Read Online The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell - Free Book Online Page B

Muthanna intersection, and Pulowski, rather than follow him, had stood and sprinted away, back into the intersection, unhooked the mic from Waldorf’s dashboard, and said, We got separated from Beale. I have no idea where he might be. Pulowski’s father had been a liar too—as well as a resident surgeon at the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital outside Clarksville. Or at least that was how Pulowski had thought about him when his father had filed for divorce and, two months later, retired from the Army and moved to Naples, Florida. One of the most curious things about that divorce—one that had grown more curious once Pulowski, who’d been sixteen at the time, had gone off to college and developed a better sense of how a divorce might work, not to mention how a man like his father, who was extremely organized, would tend to plan things—was the fact that his father must have known and been planning to move to Naples for some time. It was impossible to imagine it differently. This had become the focal point of his anger with his father for years, especially once he got to college. He’d finally asked his father about this directly at the graduation banquet held for his ROTC cadre. The colonel, as far as Pulowski knew, had not put on a uniform since his retirement, which was one of the reasons that Pulowski, dressed up in his ROTC greens, had felt powerful enough to ask the question on that particular day. They’d been in a hotel ballroom near the University of Pittsburgh, the cadets in white gloves, the tables covered in fancy tablecloths, napkins frilled in cups, and when Pulowski’s mother had gotten up to go to the bathroom, he’d leaned over to his father and said, You knew you were leaving us, didn’t you? You knew it and you never said anything. Isn’t that true? His father, a fastidious man, gray-haired, not far from his own death (though, of course, Pulowski hadn’t known that then), had rearranged his utensils around his plate and then said, And what use would that information be to anybody?
    At the time, Pulowski had considered his father’s response to be, at best, cowardly. But now, as he pushed through the crowded hallways, looking for an interpreter to read the detainee’s note, all he hoped for was his father’s equanimity. He could still see Beale’s splotchy, glistening face peeking out from behind a metal dumpster once they’d started taking fire in the alley off the Muthana intersection. “You think it’s such a stupid idea to check these buildings out now?” Beale had said, hands shaking as he tried to aim his weapon. “Fuck that, man. Fuck you and your bullshit.”
    â€œTry the radio, at least,” Pulowski had said.
    â€œIt’s jammed,” Beale had said. “I got nothing.”
    â€œWe got to sit tight,” he had said. “We stick together, it’ll be all right.”
    â€œWe got to get on that roof,” Beale had said. “That’s where the shooter is. There’s a door up ahead. I’m going in.”
    â€œNo,” he had said. “No, just hold on.”
    â€œWhat the fuck am I holding on to?” Beale had said. “You?”
    Early on when they’d first started sleeping together at Fort Riley, he and Fowler had talked about Beale quite a bit because he’d been the one soldier in her platoon whom she had the most trouble with—and also the one they had the most pleasure arguing about. Pulowski had still felt adrift in the Army then. As a signal officer attached to Headquarters Company, he was not in charge of a platoon, like Fowler was, and thus had no soldiers under him, no relationship to their day-to-day concerns. Instead, despite the surface activity of the fort, which itself wasn’t all that different from a college campus, he had spent most of his days in a classroom in the back of the battalion headquarters, working to bone up on the