Then he found Fowler on the crowded floor below him. She was on the opposite end of the gym from Seacourt’s stage, kneeling beside a pile of packed rucks that he presumed belonged to her platoon. Her head was bowed and he could see the sash of brown hair across her forehead, and then the curve of her haunch underneath her fatigues, which was about the only actually, personally reassuring thing that he saw in that entire gym. She’d been more positive on the subject of Colonel Seacourt than he’d ever been, a defender of his organizational abilities, not to mention his fairness — able to overlook what Pulowski felt to be his cloying optimism by pointing out that at least he wasn’t a screamer, or a bully, or a crook. “What are you looking at?” his mother asked.
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?