Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

How-Wayne opens his mouth and flaps his jaw once or twice, but nothing comes out. His eyes have receded deep into his head. Behold, Billy thinks, the world’s most mindfucked millionaire.

“I’ve gotta go,” How-Wayne mumbles, glancing around as if checking his escape route. Don’t talk about shit you don’t know, Billy thinks, and therein lies the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real. They have dealt much death and received much death and smelled it and held it and slopped through it in their boots, had it spattered on their clothes and tasted it in their mouths. That is their advantage, and given the masculine standard America has set for itself it is interesting how few actually qualify. Why we fight, yo, who is this we ? Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.

By the time How-Wayne leaves, the Bravos are openly sniggering. “You know, David,” Albert says, gazing thoughtfully at Dime, “once you’re out of the Army, you really ought to consider acting.”

The Bravos hoot, but Albert seems serious, and Dime does too because he asks quite solemnly, “Was I too hard on him?” which cracks everybody up, yet he sits there completely straight-faced. Several Bravos start chanting Holly-wooood while Day tells Albert, “Dime ain’t no act, he just like fucking with people,” to which Albert answers, “What do you think acting is?” which inspires another round of hoots. As all this is going on Dime leans toward Billy and murmurs:

“Now dammit, Billy, why did I give that man such a hard time?”

“I don’t know, Sergeant. I guess you had your reasons.”

“Dear Jesus. And what might those be?”

Billy’s pulse takes off. It’s like being called on in class. “Hard to say, Sergeant. Because you hate bullshit?”

“Yeah, maybe. Plus I’m an asshole?”

Billy declines to answer. Dime laughs, sits back and waves for a waiter. When he turns back to Billy there it is again, The Look, his gaze so frank and open-ended that Billy can’t help but wonder, Why me? At first he feared it was the start of some hideous gay thing, gay being virtually his sole reference point for prolonged eye contact from a fellow male, but lately he doubts it, a conclusion that required no small broadening of his view of human nature. Dime is after something else, some acknowledgment or as-yet-to-be-determined insight, though Billy knows if he described it to your average third party it would come out sounding gay, just based on a strict visual rendering of the trigger event. You had to be inside it to understand the pure human misery of that day, the desolation, for instance, one among many, of seeing Lake up on the table fighting off the docs, howling and flailing and slinging blood like he wasn’t being saved but skinned alive. Billy has come to see that as the breaking point, the bend in his personal arc that day. There was before and there was after, and whatever of his shit he still had together he lost it then, broke down sobbing right there on the aid station ramp. Surely his mind would have cracked from shock and grief had not Dime shoved him into a supply pantry, slammed him up against the wall and pinned him there as if bent on bodily harm. By then Dime was weeping too, both of them hacking, gagging on snot, covered in mud and blood and sweat as if they’d just that moment climbed gasping and retching from some elemental pit of primordial sludge. I knew it would be you, Dime was hissing over and over, his mouth a butane torch in Billy’s ear, I knew it would be you, I knew it I knew it I so fucking knew it I am so fucking goddamn proud of you, then he grabbed Billy’s face in both his hands and kissed him full on the lips like a stomp, a whack with a rubber mallet.

Billy’s mouth was sore for days. He kept waiting for Dime to say something about it, and when that didn’t happen he’d put his fingers to his mouth and feel the bruise on his lips. You couldn’t put this in a movie and have people understand, not based on any movie Billy’s ever seen. If you could then he’d say, Okay, put it in, he could give a flying fuck if people think it’s gay, but it would have to be done with real shrewdness and skill, you couldn’t just throw it out there and expect people to understand, but now Swank has totally screwed up his thinking here. If she plays him and Dime both, where does it go? Like, good luck kissing yourself. Good luck saving yourself. Maybe in the movie they will all just have to lose their minds.

Fuck it, nobody knows about it anyway. Dime orders another round of Heinekens for the table, though he requires that the empties be cleared away first. After the waiter leaves another waiter arrives and asks would they like coffee. Coffee? Hell yes, coffee! Caffeine being one of the essential drugs. Crack asks if there’s Red Bull and the waiter says he’ll check, which prompts orders for Red Bull all around. Everyone rises to go for desserts but Billy needs to find the head. He’s too shy to ask where it is so he wanders the outer sanctums of the club for a while, which is fine, he needs a break anyway, and viewing forty years’ worth of pro football memorabilia is as good a way as any to numb the mind. There’s a poster-sized photo of the Hail Mary catch, Staubach’s cleats from Super Bowl VI, Mel Renfro’s grass-stained jersey from the Cowboys’ last game at the Cotton Bowl, every item curated with all the pomp and reverence of relics from the Holy Roman Empire. Billy finds the men’s room and takes his time. Everything is so clean. Iraq is trash, dust, rubble, rot, and bubbling open sewers, plus these maddening microscopic grains of sand that razor their way into every orifice of the human body. Lately he’s noticed the crud is even in his lungs. It whines when he takes a deep breath, a faint screeching down there like bagpipes playing deep in the valley, and he wonders if it’s a permanent thing or just a temporary backup in the filtration system.

He takes a long time washing his hands, watching himself in the mirror. Growing up in Stovall he knew a boy named Danny Werbner, the older brother of his friend Clay. Danny had a distant manner and rarely spoke, but he’d narrowly survived a car accident in which his two best friends died, and for this reason everybody just shrugged off the strange things Danny did. Such as, he’d strip naked in the room he and Clay shared and stare at himself in the mirror for long periods of time, not caring if the door was open or how cold it was or whether posses of younger boys were tromping through. This was just one of the weird things Danny Werbner did, disturbed behavior with its own inarguable logic, Danny staring in the mirror to make sure he was there.

Billy thinks about this lately when he looks in mirrors. Out in the hall he meets Mango coming the other way with one of the waiters, a stocky young Latino with a gold hoop earring and the high-fade haircut of the ghetto cat. They’re smirking. Something is up. Mango pulls Billy aside, and right there under a photo of Tom Landry shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, he whispers, “Wanna get high?”

Hell yeah. The waiter leads them through the kitchen, down a cluttered service corridor, and into a junky storeroom with no heat, and from there they exit into a trapezoidal pocket of outdoor space, a kind of hutch hollowed out of the stadium’s armature. It’s a mistake, a design flaw neatly tucked out of sight, hardly big enough for the three of them. The waiter, whose name is Hector, has to bend to clear the I-beam cutting across his corner.

“What is this place?” Billy asks, because he has to ask something.

Hector laughs. “It’s not nothing.” He kicks a chunk of wood under the door. “It’s nowhere, man, it’s one of them places don’t exist. Me and some of the guys, we use it for smoke breaks.”