Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (18 page)

When the photo op is done Billy decides he needs a moment. He takes up position with his back to the wall, just to the left of the stage where the arc of the backdrop as it curves inward shields him from much of the room. He stands at parade rest and works on smoothing out his breathing. A couple of medias see him and here they come. Well fuck. What the hell. Billy sucks it up.

“Hey.”

“Hello.”

“What up.”

They introduce themselves. Billy gave up trying to remember names long ago. They talk a little while for the recording gadgets, then one of them asks has Billy considered writing a book about his experiences in Iraq. Billy laughs and gives him a
Dude!
sort of look.

“A lot of soldiers are doing it,” the man tells him, “there’s a market for that right now. It’d be a way to get your story out there and make some money. Paul and me could help you with that, we’ve ghostwritten a couple of books. We’d be interested in working with you on something like that.”

Billy shuffles his feet. “I never saw myself ever trying to write a book. I hardly even ever read, till I joined the Army and a buddy started giving me books.”

What, the medias want to know.

“Well, okay. You really wanna know?
The Hobbit.
Kerouac,
On the Road.
This book
Flashman at the Charge,
which was hilarious. Why don’t they tell you about these books in school? Like maybe then they’d get people to actually read. Let’s see, the
Hell’s Angels
by Hunter S. Thompson.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle. Gorky Park
and another one with that same guy, the Russian dude.” All books given to him by Shroom.

“What did you think of the Thompson books?”

“They made me wanna get high,” Billy says, and laughs so they’ll know it’s a joke. “No, seriously, I think you’d have to say the man’s a total lunatic, but in a way it makes sense, like it’s a normal response to the situations he puts himself in. Though why a person would do a lot of the shi— stuff he does . . . I bet he’d have some interesting things to say about Iraq, like if he went, if he could see it the way the soldiers see it. I’m not saying I endorse his lifestyle or anything. I just like the way he writes.”

“Would you say there’s much drug use among the soldiers over there?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. I’m only nineteen. I can’t even drink beer!”

“You can vote and die for your country, but you can’t walk into a bar and buy a beer.”

“I guess that’s one way to put it.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Billy takes a moment to reflect. “It’s probably for the best.”

Again the medias raise the idea of writing a book. Billy becomes aware of a radiant heat source on his right, and glancing over he sees it’s her standing patiently at his side. His pulse takes off at gazelle speed, oh God oh God oh God oh fuck fuck fuck fuck, meanwhile the medias natter on about markets, contracts, agents, publishers, and God knows what. He gives them his e-mail address just so they’ll leave him alone, and when at last they do he turns to her. She regards him steadily, with an air of frank expectation. Somehow he has the poise to look her up and down, not a leering perv look but more like that of a childhood friend encountering the splendid grown-up version of the knock-kneed, noodle-armed, grass-flecked little girl he used to chase around the playground in first grade.

“So you’re gonna write a book?”

“
No,
” he gruffs, and they both laugh. Suddenly he’s barely nervous at all. “Don’t you get cold out there, cheering in that rig?”

“We move around so much it’s almost never a problem, though I’m tellin’ you, last week in Green Bay I thought I was gonna freeze my you-know-what off. We do have coats for really cold weather, but we hardly ever wear them out on the field. I’m”—sounds like
pheasant
? She shifts her pom-poms and holds out her hand.

“Say again?”

She laughs. “Faison. F-a-i-s-o-n. I know who you are, Billy Lynn from Stovall. My grandmother was Miss Stovall 1937, how about that?” She laughs easily, a husky trilling from deep in her chest. “Everybody said she had a shot at winning Miss Texas that year. A bunch of local business guys got together and financed her wardrobe, voice lessons, all her travel expenses, they really wanted it for the town. Back then Stovall was sort of a big deal, with all the oil they were pulling out of the ground.”

“So how’d she do?”

Faison shakes her head. “Second runner-up. Everybody said she should’ve won, but the fix was in. You know how those pageant deals work.”

And with his vast experience in beauty pageants, Billy eagerly nods. For the moment people are leaving them alone.

“Not much you could call a big deal about Stovall these days.”

“That’s what I hear. Haven’t been since I was a kid, but when I saw one of the Bravos was from Stovall, I was like, Hey, Stovall! I felt like I kind of knew you in a way, I mean,
Stovall,
come on, out of all the places a person could be from? It just seemed funny.”

She grew up in Flower Mound, she tells him, and works part-time as a law firm receptionist while paying her own way through UNT, a mere six credits to go before she earns her degree in broadcast journalism. He guesses she’s twenty-two, twenty-three, a compact, curvy package with a pert, inquiring nose, green eyes strewn with flecks of amber and gold, and the kind of cleavage that makes men weep. At the moment she’s telling him how much his comments at the press conference meant to her, but he barely hears, so absorbed is he in the beautiful shapes her mouth makes as it forms the words

“You were so incredibly eloquent up there.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“No, yeah, you were! You put it right out there and that’s strong, a lot of people can’t talk about those kinds of things. I mean, like, death, your friend’s death? And you were right there with him? It can’t be easy talking to a room full of strangers about that.”

Billy inclines his head. “It is sort of weird. Being honored for the worst day of your life.”

“I can’t imagine! A lot of people would just shut down.”

“So what’s it like being a cheerleader?”

“Oh, great! A
lot
of work but I love it, it’s a lot more work than people realize. They see us on TV and think that’s all there is to it, just dressing out for the games and dancing and having fun, but that’s really just a very small fraction of what we do.”

“Really,” he says encouragingly. He feels light inside, refreshed, a physical state of hopefulness. Talking to this beautiful girl makes him realize just how precious his unremarkable life is to him.

“Yeah, community service is really the main part of our job. We do lots of hospitals, lots of stuff with underprivileged kids, appearances at fund-raisers and stuff like that. Like right now that it’s the holidays? We’re doing four or five service events per week, then practice and games on top of that. But I’m not complaining. I’m grateful for every minute of it.”

“Did you do the USO tour last spring?”

“Oh my God NO and I SO would’ve gone but I only made the squad this summer. Listen, I’m DYING to do a trip like that, no way they’re gonna keep me off that plane next time it happens. The girls who did it? They came back so enriched and that’s the thing about service, people say, ‘Oh, you’re so good to be giving so much of yourselves,’ but really it’s the other way around, we get so much back. To me that’s been the most satisfying thing about being a cheerleader, serving others. The spiritual aspect of it. Like it’s another stage in the journey, the quest.” She pauses; her eyes hold Billy’s for a long, searching moment, and just before she speaks he knows what’s coming.

“Billy, are you a Christian?”

He coughs into his fist, looks away. The confusion is genuine, but he rarely goes to the trouble of showing it.

“I’m searching,” he says finally, dipping into his repertoire of Christian buzz words, which, thanks to growing up in small-town Texas, is extensive.

“Do you pray?” She’s become softer in her manner, more solicitous.

“Sometimes. Not as much as I should, I guess. But some of the stuff we saw in Iraq, the little kids especially . . . Praying doesn’t come so easy after that.”

So if he’s laying it on a little thick, so what. His sensors haven’t picked up a false word yet.

“You’ve been tested in so many ways, I know. But a lot of the time that’s how it works, life gets so dark until we think all the light’s gone out of us. But it’s there, it’s always there. If we just open the door a crack the light comes pouring in.” She smiles and ducks her head, emits a shy chuckle. “You know how we kept looking at each other during the press conference? And I was thinking to myself, Now, why out of all the people here does he keep looking at me and I keep looking at him? I mean you’re cute and everything, you’ve got gorgeous eyes . . .” She giggles, regroups her seriousness. “But now I think I know why, I really do. I think God wanted us to meet today.”

Billy sighs, his eyelids flutter and his head tips back, meets the wall with an understated
thunk
. For all he knows every word she says is true.

“We’re all called upon to be His lights out in the world,” she continues, brushing a pom-pom against his arm, and thirty seconds into the story of how she came to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Billy quietly, slowly, firmly, reaches underneath her pom-pom and takes her hand. Because, why not. Because he’s moved. Because in two days he’s back in the shit and what’s the worst that can happen compared to that? Faison doesn’t falter, in fact her rate of speech gathers speed. Her sternum lifts and swells; hothouse blooms of plum purple and fireball red dapple the regions of her face and neck. Her pupils dilate to twice their former size, and faint, shallow pantings swirl and ripple through her words as if she’s just trotted up five flights of stairs.