The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  Traditionally, a platoon sergeant was supposed to be a father figure for the men, not to mention a bridge between them and a rookie lieutenant like herself. Having daddy issues appeared to be a bad ingredient for either job; so far, rather than learning from Beale’s supposed wisdom and experience, she’d felt nothing but impatience at his immaturity—he was like a stuck wheel on a shopping cart, causing her whole platoon to veer and shift in inexplicable ways. Like now, when, instead of sulking after she’d yelled at him, Beale instead became mysteriously generous, offering two or three times to get the gear all out for her, even suggesting that she go get lunch while he took care of the rest. Or at least it seemed like he was being generous—like maybe she was making progress—until she dragged out the crate of shackles that she’d stored against the wall and began to inventory them. The box was supposed to hold eighty-seven shackles, each nearly impossible to replace. She counted only fifty now. “Beale, come here for a second,” she said. “McWilliams too. You got any explanation for this?” she asked, nodding to the box.

  “It’s a box of shackles,” Beale said. But his smirk was missing.

  “You got a better answer, McWilliams?”

  “No, ma’am,” the private said, looking at his boots.

  “So you have no idea why there are fifty shackles in this box, instead of eighty-seven? Which is how many there were this morning?”

  Beale flinched and swiveled his shoulders, as if he couldn’t believe he was going to be called to the canvas for something so trivial.

  “What, you don’t care about thirty-seven shackles?” Fowler asked.

  “Doesn’t seem like the biggest loss in the world to me.”

  “How about your weapon? How many rounds in your magazine?”

  “Thirty.”

  “So why don’t we take, what, forty percent of that away? You want to go outside the wire with eighteen rounds in your magazine instead?”

  Beale muttered something.

  “What?”

  “I said,” Beale spat, “that I’d be a hell of a lot more worried about some missing shackles if I thought they’d keep me alive. Or if we ever got to go to the firing range instead of sitting around here practicing how we’re going to load a Humvee onto a train car, which isn’t even going to happen for another month.”

  “You want to be in the infantry, Beale?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, ‘Do … you … want … to … be … in … the … infantry?’” She could see Beale’s mother, sitting there at her kitchen table, disliking the woman intensely for having saddled her with such an idiot. “Or maybe it’s me. Maybe you just have some kind of problem taking orders from a woman. Isn’t that what you really mean?”

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t worried this might happen. Hell, if she’d had a mother like Beale’s—which she’d once had, in a way—she might’ve thought that a woman couldn’t run a platoon. But what she hadn’t expected was how raw and explosive her own direct reference to her sex would feel, the way it would suck all the air out of the hangar. The way she could hear her entire platoon listening.

  “Because if you were in the infantry,” she said, “if you were with Captain Masterson, who just now walked out of here, I can promise you that he would feel exactly the same way that I do about some lost gear.”

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  “I think I do.” Here she was on firmer ground. “This is my platoon. I am not embarrassed to be organized. I am not embarrassed to do things right. That’s why we’re here. And if you don’t think that this job is important enough to take seriously, then why don’t you ask Captain Masterson? Because what he’s going to tell you is that the Army is not about acting cool. It’s about getting the job done. It’s about being precise. It’s about—”

  Halfway through, Fowler felt her firmer ground dissolve. She was repeating herself. Beale had dropped into a squat, his head tucked, gazing off to the side, his raspberry lips mashed against his sleeve. “Captain Masterson took the gear,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? I just—” She glanced toward the doorway of the hangar. “He was just here. He was complimenting me … us.”

  Then she remembered the “baseball” bags. Their heaviness. Their metallic clanks.

  “Stand up!” Fowler shouted. “Stand up and look at me.”

  Beale did stand. He had to, which in her mind was supposed to be one of the benefits of the Army. But this time it didn’t feel that way.

  “Why didn’t you report it to me?” she asked.

  “What would you have done if I did?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Fowler saw McWilliams and a couple of other soldiers laugh at this. “Report it myself,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s great, ma’am. That’d really work out.”

  “Why not? He’s not immune to the rules. If a captain’s doing something wrong, it’s no different than anybody else.” The moment that she said these things, she realized that she sounded exactly like his mother. Talking about how unfair the world had been to her poor Carl. Taking refuge in how things were supposed to be. “If he’s wrong, he’s wrong. That’s the end of it,” she added, as if to convince herself more than anybody else.

  “Yeah, well, then I’m wrong, aren’t I, ma’am?”

  “So?”

  “So you won’t defend me. But he might.”

  It wasn’t what Beale said that set her off. Beale could have accused her of a lot of things, plenty of shortcomings—poor organization, bad people skills. Impatience. Quickness to anger. Lack of self-confidence. It was how she sounded when she was responding to him. Her shrillness, her brittleness. She could hear the humorless flatness of her voice spanking off the upper rafters of the hangar, with their leaky fiberglass tiles, and returning back to her, and whoever that person was, whatever she might be saying, however true it might have been, she sure as hell wouldn’t have been convinced.

  “You’re out of here, Beale,” she said. “Until I get you reassigned, I don’t want you near anybody or anything that involves me or my team.”

  14

  “Cancer,” Pulowski was saying. “Psoriasis. Mumps—which can make you sterile, if you’re a guy.”

  “I think that’s chicken pox,” Fowler said.

  Her brother, Harris, had had chicken pox about six months after their mom left. For a moment, in the rattling cab of her truck, Fowler could smell the skin of her brother beneath his pajamas. The best solution to the itching had been cold baths, peeling Harris out of his clothes, slipping his bony shins down into the tub, both of them examining with a certain admiration the red bumps on his chest.

  “Really? What the hell would you know about it?”

  Pulowski had spent a good portion of their two-hour drive to Kansas City compiling a list of diseases that he might contract to avoid deployment.

  “My brother had them,” she offered.

  “Before or after your mom left?”

  “After.”

  Her pickup rattled through an unfamiliar, leafy residential maze in the city’s core. A school bordered the park off to her left, identified by a white signboard and about twenty girls in sweatpants and cleats swinging hockey sticks out on a thatched and yellowed field. As they descended past hotels and high-rises and crossed a bridge over a creek, entering a crowded shopping area, Pulowski’s GPS entered into a state of panic. Turn Right. Recalibrating route. In one hundred yards, turn left. For once, Fowler could identify with the machine. The wealth of the surrounding shops, the vaguely familiar names—BCBG, Dolce & Gabbana, Ann Taylor—swirled around the truck in dizzying confusion. Pulowski stared at her cockeyed as she wrenched the Ford down a side street, flaring a pack of women who all seemed to be wearing high black leather boots with extremely pointed toes—a style she’d managed to somehow miss entirely. “So you did, like, take care of him occasionally, didn’t you?” Pulowski said. “There might conceivably be some good memory that he has of this.”

  “Th
at’s not how Harris works,” Fowler said as she parked and climbed out.

  “How do you know?” Pulowski scooted over to the driver’s window, sticking his head out.

  “Because I lived with him,” Fowler said. “Because he’s my brother. Because we are both very stubborn people and we have different views on shit.”

  “And you don’t think people change?”

  “If I say yes, would you actually feel better? Or would you just go back to pestering me about the chicken pox?”

  “Do you have chicken pox? Because if that is actually deferment-worthy—” Pulowski closed his eyes and lifted his chin as if for a kiss.

  “Pulowski!” On the far side of the truck, she noticed people had paused along the sidewalk, gawking. “See? I’m not encouraging this,” she said. “There’s no point in fixing one worry, if you’re just going to replace it with something else.”

  “See what?” Pulowski asked. He kept his eyes closed and smiled goofily. “I got a hard-on. But I’m not seeing anything, really.”

  She rounded the corner, past a shop that sold, apparently, only women’s jeans stacked on racks of white shelves, all of which looked far too skinny for her to be able to actually wear. Mom jeans. That was what Harris had called the pants she’d gravitated toward back in the day, none of which appeared to be on sale here. Harris himself had always been much quicker, much more decisive, much more original in what he chose to wear. No uniforms for Harris. Nothing that would have suggested that he came from the place that he actually had come from, whereas for her, the uniform, from the moment she’d put it on, had been a relief. Better than mom jeans, since mom jeans were still pretty tight in the crotch. But similar, since mom jeans meant that you had a husband to come home to, which implied (she assumed) that the women who wore them had negotiated some sort of cessation of hostilities, wherein the mom might be said to have value for something other than the fit of her jeans. For what she did. That was what the uniform meant to her, at least.

  Maybe it was a weakness, wanting to belong so badly. Harris certainly had seen it that way. And there were times, like this morning, when she wore the uniform as protection and as a warning, even though by regulation she should’ve probably been in civilian gear. She was passing a restaurant with tables set out on the sidewalk behind an iron railing, and the patrons were out in wire-backed chairs, every one of them eating something different—salmon, salad, fruit, a plateful of pasta. She tried to imagine herself as one of the women there, tried to imagine herself holding a job, maybe living in one of the glassy apartments off to her left, up the hill. Tried to imagine not having a platoon, not knowing Dykstra, not knowing Crawford, not knowing Hartz, not having to go to PT, never having replaced the hydraulics on a Hercules, or signed her commission, or given a briefing, or fired an M4.

  She’d reached the bank building by then. The windows along the sidewalk were clear and oversize and the décor inside was, if anything, retro compared with the shops she’d passed: broad red carpet, teller window of newly stained wood, potted plants, a set of three very large and very heavy-looking desks with nameplates, brass lamps, and translucent green shades. It had been two years since she’d last seen her brother, and nearly seven now since their fight over the Ryersons’ car, and as she paused outside the revolving glass door, buffeted by women in their high, unsteady heels, she wished, if only briefly, she’d worn something that would make her seem as helpless as she felt.

  “Hello! Can I do something for you?” The girl who approached her could’ve been one of the ones from outside on the street: glossy black hair cut straight across her forehead, a pencil-thin skirt, two-toned shoes.

  “Yeah,” Fowler said, “I’m, uh…”

  “Are you wanting to open an account?”

  “No. No—I mean, I have a bank account.”

  “Looking to finance a mortgage?”

  “That would be, um…” She was still scanning the room, past this woman’s silk, pin-striped shoulder, searching for … what, she wasn’t sure. A patch of curly ginger hair (I kissed that once; I combed it; I washed it with soap and water). Yes, I’m here to see my little brother, but I have no idea what he does here. No idea how he got here. No idea how long he’s been here. Or why he didn’t tell me. “That would be a little premature,” she concluded, folding her arms so that her briefcase covered the name tag on her blouse. “I’m afraid. Unless, you know, you got something outside Baghdad.”

  It was a joke—at least Fowler had intended it that way. But even though the woman seemed to understand this, there was no corresponding laughter. Only a reshuffling of possibilities behind her plucked eyebrows, her wide-eyed, mascaraed face.

  “We have a federally funded program for servicemen and -women,” she said, thrusting a brochure into Fowler’s hands. “I can prequalify you at a rate of five-point-six percent for the first five years of your mortgage. I can fold your closing costs and your down payment into the loan, so you can walk out of here with immediate access to a couple hundred thou in equity. Plus”—the woman came around so that she was shoulder to shoulder with Fowler, her perfume sharp as spoiled wine—“we will actually pay off, in cash, your title fees. It’s our way of saying thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For your service,” the woman said. She nodded at Fowler’s fatigues.

  Fowler handed the brochure back. “Do you think you could help me find Harris Fowler? He’s supposed to work around here someplace.”

  Speaking her brother’s name out loud caused Fowler’s legs to go wooden, and her hands seemed cottony and distant, as if her blood sugar had suddenly dropped. For the woman, however, it seemed to have the effect of a slap: her face dimmed without changing expression, like a phone screen that had shifted to sleep. She stepped off briskly to her desk, pushed a button, spoke into her phone’s intercom, then savagely rifled her drawers before returning with her business card: Rachel Nystrom.

  “I know that Mr. Harris has a good reputation,” Rachel said, “but I can really use the business—and I can pay better attention to you too.”

  She hadn’t considered the possibility that Harris would have a reputation of any kind, certainly not one that would intimidate a woman like Rachel; she’d imagined that he’d still be wearing a hoodie and a faded T-shirt promoting some deliberately obscure band—Echo and the Bunnymen, the English Beat—that had been popular before they’d been born, and even then not very. His “ironic” Budweiser cap. But instead he exited an office at the far end of the room dressed in a starched white shirt and a flashy yellow tie with a gold clip. His tightly curled brown hair was now cut short along the sides, he was taller than she’d remembered (was he still growing?), but the expression on his face—a studied and carefully arranged lack of focus, an overstudied calm—was familiar. It was the same expression he’d worn when she’d confronted him about the Ryersons’ car, as if he knew exactly why she’d come, how she’d found him—though in fact Pulowski had done it on the Internet. “Well, look who’s here,” Harris said. “This is a surprise.” He appeared to be evaluating the room to see if anyone else would notice their meeting.

  “I was just in the neighborhood,” she said, then stuck her hand out at Rachel Nystrom, rather than hugging Harris, since she wasn’t sure what sort of reception she’d receive. “Lieutenant Fowler. I’m, uh—well, I grew up with this kid.”

  Immediately Harris stiffened, and a slight warp lifted his lip. But when he turned toward her previous host, his voice seemed artificially loud, designed to draw the attention of the tellers and the other employees. “You learn anything interesting from my sister, Rachel?”

  “No,” Rachel said, in a tone that seemed to imply that she hoped that Fowler wouldn’t repeat anything she’d just said.

  This seemed to set Harris at ease. “No? You’re kidding me. You let a client walk in here and don’t get a read on her? Come on, haven’t I taught you anything?”

  “Hey, take it easy,” Fowler said. “I was in the neighborhoo
d. I came by because I’ve got some family business. If you aren’t free, I understand.”

  “Now, there’s a revealing comment,” Harris said. “Do I have a choice about this meeting? Or does the lieutenant really mean that because we’re family, she can show up out of the blue and expect me to take off work? That, Rachel, is information you can use. Rule one, make sure you know what your client values most.” This was spoken while Harris executed what looked like a series of community-theater stage directions: return to the last, largest desk on the bank’s open floor, adjust your name tag so it’s visible, hunt busily for props. “Rule two, pay more attention to what they do, not what they say.”

  “What’s the third?” Rachel asked.

  Harris came beaming around the desk, swinging the briefcase, a golden moleskin coat over his arm. It was an impressive sight—as if he’d finally arrived in character, a banker who looked just exactly like a banker. He gave Fowler a dry peck on the cheek, slipped Rachel’s folder from her hands, and waved it as he headed for the doorway. “The third rule is if you want to steal a client, never let them go to lunch with me.”