Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“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.”

Billy wanted to point out that Ray was sitting right here — as if the situation called for a certain delicacy? But this was how they did, apparently, the women talked about and around him as if discussing the price of bleach, and Ray, for his part, might as well have been deaf for all the notice he took. He kept his eyes on O’Reilly and worked his fork with a fist grip, like little Brian.

“Mom,” said Patty, “next time she calls, you need to tell her your lawyer said you can’t talk to her.”

“I do, I tell her every time. But she keeps calling anyway.”

“So hang up on the bitch!” Kathryn cried, cackling, widening her eyes at Billy. See? See what a bunch of lunatics we are?

“I don’t know what difference it makes,” Denise answered. “We might as well talk, I mean, it can’t do any harm, it’s not like either of us has any money the other could take. ‘I’ve got bills,’ she says, ‘how’m I supposed to raise this child? What’m I gonna do about sending her to college?’ Tell me about it, I say, I’m in the same boat as you. If you can find any money you’re more than welcome to it, just take his medical bills too.”

Kathryn was laughing. “Oh come on, Mom, say it. Say it! She can take him too!”

What was soothing and not something Billy had even anticipated was the pleasure of masturbating in his old room. He walked in and all the old associations mugged him, the twin beds with their plain blue bedspreads, the plastic sports trophies lined up across his dresser, the faint musk of adolescence lingering in the air like the loamy smell of last year’s mulch. He tossed his duffel on the bed, shut the door to change clothes, and boom, the Pavlovian response reared its angry head below. He was done in ninety seconds so it wasn’t like he kept anybody waiting, then next was the pleasing discovery that his old shirts were tight from all the muscle he’d packed on, his size 30 blue jeans slack through the waist. That night he had another j.o. session after turning in, then again first thing in the morning, and each time with this relaxed mood of easy reconnection, as if a fond former girlfriend had welcomed him back with open arms. What a luxury not to have to meet your masculine needs in some stinking horror of a port-a-potty, or even worse in a hardpan Ranger grave out in the field with mortal enemies all about and always, always, alwayssome torment of nature with which to contend, bugs, rain, wind, dust, extremes of temperature, no misery too small for such a small thing as a man. So give it up for America, yes! And God shed His grace on thee, where a boy can grow up having a room of his own with a door that locks and a bottomless stash of Internet porn.

“Nice to be home,” he said at breakfast, which was Cheerios, bacon and eggs, raisin-cinnamon toast, orange juice, coffee, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. For lunch there would be homemade split-pea soup, Waldorf salad, fried bologna sandwiches, and warm brownies. For dinner, a slow-cooked pot roast with carrots, potatoes, and scallions, braised brussels sprouts, a citrus congealed salad, and double-fudge chocolate cake with Blue Bell ice cream. Denise had taken the day off from work, “this special day” she kept saying at breakfast, which Kathryn echoed in swoony Hallmark tones, then Ray tumped the coffeepot and placidly motored into the den, leaving the mess for everyone else to clean up. As they hurtled around the kitchen with rags and paper towels, the Fox News theme came thundering from the den.

“Does he watch that all day?” Billy asked. His mother and sisters turned to him with long-suffering eyes. Welcome to our world.

After breakfast Billy took his little nephew out to play. It was a mellow fall morning, the blue sky-dome stretched high and tight with that sweet winesap smell in the air, the honeyed, vaguely melancholy scent of vegetable ferment and illegal leaf burns. Billy figured they were good for ten, maybe fifteen minutes before he, Billy, was bored out of his mind, but half an hour later they were still at it. Based on his highly limited experience with small children, Billy had always regarded the pre-K set as creatures on the level of not-very-interesting pets, thus he was unprepared for the phenomenal variety of his little nephew’s play. Whatever came to hand, the kid devised some form of interaction with it. Flowers, pet and sniff. Dirt, dig. Cyclone fence, rattle and climb, grit links between teeth. Squirrels, harass with feebly launched sticks. “Why?” he kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the twee? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge.