Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Read online

  Dime snaps, “A-bort, what the fuck are you doing?”

  “I’m texting Lake, Sergeant. Just saying what up.”

  Dime can’t very well object to that. He scans the table for other targets, but everyone’s staying low to his plate, shoveling it in. Then Albert starts chuckling.

  “Here, take a look at this.” He passes the BlackBerry to Dime.

  “Dude’s serious? Can’t be serious.”

  “I’m afraid he is.”

  Dime turns to Billy. “Dude’s saying our movie’s another Walking Tall, but in Iraq.”

  “Ah.” Billy has never seen Walking Tall. “Was Hilary Swank in that?”

  “No, Billy, Hilary Swank was not—Jesus, never mind. Albert, who are these people?”

  “Twerps,” Albert says. “Nerds, wimps, liars, they’re a bunch of skinny mutts with not much brains chasing a fake rabbit around a track. Content scares them, no, absolutely terrifies them. ‘Is this any good? Ewwww, is it bad? Ewwww, I just can’t tell!’ It’s pathetic, all that money and no taste. You could hit them over the head with another Chinatown and they’d say let’s stick a couple of cute little dogs in it.”

  Dime is casual. “So you’re saying we’re screwed.”

  “Whoa, did I say that? Did I say that? Oh no indeed, I don’t think I did. I’ve made a living in this business for thirty-five years, do I look screwable?” The Bravos laugh—well, no, screwable does not leap to mind when considering Albert. “Hollywood’s a sick, twisted place, I will most certainly grant you that. Corrupt, decadent, full of practicing sociopaths, roughly analogous to, say, the court of Louis the Sun King in seventeenth-century France. Don’t laugh, guys, I’m serious, sometimes it helps to visualize these things in concrete terms. Gobs of wealth floating around, obscene wealth, complete over-the-top excess in every way, and every jerk in town’s got their hustle going, trying to break off their little piece of it. But for that you’ve got to get to the king, because everything goes through the king, right? But that’s a problem. Huge problem. Access is a problem. You can’t just walk in off the street and pitch the king, but at any given moment there’ll be twenty, thirty people hanging around the court who can get to the king. They’ve got access, influence, they’re tapped in—the key is getting one of those guys attached to your deal. Same thing in Hollywood, there’s maybe twenty, thirty people at any one time who can make a project go. The names might change from year to year, but the dynamic’s the same, the number stays about the same. You get one of those people attached to your deal, you’re gold.”

  “Swank,” Crack offers.

  “Swank is gold,” Albert confirms.

  “Wahlberg?” Mango asks.

  “Marky can make a project go.”

  “How ’bout Wesley Snipes,” says Lodis. “Like, you know, say we got him to play me.”

  “Interesting.” Albert ponders a moment. “Not this movie, but I tell you what, Lodis. I’ll see if I can get you the bitch part in his next film, how about that.”

  Aaaaaaaannnnnnnhhhhhhh, everybody slags on Lodis, who just grins with food mashed all over his teeth. They’re interrupted by a Stadium Club patron who wants to say hello. It’s never the young or middle-aged men who stop to speak but always the older guys, the silverbacks secure in the fact that they’re past their fighting prime. They thank the soldiers for their service. They ask how is lunch. They offer praise for such assumed attributes as tenacity, aggressiveness, love of country. This particular patron, a fit, ruddy fellow with some black still in his hair, introduces himself with a lavish trawling of vowels that comes out sounding like “How-Wayne.” Soon he’s telling them about the bold new technology his family’s oil company uses to juice more crude out of the Barnett Shale, something to do with salt water and chemical fracturing agents.

  “Some of my friends’ kids are serving over there with you,” How-Wayne tells them. “So it’s a personal thing with me, boosting domestic production, lessening our dependence on foreign oil. I figure the better I do my job, the sooner we can bring you young men home.”

  “Thank you!” Dime responds. “That’s just excellent, sir. We certainly do appreciate that.”

  “I’m just trying to do my part.” And that was cool, Billy will later reflect. If he’d just said enjoy your meal like everybody else and returned to his lucrative patriotic life, but no, he got greedy. He had to squeeze just a little bit more from Bravo. So, he says, just from your own perspective, how do you think we’re doing over there?

  “How’re we doing?” Dime echoes brightly. “Just from our own perspective?” The Bravos fold their hands and look down at their plates, though several can’t help smiling. Albert cocks his head and pockets his BlackBerry, suddenly interested. “Well, it’s a war,” Dime continues in that same bright voice, “which is by definition an extreme situation, people trying very hard to terminate each other. But I’m far from qualified to speak to the big picture, sir. All I can tell you with any confidence is that the exchange of force with intent to kill, that is truly a mind-altering experience, sir.”

  “I’m sure, I’m sure.” How-Wayne is gravely nodding. “I can imagine how hard it is on you young men. To be exposed to that level of violence—”

  “No!” Dime interrupts. “That’s not it at all! We like violence, we like going lethal! I mean, isn’t that what you’re paying us for? To take the fight to America’s enemies and send them straight to hell? If we didn’t like killing people then what’s the point? You might as well send in the Peace Corps to fight the war.”

  “Ah ha,” How-Wayne chuckles, though his smile has lost some wattage. “I guess you’ve got me there.”

  “Listen, you see these men?” Dime gestures around the table. “I love every one of these mutts like a brother, I bet I love them more than their mommas even, but I’ll tell you frankly, and they know how I feel so I can say this right in front of them, but just for the record, this is the most murdering bunch of psychopaths you’ll ever see. I don’t know how they were before the Army got them, but you give them a weapons system and a couple of Ripped Fuels and they’ll blast the hell out of anything that moves. Isn’t that right, Bravo?”

  They answer instantly, with gusto, Yes, Sergeant! Throughout the restaurant, dozens of well-coifed heads whip around.

  “See what I mean?” Dime chortles. “They’re killers, they’re having the time of their lives. So if your family’s oil company wants to frack the living shit out of the Barnett Shale, that’s fine, sir, that’s absolutely your prerogative, but don’t be doing it on our account. You’ve got your business and we’ve got ours, so you just keep on drilling, sir, and we’ll keep on killing.”

  How-Wayne opens his mouth and flaps his jaw once or twice, but nothing comes out. His eyes have receded deep into his head. Behold, Billy thinks, the world’s most mindfucked millionaire.

  “I’ve gotta go,” How-Wayne mumbles, glancing around as if checking his escape route. Don’t talk about shit you don’t know, Billy thinks, and therein lies the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real. They have dealt much death and received much death and smelled it and held it and slopped through it in their boots, had it spattered on their clothes and tasted it in their mouths. That is their advantage, and given the masculine standard America has set for itself it is interesting how few actually qualify. Why we fight, yo, who is this we? Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.

  By the time How-Wayne leaves, the Bravos are openly sniggering. “You know, David,” Albert says, gazing thoughtfully at Dime, “once you’re out of the Army, you really ought to consider acting.”

  The Bravos hoot, but Albert seems serious, and Dime does too because he asks quite solemnly, “Was I too hard on him?” which cracks everybody up, yet he sits there completely straight-faced. Several Bravos start chanting Holly-wooood while Day tells Albert, “Dime ain’t no act, he just
like fucking with people,” to which Albert answers, “What do you think acting is?” which inspires another round of hoots. As all this is going on Dime leans toward Billy and murmurs:

  “Now dammit, Billy, why did I give that man such a hard time?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant. I guess you had your reasons.”

  “Dear Jesus. And what might those be?”

  Billy’s pulse takes off. It’s like being called on in class. “Hard to say, Sergeant. Because you hate bullshit?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Plus I’m an asshole?”

  Billy declines to answer. Dime laughs, sits back and waves for a waiter. When he turns back to Billy there it is again, The Look, his gaze so frank and open-ended that Billy can’t help but wonder, Why me? At first he feared it was the start of some hideous gay thing, gay being virtually his sole reference point for prolonged eye contact from a fellow male, but lately he doubts it, a conclusion that required no small broadening of his view of human nature. Dime is after something else, some acknowledgment or as-yet-to-be-determined insight, though Billy knows if he described it to your average third party it would come out sounding gay, just based on a strict visual rendering of the trigger event. You had to be inside it to understand the pure human misery of that day, the desolation, for instance, one among many, of seeing Lake up on the table fighting off the docs, howling and flailing and slinging blood like he wasn’t being saved but skinned alive. Billy has come to see that as the breaking point, the bend in his personal arc that day. There was before and there was after, and whatever of his shit he still had together he lost it then, broke down sobbing right there on the aid station ramp. Surely his mind would have cracked from shock and grief had not Dime shoved him into a supply pantry, slammed him up against the wall and pinned him there as if bent on bodily harm. By then Dime was weeping too, both of them hacking, gagging on snot, covered in mud and blood and sweat as if they’d just that moment climbed gasping and retching from some elemental pit of primordial sludge. I knew it would be you, Dime was hissing over and over, his mouth a butane torch in Billy’s ear, I knew it would be you, I knew it I knew it I so fucking knew it I am so fucking goddamn proud of you, then he grabbed Billy’s face in both his hands and kissed him full on the lips like a stomp, a whack with a rubber mallet.

  Billy’s mouth was sore for days. He kept waiting for Dime to say something about it, and when that didn’t happen he’d put his fingers to his mouth and feel the bruise on his lips. You couldn’t put this in a movie and have people understand, not based on any movie Billy’s ever seen. If you could then he’d say, Okay, put it in, he could give a flying fuck if people think it’s gay, but it would have to be done with real shrewdness and skill, you couldn’t just throw it out there and expect people to understand, but now Swank has totally screwed up his thinking here. If she plays him and Dime both, where does it go? Like, good luck kissing yourself. Good luck saving yourself. Maybe in the movie they will all just have to lose their minds.

  Fuck it, nobody knows about it anyway. Dime orders another round of Heinekens for the table, though he requires that the empties be cleared away first. After the waiter leaves another waiter arrives and asks would they like coffee. Coffee? Hell yes, coffee! Caffeine being one of the essential drugs. Crack asks if there’s Red Bull and the waiter says he’ll check, which prompts orders for Red Bull all around. Everyone rises to go for desserts but Billy needs to find the head. He’s too shy to ask where it is so he wanders the outer sanctums of the club for a while, which is fine, he needs a break anyway, and viewing forty years’ worth of pro football memorabilia is as good a way as any to numb the mind. There’s a poster-sized photo of the Hail Mary catch, Staubach’s cleats from Super Bowl VI, Mel Renfro’s grass-stained jersey from the Cowboys’ last game at the Cotton Bowl, every item curated with all the pomp and reverence of relics from the Holy Roman Empire. Billy finds the men’s room and takes his time. Everything is so clean. Iraq is trash, dust, rubble, rot, and bubbling open sewers, plus these maddening microscopic grains of sand that razor their way into every orifice of the human body. Lately he’s noticed the crud is even in his lungs. It whines when he takes a deep breath, a faint screeching down there like bagpipes playing deep in the valley, and he wonders if it’s a permanent thing or just a temporary backup in the filtration system.

  He takes a long time washing his hands, watching himself in the mirror. Growing up in Stovall he knew a boy named Danny Werbner, the older brother of his friend Clay. Danny had a distant manner and rarely spoke, but he’d narrowly survived a car accident in which his two best friends died, and for this reason everybody just shrugged off the strange things Danny did. Such as, he’d strip naked in the room he and Clay shared and stare at himself in the mirror for long periods of time, not caring if the door was open or how cold it was or whether posses of younger boys were tromping through. This was just one of the weird things Danny Werbner did, disturbed behavior with its own inarguable logic, Danny staring in the mirror to make sure he was there.

  Billy thinks about this lately when he looks in mirrors. Out in the hall he meets Mango coming the other way with one of the waiters, a stocky young Latino with a gold hoop earring and the high-fade haircut of the ghetto cat. They’re smirking. Something is up. Mango pulls Billy aside, and right there under a photo of Tom Landry shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, he whispers, “Wanna get high?”

  Hell yeah. The waiter leads them through the kitchen, down a cluttered service corridor, and into a junky storeroom with no heat, and from there they exit into a trapezoidal pocket of outdoor space, a kind of hutch hollowed out of the stadium’s armature. It’s a mistake, a design flaw neatly tucked out of sight, hardly big enough for the three of them. The waiter, whose name is Hector, has to bend to clear the I-beam cutting across his corner.

  “What is this place?” Billy asks, because he has to ask something.

  Hector laughs. “It’s not nothing.” He kicks a chunk of wood under the door. “It’s nowhere, man, it’s one of them places don’t exist. Me and some of the guys, we use it for smoke breaks.”

  They laugh. The cold air feels good. A neutered sort of daylight filters down to them, strained and sifted through the steel fretwork. For several moments Billy imagines the stadium as an extension of himself, as if he’s wearing it, strapped into the most awesome set of body armor ever known to man. It’s a fine, secure feeling until his chest starts to labor under the weight of all that steel, but the joint coming around helps with that.

  “Nice,” Mango says appreciatively.

  Hector nods. “Takes the edge off, vato. Gets you through the day.”

  “That it does,” Billy sagely agrees. Certain lights are switching on in his head, others switching off. “That’s some dank-ass bud.”

  “Hey, you know, gotta support the troops.” Hector laughs and takes his hit. “You guys ain’t worried about pissing hot?”

  Mango explains that, no, they aren’t worried about it. Bravo has deduced that the Army is loath to risk all this good PR by tagging Bravo with random drug tests, so for the duration of the Victory Tour they feel safe. “And what’d they do if they nailed us, yo, send our ass back to Iraq?”

  Hector shakes his head with stoned gravitas. “No way, not for a blunt. Even the Army ain’t that harsh.”

  Billy and Mango hesitate. Command seems sensitive about this, Bravo’s imminent return to Iraq. The Bravos are not to deny they’re redeploying if the subject comes up, but higher would prefer to omit this detail from the Victory Tour conversation.

  Mango grins, cuts Billy a look. “Dude,” he tells Hector, “we already goin’ back.”

  Hector squints. “Shittin’ me.”

  “Shit you not. Leaving Saturday.”

  “The fuck you gotta go back.”

  “Gotta finish out our tour.”

  “The fuck! The fuck you gotta go back, after all you fuckin’ done, fuckin’ heroes? Where’s the fuckin’ right in that? You guys done kicked your share a ass, like
whyn’t they let you just coast on out?”

  Mango laughs. “The Army don’t work that way. They need bodies.”

  “Shit.” Hector is scandalized. “For how long you gotta go?”

  “Eleven months.”

  “Fuck!” Sheer outrage. “You wanna go back?”

  The Bravos snort.

  “Man. Fuckin’ harsh. That just ain’t right.” Hector casts about. “Ain’t they supposed to be making a movie about you?”

  Uh huh.

  “And you still gotta go back? Fuck, so what happens if you, uh, you, uh—”

  “Get smoked?” Billy offers.

  Hector turns away, stricken.

  “No worries, homes,” Mango says, “that’s a totally different movie.” The Bravos laugh, and Hector smiles bashfully, grateful to be absolved for raising the spectre of their deaths. The joint makes another circuit. The light in their little space takes on a pearly, numinous glow. The war is out there somewhere but Billy can’t feel it, like his sole experience with morphine when he could not feel pain. At one point he even tried as an experiment, stared at his cut-up arms and legs thinking hurt, but the notion simply gassed into thin air. That’s how the war feels now, it is at most a presence or pressure on his mind, awareness without content, an experiential doughnut hole. When he tunes back into the conversation, Hector is asking if they’re going to meet Destiny’s Child, the headliner for today’s halftime extravaganza and currently number one on the national wet-dream charts.

  “They ain’t said nothing about that.” Mango’s English is getting looser, leaning toward the street. Not that he’s slurring, just taking the corners wide. “Ain’t told us much of anything, like we’re supposed to be in the halftime show? They said we’re gonna meet the cheerleaders.”