The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  The head-bobs that followed this explanation seemed to suggest that in this room of men, he was, shockingly, an authority. The women in the family bustled in the kitchen, and the prairie wind buffeted the house outside, and as the network cut to videos of the turkey-eating soldiers, shot against the dune background of tents or bunkers, Pulowski began to say whatever in the hell came to mind. True, Fowler would’ve called him out on some of the bullshit he came up with—and it seemed odd to him that they hadn’t already asked her about these same issues. But Fowler wasn’t there. “Did your daughter ever tell you the story of how our battalion commander got the nickname Bucky?” He glanced up at the men’s expectant faces, then hesitated theatrically. “I probably shouldn’t tell it. I doubt she’d approve.”

  Donny Fowler wheezed and coughed in the chair beside him, waving his hand as if to suggest his outburst should be ignored.

  “So you do know it,” Pulowski said.

  It was Bob Summers, sprawling back and observing the scene with a milder, wiser grin on his face, who filled him in. “Naw, son, it’s just we all have had a little experience with the lieutenant”—he said this in ironic quotes—“disapproving of something. Ain’t that right, Donny?”

  “I don’t think she disapproves of cursing, does she?” Pulowski asked. “’Cause that’s what Colonel Seacourt does.”

  The men considered him through the haze their cigarettes left in the living room—it was the first real case that Pulowski had seen of indoor smoking—as if he’d just declared that the colonel had two heads. Donny Fowler was still coughing, his eyes wet with amusement from Bob Summers’s joke. “Come again?” he said.

  “No cursing—that’s how the colonel got his nickname,” Pulowski said. “I mean, he can’t outlaw it, exactly. Not in the entire Army. But he did have everybody on his personal security detail sign a pledge that they would quit.”

  “I would sign a pledge to kick his ass,” Bob Summers said.

  Pulowski lowered his voice to a whisper. “So one day the colonel’s got the base commander, General Nunce, out for troop review. We’re going to do a convoy-protection exercise for him. The one thing Colonel Bucky tells everybody to do is make sure they keep enough distance between their vehicle and the one in front. Don’t speed. Don’t rush it. Don’t cowboy anything. You know, just keep in line.”

  “Uh-oh,” Donny Fowler said. “I think I’ve seen this movie.”

  “That’s right. First thing, first thing that happens—right in front of the grandstand, which is where we’re doing this—”

  “Because,” Bob Summers put in, “they’ve got a whole lot of grandstands in Iraq, don’t they?”

  “Right in front of the grandstand, a private pops his clutch and runs his Humvee right up under the back of an Abrams tank. Bumper gets pinched, immediate traffic jam. End of the exercise. But get this, get this.” Pulowski was waving his hands now, leaning in. He had his audience, he could feel that. “The colonel, he’s standing off to one side of the grandstand, and you can just see his face.” Pulowski made a drooping motion with his fingers along his cheeks. “I mean, he is furious. Head’s about to blow off. He stands there for a second, then he does an about-face and heads off under the grandstand. The guys around him wait. He doesn’t come back. Finally, this major—a guy named McKutcheon, he’s my CO—he goes after him, and he finds Bucky just whaling away on one of those I-beams with his boot. Just kicking it. And you know what he’s saying? “Buck, buck, buck—”

  * * *

  The kitchen of the wood-frame house was tiny, a cramped hutch—nothing at all like the place his mother had refinanced back in Clarksville, with a granite counter and a bright and shiny Sub-Zero refrigerator. The wives of the men in the front room were gathered there—including Bob Summers’s wife, who introduced herself as Aunt Carla—all wearing similar combinations of sweatshirts, massive purses, tennis shoes.

  The back door crashed open and Fowler charged in, dressed in a pair of jean shorts and flip-flops, her hands black with soot. “All right, Aunt Carla,” she said, “I got the coals going.” She gave Pulowski a flickering glance that he had a tiny bit of trouble trying to interpret: partly accusatory, partly worried, mostly flighty, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to make of him standing in the kitchen. It was uncertainty, he realized. Divided purpose. That’s what made it seem unfamiliar, enough so that he enjoyed standing there.

  “Your father was going to do that,” Aunt Carla said.

  “Well, do you see it happening?” Fowler asked. “Are there coals started? I’ve got fourteen people to feed, and I’ve got three birds to make, and salad to get started, and—”

  She grabbed one of the three chickens that Aunt Carla had lined up on the narrow counter. “Hey, hey, don’t touch that,” Aunt Carla said. She pointed at three black smudges that Fowler’s fingers had left on the bird’s skin. “You got to wash your hands before you’re handling the meat.”

  Fowler held her hands up, splaying her fingers. “We’re cooking this on a fire, right, Carla? Am I right about this?”

  “On a fire,” Aunt Carla said, her head bent stubbornly, her thick fingers parting a clot of chicken innards. “Not in.”

  “What I’m saying is it doesn’t matter. The whole thing gets cooked anyway, right? It’s not like this is bacteria or something—it just burns off. It’s a little smudge. Right, Pulowski?”

  “That’s sort of a false dichotomy there, if you ask me,” Pulowski said. He edged his way past Aunt Carla’s ample rear end, removed the chicken carcass from Fowler’s smudged hands, and carried it to the sink. “Think of it like a weapon,” he said.

  “She’s in charge of weapons?” Aunt Carla said.

  “The better question would be, what weapons isn’t she in charge of?” Pulowski said. “Squad automatic weapon, fifty-caliber machine gun, M4, that cute little Beretta she walks around with all the time.”

  “Is that right?” Aunt Carla said. She was shuffling over to the oven disapprovingly, showing them her wide back. “So what you’re saying, Lieutenant Pulowski, is that Emma’s good enough to play rifle with her soldiers, but not good enough to remember to buy a Thanksgiving turkey for her family?”

  He followed Fowler out back a few minutes later, carrying two of the chicken carcasses that he’d cleaned, stifling any further argument. The plan was to make beer-can chicken, a recipe that Pulowski had heard about but never seen prepared: A rub, he thought, possibly. Or a marinade. But he had a hard time paying attention, with Aunt Carla’s jealous sniping still floating about his head, a fart-scented mist of stupidity.

  Fowler reached into a cooler, pulled a can of Busch Light, opened it, and set it on a cutting board, the circular top of a cable spool that appeared to be serving as a cook space beside the grill. “You can either hold the can or hold the bird,” Fowler said, nodding at the three chicken carcasses that Aunt Carla had given them.

  He picked up a bird. It felt clammy in the warm November air.

  “And?” he said.

  Fowler cracked the beer and assumed an odd position, half in a crouch, holding the can with both hands. “And put it on here,” Fowler said.

  “Put it on there,” he said.

  “Put it on there.” While he stood there blinking, examining the chicken, turning it over in his hands, Fowler watched him dryly. “Where the hole is, Pulowski,” she said. “Come on, you ought to know how to do this.”

  Pulowski chose to hold the bird. It was not exactly the kind of thing he could’ve imagined doing with his college girlfriend, Marcia Widemann, in the backyard of her parents’ Tudor in Bucks County. No head-tilt or coquettish smile as she worked the Busch Light up into the chicken’s chest cavity. Instead, her features, her slightly charcoal-smeared cheeks—there was a war paint element that suited her—were simply open, neutral, her eyes slightly widened and her brown forehead tweaked as if to admit her awareness of the possible sex jokes on hand, and also to suggest that he move on to better material. “You got a better rec
ipe?” Fowler asked.

  “I might have gone with chicken piccata,” Pulowski said. “Make a little roux to go with it. Maybe grill some peppers.”

  “Oh, we’re a cook now.”

  “I know how to read a cookbook,” Pulowski said. “Although I have never personally read about Busch Light chicken in a book—but hey, maybe it’s like a family tradition? Something passed down through your history?”

  He’d almost said mother—that was the one person whose picture he noticed wasn’t anywhere in the house—and he felt a slight tightening in the air. Steer clear, keep it light, he told himself. No need to get involved in a family mess. He had definitely clear memories of his own father, in the house they’d lived in before the divorce, but his mother had moved almost immediately—a good choice, in his opinion. Leave the past in the past. Something his parents had agreed on, anyway. Nothing absolutely had to be permanent. “What, you don’t like family traditions?” Fowler said.

  Politeness. That was the word he would’ve used to summarize and quantify nearly all of his failures with women, all his faults. There had been Betsy Greyson, with whom he had spent one terrifically awkward evening at the Clarksville Country Club, on pasta night, very politely ignoring the fact that Betsy had at least three times told her parents that he would be “following in his father’s footsteps” into medical school. Also a trip to Bucks County with Marcia Widemann: a Kappa, a member of the student senate, an alternate on the cheerleading team. Oh, God, he’d been polite to Marcia Widemann in her yoga pants and her ballerina flats. Polite enough to spend an entire weekend at her parents’ house in Bucks County, not having sex. Polite enough not to “mind” as Marcia also invited her “good friend” from high school out to lunch, while Pulowski played eighteen holes of golf with her dad. Polite enough that he did not mind getting smoked by Mr. Widemann to the tune of two hundred dollars, and polite enough—so perfect, so polite—that he’d merely nodded in agreement when Mr. Widemann had shown him the picture he’d taken with Dick Cheney at a Rotary Club luncheon. Polite enough not to dispute the heroic motives that Mr. Widemann attributed to him, while beating the living crap out of him on every tee, all of which Pulowski had been too polite not to accept.

  But of course he was not polite, not really. Back in the kitchen, when Fowler had hung her head and silently submitted to Aunt Carla’s stupidity, he definitely hadn’t felt that way. “There’s a difference between family and family traditions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as you could serve chicken piccata to your family even if it wasn’t a tradition and it would taste okay,” he said. “Or you could stop letting a battleax like Aunt Carla intimidate you. What’s she got on you anyway? You murder somebody?”

  Fowler’s legs had a tethered musculature, the long curve of her thigh muscles tapering and gathering in above her knee. In shorts and bare feet—Pulowski gave a brief thanks for the unseasonably warm weather—this was visible in a way it never was in her ACUs, along with the strange, dolphin smoothness of her skin. As she knelt, cupping her hands about the brim of her ball cap and peering in at the charcoal, her pale, untanned soles peeled up from her flip-flops, revealing a line of tendon that extended from the ball of her foot to the heel. “Your parents are separated, right?”

  “Divorced. My dad’s passed away.”

  “So how happy were you when he left?”

  “I wasn’t thrilled about it.” He could feel where the conversation was going. Somehow this was really about her brother. If there was one thing he should know better than to bother with in this relationship, it was this missing brother of hers.

  “Did you talk to him much?” Fowler asked.

  “Nope.”

  “And you joined ROTC because you didn’t want to take any of his money to go to school, right?”

  “Fucking stupidest decision of my life, but yeah.”

  “Why was that a stupid decision?”

  The answer to this was that if he hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t be in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, about to go to Iraq. But he also wouldn’t be standing here with Fowler. “Because he is an independent person. Because he didn’t have some kind of special responsibility to stay married to my mom if he didn’t want to stay married. I mean, I didn’t like it, necessarily—but that’s not a good enough reason not to take his money.” By now they both knew this was a parallel commentary, heading off any attempt Fowler might make to beat herself up about her brother. Or at least he knew it.

  “Still, you told him to piss off,” Fowler said.

  “That’s my right too. He’s got a right to bag a hot nurse and move down to Florida before he kicks it. And I got a right to be an idiot and join ROTC.”

  “Yeah, well, that was pretty much my mom’s theory. Which was a nice one for her, but it didn’t work out too good for the rest of us.”

  “So what’s that got to do with anything? You stayed. Your mom didn’t. What the fuck right does Carla have to be riding your ass?”

  “I didn’t stay. Not completely.”

  “Which is exactly what she’s jealous of,” Pulowski said.

  “No, she doesn’t think that I’m holding up my end of the bargain,” Fowler said. “I should’ve stayed back, taken care of my brother. If I had, he’d be here.”

  They fixed the other two chickens and got them on the grill, a short, uneasy truce, during which Pulowski evaluated the backyard of the Fowlers’ place. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call poverty-stricken, but it also wasn’t something you’d see out back of a doctor’s house in Clarksville, or Bucks County. An unpainted chicken coop. The metal remnants of a clothesline. Bare and severe-looking, purely functional, the kind of place most people wanted to escape. The same went for the backhanded comments about Fowler’s “disapproval” back in the living room, any fool could see that. Except Fowler, who seemed oddly vulnerable around her family, unarmed, eager to please … if not wounded already. And what had he done in her defense? Been polite.

  “What the hell kind of bargain is that?” he said, deciding to press the argument. “All the guys sit around and watch the Lions game, Carla and her mommy cohort take over the kitchen, you work all week training fucking Beale, and—”

  “Jesus, Beale,” Fowler said, rolling her eyes and laughing. “He’d fucking love it over here, wouldn’t he?”

  “You’re saying to me that you think this is a fair and equitable system?”

  “Hey, it’s family, Pulowski. You know this. Rules are rules. Traditions are traditions. If Aunt Carla was having the dinner at her house, she’d be the one who did the shopping. She’d have coals ready. I’m head of the household.”

  “That’s terrible logic.” Pulowski was surprised at the decisiveness in his voice, at the vehemence of his anger. “But fine: You follow your rules. I’ll make mine.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, if anybody complains about having beer-can chicken for dinner—without coming out here to help you cook—I get to kick their ass.”

  Pulowski yanked the chickens around the grill barehanded, imagining a very unlikely scenario in which he was tough enough to kick Aunt Carla’s ass. Imagining some better version of himself, one that would actually get mad at the people who deserved it, instead of yelling at a woman who didn’t. When he turned, expecting Fowler to have disappeared, to have run inside, he nearly trampled her. She was standing close to him, close enough that he could feel her breasts against his elbows. He tried to walk around her but she stepped, slyly, in front of him. Her chin was up and he could smell her shampoo. “You, Pulowski,” she reminded him. “You’d be the person who complained.”

  What would happen if he met a woman who did not require him to be polite? Or even want it? At a loss, he leaned down to kiss her, his hands covered in grease.

  This, apparently.

  16

  Fowler’s mother had picked her up from school early, the day she left. The feeling Fowler remembered was one of derangement. Not mental derang
ement (though her mother, on that particular day, probably qualified), but deranged as in rearranged, out-of-phase; Deirdre Fowler was not dressed in her usual khaki pants and a belt and an oxford shirt, but instead had shimmied into a dress, an actual evening dress, short-cut in turquoise blue, which seemed a strange choice for the middle of the day. And also she could not, or would not, engage with her daughter directly; only when Fowler stopped asking questions about their destination—“Can we go to the pet store?” “Are we going to a movie?” “Don’t we have to get Harris?”—and instead mooned out the window quietly did she feel her mother’s abstracted, fluttering caress. Even these touches were ill-timed, somehow off-beat, arriving when her mother was busy making a turn so that the wheel slipped and she had to quickly grab after it, and when Fowler turned to try to catch her mother’s eyes, to get an actual answer, she would find instead her mother’s face quickly averted, as if the only circumstance in which she felt comfortable looking at Fowler was when her daughter wasn’t looking back.

  “Why are you all dressed up, Mama?”

  That had been her last question. She’d asked it again as they were heading down the corridor at the White Haven Motel. She had never forgotten that motel, the strange time warp of that specific corridor, the ceiling whose plaster had been teased into swirls, the stained, nearly black woodwork that, despite the darkness of the dye, still seemed light, insubstantial, the doors hollow-core, the frames a cheap white pine. Their flimsiness lacked the compensating familiarity of a Motel 6 or a Days Inn, and the rooms she glimpsed as they strode along had seemed oddly old-fashioned, out of time. They had dressers made out of gray carved wood; they had faded, embroidered chairs.

  If one thing haunted her thinking during her first few months with her platoon, it was this last encounter with her mother. Not that she made the connection immediately: the actual conversation itself, which she had never spoken about to anyone, had long ago become an event she’d “dealt with” but rarely thought about consciously. A man had been sharing her mother’s room at the White Haven Motel. He wasn’t there when Fowler arrived, but his things were, commonplace objects that, set amid her mother’s things, stuck out with unnatural clarity. The T-shirt draped over a chair’s back, a line of yellow around its neck. The smell of spice, a different, fruitier smell than her father’s, that leaked out when her mother bustled her past the bathroom. And in the bathroom, a leather dopp kit on the toilet’s back, a rusty pair of barber’s scissors, a shoe tree, upended, with its carved wooden sole facing her way. She could sense that her mother didn’t care at all what the room looked like. That it would feel shameful; that its shame would be legible to Fowler in such a clear way. She was talking confidently now, unzipping and zipping bags of makeup, knuckles close to her teeth. “I just want you to promise me, Emma, that you are capable of handling your brother. Of, uh, well, basically giving him some structure”—her eyes darkened here, as if the word “structure” stood for some deep emotional event (or, as Fowler thought later, because the word seemed so cheap)—“because Harris is a lot more fragile than you. He’s more like me.”