Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“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.