The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  Compared with the Hammermill paper on the table, Halt’s object had a surprisingly sharp color, a yellowish, phlegmy gray. Its exterior—the whole gobbet was the size of a fingertip—seemed rumpled, like a bit of coral, something that had grown in on itself, accreted, and then there were the horrifying white strings, feelers, Fowler wanted to call them, extending from a charred, frowzy skirt at the base of the main piece. Standing on her tiptoes, she scanned the intersection, the dark maw of the blast hole, the Humvees scorched to the color of tinfoil, the field of rubble beside the barracks, trying to imagine two human bodies separated into pieces as small as the one Halt had brought back. She glanced down at the insufficient white roll of Hefty trash bags in her hand.

  Then Shoemaker started to cry. She was a burly, cornrowed sergeant, normally assigned to Delta Company, and she bolted, her boots crunching over the gravel that Halt had just crossed, her pie-tin ass wobbling beneath her body armor.

  PART FOUR

  FORT RILEY

  8

  Colonel Seacourt and the tight, sunglasses-wearing phalanx of his personal security detail marched to the far end of the Fort Riley gym, where a stage had been hastily constructed—bare risers, three flags, a podium whose front had been covered with an office-paper printout of the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry’s seal. A television on a metal gurney played a DVD of still photos taken during the last six weeks of the battalion’s preparations to go overseas. Shots of soldiers shackling Humvees to railcars. Shots of volleyball games. Shots of PT—all of it too far away for Pulowski to see from the back row of the bleachers, but this didn’t matter. In his opinion, the DVD was static, designed to mask the fact that he and the entire battalion were in this gym under armed guard. And they would not be allowed to leave until 1800 hours, when they departed for Iraq.

  “He looks a little smug, don’t you think?” Pulowski’s mother said. “I wonder why they haven’t kept him in the gym with everybody else.”

  This was exactly what Pulowski himself was thinking. “Don’t worry about him, Mom,” he said. “He’s just the battalion commander. I barely see him.”

  “I guess that makes it easier to be smug, then, doesn’t it?” said his mother, yet another point with which he found it difficult to disagree.

  When his boss, Major McKutcheon, talked about Colonel Seacourt in private or out at the bar in Aggieville where Pulowski and a few of the other Headquarters Company officers met after work, he referred to him as “Bucky.” Normally, this would’ve been exactly the kind of information he would’ve been happy to share with his mother, make her guess how he got the name—or at least get her opinion on whether Bucky fit as well as Pulowski thought it did, because, in a certain sense, Bucky somehow seemed to exactly capture the essence of Colonel Seacourt’s spurious and cheerful blandness. Maybe it had to do with his teeth: Bucky, as in buckteeth. That too would’ve been amusing to share with his mother, except for the fact that it was not any more reassuring than the armed MPs at the gym’s exits. As if even Bucky understood the purity of Pulowski’s desire, at this last moment, to never see Iraq. And so, as the colonel bowed his head to begin his speech with a prayer, Pulowksi shifted his eyes nervously to the rafters of the Fort Riley gym. Not much comforting up there, save some old satin banners that looked to be from the fifties and the wiring for a PA system that he could see was equally out-of-date.

  Then he found Fowler on the crowded floor below him. She was on the opposite end of the gym from Seacourt’s stage, kneeling beside a pile of packed rucks that he presumed belonged to her platoon. Her head was bowed and he could see the sash of brown hair across her forehead, and then the curve of her haunch underneath her fatigues, which was about the only actually, personally reassuring thing that he saw in that entire gym. She’d been more positive on the subject of Colonel Seacourt than he’d ever been, a defender of his organizational abilities, not to mention his fairness—able to overlook what Pulowski felt to be his cloying optimism by pointing out that at least he wasn’t a screamer, or a bully, or a crook. “What are you looking at?” his mother asked.

  Startled, he glanced up at his mother’s face. Their coloring was much the same, pale and paler—but the winter air of central Kansas had dried her skin, causing new wrinkles to appear at the edges of her lips. Now, for the first time, he saw a flush to her cheeks, some twinkle of amusement in her green eyes.

  “Sorry?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  “That girl you’re looking at, Mr. Dixon Pulowski. Who is she?”

  “I wasn’t aware that I was looking at anyone in particular,” he said. “Just spacing out.” He spun his finger beside his head to indicate mental confusion.

  “Yeah, well, that’s about the most intense spacing out that I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’ve been practicing,” he said.

  “I’m talking about that woman, right there,” his mother said, loudly enough that the family in front of them responded with a windy, movie-theater shush.

  “Mom—come on,” he whispered, thrusting a chin toward the colonel at the podium, who by then had begun his speech.

  Pulowski and McKutcheon had adapted the colonel’s speech from four or five other public speeches that McKutcheon had stored on his hard drive. It had seemed standard enough work, sitting up in McKutcheon’s office, banging out transitions, trying to find language that would, according to the memo that Seacourt had sent them, cause us to appear both resolute and certain in our purpose. It is VERY IMPORTANT that these people believe their sons and daughters are heading out on a clearly defined mission that is important to protecting the security of the United States and is beneficial to the Iraqis.

  Unfortunately, they’d had to take out the sections in the speech—still good only six months earlier—about protecting the country from WMDs, since the Iraq Survey Group had now delivered their finding that there hadn’t been any WMDs. They’d had to remove, by executive order from the DoD, any references connecting the invasion of Iraq to the 9/11 attacks and, given the so-called facts on the ground—including casualty reports that said the coalition forces had so far lost more than two thousand men—they’d had to strike any references to their victory in Iraq, or nation-building, or peacekeeping.

  After that, there hadn’t been much left, except to focus on reconstruction projects, school-building, and the colonel’s intention to return electricity to every family in his area of operations—none of which was likely to happen, given the security intel that Pulowski had seen. Still, a bullshit speech was a bullshit speech. You wrote it and got it done. And if you knew where the bullshit was buried, as he believed he did, you could protect yourself, as he believed he had. Or at least that was how he’d felt until he listened to this speech with his mother and felt her fear and disbelief. And he realized that he had nothing better to tell her, no words that wouldn’t make her more afraid.

  “We have made a commitment to freedom,” Seacourt was saying. “As a nation and as a people. The men and women that you see in this room, your sons and daughters, are a living, breathing example of that commitment.”

  “Good Lord,” his mother muttered. “Who writes this dreck?”

  The prayer would be coming next. Quickly, before Seacourt could say more, Pulowski bent down and unzipped the tightly packed ruck at his feet. He had bought a present for Fowler just the night before. It was … well, he wasn’t exactly sure what to call it. A token of appreciation? For what? For screwing his brains out?

  “What would you think of this?” he said to his mother, handing her the cardboard-and-plastic package, in hopes of distracting her from Seacourt’s speech. “Like if somebody gave it to you? I mean, presuming you were athletic.”

  A double crease appeared in the soft skin of his mother’s forehead—a mark that he was always pleased to elicit, though the specific actions that led to its appearance often surprised him. She withdrew her reading glasses from her purse, slipped them on, and squinted first at the pedometer—the brand name, he wa
s now a little embarrassed to realize, was Pedassure—then at Fowler, barely visible over the heads of the family who’d hushed her earlier, a mountainous man and woman dressed in Harley-Davidson T-shirts, surrounding an equally mountainous son with a huge bald skull, whom Pulowski recognized as Lieutenant Anderson, from Delta Company.

  “How’s your sex life?” his mother asked.

  “What?” Pulowski coughed. “Hey, ease up, there, hoss.”

  “You mean you didn’t buy this for that woman you were staring at?”

  “I mean I’m not really up for discussing this with my mother,” he said. “Or anybody around here, for that matter.”

  His mother checked her watch. “I’m not sure when you think a better time might be,” she said, and she reached out and held his hand in hers, slipped the pedometer back.

  “All right,” Pulowski said. “Okay.” He was grinning in spite of himself, first at the pedometer in his hand and then, to his surprise, at the pleasure of imagining himself in bed with Fowler, of having been in bed with Fowler.

  “So it is good,” his mother said, watching him coyly.

  “Yup,” he said happily. “Yup.”

  “Well, then I guess you don’t have to worry about getting her trust,” his mother said, with a certain amount of asperity. “That’s a good first step, you know!” She was grinning now. Both of them were.

  “Yeah? Really? And what would you know about it?”

  “Not very much, these days,” his mother said.

  This last remark by his mother stuck out into an unexpected silence and, gazing out over the crowd, Pulowski saw that the other parents and soldiers in the audience had bowed their heads. “All right,” he said, whispering only a little, and standing long before the colonel’s address had come to an end. “I got someone I want you to meet.”

  * * *

  There were many things that Pulowski proudly rebelled against. He’d enumerated them to Fowler frequently. One was arena rock—not the most brilliant pet peeve, but still. Another was football commentators, singers, or celebrities of any kind who spoke highly of the great valor and bravery of American soldiers while at the same time selling something. Mostly he did not like the underlying implication that they were all supposed to be brave, that it was somehow the soldiers’ duty to be brave—and that there was something grand and significant in taking leave of their families in a shitty gym in central Kansas, which was one of the reasons he’d loaded up the colonel’s speech so completely with clichés. There was a kind of coercion there, don’t you think, something going on subliminally, he had more than once said to Fowler, who had more than once said to him, Well, you can always not listen to it. Or later, when he’d gone on enough to make her impatient, When the fuck is something not going on with you subliminally, anyway?

  He had to admit, as he led his mother down the ranked stairs of the bleachers and onto the familiar flat varnish of the basketball floor, that he definitely felt something subliminal going on. It certainly wasn’t rational. He’d seen Fowler a thousand times, dressed and undressed, seen her in her jog bra, her black and yellow Fort Hays sweats, but he’d never seen her with his mother, which, apparently, was an entirely different way of seeing things—because otherwise Fowler looked the same as usual. Still kneeling, she was now sorting through an open ruck (while at the same time, if he had to guess, ignoring the colonel’s speech, so she didn’t have to feel disappointed by it), her hair pinned back, cheeks lightly flushed—nothing out of the ordinary, unless you counted the Beretta strapped to her thigh. Certainly nothing that could rationally explain the thickness in his throat and the charge that electrified his scalp when he swung his mother around to greet this woman, his mother with her public radio tote bag and her chapped face. “Hey, LT,” he said. “You looking forward to this historic opportunity?”

  “You got a bag?” Fowler asked, without glancing up.

  “Sorry?”

  “You got a baggie or something, Pulowski?” she said. “Come on. Beale’s wasted, and he packed all fucking wrong. Look at this!” She held up a pair of Hawaiian swim trunks. “He’s got so much crap, I’m going to have to cram some of it in with my gear.”

  “Did your brother show up?” he said.

  “Does it look like he did?”

  “He might have liked the speech,” Pulowski said, squatting beside her.

  This would have normally been a comment that Fowler would’ve enjoyed, but instead she tucked her chin and kept rummaging through Beale’s ruck, more and more contraband spilling out. “Is that your mother?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s my mother.”

  “You want me to meet your mother.”

  “I’m standing right here,” Pulowski’s mother said.

  They stood up. Fowler approached stiffly, arms behind her back, and her chin out stubbornly, as if his mother—in her crewneck sweater—might at any minute punch her in the face. “Yes, ma’am,” Fowler said. “I’m sorry I’m a little busy here, ma’am. I hope you are enjoying the colonel’s speech.”

  “Not really,” Pulowski’s mother said. “I’ve heard better.”

  Fowler flashed him a look of panic and uncertainty. A regular person might have interpreted this as a look of hostility, but Pulowski felt confident that it only meant that Fowler was afraid—not of going to Iraq but of his mother. Fearful that she might not measure up, which was the usual thing that made Fowler afraid.

  “I’m not sure what you would’ve wanted him to say instead.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. A little bit of honesty might have been reassuring. Fewer clichés wouldn’t have been bad. Have you ever read any Orwell, Lieutenant?”

  He could tell by the wrinkled pucker of Fowler’s chin that she was working hard to remember her Orwell. And that she’d begun to get nervous about them standing together in the open like this, particularly in view of her platoon. “Emma was a history major,” Pulowski said, breaking in. He put his hand on her elbow, shielding this gesture so no one could see. Then to Fowler he said, “Mom teaches English. And public speaking. So she’s got some strong opinions on this.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not sure what kind of honesty she exactly means. We’re going to win and we’re going to come back. That’s what we’re doing. That’s how it’s going to be. I’d assume you don’t want to hear anything different.”

  “I don’t think Mom’s opposed to that,” Pulowski said. “Are you, Mom? I mean, if Pop was going, that might be different—I just think she felt like the speech was a little too rah-rah, a little too cheerleady for her. So I thought I would bring her down and talk to somebody who actually knew what she was doing.”

  Fowler flushed, glanced back at her platoon. “I’m not sure that we’re all exactly ready for inspection,” she said. “I’d sure as hell like to meet that person.”

  “Wouldn’t we all?” said Pulowski’s mother.

  “Don’t let the lieutenant fool you,” Pulowski said. Because it had gotten awkward holding on to Fowler’s elbow, he squeezed it once and then backed off and gave her a chuck on the shoulder, harder than he normally would—hard enough that she would know that he was fucking with her. Which, judging by her brief, suppressed smile, and the flash of anger in her eyes, she did. “She and her platoon have just spent the past three weeks standing around in the snow, loading about fifty thousand tons of equipment onto railcars, while the rest of these lazy fucks”—here he gestured at the auditorium as a whole, and particularly the soldiers from Masterson’s infantry company, who’d camped out in the visitors’ bleachers, under a sign that read DELTA ME TO DEATH—“sat around and polished their boots. Three weeks of preparing for the DRIF is no small thing.”

  “What’s the DRIF?” Pulowski’s mother asked. “I was married to an Army surgeon, so I’m used to the acronyms, but that’s a new one for me.”

  “The acronym is really DRRF,” Fowler said, with the first real confidence she’d displayed in the conversation—much to Pulowski’s satisfaction. “What that
means depends on who you’re talking to. The colonel translates it as Deployment Ready Reaction Field. That’s where we get our stuff ready to be loaded onto railcars. But it’s also a state of mind. So we leave an R out and call the whole thing the DRIF.”

  “Sounds even worse than OIF,” Pulowski’s mother said. She squatted down with her tote and began to examine the ruck that Fowler had unpacked.

  “One or two?” Fowler asked.

  “I don’t know. Any number.”

  “Or DFAC,” Pulowski said.

  “My ex-husband used to talk about the NBFC zone,” Pulowski’s mother said.

  “No bullshit from civilians,” Pulowski clarified.

  “He was a surgeon at Fort Campbell,” Pulowski’s mother said. “We used to call him the Dr. Ratched of the OR. Very schedule-driven person. Rule-oriented, big fan of the acronym. One of the things he liked best about the Army was that its rules kept everything from being messy. But of course things are messy, and the best things are always messy—or at least that’s what I’ve always believed.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Fowler said.

  “Have you?” Pulowski’s mother said. “From where?” A coy smile there, his mother’s best.

  “Not from me,” Pulowski assured her. “Excellence, strictness, and clarity are my buzzwords. Superb soldiering. Honor your country. Organization before oneself. Fowler knows all this. You’ve seen my dominant scores at the rifle range?”