The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  “No lions?” Pulowski asked. “No tigers?”

  “Fuck you,” Beale said.

  There was a stir outside the plywood building, figures in ACUs, standing out checkered brown against the snow-cropped field. “No fucking help,” one of them shouted. The sound was shredded up by the wind that cut through Pulowski’s jacket, and he dug his hands into his pockets and reminded himself how little he liked the country, in any form. “Mouth, Beale. Get your mouth into it. Show us your mouth.”

  Another made what sounded like a pig call: Sooey.

  Beale responded by getting down on all fours in the snow and rooting around in it with his nose. He pulled up a broken bottle, holding the neck of it between his teeth, and when he emerged this way, snow flecked on his nose and eyelashes, he held up the bottle for display for the soldiers who’d yelled at him and they cheered—though, even with the wind, Pulowski could hear higher notes of laughter. If Beale noticed these, he didn’t show it, but instead pumped his fist and made a show of dropping the bottle directly from his mouth into the bag. “So this is your band of brothers?” Pulowski asked.

  “It’s SERE training, buddy,” Beale said. “Closest thing you can get to Ranger training and still be regular Army. All these guys have it.”

  “This is SERE training?”

  “Survival, evasion, resistance, and escape, dude.”

  “Yeah?” Pulowski squinted. “What part are we working on now?”

  “We aren’t working on shit,” Beale said. “You are standing there waiting to get ass-raped by a bunch of hadjis.”

  “Really? That doesn’t sound like very much fun,” Pulowski agreed. He was slightly bored.

  “Hey, to each his own,” Beale said. “But when the ass-rape team comes calling for Carl Beale, Carl Beale intends to have a little training.”

  He picked up a second bottle with his teeth and deposited it in the trash bag, much to the enjoyment of the soldiers—one of them was Lieutenant Anderson, judging by his size—at the far end of the field. Then he stood up again and lumbered along beside Pulowski.

  “You got a real nervous thing about this ass-raping,” Pulowski said.

  “Nervous.” Beale blew air between his lips and shook his head sadly, staring up at the brilliant winter sun overhead. “Nervous. Fuck. You seen the reports we’ve been getting on IED traffic? You seen that shit on YouTube.”

  “I seen a lot of shit on YouTube,” Pulowski said.

  “Yeah, well, you want to fight the monster, you got to be the monster, dude.”

  This was the kind of moment, the kind of argument, the kind of discussion that was not very valuable to have with someone in the Army. In his experience, this was the time you walked away, which he would have done with Beale, except for the fact that he found him funny. “Fowler wants you back.”

  “Yeah, well, she was the one who kicked me out.”

  “Because you let the captain steal her shackles.”

  “She kicked me out because I let the captain steal her shackles,” Beale said. “She kicked me out because I let the captain steal her shackles. Shackles, sir. Fucking shackles.”

  They were close enough now to the plywood structure that Pulowski could see it resembled a cross between a deer stand and a boys’ clubhouse. It had two stories and had been constructed out of rough wood studs and plywood walls into which windows had been cut, unglassed and unframed. Up in the shadows of the second floor, Pulowski could see paint cans wrapped with black gauze, like cheap Halloween effigies, attached to a T-shirt stuffed with hay. “Hey, Beale,” Lieutenant Anderson said. “Drop.”

  This kind of bullshit was the reason that Pulowski spent as much time as possible avoiding the infantry. It didn’t have to exist, it didn’t always exist, but it could. The main problem that he had with it was his first instinct was always to laugh. “Come on, you don’t need to smoke this guy, Anderson. He’s good. He never did anything to you.”

  “He’s good?” Anderson said. “You think he’s good?”

  “Okay, what—you want to go with medium? He’s medium?”

  Lieutenant Anderson smiled at this joke in a way that seemed to Pulowski clearly learned from movies. The smile that wasn’t a smile. The response he gave wasn’t much more original. “Yeah, well, it is what it is.”

  “Maybe it is what it isn’t,” Pulowski said before he could stop himself.

  By then Beale had dropped into the snow and was doing push-ups, grunting lightly, and one of Anderson’s subordinates had come over to put a boot beneath his mouth, making kissing sounds and shouting out, Sooey, each time Beale’s mouth touched it. Pulowski could smell Anderson too, smell his heaviness and his weight, and it wasn’t going to be enough, in this particular situation, to simply cancel out his signal, refuse to receive it, and walk away. There was something bad here, he could feel it, whether or not he knew how to translate it exactly, and he wanted somehow to enunciate a different principle. It was the first time he felt absolutely sure of that.

  Pulowski withdrew his hand from his pocket and, glad that he was wearing gloves, tossed a lavender wad of satin into the snow at Anderson’s feet.

  Anderson lifted a boot in the air, as if he’d stepped in something foul. “What the hell is that?”

  “Your underwear,” Pulowski said.

  “That true, LT?” one of the nearby soldiers said. “Shit, check that out. You got some fucking downtown taste there, man.”

  The soldiers clustered around the tiny wad of lavender, hands on knees, inspecting it, one of them making a joke by poking at it with a stick. Anderson swept off his stocking cap and pushed them away. “Get up and get in my car,” Pulowski whispered to Beale. And then he started to walk backward, eyes on Anderson, who bent down quickly, stuffing the purple tuft of fabric into the pocket of his ACUs.

  “There’s more where that came from,” Pulowski said. He was listening for Beale’s retreating footsteps behind him. He hoped he heard them.

  “Give it,” Anderson said.

  “You want your stuff back, Lieutenant Fowler wants hers. You give us Beale, we walk away. You don’t need to be smoking this guy anyway.”

  “Fowler? The fat chick?”

  “She says she likes a man in briefs.”

  Anderson heaved the football he’d been carrying at Pulowski’s chest and Pulowski tucked a shoulder, so that it glanced off his back—still painfully.

  That was the end of his tough-guy routine. He turned and made a break for the Celica, where he had a bag of personal items that they’d stolen from the Delta Company lockers out at the DRIF. Signal officers never did shit like this. In signal processing, the primary goal was to take the analog world and make it something that a machine could understand. Take light bouncing off white snow crystals and make it ones and zeros; take motion and make it pixels. You could store motion, store sound, store position, fold it up inside an equation, then an algorithm, imprint it on a wafer of silicon—and then re-create it, anywhere, on any machine. It was like stealing the world, except safely, cleanly. Nobody ever got hurt, or was actually cold, or got drilled with a football because of a digital file, and so, if you really thought about it clearly, you could see that signal processing was the future—hell, he could probably see this dumbass “secret” field of Masterson’s on Google Earth if he wanted to and, in a way, what you saw there was more real, to more people, than the actual field that he was running through would ever be.

  Meaning that signal work did not normally involve cranking the engine of an old Toyota, or stamping the gas pedal and hoping it would catch—and when it did catch, shouting, Fuck, motherfuckerrrr!—and pulling a U-ey through the snowy field while Waldorf circled Fowler’s red pickup around beside him and Fowler herself, standing up in the back, tossed personal items out into the air—baseball caps, toothbrushes, boxers—and Anderson with his huge head and his beetle-black eyebrows high-kneed it down the frozen roadway after them, shouting, Hey, you two fucking worms, get back here. Get back here with my fuckin
g shit, Pulowski. I’m not done with your sweet ass, Beale!

  11

  ARMY OF ONE was the motto that hung over the mirrors in the Fort Riley weight room, right next to the porny photographs of competitors for the Mr. and Mrs. Fort Riley competition flexing and oiled up in their bathing suits. Fowler was in her regulation ARMY T-shirt and black gym shorts wondering what the hell Pulowski was seeing when he praised her body in bed. After three solid weeks of paperwork and overseeing the packing at the DRIF, she looked like an Army of about fifteen. Her shorts felt a size too small and the small bung of soft flesh that drooped over the waistband was visible when she kept her shirt tucked in (as regulations required), giving her the profile of a deflated gray balloon, so she strove to keep her eyes on SportsCenter as much as possible instead.

  Who had told her that she belonged here? Pulowski. Who had convinced her that she had convictions? Pulowski. Who had given her the ridiculous idea that she should act on them, even if that made her different? Well, she definitely looked different enough here—as did Dykstra, who at the moment was gamely struggling to do sit-ups on an inflated ball. Meanwhile, Fowler rocked her feet on the elliptical paddles, swinging them in a vague waddling motion that definitely wasn’t going to intimidate anybody.

  “He’s here,” Dykstra said. He’d wandered over from the bouncy ball with a towel around his neck, his bald head beaded in sweat. As a protective measure, he’d put on a hooded sweatshirt and standard-issue old-school cotton sweats (speaking of porny) and black Converse high-tops with green socks.

  “Feel strong, be strong,” Fowler said. They were watching Masterson as he worked his way through the free weights, in an ARMY shirt that seemed to have been deliberately chosen to be one size too small. He carried a small leather pack from which he withdrew a towel, an iced bottle of water, a pair of weight-lifting gloves, and a sheaf of papers, sat down on the end of a bench press that two significantly larger sergeants had been using, and began Velcroing on his gloves while reading the papers, which he set between his feet. The soldiers who’d been using the bench, though larger, moved silently away. “I got a different motto,” Dykstra said. “Never risk good health bennies.”

  “Really?” Fowler gave Dykstra the up-and-down.

  “Hell, yeah. Working the deli at Wawa don’t cover kids, you know what I’m saying? Soon as Jenny peed on that stick, I’m out doing roadwork, wearing a garbage bag. Drop forty pounds, sign up, pass my physical—and bam, that’s it for me on the workout thing.” Dykstra scrounged a cookie from the pocket of his sweats.

  “That’s a great story, Dykstra,” Fowler said. “Excellent example for everybody. Remind me to put that in the company newsletter, okay?”

  “Hey, I ain’t supposed to be an example.” Dykstra pawed his belly affectionately, then tapped her on the shoulder with his cookie. “That’s your thing.”

  * * *

  Squats were what Fowler decided to try, her legs being the area of her body where—in Pulowski’s estimation—she had the most productive mass. She’d seen it done a couple of times from right there on her elliptical trainer and she doubted that there was any kind of intensely specialized knowledge that went with lifting weights—in fact, she suspected that, like most male things, the more men acted like there was some sort of specialized body of knowledge that she was unable to acquire, the less likely it was that that knowledge amounted to anything. She knew people as well as Masterson knew people. She could train and run her soldiers as well as he did. The whole hard-ass aura that he gave off, the weight-lifting gloves, the dark and silent intensity, the gloom, his special little campground out in the woods—all of that was just sleight of hand.

  But that was only her best self, the new self that Pulowski managed to bring out somehow. The old self still believed that appearance mattered and, what’s more, was always worried about looking the part, having never really looked the part in high school, or as Harris’s stand-in mom, or as a lieutenant. That self believed that the hard-ass Masterson was real and deeply impressive and would’ve preferred to remain invisible to him.

  Masterson began a set on the bench press. Little peeps of effort escaped his lips, and his arms shook in what she saw as a reassuringly human way. She slipped two thirty-five-pound weights onto the squat bar, tightened up her back belt, positioned the bar behind her neck, gripped it with her palms, blew out (like she’d seen other lifters do), then stood, lifting the bar off the rack, feeling its weight press down on her shoulders—and squatted. Once, twice, three times, feeling easy straight through five reps. Not bad.

  She propped the bar back on its stand with a satisfying clank. “How ya doin’, sir?” she said. “You need a spot with that?”

  Masterson sat on his bench, breathing hard, and stared at her for longer than it should’ve been possible to stare at somebody without speaking. Then he reclined, legs splayed, with the sad whitefish belly of his inner thighs and his package visible at eye level. “What do you want, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “I thought you might need a spot.”

  “I doubt it.”

  It was a difficult and unnerving response. Did he mean that he doubted that was what she wanted? Or that he doubted he needed help?

  What would’ve been wrong with saying thanks?

  “Sorry, sir, my bad.” Fowler gave a wholly unconvincing laugh. “I just thought that we were sort of working here on the same team.”

  “Foster!” Masterson said. A giant sergeant set down a barbell and, with a nod from Masterson, tossed Fowler a plastic water bottle.

  “Thank you, sir,” Fowler said. She drank. Then dropped it down quickly, eyes tearing, and choked down a mouthful of warm beer.

  “I don’t want you on my team,” Masterson said.

  She clenched her fist and deliberately drank again. “Even so, sir,” she said, wiping her mouth, “I would like to talk to you about Sergeant Beale. And some shackles he might’ve given you. I apologize, but I’m going to need both Beale and those shackles back.”

  “Apologize?” Masterson said. “Hell, I should be thanking you. Who would the Packers be without the Vikings? Who would the Chiefs be without the Raiders? You want to talk about teamwork, Lieutenant—the most important ingredient in teamwork is the other team. And it really helps if they are a prissy pain in the ass.”

  She considered this theory during her second set. When she’d finished, she walked over to Masterson again. “Who exactly are the Raiders in this equation, sir?” she asked. “Because I don’t really see how there’s a hell of a lot of things you’ve got to fear from my unit. Or from Beale. He’s not Charles Woodson. He’s just my platoon sergeant. Or he would be if you’d tell me where he is.”

  “Charles Woodson,” Masterson said, smiling approvingly. He nodded over at the hulk, Foster, who’d resumed his curls. “That’s fucking nice, huh? Chick knows her old-school football. We should get you on the Delta fantasy team.”

  “I watch a lot of TV,” Fowler said.

  “The circle of brotherhood only works if there’s somebody on the outside. You and your man Beale are good candidates until we get to the Iraqis. Hell, anybody who has the nickname Family Values Fowler—that’s an outsider to the universe. I mean, personally, I’d make an effort to get that changed.”

  “It wasn’t my first choice.”

  “It’s not my first choice to drink beer on Saturday mornings, but the guys like it because they feel like we’re getting away with something. It wasn’t my first choice to steal your shackles, but the fact that you got your panties all in a bunch about it is amusing. You should try it, Fowler. Have some fun. Dislike someone. Find an enemy. All this happy talk about reconstruction and helping the Iraqis stand up and saving them for democracy? Not happening. Even if it’s real, which I sincerely doubt, it’s bad for the mind. All I really need for unit cohesion is a shithead. Beale’s an excellent shithead. I don’t think that you really are a shithead. But you keep acting like this, and hassling me about a bunch of shackles, then I
’d be happy to put you on my list.”

  The anger was good for lifting. She grunted through a set with ninety pounds on either side of the bar. No twinge in the back. No pain. She clanked the bar back in place, dusted her hands off, and walked around to the weight rack, slamming on more plates, not even really caring what weight they might be.

  Masterson racked his weights for the bench press—including the clips Fowler would’ve liked to use but was afraid to steal—and shifted over to a vertical press just beside her. He tucked the sheaf of papers he’d been reading under one thigh and paged through them thoughtfully. “So what you’re saying, sir,” she said, “is that in order to be a good lieutenant, I need to take the biggest shithead in my platoon, the weakest person, cull him out, make his life miserable, and crap all over him.”

  They were now in what Fowler considered to be a classic male position, side by side, but not facing each other. Maybe she should have tried talking to Beale that way. “Pretty much it,” Masterson said.

  She was glad, given the curtness of his tone, that she could not see his face. “Seems convenient,” she said.

  “That’s my thing,” Masterson replied.

  “You got your things, I got my things, sir,” she said. “Or really, actually, I’ve got a lot of your things, too. All your Bradleys. All your Humvees. All your transmissions. All your fuel lines. A maintenance platoon is like the equipment manager, sir. We’re pretty quiet but we do get our hands on a lot of important gear.”

  “And?”

  “And so I’d love to help you as a teammate. But I’m going to need my soldier and my shackles back first. Otherwise, things might get out of place.”

  “That’s it? That’s your battle plan? Help people?”

  “If you’re strong,” Fowler said, “you help the weak.”

  That was it, pretty much. It wasn’t exactly a complicated thought. Wasn’t likely to win any Nobel Prizes. But yes, that was pretty much it when it came to her convictions. Like most things, it sounded stupid once you’d said it, but at least now she had.