Pulowski asked. He opened the notepad Fowler had given him, flopped it onto the table, and drew a stick figure of himself. “Dixon,” he said. Then, remembering that the Iraqi across from him couldn’t hear—the man’s hand flittered up to his ear again as Pulowski spoke—he wrote his name on the pad in English. DIXON. He pointed at himself. Then he turned the pad so the man might do the same. The room that they occupied was in a small rural schoolhouse in the northern sector of their territory, near a town named Bini Ziad. When Fowler’s platoon had shown up, a line of civilians, detained by Captain Masterson, whose territory this remained, stretched clear through the school’s courtyard and into the road. All of them had to be questioned about Beale and the attack at the intersection. It was a mime show, in Pulowski’s opinion, a necessary but pointless routine, and so it felt somehow proper to be interviewing a man in his mid-twenties who, rather than answering his questions, fired off a picture, quickly sketched but done in the proper proportions, a hint of perspective, cross-hatched shading, the way a genuine cartoonist might work.
