“What the fuck am I holding on to?” Beale had said. “You?”
Early on when they’d first started sleeping together at Fort Riley, he and Fowler had talked about Beale quite a bit because he’d been the one soldier in her platoon whom she had the most trouble with — and also the one they had the most pleasure arguing about. Pulowski had still felt adrift in the Army then. As a signal officer attached to Headquarters Company, he was not in charge of a platoon, like Fowler was, and thus had no soldiers under him, no relationship to their day-to-day concerns. Instead, despite the surface activity of the fort, which itself wasn’t all that different from a college campus, he had spent most of his days in a classroom in the back of the battalion headquarters, working to bone up on the command-and-control programs for the computer systems that they would be using when they got to Iraq. None of the equipment actually existed there, physically, at the fort: it was all in Iraq, already installed, and so mostly they worked from manuals and on a few emulators that McKutcheon had managed to wrangle out of the supply chain. The whole thing had felt dry and dead — worse, in its way, than anything he’d done in college. Not to mention the fact that, in a way he’d not considered when in college — in a way that he’d thought he’d be protected from, since he had assumed that the war would be over by the time he graduated — he had for the first time the realization that he’d made a terrible mistake in judgment to join the Army.
He was not the only person, he figured, who was having this feeling. But it didn’t filter into daily conversation that much except for McKutcheon’s side comments, his tendency to repeat tidbits from the Secretary of Defense’s press conferences in a flat voice, without any clear inflection one way or the other, and then to stare at Pulowski, or some of the other junior intel officers, as if he wondered what they were looking at him for.
So talking about Beale had become a way of admitting, indirectly, his fear. Or even of really, clearly defining what that fear might be. As a soldier, Beale had been everything that Pulowski wasn’t and hoped never to be. He was brash, he was boastful, he was exceptionally jingoistic, he was constantly disregarding Fowler’s instructions to him — or, if not disregarding them, complaining that their training was not more active, that Fowler wasn’t aggressive enough, that she did things too much by the book. All of this Pulowski had taken as a joke — and Fowler had too, in at least some way, or she wouldn’t have told Pulowski stories about the troubles she’d had with Beale.
Fowler, of course, had already been through something like this. He assumed that the difficulties she’d had with her brother — his running away, his stealing, his drunk-driving arrest in Texas — were at least part of what made her comparatively cheerful at the prospect of leading a platoon of soldiers into Iraq. He’d learned most of this at the La Quinta Inn in Council Grove, Kansas, about half an hour south of Fort Riley, which was where he and Fowler slept together in order to keep their relationship secret. Maybe if he had been closer to Fowler, if he had made some public commitment to her, they might have been able to find a way through this together. But in the La Quinta Inn, the thing he’d liked most about Fowler was her secrets. There was a darkness in her, which he recognized, and a good strong streak of anger — at her mother, for instance, whenever Pulowski brought her up. (And only if Pulowski brought her up.) She’d believed that she was a poor officer, she fretted that she would not have her platoon properly trained, worried about packing, about what Captain Hartz’s opinion of her was, about her weight, and most frequently about Beale. None of this had been said self-pityingly, which was how it would’ve come out had Pulowski been talking. But naturally, and at intervals — usually after they had made love and were lying in bed watching Leno, naked, and she had her leg draped over his and she would yawn and reach over to pat his chest and deliver whatever concern it was that had troubled her that day in a flat, direct voice.
He could see Fowler now, through the doorway of a different schoolroom, seated on a folding chair beside Masterson, interviewing the local sheikhs: she looked mannish, not fat, but full in the shoulders, very muscular in the thighs. It had been a violation of the prime directive of being a signal officer, lying there in bed talking to a lieutenant — all of which could not have been more exciting for Pulowski. Not the sex, which was fine, or even excellent — better than you might imagine if you chose girls only from looking at a magazine. But it was the part about lying in bed with her watching Leno, naked, and listening to her worry that had truly excited him, because those worries bore her own private weight. And secondly because Beale’s antics, Hartz’s opinion, the concern about whether she’d measure up as an officer, were exactly the kinds of things that he’d given up worrying about a long time ago. Which meant that whatever was happening now would be worse for her than it would ever be for him.
“Hey,” Pulowski said, as Masterson’s interpreter stuck his head out of the schoolroom door. “I need you to talk to somebody.” He hustled the ’terp down the hallway to the room where the deaf man had been. What was he expecting? Nothing, he hoped. And what use would that information be to anybody? But when he and Faisal Amar entered the room, the deaf man cowered, went wide-eyed and spooked, jumping up so quickly that his chair tipped over backward, and that sound, the sudden scatter of metal against linoleum, acted as the ground for a high-voltage charge that had been running secretly through the room all along, buzzing, humming, burning just beneath their skin. Pulowski grabbed his arm, shouted uselessly, “Stop!” and then the two soldiers on guard outside swept in and tackled him. The man went down as if he’d been dropped from the ceiling. Pulowski heard his head slap linoleum and in a moment he was trussed, one soldier pinioning his arms behind his back, the other shouting, “Down! Get down!” with the muzzle of his M4 pressed into the man’s ear. This occurred in view of the other Iraqis lined up in the hallway, who craned their necks to see, until Pulowski kicked the door closed, rounded, and found Faisal squatting before the man’s bleeding face.
“It’s all right, okay, guys, no problem here,” Faisal was saying. “He just freak out a little bit, this guy. Is he crazy? Did he say something?”
“He’s deaf,” Pulowski said.
“No weapons,” said the soldier kneeling on the man’s back. “He make a move on you?”
“No,” Pulowski said. “He just bolted when I came back in.”
“He tell you what he want?” Faisal asked. He’d picked up a greasy, stained notebook that had fallen out of the man’s pocket.
“He wanted me to read something,” Pulowski said.
The man had ceased arching his back in an effort to get free. Instead, his brown irises seemed curiously calm, completely resigned as he gazed up at Pulowski. There was something off there, maybe. But Beale was dead by now. He’d lumbered out from behind that dumpster and run to the open door he’d identified. Once there, he’d glanced back at Pulowski and pointed up, as if to indicate where he was going. There had been nothing hidden in his face. He’d been terrified. He’d known that Pulowski would not help him. And he’d barged into the darkness anyway. The last thing Fowler needed, after all the favors Pulowski had done for her already, was to know how good Beale had been. Or to believe there was any hope of getting him back. In the schoolroom, Faisal whispered quietly and patiently in Arabic, which the deaf man gave no sign of understanding, and then, chuckling to himself, turned to a clean page in the notebook and, his face aping broad emotions of forgiveness, of generous importuning — his thin eyebrows raised, his lips folded into a clownlike moue — wrote something in Arabic and held it down beside the prisoner’s eyes, turning it sideways so that he could read.