Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

She breaks down crying, an awful sound like the scraping of a shovel hitting bedrock. “Kathryn,” Billy says, and waits a minute. “Kathryn,” he tries again. “Kat. It’s okay. I’m gonna be fine.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice gone swampy and blear. “Shit. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry on you. It’s just that everything’s so, whatever. Everything about it sucks.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Listen, don’t be mad at me. But I gave those people your number.”

Billy grits his teeth, says nothing. The main thing is not to get her started crying again.

“Just talk to them, Billy, please? Just hear what they have to say. They’re good people, they can make it all right for you.”

He doesn’t say yes and he doesn’t say no. She goes inside to hand the phone off to Denise, and as he waits he tries to imagine how it will be for them if he doesn’t come back. He knows Kathryn would survive, a triumph of rage over guilt. Patty also; she has Brian. But his mother? All ego aside, it would be awful for her, possibly fatal, though not right away. He envisions a long slow process of interior numbing-out that takes form in his mind as weather, a plague of bitter-cold days with wind, freezing rain, a pall of daylong dusk fading to black. Days like today, in fact.

But at the moment she’s doing okay; halftime got her pumped. “It was disgraceful,” she tells Billy. “All those lewd gyrations, they’re like something you’d see at the hoochie-coochie show at a county fair. How that mess even gets on TV is beyond me.”

“Not arguing, Mom. It wasn’t my idea.”

“Like that woman revealing herself at the Super Bowl, remember? If it keeps going like this people will just stop watching. A lot of folks are fed up. Did you see it? You couldn’t even call it dancing…”

“Mom, I was there.” She’s had a glass or three of wine, apparently. More power to you, Mom, have another. God knows the woman could use a party.

“… I remember when Tom Landry was coach you never saw anything like that. They had standards. He kept that team on a tight rein. I don’t know if it’s since Norman Oglesby bought the team, or that coach he’s got or some of those other people he’s hired…”

The longer she talks, the whinier and more righteous she gets, and the less attention she pays to herself. Billy offers small hums of agreement and waits for the momma-logue to wind down.

“I hear you’re fixing an awesome feast over there.”

“Well. It’s no different from every year.”

“Then it’ll be great. Don’t wear yourself out.”

“No, I’m fine, the girls are helping out. Did you have Thanksgiving?”

“Sure did, they fed us really well. They took us to a club here in the stadium.”

“Well, that’s nice.”

It strikes him again how pitiful her life will be if he gets smoked, all ego aside. Stove-in husband, dead son, piles and piles of medical bills… He thinks maybe he should up his GI insurance, then wonders if the hospitals would take it all.

“How’s Dad?”

“He’s fine. He’s in the den watching the game with Pete.”

“Hey, there’s a fun couple.”

“Well, they seem to get along.”

Poor Mom, she can’t help being the straight man of her own life.

“Where are you now?”

“The concourse. I think they’re taking us back to our seats.”

“Are you warm enough?”

“I’m great, mom.”

“Because I saw you weren’t wearing any kind of coat.”

“I’m fine. It’s pretty warm here inside the stadium.”

“Well, I’m sure you’re busy, so I’ll let you go.”

“Not really,” he says, exasperated. Maybe the last time they’ll ever talk— not to be dramatic about it! — and she’s giving him the bum’s rush, her own son. Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands the whole concept of boundaries, but there’s a point where this mania for normalizing turns toxic.

Perhaps this is why he tries something new. “Okay, Mom, give everybody my love. And I love you too.”

“Yes bye thanks have a nice day,” she says in a rush, and he can’t help the small laugh that gets loose from him. Let her be, he tells himself. Just let her be. Pressing her for something real seems almost cruel at this point. He clicks off and has a spasm of grief so intense that his knees buckle slightly. His hand finds the wall, and he has to remind himself that it’s not absolutely certain he will die in Iraq. Just looking at the odds, he even stands a reasonably good chance of coming through without the proverbial scratch, aside from the laceration and shrapnel wounds he already received from being blown up on Dead Girl Road, and he knows if he makes it back he will be so good . Good for Mom, good for the family. And transcendently good for Faison. He can feel it rising in him, this powerful if not quite choate sense of how to live a strong and decent life. Not that you’ll actually know except by doing it, by putting in the years — as if there’s a salvation specific to combat soldiers, one that comes of learning passion for daily things? So he suspects, at least. That’s his sense of it. He would like the chance to find out, anyway.

BRAVO IS ON THE move again. The concourse is thick with fans taking a break from the weather, and more than a few are already heading for the exits. People call out to Bravo, veer over to shake hands, but not as many as before. Major Mac has been holding the fort on row 7, the lone sentinel in their block of ice-spackled seats. Billy ends up on the aisle per normal with Mango on his left, and as their post-fight cheerleader buzz wears off Bravo starts to realize how shitty their situation is. Here they sit fully exposed to the sleet and freezing drizzle watching a dull-as-hell 7–7 third-quarter tie two days before they fly back to the war. Sucks! Mango groans and hunches over.

“Dawg,” he says to Billy, “I just wanna go to sleep.”

“Uh huh. How’s your ear?”

“Hurts like a motherfucker.” After a second they both find this extremely funny.

“What’d he do, try to rip it off?”

“He won’t doing nothing except weighing about three hundred pounds. I woulda flipped him ’cept his leg was so fat, couldn’t get my arm around it. I was like, dude, you never heard of diabetes? You might wanna shed a few, lay off the supersize for a while.”

They try to watch the game, but it’s so slow, what’s the point. The fans around them are sheltering under blankets, umbrellas, here and there a plastic trash bag; only the Bravos sit there like stock in a pasture, wide open to the weather. Billy pulls out his cell and stares at Faison’s number. He is tempted to call just to hear her voice message, which sounds more southern than her real-life voice, the vowels rounder, the hard palate hollowed out, the vox equivalent of a Hill Country feather mattress.

“Dawg, I think I’m in love.”

Mango laughs. “It’d be gay if you weren’t. I saw the way you guys were moshing back there on the field. It means something when they do that shit, you know? They don’t touch you unless they dig you.”

Billy stares at his phone.

“You get her digits?”

Billy solemnly nods.

“Well, fuck, she definitely likes you. Kind of sucks it’s coming on the back end of the trip.”

Billy moans with the pleasure and pain of it, these violent oppositional forces that are physically molding him into something new. The Jumbotron plays the American Heroes graphic again, then grinds through the deafening commercial cycle, the same ads always playing in the same maddening order. FORD TRUCKS BUILT TOUGH! TOYOTA! nissan! TOYOTA! nissan! FOR ALL YOUR BANKING NEEEEEEDS DUM-DEE-DEE-DUMMMMM! Then Sykes sings out in his gruesome falsetto, If you can’t make me say ooo! then he pauses to tell the fans fore and aft how much he loves them, how much he loves all Americans everywhere, then he’s singing again—