Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Read online

  “Shit,” someone murmurs, a speed bump in the silence—their first burst of enthusiasm on sighting the stadium has flatlined into verbal arrest. Maybe it’s the weather that brings them down, all this early-winter gloom, or maybe performance anxiety or just plain weariness, the burden of knowing much will be required of them today. Bravo doesn’t do so well with silence anyway. Guff and bullshit are more their working style, but the spell of introspective dread concludes with the appearance of a large, carefully rendered homemade sign affixed to a roadside utility pole. STOP ANAL RAPE IN IRAQ! the sign reads, below which someone has scrawled, heavens to betsey. Bravo howls.

  A PRIVATE IN THE INFANTRY

  THEY ARRIVE TWO HOURS before kickoff and no one seems to know what to do with them, so they’re parked in their seats for the time being, forty-yard line, home side, seventh row. Sykes and Lodis immediately start debating the retail value of such totally sick seats and how much they would bring on eBay, $400, $600, up and up they go, their analysis based on nothing more than air and wishful thinking. It’s a fuckwit conversation and Billy tries not to listen. He’s got the aisle seat with Mango on his left, and they talk a little bit about last night and how awesome it is to be here instead of spitting sand out their ears at FOB Viper. Hebert known as A-bort is sitting to Mango’s left, then Holliday known as Day, then Lodis a.k.a. Cum Load, Pant Load, or just plain Load, then Sykes who will never be anything other than Sucks, then Koch as in coke which makes him Crack and Crack kills!, especially when he squats and shows a slice of his ass, then Sergeant Dime, then Albert’s empty seat, then that infinite enigma known as Major Mac. Everyone says it’s cold, but Billy doesn’t feel it. The forecast calls for sleet and freezing rain by late afternoon, and through the stadium’s open dome they can watch the weather going to hell, the cloud deck bristling like a giant Brillo pad. The half-empty stands—it’s early yet—give off the low hum of a floor buffer or oscillating fan.

  “Load!” barks Sergeant Dime. “How long is a football field?”

  Lodis snorts; too easy. At least ten times a day he has to prove that certitude is the hallmark of the true moron.

  “A hunrud yards, Sergeant.”

  “Wrong, dumbshit. Billy, how long is a football field?”

  “A hundred twenty yards,” Billy answers, trying to keep it low-key, but Dime leads the rest of Bravo in whooping applause.

  Hooah, Billy, get some. He’s leery of this roll Dime’s on for singling him out for favors and praise and doing it in so frontal a manner, as if daring the other Bravos to call him on it. It’s like a punishment, whose Billy hasn’t figured out, but instructional aggression is a specialty of Dime’s. NO he’s bellowing now at Sykes, who’s begging permission to place a couple of small bets. Ever since he maxed out his credit cards on porn, Dime has had him on a vicious budget.

  “Sergeant, just fifty bucks.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been saving up—”

  “No.”

  “I’ll send every penny to my wife—”

  “Damn right you will, but you aren’t betting.”

  “Please, Sergeant—”

  “Sucks, have you not had your morning glass of shut up?” With that Dime is stepping over the seat below and sidling down the vacant row at Bravo’s front. “Gentlemen, what it do?” he says on reaching the end of the row.

  “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.

  Never even thanked them, Kathryn will say. I just laid there looking up at them, I couldn’t talk. In fact all the doctors said she should have died. Fractured pelvis, fractured leg, ruptured spleen, collapsed lung, and massive internal bleeding, then the complicated lacework on her face and back, 170 stitches below the neck, 63 above. You’re gonna be fine, the plastic surgeon tells her the day after. It may take a couple of years but we’ll get you there, I do this all the time. But pussy boy can’t handle it. Three weeks after the wreck he drives to Stovall and breaks off the engagement, whereupon the gentle Kathryn thumps the engagement ring in his face, thumps it as you’d thump a spider or slug you found crawling on your hand. But Billy felt called to a more active response. His sister, family honor, basic goddamn human decency, all these and more seemed crucially at stake. He drives to Fort Worth, locates the pussy-boy Saab outside the pussy-boy condo, and proceeds to reduce said vehicle to scrap and spare parts with the True Value crowbar he bought along the way. A sanctifying calm came over him as he mounted the roof and prepared for that first mighty swing at the windshield. He had a job to do, that was his sense of the moment, and after a frazzled adolescence marked by much conflict with authority and numerous self-inflicted fuckups, he was determined to get this right. He swung calmly, picking his spots with real care and deliberation. The work was pleasing. Even the shriek of the car alarm couldn’t shake his concentration. The feeling had been building for quite some time that something drastic needed to happen, and now it was.

  He was two weeks away from graduating. After several meetings and much official jerking around, the school board decreed that Billy would receive his diploma, but only by mail. He would not get to “walk,” i.e., do the traditional senior passage across the stage to receive his diploma. “You will not walk,” the chairman of the school board announced in the darkest, direst tones of churchly reproach, and Billy thought his throat would burst from holding in the laughs. Like he gave a flying fuck! Ooooo, I don’t get to walk? Ooooo, my life is over! The lawyer who cut the deal with the school board had to work rather harder to keep him out of jail. The demo job on the Saab wasn’t so much the problem as chasing p. boy across the parking lot. With the crowbar. “I wasn’t gonna hurt him,” Billy confessed to the lawyer. “I just wanted to see him run.” In fact Billy had been laughing so hard that he could barely stand up, much less manage anything like a credible chase.

  The DA agreed to drop the felony charge down to criminal mischief if Billy joined the Army, which seemed as good a place as any to be sloughed off, better than jail and being raped every night by guys with names like Preacher and Hawg. Thus he came to be a soldier at the age of eighteen, a private in the infantry, the lowest of the low.

  So how’s your sister? Shroom asked when the story was done.

  She’s better, Billy said. They say she’s gonna be okay.

  You’re still a fucking delinquent, Dime said, but after that they didn’t ride him so hard.

  IT IS MOSTLY IN YOUR HEAD

  BUT WE HAVE CURES FOR THAT

  BILLY HOPES JOSH BRINGS some Advil soon. The five Jack and Cokes made his hangover worse, but now that he’s stopped drinking it hurts worse still. Dime and Albert are standing in the aisle and Dime is telling him about Shroom’s funeral yesterday, how what should have been the most solemn service ever, a tribute to the spirituality of the man with readings from the Tao, Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and prayers from an elder of the local Crow tribe, had instead turned into a freak show of Christian wingnuts, a little group standing outside the church with signs like GOD HATES YOU 2 THESS. 1:8 and U.S. SOLDIERS ARE GOING TO HELL, screaming chants about abortion and dead babies and God’s curse on America.

  Crazy, Albert says. Disgusting. Outrageous.

  “Hey, Albert,” Crack calls, “make sure you get that in the movie.”

  Albert shakes his head. “Nobody would believe it.”

  The Goodyear Blimp is making labored passes overhead, bucking like a clipper ship in a storm. The Jumbotron is airing a video tribute to the late, great “Bullet” Bob Hayes, and displayed along the rim of the upper loge are the names and numbers of the Cowboys “Ring of Honor.” Staubach. Meredith. Dorsett. Lilly. This is the undeniable big-time, there is no greater sports event in the world today and Bravo is smack in the frothy middle of it. In two days they will redeploy for Iraq and the remaining eleven months of their extended tour, but for now they are deep within the sheltering womb of all things American—football, Thanksgiving, television, about eight different kinds of police and security personnel, plus three hundred million well-wishing fellow citizens. Or, as one trembly old guy in Cleveland put it, “Yew ARE America.”