Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Yes sir.”

“Listen, I’m as political as anybody, but I’d rather talk about football any day than politics. How about you?”

“Sir, I’d rather talk about just about anything than politics.”

Mr. Jones gives a quick hard laugh. Billy seems to be saying all the right things, but he won’t let himself relax.

“You’re the one from Texas?”

“Yes sir.”

“You a Cowboys fan?”

“All my life.” Billy puts some oomph in it, just for flattery’s sake.

“That’s what I like to hear. We’ll try to give you a win today. Harold,” he says to the black bartender, “how about an ice-cold Coke for our young friend. Anything in it?” He turns a raffish eye to Billy.

“A little splash of Jack Daniel’s would be nice. Though technically I’m not supposed to.”

“No worries, we’ll keep it on the down-low. Anything else I can get for you?”

Billy wonders why he’s going to so much trouble for him. “Well, to be honest, sir, I’ve got kind of a headache. Some Advil or something would be nice.”

“Hang on.” Mr. Jones pulls out his cell and taps faster than one would believe from such blunt fingers, which boast not one but two Super Bowl rings. Billy tries not to gawk at these bulbous crustaceans of the jeweler’s art. He accepts his drink and turns to face the room. From deep within the crowd Mango shoots him a look of stunned hilarity, then the sightline quickly shuts and that seems like part of the gag. The crowd is thickest around Norm, a bee swarm of hovering bodies, and Billy decides this is a learning opportunity, a chance to see a master schmoozer up close. Norm’s skill at working a room is legendary. Charisma, charm, command presence, he brings all these to bear in the smile and personal word he has for each and every guest, he is the indisputable pivot point and center of the room and Billy can see the skill with which he manages things, and yet, and yet… He is so on, is Norm. He is working so hard. He has all the right moves but betrays a salesman’s stress in the doing, or that of a mediocre actor who hits his points but seems cramped by a too-tight collar, a twist in his underwear. Norm is confident, absolutely, he is the king of self-esteem, but this is the confidence of self-help tapes and motivational mantras, confidence learned as one learns a foreign language, and so the accent lingers in his body language, a faint arthritic creak in every smile and gesture.

Painful to watch, and lacking in essential dignity — is this why he’s always getting dissed? Tales abound of weird encounters — Norm mooned en masse on South Beach in Miami, mooned again from the infield at Churchill Downs, roughed up by a gang of frisky young hedge-fund managers in the men’s room of “21” in New York City. And yet he is the owner, so it must be working for him on some level. Billy runs his gaze over the rest of the Oglesby clan and they are working every bit as hard as Norm, they are keys jangling on the same live wire, all spark and flash and brassy salesmanship, and Billy tries to imagine living at such a pitch, always on, always playing to the wider stage, channeling all your best energies into the public realm.

Jesus Christ, it looks like a hell of a lot of work. More than sympathy Billy feels respect for them, for the discipline it must take to get up every day and carry the entire Cowboys nation on their backs.

Mr. Jones clicks off and turns to Billy. “Some Aleve’s coming down for you right now.”

“Thank you, sir.” Billy tries not to look at the holster bulge. “And thank you for all this.” He waves his cup at the crowd. “This is really nice.”

“Well, we appreciate you fine young men being with us today. It’s an honor to be your host.”

“You know what I’d like to know,” Billy blurts, suddenly bold or careless with that fresh hit of bourbon in his gut, “is how you do it? I mean, business. All this. How do you make it happen?” He falters, racks his brain for intelligent-sounding business vocabulary. “I mean, okay, like where do you start, where does the money come from for, well, the stadium? The land and construction and everything, then paying the players, the coaches, I mean we’re talking about some serious cash outlay here, am I right?”

Mr. Jones laughs, not unkindly. “Pro football’s a capital-intensive business, that’s true,” he says in a patient, teaching-a-retard voice. “The key is leverage relative to cash flow, whether you can generate enough of a revenue stream to service your debt and still cover your current obligations. So it’s a fair question. In a way it’s the question. You’ve definitely put your finger on it.”

Billy nods as if he knew all along. “Uh huh, but just from a tactical standpoint”—whoa, nice —“say when Mr. Oglesby decided he wanted to buy the Cowboys, what did he do? I mean, I know he didn’t just whip out his credit card and say, Hm, I think I’ll buy the Cowboys today.”

“No”—Mr. Jones smiles—“it wasn’t quite like that. But let me tell you, leverage is a beautiful thing. In the right hands it can literally move mountains, and Norman Oglesby, well, let’s just say my boss is a genius when it comes to structuring deals. I’ve never known anybody with his feel for numbers, and he’s the best negotiator I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched him take on a roomful of New York investment bankers and come away with the deal he wanted, and let me tell you, those are some big boys. They’re used to getting what they want, but not on that day.”

Holy shit, Billy thinks, we’re talking business. He is having an actual adult business conversation with a high-ranking Cowboys executive, an extraordinary Moment in his life even though he knows he’s barely or not even hanging on and Mr. Jones is totally humoring him. But still. He’s here. They’re talking. “Debt ratio,” Mr. Jones is saying,

Mr. Jones’s cell phone chirps. He checks the screen, flashes a smile at Billy, and steps away. Billy gets a refresher shot for his Coke and stands off to the side of the bar, thinking. Life in the Army has been a crash course in the scale of the world, which is such that he finds himself in a constant state of wonder as to how things come to be. Stadiums, for example. Airports. The interstate highway system. Wars. He wants to know how is it paid for, where do the billions come from? He imagines a shadowy, math-based parallel world that exists not just beside but amid the physical world, a transparent interlay of Matrix -style numbers through which flesh-and-blood humans move like fish through kelp. This is where the money lives, an integer-based realm of code and logic, geometric modules of cause and effect. The realm of markets, contracts, transactions, elegant vectors of fiber-optic agency whereby mind-boggling sums of mysterious wealth shoot around the world on beams of light. It seems the airiest thing there is and yet the realest, but how you enter that world he has no idea except by passage through that other foreign country called college, and that ain’t happening. He will not return to the classroom, ever, the mere thought inflames a whole host of piss-offs and associated grudges that go all the way back to kindergarten, not to mention the sheer soul-sucking boredom of those years. If there is real knowledge to be had in the Texas public schools he never found it, and only lately has he started to feel the loss, the huge criminal act of his state-sanctioned ignorance as he struggles to understand the wider world. How it works, who gains, who loses, who decides. It is not a casual thing, this knowledge. In a way it might be everything. A young man needs to know where he stands in the world, not just as a matter of basic human dignity but as determinants in the ways and means of survival, and what you might hope to gain by application of honest effort—