“Like him?” Wrightman nodded toward the back of the restaurant.
Fowler leaned around the corner of her booth and saw Carl Beale grinning at her from an empty table, then swiveled around and laid her head back against the booth’s backrest, slumping. “You don’t serve beer, do you?” she asked.
“That bad, huh?” Susie Wrightman said, laughing.
“Shit, I don’t know.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Wrightman said. She knelt down briefly, still with that odd expression on her face. “He’s been tipping extra-heavy,” she whispered. “So don’t bust his ass too badly, okay?”
Fowler nodded, overcome by the certainty that Beale was, in fact, the absolute last person she wanted to see. And she had no one but herself to blame. He tottered over, grinning, eased his heavy belly in behind the table across from her.
“You mind if I sit?”
“Nope,” she said.
“You expecting anybody?” he asked.
Fowler tried to remember the advice that Pulowski had given her on Beale. Be personal. Don’t stand on ceremony. Let him see that you’re a human being. Let him know that you can get hurt. Start with posture, Pulowski had said, and don’t think about your brother. Beale isn’t your brother. She tried to smile, but it felt off-key.
“Look, Beale,” she said. “Let’s not sit here and rehash this whole thing with Masterson, okay? You think he’s a great commander, that’s fine by me. I just don’t like being put in a situation where I have to steal federal property. From members of the military. Which I am in.”
“I don’t know. Seems kind of Old Testament to me.”
“We’re not in the Old Testament, Beale. We’re in the Army. I don’t know about you, but I like the Army.”
“You do?” Beale made a shocked face, his pliable features hunching together in an impression of deep incomprehension. He was leaning forward now across the table. Sloppy. Pushing in on her. She made an effort not to back away. “What’re you doing here, anyway?” he asked slyly. “I would’ve thought that you’d be up there at the colonel’s tonight, smoking cigars with Captain Happy.” He nodded at her cell phone, which she’d set on the table. “You still waiting on a call?”
She pocketed the phone. Stared back at Beale openly but without the smile. “There’s not going to be a call,” she said. “Captain seems to think I’m not party material. Or maybe officer material at all.”
Beale nodded. “Yeah, well, you’re better off with family.”
“You’re not my family, Beale.”
“Really?”
“No,” she said. “The Army isn’t family, okay, Beale? It’s a job. And this platoon is not going to work if you keep treating it differently. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’m going to clean up your messes for you. Or show up the next time you leave me a lame mix CD.”
“No?”
“No. And if I can’t rely on you to follow my orders when I give them, if I can’t rely on you to stay inside the rules once we get out there”—she waved her hand at the front window of the Cracker Barrel, the snow swirling in the parking lot lights, as if that were Iraq—“then I can’t have you on my team!”
Beale, however, appeared undeterred. To her surprise, he didn’t stiffen up or flush, as he usually did when she corrected him.
“So you’re saying you’re not my family,” he said.
“Do I stutter?”
“Does that mean Dykstra’s not family?”
“Oh, come on, Beale.”
This was the moment, she figured, that Pulowski had been warning her about. The mad moment. The moment when you had that very bad feeling that everything you’ve been trying to escape by joining the Army is exactly the fucking thing that’s waiting for you there. “Beale, I’m going to order,” she said. “I had a shitty day.”
“Does that mean Waldorf’s not family?”
“I’m going to have the chicken-fried steak. You want anything?”
“Crawford? I mean, he’s going to be very, very sad when he hears that.”
“You know what those guys are?” Fowler said. “You know why Crawford’s never going to hear a thing like that, Beale? Because he’s got his shit together. Because he’s not the kind of soldier who comes down to the Cracker Barrel to ride his lieutenant’s ass.”
“You’re going to have to admit it eventually,” Beale said. He took the menu from her and pretended to examine it, while gazing at her over its top edge.
“Admit what?”
Beale smiled, tossed the menu back down on the table, stared at a spot just beside her ear, broad and childish, with his secretive-kid’s face.
“That you saved our fucking asses. Took the hit for us. I wouldn’t have thought that Family Values had it in her—”
“I hate that name, Beale. It’s not family values that I’m talking about here. Half the guys in the Army are here because their daddy disappeared. Did your family have good rules, Beale? ’Cause mine didn’t. You think I want to run my platoon like that? You think I enjoy lying to my CO? We stole Army property, Beale. We busted into trunks stenciled with another company’s call letters. I want something better than that.”
“He stole our shit.”
“Who, Masterson? You mean the guy that you’ve been following around for the past six months, telling me he’s the biggest fucking genius in the Army?”
“I might have been wrong about that.”
“Wrong!” she sputtered. And then she could feel that it was on her, the mad moment. “Wrong?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Beale said with his hands out, splayed flat. “Fellas, need a little help here.”
“You pissed her off enough yet, Beale?”
“What?” she said, standing up. When she turned, she could see a door behind their booth, its edge cracked, shadowed faces peering out. “No, you didn’t,” she said.
“Oh, no, he didn’t!” Beale said, repeating her phrase with a bucktoothed grin. He started waving the dark faces in and the door behind their booth opened and the rest of her platoon came out of it: Dykstra first, in his Philadelphia Flyers jersey, worn over the top of a blue flannel shirt. Crawford in his skinny jeans and sweater. Jimenez in a black hoodie decorated in gold lamé, Waldorf hulking out of the darkness in a starched blue oxford and, of all things, a suit vest buttoned tight around his stomach, and last of all, Pulowski in his Dockers and what she was surprised and pleased to recognize as his version of a “nice shirt”: A long-sleeve, rugby-type jersey in maroon and navy, probably purchased for him by his mother, and the black turtleneck that he tended to refer to as his “geek tie.” Briefly — she was corkscrewed in her seat, her thighs jammed between the table edge and the banquet — he caught her eye, and Pulowski made a twisted, goofy face, wobbling his head on his shoulders, as if to suggest that he was just following along with the crowd and had no idea why he was here.
Then there were hands on her shoulders, forcing her back down into her seat, voices, a press of bodies, everybody shouting simultaneously.
“To the queen of the DRIF, motherfuckers!” Beale said.
“Queen,” Jimenez said. “Who you calling queen, man? We don’t need no fucking gender-specific shit like that.”
“What, I got to be politically correct when I hand out compliments?” Beale said.
“Holy shit, did Beale say he was giving somebody a compliment?”
“I didn’t hear no compliment.”
“Queen is a compliment, motherfucker.”
“Not in this country, it ain’t.”
Mugs were passed. A pitcher of soda came. Everybody was jostling, chanting, giving Beale shit about something indistinct, and in order not to betray her emotion, or to look at Pulowski again, she started examining the Cracker Barrel menu, trying not to look up at any of them, or lose control of herself in an embarrassing way. “We got to have a speech,” Waldorf said from the far end of the table. “Speech! Speech!”