Nothing is embarrassing unless you decide it’s embarrassing. That was the Pulowski-ism that Fowler recited as she pushed past the Christmas tree that guarded the Echo Company offices. If she had been Pulowski instead of herself, she wouldn’t have been here at all: there was too much work to do, and she herself wasn’t even packed yet, and she had paperwork piling up all over her apartment, leave requests, uniform requisitions, billeting forms, travel documents that were going to be needed to get her soldiers on the plane. And yet, here she was, ever the good girl, ever the eager beaver, unstacking the boxes that she’d bought on Captain Hartz’s desk and opening the first with a flourish, as if it contained nothing less important than the holy grail.
“We’re under budget,” she said.
“Well, that’s, I guess, good?” Captain Hartz leaned over the large bright pink container and slipped on his reading glasses and squinted, as if reading the fine print of a diesel order. Then he pinched the shoulders of the dress inside, slowly drew it out of the box, and, as if he were imitating something he’d seen in a movie, pinned the pleated blue slip of fabric against his torso, gazing with concern at the bump his belly made. “What size did I say she was again?” he asked.
“Fourteen,” Fowler said, from memory. “She’s going to love it, sir. Blue is supposed to be a fairly conservative color. Warm. And Lilly Pulitzer is an extremely traditional brand. Classic cut. Linen. Nice enough to wear to a dinner party but not so showy that she’ll never put it on again.”
All of these were terms that she’d cribbed from an email that Pulowski’s mother had sent, answering her son’s very vague and somewhat inscrutable request: What kind of dress looks good on a fat woman?
“Nice but not too showy,” Hartz said with a bemused smile, depositing the dress gently on top of its ribboned box, as one might a phosphorus grenade. “Whatever in the hell that means. I mean, obviously it means something to you—but Sarah acts like I’m supposed to know it too. Like this is somehow common knowledge, the difference between nice and showy. Is that some sort of code in the language you all speak?”
The dresses were for the annual Christmas dinner at Seacourt’s house on post. The year before, Fowler had drawn staff duty and missed the party, but she’d been new, fresh out of college, and so it hadn’t seemed unfair—until the same thing happened during Seacourt’s golf tournament on the Fourth of July. There were rules against this sort of thing. Very specific rules about not having battalion functions that, say, female officers were mysteriously not invited to. She’d made her awareness of these rules known—not loudly, not angrily, but clearly—by congratulating Hartz on how much fun he and his two male lieutenants must have had. That August she’d received an invitation to the Christmas party, then nothing since. Until this morning, after Hartz had asked her to pick up the dress. “She probably just wanted you to think of it for yourself,” Fowler said. She was folding up the dress and replacing it in the box, trying not to re-create the supposedly female behavior that Hartz was now questioning her about.
Hartz barked a laugh and sat back down on his desk chair, tossing a pen on the table as if it were a token of surrender. “But why? That’s what I don’t get, Emma—what’s with the guessing? If she wants a dress for the party, why doesn’t she go get a dress for the party, instead of waiting until the morning of the party and telling me she doesn’t have anything to wear and so won’t be going? Give me some insight into this. I don’t get it. I never get it. Why do you do that? Why don’t you just come out and say what you want?”
“Personally, I think you’re making it a little more complicated than it needs to be, sir,” Fowler said, as neutrally as possible.
“Really? How’s that?”
“Everybody wants recognition,” Fowler said.
It hadn’t been completely unreasonable for Fowler not to pester Hartz about the party. After all, it seemed like she’d been invited. No one had said otherwise. And up until a month ago, Hartz had seemed like he’d started to pay a bit better attention to her. Nothing magic. Just a few of the old saws that Fowler had already heard in ROTC: “Don’t ask your men to do anything you wouldn’t do.” And, “Be the first one out of the foxhole and the last one in.” But they were, at least, a form of recognition, a suggestion that she might be someone worth giving advice to. Weighing against this was the incident with Masterson and the shackles, a disaster on every front, after which—paranoid coincidence or not—Hartz had restricted his communication down to a few bemused and possibly pitying glances cast her way. And then this morning had signed her up for staff duty again. Which she had been planning to discuss with him … well, right now seemed like a good fucking time. Hartz circled his desk and pulled on his coat.
“That’s what this party is,” Hartz said. He was back at ease now and their talk had fallen into its usual comfortable banter—more intimate, Fowler liked to think, than he was with his other lieutenants. As if she were an equal or even possibly a friend. “Recognition for the wives. And the random townie girlfriends. You think the colonel wants to spend seventy dollars a head on dinner? Plus footing the bill for a bunch of junior officers who don’t know the difference between Old Style and champagne? And having tomorrow be a total wreck, with everybody hung over and not worth spit?”
“Sounds awful,” Fowler said.
Hartz was quick enough to catch her sarcasm—though not quite quick enough to determine its source. That realization formed more slowly, a speck of distant dark clouds that worried the ruddy plains of his forehead: Fowler has a beef. He tucked his wife’s dress box under his arm and waved the second package, which contained a shoulder wrap for Colonel Seacourt’s wife. “Steve’s gonna appreciate this,” he said. “I told him about your Eisenhower comment too. We both liked it.”
“Really? I thought you were kind of pissed.”
She could see, from a slight tightening in his smile, that he still was. “Maybe a little bit. In the moment. I don’t exactly like being corrected by one of my own soldiers in the middle of a lecture. So I’d say that while the content was fine, what you really need to work on, Lieutenant, is delivery.”
“Fair enough,” Fowler said. Given the mildly positive tone of the conversation, she made a quick judgment—risk of unpreparedness versus risk of embarrassment—and grabbed her dry-cleaned formal uniform as they headed down the hall.
“But I do agree with this idea of yours that a good officer doesn’t need to make a big stink about doing the right thing. You don’t need to be recognized. That’s why the colonel and I value the way you’ve handled this party.”
“How did I do that?”
“Well, for one, Wilson and Jaffrey”—these were the two other male lieutenants in Echo Company—“have been siccing their wives on Sarah for the past three months. Suggestive comments. Notes. ‘Do you want to go to lunch, Mrs. Hartz?’ ‘Anything I can pick up for you at Costco, Mrs. Hartz?’ ‘The one thing I’d really, really like, before Tom goes away, is to have one really nice evening out, Mrs. Hartz.’”
He dealt Fowler a shifty, sideways glance, inviting her to share his disbelief at these kinds of tactics. But all Fowler felt was a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Wives can do that?”
“Certain wives only do that,” Hartz assured her. “But not a word from you. Which, again, is something that I’ve communicated to the colonel and which he does appreciate. And I do too. You recognize that a party like this isn’t important. It’s not what we’re about. And you know, after this incident you had with Captain Masterson—”
So that was it, then: the missing shackles. The conflict she’d initiated with Masterson. Meaning if she’d just shut up then, she’d be going to the party. Or she could make a huge stink now and also go. But there were no reasonable options in between.
“A party like this is a social occasion,” Hartz continued. “It’s not a military maneuver. It’s a family event. We may not like what our brothers are doing at every possible moment. But brothers also don’t turn on brothers.”
“I think you mean ‘fraternity event,’” Fowler said.
“You been to many fraternity parties, Lieutenant?” Hartz asked.
“No,” Fowler admitted.
“Imagine Lieutenant Anderson, five bourbons into the night, trying to hump a farm girl from La Cygne. Or, if the farm girl’s already passed out, trying to hump you.”
“I’ve seen worse,” Fowler said.
“Like he cares,” Hartz said. “Besides, who would you bring?”
They were in the parking lot out back of the battalion headquarters now. This was the moment, right now, when she could’ve argued back. When she could’ve demanded that Hartz take her off staff duty and give one of his other lieutenants the assignment, no matter what their dumb wives said. Hartz had led her to this moment deliberately so that afterward she could have no complaint. It was six o’clock, already dark, the snow piled up in lonely humps in front of the parked cars, the blacktop glistening with the day’s melt, which would itself soon freeze. And she allowed the moment to pass.
“We can all reinvent ourselves, Lieutenant,” Hartz assured her as they reached his car and he handed her a package so he had a free hand to search his pockets for his keys.
After Hartz left, she sat in her pickup, dry-cleaned uniform on her knees, and then, as if she’d been shot with adrenaline, began hammering the steering wheel with her fist. What the fuck was that supposed to mean! Reinvent herself how? She’d done what Hartz wanted but the line sounded disappointed, as if she should’ve argued. Except he didn’t want her to argue, right? And why did she care what he wanted? She had a vision of herself standing at reveille wearing the dress that Hartz had purchased for his wife, a pair of pumps, and waving a kerchief and batting her eyes as the colonel walked by.
That lasted until she saw a small package on her dash, a little white square tied up with what looked like red insulated electrical wire. Inside was a blank CD with the words Listen to me written on it in red Sharpie.
“This better be good,” she said, and put it in, engendering a burst of heavy metal so loud that she pawed the volume, and then, to her surprise, Beale’s dopey voice came on over her speakers. “Lieutenant Fowler, this is your mission, should you choose to accept it. Please back up, exit the parking lot, and go right on McCormic Road. Beep!”
“Oh, no,” she said, staring at herself in the rearview mirror. “No, no, no! You do not do what he says.” Then, to her CD player, she said, “Fuck off, Beale. I’m busy!”
But she was not busy. And there had been some obvious effort made to have the recording work like a real GPS, the words timed out as if someone had actually driven the route. So after she sat alone for a few minutes, listening to the trickling dregs of the parking-lot snow, she heard another beep. Right on Huebner Road, Beale said.
“All right, screw it,” she said, and jammed her truck in reverse.
Fifteen minutes later, after some rewardingly aggressive driving—Beep! Left on East Chestnut Street. Beep!—the phrase Turn right into the Cracker Barrel parking lot ended the CD. She parked and climbed out, feeling skeptical as hell. A light dusting of flakes blazed in headlight glare as other cars swung through the lot. Crawford and Waldorf and Dykstra—she’d felt like they’d pretty much been on board with her from the beginning. (Though who could tell, really, especially since her little war with Masterson had earned them an extra twenty-four-hour shift on the DRIF?) But Beale? Beale was a wild card. Beale was exactly the sort of person who might sit around laughing the next day about how Family Values Fowler wound up eating at the Cracker Barrel by herself.
Still, she went in. Of course, the Cracker Barrel didn’t have a bar, which sucked. And they didn’t generally have TVs for watching the game. Instead, it was filled with old farming signs, rakes nailed up to the wall—none of which she would’ve noticed or felt embarrassed about had Beale not started in with the Family Values thing. The waitress who came up in her brown apron and white blouse was familiar, though: Susie Wrightman, a girl she’d known back in high school, a couple of years behind her.
“Emma,” she said. “You guys getting ready to deploy yet?”
“Few more weeks,” she said. “How’d you guess?”
They reached a table, Fowler seating herself while Susie Wrightman laid out silverware for her, then politely slipped a menu into her hands.
Fowler glanced up at Susie Wrightman, a face that she’d once seen every day for years, pretty, bottle-blond, ex-cheerleader, now getting heavy in the cheeks. On her good days, she still felt a small flare of pride (coupled, in certain ways, with disbelief) that she had listened to their high school recruiter, Captain Morris, rather than ending up carrying around plates for $6.50 an hour plus tips. But on a night like tonight, the uniform felt like a disguise. She wasn’t any more qualified to command a platoon in Iraq than Susie Wrightman was. The difference was that Susie Wrightman wasn’t arrogant enough to pretend she could. “People talk,” Susie said, shrugging, with a funny expression on her face. “You hear things in a job like this. Plus you look a little stressed.”
“Do I?” Fowler said. She smiled uneasily, stripped her cap off, set it on the table, and ran her fingers over her hair. There was still something odd about Susie’s expression, a secret she was holding back. “Yeah, well, I got some personal problems I got to deal with.”
“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!”
“Get your own speaker, Waldorf,” she said. “I got to eat.”
“I’ll say something,” Beale said, standing up.
It was not exactly the kind of place where she’d imagined having her first-ever military success. If at any point during the dinner someone had stood up and accused her of knowing nothing about what they were about to do, what dangers they were about to face, she would’ve confessed to this immediately. In part she feared this, and in part she wished that it would occur, so that she could get it over with, climb up out of the booth, strip off her ACUs and her lieutenant’s bars and go put on a brown apron and get back to waitressing with Susie Wrightman—doing something in which the worst-case scenario was that you got tipped badly, or had to work an extra shift, and nobody ended up dead. In the end, she was rescued from having to say anything further by the advent of the K-State basketball game. One of the servers had set up a portable TV on a table in the corner of the restaurant, below a two-man wood saw that had been nailed to the wall, and the players flickered soundlessly on its screen. Gradually, because she’d started watching it, they all turned that way. She let her eyes linger on the set, the glowing, orderly court, the cheerleaders waving their pom-poms, all of it more magical and electric and satisfyingly vivid compared with the long concrete vistas of the DRIF, the steady brown and tan colors of the base. After a while, she dropped her gaze, in order to pay attention to the food that she’d ordered, and she saw Pulowski watching her instead of the game. He had a sly expression on his face, his eyebrows raised, one that seemed to say that this moment, at this table, proved everything he’d been telling her about her ability to command. Suggesting that she’d made exactly the right call to break the rules and get Beale off. “What’re you looking at, Pulowski?” she said. “When did I get so interesting?”
She reached out and palmed the black padded book that Susie Wrightman had brought over, containing their table’s tab, brushing his fingers as she did it, briefly but firmly, giving no sign to the rest of the platoon that she had done such a thing.