Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (31 page)

“Oh!”

“He had a double stroke a couple of years ago, impaired his speech.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s life.”

She’s holding his arm just above the elbow, her grip concealed by the bush of her pom-poms. “Are you going to see them before you leave?”

Billy gets a sudden clutch in his throat. “Ah, no.” He swallows. It’s fine. “We all said our good-byes yesterday.”

“That sucks.” She snugs a few millimeters closer.

“There’s you.” He’s scrolled all the way to the end.

“Zorn. I’m always last on everybody’s list.”

“I’ll change you to Anger, that way you’ll be first.”

She laughs, looks over her shoulder. The cheerleaders are moving toward the tunnel to welcome the players onto the field. “Sweetie, I gotta go,” she says, and gives his arm a squeeze. Her hand recoils as if electrically shocked, then she’s squeezing again, then palpating his entire upper arm.

“
My God,
what a great body you’ve got. Do you have even an
ounce
of fat on you?”

“Not so much, I guess.”

“Not so much I guess,”
she echoes in a gruff voice, and laughs. She’s still feeling up his arm. “You don’t even know how good you are, do you? That makes it even better!” she declares with lip-smacking enthusiasm, then gives him a fierce fast hug, as if grasping a buoy before the storm tears her away. Billy practically keels over in a delirium of bliss. How wonderful, how absolutely holy to be appreciated for yourself, to be handled, petted, groped, pawed, and generally hungered over. “Okay, I gotta scoot,” she says, releasing him. “Come see me at the twenty, same place.”

Billy says he will, and she goes trotting down the sideline after the rest of the cheerleaders. Bravo turns as she jogs past, their eyes helplessly drawn to the bounce of her bottom inside those teeny tiny cup holders that pass for shorts. Billy punches up her number and waits through six rings while watching her take position at the mouth of the tunnel. The first players come jogging onto the field like rhinos on the plod. The Jumbotron cranks up a Guns N’ Roses riff, the cheerleaders rise on their toes and wave their pom-poms high, and a swell of applause rolls through the stands like thunder rumbling down the mountainside.

“Hi, you’ve reached Faison! I’m not able to take your call right now . . .”

It makes for an odd sensation, watching her real-time person in the middle distance while holding her disembodied voice to his ear. It puts a frame around the situation, gives it focus, perspective. It makes him aware of himself being aware of himself, and here is a mystery that seems worth thinking about, why this stacking of awareness should even matter. At the moment all he knows is that there’s structure in it, a pleasing sense of poise or mental ordering. A kind of knowledge, or maybe a bridge thereto—as if existence didn’t necessarily have to be a moron’s progress of lurching from one damn thing to another? As if you might aspire to some sort of context in your life, a condition he associates with adultness. Then comes the
beep,
and he has to talk. The funny little message he leaves for her—two seconds after clicking off, he can’t remember what he said.

TEMPORARY SANITY

THE LAST FEW PLAYERS
are straggling out of the tunnel and here comes Josh trotting with them, looking like he just stepped out of a Polo ad. How does he do it? Every hair, every thread, every crease and pleat in place, as if he’s sheathed in a varnish of pussy-boy perfection.
“My bad, my bad, my bad,”
he chants in a furious monotone, “I am so so sorry guys, we blew it,
blew it,
no way you should’ve dropped off the radar like that,” and he launches into a detailed explication of post-halftime logistics, the gist of which is he’s been waiting at prearranged point X for the past twenty minutes.

“So you’re saying one of the clipboard chicks was supposed to bring us up,” Dime clarifies.

“Essentially, yes.”

“So how does that make it your bad?”

Josh opens his mouth, he’s going to try to try, but Bravo saves him the trouble with a group razz. Jaaaaaassssshhhhhh! Dah Joshster.
Jash
. He is too damn nice for his own good, which is why Bravo loves the big lunk.

“Yo Josh, you hear about our fight?”

“Wait, what. What fight?”

“The one we just had.” Crack grins and holds up his ice pack.

“Yeah, Josh, that your bad too,” Day says.

“Wait, wait a second. You’re kidding me. Oh shit, guys, what—”

“Jash, chill. It’s cool.”

“Yeah, Josh, we like to fight. It’s like our main thing to do.”

“You gotta remember, man, we’re basically just a bunch of apes.”

Day asks about the after-party, which he defines as wherever Beyoncé and her girls are, which is where he’d like to be. Bravo offers this a unanimous second but Josh thinks Destiny’s Child has already left the stadium. Billy is tired of asking about the Advil, so doesn’t even. They take a freight elevator up to the first-level concourse. Crack, Mango, and Lodis head for the men’s room to primp their injuries. The rest of the Bravos hang out on the concourse and phone home.
Didja see me? How’d I look?
Billy decides this is the grunt version of the after-party, calling up the fam. He pulls out his cell and dials Kathryn, but his sister Patty answers.

“Helloooo little brother,” she trills from deep in her cups, her voice all woozy and sickly sweet. “You looked so handsome on TV! We’re all really proud of you, baby bro.”

“Thanks.”

“Soooo”—she pauses for a sip of her drink—“what’s she like?”

“What’s who like?”

“Beyoncé, fool!” Billy hears his mother wail in the background,
Please don’t call your brother a fool.

“Oh, her.” Billy affects a yawn. “Yeah, she’s okay. She’s a little thick through the hips.”

Patty knocks that down with a braying
Hah!
“Did you meet her?”

“Never got the chance.”

“But you were right up there onstage!”

“Yeah, but that’s as close as I got. And it didn’t seem like the best time . . .”

She wants to know if he’s met any other celebrities. Billy doesn’t mind, but it sort of brings him down, talking about those people. There was the actress from
Walker, Texas Ranger,
the blonde who played the spunky district attorney role. Senator Cornish, who has the largest head of any human Billy has ever seen. Jimmer Lee Flatley, medium-heavy country music star, and Lex, the Fort Worth hunk who made it all the way to the final round of
Survivor
. He throws out a few more names like change from a dollar bill.

“Listen, that thing you were doing at the end, what was that? We were all wondering.”

What thing?

“Well, right there at the end, when you were looking up at the sky. Like you were praying or something.”

“They showed that?”

“Well, yeah.” She laughs at the rise in his voice.

“Like a close-up?”

“Not
real
close, but they showed it. For a second it was pretty much just you on the screen.”

This freaks him, though he doesn’t know why. “Well, I sure wasn’t praying.” He frets in silence a moment. “Did it look weird?”

“No,” she laughs, “it looked
sweet
. You were
cute
. We’re really proud of you.”

“I don’t remember that at all,” Billy says, though he remembers perfectly well. “It was hot up there with all the lights and everything. Maybe I was just trying to get some air.”

She starts to tell him again how handsome and brave he looked, but Kathryn takes the phone from her.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“So no Beyoncé, huh.”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“Just as well, she’s probably a total bitch. Hang on a sec . . .” Doors open and close; the house noises fall away, replaced by an airy, bottomless quiet. Kathryn has stepped outside.

“Jesus Christ!”

“What?”

“Cold as dammit out here. I would
not
want to be wildlife today. You staying warm over there?”

“Warm enough.”

She tells him she and Brian spent several hours playing in the snow this afternoon, scraping enough together to make a runt snowman. “He’s crashed in your room right now, I think I wore his little hiney out. We recorded halftime so he can watch you later. But, um, listen.” She lowers her voice. “Patty told me what you said, about Brian. About telling him never to join the Army.”

Billy closes his eyes, silently curses.

“And I don’t think you should go back.”

“Kathryn.”

“Just listen, just please hear me out, okay? I got in touch with some people, those people I told you about. The group in Austin.”

“I’m really not interested in talking about this.”

“Just listen, please, Billy, just listen for a minute. I talked to them twice, they’re good people, they know what they’re doing. They’ve got lawyers, resources, they aren’t a bunch of flakes. And they really want to help you. They’ve been hoping somebody like you would reach out.”

“Somebody like me.”

“A war hero. Somebody the movement could really rally around.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Just listen! One of these guys, one of their group, he’s got like a ten-thousand-acre ranch where you can stay. I’m telling you, man, these people have some serious stroke. They can have some people meet you at the stadium and drive you to the airport, they’ll fly you out to the ranch on a private plane tonight. You’d just disappear for a couple of weeks while the lawyers get everything set up.”

“That’s AWOL, Kathryn. They shoot people for that.”

“Not you, not after everything you’ve been through. These lawyers know what they’re doing, Billy, they have all kinds of strategies for cases like yours. And they’ll have a PR firm on it too, these guys are pros. Can you imagine how shitty they could make the government look, prosecuting you? After the whole freakin’ country saw what you did on TV?”

“I’m not psyche, if that’s what the lawyers are thinking. So they can forget about that.”

“Of
course
you’re not psyche, only a nut would want to go back to the war. We’ll have the lawyers plead temporary sanity for you, how about that? You’re too
sane
to go back to the war, Billy Lynn has come to his senses. It’s the rest of the country that’s nuts for wanting to send him back.”

“But, Kathryn.”

“But, Billy.”

“I sort of do want to go back.”

She screams. He thinks he can hear it echoing off the trees in the backyard.

“No, no way, I don’t accept that. You
cannot
want to go back to that place.”

“But I do. I can’t stay here if the rest of the squad’s going back. If they’re over there getting shot at, I want to be there too.”

“Then maybe all the Bravos should stay, how about that. Bush pinned medals on all you guys, nobody’s going to think you’re cowards for not going back.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Okay, enlighten me here. What’s the point?”

“Well, I signed up.”

“Under duress! Thanks to
me
! Me and my shit!”

“No, it was my choice. It’s what I wanted to do. And I knew they’d probably send me to Iraq. It’s not like anybody lied to me.”

She groans. “Billy, all those mofos ever do is lie. You think if they halfway told the truth we’d even be in a fucking war? You know what I think, I think we don’t
deserve
to have you guys die for us. No country that lets its leaders lie like that deserves a single soldier to die for it.”

She breaks down crying, an awful sound like the scraping of a shovel hitting bedrock. “Kathryn,” Billy says, and waits a minute. “Kathryn,” he tries again. “Kat. It’s okay. I’m gonna be fine.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice gone swampy and blear. “Shit. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry on you. It’s just that everything’s so, whatever. Everything about it sucks.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Listen, don’t be mad at me. But I gave those people your number.”

Billy grits his teeth, says nothing. The main thing is not to get her started crying again.

“Just talk to them, Billy, please? Just hear what they have to say. They’re good people, they can make it all right for you.”

He doesn’t say yes and he doesn’t say no. She goes inside to hand the phone off to Denise, and as he waits he tries to imagine how it will be for them if he doesn’t come back. He knows Kathryn would survive, a triumph of rage over guilt. Patty also; she has Brian. But his mother? All ego aside, it would be awful for her, possibly fatal, though not right away. He envisions a long slow process of interior numbing-out that takes form in his mind as weather, a plague of bitter-cold days with wind, freezing rain, a pall of daylong dusk fading to black. Days like today, in fact.

But at the moment she’s doing okay; halftime got her pumped. “It was disgraceful,” she tells Billy. “All those lewd gyrations, they’re like something you’d see at the hoochie-coochie show at a county fair. How that mess even gets on TV is beyond me.”

“Not arguing, Mom. It wasn’t my idea.”

“Like that woman revealing herself at the Super Bowl, remember? If it keeps going like this people will just stop watching. A lot of folks are fed up. Did you see it? You couldn’t even call it dancing . . .”

“Mom, I was there.” She’s had a glass or three of wine, apparently. More power to you, Mom, have another. God knows the woman could use a party.

“ . . . I remember when Tom Landry was coach you never saw anything like that. They had standards. He kept that team on a tight rein. I don’t know if it’s since Norman Oglesby bought the team, or that coach he’s got or some of those other people he’s hired . . .”

The longer she talks, the whinier and more righteous she gets, and the less attention she pays to herself. Billy offers small hums of agreement and waits for the momma-logue to wind down.

“I hear you’re fixing an awesome feast over there.”

“Well. It’s no different from every year.”

“Then it’ll be great. Don’t wear yourself out.”

“No, I’m fine, the girls are helping out. Did you have Thanksgiving?”

“Sure did, they fed us really well. They took us to a club here in the stadium.”

“Well, that’s nice.”

It strikes him again how pitiful her life will be if he gets smoked, all ego aside. Stove-in husband, dead son, piles and piles of medical bills . . . He thinks maybe he should up his GI insurance, then wonders if the hospitals would take it all.

“How’s Dad?”

“He’s fine. He’s in the den watching the game with Pete.”

“Hey, there’s a fun couple.”

“Well, they seem to get along.”