Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

by Ben Fountain

  If Billy thinks about this for more than a couple of seconds a synthesized hum starts up in his head like a tremendous swell of organ music, not the sickly calf bleatings they played at Shroom’s funeral but a thunderous massing of mighty chords, the subsurface rumble of a tidal wave as it rolls unseen through the ocean depths. Spooky as all shit, not that he fights it; the big sound might be God banging around his head or some elaborately coded form of essential truth, or maybe both, or maybe they’re one and the same thing, so put that in your fucking movie, if you can. Were you good friends? asked the reporter from the Ardmore Daily Star. “Yes,” Billy said, “we were good friends.” Do you think about him a lot? “Yes,” Billy said, “I think about him a lot.” Like, every day. Every hour. No, every couple of minutes. About once every ten seconds, actually. No, it’s more like an imprint on his retina that’s always there, Shroom alive and alert, then dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, his face eternally flipping back and forth. He saw the beebs dragging Shroom into the high grass and thought Oh fuck or maybe just Fuck, that was the extent of Billy’s inner reflections as he scrambled off his belly and made his run. Weirdest thing, though, he retains this sense as he got to his feet of knowing exactly how it was going to turn out, the visualization so intense that it shook loose a kind of double consciousness that lingers to this day. His memory of the battle is mostly a hot red blur, but the premonitory memory is sharp and clear. He wonders if all soldiers who do these radical things get a brief sightline into a very specific future, this telescopic piercing of time and space that instills the motivation to do what they do. The ones who live, maybe. Maybe they all think they see, but the ones who don’t make it, they were wrong. Only the ones who survive are allowed to feel clairvoyant and canny, though it occurs to him now that Shroom, too, saw with equal clarity, just with the opposite result.

  Hooah, Shroom. It feels like too many things to have to think about at once, movie deals and interviews and what it means to wear a medal plus that hard-core thing underneath it all, the primal and ultimately unfathomable facts of their engagement on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal. Your mind is not calm. You aren’t sick but you aren’t exactly well. There’s an airy sense of dangling or dangerous incompletion, as if your life has gotten ahead of itself and you need some time to let it back and fill. This feels right, this grasping of the time problem, here is the possible square one on which to build except Josh gives the word, Lunch!, and they rise. Little rockslides of applause tumble across the stands, and Sykes, the butthead, waves to the crowd like it’s all for him. Josh leads them bravely onto the stairs and it’s a long slow slog to the top, trudging upward in column like those poor doomed fucks near the end of Titanic striving against the horrible voids of sea and sky. If you relax even for a second, it will take you, thus a strategy is revealed: Don’t relax. Once they reach the concourse Billy feels better. Josh leads them up a spiral ramp where the wind shears into tight coiling eddies, tossing trash and dust around in little tantrums. A kind of coagulatory effect attends Bravo’s route as people stop, shout out, gape, or grin according to their politics and personality type, and Bravo blows through it all, polite and relentless, an implacable flying wedge of forward motion until the crew of a Spanish-language radio station grabs Mango for an interview, and all that good clean energy goes to hell. People gather. The air turns moist with desire. They want words. They want contact. They want pictures and autographs. Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want. With his back to the railing Billy finds himself engaged by a prosperous-looking couple from Abilene who have their grown son and daughter-in-law in tow. The young people seem embarrassed by their elders’ enthusiasm, not that the old folks give a damn. “I couldn’t stop watching!” the woman exclaims to Billy. “It was just like nina leven, I couldn’t stop watching those planes crash into the towers, I just couldn’t, Bob had to drag me away.” Husband Bob, a tall, stooped gent with mild blue eyes, nods with the calm of a man who’s learned how much slack to give a live-wire wife. “Same with yall, when Fox News started showing that video I just sat right down and didn’t move for hours. I was just so proud, just so”—she flounders in the swamps of self-expression—“proud,” she repeats, “it was like, thank God, justice is finally being done.”

  “It was like a movie,” chimes her daughter-in-law, getting into the spirit.

  “It was. I had to keep telling myself this is real, these are real American soldiers fighting for our freedom, this is not a movie. Oh God I was just so happy that day, I was relieved more than anything, like we were finally paying them back for nina leven. Now”—she pauses for a much-needed breath—“which one are you?”

  Billy politely introduces himself and leaves it at that, and the woman, as if sensing the delicacy of the question, doesn’t press. Instead, she and her daughter-in-law embark on a spoken-word duet of patriotic sentiments, they are 100 percent supporting of Bush the war the troops because defending szszszsz among nations szszszsz owl-kay-duzz szszszsz szszszsz szszszsz, the lady keeps leaning into Billy and tapping his arm, which induces a low-grade somatic trance, thus he’s feeling comfortably numb when the lid of his skull retracts and his brain floats free into the freezing air

  No matter their age or station in life, Billy can’t help but regard his fellow Americans as children. They are bold and proud and certain in the way of clever children blessed with too much self-esteem, and no amount of lecturing will enlighten them as to the state of pure sin toward which war inclines. He pities them, scorns them, loves them, hates them, these children. These boys and girls. These toddlers, these infants. Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.

  “Dude, that lady back there,” Crack says when they’re moving again, “the blonde with the little kids? When her husband was taking our picture she was totally grinding her ass up against my rod.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No lie! Like instant wood, dude, she was shoving her ass right in there. Five more seconds and I woulda come, I shit you not.”

  “He’s lying,” Mango says.

  “Swear to God! Then I’m like, hey, give me your e-mail, let’s stay in touch while I’m back in Iraq, and it’s like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Bitch.”

  Mango demurs, but Billy thinks it’s probably true—women will do some crazy shit around a uniform. He drops back a couple of paces and checks his cell. Pastor Rick has sent him another Bible text—

  Know that the Lord is God!

  It is He that made us and we are His.

  The guy is relentless, he is a used-car salesman in sheep’s clothing. Billy deletes the text, wondering if it’s bad luck to dis a preacher, even a worthless one. “Aren’t you cold?” a passing woman asks, and Billy smiles and shakes his head, No, ma’am. Truly he’s not, though he doesn’t begrudge the fans their sumptuous fur coats, their puffy parkas, their bear-paw mittens and ninja masks. A lot of men are wearing fur, now there’s fashion for you. Major Mac suddenly falls into step at his side.

  “Major McLaurin, sir!”

  The major gives him a dopy look. Billy remembers to raise his voice.

  “WE WERE WORRIED ABOUT YOU SIR! WE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE YOU’D GONE!”

  The major transitions to frown. “Look alive, soldier, I’ve been right here. Get those cobwebs out of your eyes.”

  Affirmative and copy that, in the major’s mind he’s been right here and for a grunt that’s all that matters, roger SIR! Billy becomes nervous and awkward, hyper as a setter pup, while the major strides along in brooding contemplation of his shoes. Try, fool, Billy tells himself. Like when’re you gonna get a better shot than this? He needs knowledge that Major Mac might have, knowledge and guidance having to do with death, grief, the fate of the soul, if nothing else he seeks the means for verbalizing such matters without shitting all over their very real power. When people ask does he pray, is he religious or specifically saved or Christian, Billy always says yes, partly because it makes t
hem happy and partly because he feels that’s pretty much the truth, though probably not in the way they’re thinking. What he’d like to say is that he’s lived it, if not the entire breadth and depth of the Christian faith then certainly the central thrust of it. The mystery, the awe, that huge sadness and grief. Oh my people. He felt Shroom’s soul leave his body at the moment of his death, a blinding whoom! like a high-voltage line blowing out, leaving Billy with all circuits fried and a lingering haze like he’d been whacked by a heavyweight who knows how to hit. A kind of concussion, is what it was. Sometimes he thinks his ears are ringing still.

  The soul is an actual, tangible thing, Billy knows this now. For two weeks he’s been traveling this great nation of ours in the good-faith belief that sooner or later he’ll meet someone who can explain his experience, or at least break it down and properly frame the issue. There was Pastor Rick, to whom he confided in a moment of weakness, but the pastor turned out to be an egotistical pain in the ass. Dime is too close to it, and anyway Billy needs more of the profile of the stable adult. For a while he thought Albert might be the one, a man of wide experience and impressive education who seems to know so much about so many things and can talk the sun down and up again, but lately Billy despairs. It’s not that Albert lacks compassion—though there is that cool way he looks at you sometimes, like you’re the next bite on his hamburger—but rather the irony with which he views all sides, including his own. Albert is wise to himself, as any man of the world must be, but it’s this ingrown worldliness that limits him in precisely the way that Billy needs him most.

  Which leaves Major Mac as the best available candidate, Major Mac the sphinx, the zombie, the rarely speaking and never-taking-a-piss wraith, the guy who seems about 60 percent there about 40 percent of the time. That Major Mac. Thus it’s in a state of extreme frustration that Billy accompanies the senior officer along the concourse. He wants to know what happened that day in Ramallah. Did the major lose men that day? Friends? Did he watch them die? Billy feels a terrible need to connect, heart to heart, man to man, warrior to warrior, he craves that rough and necessary wisdom and yet can barely manage small talk with officers, much less crack the code of the major’s vacancy to access something so personal and real. How is he supposed to break the ice? YO MAJOR, CHECK IT OUT, THEY GOT HEINEKENS ON TAP! He feels his chance slipping away as Josh diverts them down a side corridor to a restricted-access escalator. A pair of beefy, unconfident security men in coats and ties glance at the Bravos’ game credentials and wave them on. “Dude, stairway to heaven!” Sykes cries as the escalator rides them up, yukking like he’s the soul of wit. Standing one deferential step below the major, Billy decides it’s hopeless. He lacks the nerve and he lacks the bullshit, plus there’s the major’s disability and the corresponding sense that certain subjects should not be discussed at roadhouse volume. Death, grief, the fate of the soul, these beg congress in tones of sober thoughtfulness, you can’t scream back and forth about such matters and hope to get anywhere.

  So he says nothing, not that the major notices. They step off the escalator onto something called the “Blue Star Level,” and Josh leads them to an elevator marked RESTRICTED—STADIUM CLUB ONLY. He swipes a card through the little access gizmo and everyone boards. Two well-dressed couples join them for the ride up, they are old enough to be any Bravo’s parents but money shaves off a good ten years. No one acknowledges anyone else. The doors close, concentrating the women’s perfume, a shrill citral musk like lemon trees in heat. The elevator has just clunked into gear when necessity rumbles Billy’s bowels, precursing a monstrous anal belch. He clenches with all his might and hangs on. An almost imperceptible tremor runs through the Bravos; several more are stiffening, shifting their feet, opening and closing their fists. Oh God, please God, not here, not now. They grit their teeth and stare straight ahead. What is it about close confines that so reliably excites the fighting man’s lower GI tract?

  Dime speaks with the steel of a man born to lead. “Gentlemen.” He pauses. “Do not even think about it.”

  BY VIRTUE OF WHICH

  THE MANY BECOME THE ONE

  SADDLING UP TO THE sumptuous buffet, Sykes keeps calling it “brunch” like this makes him some big-stick metrosexual stud until Dime finally tells him to shut, this is lunch, yo, or Thanksgiving dinner if you want to get technical about it, and indeed they are faced with a postcard-perfect orgiastic feed, no less than sixty linear feet of traditional and nouveau holiday fare glistening like an ad in a Sunday magazine supplement. Billy palms a clean plate off the stack and thinks he might be sick. It’s just too much for his hangover, all the mounds, slabs, sheets, hummocks, and hillocks of edible matter resembling a complex system of defensive earthworks, and it’s that thing-ness, the sheer molecular density on display, that gives him the lurch. He stands there swaying for a moment—will he lose it?—then his stomach asserts the primal need and growls.

  “Load up, guys,” Dime tells them. “Then we’ll talk about how do the little people live.” With its establishment odors of gravy and furniture wax, this is clearly the game-day hangout for the country-club crowd. You pay ten bucks just to pass the door, then $40 plus tax and service for the meal—gratis for heroes, Josh says, to which Bravo answers troof—though the “club” isn’t much to look at, a rambling, low-ceilinged space with a bar at one end and at the other full-length windows overlooking the field. The light is a nerve-jangling palette of hards and softs, the rancid-butter mizzle of the overhead fixtures cut by the harsh silver glare from all those giant windows, a constant wrenching of visual tone and depth such that the patrons’ eyes never properly adjust. The carpet is coal-slurry gray, the furnishings a scuffed, faux-baronial mélange of burgundy vinyls and oxblood veneers reminiscent of a 1970s Holiday Inn. Clearly, all expense has been spared save for the bare minimum to keep a captive market from outright rebellion.

  Billy gets how shitty the place makes him feel, the quick sink of depression in his gut, but he thinks it’s just an allergic reaction to rich people. He clenched the moment he walked in and felt the money vibe. He wanted to back right out of there. He wanted to punch someone. Rich people make him nervous for no particular reason, they just do, and standing by the hostess station in his kudzu-green class A’s Billy felt about as belonging here as a wino pissing his pants. But—surprise! As Bravo stood there waiting to be seated, the Stadium Club patrons rose as one and achieved a stately round of applause. Several of the nearby millionaires stepped over to shake hands, while farther back in the room a group of patriots, drunk from the sound of it, offered up a woozy ballpark cheer. The manager himself, a slender, oleaginous fellow with the unctuous patter of an undertaker murmuring pickup lines in a bar, showed them to their table, and in a way this was worse, having all these high-powered people looking at you. Billy felt his stride going wonky, his arms starting to flail, but a quick glance at Dime settled him down. Shoulders square, eyes forward, head tipped six degrees as if dignity was a shot glass you balanced on your chin—he assumed the Dime tilt, and immediately everything clicked into place.

  Fake it till you make it, he reminds himself. This is how he’s survived Army life so far.

  Josh sees to it that they’re served and seated, then announces he has to leave them for a short while.

  “Dawg, you gotta eat,” A-bort says. “You’re getting skinnier just standing there.”

  Josh laughs. “I’ll be okay.”

  “When do we meet the cheerleaders?” Holliday wants to know.

  “Soon,” Josh answers over Crack, who’s saying the hell with that, bring on Destiny’s Child, he wants some quality “facial” time with Beyoncé.

  “They gonna give us some lap dances?” Day persists. Josh hesitates. “I’ll ask,” he says in perfect deadpan, and everybody haws. Josh. Jaaaaassssshhhhh. Jash is all right for a pussy boy. They are seated at a big circular table near the windows with an excellent view of the playing field, on which nothing much is happening at the moment. Dime allows them
one Heineken with lunch, one, he says, glancing at Major Mac, who nods. Billy has made sure to sit next to Dime and Albert, because whatever they say he means to hear it. He knows he doesn’t know enough. He doesn’t know anything, basically, at least nothing worth knowing, the measure of worth at this point in his life being knowledge that quiets the mind and calms the soul. So he makes it his business to sit next to Dime, and where Dime sits, that’s the head of the table. Albert is to Dime’s right, then A-bort, Day, Lodis, Crack, Sykes, Major Mac, Mango, and finally, rounding off the circle, Billy. So how about a couple of place settings for Shroom and Lake? This is his private mental ritual at the start of group meals that he does in lieu of prayers. Another ritual: Never cross a threshold with your left foot leading. And others: Fasten body armor from the bottom up, do not start sentences with the letter W, don’t masturbate within six hours of a mission. Yet he’d adhered to all such tics and talismans on the day of the canal so maybe it doesn’t matter a damn that they stayed at the W Hotel in Dallas last night, or that said hotel featured an upscale club called, how fucking weird, the Ghost Bar. So many omens, so many signs and portents to read. It’s the randomness that makes your head this way, living the Russian-roulette lifestyle every minute of the day. Mortars falling out of the sky, random. Rockets, lob bombs, IEDs, all random. Once on OP Billy was pulling night watch and felt a sick little pop just off the bridge of his nose, which was, he realized as he tumbled backward, the snap of a bullet breaking the sound barrier as it passed. Inches. Not even that. Fractions, atoms, and it was all this random, whether you stopped at the piss tube this minute or the next, or skipped seconds at chow, or were curled to the left in your bunk instead of the right, or where you lined up in column, that was a big one. At first they were hitting the lead Humvee, then they switched to number two, then it was a toss-up between two, three, and four, then they went back to one, and don’t even talk about the never-ending mindfuck debate as to your odds in any particular seat inside the vehicle, on any given day it could be anything, anywhere. “You can dodge an RPG,” he said to a reporter a couple of days ago. He hadn’t meant to reveal such a fraught and intimate fact, and felt cheap, as if he’d divulged a shameful family secret, but there it was, you can dodge an RPG, that damn crazy thing lamely fluttering at you, spitting and smoking like a cheap Mexican firework, tttttthhhhhhhpppppfffffftttt-FOOOM! What he’d meant to say, been trying to say, is that it’s not a lie, sometimes it really happens in slow-motion time, his ultimate point being just how strange and surreal your own life can be. Lately he thinks he could have tapped it as it flew by, sent it spinning off to nowhere like thumping a balloon instead of merely dodging as it sputtered past on its way to making such a christfuck mess back there. What’s happening now isn’t nearly as real as that, eating this meal, holding this fork, lifting this glass, the realest things in the world these days are the things in his head. Lake, for instance. “Lake,” that’s all it takes to get this bleak little movie going, a night shot of, say, the berm road in pale moonlight, crickets cheeping, dogs barking faintly in the distance, the slow suck and gurgle of the nearby canal. So there is the berm road on a quiet night, then a slow tracking shot that peels off the road and gradually keys on something in the high grass. A leg. Two legs. Lake’s. Peaceful. Those crickets, the soft moonlight, the purring canal. As if waking from a long sleep, the legs begin to stir. Tentative at first, they move with a childlike air of sweetly baffled innocence, but eventually they rise, shake themselves off, and set off in search of the rest of Lake. It could be a Disney movie about a couple of household pets mistakenly left behind, for they are as brave as that, as trusting and loyal, how can they know they’re screwed from the start for Lake is six thousand miles and an ocean away? Not that these are appropriate thoughts for mealtime, but once these little movies get going in your head—