Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (9 page)

“Nice,” Mango says appreciatively.

Hector nods. “Takes the edge off,
vato
. Gets you through the day.”

“That it does,” Billy sagely agrees. Certain lights are switching on in his head, others switching off. “That’s some dank-ass bud.”

“Hey, you know, gotta support the troops.” Hector laughs and takes his hit. “You guys ain’t worried about pissing hot?”

Mango explains that, no, they aren’t worried about it. Bravo has deduced that the Army is loath to risk all this good PR by tagging Bravo with random drug tests, so for the duration of the
Victory Tour
they feel safe. “And what’d they do if they nailed us, yo, send our ass back to Iraq?”

Hector shakes his head with stoned gravitas. “No way, not for a blunt. Even the Army ain’t that harsh.”

Billy and Mango hesitate. Command seems sensitive about this, Bravo’s imminent return to Iraq. The Bravos are not to deny they’re redeploying if the subject comes up, but higher would prefer to omit this detail from the
Victory Tour
conversation.

Mango grins, cuts Billy a look. “Dude,” he tells Hector, “we
already
goin’ back.”

Hector squints. “Shittin’ me.”

“Shit you not. Leaving Saturday.”

“The fuck you gotta go back.”

“Gotta finish out our tour.”

“The fuck! The fuck you gotta go back, after all you fuckin’ done, fuckin’ heroes? Where’s the fuckin’ right in that? You guys done kicked your share a ass, like whyn’t they let you just coast on out?”

Mango laughs. “The Army don’t work that way. They need bodies.”

“Shit.” Hector is scandalized. “For how long you gotta go?”

“Eleven months.”

“Fuck!” Sheer outrage. “You
wanna
go back?”

The Bravos snort.

“Man. Fuckin’ harsh. That just ain’t right.” Hector casts about. “Ain’t they supposed to be making a movie about you?”

Uh huh.

“And you still gotta go back? Fuck, so what happens if you, uh, you, uh—”

“Get smoked?” Billy offers.

Hector turns away, stricken.

“No worries, homes,” Mango says, “that’s a totally different movie.” The Bravos laugh, and Hector smiles bashfully, grateful to be absolved for raising the spectre of their deaths. The joint makes another circuit. The light in their little space takes on a pearly, numinous glow. The war is out there somewhere but Billy can’t feel it, like his sole experience with morphine when he could not feel pain. At one point he even tried as an experiment, stared at his cut-up arms and legs thinking
hurt,
but the notion simply gassed into thin air. That’s how the war feels now, it is at most a presence or pressure on his mind, awareness without content, an experiential doughnut hole. When he tunes back into the conversation, Hector is asking if they’re going to meet Destiny’s Child, the headliner for today’s halftime extravaganza and currently number one on the national wet-dream charts.

“They ain’t said nothing about that.” Mango’s English is getting looser, leaning toward the street. Not that he’s slurring, just taking the corners wide. “Ain’t told us much of anything, like we’re supposed to be in the halftime show? They said we’re gonna meet the cheerleaders.”

“Shit,
vato,
everybody meets the cheerleaders, fucking Boy Scouts meet the cheerleaders. You guys are rock stars, they oughta get you with Beyoncé and her girls. Shit, heroes ’n’ all, they oughta let you bone those bitches fah real.”

Bonemfahreal, Billy says to himself. Not possible. Not that he necessarily would if given the chance, though probably. Maybe. Okay, definitely. Or it depends. He decides he wants both more and less. He’d like to hang with Beyoncé in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other’s brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning. Has the war done this to him, he wonders, inspired these deeper sensitivities and yearnings of his? Or is it just because he’s going on his twentieth year of life?

Time is growing short. They need to get back to the unit, but the engine’s dropped out of their urgency. The joint has burned down to a glowing squib when Hector confides that he’s thinking of joining the Army.

The Bravos groan.
Don’t.

“Yeah, I know it’s fucked, but I got a kid and her moms don’t work so it’s all on me, which I accept, I mean I wanna take care of ’em and all, but the way it is now it just ain’t happening. I got the job here, I work five days a week at Kwik Lube and don’t get insurance neither place, and I gotta have insurance for my little girl. And I got debts. Like, you know, who don’t have debts.” Billy notes that Hector is worried in the way a man worries, not freaking and thrashing around like a fuckwit kid but soberly taking the measure of his trouble, manning up to live it every day. He says the Army is offering enlistment bonuses of $6,000, and once he’s in he wouldn’t have to worry about insurance.

“So you gonna do it?” Billy asks, panged by the $6,000. The Army got his carcass for absolutely free.

“Dunno. You guys think I should?”

Billy and Mango lock eyes. After a couple of seconds they all bust up laughing.

“It pretty much sucks,” says Billy. “I don’t know why the hell we’re laughing.”

“Hell yeah,” Mango says, “all those days I’m thinking, Yo, I am so fuckin’ done with this shit, and then I’m like, Okay, so I get out when my time’s up, what the fuck’s waiting for me gonna be any better? Like, fuck, workin’ at Burger King? Then I remember why I signed up in the first place.”

Hector is nodding. “That’s sort of my whole point. What I got out here sucks, so I might as well join.”

“What else is there,” Mango says.

“What else is there,” Hector agrees.

“What else is there,” Billy echoes, but he’s thinking of home.

BULLY OF THE HEART

THEY GOT TWO NIGHTS
and a day. Sykes went to Fort Hood, to the tiny on-post house where his daughter and pregnant wife live, at the edge of the artillery drop zone. Lodis went to Florence, S.C., which is also the hometown, or so he claimed, of his fourth or maybe second cousin Snoop Dogg. A-bort went to Lafayette, La., Crack to Birmingham, Mango to Tucson, and Day to Indianapolis. Dime went to Carolina. Lake continued his long-term residency at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and Shroom was being held against his will at the Merriam-Gaylord Funeral Home in Ardmore, Oklahoma. And Billy, Billy went to Stovall, to the three-bedroom, two-bath brick ranch house on Cisco Street with sturdy access ramps front and back for his father’s wheelchair, a dark purple motorized job with fat whitewalls and an American flag decal stuck to the back. “The Beast,” Billy’s sister Kathryn called it, a flanged and humpbacked ride with all the grace of a tar cooker or giant dung beetle. “Damn thing gives me the willies,” she confessed to Billy, and Ray’s aggressive style of driving did in fact seem to strive for maximum creep effect.
Whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr,
he buzzed to the kitchen for his morning coffee, then
whhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrrr
into the den for the day’s first hit of nicotine and Fox News, then
whhhhhhhiiiiiirrrrrr
back to the kitchen for his breakfast,
whhhhhiiiiirrrrrr
to the bathroom,
whhhhhhiiiiirrrrrr
to the den and the blathering TV,
whhhhhhiiiiirrrrrr, whhhhhiiiiiiirrrrr, whhhhhhiiiiiiirrrrrrr,
he jammed the joystick so hard around its vulcanized socket that the motor keened like a tattoo drill, the piercing
eeeeeeennnnnhhhhhh
contrapuntaling off the baseline
whhhhiiiiirrrrrrrr
to capture in sound, in stereophonic chorus no less, the very essence of the man’s personality.

“He’s an asshole,” Kathryn said.

To which Billy: “You just now figured that out?”

“Shut up. What I mean is he
likes
being an asshole, he
enjoys
it. Some people you get the feeling they can’t help it? But he
works
at it. He’s what you’d call a
proactive
asshole.”

“What does he do?”

“Nothing! That’s my whole point, doesn’t do shit! Won’t do his physical therapy, never goes out, just sits in that damn chair all day watching Fox and listening to fat-ass Rush Limbaugh, won’t even talk unless he wants something, and then he just grunts. Expects us to wait on him hand and foot.”

“So don’t do it.”

“I don’t! But then it all falls on Mom and she wears herself out and I’m like, Okay, whatever, I’m in. As long as I’m living here I might as well be part of the problem.”

Somewhere in the house there’s a trunk full of glossy promotional photos of rock and metal bands from the seventies, eighties, and into the nineties, “the mullet years” as Kathryn has tagged that primitive era, most of these bands long forgotten and mercifully so, though Ray’s collection does contain a few bona fide stars. Meat Loaf. .38 Special. Kansas. The Allman Brothers. Proximity to talent as well as the empire of his own considerable ego propelled Ray to a minor local stardom all his own, and while the pop music juggernaut of love, lust, and endless adolescence powers on and on, it endures without the oral gifts of Rockin’ Ray Lynn, who in the 9-11 climate of recessive economics found himself out on his downsized and too-old ass. We love ya, big guy, but you’re gone. And all those years he’d kept apartments in Dallas and Fort Worth, that era came to a sputtering and ignominious end too, though he was plotting his comeback in between the odd jobs that came his way, emceeing local beauty pageants and Rotary Club banquets, “monkey gigs” he called them in the bitter, waspish voice he used at home, the one best suited to his default settings of contempt, sarcasm, and general hatefulness. The way he could switch from that to his professional voice was something to see, a kind of ventriloquist’s trick, no dummy necessary. He’d be berating you for, say, failing to lather the tires with sufficient Armor All to achieve that lustrous showroom shine, and in the midst of his ruptured sewer line of fucks and damns and worthless-piece-of-shits his cell would ring and it was like a switch flipped, all at once he was the hip, happy voice of ten thousand drive-times and the perennial metro-area Arbitron champ.

Billy hated that. Not just the lie of it but the affront to nature, like someone’s head changing shape right before your eyes. But the comeback. That was his mission. Through research Ray concluded that the market could support yet one more aggrieved white male defending faith and flag from America’s heartland. He studied the masters, followed the news, logged serious hours on the Internet. He began making demo tapes and sending them out; the family became his test audience for ever more baroque elaborations of conservative creed. “America’s Prick,” Billy’s elder sister, Patty, called him after an especially inspired riff on the welfare state. He’d leaped straight from rock ’n’ roll to hard-core right wing with no stops in between. It was a remarkable feat of self-actualization, but at what cost, what stresses of body and soul, a bending of the psyche beyond human limits such as might be endured on a space voyage to Mars. The man existed in a 24/7 paranoid clench. He had TV and radio for intellectual affirmation, a two-packs-a-day habit for sensual sustenance, and none of the mundane distractions of fresh air or exercise. Thus he was operating at peak efficiency until the day he rose punch-drunk from the couch, staggering, sloshing his words, comically swatting his head like a man trying to ward off a swarm of bees.

Stroke. Then another before the EMTs arrived, the one that nearly killed him. Now he mumbles and mewls like the Tin Man pre–lube job, and Billy makes not the slightest effort to understand. Kathryn understands him, and their mother, Denise, and Patty, who drove from Amarillo with her toddler son, Brian, just to spend these two nights and one day with Billy, she mostly understands. Not that Ray tries to talk except where his personal needs are concerned, and therein lies the family secret which dare not speak its name. It wasn’t that he screwed around during all those years of keeping an apartment, which he
had
to do, keep an apartment that is; as the morning DJ for a succession of Metroplex radio stations no way he could handle the daily commute from Stovall, and Stovall was where they chose to raise the kids, steeped in the neighborly virtues and core American values of small-town Texas. Plus Denise had a pretty good job there, so the arrangement was he’d stay in the city during the week working his fingers
to the bone,
and would return home in triumph on the weekends. Extramarital sex wasn’t the terrible family secret, neither the screwing around nor the evidence thereof, the surfacing after his stroke of the alleged teenage daughter and the lawsuit for acknowledgment of paternity and child support. A sorry business to be sure, but no secret, no tiptoeing around the smirch to family honor. But that other shame they never spoke of, thrilling though it was. You felt bad about feeling good, was what the shame amounted to. Ray wouldn’t—couldn’t?—talk: ! The famous silver tongue was finally stilled, and what a relief and secret joy that was for everyone.

“Some days I think I’m living in a bad country song,” Kathryn said, and she told Billy about walking into the den one day to find Ray whimpering on the floor, stuck between the coffee table and the sofa. He’d clearly been there awhile, judging from the dark stain across the front of his pants, and not ten feet away Denise sat at her desk paying bills and shuffling insurance forms. Mom! Kathryn cried. Don’t you see Dad lying there? Denise gave her husband a breezy glance. “Oh,” she said, turning back to the desk, “he’s okay. He’ll get up when he’s good and ready.”

Kathryn laughed when she finished the story. “I swear I think she’d let him die if I wasn’t around.”

You couldn’t please him, not if you happened to be his son, not even if you came home a national hero. There was a noisy happy scene when Billy walked in the door, his mother crying, his sisters laughing and crying, little Brian swinging among their knees and crying too, everyone lumped in a big sloppy blob of a hug. Ray was in the den watching TV. He glanced up when Billy entered, gave a noncommittal grunt, and turned back to the tube. Billy stood at parade rest and sized up the situation. Still dyeing your hair I see, he said, and indeed the old man’s brick of a pompadour was the glossy jet-black of a fresh oil spill. Nice boots, Billy went on, nodding at the brown ostrich quills, never creased. New? Ray cut him a look, eyes glittering with dangerously high IQ. Billy chuckled. He couldn’t help it. Still the dude with his Bible-black hair and prickly attention to grooming and dress, the pretty pink candies of his fingernails gleaming from a house-call manicure. He wasn’t tall, he had a pinched dirt-dauber sort of build and his sharp-featured face was just this side of handsome, but a certain class of woman had always gone for him. Waitresses, hairstylists, receptionists, the moment he opened his mouth they were hormone mush. Secretaries were a specialty; his own, others’. Much had been learned in the course of the lawsuit.

“Your chair’s looking all spiff. You get it waxed?”

Ray ignored him.

“Looks like a little Zamboni, anybody ever told you that?”

Still Ray didn’t react.

“So does it make that beeping sound when you put it in reverse?”

For dinner Denise served up a spectacular chicken tetrazzini feed. She’d had her hair done. She’d put on makeup. She wanted everything perfect, which Ray deftly sandbagged by cranking up the volume for Bill O’Reilly and chain-smoking through dinner. “It’s every daughter’s dream to die of secondhand smoke,” Kathryn wistfully crooned, then she turned to Billy and laughed. “Listen, if he could stick the whole pack in his mouth and smoke it all at once he would, nothing would make him happier.” Ray just ignored her. He pretty much ignored them all, and that night it struck Billy as never before how completely they were all bound up in one another. You can deny him, he thought, watching his father across the table. You can hate him, love him, pity him, never speak to or look him in the eye again, never deign even to be in his crabbed and bitter presence, but you’re still stuck with the son of a bitch. One way or another he’ll always be your daddy, not even all-powerful death was going to change that.

Denise waited on her husband’s every need, though she was never quick about it, Billy noticed, she seemed quite fine with him harrumphing a second and third time, and when she did get around to fetching, pouring, cutting, she performed with a multitasky air of distractedness, like she was watering plants while talking on the phone. She was sneaky. She had those passive-aggressive wiles. Her hair was an indeterminate washed-out chemical color, and most of the emotional muscle tone was gone from her face, though she was still capable of sad, skewed smiles from time to time, forcing the cheer like Christmas lights in the poor part of town. She strove mightily to keep the conversation upbeat, but family troubles kept leaking in around the edges. Money troubles, insurance troubles, medical-bureaucracy troubles, Ray-being-a-stubborn-pain-in-the-ass troubles. Halfway through the meal young Brian grew restless. “Hey!” Kathryn cried. “Hey, Briny, watch this!” She stuck two of Ray’s Marlboros in her nose and bought them five more minutes of peace.

“She called today,” Denise said, helping herself to a third glass of wine.

“Who called?” Billy asked, not knowing any better. His sisters hooted. “That
hussy
!” Kathryn answered with a berserk-debutante sort of shriek. She plucked the cigarettes from her nose and returned them to Ray’s pack. “Mother knows she’s not supposed to talk to her. Everything’s supposed to go through the lawyers.”

“Well,” Denise said, “she called. I can’t help it if the woman keeps calling my house.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to talk to her,” Patty pointed out.

“Well, I can’t just hang up. That would be rude.”

The girls yelped. “That woman,” Kathryn began, and had to pause for a fit of dry-heave laughs, “that woman had an
affair
with your husband, and you can’t be
rude
? Ye gods, Mom, she did your old man for eighteen years, they had a
kid
together for Christ’s sake. Be rude, please. Like that’s the least you could do.”