Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“I don’t know,” Fowler said. “I guess, when we were back at Riley, I used to imagine I’d be dead in sixty seconds if I ever came out here at all. Like it’d be the surface of the moon or some real bleak thing—”

“Who says it ain’t?” Beale asked.

Fowler punched her driver in the shoulder, then swiveled around, a plastic bottle of Mountain Dew clutched in her right fist. “Don’t listen to Beale, he doesn’t know shit. And forget McKutcheon’s doubts about your camera system — I appreciate you asking us along, okay? It took some balls to do that. Not a crazy amount of balls, ’cause we’re gonna be fine. But some balls, a decent amount of balls. Pulowski on patrol. That’s high speed. High speed.” She reached back and hit his knee with her fist. “Trust me — McKutcheon’s wrong on this one. You did the grown-up thing.”

This was less a take than a Disney fantasy. Doubt was the core principle of the camera system, whose batteries, encoder boxes, and D-link switches were stowed beside him on the Humvee’s backseat. Doubt had been the point — that and staying the hell away from places like the Muthanna intersection, where they were headed currently.

“You know where I saw a lot of grown-ups while I was on leave?” He dug his hands out from his crotch and laid them tentatively atop his thighs. “Malls.”

“Funny, that’s not where I would have gone.”

“You wanna know specifically what I thought about? I thought about all those women — or not just women, all those people, sucking up designer ice cream. Back there walking around Nordstrom’s where their biggest concern is, I don’t know, buying panties, and you’re”—he gestured out the window—“here. Doing this.”

Fowler blew air out past her lower lip and turned to him with a wrinkled grin. “Beale can get you all the panties you want at the PX.”

“Thongs,” Beale grumbled. “I like thongs.”

“He’s very adult,” Fowler said.

“Yeah,” Pulowski said. “Well, you know, hey, I’m just saying I shouldn’t have blamed you for this mission. I’m sorry. It’s taking me a while to get back in the groove.”

Speaking of easy takes. This, he understood, was where he was having problems adjusting, where he felt out of step and quavery, like some newborn colt, in the face of Fowler’s perkiness. Hadn’t he dumped this woman four weeks ago, right before he’d gone on leave? And now, five days after he’d come back, he’d asked her to help him install his cameras at the Muthanna intersection. The old Fowler would’ve had a take on that kind of hypocrisy. And if that wasn’t enough, what had he called her? A “cow-eyed innocent.” Because here’s the thing he hadn’t said about the women at the mall: fucking beautiful creatures. Coeds, with nails done and dainty flip-flops on their feet. Legs as trim and taut as an airplane fuselage. Are you single? If you’re asking, I am. Oh, yes, I am free. And also not stupid, not chained down to a war that you could already tell was about as popular as a canceled Lifetime series — and so his honesty with Fowler had been a form of fairness, as he’d seen it. If he was totally direct and honest that he still wouldn’t be getting back with her even if she helped him bring the cameras out to Muthanna, well, then it was on her if she was stupid enough to take the mission anyway.

But this Fowler, the Fowler whom he’d expected to be angry and bitter with him, instead turned in her seat and chortled. “There it is! You hear that, Beale? You two are the worst! The worst motherfucking malcontents I’ve ever seen!”

“Malcontent?” Beale said. “Is that show still on TV?”

“Fox, I think,” Pulowski said.

“Malcontent in the Middle pretty much describes every soldier in all of Iraq, if you’re talking about how people think this place ain’t worth a shit.”

“Aw, fuck!” Fowler said, beating the roof of the Humvee with her fist. “Here we go. I can see it now: one compliment to these guys, and they shit the bed immediately. Come on, Beale, bring it on!”

“Maybe this McKutcheon’s the first reasonable dude we met,” Beale said.

“Oh, shit! Yes! That’s right!” Fowler shouted. Though it seemed as if Beale was directly contradicting her, she took a surprising pleasure in this. “I’m sorry, Pulowski, I am completely wrong about this thing. We are fucked. We are undeniably fucked. We got no chance. We’re losing. All the dead people are dead now for no reason at all and every fucking lick of work we’ve done in this place is total crap. Let’s all be McKutcheon. Let’s all sit on our ass and complain about how shit is broken. Life sucks, war is bad — what a genius concept! What an incredible insight!”

It was, maybe, possibly the closest thing he’d ever heard from her in the way of a semi-decent speech, a rallying cry — surprising only in that it was delivered in the negative, a mockery of what not to be, rather than a statement of belief. Even so, as he listened to Fowler’s voice, he felt a burbling in his throat, a buzzing clot of emotion that stuck there uncomfortably. “What about the Iraqi you took down?” Pulowski said, trying to resist this. “In the war-is-bad category?”

Fowler checked her mirror in silence. This too was different.

“You know what the colonel did to the Muthanna intersection after it got hit?” Fowler said, pivoting around again in her seat. “Nothing. Totally abandoned. Go on, Beale, take us through Muthanna. Let’s go in the front door like we own the place.”

He’d seen the bombed Muthanna intersection twice: once on a flat-screen television beside the Camp Tolerance chow line, which normally showed poker tournaments, and once back in Tennessee sitting in his mother’s living room on leave — the grainy column of black smoke, the evacuated soldiers, half dressed, some down to their underwear. But it had mutated over time — after the details about the deaths of the two soldiers had come out — into something more organic. The bombing at Muthanna was the thing that skittered and scratched inside his brain when a warm gust of breeze touched his cheek, or he picked the paper up off his mom’s lawn, or he drove past his high school — anytime that he relaxed back into the ease that was normal life, there it would be, even if what had happened to those soldiers had nothing to do with him. Even if the only thing more ridiculous than getting killed at a traffic control point, at a completely unimportant intersection, was Fowler’s pigheaded insistence that this kind of ridiculousness needed to be stamped out or solved in some way. He’d said as much to Fowler — hell, he’d dumped her for that, basically — and, despite her compliments, he worried that she had brought him here to shame him, so he made an effort to keep a hard expression on his face and especially not to show fear. “I mean, okay, so the barracks don’t look too good,” he said, peering out the window at the crumpled slabs of concrete where the soldiers had stayed. “But it’s not … well, it’s not completely insane. I mean, look, what’s that?” He craned his head so that he could see through the windshield. “There’s people out, lots of traffic. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

The worst part had been the feeling he’d had before he’d separated from Fowler, the premonition that he was going to do something cowardly and that he was powerless to stop it or make it change. And this was it. Forgetting his resolution, believing that maybe, in Fowler, there was something very, very serious he’d missed. “So tell me, where are the bad guys?” he asked. “What is it I don’t see?”

“Same thing we don’t see,” Fowler said. He noticed that her tone had turned grave, respectful — though not frightened — and that she and Beale were upright in their seats, scanning both sides of the street that they’d now entered, while patting the … what was it? a broken shackle?… that Beale had welded to the roof, one, two, three, some ritualized version of a handshake between themselves and the Humvee.