Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Bastard, he probably meant to do it. He didn’t acknowledge his son or even glance Billy’s way, but Billy detected a faint smirk in the set of his mouth, a crimping of flesh at the corners of his lips. Ray motored down the ramp and into the yard. Billy felt sick from all the adrenaline jamming his system, but he scruffed up on one elbow and had a look around. Kathryn was gone. His mouth was skunky from all the pre-nap beers. The afternoon had turned overcast, the sun bleared by the clouds like a soap ball floating in a tub of dirty bathwater. Out in the yard Ray paused to light a cigarette. A real piece of work, that one, Billy mused. Highly intelligent and glib as hell, you couldn’t beat him in any argument. Never went to college but made a shit ton of money, back in the day. Ray snapped his lighter shut and trundled farther into the yard, his chair waddling over all the little bumps and rills. It had a sad lack of dignity when viewed from behind, as graceless in motion as a hippo’s backside, and the American flag decal stuck there dead center seemed like a cruel and tasteless joke, someone’s lame attempt at satire.

Billy leaned back on his elbows and watched his father. You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing. For proof all you had to do was take a quick poll of Bravo. On Holliday’s last visit home before shipping out, his brother told him, I hope you fuckin’ die in Iraq. When Mango was fifteen his father cracked his skull with a monkey wrench, and Mrs. Mango’s comment was, So maybe now you’ll stop pissing your father off. Dime’s grandfather and one of his uncles were suicides. Lake’s mother was an OxyContin addict who’d done time, his father a dealer who ditto. When Crack was eleven years old his mother ran off with the assistant pastor of their church. Shroom, he barely had a family. A-bort’s father had been the deadbeat poster dad for the state of Louisiana, and Sykes’s father and brothers blew up their house cooking meth.

Yes, family was key, Billy decided. If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace, but for that, the finding, the figuring out, you needed a strategy. So where did you go for that? Age by itself didn’t do it for you, obviously. Maybe books, but they took so long, and in the meantime the thing was always coming at you. When violent animal forces were in play, who had the fucking time for books? The morning after 9-11 Ray was on the air advocating “nuclear cleansing” of certain Middle East capitals, playing “Bomb Bomb Iran” by Vince Vance and the Valiants and “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Billy remembers thinking, Is this how it works? Terrible things had happened, which meant more and greater terrors were on the way, as if the process was not merely automatic, but absolute. Those days and weeks have since acquired an aura of prophecy in his life. Billy thinks he sensed the fatedness of it even then — war was coming and he was bound for the war, and some occult, irresistible father-son dynamic was at work to ensure that this was so. If the father loved the war, how could the son stay away? Not that love for the war would necessarily translate into love for the son.

Whhhhiiiirrrr, stop. Whhhhiiiirrrr, stop. What was he doing? Ray paused at the flowers growing along the fence, a stand of powder-blue puffballs on tall, skinny stems. Something blue mist, they were called — Billy had asked his mother that morning, after he and Brian counted seventeen monarch butterflies feeding on the blooms. All day the monarchs had been wobbling through the yard on their way south, pausing to snack on the something-blue-mist before continuing on their way to Mexico. Ray lit another cigarette and sat there smoking, watching the monarchs flutter around. Billy had never seen his father do such a thing, spend any amount of time in contemplation of nature. This was a man whose chief relation to the natural world was that of a carnivore toward his steak, but with him sitting there quietly observing the butterflies, Billy sensed, if not an opening, then some potential or possibility that threw him back on himself. It made him a little desperate, this feeling. If the opportunity came along, would he know what to do? If there could be some minor good between them and they lacked the skills to make it happen, well that would be a damn shame and maybe even tragic, given that this might be their final day together. Then the door banged open, boom, not so loud this time, and here came Brian trotting across the patio.

“Hey, Billy,” he chirped, so sweetly matter-of-fact that Billy had to smile. Brian jogged across the yard to Ray and climbed onto the back of the old man’s wheelchair. Ray smiled and wheeled the chair about, and they went rattling across the yard. “Make it jump!” Brian cried. Ray pulled back the joystick, then rammed it forward; the chair bucked, its front rising an inch off the ground. The thing did maybe three miles per hour, max, and Ray somehow juiced a wheelie out of it. Brian squealed and called for more, and off they went on a wide loop, popping and bucking, Ray gaming the chair for all it had while Brian hung on the back and laughed himself silly. Their loop gradually brought them around to Billy, and thinking about it later he will recall that he was smiling not just out of a general sense of pleasure, but in a specifically feeling way toward his father. In these later reflections, Billy will realize he’d been thinking he and Ray might have a Moment, and what he got instead was one of the great silent fuck-offs of all time. How exactly Ray did this Billy will never figure out, though it seemed to happen mostly in the eyes, in the cool, dismissive edge to their sidelong cut, that briefest of glances as the wheelchair tractored by. Some vast rejection was rendered in that moment, but Billy couldn’t describe it any better than as his father’s way of saying, This isn’t for you. You aren’t part of it, you don’t belong. Ray was keeping the Moment all to himself; he could make Brian love him whenever he wanted and none of the rest of them even deserved his effort.

All of which went to prove the point, that without a strategy you were a big fat target dangling out there, chum in the shark tank of family dynamics. At dinner that night Bill O’Reilly raged on the TV, Denise and the girls bickered about the home equity loan, Brian was tired and started acting like a little shit, the roast was overdone, Ray wouldn’t stop smoking, and Denise broke down crying because she wanted everything perfect and of course it couldn’t be. Mom, Billy said, laughing, putting his arms around her, plumbing reserves of serenity he didn’t know he had, Mom, don’t worry about it. I’m happy. I’m home. Everything’s cool. What was amazing was this actually seemed to help. His mother calmed down. Brian fell asleep in the high chair. Patty and Kathryn got the giggles and opened another bottle of wine, and Billy felt so much older than nineteen, as if blessed with wisdom beyond his years. Had the war done this? All that ever got talked about was how war was supposed to fuck you up, true enough but maybe not the whole truth. He tumbled into bed that night buzzed on chocolate cake and wine, closing his eyes with the satisfaction that disaster had been averted, something crucial salvaged. There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.