The Good Lieutenant (10 page)

They had once watched movies here, before Faisal had gotten himself banned. Faisal had always been the better actor, but in the silence that was between them—a silence that Faisal had always accepted better than anybody else—Ayad tottered over to him, imagining a pantomime. What should he act out? A hug? An embrace? Fall to his knees and beg? He paused and squatted before his old friend. Nothing so dramatic; Faisal had never been a fan of sentimentality. Over the past two weeks he'd watched the headlights gradually work their way in, stopping sometimes in a field all night, other times a steady crisscrossing to the south until, two nights ago, a small patrol, two vehicles, had cruised the road outside their gate. They'd stopped, the twinned white lights of reverse blinking on, and jolted up the driveway for a sniff. Then he'd seen Faisal's blue sedan come speeding up, heard an angry shout, and their brights had flared, whitening the walls of his father's house, as the patrol pulled away.

I am afraid I cannot sell the spaceship
, Ayad wrote. He reached across and held Faisal's hand, his expression (he hoped) as grave and deadpan as his friend's had been when he'd built the spaceship.
The world is not prepared for such advanced technology.

Stay here was what he meant. Hide with me.

*   *   *

Pulowski tucked his hands beneath his nuts. He was in the back of Fowler's Humvee; Fowler and her driver, Carl Beale, occupied the front. The thing that he was processing was how much smarter he'd felt in Tennessee. Leafy streets? Regis and Kathy in the morning? A coffee shop called the Ethical Bean? The whole town had seemed a kind of cartoon invitation to irony: Hey, guess what, these people don't care about your soldiering. It crossed his mind that maybe the exact thing that had comforted him about being home was that America seemed
designed
for the easy take: Regis Philbin, clown. New England Patriots, arrogant. Even Bill Moyers, his mother's favorite, didn't do much more than hit gassed-up Republican piñatas off a tee. While Iraq, rolling past Fowler's Humvee window, left him slack-jawed and empty. Looted rows of strip malls. A lot filled with pureed bricks. A string of trash-roofed garages. Then the blocky quad of the University of Baghdad Agricultural College, identified by a neat roadside sign in English. “First time I came out,” Fowler said, pointing to the college, “the thing that surprised me the most was the architecture. For an Arab country, it seems pretty sixties.”

It was the fourth or fifth cheerful thing she'd said to him since they'd left the gate, a fact that made no sense, given how he'd treated her recently. But his nuts tingled anyway, appreciatively. “What were you expecting, minarets?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Fowler said. “I guess, when we were back at Riley, I used to imagine I'd be dead in sixty seconds if I ever came out here at all. Like it'd be the surface of the moon or some real bleak thing—”

“Who says it ain't?” Beale asked.

Fowler punched her driver in the shoulder, then swiveled around, a plastic bottle of Mountain Dew clutched in her right fist. “Don't listen to Beale, he doesn't know shit. And forget McKutcheon's doubts about your camera system—I appreciate you asking us along, okay? It took some balls to do that. Not a crazy amount of balls, 'cause we're gonna be fine. But some balls, a
decent
amount of balls. Pulowski on patrol. That's high speed. High speed.” She reached back and hit his knee with her fist. “Trust me—McKutcheon's wrong on this one. You did the grown-up thing.”

This was less a take than a Disney fantasy. Doubt was the core principle of the camera system, whose batteries, encoder boxes, and D-link switches were stowed beside him on the Humvee's backseat. Doubt had been the point—that and staying the hell away from places like the Muthanna intersection, where they were headed currently.

“You know where I saw a lot of grown-ups while I was on leave?” He dug his hands out from his crotch and laid them tentatively atop his thighs. “Malls.”

“Funny, that's not where I would have gone.”

“You wanna know specifically what I thought about? I thought about all those women—or not just women, all those people, sucking up designer ice cream. Back there walking around Nordstrom's where their biggest concern is, I don't know, buying panties, and you're”—he gestured out the window—“here. Doing this.”

Fowler blew air out past her lower lip and turned to him with a wrinkled grin. “Beale can get you all the panties you want at the PX.”

“Thongs,” Beale grumbled. “I like thongs.”

“He's very adult,” Fowler said.

“Yeah,” Pulowski said. “Well, you know, hey, I'm just saying I shouldn't have blamed you for this mission. I'm sorry. It's taking me a while to get back in the groove.”

Speaking of easy takes. This, he understood, was where he was having problems adjusting, where he felt out of step and quavery, like some newborn colt, in the face of Fowler's perkiness. Hadn't he dumped this woman four weeks ago, right before he'd gone on leave? And now, five days after he'd come back, he'd asked her to help him install his cameras at the Muthanna intersection. The old Fowler would've had a take on that kind of hypocrisy. And if that wasn't enough, what had he called her? A “cow-eyed innocent.” Because here's the thing he hadn't said about the women at the mall: fucking beautiful creatures. Coeds, with nails done and dainty flip-flops on their feet. Legs as trim and taut as an airplane fuselage.
Are you single?
If you're asking, I am. Oh, yes, I am free. And also not stupid, not chained down to a war that you could already tell was about as popular as a canceled Lifetime series—and so his honesty with Fowler had been a form of fairness, as he'd seen it. If he was totally direct and honest that he still wouldn't be getting back with her
even if
she helped him bring the cameras out to Muthanna, well, then it was on her if she was stupid enough to take the mission anyway.

But this Fowler, the Fowler whom he'd expected to be angry and bitter with him, instead turned in her seat and chortled. “There it is! You hear that, Beale? You two are the worst! The worst motherfucking malcontents I've ever seen!”

“Malcontent?” Beale said. “Is that show still on TV?”

“Fox, I think,” Pulowski said.

“Malcontent in the Middle pretty much describes every soldier in all of Iraq, if you're talking about how people think this place ain't worth a shit.”

“Aw, fuck!” Fowler said, beating the roof of the Humvee with her fist. “Here we go. I can see it now: one compliment to these guys, and they shit the bed immediately. Come on, Beale, bring it on!”

“Maybe this McKutcheon's the first
reasonable
dude we met,” Beale said.

“Oh, shit! Yes! That's right!” Fowler shouted. Though it seemed as if Beale was directly contradicting her, she took a surprising pleasure in this. “I'm sorry, Pulowski, I am completely wrong about this thing. We
are
fucked. We are undeniably fucked. We got no chance. We're losing. All the dead people are dead now for no reason at all and every fucking lick of work we've done in this place is total crap. Let's all be McKutcheon. Let's all sit on our ass and complain about how shit is broken. Life sucks, war is bad—what a genius concept! What an incredible insight!”

It was, maybe, possibly the closest thing he'd ever heard from her in the way of a semi-decent speech, a rallying cry—surprising only in that it was delivered in the negative, a mockery of what not to be, rather than a statement of belief. Even so, as he listened to Fowler's voice, he felt a burbling in his throat, a buzzing clot of emotion that stuck there uncomfortably. “What about the Iraqi you took down?” Pulowski said, trying to resist this. “In the war-is-bad category?”

Fowler checked her mirror in silence. This too was different.

“You know what the colonel did to the Muthanna intersection after it got hit?” Fowler said, pivoting around again in her seat. “Nothing. Totally abandoned. Go on, Beale, take us through Muthanna. Let's go in the front door like we own the place.”

He'd seen the bombed Muthanna intersection twice: once on a flat-screen television beside the Camp Tolerance chow line, which normally showed poker tournaments, and once back in Tennessee sitting in his mother's living room on leave—the grainy column of black smoke, the evacuated soldiers, half dressed, some down to their underwear. But it had mutated over time—after the details about the deaths of the two soldiers had come out—into something more organic. The bombing at Muthanna was the thing that skittered and scratched inside his brain when a warm gust of breeze touched his cheek, or he picked the paper up off his mom's lawn, or he drove past his high school—anytime that he relaxed back into the ease that was normal life, there it would be, even if what had happened to those soldiers had nothing to do with him. Even if the only thing more ridiculous than getting killed at a traffic control point, at a completely unimportant intersection, was Fowler's pigheaded insistence that this kind of ridiculousness needed to be stamped out or solved in some way. He'd said as much to Fowler—hell, he'd dumped her for that, basically—and, despite her compliments, he worried that she had brought him here to shame him, so he made an effort to keep a hard expression on his face and especially not to show fear. “I mean, okay, so the barracks don't look too good,” he said, peering out the window at the crumpled slabs of concrete where the soldiers had stayed. “But it's not … well, it's not completely insane. I mean, look, what's that?” He craned his head so that he could see through the windshield. “There's people out, lots of traffic. That's a good sign, isn't it?”

The worst part had been the feeling he'd had
before
he'd separated from Fowler, the premonition that he was going to do something cowardly and that he was powerless to stop it or make it change. And this was it. Forgetting his resolution, believing that maybe, in Fowler, there was something very, very serious he'd missed. “So tell me, where are the bad guys?” he asked. “What is it I don't see?”

“Same thing we don't see,” Fowler said. He noticed that her tone had turned grave, respectful—though not frightened—and that she and Beale were upright in their seats, scanning both sides of the street that they'd now entered, while patting the … what was it? a broken shackle?… that Beale had welded to the roof, one, two, three, some ritualized version of a handshake between themselves and the Humvee.

“Touch it,” Fowler said.

“Touch what?”

“Touch me, touch Beale, give us a little love, Pulowski.”

He reached up, awkwardly, not wanting to undo his shoulder belt, and brushed the backs of their hands with his fingertips.

“That's good,” Fowler said. “That's for Fredrickson and Arthur, who fucking bit it right fucking here. And now, in their honor, we're going to fix this place.”

“Hooah,” Beale said.

*   *   *

The traffic
was
a problem. Fowler could handle the bomb crater, the pile of slag left from the building that had collapsed, but what she hadn't accounted for were the cabs, mini Nissan pickups loaded with melons, overladen buses, hatchbacks with angry-looking men that zoomed around her platoon's vehicles as they pulled into the intersection outside Muthanna. So she pretended that she had. She called the battalion and requested four additional Humvees. She established a security perimeter, her Humvee's .50-cal warning traffic away, then she ordered her platoon to fill the blast hole with gravel and tow away the chassis of the truck that had blown up Fredrickson and Arthur. And what did Pulowski do during these two hours of steady work? Nothing. He slouched around her truck. He unpacked his cameras, fiddled with some wires, and generally acted terrified—which, you know, fine, but so was everybody. It had always been her one weakness, trying to take care of a man who couldn't take care of himself. You told yourself you were going to change things, then you just kept making the same dumb mistake over and over again. It wasn't exactly what she'd imagined when the ROTC recruiting officer, Captain Granger, had shown up at her high school wearing dress greens that had been cut so tight that everyone—including, Fowler had noticed, Miss Simmons, her homeroom teacher—could clearly see his biceps through the fabric.
That
was the kind of officer she'd expected to teach her about life in the Army—energetic, confident, and hard as fucking nails. Instead, she'd gone for the complicated option, the sensitive model, the one that had seemed more interesting, which was how you ended up in a tactical situation that was far more fucked-up than anyone had realized it would be.

More than anything, she resented the way Pulowski had accused
her
of being responsible for this mission the night before. The whole lecture on how she had the free will to say no, as if the connection between them had never existed. Which was a lie. But then again, so were the arguments she'd used to keep her platoon together, functioning, and in the field. It didn't help that she got a call from the TOC, informing her that the reinforcements she'd requested had been diverted to provide security for a tour that Colonel Seacourt was giving that day. Or that, hearing this news, her platoon sergeant, Carl Beale, became increasingly nervous, pacing back and forth, scanning the windows of the nearby buildings incessantly. “Why don't you give me a couple guys, LT,” he said finally, “and let me walk this west perimeter, go in these storefronts? I don't like them.”

Beale had freckles so thick that in places they blended to solid patterns on his cheeks, and a body that resembled, in its doughiness and the flat-footed way his boots creased at the instep, an old-fashioned power hitter gone to seed. They were standing at the fender of Fowler's Humvee, which she'd parked in the center of their work site. Pulowski had stopped for a water break a few meters away. “Stick with the plan, Beale,” she said. “We secure this area, we get the T-walls for the new checkpoint up, then we wait for the extra manpower to go in the buildings and get those cameras installed.”