“Such as if your brother decides to steal a car, that’s his problem, isn’t it? Why should you care one way or the other about that?”
“Because he’s my brother. He did something wrong. If I don’t say something to him about it, if don’t tell him that it’s wrong, then who will?”
“I think it’s probably not that simple,” Pulowski said.
“Yeah, well, why don’t you talk to him, then?”
“Maybe I will.”
“What would you tell him?” She’d crawled back on the bed by then, sitting up this time, watching the TV between her knees. Pulowski had told her, early on in their relationship, that Leno was the inferior late-night host, especially when compared with Letterman. Largely, in his opinion, it was because Leno was unwilling to be genuinely unpleasant. He was a glad-hander. He tried so hard to get his audience to like him that he could never be quite as funny as Letterman. He pulled his punches instead, refused to humiliate his guests. The comparison had been, she guessed, a proxy for Pulowski’s own views on how she dealt with her platoon — or, in the current conversation, how she dealt with Harris. The implication was that she was more complicated than she pretended, a flattering criticism, especially since nobody in her family had ever suggested it.
“I’d tell him it’s possible for somebody to be more than one thing,” Pulowski said. “Like maybe he might consider the possibility that you could be wrong and right.”
“Why both?”
“Because everybody is,” Pulowski said. “The possibility that you’re just like everybody else is something he probably hasn’t considered yet.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.
Pulowski turned his chin and looked at her with a squint, as if he’d never heard such a ridiculous assertion. “Then how did we end up here?”
It was a fair question. At night, during the previous summer, when she left Fort Riley and returned alone to her apartment in Harmony Woods, she had developed a habit of drinking beer on a small porch outside her bedroom. It was just a slab of concrete, marked off by an iron railing, that led onto a poorly tended patch of grass — an imitation of something real. Pulowski had lived in the apartment across the way. He’d normally be up and about in a T-shirt and a pair of what Harris had referred to derisively as “tighty-whities,” drinking a glass of orange juice and firing up his computer, alone at his kitchen table, unaware of his existence in her head. The alone part had interested her. So she’d continued to investigate. He was from Tennessee but had no accent, no visible interest in football or sports, drove a Toyota Celica, and did not hang out with the other southerners in the battalion, which made him less of a risk. On the rifle range, she noticed that he showed no visible interest in even attempting to look proficient with his weapon, but instead tended to choose a shooting station as far away from the other soldiers as possible, and quickly run through his shot selection without any real concentration, as if firing a weapon were somehow a shameful or embarrassing thing. In terms of avoiding complication, these were all good things. Relationships between officers of equal rank were legal, technically, in the Army. But the gossip they engendered was more toxic for female officers than any technicality. Just the news that she’d been slutty enough to ask someone out, much less sleep with them, was enough to obliterate all the respect she’d worked to achieve. Pulowski, however, had had no one to tell. So maybe her decision to ask him out was just a crime of opportunity. Maybe it was just being selfish, her body knowing that she liked having somebody to touch when she got home from work. Maybe it was just her own mind entertaining itself and there was nothing special about this guy.
And yet it didn’t feel that way. Here on a queen-size bed in the La Quinta Inn, drunk on the beer she’d brought, the room lit by the blue glow of Leno’s set, she was pleasantly aware of Pulowski’s increasing complexity.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Pulowski,” she said. “But knowing that I sleep around is unlikely to make my brother happy.”
“I thought we’d just established that he’s an idiot.”
She sat up and whomped him with a pillow.
“What the hell was that for?”
“This is my brother we’re talking about,” she said. “I’m the one who gets to say whether or not he’s an idiot. Not you.”
Pulowski got a curiously amused expression on his face. “Okay, then what do I get to say? What areas am I fit to comment on?”
“Yourself.”
“And you?”
“No, not me. Just you.”
Snorting, Pulowski scooted toward her along the bed so that they were shoulder to shoulder and he swiveled his hand down along her pelvis, and as she leaned her head back, she could smell the soap he used. His nose brushed her neck. “Then maybe I’m the idiot,” he said. “Because I am very, very happy”—his touch was like an electric current grounded through her body—“that you’ve done wrong with me.”
* * *
In the morning she got up early, before Pulowski did. It had been a mistake to sleep with him, she was sure of that. In her sleep, she’d had vague dreams about her company commander, Captain Hartz, leaning over her and telling her to get her shit in a pile, effective immediately. The scary thing was, in the dream she’d had the sensation that her shit was in a pile, at least everything that she understood her shit to be. Her files were all in order (in real life, a rarity). Her Beretta had been cleaned. She had a to-do list written up for the day. She’d even emptied out her email in-box entirely. It was a common dream of hers, one that she’d been repeating fairly frequently since she’d received her commission. There had been a frost overnight and the windshield of her truck was opaque. She searched through the bed and found her frost scraper and cleaned the windows off, then put her gloves back on and headed across the parking lot toward the Gas ’n Go, where she intended to buy some coffee for the ride back to Fort Riley. Halfway there, she turned around and walked back to Pulowski’s Celica and peered in through the windows to see if he had a scraper. He did not, though the inside of this car was extraordinarily clean and neat, far more than hers.
She returned to her truck, grabbed the scraper, and carried it back to his car, where she began scrubbing off the frost and dusting it away. Who was he to tell her how to be a lieutenant? Who was he to tell her how to talk to her brother? Of course, it was early enough in their relationship that she could break things off and no one would complain, least of all Pulowski. There had been no commitments made. No rules at all to govern their relationship — nothing that explicitly held them together or determined how they should act. It was just an affair, neither good nor bad. There was no group, no platoon, no company, no family, no blood, no country. No expectations. No structure to tell either of them whether they were doing things right. And thus, no way to judge it, no way to guess how it might turn out, or where it might possibly lead.
And yet she was out here in the cold at six a.m., scraping the frost off his windshield and feeling happier about it than she had any right to be.
PART FIVE. EPILOGUE. THE FIELD
The police station in Bini Ziad, a small town west of Baghdad, is in a long cinder-block building that has been painted white with a blue stripe. It’s early June. Lieutenant Emma Fowler follows an Iraqi constable and her company commander, Captain Hartz, through the front entrance and down a dank hall to a makeshift interview room, its walls constructed of sheets hung from wires overhead. The mother of the Iraqi whom Fowler shot that morning is there. She refuses to take Captain Hartz’s hand and then, checking her chair as if something might have climbed up on it, sits down with a sweep of her hand beneath her black skirt. She wears a Western blazer with gold buttons, a black scarf about her head, her mouth drawn prim and fierce. None of the humor that Fowler remembers in Pulowski, no self-deprecation, no eye turning inward. Instead, the woman speaks offhandedly to the Iraqi officer, her gaze askew, and moments later, a hand pokes through the sheets with a glass cup of chai. Money is what this says to Fowler; here’s someone who’s used to getting what she wants in this place. Captain Masterson is already there, seated at the table, his body armor piled in the corner. Fowler strips down too, but Hartz chooses to sit down in full gear, so that he appears swollen, like a giant pumpkin, the skin of his neck flushing scarlet. “This letter, ma’am,” he says as he unfolds a piece of stationery, “constitutes an official condolence for your son’s death from the coalition forces and the United States Army. This letter is not an admission of guilt. Your son was present during an attack on coalition forces, during which three soldiers were killed. We believe our soldiers acted properly to defend themselves.” He casts a hopeful glance at Fowler, which she does not match. “Unfortunately, these actions appear to have resulted in your son’s death. It was an accident, which doesn’t make it less of a tragedy.”