Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“Can you draw?” Pulowski asked. He opened the notepad Fowler had given him, flopped it onto the table, and drew a stick figure of himself. “Dixon,” he said. Then, remembering that the Iraqi across from him couldn’t hear — the man’s hand flittered up to his ear again as Pulowski spoke — he wrote his name on the pad in English. DIXON . He pointed at himself. Then he turned the pad so the man might do the same.

The room that they occupied was in a small rural schoolhouse in the northern sector of their territory, near a town named Bini Ziad. When Fowler’s platoon had shown up, a line of civilians, detained by Captain Masterson, whose territory this remained, stretched clear through the school’s courtyard and into the road. All of them had to be questioned about Beale and the attack at the intersection. It was a mime show, in Pulowski’s opinion, a necessary but pointless routine, and so it felt somehow proper to be interviewing a man in his mid-twenties who, rather than answering his questions, fired off a picture, quickly sketched but done in the proper proportions, a hint of perspective, cross-hatched shading, the way a genuine cartoonist might work. It was a self-portrait, no blemish left out, his defects if anything exaggerated, the chin melting away into his neck, the teeth overlarge, possibly the most honest testimony he’d seen all day.

“Very cute,” Pulowski said. He held the drawing up beside the man’s head as if to judge its likeness. Then he frowned, as if he couldn’t see the resemblance.

The man widened his eyes insistently. Yes, I am that ugly , he seemed to be saying, if it was possible to derive actual words from the folds and positioning of a face. Seriously, I’ll show you! He stuck his rabbit teeth out and jabbed at them, then jabbed back at the picture— See? — and gave a quick offhand shrug— Who, me? — as if he did not intend to let his achievement of this ugliness go to his head.

Pulowski laughed. Okay, okay— he nodded— you win. Then he pointed to the name Dixon on his sketch and tapped the blank space beneath the artist’s.

The man shook his head gravely. He flipped the stationery and the sketch over, revealing what appeared to be a formal note, written in Arabic.

“You want me to read this?” Pulowski asked.

The man nodded, though of course there was no way he could have understood. Then he grabbed the note and drew on it again, this time right beneath the text, the small lines scratching and fanning out magically, creating out of the nothing that had been there a face, a body, a pair of wings. Was it … what? A male angel. Did they have angels in Islam? Or just virgins? The man pointed eagerly toward the door, as if he wanted someone to read the note, so Pulowski nodded politely and carried it into the hallway.

The main problem Pulowski was experiencing just then was the awareness of his own secret. The fact that he’d abandoned Beale and then lied about it was probably more important than anything the Iraqi had to say. On the other hand, he’d decided that telling the truth about it wouldn’t help anybody, least of all Beale. He had reasoned very carefully through all of this during the twenty-four hours that had passed since Beale had charged into the abandoned building in the Muthanna intersection, and Pulowski, rather than follow him, had stood and sprinted away, back into the intersection, unhooked the mic from Waldorf’s dashboard, and said, We got separated from Beale. I have no idea where he might be. Pulowski’s father had been a liar too — as well as a resident surgeon at the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital outside Clarksville. Or at least that was how Pulowski had thought about him when his father had filed for divorce and, two months later, retired from the Army and moved to Naples, Florida. One of the most curious things about that divorce — one that had grown more curious once Pulowski, who’d been sixteen at the time, had gone off to college and developed a better sense of how a divorce might work, not to mention how a man like his father, who was extremely organized, would tend to plan things — was the fact that his father must have known and been planning to move to Naples for some time. It was impossible to imagine it differently. This had become the focal point of his anger with his father for years, especially once he got to college. He’d finally asked his father about this directly at the graduation banquet held for his ROTC cadre. The colonel, as far as Pulowski knew, had not put on a uniform since his retirement, which was one of the reasons that Pulowski, dressed up in his ROTC greens, had felt powerful enough to ask the question on that particular day. They’d been in a hotel ballroom near the University of Pittsburgh, the cadets in white gloves, the tables covered in fancy tablecloths, napkins frilled in cups, and when Pulowski’s mother had gotten up to go to the bathroom, he’d leaned over to his father and said, You knew you were leaving us, didn’t you? You knew it and you never said anything. Isn’t that true? His father, a fastidious man, gray-haired, not far from his own death (though, of course, Pulowski hadn’t known that then), had rearranged his utensils around his plate and then said, And what use would that information be to anybody?

At the time, Pulowski had considered his father’s response to be, at best, cowardly. But now, as he pushed through the crowded hallways, looking for an interpreter to read the detainee’s note, all he hoped for was his father’s equanimity. He could still see Beale’s splotchy, glistening face peeking out from behind a metal dumpster once they’d started taking fire in the alley off the Muthana intersection. “You think it’s such a stupid idea to check these buildings out now?” Beale had said, hands shaking as he tried to aim his weapon. “Fuck that, man. Fuck you and your bullshit.”

“Try the radio, at least,” Pulowski had said.

“It’s jammed,” Beale had said. “I got nothing.”

“We got to sit tight,” he had said. “We stick together, it’ll be all right.”

“We got to get on that roof,” Beale had said. “That’s where the shooter is. There’s a door up ahead. I’m going in.”

“No,” he had said. “No, just hold on.”

“What the fuck am I holding on to?” Beale had said. “You?”

Early on when they’d first started sleeping together at Fort Riley, he and Fowler had talked about Beale quite a bit because he’d been the one soldier in her platoon whom she had the most trouble with — and also the one they had the most pleasure arguing about. Pulowski had still felt adrift in the Army then. As a signal officer attached to Headquarters Company, he was not in charge of a platoon, like Fowler was, and thus had no soldiers under him, no relationship to their day-to-day concerns. Instead, despite the surface activity of the fort, which itself wasn’t all that different from a college campus, he had spent most of his days in a classroom in the back of the battalion headquarters, working to bone up on the command-and-control programs for the computer systems that they would be using when they got to Iraq. None of the equipment actually existed there, physically, at the fort: it was all in Iraq, already installed, and so mostly they worked from manuals and on a few emulators that McKutcheon had managed to wrangle out of the supply chain. The whole thing had felt dry and dead — worse, in its way, than anything he’d done in college. Not to mention the fact that, in a way he’d not considered when in college — in a way that he’d thought he’d be protected from, since he had assumed that the war would be over by the time he graduated — he had for the first time the realization that he’d made a terrible mistake in judgment to join the Army.