Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“All this stuff?” he asked.

“Well, sir,” she said, “everything that belongs to our company. Of course, I’m not going to be bringing my truck. Or any of the other civilian vehicles you see here.”

“And why the hell not?” Masterson asked. “If I was the unit movement officer, I’d sure as hell pack up my truck. Maybe strap on a couple of ATVs.”

“I guess, you know, I could think about it,” Fowler said, squinting and surveying the motor pool, happy to play along with Masterson’s banter. “Those railcars do carry a lot of weight.We could probably figure out how to add a little old two-ton pickup. It’d be like the cherry on top.”

She was well aware that her answers had gone on too long, that she’d been geeking out on details — exactly the kind of thing that Beale tended to hate.

“Fascinating,” Masterson said. “Fascinating stuff, Lieutenant. Nothing like Army logistics, huh?” He gave a sideways glance at his lieutenants, who might have been derisive, but when his expression returned to meet Fowler, it seemed harmlessly amused. With her, not at her. “Keep it up,” he said. “I’m sure you’re doing just great.”

* * *

Inside the hangar, she found McWilliams driving a forklift with a cigarette clenched between his teeth while Beale balanced on the lift’s front tines, clutching a half-inflated basketball against his chest. “Let’s go, White Chocolate!” McWilliams shouted. “Throw it down!” Immediately the glow of Masterson’s words curdled — he hadn’t been complimenting her. He’d been laughing at the goofballs under her command. Like Beale, who at the moment clutched the ball against his overly ample belly, as McWilliams steered him toward the basketball rim that had been erected at the hangar’s end. Fowler judged that he had never dunked — or even probably played organized ball. It was a fantasy. A dream. By then, still hooting and hollering — and being too stupid to notice that their commanding officer was present — McWilliams had swung the unsteady Beale, with his bright red hair and his flushed face, by the basketball hoop, and Beale, setting up for his dunk, slipped at the last minute and came up short, the ball jamming against the rim, and the entire basket tipping over, its metal pole banging against the hangar floor with an enormous thongg! “Beale? McWilliams?” she shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?”

McWilliams, at least, seemed mildly ashamed of himself. He was high-cheekboned, with long sideburns, the top of his crew cut platinum blond — a pretty boy with rough and brutal edges, a fairly heavy drinker, but not a soldier troubled by any grand illusions of what he might be. “Um, shooting hoops, ma’am?” he said. Beale, however, was another matter. Even if he wasn’t what you’d consider an athletic specimen, Beale was at once bigger and more boyish. And the smirk on his face — he’d pulled his upper lip down over his teeth, his green eyes bright — destroyed every good feeling Fowler had taken from her encounter with Masterson. “You think that’s funny?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” Beale said. “Nothing is ever funny. We know that.”

“Did you see Captain Masterson walking through here? Do you think he was particularly impressed with watching you play grab-ass?”

“No, ma’am,” Beale said sullenly.

“Because I was just out front talking to Captain Masterson and he was telling me how much he appreciated the work we’re doing here.”

She immediately regretted admitting her pride in this, seeing the ripple of amusement that passed over Beale’s features. “I’m glad to hear it,” Beale said.

“Are you?” she asked. “Because I don’t know about you, Beale, but I take some pride in what I do. This is my platoon. I am not embarrassed to be organized. I am not embarrassed to do things right. That’s why we’re here. And if you don’t think that this job is important enough to take seriously, then why don’t you go right up the chain of command and check? Ask Captain Hartz if he doesn’t care if we do things right. Ask Captain Masterson. Ask the colonel. And what they’re going to tell you is that the Army is not about acting cool. It’s about getting the job done. It’s about being precise. It’s about completing your mission, okay? You get no points for style.”

* * *

A fantasist, a dreamer. That’s what Beale was. Somebody imitating what it meant to be a soldier — Pulowski had been right about that, at least. Not long after Beale had been assigned to her platoon, she’d met his mother at a battalion-wide “family weekend” picnic on post. Beale had been off playing horseshoes and smoking a cigar and Fowler had sat in the wilted food tent with his mother — a small, fretful woman with ragged blond hair, dressed in jeans, with tiny, oddly delicate ballet slippers on her feet. What it was that caused this woman to begin speaking so frankly about her son, Fowler couldn’t say. Maybe it was a warning, or maybe Beale’s mother had believed that this was information that could be exchanged only female-to-female, as if Fowler’s sex put her more in the category of a chaplain, rather than of Beale’s boss. Whatever it was, the woman had begun a vague discussion of her son’s childhood that quickly found its focus in her ex-husband and the effect his departure had on Beale. Her son had been a risk taker ever since. And she had always, in some ways, thought that Carl’s interest in joining the service (this was how she’d phrased it, as if the word “Army” frightened her too much to say) had been in a sense a way for him to find another father, or at least a different series of fathers — first his high school Army recruiter, then the sergeant who’d put him through basic. And that (so Beale’s mother said) Carl had been deeply disappointed, after his vocational aptitude test, that he’d graded out as a fuel handler, rather than infantry. Meaning, Fowler knew, he’d scored incredibly poorly. So , she had thought, giving the woman her best party smile, in other words, your son is a reject.

Traditionally, a platoon sergeant was supposed to be a father figure for the men, not to mention a bridge between them and a rookie lieutenant like herself. Having daddy issues appeared to be a bad ingredient for either job; so far, rather than learning from Beale’s supposed wisdom and experience, she’d felt nothing but impatience at his immaturity — he was like a stuck wheel on a shopping cart, causing her whole platoon to veer and shift in inexplicable ways. Like now, when, instead of sulking after she’d yelled at him, Beale instead became mysteriously generous, offering two or three times to get the gear all out for her, even suggesting that she go get lunch while he took care of the rest. Or at least it seemed like he was being generous — like maybe she was making progress — until she dragged out the crate of shackles that she’d stored against the wall and began to inventory them. The box was supposed to hold eighty-seven shackles, each nearly impossible to replace. She counted only fifty now. “Beale, come here for a second,” she said. “McWilliams too. You got any explanation for this?” she asked, nodding to the box.

“It’s a box of shackles,” Beale said. But his smirk was missing.

“You got a better answer, McWilliams?”

“No, ma’am,” the private said, looking at his boots.

“So you have no idea why there are fifty shackles in this box, instead of eighty-seven? Which is how many there were this morning?”

Beale flinched and swiveled his shoulders, as if he couldn’t believe he was going to be called to the canvas for something so trivial.

“What, you don’t care about thirty-seven shackles?” Fowler asked.

“Doesn’t seem like the biggest loss in the world to me.”