Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (28 page)

“We’re not terrorists,” Billy deadpans, pushing it.

“Move,” says one of the cops. “Now.”

“We’re just talking to my friend down there.”

“I don’t care if you’re talking to the president, you can’t stand here.”

“You’re blocking their view,” says the other cop, indicating the front row. “These people paid good money for their seats.”

“What if they paid bad money?” says Mango, getting into the spirit, and the careful way the cops turn to him hums with all kinds of possibilities. For nothing Billy would gladly bust their heads, it’s that fast, adrenal valves shoved full on and his brain hot-wired every which way, and wouldn’t that do it, he thinks, busting their faces in, putting the truth of himself out there for all the world to see. If they make a move—but they don’t, and Billy’s homicide moment passes. He calls over the railing to Faison:

“These guys are saying we have to go.”

She’s walked over and is right below them now. “I think you better.” She’s worried, Billy realizes. She’s fearful of a scene.

“So I’ll see you!” he calls down.

“At halftime!” She sends up a killer smile. “I’ll look for you on the field!”

He doesn’t understand but nods anyway. Sure, on the field, in the stands, Brazil, wherever. He feels like he’s known her all his life and loved her even longer. The Bravos mad-dog the cops with one last stare and head for the main concourse, where Mango staggers around like he’s been maced. “Billy,” he moans, “Billy, Billy, a
cheerleader
? Oh God she’s fuckin’ beautiful, Billy, how’d you get with that?”

Mango’s slavering makes Billy cherish her even more. “I don’t know. We met at the press conference and just started talking.”

Mango turns wistful. “She really likes you, man. You can tell just by the way she looked at you, all warm and chewy and everything.”

Billy wants to go straight back and see her again. Their hump session could have been a freak of nature, but this second encounter proved some things. Maybe there’s hope for his love life after all. Maybe it didn’t end with Shroom.

“Dude, you gotta get with her before we go,” Mango says.

“Don’t see how. We’re on post as of twenty-two hundred. Plus she’s a Christian girl.”

“Fuck, you kiddin’ me? Christian girls fuck like rabbits,
vato
. If you’re gonna give up sin, you gotta sin, you know? You better go for it now, ’cause by the time we get back she ain’t gonna know you, dawg. She’ll be fucking some linebacker and you’ll be like, Billy who?”

“Thanks, asshole.”

“I’m just sayin’! You better hit it while she’s into you. That’s just good advice.”

Billy’s cell rings. He checks the screen. A-bort.

“Yo.”

“Where the fuck are you guys? Dime is
pissed
.”

“We went for a walk. We’re on our way back.”

“They went for a walk,” A-bort says off-phone. “They’re on their way back.” Billy can hear Dime’s growling response.

“He says get the fuck back asap.” A-bort pulls away again. “Hang on, they’re briefing us on halftime.” Another pause. “What the fuck. They’re saying—uh.” Pause. “Oh Jesus.” There follows a longer pause, then A-bort resumes in a hushed voice. “Dude, you don’t even wanna know what they’re gonna make us do.”

RAPED BY ANGELS

BILLY KNOWS THEY ARE
truly in the shit when Lodis gives him a cockeyed grin and leans close, like he’s about to impart some awesome piece of wisdom. “Billy,” he mumbles
. Bih-yee.

“What.”

“
Biy-yee.
” Lodis is so far gone he’s in Buckwheat mode. “Man, where we at?”

Dear Lord. “Lodis,” Billy murmurs, “we’re down on the field. We’re gonna do some drill, got it?”

Lodis grins and bobs his head. He’s practically drooling.

“How many drinks you have up there?”

“Wonh’ tha’ many!”

Day peers around Crack. “What’s his problem?”

“He’s hammered,” says Billy.

Crack sniggers. “This oughta be good. He can’t drill worth shit even when he’s sober.”

“Don’ be wishin’ bad on me!”

“No worries, Load. You don’t need my help to suck.”

Jesus Christ. Billy tells Lodis to key on him. Stay on my shoulder, just do everything I do. He wants to tell Dime they have to call it off but Dime is clear on the other side of the formation, yes, thank you, in addition to everything else they have split Bravo in half to please some fascist bandmaster’s jones for symmetry. Holliday, Crack, Billy, and Lodis stand four abreast on the home sideline. To the rear and sides the Prairie View A&M marching band is moving into position. It could be the setup for a night attack, there’s that same edgy rustling of gear and clothes, the covert thump of boots on turf. Somewhere a lone drummer is marking time with his sticks, left, right, left, right, tick, tick, tick.

“Load, take some breaths. Clear your head.”

Scgggggck. Scgggggck.

“He dying over there?” Crack asks.

“
Coal!
”

“Hell yeah it’s cold. Suck it up, bitch.” Thirty-four degrees, so they were informed by an unseen voice in the tunnel, and stepping onto the field they were met by a stinging crystalline mist, swarms of frozen micro-droplets like polar gnats. Ranks of young flag girls stood bravely in the cold, pinch-faced, pale, their bare legs pebbled and chapped, heads shiny with condensed mist. Lambs to the slaughter, Billy thought, as if they were truly forming up for battle, and farther on stood the high school bands in silent ranks, all those rows and rows of pink-cheeked baby faces so still and focused beneath their feathered caps, so seriously fixed on what they were about. Billy envied these kids the sincerity of their youth, their orderly student lives of classes, pep rallies, sleeping late on Saturdays. They looked so sharp! He felt tremendously tender toward them. They made him nostalgic. They made him feel so damn old.

The Prairie View drum line sets up at midfield, led by a towering black warlock of a drum major in high-church drum-major rig, cape, spats, golden braids and epaulets, a funnel cloud of a shako strapped to his head. The other four Bravos are somewhere to the left, and between their two contingents stands the United States Army Drill Team out of Fort Myer, Maryland, twenty drill grunts in flawless dress blues who can make their fixed-bayonet Springfields flip, twirl, spin, do cartwheels about the waist, loop the loop around the shoulder, sail through the air in a daring four-man diamond toss, and probably moonwalk if so ordered. A corps of ROTCs is positioned behind this front rank of Bravos and Drill grunts, the Rots stomping and huffing like water buffalo.

“
Heeuunh, hoooo, hreeee, horrrr,
” the warlock barks, and the drums erupt in a driving rataplan,
tatta-tottta tatta-totta drrrrp drrrrp boodly-boo,
a stirring take on the ructions of the smitten human heart. Then trumpets. Brass is jailbreak and bust out, the horns swinging in martial counterpoint as three slender women slip in from the side and take position front and center of the Drill grunts. It is Them. Billy floats a little outside of himself. The women’s backs are to the soldiers, but even or maybe especially from behind there is no question that Destiny’s Child has arrived, the current undisputed world champs of mass-market pop, Colored Girl Division. Beyoncé takes the starring middle spot, while Michelle and Kelly—which is which?—decant themselves on the flanks. They wear tight low-rise pants, stiletto heels, flirty midriff tops with long lacy sleeves, and there’s an awesome physical discipline in their stance, hips cocked, coaxialed to trunk and legs, backs sturdy and supple as flexed bows. Thus posed, they freeze. The music snaps to a halt. Cameramen are crab-walking around the singers, this is live TV happening as the girls raise the microphones to their lips, and soft as bedcovers being turned down for the night they croon in lush a cappella

bending toward a reprise of the national anthem, it could tip that way with the slightest nudge, but their voices flower into something softer, sweeter, a rain of sugared rose petals batting the ears

On the far sideline a stage has been concocted, a spangly three-tiered affair with a jigsaw backdrop of multicolored panels that seems to strive for a modernist stained-glass look. A dance troupe is freeze-framed on the various tiers, guys in shimmery white sweat suits and jumbo bling, women in tight slacks or cutoffs and artfully mangled Cowboys jerseys, ripped, cropped, sleeveless, no two alike. To Billy’s right Lodis seems to be gagging on his snot. Destiny’s Child reprises the
take me there
refrain, then the drums sound off and that’s their cue, the entire formation steps out. The cameramen start backpedaling, going on faith. Up ahead the drum line peels left and right, clearing a route to the stage. Later, watching the performance on YouTube, Billy will start to piece together the enormous scale of it, at least five marching bands cycling on and off the field, the frantic sex-show choreography happening onstage, flag girls and drill squads from one end zone to the other, Rotcees, Bravos, Drill grunts, Destiny’s Child. The proverbial cast of thousands. Someone will describe it as a production worthy of a Broadway musical, and though Billy has never set foot in New York, much less seen a musical of any kind, that will sound about right, but while it’s happening he’s just trying to hang on. A baton twirler skips by in a blur of skin and spinning chrome. High school drill teams in one-piece leotards are doing a shoop-shoop sort of booty-bump routine, they are training to be strippers apparently. Drum lines wheel alongside the soldier column, flying squads of flag girls zigzag across the route and Destiny’s Child powers through it all with a back-leaning hip-heavy sashay strut that doesn’t look quite possible from where Billy is, as if some mystical combination of diva mojo and StairMastered thighs keeps them upright when mere mortals would fall flat on their ass. Up ahead troupes of dancers flank the stage, guys in floppy shirts and pants, caps to the back, girls in silver sports bras and royal-blue tights. Already there’s so much for the mind to absorb and then the disco lights get going, rows of blue and white strobes between the stage tiers, more strobes trimming the steel-pipe frame and everything flashing all at once, electro-visual spaz-pulse and epileptic overload, retinal scarring, frontal lobes blown to caterpillar fuzz—

This is yr brain on meth!
Lodis is flinching, his poor head keeps swagging to the side, then the explosions start and they all flinch,
boom boom boom boom,
lum rounds are shooting off from somewhere backstage, smokers that explode with the arid crackle of cluster bombs scattering over a wheat field. A howl commences deep in Lodis’s throat. “It’s cool,” Billy murmurs, “it’s cool, it’s cool,
it’s just fireworks
.” Lodis starts laughing, gasping for breath. On Billy’s other side Crack is looking clammy and grim. If there was ever a prime-time trigger for PTSD you couldn’t do much better than this, but lucky for Norm, the crowd, America, the forty-million-plus TV viewing audience, Bravos can deal, oh yes! Pupils dilated, pulse and blood pressure through the roof, limbs trembling with stress-reflex cortisol rush, but it’s cool, it’s good, their shit’s down tight, no Vietnam-vet crackups for Bravo squad! You can march these boys straight into sound-and-light-show hell and Bravos can deal, but, damn, isn’t it rude to put them through it.

The formation moves on eight-to-five step with the beat,
boody-Boom boody-Boom boody-bood-bood-BOOM,
snare drums make a fella damn proud to be a soldier. It’s not a joke, Billy realizes. They spent too much money and went to too much effort for halftime to be intentionally ridiculous, which isn’t to say that big expensive things can’t be dumb. The
Titanic
was dumb. Enron was dumb. Hitler invading Russia, dumb.
Boom-diddy boom-diddy boom-buddah-dit-BOOM,
so go the Prairie View drums, thunder’s wind chimes. Lodis knocks into Billy, steadies. “Sorry, Biyee.” At the north hash mark all soldiers will about-face and march south while Destiny’s Child proceeds to the stage. Billy is watching for his mark and trying not to hyperventilate.
Boom-diddy boom-diddy diddy-diddy BOOM.
Disco strobes, hump dancing, lum rounds and flares, marching bands marking time in regal high step, and here is Billy soldiering through the vast mindfuck of it, coiled into himself and determined to deal.

“Lay-dees A N D gennelmunnn,” booms the PA announcer in the fawning, basso profundo lilt of the pitchman who doesn’t know he’s a fool,

Such an unholy barrage of noise pours forth that Billy thinks he might be lifted off his feet. It is a dam bursting, bridges collapsing at rush hour, tsunamis of killer froth and boulder-sized debris revising the contours of the known world.
Just assume you’re going to die,
so they were instructed the week before deploying to Iraq. Affirmative! Roger that! Sir yes sir! Carnage awaits us, we are the ones who will not be saved, the poor sad doomed honorably fucked front line who will fight them over there so as not to fight them here! A harsh thing for any young man to hear, but this is part of every youth’s education in the world, learning the risks are never fully revealed until you commit. Destiny’s Child is really laying into the strut, they could be wading through a storm surge up to their waists,
goddamn,
Billy thinks, watching them sling it,
goddamn,
so how is he supposed to redeploy with such sights in his head? Within days, no,
hours,
Bravo is back in the shit and he’s waiting for them to say it again, he dreads it but the harsh words need to be said,
you’re going to die,
just get that part of it over with please, but no, no one will do it, they get Beyoncé and her mouthwatering ass instead!