Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“All right, okay, I get the idea,” Pulowski said, flushing. He was still holding the piece of stationery, with the man’s sketched pictures. The unsettling male angel. If he’d had any balls he would’ve thrown it away. Instead, he stuck it in his pocket, which felt like the only truly cowardly thing he’d done all day. “Get him out of here. We’ve had a nice ha-ha, so let’s give Romeo his walking papers and move on.”

“We could always ask the captain if he has a policy on this,” Faisal said.

But Pulowski already had the door open, waving the deaf man — now transformed back into a civilian from a prisoner — out the door and into the crowded hallway beyond. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, very funny. Okay, who’s the next case?”

* * *

Fowler collapsed against the wall of her trailer at Camp Tolerance, head tilted back, still sweating, having just returned from the schoolhouse and her last, fruitless attempt to find Beale. “It was my fault,” she said.

Pulowski lay on the floor with his arms winged behind his head, like he did when he was thinking up a line. By now she was ready for one.

“If you’re going to make me lie here and listen to you say stupid things like that,” he said, “you could at least have the decency to clean the place up.”

Not bad. Maybe she could work with that.

“You’re a fucking classic, Pulowski.” She grabbed an old T-shirt from the floor and smacked him in the center of his skinny chest, shaking her head. “The one person in the Army who’d try to fix a disaster like this by cleaning .”

It was an experiment, she understood that. Some attempt to touch the world as it had been before they’d lost Beale. As it had been when they’d made love here.

“Controlling your environment,” Pulowski said, doing a passable impersonation of Captain Hartz’s crusty bark, “is the first step on the road to clarity of mind.”

“I hope not,” she said, gazing around her trailer. The place was a disaster of crap. The tops of her two lockers were cluttered with backup supplies, razors (unused now for a week), her extra soap, her iPod dock, her camera charger, her stacks of toilet paper, baby wipes, bug spray. The top of the fridge where she’d put together a tiny kitchenette, hot plate, coffeemaker, powdered Gatorade. The corner where she’d tossed USPS Priority Mail boxes that contained the rare postings from her dad — never anything from her mother — the plastic bags of trail mix, almonds, the copies of The Kansas City Star , already yellowing. Cleaning up her personal space had been one thing she’d let go since her commission. She’d done enough of it back home with Harris, loads of laundry, the toilets, the showers, not because she liked it, but because it was part of her imitation of what a mother did. The other option was to take about four Tylenol PM and just go dead — except she wasn’t even sure, with the way her head was spinning, that meds would work. “All right, let’s do it. Clarity of mind. I could go for a little bit of that.”

Pulowski scrounged up a couple of plastic bags from the PX and began stuffing them with papers, the bits of food, and empty soda cans. She went to the closet for a broom and swept and then found somewhere back in her locker one of those dustless mops with the pads that came in a box — she tried looking at the box, at the instructions on it, the brightly photogenic housewife in her jeans, and somehow this terrified her in a way the broom did not. She had to set the box down quickly and walk away.

She wondered how it could be so simple for Pulowski. He wasn’t like Dykstra or Waldorf, who might look a hell of a lot tougher on the surface but who’d cried like kids once they’d given up the chase. Pulowski was more like a wasp — nervous, always buzzing around about something, attacking to protect his fragility. Once, he’d told her a story about how, after his father had left, he’d come home in tears from the bus, because the kids at school had claimed he threw a ball like a girl. So he’d led his mom out in the front yard, jammed a baseball glove on her hand, and said, “Look, I’m never going to be good at this, okay? I just need you to teach me how not to suck.” So it wasn’t like Fowler had to worry about him treating her like she had leprosy just because she’d committed the worst sin an officer could commit. But he was also not exactly someone you’d expect to keep quiet after a firefight — even if, as he’d said, he’d been too far away from Beale to see what had happened. Still, for a good twenty minutes they strained and encouraged each other toward some objective that had nothing to do with Beale. She opened the door to let in a breeze. Pulowski was squatting on his haunches, thumbing through the back issues of The Kansas City Star , and when she walked back past him, she rubbed his scalp offhandedly, as if stealing something.

“So what do we do next?” he asked.

She sat on her bed, unbuttoned her blouse, and stripped apart the Velcro on her shoulder brace. “I don’t know, Dix. You can tell me we’re gonna find him someplace.”

“You don’t really think he’s alive?”

She took a long, deep breath. “You can’t not think that,” she said.

He tucked his chin against his chest. “Look, what you’ve got to realize is that this is just a bad accident. It just fucking feels bigger than that, okay?”

“You’re kidding me,” she said. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

“It’s true,” Pulowski said. “You think you’re in the middle of some life-crushing, horrible event. Losing a soldier is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a platoon leader.” When he said this, she felt an electric stab through her entire body, as if it were the first thing he’d said that was true. “Okay? I agree. But that’s not the same as saying you’re to blame. It was Colonel Seacourt’s idea to set those cameras up. I was the one who asked your platoon to take me outside the wire. And your sergeant was the idiot who charged into that building — and got himself shot. Or whatever happened in there.”

Here was his buzz, coming back. The problem was, she had asked herself all the same questions. Why hadn’t she been there? If she had been there, couldn’t the same thing have happened to her? What would it be like if it was happening to her?

“I should’ve gotten in the building sooner,” she said.

“We were getting shot at,” Pulowski said.

She dropped her head back. “We were all getting shot at.”

“And you told us specifically not to go into that building without a full team,” Pulowski said. “Didn’t you do that? Wasn’t that the case? Okay, so that was ugly. That was something I never want to see, and I hope I live long enough to forget about it, but I am not going to sit here and let you destroy yourself because you didn’t follow Beale into doing what was obviously a stupid thing.”

“You knew that,” Fowler said. “You knew that was a stupid thing.”

“Sure as fuck turned out that way.”

She saw the flinch, the darting way his eyes shifted to the dingy trailer window, a quick grope of his armpit. “How were you so sure?” she asked.

“What difference does it make?”

“Because the shooter”—Fowler pointed at the trailer’s ceiling—“was on the roof. We missed it. I missed it. But Beale saw it. Beale was trying to protect me, and my soldiers, a twenty-eight-year-old sergeant—”

“Oh, come on. You are not going to—”

“A twenty-eight-year-old sergeant,” Fowler said, rising to her feet, “who risks his life to help my team, and meanwhile I’m lying around inside my Humvee, farting around on the radio—”

To her shock and surprise, as she reached this crescendo, Pulowski laughed in her face. “Oh, man, that is some desperation, Fowler. What do you want me to do? You want me to take the blame? What do you think would’ve happened if I had gone in after Beale?”