Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

The Bravos look at one another. What’s amazing is a lot of what he says is true.

“Look, talk to Bob. He could use a hit right now, and I’m bringing him one on a goddamn silver platter.” Silence. “Jesus.” Silence again. “Well fuck me, it is Thanksgiving. Just trust me when I say Hilary’s interested. You’ll be glad you did.”

“Problems?” Dime asks when Albert clicks off.

“Nah. All normal.” Albert takes a drink of Cowboyrita and winces. “It’s all accountants running the studios these days. Midgets in Maseratis, tiny men in big suits. They have to google themselves every morning just to remember who they are.”

“Didn’t you say Oliver Stone went to Nam?” Sykes asks.

“Yes I did, Kenneth. Did I fail to also mention he’s a lunatic? And he can’t bring the money anyway. Look, if I have to hit the street to make this film that’s what I’ll do, that’s how much I believe in you guys.”

No one knows what this means exactly, but the buffet beckons. When they go back for seconds — only Dime, Albert, and Major Mac stand pat — a long line precedes them, but as soon as people notice Bravo standing there they move aside and urge the soldiers forward. At first Bravo declines, which triggers a merry hue and cry. Go on! people insist in mock-scolding tones. Get on up there, go! They nod and chuckle as the Bravos pass, heartened by the sight of these fine, strapping American boys with their big broad shoulders and excellent manners and ability to eat everything in sight. Everyone is happy. It is a Moment. A point has been made, assumptions proved, and now they can all go forth and enjoy the day. Billy’s hangover has been shocked into remission by the onslaught of calories, and on this second pass he marvels once more at the gorgeous food, the woody grain of the turkey beneath its golden crust, the lush, moist plaids of the vegetable casseroles, the luxuriant mounds of stuffing, and the six different kinds of mashed and whole potatoes, including an exotic purple variety with the strangely pleasing texture of leavened mildew. Here in the God-blessed realms of mainstream America you eat civilized meals and take civilized dumps, indoors, in peace, on toilets that flush, in the common decent privacy that God intended as opposed to the wide-open vistas of the barbarous desert, nature nipping at your ass like a pit bull puppy. So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.

Walking back to the table they start giggling. No reason, they’re just punchy, the food has given them a glucose high, but on arrival Dime tells them to sit the fuck down and shut up and he is not messing around. Something has happened. What happened? Soon they will learn that the powerful producer-director team of Grazer and Howard has relayed its desire to make the Bravo movie, Universal Studios has even verbally committed, but all on condition that the story relocates to World War II. But for now the only thing Bravo knows is that Dime is suddenly OTR, on the rag, while Albert carries on as if everything’s cool, placidly keying in a message on his BlackBerry. “A master of the psyche,” Shroom said of Dime, after the sergeant spent the better part of a morning smoking Billy’s ass for leaving his night-vision goggles in the Humvee overnight. Push-ups, crunches, stress positions with sandbags, then six deadly laps in hundred-degree heat around the FOB’s inner perimeter, roughly the equivalent of four miles. “You’ll never figure him out, so don’t even try,” Shroom advised.

“He’s an asshole,” said Billy.

“Yeah, he is. And that just makes you love him more.”

“Fuck that. I hate the son of a bitch.”

Shroom laughed, but then he could, he and Dime had served together in Afghanistan and he was the only Bravo who Dime never smoked. This exchange took place in the shade of the concealment netting that Shroom rigged up outside his Conex, to which he would repair in his leisure hours to smoke and read and ponder the nature of things from the camo camp chair he bought in Kuwait. It calms Billy to think about him thus arranged, barefoot, shirtless, cigarette in hand, and with a book in his lap, Slowly Down the Ganges . He was heavy into the whole ethnobotanical mystic trip and even looked like a giant shroom, a fleshy, slope-shouldered, melanin-deficient white man with the basic body type of a manatee, yet he possessed a prodigious blue-collar strength. He could one-hand the SAW like a pistol and ready-up the.50 cal, and forty-pound sacks of HA rice were like beanbags in his grasp. Every other day he shaved his head, a surprisingly delicate orb that seemed a couple of sizes too small for the rest of him. In heat conditions his face lit up in swirling lava-lamp blobs, and he didn’t so much perspire as secrete, producing an oily substance that covered his body like a slick of stale pickle juice.

“If people lived on the moon,” Dime liked to say, “they would all look like Shroom.”

It was Shroom who told Billy that Dime’s father was a high-powered judge back in North Carolina. “Dime is money,” he said. “But he doesn’t want people to know. And you know what that means.”

No, Billy said. What does it mean?

“It means that money’s old .”

They made the oddest of odd couples, handsome Dime palling around with mooncalf Shroom, and they seemed to know more about each other than would be considered healthy in a normal environment. From time to time Dime would allude to Shroom’s horrific childhood, an apparently epic tale of hard knocks that included a stint in some sort of religious institution for waifs, or, as Dime called it with never a batted eye from Shroom, the Anal Redemptive Baptist Home for Misplaced Boys of Buttfuck, Oklahoma. Billy supposed that’s where Shroom came by his impressive repertoire of Bible verses, in addition to such gnomic pronouncements as “Jesus was not a U-Haul” and “We’re all God’s Pop-Tarts whether we like it or not.” In Shroom World, bricks were “earth biscuits,” trees were “sky shrubs,” and all frontline infantry “meat rabbits,” while media pronouncements on the progress of the war were like “being lied to on your tombstone.” Early on, before they’d seen any real action, Billy asked him what being in a firefight was like. Shroom thought for a moment. “It’s not like anything, except maybe being raped by angels.” He’d say “I love you” to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone’s soul. Then other Bravos started saying it but they hedged at first, blatting “I love you man” in the tearful desperate voice of the schmuck in the Budweiser ad, but as the hits piled up and every trip outside the wire became an exercise in the full pucker, nobody was playing anymore.

I’m going down. Like a slide show, alive, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead. Billy was doing about ten different things at once, unpacking his medical kit, jamming a fresh magazine into his rifle, talking to Shroom, slapping his face, yelling at him to stay awake, trying to track the direction of the incoming rounds and crouching low with absolute fuck-all for cover. The Fox footage shows him firing with one hand and working on Shroom with the other, but he doesn’t remember that. He thinks he must have been cutting Shroom’s ammo rack loose, pulling the release on his IBA to get at his wounds. Is this what they mean by courage? Simply doing all the things you were trained to do, albeit everything at once and very fast. He remembers the whole front of his body being covered in blood and half-wondering if any of it was his, his bloody hands so slick he finally had to tear open the compression bandage with his teeth, and when he turned back to Shroom the big bastard was sitting up! Then going right back down, Billy sliding crabwise to catch him in his lap, and Shroom looked up at him then with his brow furrowed, eyes burning like he had something crucial to say.