Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“Fuck,” Harris said warmly. “Lying’s practically the job description.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How much do you make?” Harris asked. He handed the folder of papers back to her across the table.

“What?”

“You heard me.” He jabbed a finger at the paperwork. “You show up and claim you want my approval to make me your beneficiary. What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, cool, I’m your beneficiary’? Because it doesn’t feel cool to me. Imagine I gave you some paperwork whose primary takeaway was that my job put me at risk of being dead —”

“Forty a year,” she said. It had never been an embarrassing number to die for until now, sitting on the terrace of an ice rink, in the middle of what appeared to be an urban shopping center — tall office buildings looming around, a fifty-foot Douglas fir set out amid brightly painted nutcrackers — watching Harris raise his pale eyebrows in a wince.

“There’s good benefits,” she said, trying to make a joke out of it. She reached under the table and touched his knee. “If I make captain before I bite it, you’ll get an extra bump. Sorry, sorry—” She waved her hands as Harris reared back. “Look, the paperwork is just a technicality. Nothing is going to happen to me. I got a good team. I came out because I wanted to see you. The only real thing I need is your address.”

“You know what’s great about the mortgage industry?” Harris pushed the papers back without writing anything. “No team. Straight percentage. Don’t have to worry about anyone walking away.”

“I didn’t walk away from you, Harris.”

Harris assaulted the pocket of his suit and retrieved a pack of Camels — one of the few habits he’d picked up from their father. Despite his last jab, he seemed mollified by her decision to frame the paperwork as a ruse. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe running a platoon in Iraq will be a good educational experience for you. Come back down to earth with the rest of us fuckups. Provided you survive.”

Fowler laughed, genuinely this time. “Oh, come on, Harris! Jesus Christ, talk about the Fowler morality hour. Next you’re going to be telling me that you want to join Greenpeace and vote for fucking Kerry. I’m sorry. For bleeding hearts, I know plenty of officers who’ve got you covered. Along with about half the guys in my platoon.”

Harris seemed mildly surprised at this. “Well, that’s fucking great. I don’t know, does it improve things when you know you’re doing something stupid?”

“Depends on how you define stupid.”

“Did Rachel run over our ‘Thank You for Your Service’ plan when you came in?”

“I rent,” Fowler said.

“Well, at least you’ve got some sense,” Harris said.

“Yeah?” Fowler said. “What’s so bad about what Rachel offered?”

This was the Harris that she remembered. In the old days, she’d imagined his arguments like a snare. Fowler was always trying to defend something — school, grades, not getting stoned at three p.m. — that put her in the position of sounding impossibly square, impossibly naïve. The more she tried to avoid being pushed into that position (who didn’t recognize that there were arguments against going to school, who didn’t know the world wasn’t fair?), the angrier Harris got and the more he’d argue, until finally she’d step into the snare. Once it happened, she imagined a loop circling around her ankle and her body being dragged suddenly upward into the air by a bent tree, until she dangled helplessly upside down, so that Harris could lecture her on her stupidity.

“First of all,” Harris said, leaning forward in his seat, “how much of a loan did she say she could set you up with? Three bills? Yeah? And how the fuck are you going to fulfill a mortgage payment on three bills while making forty grand a year? The answer is you’re not. And we don’t even care if you do. We’re going to sell that thing, securitize it, and it’s out of our hands. You guys, the blacks, and the Latinos — our triumvirate of morons. And do you know what you all have in common? You all are stupid enough to believe that you actually deserve something. Because you’re good Americans. Because you like to feel that you’re morally superior. Hey, I’m a good soldier. Hey, I’m going off to war to save my country! Aren’t I awesome! Don’t I deserve to be thanked? No! You volunteered to get screwed. Okay? And at some level, you know that.”

Fowler relaxed back into her chair. She felt some guilt for having egged Harris on, but there was also a certain relief, proof that her brother was the person she’d claimed he would be — especially for Pulowski, who’d swung up to the boards beside them, close enough that he’d likely overheard the whole thing. No hope here. Nothing to see.

“You guys coming out?” Pulowski said, tugging at the wrist of his right glove with his teeth. “You pay for the skates, you gotta skate. Come on, now, it isn’t possible for either one of you to be worse than me.”

Harris’s green eyes flitted between the two of them, as if an ally were the last thing he’d expected. “We’re having a conversation,” he said.

“That’s not what it sounds like to me,” Pulowski said. “What it sounds like to me is that you are passing off garden-variety, bullshit MSNBC skepticism as actual opinion. You’re going to have to do better than that or I’m going to have to start thinking that Fowler here may have actually fucked up your childhood as badly as she imagines.”

“Pulowski is one of those bleeding hearts I was talking about,” Fowler said. “He’d probably agree with you on the whole volunteering-to-get-screwed thing.”

“Maybe,” Pulowski said. “But, hey, going to Iraq isn’t any more ridiculous than lecturing people on the ways of the world because you’re making eighty grand a year selling mortgages. If that. Imagining that somehow you’re not getting used. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, slick. Where do you think you stand in the fucking pecking order? You are right there on the bottom with the rest of us idiots. We’re all getting used.”

“Yeah, well, at least I’m not going to get killed while it’s happening,” Harris said.

“And if you were going to get killed, who’d you want to be with?”

“I wouldn’t want to get killed at all.”

“ Now you’re making some sense, dude,” Pulowski said. He clopped over to their table on his skates, his pants smeared with ice chips. “Fortunately”—he stuck his hand out to Harris, waggling his fingers, as if to pull him from his seat—“getting killed is not a risk while skating. The only risk is looking like an idiot, which, you know, comparatively isn’t any worse than, say, stealing some asshole’s car.”

The entire argument embarrassed her. Even if she agreed with some of Pulowski’s points, the car issue was supposed to be buried territory between herself and Harris — his job to bring it up, his job to apologize, since who else in the universe other than Pulowski would claim that somehow stealing a car wasn’t wrong? And yet here was Pulowski defending her by using language, principles, and ideas that seemed every bit as bleak as Harris’s. So far as she was concerned, the snare was still wrapped around her foot and she was dangling up in the air, battered by both of them now — though Pulowski’s argument was being made in her favor, which counted for something, at least.

“I’ll go with him,” she said. She stood, a bit wobbly, and took her brother’s hand.

“You’ve got to keep your weight forward ,” Pulowski said. He gave her a sly look that said, Forget the argument. This is going better than you think. “Don’t lean back. You just kind of glide and push. Just focus on what’s ahead .”