldorf ran the show, changing oil, checking transmissions, and caring for the battalion’s vehicles generally. You could get lost in it and, to a certain extent, she had. Every evening before chow, she led a run for PT. Crawford, she had discovered, spent a fair number of his off-hours walking around Camp Tolerance, which itself was so large and cumbersome that it had an actual bus service. He knew all the special trails and so she allowed him to set their route, which he executed with a child’s innate artistic flair: long tours along the beaten outer ring, under the silver-fluttering leaves of eucalyptus trees. Afterward, she touched their sweaty backs, emphasized hydration, broke open stacks of shrink-wrapped water bottles, and handed them out to drink. No one spoke to her crossly. The nickname that Beale had saddled her with, Family Values, was more a faded watermark than a brand.
At night, she settled down in a yard chair inside her trailer, her workout clothes drying on the doorknob, a notepad in her lap, intending to write down a list of activities for the next day. But instead she dozed off and saw Beale and then Pulowski, oddly paired, on the far side of a long, dark canal, waving to her furiously. It was strange that the two of them should be joined together in agreement, but that’s what the dream implied, their movements coordinated, their semaphore the same. Come to us. Wake up. Get out of there.
Opening her eyes, she had the feeling that the trailer itself, and everything around it, had a purpose, which she couldn’t define but nevertheless was specific, threatening, and directed her way. It was similar to how she’d felt the last time she’d made love to Pulowski, shoving her ass up in the air, as he had stood above her—and later when she’d straddled him, her bare feet planted firmly on the floor and her hands kneading the muscles of his chest—and they were quiet except for their breathing, and they could feel the heat of the day pressing the walls of the trailer, and they could hear other soldiers walking by and talking, separated from them only by the thin skin of the aluminum, by a metal door, by a window with a construction-paper shade—and she would occasionally see a part of Pulowski’s body—an elbow, foreshortened like a wrinkled peach, a foot with its toes flexing, the skin callused at the heel, his belly button, his translucent ear whorling out—and she would be aware of the body parts at the intersection, and the baggies, and the ice, and the GPS. The difference was that with Pulowski she hadn’t been afraid, because his body and her body were the same, whole but penetrated, jumbled but not destroyed, one and the same. But on this night, when she woke up, she was alone, and this time, in the grainy darkness, her aluminum walls and iron-framed bed and plywood floor seemed as impersonal as a prison—hard, bare, and temporary in every way.
* * *
“Remember those shackles I lost back at Fort Riley?” Her platoon sergeant, Carl Beale—whose bad temper she generally tried to avoid while on base—stepped up beside her at the refrigerated drink case in the center of the Dining Facility and they both peered in through frosted glass. “Why’d you bust my ass for giving those away?”
“I trusted you,” she said.
“Bullshit. You didn’t trust me to pick my nose back then.”
“True,” she admitted.
“So how about now?” he said. “You trust me any better? Would you say that I have or have not become significantly less of a dick?”
She evaluated this question. The answer was that Beale had been much less of a dick lately. His reliable combination of bravery and stupidity was something she’d begun to, if not value, then dismiss less completely after he’d helped her save Lieutenant Weazer out at the Muthanna intersection. On the other hand, it would have been real progress if he hadn’t felt the need to bring this up so quickly.
“Since when do you fish for compliments from me, Beale? Are you still upset that the guys dimed you out for playing Kid Rock when we’re on convoy?” She cracked the door of her case—the line of refrigerators was a block long, running down the center of the five-thousand-seat dining facility—and grabbed a Gatorade.
“Aw, fuck, come on with that. What the hell else am I going to play?”
“I’d go more Tom Petty,” Fowler said.
“He su-ucks,” Beale said in a singsong voice.
“Not as much as Kid Rock. But it doesn’t matter what you or I think. It matters what the guys think. You play their music, you aren’t going to have people upset about you playing tunes when we’re outside the wire. Think about that.”
“Okay,” Beale said. He didn’t protest, which was itself a surprise. Instead, he followed her grimly, past a half acre of crowded tables, the flat-screens showing highlights of early season baseball games back in the States. “But I don’t think that’s the real problem here,” he said. “I think the real problem is Muthanna.”
She dumped her tray on the dish conveyor and pushed out through frowzy plastic strips into the blacktop of the DFAC parking lot, the blistering noon air.
> “I know you saw what I saw,” he said, following her. “Seacourt shouldn’t have had soldiers at the intersection. That place had no defenses. At worst, we should’ve been setting up T-walls out there, instead of working inside the wire last couple weeks.”
“I thought we were talking about music.”
“And I listened to you, didn’t I?” Beale said. He pointed back into the DFAC as if there would be a statue there, erected to the memorial of his listening. “Maybe our guys legitimately don’t like my taste. But I’m telling you that they’re unhappy about what went down at that intersection. Lots of bitching. Lots of grief. You told me that we do the right thing even when other people aren’t doing it. That’s the Family Values rule, okay? Okay, well, I’m telling you that they all know something isn’t right.”
* * *
Two days later, she left her desk at dusk. The center of Camp Tolerance was a broad, open concrete square bordered by the PX, its lifeless Stars-and-Stripes bunting, the wilted tents of a small hadji rug seller, the barber, the dry cleaner’s. She veered off onto a dirt road that wound its way through truck yards, chain-link fences coiled with vine, the back entrance to the 66th Armor Regiment’s motor pool, where Pulowski was waiting with a thistle blossom pinched between his teeth. Questions like the ones Beale had asked her in the DFAC were usually the kind of thing that she discussed with Pulowski. But she was still afraid to get too graphic about what had happened at the intersection—afraid somehow that she would be tainted by it. “You know what Beale asked the other day?” she said instead, glancing over her shoulder. “He wanted to know if he was ‘still a dick.’”
“What’d you tell him?”
Fowler shrugged, as if the jury was still out. “Depends on the context.”
“Yeah?” He dropped back half a step as two sergeants passed, then pulled her by the elbow through a gap in the fence. It was a small bower: broken fountain, a couple of crumbling benches left over from Saddam days. They kissed and then started walking up a small dirt path that led up a rutted and bushy dirt hill that housed the communications antennas for the camp. “Rough day?” he said. She nodded, took his hand. “Personally, I think if Beale was running the war, he’d start by shooting every adult male over the age of eighteen. So if he’s sucking up to you, he’s probably got a motive. What is it? Muthanna? He pushing to get outside the wire?”
Here it was again, the rotting stink of the intersection. She swung his hand up, sniffed, but smelled only live Pulowski. “Muthanna was a disaster waiting to happen,” she said. “That position was undefended. We’re moving people in and out too regularly. If you think it’s a bad idea to shoot people, maybe the T-walls would’ve helped things.”
“Don’t be naïve.”
“That’s not naïve. It’s just a fact.”
They had climbed far enough up the hill that they had a view over the camp, the dingy Mylar dome of the DFAC, the main highway. They sat down on the edge of the track. Pulowski tucked his forehead against her cheek. “Facts are naïve,” he said.
“So what—I just go along with Seacourt. I just let things suck.”
“I would.” He was still nuzzling her, touching her, playing. “Isn’t that what you always wanted? You want to be pals with Captain Happy? You want to get invited to Seacourt’s house for fucking cocktails and SportsCenter? Then tuck your head down, suck it up, and stay quiet while they clean up their mistake.”
She should have left it. When they made love, they didn’t play. It felt awkward now for both of them, like they were imitating another couple. But she went along with it, slipping her leg over his, pressing her pelvis down on his lap, kissing him, then like a tease pulling back. “So when we were at Riley,” she said, “it was good for me to think for myself. Good for me not to take any shit from Masterson. Pathetic that I was even marginally interested in impressing Seacourt and Hartz—”
“I think pathetic is a little strong.”
“But now I’m supposed to love them up and forget about anything I saw out there at the intersection. Just be a good soldier and roll on.”
Pulowski stiffened. Now she’d ruined it. “I gotta get going,” he said. “McKutcheon managed to get me on an early flight.”
“Are you punishing me?” she whispered in his ear. He had once told her that when he looked at the sky over Camp Tolerance, he saw ones and zeros. Signals, orders, satellite tracking, Wi-Fi, cellular communications, encrypted channels, tethered zephyrs that videoed the world beyond the wall, then beamed it back to someone’s desk. The point was to receive and interpret the signals clearly, not to fool yourself into imagining that you could affect them in any way. “Because if you really want to punish me, you ought to take me back to the trailer. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to do it there?”
“I said I’ve got a flight to catch.”
“Today?” They were tangled up, Pulowski trying to slide his legs out from under her. She held him with her thighs. “You didn’t tell me that. That’s not even fair.”
“You think it’s fair to ask me to be connected to this?”
Fowler glanced down at herself, rumpled ACU blouse, scuffed and faded knees on either side of Pulowski’s clean fabric. “I showered,” she said.
“Aw, Jesus fucking Christ.” Pulowski gave her his rat smile, upper teeth biting down on his lip. She sat beside him. The base spread out below them like an industrial resort, ranks of trailers like grubs, motor pools, junkyards. “Not you. This,” he said.
“You’re an Army officer, you dumbshit. You’re already fucking connected to this. What are you going to do, fly to Canada?”
“Canada’s in the coalition, you mope.”
There was a brief flash of humor there that she liked: Pulowski still had a little game. He turned to her and straightened out the collar of her blouse, so that the backs of his fingers touched her collarbone. It was more a fussy gesture than a loving one. Patronizing. She was frightened by how in control he seemed to be, by his lack of uncertainty. “You tell me what it was really like out there at Muthanna, picking up those pieces. It’s not just remains. Or that’s not the right word. There were dicks, right? I mean, there were actual physical dicks out there, right?”
“Come on, Pulowski. That’s wrong.”
“No, no, no—it’s exactly right. It is exactly accurate. You remember all the ladies running around kissing Mel Gibson’s ass in that movie Hartz showed us? Waiting around to get their death letters? I am not going to do that. I want to do things differently.” He paused as if he had something more to say, staring at her cockeyed, then stood up wearily and beat the dust off his pants. “I want to be alone when I come back.”
“All right,” she said. It was the opposite of what she meant.
“Fuck, yeah, it’s all right,” Pulowski said. “It’s perfectly fine. It’s me.”
* * *
The RG-31 was a specialized mine-clearing vehicle that the U.S. government had purchased from the South Africans for more than half a million a pop. There was a .50-cal on the roof, with a flared steel cowling around it, but its most important features, according to Colonel Seacourt’s PowerPoints, were the extra-wide, specially armored windows that would allow their soldiers to search for the culprits in the Muthanna bombing without having to dismount. To Fowler, it seemed the kind of strategy Pulowski would’ve liked. Separation. Distance. I’m not going to get involved. She was also curious how, given all those windows, this RG’s grille had become embedded in the mud wall of a canal off Route Serenade, a hundred meters from the main road. “Nice,” said Jimenez. “Man, shit, you’d think for the money they’d have some airbags in these things.”
“Or TV,” said Dykstra. “Huh? Nice fucking flat-screen.”
“Fuck the TV, man,” Beale said. “They need to get about four fifty-cals on this baby. Show the hadjis how we party.” The RG’s rear bumper was propped up on the near side of the canal and Beale dropped beneath the chassis, checked for wires, then chinned himself up into the RG’
s cab, pants V’d with sweat, burrs cockling his pockets.
“Shut the fuck up, Beale,” Dykstra said.
“What, Jimenez gets to do jokes on airbags but I can’t say anything?” Beale said. “What’s that, a cultural thing?”
“It’s a shut-the-fuck-up thing,” Dykstra said.
“Guys,” Fowler said. And that ended it.
What she paid attention to instead—what she sensed, flowing alongside her anger and her impotence, calming it, easing it, compensating for it—were the motions of her platoon as they dispersed. She kept track of them like a melody, Waldorf across the canal to the northeast, Dykstra opposite him to the northwest, Jimenez behind them to the south, Crawford guarding the road, each of them concentrating his focus on the trees and grass and bean fields that stretched out from the RG on all sides. Even Beale, who—dick or not—she kept as close to her as possible, seemed to have things under control inside the RG. It was her first recovery mission since Pulowski had left, and she was happy to be away from the maintenance bay and her desk. Her platoon moved exactly as they’d practiced, just exactly according to the basic, simple rules for foot patrols that she herself had learned back in the woods around Fort Hays State: post security in all four ordinal directions, follow your team leader, do not speak. Not as good as sex, but definitely better than GoldenEye, or answering emails all goddamn day. So she noticed and secretly approved—and reminded herself to congratulate—the small hiss that Waldorf made across the ditch, and the response from Dykstra, which was to slowly, as if he’d sprung a leak, deflate himself into a prone position amid the thick bushy grass, each and every considered movement a redemption for the emptiness and confusion that had shamed and overtaken all of them, Fowler included, since they’d packed Fredrickson’s and Arthur’s body parts up at the intersection. To be involved in a battle in the proper way.
The Good Lieutenant Page 10
