Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

They laugh. The cold air feels good. A neutered sort of daylight filters down to them, strained and sifted through the steel fretwork. For several moments Billy imagines the stadium as an extension of himself, as if he’s wearing it, strapped into the most awesome set of body armor ever known to man. It’s a fine, secure feeling until his chest starts to labor under the weight of all that steel, but the joint coming around helps with that.

“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.

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.