Ben Fountain: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Just chillin’,” says Mango.

“You get any chiller, we’re gonna put you on a stick and sell mango Blow Pops. Lodis still says the football field’s a hundred yards long.”

“Is!” Lodis calls from down the row. “Since when anybody count the end zone, yo.”

“Sergeant,” Sykes wails, “just please this once—”

“Shut!” Dime barks, the stalk of his neck twisting around as if he means to pop his head off by self-induced torque, then his eyes alight on Billy and there it is, The Look, the fixed fire of Dime’s gaze bearing down on Billy’s humble self. This has happened a lot lately and it’s freaking Billy out, the concentrated calm of Dime’s gray eyes with that sense of mad energy swirling at the edges, like finding yourself at the center of a hurricane.

“Billy.”

“Sergeant.”

“Your thoughts on the Hilary Swank deal.”

“I don’t know, Sergeant. It seems sort of weird, having a girl play a guy.”

“But Billy, haven’t you heard, weird is the new normal.” Dime is buzzing with game-day energy, arms swinging, hips juking little half-feints and slants. “But maybe she’d play it as a girl, you heard Albert. They’d turn you into a chick, how about that? So for the rest of your life people’ll be like, ‘Look, there goes ol’ Billy Lynn. He let them turn him into a girl for that movie they made.’ ”

“She wants to play you too, Sergeant. Would you do it?”

Dime gives a lippy sort of laugh. “I tell you what, maybe. If she’d let me be her boyfriend for a couple of weeks, I could be persuaded.”

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper’s, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day’s head into the base motor pool. He has a Purple Heart and Bronze Star from Afghanistan, and among the other company sergeants his tag is “Fuckin’ Liberal,” but what was extraordinary about Bravo, the miracle that only gradually became apparent to Billy, was the presence in the squad of not one but two demonstrably superb warriors, neither of whom had any use for the prevailing orthodoxies. When Vice President Cheney made his morale-boosting stop at FOB Viper, Dime and Shroom had cheered with such sick abandon that even Captain Tripp registered the savage mockery of it. Woooo-woooh, yeanh, Dick! Give ’em hell! Bring it awn ! Woooo-woooh, let’s kick some raghead ass! The entire platoon snickering and giggling, about to piss their pants, finally the captain passed a note to Dime saying to “tone it the fuck down now ,” though Cheney seemed well pleased with his reception. Standing there onstage in his L.L.Bean khakis, hands in his pockets, NASA windbreaker zipped to his neck, he complimented Viper on its fighting spirit and offered up encouraging news about the war. There is no doubt, he said. The latest intelligence, he said. Our commanders in the field, he said, all in that modulated dial-tone Cheney voice that made everything sound so fucking reasonable. So what was it he said? Oh, right. The insurgency was on its last legs, he said.

“Albert!” Dime calls out. “Billy thinks Hilary Swank is weird.”

“Wait. No.” Billy turns, and there’s Albert coming down the steps, smiling with a bemused sort of West Coast cool. “I just said I thought it’s weird she’d wanna play a guy.”

“Hilary’s all right,” Albert says mildly. “In fact she’s one of the nicest ladies in Hollywood. But if you think about it, Billy”—the young soldier is always shocked when Albert calls him by name; Dude, he wants to say, not necessary, you don’t have to remember my actual name—“that’s the supreme challenge for any actor, playing the opposite sex. I can see why she’d be interested.”

“He doesn’t want a chick playing him,” Dime says. “He’s scared people are going to think he’s a pussy.”

“Albert, don’t listen to anything he says.”

Albert chuckles, and for a second Billy thinks of Santa Claus, another jolly man of girth. “Stay loose, guys. We’ve got a long way to go before you have to worry about that.”

Albert’s target is a hundred thousand down for each Bravo’s life story, plus all manner of arcane fees, points, percentages, and other unintelligible stuff they will just have to trust him on. For the past two weeks he’s been jumping in and out of the Victory Tour, meeting up with Bravo in DC, then jetting out, another meeting in Denver, then jetting out, Phoenix and out, and now here at the tour’s end, Dallas. Two weeks ago he said they’d have a deal by Thanksgiving, and while it looks like everything’s under control Billy senses an inchoate diminishing of heat, a barely perceptible laboring on Albert’s part to keep it stoked. None of the other Bravos has said anything, so maybe Billy is wrong. Probably he’s wrong. Dear God please let me be wrong. If he could come out of this just a little bit rich all monies would be devoted toward a most worthy cause. When Billy joined the platoon at Fort Hood, Dime and Shroom rode him 24/7 with taunts of punk, thug, delinquent, and not in a friendly way. For some reason they had it in for him, and with deployment looming, not to mention three and a half years left on his Army contract, he was screwed if he couldn’t get them off his back. So one day they come upon him lifting weights in the gym and there it is again, the whole shitbag punk-ass gangbanger line. Billy follows them out to the lobby and addresses them in his most formal manner. Sergeant Dime, Sergeant Breem, I’m not a delinquent or a punk or a gangbanger, so please stop calling me that. I’m just a guy busting his ass as hard as he can to be a credit to his platoon and his company.

No, Shroom said, you are a fucking delinquent punk. Only a punk would trash another man’s car.

The fuck, Billy thought, how’d they know about that? “Depends on whose car,” he said.

So whose?

My sister’s fiancé. Ex-fiancé.

This got their attention. What kind of car? Dime asked.

A Saab, Billy told them. Convertible five-speed with graphite-alloy rims, three months off the lot. By then they were ready to hear him out, so Billy told them about Kathryn, his middle sister and the star of the family, an extremely beautiful girl and gentle and smart who won a partial scholarship to TCU. So far so good. Majors in business, joins a sorority, makes dean’s list every term. All good. Becomes engaged to a guy three years her senior who’s getting his MBA, kind of a tight-ass pussy boy and far too impressed with himself, but it’s still good, mostly, sort of, even though Billy secretly hates the guy. Then one rainy May morning at the end of her sophomore year Kathryn’s driving to work, she has a job as receptionist and broker-trainee at the Blinn Insurance Agency, all good except she’s T-boned on Camp Bowie Boulevard by a hydroplaning Mercedes in a flat spin, this enormous dark object windmilling her way and it’s the sound she remembers more than anything, the whoof whoof whoof of its rotary vortex like the flapping wings of the angel of death. Next thing she knows she’s lying flat on her back and three grizzled Mexicans are standing over her, trying to shield her from the rain with a sheet of cardboard. Kathryn always cries when she gets to this part. She simply cannot talk about it without breaking down, describing the three men hovering there wide-eyed and scared, their soaked clothes, their whispered Spanish, the delicate way they held the cardboard like an offering of some sort.