Three straight days like that. Then five. She plowed through paper in the office, with side trips to the motor pool, where Beale, Dykstra, and Waldorf ran the show, changing oil, checking transmissions, and caring for the battalion’s vehicles generally. You could get lost in it and, to a certain extent, she had. Every evening before chow, she led a run for PT. Crawford, she had discovered, spent a fair number of his off-hours walking around Camp Tolerance, which itself was so large and cumbersome that it had an actual bus service. He knew all the special trails and so she allowed him to set their route, which he executed with a child’s innate artistic flair: long tours along the beaten outer ring, under the silver-fluttering leaves of eucalyptus trees. Afterward, she touched their sweaty backs, emphasized hydration, broke open stacks of shrink-wrapped water bottles, and handed them out to drink. No one spoke to her crossly. The nickname that Beale had saddled her with, Family Values, was more a faded watermark than a brand.
At night, she settled down in a yard chair inside her trailer, her workout clothes drying on the doorknob, a notepad in her lap, intending to write down a list of activities for the next day. But instead she dozed off and saw Beale and then Pulowski, oddly paired, on the far side of a long, dark canal, waving to her furiously. It was strange that the two of them should be joined together in agreement, but that’s what the dream implied, their movements coordinated, their semaphore the same. Come to us. Wake up. Get out of there.
Opening her eyes, she had the feeling that the trailer itself, and everything around it, had a purpose, which she couldn’t define but nevertheless was specific, threatening, and directed her way. It was similar to how she’d felt the last time she’d made love to Pulowski, shoving her ass up in the air, as he had stood above her — and later when she’d straddled him, her bare feet planted firmly on the floor and her hands kneading the muscles of his chest — and they were quiet except for their breathing, and they could feel the heat of the day pressing the walls of the trailer, and they could hear other soldiers walking by and talking, separated from them only by the thin skin of the aluminum, by a metal door, by a window with a construction-paper shade — and she would occasionally see a part of Pulowski’s body — an elbow, foreshortened like a wrinkled peach, a foot with its toes flexing, the skin callused at the heel, his belly button, his translucent ear whorling out — and she would be aware of the body parts at the intersection, and the baggies, and the ice, and the GPS. The difference was that with Pulowski she hadn’t been afraid, because his body and her body were the same, whole but penetrated, jumbled but not destroyed, one and the same. But on this night, when she woke up, she was alone, and this time, in the grainy darkness, her aluminum walls and iron-framed bed and plywood floor seemed as impersonal as a prison — hard, bare, and temporary in every way.
* * *
“Remember those shackles I lost back at Fort Riley?” Her platoon sergeant, Carl Beale — whose bad temper she generally tried to avoid while on base — stepped up beside her at the refrigerated drink case in the center of the Dining Facility and they both peered in through frosted glass. “Why’d you bust my ass for giving those away?”
“I trusted you,” she said.
“Bullshit. You didn’t trust me to pick my nose back then.”
“True,” she admitted.
“So how about now?” he said. “You trust me any better? Would you say that I have or have not become significantly less of a dick?”
She evaluated this question. The answer was that Beale had been much less of a dick lately. His reliable combination of bravery and stupidity was something she’d begun to, if not value, then dismiss less completely after he’d helped her save Lieutenant Weazer out at the Muthanna intersection. On the other hand, it would have been real progress if he hadn’t felt the need to bring this up so quickly.
“Since when do you fish for compliments from me, Beale? Are you still upset that the guys dimed you out for playing Kid Rock when we’re on convoy?” She cracked the door of her case — the line of refrigerators was a block long, running down the center of the five-thousand-seat dining facility — and grabbed a Gatorade.
“Aw, fuck, come on with that. What the hell else am I going to play?”
“I’d go more Tom Petty,” Fowler said.
“He su-ucks,” Beale said in a singsong voice.
“Not as much as Kid Rock. But it doesn’t matter what you or I think. It matters what the guys think. You play their music, you aren’t going to have people upset about you playing tunes when we’re outside the wire. Think about that.”
“Okay,” Beale said. He didn’t protest, which was itself a surprise. Instead, he followed her grimly, past a half acre of crowded tables, the flat-screens showing highlights of early season baseball games back in the States. “But I don’t think that’s the real problem here,” he said. “I think the real problem is Muthanna.”
She dumped her tray on the dish conveyor and pushed out through frowzy plastic strips into the blacktop of the DFAC parking lot, the blistering noon air.
“I know you saw what I saw,” he said, following her. “Seacourt shouldn’t have had soldiers at the intersection. That place had no defenses. At worst, we should’ve been setting up T-walls out there, instead of working inside the wire last couple weeks.”
“I thought we were talking about music.”
“And I listened to you, didn’t I?” Beale said. He pointed back into the DFAC as if there would be a statue there, erected to the memorial of his listening. “Maybe our guys legitimately don’t like my taste. But I’m telling you that they’re unhappy about what went down at that intersection. Lots of bitching. Lots of grief. You told me that we do the right thing even when other people aren’t doing it. That’s the Family Values rule, okay? Okay, well, I’m telling you that they all know something isn’t right.”
* * *
Two days later, she left her desk at dusk. The center of Camp Tolerance was a broad, open concrete square bordered by the PX, its lifeless Stars-and-Stripes bunting, the wilted tents of a small hadji rug seller, the barber, the dry cleaner’s. She veered off onto a dirt road that wound its way through truck yards, chain-link fences coiled with vine, the back entrance to the 66th Armor Regiment’s motor pool, where Pulowski was waiting with a thistle blossom pinched between his teeth. Questions like the ones Beale had asked her in the DFAC were usually the kind of thing that she discussed with Pulowski. But she was still afraid to get too graphic about what had happened at the intersection — afraid somehow that she would be tainted by it. “You know what Beale asked the other day?” she said instead, glancing over her shoulder. “He wanted to know if he was ‘still a dick.’”
“What’d you tell him?”
Fowler shrugged, as if the jury was still out. “Depends on the context.”
“Yeah?” He dropped back half a step as two sergeants passed, then pulled her by the elbow through a gap in the fence. It was a small bower: broken fountain, a couple of crumbling benches left over from Saddam days. They kissed and then started walking up a small dirt path that led up a rutted and bushy dirt hill that housed the communications antennas for the camp. “Rough day?” he said. She nodded, took his hand. “Personally, I think if Beale was running the war, he’d start by shooting every adult male over the age of eighteen. So if he’s sucking up to you, he’s probably got a motive. What is it? Muthanna? He pushing to get outside the wire?”