Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Mr. Whaley left. Kathryn did not appear for lunch. After the meal, Ray and Brian went down for naps, Denise and Patty went to the store, and Billy had a relaxing jack-off session in the friendly confines of his room. Then he repaired to the backyard and laid himself down on a blanket in the sun. He dozed. Dreams came and went like fish drifting through the wheelhouse of an old shipwreck. He stirred, took off his shirt so that the sun would toast his chest acne, and dozed again. He dreamed in paisleys now, big atom-bomb swirls of biomorphic colors that presently resolved into a parade. His parade. He was in it yet watching from slightly above, and he was happy, safe, he’d made it back home. No worries! It was a sunny winter day and everyone was bundled up except for the strippers riding by on floats, blazingly naked but for G-strings and long evening gloves. A high school band stomped by, trombones and trumpets flashing in the sun, then there was Shroom far back in the crowd, his pale onion of a head sticking out of the general mass. His eyes met Billy’s and he laughed, raised a big Bud Light cup in salute. Yo, Shroom! Shroom! Get your ass up here! He kept yelling at Shroom to join him on the float, but Shroom seemed happy where he was, content to be just another face in the crowd. Shroom. Fuck. Get up here, man. The dream contained awareness that Shroom was dead so there was the huge anxiety of an opportunity missed, the parade moving on and Billy’s float being carried with it, this ridiculous paper barge coasting down the river of life and the banks lined with all these thousands of cheering folks who — dear Jesus! terrifying thought! — were they all as dead as Shroom?

His sleep broke with that throb of panic, a desperate lunge into waking. Someone was leaning over him, breathing in his face. He tipped open one eye to find Kathryn staring down at him through big Angelina Jolie — style sunglasses.

“You better be careful over there,” she murmured darkly. “If anything happens to you, I’m going to kill myself.”

Hunfh. He opened both eyes, lifted his head. His sister was stretched out beside him on a beach towel, propped on an elbow with her frontage facing him. She was also, he couldn’t help noticing, wearing a bikini, the sight of which cracked his lungs even if she was his sister. Despite the divot in her cheek she was undeniably hot: long, tan legs, an amply palmable rack, tummy flat and golden-brown as the most perfect pancake.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m the reason you’re over there.”

“Oh, right.” He closed his eyes and let his head drop back. “Your bad, getting whacked by that Mercedes. Getting dumped by whatsisface, yeah, thanks. Thanks for getting me in the shit, Kat.”

She snickered, a breathy whiffling like wind through a microphone. “Yeah, but anyway. Sorry, dawg.”

“Not a problem,” he mumbled, sounding sleepier than he was. Though if he kept his eyes shut sleep would come. Kathryn rustled about, doing female preening sorts of things.

“Mom’s pissed at me,” she said.

“Imagine that.”

“Whalers, gimme a break, a fucking parade . Those guys are talking about a parade, and you might die .”

Billy had to laugh. It was refreshing, having someone put it right out there. Living at home as she had for the past sixteen months, enduring all she’d endured by way of health and family troubles and getting dumped by p. boy, Kathryn had undergone drastic and interesting changes. For one thing, her trials had burned off all her baby fat, her tendency to pudge toward the rounder, gentler line of wholesome Christian voluptuousness. Now she sported the lean, rangy frame of a girl bartender in some kick-ass honky-tonk, if such places even existed anymore. A glossy track of keloid tissue looped over her shoulder and down her back like the dangling tail of a coil of rope. Her face was “eighty-seven percent” recovered, she told him, utterly deadpan as she emphasized that “eighty- seven percent” like a dimwit sportscaster flogging statistics. She loved that her orthopedic surgeon’s name was Dr. Stiffenbach, whom she endowed with a jaw-breaking German accent. “High ham Dock-terr Shhhtiffen-bock, jah! You vill do dese exercises for your healdth, jah!” She called Billy’s commander in chief “idiot-head,” as in “What was it like meeting idiot-head?” which had provoked scolding shushes from their mother. “Well he is!” Kathryn protested. “He’s got the brains of a cicada!” Billy’s sweet, beautiful, studious, supremely square sister who’d always been so reverent toward authority, who thought only good clean all-American thoughts and never cursed or denigrated anyone, she’d become a punchy hell on wheels.

She reached into the cooler by her side and brought out two Tecate beers. “You miss drinking over there?” she asked, handing one to Billy.

“At first. But after a while, not so much.” He popped the top and savored that happiest of fizzy sounds. “There’s days, though, you’d give about anything for one.”

“No shit. Listen, I think drinking’s way underrated in our society, like for its therapeutic values? Lets you bust out from time to time, take a little vacation from yourself. It’s hard living in your own head twenty-four/seven.”

“You sort of go insane.”

“Explains a lot, eh, all those preachers getting caught doing hookers. I just hope I never have a drinking problem, then I’d have to quit.”

They drank. A healthful sense of well-being enveloped them.

“So tell me about the Victory Tour .”

“The tour. Huh. Well, it’s kind of a blur.”

“Then just tell me about the groupies.”

He laughed but could feel himself flushing from the shoulders up. A puritanical mood came over him. “Haven’t been any groupies,” he muttered.

“Lie.”

“No lie.”

“You are a lying sackful of it. Listen, boy, you better be out there hitting it! Like, get out there and get some for me.”

“Kathryn, stop.”

“The truth, dude, I’m going a little crazy in this burg.”

“You’ll be gone soon enough.”

“Soon, maybe, yeah, but not soon enough. Not one decent guy in this freakin’ town, believe me, I checked. Some nights I’m like, whatever, maybe I’ll drive over to Sonic and hit on the high school boys, like, hey bubba, come take a ride with me! Once you’ve had a chick with a scar on her face you never go back.”

“Kathryn,” Billy pleaded.

“I should be graduated by now. I could be making sixty thousand a year someplace.”

“You’ll get there.”

“Yes, I will,” she said firmly.

“You’re getting there,” Billy amended.

“If I don’t go crazy first.”

Her last two surgeries were scheduled for spring. In January she’d start a couple of classes at community college, which she had to do, otherwise the compassionate bankers at College Fund Inc. would start charging penalty interest on her student loans. “You know what’s funny,” she said, “everybody around here’s such a major conservative till they get sick, get screwed over by their insurance company, their job goes over to China or whatever, then they’re like, ‘Oooooh, what happened? I thought America was just the greatest country ever and I’m such a good person, why is all this terrible shit happening to me?’ And I was one of ’em, man. Just as stupid as the rest. I never thought anything bad would happen to me, or if it did there was a system that would make it all right.”

“Maybe you didn’t pray hard enough.”

She coughed up a laugh. “Yeah, that must be it. The power of prayer, dawg.”

They drank. Kathryn touched the cold beer can to her cheeks, her neck, her navel, each touch triggering starbursts in Billy’s brain. He asked what their mother planned to do about the home equity loan.