Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“Aw, fuck-all, Jesus Christ, what were we thinking?” Beale was saying. “Get the hell out of there, ma’am. Even if we get this cable through, we’re at the wrong angle to lift this thing.” He was unhappy about the uphill slant of the Hercules.

“Tell him how we can’t do this,” she said to Beale.

“What the fuck you talking about? I’m telling you .”

She couldn’t move anything else so she tried to roll her eyes to indicate the fingers she felt around her wrist, in the dark. “Tell this guy we’re never getting him out,” she said. “Tell him what a lame-ass job we’re going to do, you and me.”

Beale had his hands cupped around his eyes in order to see into the shadow beneath the slab, so his dawning comprehension played out entirely in the tiny expansion of his pupils, the slackening of muscles about his eyes. “We got this!” he shouted abruptly into Fowler’s face. “You’re going to be drinking iced tea in about two seconds, buddy. We’re moving this rock ASAP.”

Her entire platoon had climbed the pile by then and they pried and strained at the top edge of the slab and she pushed the painter cable as far as she could into the darkness until she heard Waldorf shout on the far side of the slab and there was tension on the cable and Waldorf pulled it through, the braided metal slithering between her belly and the slab. The painter cable was too thin to lift the slab itself, so Waldorf hooked it to a chain and then they had to pull that back through, the links grabbing and bumping over her ACU and tearing out her hair, which she tried to deal with quietly, gritting her teeth and letting it pull away. They got five chains beneath the slab this way and she could hear Beale and Waldorf hooking their ends onto the main cable from the Hercules’ winch and Eggleston gunned the Continental diesel in the Hercules’ guts and everything shook, her flashlight rattled in her pocket, the gravel beside her eyes popped like jumping beans. And then she felt the weight lift, and for the first time she was afraid, because if Eggleston dropped it now, she would be dead, but he did not drop it and the slab rose and she scrambled out from under it and the men swung it away on a tether and there was Delta Company’s Lieutenant Weazer, blinking, pale with dust, and Eggleston dropped the slab to one side with a crash.

* * *

That night, Fowler climbed a metal ladder to the roof of the nearest intact building overlooking the intersection, and stopped when she heard voices. Crawford squatted twenty yards away, face illuminated by the radio he’d set up atop a crate; Beale was nearby in the shadow of the roof’s edge. “Any calls?” she asked Beale, as she crawled across the roof to him.

“Usual traffic,” Beale said.

“You ring up Hartz?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No new orders?”

“Captain Happy advises us to stay safe.”

Fowler waited for her eyes to get used to the darkness. They’d spent the entire day making sure the living members of the Artillery Battery got on convoys back to Camp Tolerance, dousing fires, and then searching every single one of the spooky, dust-splashed bunks in the back of the blown-up barracks, checking for other bodies. It ought to have been a depressing detail, but once they’d seen the artillerymen haul Weazer from the rubble, his slender thumb poking up in the air, every empty pocket of rubble felt like a present, a victory, a prize. Her project now was convincing Beale to enjoy this. “So what’s it feel like, being a big war hero?” she said. “Saving a life.”

Bad start. Beale snorted, looked down at his boots.

“Just doing my job.”

“Oh, shit. Oh, no.” She punched Beale in the shoulder. It was like hitting a HESCO barrier that had gotten wet. “Listen to this guy, Crawford. Beale was just doing his job. Saving people. Which is funny, because what I remember from back at Riley was that he never liked this job in the first place.”

“Family Values, man,” Crawford said.

“I’m more worried about his emotional state,” she said to Crawford. “I think he might be depressed. I think he was genuinely fucking worried when Eggleston was listing that slab off of me. Is that true, Beale? Do we need to get you some meds?”

Beale took this in, absorbing something into his lumbering frame — hopefully the good vibe she directed at him beneath the talking. His face had been there, peering in at her, as the darkness closed down on her. She’d known he would’ve stuck his arm in and lost it, just to hold on to her. A fact both stupid and in some ways great.

“You might want to talk to the assholes who set off that bomb,” Beale said, “about what their emotional state happened to be.”

“Probably real disappointed,” Fowler said.

“ Werd ,” Crawford said.

Everything she’d been trying to communicate to Beale, every positive thought about what her platoon could do, might be — not all the bullshit stuff, not the benefits, not the personal glory, not the assholes (like, for instance, Captain Masterson) who told him he was somehow lesser and weaker for being in support rather than infantry, lesser and weaker for having a lieutenant who was a chick, but the good stuff, which she admittedly sucked at defining but knew was there — all of that had appeared in physical form, in the teamwork that had gotten the Hercules atop that pile, lifted that concrete slab off Weazer, and saved his life. A refutation of losing. That was what it felt like.

Three months ago, she might’ve just told Beale, Look, dumbass, this is what I’ve been trying to accomplish. This is what happens if you pull your head out of your ass and follow my advice. But Pulowski had taught her that the direct approach didn’t always work. That it was a poor idea to be so certain about being right.

Instead, she sat with him for a while, waiting it out, leaving silence and some space. He squatted on his heels, his hands flattened on the roof in a strange position, wrist to wrist, as if preparing to climb into the starting blocks for a race.

“Remember those shackles Masterson stole from us?” she asked.

Beale shrugged, as if she were referring to a distant, murky past.

She dug into the flap pocket of her fatigues, pulled out the heavy metal clip. It was solid steel, forged in the shape of a G, thick as her index and middle finger put together, but the hook of the shackle’s lower jaw had been bent, distended.

“That one came off the Hercules,” she said. “That was the one we used to lift the slab. Thought you might want it for a trophy.”

“A bent shackle?” Beale asked. “Oh, that’s nice, LT. Jeez, that’s sweet. Just what I always wanted.” He held it between two fingers, examining the lower part of the shackle, which had bent so much that it was clear they’d been two centimeters away from dropping the slab.

“I thought you might want to give that to somebody. A trophy.”

“Who?”

“I didn’t fucking get one,” Crawford said.

“I don’t know,” Fowler said, in a light tone that she hoped suggested that she knew exactly to whom he might give it. “Somebody who’s hard to impress. Somebody back home who doesn’t understand what you’ve been doing.”

“How about somebody I might want to piss off?”

“Maybe,” she said. “You could go that way.”

* * *

With no lights on at all and the moon still low, the darkness seemed to pulse and crest beyond the edges of the rooftop as if it were a liquid. Beale had gone to bed. She thought it had gone well with him — not perfect, not Eisenhower-worthy. But better. An improvement. They weren’t lacking for food out at the bomb site. Plenty had been brought in during the day and she sat with a pile of chips on a paper plate, staring out over the empty entrance to Muthanna, and thinking oddly of Beale’s father — the one who’d run away, the one who, according to Beale’s mother, he’d been trying to impress by joining the Army. What Fowler had wanted to do, what she’d considered doing, was telling Beale to take that shackle and mail it to his dad, show him what he’d done. Make up his own story, rather than look to somebody else for what his story ought to be.