Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

Another made what sounded like a pig call: Sooey.

Beale responded by getting down on all fours in the snow and rooting around in it with his nose. He pulled up a broken bottle, holding the neck of it between his teeth, and when he emerged this way, snow flecked on his nose and eyelashes, he held up the bottle for display for the soldiers who’d yelled at him and they cheered — though, even with the wind, Pulowski could hear higher notes of laughter. If Beale noticed these, he didn’t show it, but instead pumped his fist and made a show of dropping the bottle directly from his mouth into the bag. “So this is your band of brothers?” Pulowski asked.

“It’s SERE training, buddy,” Beale said. “Closest thing you can get to Ranger training and still be regular Army. All these guys have it.”

“ This is SERE training?”

“Survival, evasion, resistance, and escape, dude.”

“Yeah?” Pulowski squinted. “What part are we working on now?”

“ We aren’t working on shit,” Beale said. “ You are standing there waiting to get ass-raped by a bunch of hadjis.”

“Really? That doesn’t sound like very much fun,” Pulowski agreed. He was slightly bored.

“Hey, to each his own,” Beale said. “But when the ass-rape team comes calling for Carl Beale, Carl Beale intends to have a little training.”

He picked up a second bottle with his teeth and deposited it in the trash bag, much to the enjoyment of the soldiers — one of them was Lieutenant Anderson, judging by his size — at the far end of the field. Then he stood up again and lumbered along beside Pulowski.

“You got a real nervous thing about this ass-raping,” Pulowski said.

“Nervous.” Beale blew air between his lips and shook his head sadly, staring up at the brilliant winter sun overhead. “Nervous. Fuck. You seen the reports we’ve been getting on IED traffic? You seen that shit on YouTube.”

“I seen a lot of shit on YouTube,” Pulowski said.

“Yeah, well, you want to fight the monster, you got to be the monster, dude.”

This was the kind of moment, the kind of argument, the kind of discussion that was not very valuable to have with someone in the Army. In his experience, this was the time you walked away, which he would have done with Beale, except for the fact that he found him funny. “Fowler wants you back.”

“Yeah, well, she was the one who kicked me out.”

“Because you let the captain steal her shackles.”

“She kicked me out because I let the captain steal her shackles,” Beale said. “She kicked me out because I let the captain steal her shackles. Shackles, sir. Fucking shackles.”

They were close enough now to the plywood structure that Pulowski could see it resembled a cross between a deer stand and a boys’ clubhouse. It had two stories and had been constructed out of rough wood studs and plywood walls into which windows had been cut, unglassed and unframed. Up in the shadows of the second floor, Pulowski could see paint cans wrapped with black gauze, like cheap Halloween effigies, attached to a T-shirt stuffed with hay. “Hey, Beale,” Lieutenant Anderson said. “Drop.”

This kind of bullshit was the reason that Pulowski spent as much time as possible avoiding the infantry. It didn’t have to exist, it didn’t always exist, but it could. The main problem that he had with it was his first instinct was always to laugh. “Come on, you don’t need to smoke this guy, Anderson. He’s good. He never did anything to you.”

“He’s good?” Anderson said. “You think he’s good?”

“Okay, what — you want to go with medium? He’s medium?”

Lieutenant Anderson smiled at this joke in a way that seemed to Pulowski clearly learned from movies. The smile that wasn’t a smile. The response he gave wasn’t much more original. “Yeah, well, it is what it is.”

“Maybe it is what it isn’t,” Pulowski said before he could stop himself.

By then Beale had dropped into the snow and was doing push-ups, grunting lightly, and one of Anderson’s subordinates had come over to put a boot beneath his mouth, making kissing sounds and shouting out, Sooey , each time Beale’s mouth touched it. Pulowski could smell Anderson too, smell his heaviness and his weight, and it wasn’t going to be enough, in this particular situation, to simply cancel out his signal, refuse to receive it, and walk away. There was something bad here, he could feel it, whether or not he knew how to translate it exactly, and he wanted somehow to enunciate a different principle. It was the first time he felt absolutely sure of that.

Pulowski withdrew his hand from his pocket and, glad that he was wearing gloves, tossed a lavender wad of satin into the snow at Anderson’s feet.

Anderson lifted a boot in the air, as if he’d stepped in something foul. “What the hell is that?”

“Your underwear,” Pulowski said.

“That true, LT?” one of the nearby soldiers said. “Shit, check that out. You got some fucking downtown taste there, man.”

The soldiers clustered around the tiny wad of lavender, hands on knees, inspecting it, one of them making a joke by poking at it with a stick. Anderson swept off his stocking cap and pushed them away. “Get up and get in my car,” Pulowski whispered to Beale. And then he started to walk backward, eyes on Anderson, who bent down quickly, stuffing the purple tuft of fabric into the pocket of his ACUs.

“There’s more where that came from,” Pulowski said. He was listening for Beale’s retreating footsteps behind him. He hoped he heard them.

“Give it,” Anderson said.

“You want your stuff back, Lieutenant Fowler wants hers. You give us Beale, we walk away. You don’t need to be smoking this guy anyway.”

“Fowler? The fat chick?”

“She says she likes a man in briefs.”

Anderson heaved the football he’d been carrying at Pulowski’s chest and Pulowski tucked a shoulder, so that it glanced off his back — still painfully.

That was the end of his tough-guy routine. He turned and made a break for the Celica, where he had a bag of personal items that they’d stolen from the Delta Company lockers out at the DRIF. Signal officers never did shit like this. In signal processing, the primary goal was to take the analog world and make it something that a machine could understand. Take light bouncing off white snow crystals and make it ones and zeros; take motion and make it pixels. You could store motion, store sound, store position, fold it up inside an equation, then an algorithm, imprint it on a wafer of silicon — and then re-create it, anywhere, on any machine. It was like stealing the world, except safely, cleanly. Nobody ever got hurt, or was actually cold, or got drilled with a football because of a digital file, and so, if you really thought about it clearly, you could see that signal processing was the future — hell, he could probably see this dumbass “secret” field of Masterson’s on Google Earth if he wanted to and, in a way, what you saw there was more real, to more people, than the actual field that he was running through would ever be.

Meaning that signal work did not normally involve cranking the engine of an old Toyota, or stamping the gas pedal and hoping it would catch — and when it did catch, shouting, Fuck, motherfuckerrrr! — and pulling a U-ey through the snowy field while Waldorf circled Fowler’s red pickup around beside him and Fowler herself, standing up in the back, tossed personal items out into the air — baseball caps, toothbrushes, boxers — and Anderson with his huge head and his beetle-black eyebrows high-kneed it down the frozen roadway after them, shouting, Hey, you two fucking worms, get back here. Get back here with my fucking shit, Pulowski. I’m not done with your sweet ass, Beale!