The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  * * *

  The skating rink had been Pulowski’s idea. He’d called it a tactical move. The fact that neither he nor Fowler nor Harris actually knew how to skate was the point: here would be an opportunity for Fowler and her brother to encounter each other on neutral ground. It also revealed a helpful chink in Harris’s man-about-town armor, since Pulowski was the only one who’d googled the rink’s name and saved its address—it was farther downtown, in a large shopping complex, and thus Fowler got to drive all three of them in her truck, following the chirps of Pulowski’s GPS. The soundness of this plan felt less evident twenty minutes later, however, when Fowler found herself at a white steel-mesh table with a pair of beige rental skates bound about her feet, feeling about as comfortable as an amputee. Pulowski had already wobbled out onto the ice while Harris sat across from her, paging through the forms she’d brought that named him the beneficiary of her estate. Tactically, the papers were her excuse for why she needed to see her brother, but all she’d really wanted to know was how Harris was doing and the answer—as the rink’s boards thumped with the toes of other skaters and Justin Timberlake pulsed from speakers overhead—appeared to be fine. Better than she’d expected. Definitely better than in San Antonio, when she’d tried to bail him out of jail for a DUI. So why didn’t she feel more relieved? “So you didn’t have any trouble with your record?” she asked when Harris finished reading. “I mean, I’m glad you’ve got a job, I’m just trying to make sure you didn’t have to lie to them or anything. Make sure it’s secure.”

  “Fuck,” Harris said warmly. “Lying’s practically the job description.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How much do you make?” Harris asked. He handed the folder of papers back to her across the table.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” He jabbed a finger at the paperwork. “You show up and claim you want my approval to make me your beneficiary. What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, cool, I’m your beneficiary’? Because it doesn’t feel cool to me. Imagine I gave you some paperwork whose primary takeaway was that my job put me at risk of being dead—”

  “Forty a year,” she said. It had never been an embarrassing number to die for until now, sitting on the terrace of an ice rink, in the middle of what appeared to be an urban shopping center—tall office buildings looming around, a fifty-foot Douglas fir set out amid brightly painted nutcrackers—watching Harris raise his pale eyebrows in a wince.

  “There’s good benefits,” she said, trying to make a joke out of it. She reached under the table and touched his knee. “If I make captain before I bite it, you’ll get an extra bump. Sorry, sorry—” She waved her hands as Harris reared back. “Look, the paperwork is just a technicality. Nothing is going to happen to me. I got a good team. I came out because I wanted to see you. The only real thing I need is your address.”

  “You know what’s great about the mortgage industry?” Harris pushed the papers back without writing anything. “No team. Straight percentage. Don’t have to worry about anyone walking away.”

  “I didn’t walk away from you, Harris.”

  Harris assaulted the pocket of his suit and retrieved a pack of Camels—one of the few habits he’d picked up from their father. Despite his last jab, he seemed mollified by her decision to frame the paperwork as a ruse. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe running a platoon in Iraq will be a good educational experience for you. Come back down to earth with the rest of us fuckups. Provided you survive.”

  Fowler laughed, genuinely this time. “Oh, come on, Harris! Jesus Christ, talk about the Fowler morality hour. Next you’re going to be telling me that you want to join Greenpeace and vote for fucking Kerry. I’m sorry. For bleeding hearts, I know plenty of officers who’ve got you covered. Along with about half the guys in my platoon.”

  Harris seemed mildly surprised at this. “Well, that’s fucking great. I don’t know, does it improve things when you know you’re doing something stupid?”

  “Depends on how you define stupid.”

  “Did Rachel run over our ‘Thank You for Your Service’ plan when you came in?”

  “I rent,” Fowler said.

  “Well, at least you’ve got some sense,” Harris said.

  “Yeah?” Fowler said. “What’s so bad about what Rachel offered?”

  This was the Harris that she remembered. In the old days, she’d imagined his arguments like a snare. Fowler was always trying to defend something—school, grades, not getting stoned at three p.m.—that put her in the position of sounding impossibly square, impossibly naïve. The more she tried to avoid being pushed into that position (who didn’t recognize that there were arguments against going to school, who didn’t know the world wasn’t fair?), the angrier Harris got and the more he’d argue, until finally she’d step into the snare. Once it happened, she imagined a loop circling around her ankle and her body being dragged suddenly upward into the air by a bent tree, until she dangled helplessly upside down, so that Harris could lecture her on her stupidity.

  “First of all,” Harris said, leaning forward in his seat, “how much of a loan did she say she could set you up with? Three bills? Yeah? And how the fuck are you going to fulfill a mortgage payment on three bills while making forty grand a year? The answer is you’re not. And we don’t even care if you do. We’re going to sell that thing, securitize it, and it’s out of our hands. You guys, the blacks, and the Latinos—our triumvirate of morons. And do you know what you all have in common? You all are stupid enough to believe that you actually deserve something. Because you’re good Americans. Because you like to feel that you’re morally superior. Hey, I’m a good soldier. Hey, I’m going off to war to save my country! Aren’t I awesome! Don’t I deserve to be thanked? No! You volunteered to get screwed. Okay? And at some level, you know that.”

  Fowler relaxed back into her chair. She felt some guilt for having egged Harris on, but there was also a certain relief, proof that her brother was the person she’d claimed he would be—especially for Pulowski, who’d swung up to the boards beside them, close enough that he’d likely overheard the whole thing. No hope here. Nothing to see.

  “You guys coming out?” Pulowski said, tugging at the wrist of his right glove with his teeth. “You pay for the skates, you gotta skate. Come on, now, it isn’t possible for either one of you to be worse than me.”

  Harris’s green eyes flitted between the two of them, as if an ally were the last thing he’d expected. “We’re having a conversation,” he said.

  “That’s not what it sounds like to me,” Pulowski said. “What it sounds like to me is that you are passing off garden-variety, bullshit MSNBC skepticism as actual opinion. You’re going to have to do better than that or I’m going to have to start thinking that Fowler here may have actually fucked up your childhood as badly as she imagines.”

  “Pulowski is one of those bleeding hearts I was talking about,” Fowler said. “He’d probably agree with you on the whole volunteering-to-get-screwed thing.”

  “Maybe,” Pulowski said. “But, hey, going to Iraq isn’t any more ridiculous than lecturing people on the ways of the world because you’re making eighty grand a year selling mortgages. If that. Imagining that somehow you’re not getting used. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, slick. Where do you think you stand in the fucking pecking order? You are right there on the bottom with the rest of us idiots. We’re all getting used.”

  “Yeah, well, at least I’m not going to get killed while it’s happening,” Harris said.

  “And if you were going to get killed, who’d you want to be with?”

  “I wouldn’t want to get killed at all.”

  “Now you’re making some sense, dude,” Pulowski said. He clopped over to their table on his skates, his pants smeared with ice chips. “Fortunately”—he stuck his hand out to Harris, waggling his fingers, as if to pull him from his seat—“getting killed is not a risk while skating. The only risk is looking like an
idiot, which, you know, comparatively isn’t any worse than, say, stealing some asshole’s car.”

  The entire argument embarrassed her. Even if she agreed with some of Pulowski’s points, the car issue was supposed to be buried territory between herself and Harris—his job to bring it up, his job to apologize, since who else in the universe other than Pulowski would claim that somehow stealing a car wasn’t wrong? And yet here was Pulowski defending her by using language, principles, and ideas that seemed every bit as bleak as Harris’s. So far as she was concerned, the snare was still wrapped around her foot and she was dangling up in the air, battered by both of them now—though Pulowski’s argument was being made in her favor, which counted for something, at least.

  “I’ll go with him,” she said. She stood, a bit wobbly, and took her brother’s hand.

  “You’ve got to keep your weight forward,” Pulowski said. He gave her a sly look that said, Forget the argument. This is going better than you think. “Don’t lean back. You just kind of glide and push. Just focus on what’s ahead.”

  “Shut up, Pulowski,” Fowler said pleasantly. And then, in the moment that her blades left the rubber mat and she could feel the greasy uncertainty of the ice underneath her, frictionless, like outer space, she squealed in a very un-lieutenant way and grabbed Harris’s arm. “Holy shit!”

  “Okay, okay,” Harris said, concentrating. He’d reached a hand out instinctively, as if to pacify her. “We can do this.” This she remembered about Harris: his concentration. The small jut of his lower lip, bright scarlet, the way his nose wrinkled up, rabbitlike, when he was really concentrating. They tottered silently through a quarter turn of the rink like this. Even his grand unified theory of the idiocy of her trip to Iraq was itself a form of concentration. He must have thought of it ahead of time, worked it all out, imagined what he would say. And what was concentration but a form of love, no matter how it came out? It was his best attribute, the thing he had to give.

  He was quiet now beside her, absorbed. You could have called it meditation, save for the occasional spasms that ran through his limbs when his balance faded away. He skated just exactly like she did: determined not to look the fool. And now, steadying herself, bending her knees as Pulowski had suggested, reaching that state of glide which, oddly enough, seemed to be largely composed of not trying to glide, she tried to work out what Pulowski had told her about her brother, the complicated riddle that she was not responsible for how her brother had turned out and yet, at the same time, was and always would be. “You trust him?” Harris said. He was still holding her hand.

  The question was a surprise. It appeared to be genuine, no pose, no implied criticism. She wobbled, overcorrected, clutching Harris’s sleeve. “Who, Pulowski?”

  “Yeah. I kind of like the guy. Is he gonna stick?”

  “He’s okay,” she said.

  “Not like Mom?”

  “You mean not like me,” she said. She was blinking her eyes more than usual, as if the wind had scalded them. “I’m sorry about the car,” she said. “All of that. I mean, we never even talked about it. I don’t know why I have to be such a hard-ass.”

  Harris shrugged, as if he wasn’t entirely sure he would’ve wanted things to be different. “You were never like Mom,” he said.

  “Do you really think so?”

  Harris raised his shoulders as if he didn’t care. “You were worse.”

  “No, I wasn’t!”

  “See?” Harris said cheerfully. “It’s useful to have someone be absolutely sure you fucked up. Gives you something to define yourself against.” He slid his cigarettes back in his jacket. “You ought to try it sometime.”

  Instead, she glided through a forest of memories as fleeting and as finely detailed as the backs of the skaters that they trailed. She had wrestled Harris on the Indian rug in her father’s living room, and argued over her willingness to defeat him. “Try harder,” he’d insisted. “It’s no fun if you let me win.” And in the passenger seat of the Ford, a teenager with nervous hands and the experimental outline of a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, arguing with her over Vincent Foster, who she refused to admit had been murdered by the CIA. Everything had to be questioned; every position she took, examined, checked for flaws—or maybe just dismissed for the sake of it. A waste. But who said it had to be? She and her brother had argued enough to fill fifteen of Pulowski’s laptops, and yet it was only now that she had ever considered that maybe he hadn’t really meant to trap her in a snare. Maybe Harris’s jutted lip and wrinkled nose were attention, directed with all his soul, her way. “It seems a little academic, doesn’t it,” she asked, “which one of us has the true view of the shittiness of everything?”

  Harris was silent after she spoke, watching as Pulowski, up ahead of them, fumbled for his stocking cap. “I’ll do the next-of-kin thing,” he said. “Okay? I’ll give you my address. But that’s as far as I go. And you gotta promise to do one thing for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Find somebody to be your Emma over there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let somebody else do the work, for once,” Harris said. “Let somebody else worry about what’s supposed to be true but isn’t. That way you can figure out what you really believe. It works. Or anyway, it worked for me.” His coat buzzed, and, pulling out his phone, he held a finger up and said, “Sorry, I gotta take this.”

  They had reached the open gate that led off the rink. Harris murmured into the phone and then, with a sharp and amused glance at Fowler, one that implicated her in his amusement, he let go of her and glided rather stylishly for the exit, stepping over the scarred wood plank and onto the black rubber mat and into the crowd. She watched him go. Without her, he fit in, looked as organized and citified in his moleskin coat and his yellow tie as anybody there—a part of whatever was happening here. The first club he’d ever wanted to join. Then she swung around awkwardly to find Pulowski.

  15

  Fowler was in the kitchen. Pulowski sat with her father in the low-ceilinged gloom of her ancestral TV room. A decent-size flat-screen illuminated a knitted throw rug in red and black Native American patterns, old enough that he suspected the threadbare patches nearest the TV had been put there by Fowler’s elbows. Her father, Donny Fowler, was slight, dressed in a denim shirt and with thinning black hair that he wore combed straight down in a bowl. His skin had drawn into a tight little bunch of wrinkles up under his neck, and his eyes were brown and mobile. When he’d briskly shaken Pulowski’s hand a half hour ago, Pulowski had been surprised to find a flash of timidity in his gaze—a groping quality, as if he were begging the lieutenant to accept him, his house, and his friends for what they were, despite whatever deficiencies might exist. “Lieutenant, this is our resident bullshit artist—I’m sorry, cousin, Bob Summers. My advice is don’t let him touch anything that you’re hoping to see ever again,” said Donny Fowler, introducing a man in a purple Kansas State fleece and a pair of khakis, who was examining the Pinot Noir that Pulowski had carted in. “Now, see that, Bob? That make you feel better? Bob is always dissatisfied with the wine list over here. But what the hell do I know about it anyway? That’s officer business, not mechanic territory. What I can do, what I will do, is get you another beer—”

  “No, I’m fine,” Pulowski said.

  “That is not fine,” Donny Fowler said. “Not fine at all.” He turned then away from Pulowski, handed an empty bottle to the kid who’d accompanied Pulowski inside, and said, “Ronnie, you go get your mother to pull out a Corona from the fridge for the lieutenant here. We’re gonna sit him right down and have him relax.”

  Like his father, who, once the football-watching started in their own family, tended to quietly excuse himself and drift away to his study, Pulowski had never been particularly comfortable in the company of a large group of men. He didn’t know how to sit. Had never chewed or smoked tobacco. He could drink just fine—and he was glad he’d pregamed with some beers u
p by the Ryersons’ place—so once young Ronnie Summers came back to him with a Corona Light, he focused intently on that.

  “So, I guess you guys have been training pretty hard to get ready for all this,” Bob Summers said. “Ol’ Donny here tells me that he’s been hearing all kinds of artillery, last couple of weekends. Isn’t that right, Don?”

  “Shoo,” Donny Fowler said. “I think that might’ve been why I chose to put money on the goddamn Lions.” He spun a circle by his ear. “That stuff’s loud enough for me to get out on PTSD. Man, I’d hate to be underneath it.”

  “I heard some of those rounds are spent uranium,” said a wiry blond in a Peterbilt cap. “You know Steve Roebuck? He’s got a cousin down at Fort Hood. He says when this is all over, there’s gonna be soldiers ending up with exactly the kind of health claims they had with Agent Orange in Vietnam. Lawsuits all over the place.”

  Pulowski’s battle plan for this particular family gathering was to keep his head above water, float along, remain present but unobtrusive. Stay detached. Avoid politics. But a silence followed this observation and Pulowski realized that it had been left for him. “Well,” he said, “that might’ve been true with the invasion, but we’re not going to be in a real artillery-friendly situation over there. Or at least that’s what it looks like to me.”

  “So why the hell you all practicing so much?”

  “’Cause it makes people feel good,” Pulowski said. “I mean, look, we’ve got enough satellite coverage there, we can see the muzzle flash right out of a mortar. And now that we’ve got bases set up, our response system’s mechanized—automatic fire. Soon as that mortar’s in the air, they got coordinates and ten seconds later you’ve got four or five rounds on the way. It’s a programming problem, mostly.”