Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (26 page)

The realtress pulls him closer. He doesn’t sense that it’s a sexual thing at all; it feels too brittle, more like a codependent clinginess or mothering clutch, which he can handle. Part of being a soldier is accepting that your body does not belong to you.

Ore th’ Laaa-ha-annnndddd of the Freeeeeeeeeee—HEEEEEEEEE

Then the pause, the teetering catch at cliff’s edge, followed by the vocal swan dive—

Never do Americans sound so much like a bunch of drunks as when celebrating the end of their national anthem. In the midst of all the boozy clapping and cheering perhaps a dozen middle-aged women converge on Billy. For a second it seems they’ll tear him limb from limb, their eyes are cranking those crazy lights and there is nothing they wouldn’t do for America, torture, nukes, worldwide collateral damage, for the sake of God and country they are down for it all. “Isn’t it wonderful?” the realtress cries as she holds him tight. “Don’t you love it? Doesn’t it make you just so proud?”

Well, right this second he wants to weep, that’s how desperately proud he feels. Does that count? Are we talking the same language here? Proud, sure, he thinks of Shroom and Lake and all the blood-truths of that day and starts brainstorming quantum-theory proofs of
proud
. Yes ma’am, proud, Bravo has achieved levels of proud that can move mountains and knock the moon out of phase, but why, please, do they play the national anthem before games anyway? The Dallas Cowboys and the Chicago Bears, these are two privately owned, for-profit corporations, these their contractual employees taking the field. As well play the national anthem at the top of every commercial, before every board meeting, with every deposit and withdrawal you make at the bank!

But Billy tries. “I feel full,” he says, and the women cry out and a pillowy sort of scrummage ensues with much hugging and pawing, many cell phone snaps, three or four conversations going at once and more than one woman shedding actual tears. It is a heavy Group Moment and about as much as he can handle, and when it finally tapers off he puts his head down and makes for the lower level because, like Custer’s line of retreat at Little Bighorn, there’s really no place else to go. People smile and greet him as he moves through the crowd. Someone holds out a drink, which he takes; later he’ll realize they were merely waving at him. He comes to the bank of stadium seats and starts down the stairs. Three of his fellow Bravos are hunkered down on the bottom row, a refuge, a small redoubt amid this crowd of dangerously overstimulated civilians.

“Jesus Christ,” Billy says, dropping into a seat.

The other Bravos grunt. Being a hero is exhausting.

“Bears won the toss,” A-bort announces. “Up fifty already, homes.”

Holliday snorts. “You dah man, A. Showin’ some real fine savvy with that call.” He turns to Billy. “Where’s Lodis?”

“Up there.”

“Actin’ a fool?”

“He’s doing all right. Any word about halftime?”

The other Bravos grimly shake their heads. They’re all feeling it, not just the usual performance anxiety but the soldier’s innate dread of cosmic payback. They’ve accomplished two weeks of remarkably glitch-free events, so perhaps the natural or even necessary climax of the
Victory Tour
—like they’ve been saving up!—will be the mother of all fuckups on national TV.

The Cowboys kick off to the Bears. Touchback. From the twenty-yard line the Bears run off tackle for three, up the middle for two, then a weakside sweep for four, but there’s a flag. Between plays there is nothing much to do except watch bad commercials on the Jumbotron and worry about halftime.

“Do you think we’re being rude?” Mango asks.

Everyone looks at him.

“Sitting down here by ourselves. Not mingling or anything.”

“Rude as fuck,” Day says.

“Let’s put up a sign,” A-bort suggests. “ ‘Dysfunctional Vets, Leave Us Alone.’ ”

They watch a few plays. Mango keeps sighing and squirming around. “Football is
boring,
” he finally announces. “You guys never noticed? It’s like, start, stop, start, stop, you get about five seconds of plays for every minute of standing around. Shit is
dull
.”

“You can leave,” Holliday tells him. “Nobody say you got to be here.”

“No, Day, I do got to be here. I gotta be wherever the Army says I gotta be, and right now it’s here.”

The Bears punt. The Cowboys return to the twenty-six. There is a long wait while the chains are moved and the football replaced. The offense and defense trundle onto the field. The offense huddles while the defense mills around, huffing and puffing with their hands on their hips. Goddamn, Billy thinks, Mango’s right. Between plays is sort of like sitting in church, if not for the infernal blaring of the Jumbotron everybody would keel over and fall asleep. One of the Filipino waiters comes by and asks would they care for anything. The Bravos check to make sure Dime isn’t lurking, and since he isn’t they order a round of Jack and Cokes. Billy chugs his accidental cranberry vodka and keeps a fond eye on Faison. The drinks arrive. They help it be not so much like church. The Cowboys advance to the Bears’ forty-two, then lose sixteen yards when Henson takes a sack, and Billy begins to intuit the basic futility of seizing ground you can’t control.

“
Please
tell me there’s no booze in those drinks,” Dime wharls. The Bravos jump. Dime drops into the seat next to Billy, a pair of binoculars swinging from a strap around his neck.

“Not hardly,” says A-bort. “We were about to complain.”

“C’mon guys, I told you—”

“Yo Dime,” Day breaks in, “Mango says football is boring.”

“
What?
” Dime instantly rounds on Mango. “What the
fuck
do you
mean
football is
boring,
football is
great,
football kicks every other sport’s
ass,
football’s the fucking
pinnacle
of the sports world. What’re you trying to say, you like
soccer
? A bunch of fruits running around in little shorts and knee socks? They play for ninety minutes and
nobody ever scores,
yeah, sounds like a lot of fun, the game of choice for the vegetally comatose? But
fine,
if you’d rather watch
fut-BOLL,
Mango, you can just go the fuck back to Meh-
hee
-co.”

“I’m from Tucson,” Mango answers mildly. “I was actually born there, Sergeant. You know that.”

“You could be from Squirrel Dick, Idaho, for all I care. Football’s
strategic,
it’s got
tactics,
it’s a thinking man’s game in addition to being goddamn poetry in motion. But you’re obviously too much of a dumbfuck to appreciate that.”

“That must be it,” Mango says. “I guess you’ve gotta be a genius—”

“Shut UP! You’re hopeless, Montoya, you are a disgrace to the cause. I bet it was sad fucks like you who lost the Alamo.”

Mango giggles. “Sergeant, I think you’re a little confused. It was the—”

“Shut! I don’t wanna hear any more of your gay revisionist crap, so just
shut
.”

Mango bides a couple of beats. “You know, they say if the Alamo’d had a back door, Texas never woulda—”

“SHUT!”

The Bravos titter like a bunch of Cub Scouts. The Cowboys punt, but there’s a penalty so they do it again, then everybody stands down for a TV time-out. Dime has the binoculars to his face.

“Which one is she?” he murmurs, understanding this is a private, no, a sacred matter.

“To the left,” Billy says in a low voice, “down around the twenty. Kind of blondish reddish hair.”

Dime swivels left. The cheerleaders are doing a hip-rock fanny-bop routine, a fetching little number to pass the time. Dime watches for a while, then with the binoculars still to his face he extends his hand to Billy.

“Congratulations.”

They shake hands.

“Lady is bangin’.”

“Thanks, Sergeant.”

Dime continues to watch.

“You really mugged down with that?”

“I did. I swear, Sergeant.”

“You don’t have to swear. What’s her name?”

“Faison.”

“Last or first?”

“Uh, first.” Billy realizes he doesn’t know her last.

“Umph. Damn.” Dime chuckles to himself. “Depths and depths in young Billy. Who’da thought.”

When Dime leaves Billy asks if he can borrow the binoculars, and with grand, silent solemnity Dime drapes the lanyard around Billy’s neck as if anointing an Olympic champion. Billy has a fine time with the binoculars. Mostly he keeps them trained on Faison, tracking her dance routines, her strenuous pom-pom shaking, her arm-waving exhortations to the crowd. The binos conjure a strange, delicate clarity from the material world, a kind of dollhouse fineness of texture and detail. So framed, everything Faison does is sort of miraculous. Here, she gives her hair a coltish toss; there, idly cocks her knee, thumps her toe on the turf while conferring with her sister cheerleaders. Billy conceives an almost delirious tenderness for her, along with sweet-sour roilings of nostalgia and loss, a sense of watching her not only from far away but across some long passage of time as well. Which means what, this melancholy, this mournful soul-leakage—that he’s in love? The bitch of it is there’s no time to figure it out. He and Faison need to talk—he needs her number! Along with her e-mail. And her last name would be nice.

“Hey.” Mango is nudging him. “We’re gonna hit the buffet. You comin’?”

Billy says no. He just wants to sit here with the binoculars and watch everything. The game doesn’t interest him at all but the people do, the way the steam, for instance, rises off the players like a cartoon rendering of body odor. Coach Tuttle stalks the sidelines with the addled look of a man who can’t remember where he parked his car. A sense of relaxing omniscience comes over Billy as he studies the fans, a kind of clinical, gorillas-in-the-mist absorption in how they eat, drink, yawn, pick their noses, preen and primp, indulge or rebuff their young. He lingers on all the hot women, of course, and spots no fewer than six people dressed up in turkey costumes. Often he catches people staring into space, their faces slack, unguarded, verging on fretfulness, fogged in by the general bewilderment of life. Oh Americans. Oh my people. Then he swings back to Faison and his vitals turn to mush. She’s not just hot, she’s
Maxim
and Victoria’s Secret hot, she is world-class and he needs to get a plan together. A woman like her requires means—

“There’s my Texan!”

He looks up. March Hawey is coming at him, sidling down the row. He starts to rise but Hawey palms his shoulder and guides him back down. He sits next to Billy and props his feet on the railing, and Billy immediately conceives a lust for his cowboy boots, a pair of lustrous sea-green ostrich quills with toecaps of silver filigree.

“How you doin’?”

“Really well, sir. And you?”

“All right, except I wish our boys would get their butts in gear.”