“Family Values, man,” Crawford said.
“I’m more worried about his emotional state,” she said to Crawford. “I think he might be depressed. I think he was genuinely fucking worried when Eggleston was listing that slab off of me. Is that true, Beale? Do we need to get you some meds?”
Beale took this in, absorbing something into his lumbering frame — hopefully the good vibe she directed at him beneath the talking. His face had been there, peering in at her, as the darkness closed down on her. She’d known he would’ve stuck his arm in and lost it, just to hold on to her. A fact both stupid and in some ways great.
“You might want to talk to the assholes who set off that bomb,” Beale said, “about what their emotional state happened to be.”
“Probably real disappointed,” Fowler said.
“Werd,” Crawford said.
Everything she’d been trying to communicate to Beale, every positive thought about what her platoon could do, might be — not all the bullshit stuff, not the benefits, not the personal glory, not the assholes (like, for instance, Captain Masterson) who told him he was somehow lesser and weaker for being in support rather than infantry, lesser and weaker for having a lieutenant who was a chick, but the good stuff, which she admittedly sucked at defining but knew was there — all of that had appeared in physical form, in the teamwork that had gotten the Hercules atop that pile, lifted that concrete slab off Weazer, and saved his life. A refutation of losing. That was what it felt like.
Three months ago, she might’ve just told Beale, Look, dumbass, this is what I’ve been trying to accomplish. This is what happens if you pull your head out of your ass and follow my advice. But Pulowski had taught her that the direct approach didn’t always work. That it was a poor idea to be so certain about being right.
Instead, she sat with him for a while, waiting it out, leaving silence and some space. He squatted on his heels, his hands flattened on the roof in a strange position, wrist to wrist, as if preparing to climb into the starting blocks for a race.
“Remember those shackles Masterson stole from us?” she asked.
Beale shrugged, as if she were referring to a distant, murky past.
She dug into the flap pocket of her fatigues, pulled out the heavy metal clip. It was solid steel, forged in the shape of a G, thick as her index and middle finger put together, but the hook of the shackle’s lower jaw had been bent, distended.
“That one came off the Hercules,” she said. “That was the one we used to lift the slab. Thought you might want it for a trophy.”
“A bent shackle?” Beale asked. “Oh, that’s nice, LT. Jeez, that’s sweet. Just what I always wanted.” He held it between two fingers, examining the lower part of the shackle, which had bent so much that it was clear they’d been two centimeters away from dropping the slab.
“I thought you might want to give that to somebody. A trophy.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t fucking get one,” Crawford said.
“I don’t know,” Fowler said, in a light tone that she hoped suggested that she knew exactly to whom he might give it. “Somebody who’s hard to impress. Somebody back home who doesn’t understand what you’ve been doing.”
“How about somebody I might want to piss off?”
“Maybe,” she said. “You could go that way.”
* * *
With no lights on at all and the moon still low, the darkness seemed to pulse and crest beyond the edges of the rooftop as if it were a liquid. Beale had gone to bed. She thought it had gone well with him — not perfect, not Eisenhower-worthy. But better. An improvement. They weren’t lacking for food out at the bomb site. Plenty had been brought in during the day and she sat with a pile of chips on a paper plate, staring out over the empty entrance to Muthanna, and thinking oddly of Beale’s father — the one who’d run away, the one who, according to Beale’s mother, he’d been trying to impress by joining the Army. What Fowler had wanted to do, what she’d considered doing, was telling Beale to take that shackle and mail it to his dad, show him what he’d done. Make up his own story, rather than look to somebody else for what his story ought to be.
Crawford sidled up to her, his gold glasses floating like a strange, delicate cage on his face. “The colonel sent a message.”
“What’s that?” she said.
“You ain’t gonna like it.”
“Try me.”
“Fredrickson and Arthur. Remember when we stole their shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so, the word is that those two dudes didn’t show up on the convoys back to Camp Tolerance. No account of them.”
“Where’d they go?”
Crawford swung his boots over the roof’s edge. The pile of rubble that had once constituted the checkpoint’s barracks slumped to his left, while between his arches she could see the focused darkness of the blast zone, like a rotted molar, then some three hundred yards of emptied street and blasted cars. Nothing moved down there except rats.
“Maybe they just walked off, quit, dropped their weapons,” Crawford said, hopefully. “You know, went native on the thing.”
“Native what?” Fowler asked. “Native fuckheads?”
“Shit, man, I ain’t native.”
“They’re Delta Company. Masterson’s guys. They’re not dropping weapons anyplace.” She stared out for a while longer. “We looked pretty hard.”
“If I ever go native at a shitty checkpoint, you write my moms something different, you know. This boy died heroically.”
“Don’t sweat it, Crawford,” Fowler said. “If anyone’s writing their mom, it’ll be you writing mine. And when you do, ask her why she never came to visit.”
Crawford chuckled at this. Fowler handed him her plate of chips. He ate a few in somber silence, then said in a more serious voice, “Damn. That is the case.”
* * *
The day before, there had been grumblings about the checkpoint’s conditions, even after Weazer had been saved. As they’d hunted through the wreckage, Beale had pointed out that everyone had known the intersection’s checkpoint didn’t have any T-walls and soldiers would die if they were posted there. Which meant, as Waldorf noted, that the soldiers there had died to prove something that most everyone knew already. And finally, Dykstra had heard that the Iraqi bomber had been contracted to haul gravel to the checkpoint because it was Army policy to hire locals, even for jobs they could have done themselves. Which meant that Weazer had been killed (except, of course, they’d saved him) by someone that the U.S. Army was paying. So as Fowler prepared to address her platoon the next morning, she felt less like a lieutenant and more like a sex-ed teacher, hoping against hope that there were certain questions her students wouldn’t ask.
“Okay,” she said, standing behind a rust-scabbed folding table that she’d salvaged from the wreckage, “we have a couple more soldiers unaccounted for. Fredrickson and Arthur from Delta Company. I’ve drawn up a grid. You will be assigned to work an area in pairs. Whenever you find anything that might be significant, the first thing you do is that you take a picture of it. So don’t move it.”
Beale raised his arm for a question. She noticed that he was holding the bent shackle she’d given him the night before in his hand and, flushing, she ignored him.