In September, four months before their deployment, Fowler disassembled and rebuilt the hydraulic system on the Hercules, having ordered new hoses through the requisition office. The pattern of the hoses, as they branched and divided through the interior of the machine, was a reassuring puzzle, complicated but never contradictory, the return lines and outgoing lines perfectly balanced, like the arteries in a heart. By the end, each was flagged, the pattern fully memorized by herself and by Sergeant Eggleston, whom she had chosen to command this machine, and all the rest of her NCOs. Having made the Hercules whole, they would soon have to break it all down again for transport to Iraq, but before they did, they spent weekends trundling the great big squat machine patiently out into the soybean fields, a deeply unsexy, dowdy beast waddling up to creek beds and hauling out logs, clanking out to the motor pool and hooking its tow cable to decommissioned tanks, to truck cabs, to Fowler’s beater F-150.
Now, lying beside Pulowski in the La Quinta Inn, she guiltily compared the puzzle of the Hercules to the puzzle of the signal officer she had now slept with four times. Physically, things clicked just fine, though she was beginning to worry that the other parameters of their relationship weren’t going to be as cut-and-dried. “You gonna ever tell me anything about yourself?” Pulowski asked, rolling over on his side. “Or are these meetings going to be just, kind of, a refreshing form of PT?”
“What do you want to know?” She slid one leg over Pulowski’s skinny midsection and sat up high atop him, so as to feel less vulnerable.
“What about your family?”
“Divorce,” she said. “Mom remarried, like, fifteen years ago. Lives in Oregon. So not really in touch. And I got a brother, Harris, who”—she poked him in the nose with her finger; playful, but also reminding him that he was an outsider to this whole thing—“is not a big fan of my joining the Army.”
“Sounds like my kind of guy.”
“I thought you had a sense of humor.”
“I do.” He craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the TV behind her, where Leno was talking. “Speaking of which—”
“Yeah, well, Harris isn’t much into jokes. Harris is a very serious guy. Or at least he is when it comes to me.”
“Maybe it’s the way you talk to him,” Pulowski suggested.
“Maybe. Although he also gets mad when I don’t talk to him.”
“Sounds like what you might need are some lessons in male psychology.”
“Yeah? This from a guy who tells me I need to make a fool out of myself. I always find that useful when I’m dealing with my platoon.”
“Maybe you ought to try it.”
“Have you been a woman in the Army?” she asked. “Like in some previous life?”
Pulowski had his head propped up against a folded pillow and he gave her a beaky, acned smile, as if in fact he had. Or was intending to try it out.
“I know that if my nickname was Family Values Fowler, I might consider the possibility that I needed to lighten up. Especially since, you know”—he gestured to the room with a sweeping wave that included, in a final underhand curl, her crotch where it pressed against his belly—“there’s so much excellent evidence here to the contrary.”
She’d not heard the name before and she felt immediately self-indulgent and foolish, talking about herself. Self-indulgent to even be here. She slid easily off Pulowski’s belly and padded over to the table and chairs that sat before the motel room’s window and found her panties and, sitting down on the rough woven wool of the chair, fit her feet through the leg holes. Pulowski may have been right to make fun of Seacourt and his proscription against smoking, his rules, his habit of dropping down to do fifty push-ups during meeting breaks, his focus on PT. None of it, she admitted, was going to necessarily help anybody in a firefight. But there was still something clear and clean to it that she liked; if you sat in a chair in your office and pored over the roster of your platoon and you learned to be thinking only of them and knowing that you yourself needed nothing from them, it helped with the nerves. And in moments like this. “Really?” she said. “That’s what they call me?”
“That’s what I heard,” Pulowski said, pushing himself up on his elbow so that he could watch her dress. “So is it true?”
She’d finished pulling up her panties and sat back in the chair, otherwise naked, testing out how this felt under the beetle-black gaze that Pulowski gave her from the bed. It felt good. “No,” she said. “I was bad at family. Or at least that’s what my brother seems to think.”
“Why does he think that?”
“Because he thinks I abandoned him,” she said.
“Did you?”
“No,” she said.
Pulowski waited for a further answer—or no, that was wrong. He accepted her answer, without any further comment, which was not, she realized, quite the same thing. She was curious about how he knew that she preferred it.
“He stole a car,” Fowler explained. “When he was, like, sixteen. It was our neighbor’s, right down the road. The Ryersons. He hid it in our barn out back, which was totally insane, naturally.” She laughed, thinking about it now, trying to imagine what might have been going through Harris’s head.
It was a funnier story when you said it out loud. Funnier too when she said it to Pulowski. If she’d tried it with Hartz, or Seacourt, they would’ve spent too much time trying to figure out what professional lessons could be drawn from it.
“Sweet,” Pulowski said.
“Oh, yeah. It was sweet, all right.”
“So what did you do?”
“I fucking turned him in,” she said. This too she found herself unable to say without a guilty smile.
“You’re kidding me!”
“What the hell else was I supposed to do?”
This was not a question she liked to ask. In fact, the best way she’d found to get over the past was to accept the present, to take it one day at a time, as Hartz would’ve said, which was one of the things she loved about the Army, that you could actually try. The present was always there. Tomorrow, there would be M4 qualification at ten a.m. Then a PowerPoint on tactics for observing IEDs. Then vehicle inspection. Then at 1600, a five-mile run for PT. All of that she felt perfectly capable of handling. It was the stuff that had to do with the future or the past that frightened her. And yet she had been dying to ask somebody this question about Harris since the first moment when she’d stood the soldiers in her platoon up for roll call and listened to them blurt out their names. Their trusting faces had terrified her in exactly the same way Harris’s had.
“You could’ve let him go,” Pulowski said. “Got him off—or at least let him sneak the car back. Did anybody else know that he’d stolen it, other than you?”
“No,” she said. “Nobody else did.”
“So why didn’t you do that?”
“Because I was angry at him,” she said. “Because I thought he needed to learn a lesson. It is wrong, you know. It is not a good idea for a sixteen-year-old to steal a car. Did you steal any?”
“No, I was too much of a pussy.”
“Okay, and plus it was bad for the family.”
“What?”
“There’s rules for a family, just like there’s rules for a platoon. Or a company. You don’t fucking run out on people. You don’t break the law. You don’t lie—or at least not to the people who are supposed to be on your side.”
“That’s it? That’s your whole philosophy?”
“It’s what I’m working with currently.”
“You don’t think it’s more complicated than that?”
“Such as?”
“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.