The Good Lieutenant (21 page)

But if there was going to be somebody who helped Fowler repack her ruck other than himself, it was his mother, who after all had taught him all of his tricks. Tuck your socks inside your shoes. Fold everything, even your underwear. Don't forget your floss and toothpaste. Keep all your liquids in a plastic bag. They were talking together, the two women, crouched in the center of the basketball court, Fowler's watch cap and his mother's short black bob nearly touching, pyramided over the two rucks. His mother was unpacking all the zip-locks and bags of baby wipes that she had longed to give to him, and gently, with Fowler's serious and mute attention, explaining how to best fold a pair of panties. He would go off and get some coffee. Then he would climb up in the stands and get his own ruck and bring it down and put it in the pile that Fowler had assembled for her platoon, so they could ride together on the flight to Kuwait. And then, when he came back, after his mother had had about twenty minutes alone with Fowler—in his estimation that was all she'd need to repack her entirely—he'd stick with the jokes, whatever it took. He felt as confident as he'd felt in months, maybe ever in his lifetime. He'd made good choices; he'd done the right thing. His mother's worry was gone; Fowler was getting a little mothering. And he couldn't imagine a situation that he couldn't get out of, not if he used his head, kept Fowler out of trouble, and refused at every moment to take even one fucking second of this entire mission seriously.

 

9

Nothing is embarrassing unless you
decide
it's embarrassing. That was the Pulowski-ism that Fowler recited as she pushed past the Christmas tree that guarded the Echo Company offices. If she had been Pulowski instead of herself, she wouldn't have been here at all: there was too much work to do, and she herself wasn't even packed yet, and she had paperwork piling up all over her apartment, leave requests, uniform requisitions, billeting forms, travel documents that were going to be needed to get her soldiers on the plane. And yet, here she was, ever the good girl, ever the eager beaver, unstacking the boxes that she'd bought on Captain Hartz's desk and opening the first with a flourish, as if it contained nothing less important than the holy grail.

“We're under budget,” she said.

“Well, that's, I guess, good?” Captain Hartz leaned over the large bright pink container and slipped on his reading glasses and squinted, as if reading the fine print of a diesel order. Then he pinched the shoulders of the dress inside, slowly drew it out of the box, and, as if he were imitating something he'd seen in a movie, pinned the pleated blue slip of fabric against his torso, gazing with concern at the bump his belly made. “What size did I say she was again?” he asked.

“Fourteen,” Fowler said, from memory. “She's going to love it, sir. Blue is supposed to be a fairly conservative color. Warm. And Lilly Pulitzer is an extremely traditional brand. Classic cut. Linen. Nice enough to wear to a dinner party but not so showy that she'll never put it on again.”

All of these were terms that she'd cribbed from an email that Pulowski's mother had sent, answering her son's very vague and somewhat inscrutable request: What kind of dress looks good on a fat woman?

“Nice but not too showy,” Hartz said with a bemused smile, depositing the dress gently on top of its ribboned box, as one might a phosphorus grenade. “Whatever in the hell that means. I mean, obviously it means something to you—but Sarah acts like I'm supposed to know it too. Like this is somehow common knowledge, the difference between nice and showy. Is that some sort of code in the language you all speak?”

The dresses were for the annual Christmas dinner at Seacourt's house on post. The year before, Fowler had drawn staff duty and missed the party, but she'd been new, fresh out of college, and so it hadn't seemed unfair—until the same thing happened during Seacourt's golf tournament on the Fourth of July. There were rules against this sort of thing. Very specific rules about not having battalion functions that, say, female officers were mysteriously not invited to. She'd made her awareness of these rules known—not loudly, not angrily, but clearly—by congratulating Hartz on how much
fun
he and his two male lieutenants must have had. That August she'd received an invitation to the Christmas party, then nothing since. Until this morning, after Hartz had asked her to pick up the dress. “She probably just wanted you to think of it for yourself,” Fowler said. She was folding up the dress and replacing it in the box, trying not to re-create the supposedly female behavior that Hartz was now questioning her about.

Hartz barked a laugh and sat back down on his desk chair, tossing a pen on the table as if it were a token of surrender. “But why? That's what I don't get, Emma—what's with the guessing? If she wants a dress for the party, why doesn't she go
get
a dress for the party, instead of waiting until the morning of the party and telling me she doesn't have anything to wear and so won't be going? Give me some insight into this. I don't get it. I never get it. Why do you do that? Why don't you just come out and say what you want?”

“Personally, I think you're making it a little more complicated than it needs to be, sir,” Fowler said, as neutrally as possible.

“Really? How's that?”

“Everybody wants recognition,” Fowler said.

It hadn't been completely unreasonable for Fowler not to pester Hartz about the party. After all, it
seemed
like she'd been invited. No one had said otherwise. And up until a month ago, Hartz had seemed like he'd started to pay a bit better attention to her. Nothing magic. Just a few of the old saws that Fowler had already heard in ROTC: “Don't ask your men to do anything you wouldn't do.” And, “Be the first one out of the foxhole and the last one in.” But they were, at least, a
form
of recognition, a
suggestion
that she might be someone worth giving advice to. Weighing against this was the incident with Masterson and the shackles, a disaster on every front, after which—paranoid coincidence or not—Hartz had restricted his communication down to a few bemused and possibly pitying glances cast her way. And then this morning had signed her up for staff duty again. Which she had been planning to discuss with him … well, right now seemed like a good fucking time. Hartz circled his desk and pulled on his coat.

“That's what this party
is
,” Hartz said. He was back at ease now and their talk had fallen into its usual comfortable banter—more intimate, Fowler liked to think, than he was with his other lieutenants. As if she were an equal or even possibly a friend. “Recognition for the wives. And the random townie girlfriends. You think the colonel wants to spend seventy dollars a head on dinner? Plus footing the bill for a bunch of junior officers who don't know the difference between Old Style and champagne? And having tomorrow be a total wreck, with everybody hung over and not worth spit?”

“Sounds awful,” Fowler said.

Hartz was quick enough to catch her sarcasm—though not quite quick enough to determine its source. That realization formed more slowly, a speck of distant dark clouds that worried the ruddy plains of his forehead: Fowler has a beef. He tucked his wife's dress box under his arm and waved the second package, which contained a shoulder wrap for Colonel Seacourt's wife. “Steve's gonna appreciate this,” he said. “I told him about your Eisenhower comment too. We both liked it.”

“Really? I thought you were kind of pissed.”

She could see, from a slight tightening in his smile, that he still was. “Maybe a little bit. In the moment. I don't exactly like being corrected by one of my own soldiers in the middle of a lecture. So I'd say that while the content was fine, what you really need to work on, Lieutenant, is
delivery
.”

“Fair enough,” Fowler said. Given the mildly positive tone of the conversation, she made a quick judgment—risk of unpreparedness versus risk of embarrassment—and grabbed her dry-cleaned formal uniform as they headed down the hall.

“But I do agree with this idea of yours that a good officer doesn't need to make a big stink about doing the right thing. You don't
need
to be recognized. That's why the colonel and I value the way you've handled this party.”

“How did I do that?”

“Well, for one, Wilson and Jaffrey”—these were the two other male lieutenants in Echo Company—“have been siccing their wives on Sarah for the past three months. Suggestive comments. Notes. ‘Do you want to go to lunch, Mrs. Hartz?' ‘Anything I can pick up for you at Costco, Mrs. Hartz?' ‘The one thing I'd really, really like, before Tom goes away, is to have one really nice evening out, Mrs. Hartz.'”

He dealt Fowler a shifty, sideways glance, inviting her to share his disbelief at these kinds of tactics. But all Fowler felt was a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Wives can do that?”

“Certain wives
only
do that,” Hartz assured her. “But not a word from you. Which, again, is something that I've communicated to the colonel and which he does appreciate. And I do too. You recognize that a party like this isn't important. It's not what we're about. And you know, after this
incident
you had with Captain Masterson—”

So that was it, then: the missing shackles. The conflict she'd initiated with Masterson. Meaning if she'd just shut up then, she'd be going to the party. Or she could make a huge stink now and also go. But there were no reasonable options in between.

“A party like this is a social occasion,” Hartz continued. “It's not a military maneuver. It's a family event. We may not like what our brothers are doing at every possible moment. But brothers also don't
turn
on brothers.”

“I think you mean ‘fraternity event,'” Fowler said.

“You been to many fraternity parties, Lieutenant?” Hartz asked.

“No,” Fowler admitted.

“Imagine Lieutenant Anderson, five bourbons into the night, trying to hump a farm girl from La Cygne. Or, if the farm girl's already passed out, trying to hump you.”

“I've seen worse,” Fowler said.

“Like
he
cares,” Hartz said. “Besides, who would you bring?”

They were in the parking lot out back of the battalion headquarters now. This was the moment, right now, when she could've argued back. When she could've demanded that Hartz take her off staff duty and give one of his other lieutenants the assignment, no matter what their dumb wives said. Hartz had led her to this moment deliberately so that afterward she could have no complaint. It was six o'clock, already dark, the snow piled up in lonely humps in front of the parked cars, the blacktop glistening with the day's melt, which would itself soon freeze. And she allowed the moment to pass.

“We can all reinvent ourselves, Lieutenant,” Hartz assured her as they reached his car and he handed her a package so he had a free hand to search his pockets for his keys.

After Hartz left, she sat in her pickup, dry-cleaned uniform on her knees, and then, as if she'd been shot with adrenaline, began hammering the steering wheel with her fist. What the fuck was that supposed to mean! Reinvent herself how? She'd done what Hartz wanted but the line sounded disappointed, as if she should've argued. Except he didn't want her to argue, right? And why did she care what he wanted? She had a vision of herself standing at reveille wearing the dress that Hartz had purchased for his wife, a pair of pumps, and waving a kerchief and batting her eyes as the colonel walked by.

That lasted until she saw a small package on her dash, a little white square tied up with what looked like red insulated electrical wire. Inside was a blank CD with the words
Listen to me
written on it in red Sharpie.

“This better be good,” she said, and put it in, engendering a burst of heavy metal so loud that she pawed the volume, and then, to her surprise, Beale's dopey voice came on over her speakers. “Lieutenant Fowler, this is your mission, should you choose to accept it. Please back up, exit the parking lot, and go right on McCormic Road.
Beep!
”

“Oh, no,” she said, staring at herself in the rearview mirror. “No, no, no! You do
not
do what he says.” Then, to her CD player, she said, “Fuck off, Beale. I'm busy!”

But she was not busy. And there had been some obvious effort made to have the recording work like a real GPS, the words timed out as if someone had actually driven the route. So after she sat alone for a few minutes, listening to the trickling dregs of the parking-lot snow, she heard another beep.
Right on Huebner Road
, Beale said.

“All right, screw it,” she said, and jammed her truck in reverse.

Fifteen minutes later, after some rewardingly aggressive driving—
Beep! Left on East Chestnut Street. Beep!
—the phrase
Turn right into the Cracker Barrel parking lot
ended the CD. She parked and climbed out, feeling skeptical as hell. A light dusting of flakes blazed in headlight glare as other cars swung through the lot. Crawford and Waldorf and Dykstra—she'd felt like they'd pretty much been on board with her from the beginning. (Though who could tell, really, especially since her little war with Masterson had earned them an extra twenty-four-hour shift on the DRIF?) But Beale? Beale was a wild card. Beale was exactly the sort of person who might sit around laughing the next day about how Family Values Fowler wound up eating at the Cracker Barrel by herself.

Still, she went in. Of course, the Cracker Barrel didn't have a bar, which sucked. And they didn't generally have TVs for watching the game. Instead, it was filled with old farming signs, rakes nailed up to the wall—none of which she would've noticed or felt embarrassed about had Beale not started in with the Family Values thing. The waitress who came up in her brown apron and white blouse was familiar, though: Susie Wrightman, a girl she'd known back in high school, a couple of years behind her.