Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“What’s the DRIF?” Pulowski’s mother asked. “I was married to an Army surgeon, so I’m used to the acronyms, but that’s a new one for me.”

“The acronym is really DRRF,” Fowler said, with the first real confidence she’d displayed in the conversation — much to Pulowski’s satisfaction. “What that means depends on who you’re talking to. The colonel translates it as Deployment Ready Reaction Field. That’s where we get our stuff ready to be loaded onto railcars. But it’s also a state of mind. So we leave an R out and call the whole thing the DRIF.”

“Sounds even worse than OIF,” Pulowski’s mother said. She squatted down with her tote and began to examine the ruck that Fowler had unpacked.

“One or two?” Fowler asked.

“I don’t know. Any number.”

“Or DFAC,” Pulowski said.

“My ex-husband used to talk about the NBFC zone,” Pulowski’s mother said.

“No bullshit from civilians,” Pulowski clarified.

“He was a surgeon at Fort Campbell,” Pulowski’s mother said. “We used to call him the Dr. Ratched of the OR. Very schedule-driven person. Rule-oriented, big fan of the acronym. One of the things he liked best about the Army was that its rules kept everything from being messy. But of course things are messy, and the best things are always messy — or at least that’s what I’ve always believed.”

“So I’ve heard,” Fowler said.

“Have you?” Pulowski’s mother said. “From where?” A coy smile there, his mother’s best.

“Not from me,” Pulowski assured her. “Excellence, strictness, and clarity are my buzzwords. Superb soldiering. Honor your country. Organization before oneself. Fowler knows all this. You’ve seen my dominant scores at the rifle range?”

But they were already working, dragging over and unzipping Fowler’s ruck, which he knew from experience would be at least as poorly organized and overstuffed as Beale’s, and had already forgotten him. Of course, he could have helped Fowler repack her gear more efficiently. And he would’ve recommended that she just throw away Beale’s extra stuff. He’d told Fowler a thousand times that she needed to think about herself more. She might have been excellent at strapping tanks onto railcars, but her skills at personal organization — her skills at personal life in general — had always been suspect. Naturally, she’d refused his aid.

But if there was going to be somebody who helped Fowler repack her ruck other than himself, it was his mother, who after all had taught him all of his tricks. Tuck your socks inside your shoes. Fold everything, even your underwear. Don’t forget your floss and toothpaste. Keep all your liquids in a plastic bag. They were talking together, the two women, crouched in the center of the basketball court, Fowler’s watch cap and his mother’s short black bob nearly touching, pyramided over the two rucks. His mother was unpacking all the zip-locks and bags of baby wipes that she had longed to give to him, and gently, with Fowler’s serious and mute attention, explaining how to best fold a pair of panties. He would go off and get some coffee. Then he would climb up in the stands and get his own ruck and bring it down and put it in the pile that Fowler had assembled for her platoon, so they could ride together on the flight to Kuwait. And then, when he came back, after his mother had had about twenty minutes alone with Fowler — in his estimation that was all she’d need to repack her entirely — he’d stick with the jokes, whatever it took. He felt as confident as he’d felt in months, maybe ever in his lifetime. He’d made good choices; he’d done the right thing. His mother’s worry was gone; Fowler was getting a little mothering. And he couldn’t imagine a situation that he couldn’t get out of, not if he used his head, kept Fowler out of trouble, and refused at every moment to take even one fucking second of this entire mission seriously.

Nothing is embarrassing unless you decide it’s embarrassing. That was the Pulowski-ism that Fowler recited as she pushed past the Christmas tree that guarded the Echo Company offices. If she had been Pulowski instead of herself, she wouldn’t have been here at all: there was too much work to do, and she herself wasn’t even packed yet, and she had paperwork piling up all over her apartment, leave requests, uniform requisitions, billeting forms, travel documents that were going to be needed to get her soldiers on the plane. And yet, here she was, ever the good girl, ever the eager beaver, unstacking the boxes that she’d bought on Captain Hartz’s desk and opening the first with a flourish, as if it contained nothing less important than the holy grail.

“We’re under budget,” she said.

“Well, that’s, I guess, good?” Captain Hartz leaned over the large bright pink container and slipped on his reading glasses and squinted, as if reading the fine print of a diesel order. Then he pinched the shoulders of the dress inside, slowly drew it out of the box, and, as if he were imitating something he’d seen in a movie, pinned the pleated blue slip of fabric against his torso, gazing with concern at the bump his belly made. “What size did I say she was again?” he asked.

“Fourteen,” Fowler said, from memory. “She’s going to love it, sir. Blue is supposed to be a fairly conservative color. Warm. And Lilly Pulitzer is an extremely traditional brand. Classic cut. Linen. Nice enough to wear to a dinner party but not so showy that she’ll never put it on again.”

All of these were terms that she’d cribbed from an email that Pulowski’s mother had sent, answering her son’s very vague and somewhat inscrutable request: What kind of dress looks good on a fat woman?

“Nice but not too showy,” Hartz said with a bemused smile, depositing the dress gently on top of its ribboned box, as one might a phosphorus grenade. “Whatever in the hell that means. I mean, obviously it means something to you — but Sarah acts like I’m supposed to know it too. Like this is somehow common knowledge, the difference between nice and showy. Is that some sort of code in the language you all speak?”

The dresses were for the annual Christmas dinner at Seacourt’s house on post. The year before, Fowler had drawn staff duty and missed the party, but she’d been new, fresh out of college, and so it hadn’t seemed unfair — until the same thing happened during Seacourt’s golf tournament on the Fourth of July. There were rules against this sort of thing. Very specific rules about not having battalion functions that, say, female officers were mysteriously not invited to. She’d made her awareness of these rules known — not loudly, not angrily, but clearly — by congratulating Hartz on how much fun he and his two male lieutenants must have had. That August she’d received an invitation to the Christmas party, then nothing since. Until this morning, after Hartz had asked her to pick up the dress. “She probably just wanted you to think of it for yourself,” Fowler said. She was folding up the dress and replacing it in the box, trying not to re-create the supposedly female behavior that Hartz was now questioning her about.

Hartz barked a laugh and sat back down on his desk chair, tossing a pen on the table as if it were a token of surrender. “But why? That’s what I don’t get, Emma — what’s with the guessing? If she wants a dress for the party, why doesn’t she go get a dress for the party, instead of waiting until the morning of the party and telling me she doesn’t have anything to wear and so won’t be going? Give me some insight into this. I don’t get it. I never get it. Why do you do that? Why don’t you just come out and say what you want?”