Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“These are sworn affidavits that your son was involved in an insurgent group dedicated to the resistance of the coalition forces. Can you explain to me why these Iraqi citizens would say your son was involved in the insurgency if he was not?”

“Hold on a second here—” Hartz says.

“Why would I do that, Captain?” Masterson says. “These documents are proof that this woman’s son engaged in anti-coalition activity.”

As soon as Fowler sees the affidavits, she knows they’re fake. One is from Masterson’s former interpreter, Faisal Amar, who is conveniently dead. The other is accompanied by a photo of a sheikh she recognizes, a man in his fifties, with a heavily lined face. She and Masterson had interviewed him at the schoolhouse in Bini Ziad the day of Beale’s abduction. He knew nothing about Beale — though at one point he spread his hands, a bargaining man, and explained that perhaps he could be more helpful if the captain told him whom he wished to blame. But the affidavits don’t matter. What interests her is the woman’s reaction to the files, the way her gaze slides contemptuously off to the side. Fowler wants a confrontation, wants her anger, wants the woman to dare to challenge their legitimacy. She leans forward until the woman meets her gaze.

Immediately, the woman speaks, abruptly, haughtily.

“These people are nothing,” the interpreter says.

“Nothing in what way, ma’am?”

“Her son was educated,” the interpreter says. “These are village people. They can’t even write. It’s an insult to bring her this testimony.”

The woman speaks with pure contempt, a clear, high-octane cook-off of hatred, which Fowler finds herself more than ready to meet.

“So you know them, then?” Fowler asks.

“Who is this?” the woman asks.

“Ma’am,” Hartz says, halfway rising, “this is Lieutenant Fowler, one of my subordinates. She was in the field when your son was … received his injuries. She lost three soldiers herself…”

But the woman has no interest in Hartz. She’s locked on to Fowler now.

“My son was deaf,” the interpreter says while the woman, loosening her scarf, pulls her ear as if she intends to rip it off and hand it to Fowler. “He was deaf. He was deaf. You are a woman. You tell me, what kind of animal would kill a man like that?”

“Ho now!” Hartz says. He’s up and out of his chair, sweaty and red, waggling his pale palms in her face, as if he might rub her away. “Let’s take a break, okay?”

“No,” Fowler says. “I’ll speak to that. I shot your son.” Hartz has collared her now, hauling her away. “But if I’m an animal, then maybe you can ask her where she was when I came looking for him. Why don’t you ask her that?”

The interpreter dutifully begins, but Hartz waves him off. “No, no. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” Fowler says. It’s ugly what she’s saying and she knows it, but she can taste Pulowski’s death in her mouth, choking her, and she will say anything to get it out. Even animals have to breathe. “Single males living alone are the people most likely to be targeted by insurgents. That’s the profile. She knows that. You leave a kid out there alone, with no clue what’s happening, nobody to speak for him — ask her what kind of animal does a thing like that.”

* * *

The backyard of Ayad al-Tayyib’s house is a mess of men. The Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team is rigging charges to clear the remaining IEDs from the field so that Fowler and her platoon can safely dig out Beale’s body. She exchanges nods with these men, brief waves. Pulowski’s body is long gone, on the first transport out the night before. Coming through the side yard, she has a couple of flashes of him scrambling away from her, as if she has become a person whom he does not know, or cannot see. It feels like she’s peering through the wrong end of a telescope at a universe from which she had been barred, passport revoked, papers out of date. She goes into the living room to get Eggleston, who’s watching TV. “Eggy, come on,” she says.

“I can’t believe those guys are dead, ma’am,” Eggleston says. The video is of a cricket match, a sport she doubts the sergeant has ever seen before. Or cares about.

They watch it together as a memorial to the dead, the vast glowing park of green space, somewhere in Pakistan. No stranger than the fact that Crawford, McWilliams, and Pulowski have gone away. “You get any intel from the mother?” Eggleston says.

“Enough to make me sick,” she says. She’s moving already to the back of the house, through the parquet-floored hall in front, past a varnished, spindle-legged table, a nice one, whose front drawer has been opened, spilling papers, bills. “Look at this shit. It’s like a fucking country club around here. Fucking lady, you should’ve heard her.” She paws through these bills listlessly, recognizing the stationery, but seeing Crawford’s peppercorn eyes. “Fucking sob story. Calls me an animal for shooting her kid. Meanwhile, she’s fucking sitting around watching cricket while Beale rots in the backyard.”

“That’s bullshit, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

“And then the captain shows her sworn testimony that her son was running with bad guys, and what’s she do? She attacks the witnesses. Hear no evil, fucking see no evil, huh, Eggy? You can’t help people if they act that way.”

Someone had carried down Pulowski’s camera system from the roof while she was away and placed it just inside the front door of the dead man’s house. A cord runs out of a hole Pulowski had bored in the side of one of the Rubbermaid tubs, and up into the hollow base of the camera’s metal stand. She traces it with her finger to the smoked bulb of glass at the curved end. A black glass eye. She stares into it, but it’s just a camera. Unlike Pulowski, it doesn’t flinch or shy away. But his last signal is somewhere inside. “Where are the guys?”

Eggleston jerks his chin, indicating outside.

“How are they holding up?”

Eggleston has a fleshy, baggy face with violet bands beneath the great big hooded globes of his eyes, a face that belongs inside, overfleshed and heavy, like a guy you’d see on a subway in New York City. “Waldorf’s having a hard time with it.”

“Why’s that?” She’s hot with embarrassment. She realizes what it is now. She’s embarrassed at how happy she was to bring Pulowski here. How fucking naïve it was to wish even for a second that they could’ve ever returned to anything.

“He feels like it was his fault that we left the compound. He should’ve stuck with your orders instead of listening to Pulowski.”

“Yeah? And who was the genius who brought Pulowski out? And then left him behind with you guys to whine about some fucking dog he saw on TV?”

Now its Eggleston’s turn to be embarrassed. He shuffles his feet.

“Answer my question, Sergeant.”

“You were, ma’am.”

“So you can tell Waldorf to quit crying about it, then. I don’t have time for everybody to be running around crying today. That’s how you make mistakes.”

It’s hot and still in the dead man’s house. She does not want whatever Eggleston is trying to give. “I do think Pulowski was legitimately trying to help, ma’am,” the sergeant says. “For what it’s worth.”

“Well, it’s not worth very fucking much, Eggy, is it?” She has a little problem with voice control at the end of this. “You tell Waldorf this. Pulowski made the call to go out, not him. I’ve known that guy a long time. I should’ve known he wouldn’t follow orders. He has no concept of orders. I’m sorry he’s dead, but he made the mistake.”

* * *

She finds her platoon outside the north wall of the compound, sitting with their backs against the stone and looking out at the field. There’s a tiny strip of shade along the base of the wall. They are sitting with their heads in the shadow and their boots sticking into the sunlight. Waldorf’s hands cover his face. Dykstra has wrapped his arm around him. Others, like Jimenez, have their eyes closed, trying to sleep. Down below them, in the wheat field, a lieutenant from the EOD Team walks out of the field, away from the abandoned hulks of her Humvee and Eggleston’s Hercules, back toward the compound gate. He carries a great spool of copper wire under his arm, unrolling it as he goes, the wire flashing and gleaming as it bucks and falls into the grass, like a string of fire.