The Good Lieutenant (20 page)

Startled, he glanced up at his mother's face. Their coloring was much the same, pale and paler—but the winter air of central Kansas had dried her skin, causing new wrinkles to appear at the edges of her lips. Now, for the first time, he saw a flush to her cheeks, some twinkle of amusement in her green eyes.

“Sorry?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

“That girl you're looking at, Mr. Dixon Pulowski. Who is she?”

“I wasn't aware that I was looking at anyone in particular,” he said. “Just spacing out.” He spun his finger beside his head to indicate mental confusion.

“Yeah, well, that's about the most intense spacing out that I've ever seen.”

“I've been practicing,” he said.

“I'm talking about that woman, right there,” his mother said, loudly enough that the family in front of them responded with a windy, movie-theater shush.

“Mom—come on,” he whispered, thrusting a chin toward the colonel at the podium, who by then had begun his speech.

Pulowski and McKutcheon had adapted the colonel's speech from four or five other public speeches that McKutcheon had stored on his hard drive. It had seemed standard enough work, sitting up in McKutcheon's office, banging out transitions, trying to find language that would, according to the memo that Seacourt had sent them,
cause us to appear both resolute and certain in our purpose. It is VERY IMPORTANT that these people believe their sons and daughters are heading out on a clearly defined mission that is important to protecting the security of the United States and is beneficial to the Iraqis.

Unfortunately, they'd had to take out the sections in the speech—still good only six months earlier—about protecting the country from WMDs, since the Iraq Survey Group had now delivered their finding that there hadn't been any WMDs. They'd had to remove, by executive order from the DoD, any references connecting the invasion of Iraq to the 9/11 attacks and, given the so-called facts on the ground—including casualty reports that said the coalition forces had so far lost more than two thousand men—they'd had to strike any references to their victory in Iraq, or nation-building, or peacekeeping.

After that, there hadn't been much left, except to focus on reconstruction projects, school-building, and the colonel's intention to return electricity to every family in his area of operations—none of which was likely to happen, given the security intel that Pulowski had seen. Still, a bullshit speech was a bullshit speech. You wrote it and got it done. And if you knew where the bullshit was buried, as he believed he did, you could protect yourself, as he believed he had. Or at least that was how he'd felt until he listened to this speech with his mother and felt her fear and disbelief. And he realized that he had nothing better to tell her, no words that wouldn't make her more afraid.

“We have made a commitment to freedom,” Seacourt was saying. “As a nation and as a people. The men and women that you see in this room, your sons and daughters, are a living, breathing example of that commitment.”

“Good Lord,” his mother muttered. “Who
writes
this dreck?”

The prayer would be coming next. Quickly, before Seacourt could say more, Pulowski bent down and unzipped the tightly packed ruck at his feet. He had bought a present for Fowler just the night before. It was … well, he wasn't exactly sure what to call it. A token of appreciation? For what? For screwing his brains out?

“What would you think of this?” he said to his mother, handing her the cardboard-and-plastic package, in hopes of distracting her from Seacourt's speech. “Like if somebody gave it to you? I mean, presuming you were athletic.”

A double crease appeared in the soft skin of his mother's forehead—a mark that he was always pleased to elicit, though the specific actions that led to its appearance often surprised him. She withdrew her reading glasses from her purse, slipped them on, and squinted first at the pedometer—the brand name, he was now a little embarrassed to realize, was Pedassure—then at Fowler, barely visible over the heads of the family who'd hushed her earlier, a mountainous man and woman dressed in Harley-Davidson T-shirts, surrounding an equally mountainous son with a huge bald skull, whom Pulowski recognized as Lieutenant Anderson, from Delta Company.

“How's your sex life?” his mother asked.

“What?” Pulowski coughed. “Hey, ease up, there, hoss.”

“You mean you didn't buy this for that woman you were staring at?”

“I mean I'm not really up for discussing this with my mother,” he said. “Or anybody around here, for that matter.”

His mother checked her watch. “I'm not sure when you think a better time might be,” she said, and she reached out and held his hand in hers, slipped the pedometer back.

“All right,” Pulowski said. “Okay.” He was grinning in spite of himself, first at the pedometer in his hand and then, to his surprise, at the pleasure of imagining himself in bed with Fowler, of having
been
in bed with Fowler.

“So it
is
good,” his mother said, watching him coyly.

“Yup,” he said happily. “Yup.”

“Well, then I guess you don't have to worry about getting her trust,” his mother said, with a certain amount of asperity. “That's a good first step, you know!” She was grinning now. Both of them were.

“Yeah? Really? And what would you know about it?”

“Not very much, these days,” his mother said.

This last remark by his mother stuck out into an unexpected silence and, gazing out over the crowd, Pulowski saw that the other parents and soldiers in the audience had bowed their heads. “All right,” he said, whispering only a little, and standing long before the colonel's address had come to an end. “I got someone I want you to meet.”

*   *   *

There were many things that Pulowski proudly rebelled against. He'd enumerated them to Fowler frequently. One was arena rock—not the most brilliant pet peeve, but still. Another was football commentators, singers, or celebrities of any kind who spoke highly of the great valor and bravery of American soldiers while at the same time selling something. Mostly he did not like the underlying implication that they were all supposed to be brave, that it was somehow the soldiers' duty to be brave—and that there was something grand and significant in taking leave of their families in a shitty gym in central Kansas, which was one of the reasons he'd loaded up the colonel's speech so completely with clichés. There was a kind of coercion there, don't you think, something going on subliminally, he had more than once said to Fowler, who had more than once said to him,
Well, you can always not listen to it.
Or later, when he'd gone on enough to make her impatient,
When the fuck is something not going on with you subliminally, anyway?

He had to admit, as he led his mother down the ranked stairs of the bleachers and onto the familiar flat varnish of the basketball floor, that he definitely felt something subliminal going on. It certainly wasn't rational. He'd seen Fowler a thousand times, dressed and undressed, seen her in her jog bra, her black and yellow Fort Hays sweats, but he'd never seen her
with his mother
, which, apparently, was an entirely different way of seeing things—because otherwise Fowler looked the same as usual. Still kneeling, she was now sorting through an open ruck (while at the same time, if he had to guess, ignoring the colonel's speech, so she didn't have to feel disappointed by it), her hair pinned back, cheeks lightly flushed—nothing out of the ordinary, unless you counted the Beretta strapped to her thigh. Certainly nothing that could rationally explain the thickness in his throat and the charge that electrified his scalp when he swung his mother around to greet this woman, his mother with her public radio tote bag and her chapped face. “Hey, LT,” he said. “You looking forward to this historic opportunity?”

“You got a bag?” Fowler asked, without glancing up.

“Sorry?”

“You got a baggie or something, Pulowski?” she said. “Come on. Beale's wasted, and he packed all fucking wrong. Look at this!” She held up a pair of Hawaiian swim trunks. “He's got so much crap, I'm going to have to cram some of it in with my gear.”

“Did your brother show up?” he said.

“Does it look like he did?”

“He might have liked the speech,” Pulowski said, squatting beside her.

This would have normally been a comment that Fowler would've enjoyed, but instead she tucked her chin and kept rummaging through Beale's ruck, more and more contraband spilling out. “Is that your mother?” she asked.

“Yes, that's my mother.”

“You want me to meet your mother.”

“I'm standing right here,” Pulowski's mother said.

They stood up. Fowler approached stiffly, arms behind her back, and her chin out stubbornly, as if his mother—in her crewneck sweater—might at any minute punch her in the face. “Yes, ma'am,” Fowler said. “I'm sorry I'm a little busy here, ma'am. I hope you are enjoying the colonel's speech.”

“Not really,” Pulowski's mother said. “I've heard better.”

Fowler flashed him a look of panic and uncertainty. A regular person might have interpreted this as a look of hostility, but Pulowski felt confident that it only meant that Fowler was afraid—not of going to Iraq but of his mother. Fearful that she might not measure up, which was the usual thing that made Fowler afraid.

“I'm not sure what you would've wanted him to say instead.”

“Oh, I don't know. A little bit of honesty might have been reassuring. Fewer clichés wouldn't have been bad. Have you ever read any Orwell, Lieutenant?”

He could tell by the wrinkled pucker of Fowler's chin that she was working hard to remember her Orwell. And that she'd begun to get nervous about them standing together in the open like this, particularly in view of her platoon. “Emma was a history major,” Pulowski said, breaking in. He put his hand on her elbow, shielding this gesture so no one could see. Then to Fowler he said, “Mom teaches English. And public speaking. So she's got some strong opinions on this.”

“Yeah, well, I'm not sure what kind of honesty she exactly means. We're going to win and we're going to come back. That's what we're doing. That's how it's going to be. I'd assume you don't want to hear anything different.”

“I don't think Mom's opposed to that,” Pulowski said. “Are you, Mom? I mean, if Pop was going, that might be different—I just think she felt like the speech was a little too rah-rah, a little too cheerleady for her. So I thought I would bring her down and talk to somebody who actually knew what she was doing.”

Fowler flushed, glanced back at her platoon. “I'm not sure that we're all exactly ready for inspection,” she said. “I'd sure as hell like to meet that person.”

“Wouldn't we all?” said Pulowski's mother.

“Don't let the lieutenant fool you,” Pulowski said. Because it had gotten awkward holding on to Fowler's elbow, he squeezed it once and then backed off and gave her a chuck on the shoulder, harder than he normally would—hard enough that she would know that he was fucking with her. Which, judging by her brief, suppressed smile, and the flash of anger in her eyes, she did. “She and her platoon have just spent the past three weeks standing around in the snow, loading about fifty thousand tons of equipment onto railcars, while the rest of these lazy fucks”—here he gestured at the auditorium as a whole, and particularly the soldiers from Masterson's infantry company, who'd camped out in the visitors' bleachers, under a sign that read
DELTA ME TO DEATH
—“sat around and polished their boots. Three weeks of preparing for the DRIF is no small thing.”

“What's the DRIF?” Pulowski's mother asked. “I was married to an Army surgeon, so I'm used to the acronyms, but that's a new one for me.”

“The acronym is really DRRF,” Fowler said, with the first real confidence she'd displayed in the conversation—much to Pulowski's satisfaction. “What
that
means depends on who you're talking to. The colonel translates it as Deployment Ready Reaction Field. That's where we get our stuff ready to be loaded onto railcars. But it's also a state of mind. So we leave an
R
out and call the whole thing the DRIF.”

“Sounds even worse than OIF,” Pulowski's mother said. She squatted down with her tote and began to examine the ruck that Fowler had unpacked.

“One or two?” Fowler asked.

“I don't know. Any number.”

“Or DFAC,” Pulowski said.

“My ex-husband used to talk about the NBFC zone,” Pulowski's mother said.

“No bullshit from civilians,” Pulowski clarified.

“He was a surgeon at Fort Campbell,” Pulowski's mother said. “We used to call him the Dr. Ratched of the OR. Very schedule-driven person. Rule-oriented, big fan of the acronym. One of the things he liked best about the Army was that its rules kept everything from being messy. But of course things are messy, and the
best
things are
always
messy—or at least that's what I've always believed.”

“So I've heard,” Fowler said.

“Have you?” Pulowski's mother said. “From where?” A coy smile there, his mother's best.

“Not from me,” Pulowski assured her. “Excellence, strictness, and clarity are my buzzwords. Superb soldiering. Honor your country. Organization before oneself. Fowler knows all this. You've seen my dominant scores at the rifle range?”

But they were already working, dragging over and unzipping Fowler's ruck, which he knew from experience would be at least as poorly organized and overstuffed as Beale's, and had already forgotten him. Of course,
he
could have helped Fowler repack her gear more efficiently. And he would've recommended that she just throw away Beale's extra stuff. He'd told Fowler a thousand times that she needed to think about herself more. She might have been excellent at strapping tanks onto railcars, but her skills at personal organization—her skills at personal life in general—had always been suspect. Naturally, she'd refused his aid.