Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

Fowler reached into a cooler, pulled a can of Busch Light, opened it, and set it on a cutting board, the circular top of a cable spool that appeared to be serving as a cook space beside the grill. “You can either hold the can or hold the bird,” Fowler said, nodding at the three chicken carcasses that Aunt Carla had given them.

He picked up a bird. It felt clammy in the warm November air.

“And?” he said.

Fowler cracked the beer and assumed an odd position, half in a crouch, holding the can with both hands. “And put it on here,” Fowler said.

“Put it on there,” he said.

“Put it on there.” While he stood there blinking, examining the chicken, turning it over in his hands, Fowler watched him dryly. “Where the hole is, Pulowski,” she said. “Come on, you ought to know how to do this.”

Pulowski chose to hold the bird. It was not exactly the kind of thing he could’ve imagined doing with his college girlfriend, Marcia Widemann, in the backyard of her parents’ Tudor in Bucks County. No head-tilt or coquettish smile as she worked the Busch Light up into the chicken’s chest cavity. Instead, her features, her slightly charcoal-smeared cheeks — there was a war paint element that suited her — were simply open, neutral, her eyes slightly widened and her brown forehead tweaked as if to admit her awareness of the possible sex jokes on hand, and also to suggest that he move on to better material. “You got a better recipe?” Fowler asked.

“I might have gone with chicken piccata,” Pulowski said. “Make a little roux to go with it. Maybe grill some peppers.”

“Oh, we’re a cook now.”

“I know how to read a cookbook,” Pulowski said. “Although I have never personally read about Busch Light chicken in a book — but hey, maybe it’s like a family tradition? Something passed down through your history?”

He’d almost said mother — that was the one person whose picture he noticed wasn’t anywhere in the house — and he felt a slight tightening in the air. Steer clear, keep it light , he told himself. No need to get involved in a family mess . He had definitely clear memories of his own father, in the house they’d lived in before the divorce, but his mother had moved almost immediately — a good choice, in his opinion. Leave the past in the past. Something his parents had agreed on, anyway. Nothing absolutely had to be permanent. “What, you don’t like family traditions?” Fowler said.

Politeness. That was the word he would’ve used to summarize and quantify nearly all of his failures with women, all his faults. There had been Betsy Greyson, with whom he had spent one terrifically awkward evening at the Clarksville Country Club, on pasta night, very politely ignoring the fact that Betsy had at least three times told her parents that he would be “following in his father’s footsteps” into medical school. Also a trip to Bucks County with Marcia Widemann: a Kappa, a member of the student senate, an alternate on the cheerleading team. Oh, God, he’d been polite to Marcia Widemann in her yoga pants and her ballerina flats. Polite enough to spend an entire weekend at her parents’ house in Bucks County, not having sex. Polite enough not to “mind” as Marcia also invited her “good friend” from high school out to lunch, while Pulowski played eighteen holes of golf with her dad. Polite enough that he did not mind getting smoked by Mr. Widemann to the tune of two hundred dollars, and polite enough — so perfect, so polite — that he’d merely nodded in agreement when Mr. Widemann had shown him the picture he’d taken with Dick Cheney at a Rotary Club luncheon. Polite enough not to dispute the heroic motives that Mr. Widemann attributed to him, while beating the living crap out of him on every tee, all of which Pulowski had been too polite not to accept.

But of course he was not polite, not really. Back in the kitchen, when Fowler had hung her head and silently submitted to Aunt Carla’s stupidity, he definitely hadn’t felt that way. “There’s a difference between family and family traditions.”

“Such as?”

“Such as you could serve chicken piccata to your family even if it wasn’t a tradition and it would taste okay,” he said. “Or you could stop letting a battleax like Aunt Carla intimidate you. What’s she got on you anyway? You murder somebody?”

Fowler’s legs had a tethered musculature, the long curve of her thigh muscles tapering and gathering in above her knee. In shorts and bare feet — Pulowski gave a brief thanks for the unseasonably warm weather — this was visible in a way it never was in her ACUs, along with the strange, dolphin smoothness of her skin. As she knelt, cupping her hands about the brim of her ball cap and peering in at the charcoal, her pale, untanned soles peeled up from her flip-flops, revealing a line of tendon that extended from the ball of her foot to the heel. “Your parents are separated, right?”

“Divorced. My dad’s passed away.”

“So how happy were you when he left?”

“I wasn’t thrilled about it.” He could feel where the conversation was going. Somehow this was really about her brother. If there was one thing he should know better than to bother with in this relationship, it was this missing brother of hers.

“Did you talk to him much?” Fowler asked.

“Nope.”

“And you joined ROTC because you didn’t want to take any of his money to go to school, right?”

“Fucking stupidest decision of my life, but yeah.”

“Why was that a stupid decision?”

The answer to this was that if he hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t be in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, about to go to Iraq. But he also wouldn’t be standing here with Fowler. “Because he is an independent person. Because he didn’t have some kind of special responsibility to stay married to my mom if he didn’t want to stay married. I mean, I didn’t like it, necessarily — but that’s not a good enough reason not to take his money.” By now they both knew this was a parallel commentary, heading off any attempt Fowler might make to beat herself up about her brother. Or at least he knew it.

“Still, you told him to piss off,” Fowler said.

“That’s my right too. He’s got a right to bag a hot nurse and move down to Florida before he kicks it. And I got a right to be an idiot and join ROTC.”

“Yeah, well, that was pretty much my mom’s theory. Which was a nice one for her, but it didn’t work out too good for the rest of us.”

“So what’s that got to do with anything? You stayed. Your mom didn’t. What the fuck right does Carla have to be riding your ass?”

“I didn’t stay. Not completely.”

“Which is exactly what she’s jealous of,” Pulowski said.

“No, she doesn’t think that I’m holding up my end of the bargain,” Fowler said. “I should’ve stayed back, taken care of my brother. If I had, he’d be here.”

They fixed the other two chickens and got them on the grill, a short, uneasy truce, during which Pulowski evaluated the backyard of the Fowlers’ place. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call poverty-stricken, but it also wasn’t something you’d see out back of a doctor’s house in Clarksville, or Bucks County. An unpainted chicken coop. The metal remnants of a clothesline. Bare and severe-looking, purely functional, the kind of place most people wanted to escape. The same went for the backhanded comments about Fowler’s “disapproval” back in the living room, any fool could see that. Except Fowler, who seemed oddly vulnerable around her family, unarmed, eager to please … if not wounded already. And what had he done in her defense? Been polite.

“What the hell kind of bargain is that?” he said, deciding to press the argument. “All the guys sit around and watch the Lions game, Carla and her mommy cohort take over the kitchen, you work all week training fucking Beale, and—”