Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (4 page)

So either America’s fucked up, or he is. Billy walks the concourse with his aching heart and awareness that time is running out. They report to Fort Hood at 2200 tonight, tomorrow will be PACK YOUR SHIT day, and the day after will commence their twenty-seven hours of flying time and the resumption of their combat tour. It seems to Billy a flat-out miracle that any of them are still alive. So they’ve lost Shroom and Lake,
only two
a numbers man might say, but given that each Bravo has missed death by a margin of inches, the casualty rate could just as easily be 100 percent. The freaking
randomness
is what wears on you, the difference between life, death, and horrible injury sometimes as slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on the way to chow, choosing the third shitter in line instead of the fourth, turning your head to the left instead of the right. Random. How that shit does twist your mind. Billy sensed the true mindfucking potential of it on their first trip outside the wire, when Shroom advised him to place his feet one in front of the other instead of side by side, that way if an IED blew low through the Humvee Billy might lose only one foot instead of two. After a couple of weeks of aligning his feet just so, tucking his hands inside his body armor, always wearing eye pro and all the rest, he went to Shroom and asked how do you keep from going crazy? Shroom nodded like this was an eminently reasonable question to ask, then told him of an Inuit shaman he’d read about somewhere, how this man could supposedly look at you and know to the day when you were going to die. He wouldn’t tell you, though; he considered that impolite, an intrusion into matters that were none of his business. But talk about freaky, huh? Shroom chuckled. Looking that old man in the eye and knowing he knows.

“I don’t ever wanna meet that guy,” Billy said, but Shroom’s point was made. If a bullet’s going to get you, it’s already been fired.

Billy realizes that Mango hasn’t spoken for the past five minutes, so he knows his friend is also thinking about the war. He’s tempted to raise the subject, but really, what can you say short of everything? As if once you opened your mouth would you even be able to stop, though in the end it all amounts to one and the same thing, how the hell are they going to get through eleven more months of it.

“You’ve been lucky so far, right?”

This was Kathryn, talking to Billy over backyard beers.

I guess I have, he answered.

“So keep on being lucky.”

Sometimes it feels as easy as that, just remembering to be lucky. Billy thinks about this as he eyes the fast food outlets that line the stadium concourse, your Taco Bells, your Subways, your Pizza Huts and Papa John’s, clouds of hot meaty gases waft from these places and surely it speaks to the genius of American cooking that they all smell pretty much the same. It dawns on him that Texas Stadium is basically a shithole. It’s cold, gritty, drafty, dirty, in general possessed of all the charm of an industrial warehouse where people pee in the corners. Urine, the faint reek of it, pervades the place.

“Fierce,” Mango says in hushed tones of wonder.

“What?”

“All these thousands of gringos, and not a single Major Mac.”

Billy snorts. “You know we’re never gonna find that mofo. He’s a grown man anyway, like why are we even looking for him.”

“He knows where he is.”

“You would think.”

They look at each other and laugh.

“Let’s go back,” Billy says.

“Let’s go back,” Mango agrees.

First they stop at Sbarro and get a couple of slices of pizza, then stand there munching off paper plates, content for the moment not to be recognized. Being a Bravo means inhabiting a state of semi-celebrity that occasionally flattens you with praise and adulation. At staged rallies, for instance, or appearances at malls, or whenever TV or radio is present, you are apt at some point to be lovingly mobbed by everyday Americans eager to show their gratitude, then other times it’s like you’re invisible, people just see right through you, nothing registers. Billy and Mango stand there eating scalding hot pizza and know that their fame is not their own. Mainly it’s another thing to laugh about, this huge floating hologram of context and cue that leads everyone around by the nose, Bravo included, but Bravo can laugh and feel somewhat superior because they know they’re being used. Of course they do, manipulation is their air and element, for what is a soldier’s job but to be the pawn of higher?

Wear this, say that, go there, shoot them, then of course there’s the final and ultimate,
be killed
. Every Bravo is a PhD in the art and science of duress. Billy and Mango finish their pizza and start walking. With some food in their bellies they’re feeling stoked, and on a whim they wander into Cowboys Select, the highest-end of all the on-site establishments offering Cowboys apparel and brand merchandise for sale. The dizzying scent of fine leathers meets them at the door, along with a brightly lit Texas Lottery machine. Flat-screen TVs mounted in the walls are playing a highlights reel from the Aikman years. Billy and Mango are a little bit punchy coming in, they’re primed for an ironic retail experience, and in seconds the place has them laughing out loud. It’s not just the racks and racks of upscale clothing, the fine jewelry, the framed and certified collector memorabilia, no, you had to admire the determination, the sheer marketing
balls
of stamping the Cowboys brand on chess sets, toaster ovens, high-capacity ice makers, personal oxygen bars, and laser-guided pool cues. Dude, check it out! An entire line of Cowboys kitchenware. The two Bravos grow so rowdy that other customers start to give them some space. As far as Billy and Mango are concerned, the store is a museum, these are all things to look at but nothing a Bravo could buy, and the humiliation of it makes them a little wild. His ’n’ hers cotton terry-cloth robes, like, four hundred dollars. Authentic game jerseys, a hundred fifty-nine ninety-five. Cashmere pullovers, cut-crystal Christmas ornaments, Tony Lama limited-edition boots. As their shame and sense of insult mount the two Bravos become rough with each other. Dude, check it out, sick bomber jacket. Only six hundred seventy-nine bucks, dawg.

Is it leather?

The fuck you mean, hell yeah it’s leather!

’Cause, dawg, I don’t think so. I think that’s pleather.

The fuck it’s pleather!

Unh-unh, dumbshit. It’s just you’re so fucking ghetto you don’t know from pleather—

Suddenly they’re grappling, they’ve hooked arms in a fierce shoulder clench and lumber about like a couple of barroom drunks, grunting, cursing each other and butting heads, laughing so hard they can hardly stand up. Their berets go flying as they tear at their ears. It hurts and they laugh harder, they’re gasping now,
bitch, shitbag, cum-slut, faggot,
Mango jabs at Billy with stinging uppercuts, Billy crams a fist into Mango’s armpit and off they go on a left-tilting axis, pottery wheel and pot rolling loose across the floor.
Can I help you!
someone is shouting, jumping in and out of the way.
Gentlemen! Fellas, guys, can I help you? Whoa there!

Billy and Mango separate, come up flushed and laughing. The salesman—store manager? a middle-aged white guy with thinning hair—he, too, is laughing, but it’s clearly a situation for him, what with two obvious lunatics on his hands. Everyone else, staff, customers—the few who haven’t fled—is standing well back.

“Is this leather?” Billy asks, lifting a sleeve from the rack of bomber jackets. “ ’Cause moron here’s trying to tell me it’s pleather.”

“Oh no sir,” says the manager, “that’s genuine leather.” He’s chuckling, he knows they’re putting him on, but in the manner of straight men since the beginning of time whose job it is to bring order to a sick and comical world, he launches into a fruity description of this full-grain aniline lamb’s-leather jacket, the special tanning and dyeing processes and so forth, not to mention the coat’s superior construction qualities. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, the Bravos hear him out with the rapt expressions of cavemen watching popcorn pop.

“See, dumbfuck”—Billy cuffs Mango’s shoulder—“I told you it was leather.”

“Like you know so much about fashion. I bet you ain’t even wearing underwear—”

They swat at each other, start to grapple, but the manager’s gulpy Whoa! calls them off.

“So, hunh. You sell a lot of these?” Billy asks, fingering one of the jackets.

“Five or six a game. When we’re winning we might do better than that.”

“Damn. Your peeps got some juicy cash flow, huh.”

The manager smiles. “I guess that’s one way to put it.”

The Bravos thank the manager and leave. “Dawg,” Mango says once they’re outside. “Six hundred seventy-nine dollars,” he says. “Billy,” he says, then, “Shit.” And that’s all they say about it.

THE HUMAN RESPONSE

“FIFTEEN MILLION,” ALBERT IS
saying as Billy and Mango resume their seats. “Fifteen cash against fifteen percent of gross, a star can do that when they’re running hot. And Hilary’s running very hot these days. Her agent won’t let her read without a guarantee.”

“Read what?” Sykes asks. Albert’s eyes slowly track that way, followed by his head.

“The script, Kenneth.”

“But I thought you said we don’t have a script.”

“We don’t, but we’ve got a treatment and we’ve got a writer. And now that Hilary’s interested, we can slant it in a way that really speaks to her.”

“I love it when he talks like that,” says Dime.

“Look, the script’s not the problem, just telling your story’s gonna make a compelling script. The hard part’s getting the damn thing in her hands.”

“You said you know her,” Crack points out.

“Hell yes I know her! We got bombed off our ass a couple of months ago at Jane Fonda’s house! But this is business, guys, everything she reads has to go through her agent, and he won’t let her so much as touch a script unless it comes with a firm offer from a studio. That way she knows if she says yes, the studio’s on the hook. She can’t get turned down.”

“Uh, so, do we have a studio?” Crack asks. He knows he should know this, but everything about the deal seems so abstract.

“Robert, we do not. There’s tons of interest out there, but nobody wants to commit until a star commits.”

“But Swank won’t commit until they do.”

Albert smiles. “Precisely.” The Bravos emit an appreciative
ahhhhh
. The paradox is so perfect, so completely circular in the modern way, that everyone can identify.

“That’s kind of fucked,” says Crack.

“It is,” Albert agrees. “It’s totally fucked.”

“So how do you make it happen?” asks A-bort.

“By making it inevitable. By making it a goddamn force of nature. By scaring these guys so bad that somebody else is gonna buy it that they have to commit or their heads’ll explode.”

“People,” Dime announces, “I think I just figured out what Albert does.”

Billy and Mango are sitting at the end of the row, then it’s Crack, Albert, Dime, Day, A-bort, Sykes, and Lodis, then an empty seat for Major Mac. Billy has noticed that Albert is never far from Dime. Not that Bravo needed proof of how special their sergeant is, but it arrived anyway in the form of Albert and his instant fascination with the Bravo leader. Billy has decided that Albert is gay for Dime, in a nonsexual sense. Dime interests him, Dime the person and Dime the soldier, the entire phenomenon of Dime-ness loosed upon a square and unsuspecting world. In the pantheon of Albert’s attentions, Dime comes first and Holliday a distant second, and even that seems more of a proximate sort of interest, conditional, complementary, a function of Day’s black yin yoked to Dime’s honky yang. Day deigns not to notice his secondary status, like now, for instance, as Albert and Dime huddle in intense conversation while Day perches on his seat back surveying the field like an African king high on his throne, looking down on all his little subject bitches. And as for the rest of Bravo, they might as well be so many shares of corporate stock that happen to talk and walk and drink a lot of beer. “Dime the
property,
” as Day muttered to Billy last night, in a rare drunken moment of resentful candor. “The rest a you just the
produck
.”

Which made Shroom what? Shroom and Lake, were they
produck
too? Bravo’s talk these days is so much about money,
moneymoneymoney
like a bug on the brain or a hamster spinning his squeaky wheel, a conversation going nowhere at tremendous speed. Billy would just as soon move on to other subjects, but he won’t call his fellow Bravos on it. The way they obsess, it’s as if a big payday involved more than mere buying power, as if x amount of dollars cooling in the bank could bring your ass safely through the war. He intuits the spiritual logic of it, but for him the equation works in reverse: The day the money comes through, the actual day his check clears, that will be the very day he gets smoked.

So he attunes to the movie talk with pronounced conflictedness. Bravo peppers Albert with questions. What about Clooney? What’s going on with Oliver Stone? How about the guy who said he could get Robert Downey Jr.? Then the distinguished-looking gentleman seated behind Albert leans over and asks if he’s in the movie business.

Albert freezes, head cocked to the side as if he’s heard the call of some rare and wonderful bird. “Why, yes.” he answers sweetly. “Yes I am in the film industry.”

“Director? Writer?”

“Producer,” Albert allows.

“L.A.?”

“L.A.,” Albert confirms.

“Listen,” says the man, “I’m a lawyer. I do white-collar criminal defense and I’ve got a great idea for a legal thriller–type script. Care to hear it?”

Albert says he’d be delighted, as long as the lawyer can describe it in twenty seconds or less. Meanwhile a couple of dozen Cowboys players have taken the field and begin warming up. This isn’t the real warm-up, explains Crack, who played a year of college ball at Southeast Alabama State, but the pre-warm-up warm-up for the guys who need some extra loosening up. Billy’s attention is soon drawn to the Cowboys punter, a slope-shouldered, moon-faced, paunchy fellow with hardly any hair, the kind of guy you’d normally find behind your supermarket meat counter, except this guy can kick a football to oblivion and back.
Foom,
the soggy thump of each kick resounds in Billy’s gut as the ball rockets off on a steep trajectory, up, up, onward and upward still, your eye falters at the spot where the ball should level off and yet it climbs higher still as if some unseen booster charge has fired and straight for the bottomless dome it goes. Billy tries to mark the absolute highest point, that instant of neutral buoyancy where the ball hangs or dangles, actually pauses for a moment as if measuring the fall that even now begins as the nose rolls over with a languid elegance, and there’s an aspect of surrender, of grateful relinquishment as it yields to the gravitational fate. After seven or eight kicks Billy feels a kind of interior vaporization taking place, a dilution or relaxation of self-awareness. He feels calm. Watching the kicker is restful for his mind. The peak moments give him the most intense pleasure, a bristling in his brain like tiny lightning strikes as the ball sniffs eternity’s lower reaches, strokes the soft underbelly of empty-headed bliss for as long as it lingers at the top of its arc. Billy can imagine that’s where Shroom lives now, he is a citizen of the realms of neutral buoyancy. It’s sort of a childish and sentimental thought, but why not, if Shroom has to be somewhere then why not there? Bravo has long since been reduced to bestselling
produck,
but even the long arm of marketing can’t touch Shroom now.

It’s a Zen thing, watching punts, as absorbing in its way as watching goldfish paddle around an ornamental pond. Billy would happily watch punts for the rest of the afternoon except the fans behind him start pounding his back, crying, Look! Look! Check out the Jumbotron! And there on the screen loom the eight operational Bravos literally bigger than life, plus Albert, who’s smiling like a proud new papa. Small pockets of applause spark off here and there. The Bravos assume postures of masculine nonchalance. Mainly they’re trying not to stare at themselves on the screen, but so pumped with the moment is Sykes that he starts mouthing off and flashing gangsta signs. To a man Bravo tells him to shut the fuck up, but after a moment the screen cuts to a flags-waving, bombs-bursting cartoon graphic against a background of starry outer space, and from within these inky depths enormous white letters suddenly zoom to the fore

AMERICA’S TEAM PROUDLY HONORS AMERICAN HEROES

which disappears, clearing the way for a second wave

THE DALLAS COWBOYS

WELCOME HEROS OF AL-ANSAKAR CANAL!!!!!!!

STAFF SGT. DAVID DIME

STAFF SGT. KELLUM HOLLIDAY

SPC. LODIS BECKWITH

SPC. BRIAN HEBERT

SPC. ROBERT EARL KOCH

SPC. WILLIAM LYNN

SPC. MARCELLINO MONTOYA

SPC. KENNETH SYKES

As if drawing down energy through the stadium’s blowhole, the applause slowly gathers volume and heft. People moving in the aisle stop and turn their way. The fans behind Bravo come to their feet, the prompt for a slow-motion standing ovation that rolls through their section in a gravity-defying backward wave. Soon the Jumbotron cuts to a hyperactive ad for Chevy trucks, but too late, people are already heading Bravo’s way and there is just no help for it and no escape. Billy rises and assumes the stance for such occasions, back straight, weight balanced center-mass, a reserved yet courteous expression on his youthful face. He came to the style more or less by instinct, this tense, stoic vein of male Americanism defined by multiple generations of movie and TV actors, which conveniently furnishes him a way of being without having to think about it too much. You say a few words, you smile occasionally. You let your eyes seem a little tired. You are unfailingly modest and gentle with women, firm of handshake and eye contact with men. Billy knows he looks good doing this. He must, because people totally eat it up, in fact they go a little out of their heads. They do! They mash in close, push and shove, grab at his arms and talk too loud, and sometimes they break wind, so propulsive is their stress. After two solid weeks of public events Billy continues to be amazed at the public response, the raw wavering voices and frenzied speech patterns, the gibberish spilled from the mouths of seemingly well-adjusted citizens.
We appreciate,
they say, their voices throbbing like a lover’s. Sometimes they come right out and say it,
We love you
. We are so grateful. We cherish and bless. We pray, hope, honor-respect-love-and-revere and they
do,
in the act of speaking they experience the mighty words, these verbal arabesques that spark and snap in Billy’s ears like bugs impacting an electric bug zapper

No one spits, no one calls him baby-killer. On the contrary, people could not be more supportive or kindlier disposed, yet Billy finds these encounters weird and frightening all the same. There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year. For these adult, affluent people he is mere petty cash in their personal accounting, yet they lose it when they enter his personal space. They tremble. They breathe in fitful, stinky huffs. Their eyes skitz and quiver with the force of the moment, because here, finally, up close and personal, is the war made flesh, an actual point of contact after all the months and years of reading about the war, watching the war on TV, hearing the war flogged and flacked on talk radio. It’s been hard times in America—how did we get this way? So scared all the time, and so shamed at being scared through the long dark nights of worry and dread, days of rumor and doubt, years of drift and slowly ossifying angst. You listened and read and watched and it was
just, so, obvious,
what had to be done, a mental tic of a mantra that became second nature as the war dragged on.
Why don’t they just
. . . Send in more troops. Make the troops fight harder. Pile on the armor and go in blazing, full-frontal smackdown and no prisoners. And by the way, shouldn’t the Iraqis be thanking us? Somebody needs to tell them that, would you tell them that, please? Or maybe they’d like their dictator back. Failing that, drop bombs. More and bigger bombs. Show these persons the wrath of God and pound them into compliance, and if that doesn’t work then bring out the nukes and take it all the way down, wipe it clean, reload with fresh hearts and minds, a nuclear slum clearance of the country’s soul.