by Ben Fountain
“The food was pretty good,” says Candace, “the chow. We only had to eat MREs a couple of times.”
“A lot of carbs,” adds Lexis.
“I swear, ever since we got back? I cry whenever I hear the national anthem,” Alicia admits.
Billy was hoping to meet his strawberry-blond cheerleader but knows he should be grateful for what he has right here, three beautiful and voluptuous Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. They are so sweet, so utterly gorgeous. They smell so good. They cry out and give him high-fives on discovering he’s a Texan just like them. Their wonderful breasts keep noodging up against his arms, setting off sensory bells and whistles like a run of bonus points in a video game. Whenever any of the medias approach, the girls hook their thumbs into their hot pants and stand there cock-hipped and saucy as if daring the press to give their Billy a hard time. And the medias, the men, they cannot deal straightforwardly but throw out smirks, sidelong looks, ironical tones of voice. Yeah, yeah, we see you, hoss, they as much as say to Billy. Rock star and everything, ain’t you the shit. Viewing himself through the medias’ eyes, Billy understands how close the cheerleaders come to rendering him absurd, the pimp excess of not just one or two but three beautiful girls. He’s fully aware it’s all fake, and surely they know he knows, so is this put-on scorn their way of manning up to him?
He begins to resent the situation. The reporters waft a few pro forma questions his way. Did he play sports in high school? Is he a Cowboys fan? What does it mean to be home for Thanksgiving this year?
“Well, technically,” Billy points out, “I’m not at home. I’m here.”
They don’t even have to take notes, just hoover up his words with sleek little recording gadgets that look like protein bars. Merely by standing there they manage to be incredibly annoying, a middle-aged bunch of mostly big-assed white guys dressed in boring-as-hell business casual, such a sad-fuck sampling of civilian bio-matter that for a moment Billy is actually glad for the war, hell yes, so much better to be out there shooting guns and blowing shit up than shuffling around like scenery on a bad sitcom. God knows the war sucks, but he sees no great appeal in these tepid peacetime lives.
Through the crowd he spots his cheerleader, who’s been assigned—gah!—to Sykes. The proceedings are definitely getting on his nerves. She catches him looking and sends back a seemingly warm and genuine smile, then tips her head in concern or puzzlement. His abs contract as if from a body blow.
When the medias finally leave he turns to Lexis and asks, “Do you have to be single to be a cheerleader?”
She gives a curt laugh; a look passes among the cheerleaders. Oh Christ, they think he’s hitting on them.
“Well, no,” she says, very crisp and businesslike, “you don’t, and we’ve always got some married girls on the squad. Me and Candace and Al, we aren’t married, but we’ve all got steady boyfriends.”
Billy’s head is bobbing in manic agreeableness, uh huh, uh huh, of course you do! “I was just, you know, um, curious.”
The girls exchange another look. Sure you were. He is trying to figure out how to nicely say it’s not you particular three I’m interested in, but before this formulation is revealed to him he’s summoned by Josh. Showtime. The medias want a photo op, Norm and the Bravos together. A space is cleared in front of the stage, chairs pushed back, bodies herded. One of Norm’s small grandsons darts past playing tag with the cheerleaders, the sturdy little stub of his erect penis straining against his pants. As everyone takes their places a reporter asks Norm about his plans for a possible new stadium. An oh-ho sort of razzing rises from the medias.
“Well, obviously we’re playing in an aging facility,” Norm answers. “But Texas Stadium has been a wonderful home for the Cowboys. I don’t see that changing any time soon.”
“But,” the reporter prompts, drawing laughs. Norm smiles. He’s happy to play the straight man in this routine.
“But for the long-term health of the organization, I think it’s something we’ll have to look at.”
“Some of the Irving city council think you already are. They’re saying that’s why you cut the stadium maintenance budget by seventeen percent.”
“No, not at all. We just did our review in the normal course of business and found a few places where some fat could be trimmed. We have every intention of maintaining Texas Stadium as a first-class facility.”
“Any chance you’ll move the team back to Dallas?”
Norm merely smiles for the cameras, which click away like parakeets cracking seeds. A few of the medias keep on about the stadium, but Norm ignores them. Billy begins to get a sense of the dynamic here, a power equation along the lines of the CEO of a giant corporation vis-à-vis the urinal puck he so thoughtfully studies as it’s drenched with his mighty personal stream. It is Norm’s job to maximize the value of the Cowboys brand, and it is the job of the medias to soak up every drop, dab, and dribble of PR he sends their way. As sentient human beings endowed with reason and free will, they naturally resent such treatment; perhaps this explains their sourpuss attitude, the karmic dampness that breathes off them like the towel hamper at a gym. Tomorrow he’ll read the newspaper and wonder why this, too, isn’t part of the story: that the press, however grudgingly, gathered as instructed to record in its stenographic capacity Norm’s presentation of Bravo Squad, a blatantly formulaic marketing event that enlightened no one, revealed nothing, and served no tangible purpose other than to big-up awareness of the Cowboys brand.
The bullshit part of it, isn’t that part of the story too? But not a word, not a murmur, not a peep from the press about how thoroughly they’ve been used, and no hint of their personal feelings toward Norm, which, as Billy infers from the body language, consist in roughly equal measure of resentment and fear. If he so wished, Norm could probably get any one of them fired. Could probably get them killed, if he wished. Not that he would. Probably. Billy spots Mr. Jones nearby, discussing the line with several other suits. Cowboys by four? ’Boys by three? They chuckle like men comparing the talents of a carnally shared woman, and Billy would like to go over there and beat their faces in. He doesn’t know why he’s so offended, but he is, maybe it’s Mr. Jones’s gun that sets him off, something about the presumption of it, the ignorance, the sheer fucking ego of carrying around an instrument of deadly force. Like you know? You wanna see what deadly force can do? Bravo can show you, Bravo does deadly like you wouldn’t believe, the kind that will break your mind and make you wish you’d never spilled out of your mother’s crack.
When the photo op is done Billy decides he needs a moment. He takes up position with his back to the wall, just to the left of the stage where the arc of the backdrop as it curves inward shields him from much of the room. He stands at parade rest and works on smoothing out his breathing. A couple of medias see him and here they come. Well fuck. What the hell. Billy sucks it up.
“Hey.”
“Hello.”
“What up.”
They introduce themselves. Billy gave up trying to remember names long ago. They talk a little while for the recording gadgets, then one of them asks has Billy considered writing a book about his experiences in Iraq. Billy laughs and gives him a Dude! sort of look.
“A lot of soldiers are doing it,” the man tells him, “there’s a market for that right now. It’d be a way to get your story out there and make some money. Paul and me could help you with that, we’ve ghostwritten a couple of books. We’d be interested in working with you on something like that.”
Billy shuffles his feet. “I never saw myself ever trying to write a book. I hardly even ever read, till I joined the Army and a buddy started giving me books.”
What, the medias want to know.
“Well, okay. You really wanna know? The Hobbit. Kerouac, On the Road. This book Flashman at the Charge, which was hilarious. Why don’t they tell you about these books in school? Like maybe then they’d get people to actually read. Let’s see, the Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. Fe
ar and Loathing in Las Vegas. Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle. Gorky Park and another one with that same guy, the Russian dude.” All books given to him by Shroom.
“What did you think of the Thompson books?”
“They made me wanna get high,” Billy says, and laughs so they’ll know it’s a joke. “No, seriously, I think you’d have to say the man’s a total lunatic, but in a way it makes sense, like it’s a normal response to the situations he puts himself in. Though why a person would do a lot of the shi— stuff he does . . . I bet he’d have some interesting things to say about Iraq, like if he went, if he could see it the way the soldiers see it. I’m not saying I endorse his lifestyle or anything. I just like the way he writes.”
“Would you say there’s much drug use among the soldiers over there?”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I’m only nineteen. I can’t even drink beer!”
“You can vote and die for your country, but you can’t walk into a bar and buy a beer.”
“I guess that’s one way to put it.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Billy takes a moment to reflect. “It’s probably for the best.”
Again the medias raise the idea of writing a book. Billy becomes aware of a radiant heat source on his right, and glancing over he sees it’s her standing patiently at his side. His pulse takes off at gazelle speed, oh God oh God oh God oh fuck fuck fuck fuck, meanwhile the medias natter on about markets, contracts, agents, publishers, and God knows what. He gives them his e-mail address just so they’ll leave him alone, and when at last they do he turns to her. She regards him steadily, with an air of frank expectation. Somehow he has the poise to look her up and down, not a leering perv look but more like that of a childhood friend encountering the splendid grown-up version of the knock-kneed, noodle-armed, grass-flecked little girl he used to chase around the playground in first grade.
“So you’re gonna write a book?”
“No,” he gruffs, and they both laugh. Suddenly he’s barely nervous at all. “Don’t you get cold out there, cheering in that rig?”
“We move around so much it’s almost never a problem, though I’m tellin’ you, last week in Green Bay I thought I was gonna freeze my you-know-what off. We do have coats for really cold weather, but we hardly ever wear them out on the field. I’m”—sounds like pheasant? She shifts her pom-poms and holds out her hand.
“Say again?”
She laughs. “Faison. F-a-i-s-o-n. I know who you are, Billy Lynn from Stovall. My grandmother was Miss Stovall 1937, how about that?” She laughs easily, a husky trilling from deep in her chest. “Everybody said she had a shot at winning Miss Texas that year. A bunch of local business guys got together and financed her wardrobe, voice lessons, all her travel expenses, they really wanted it for the town. Back then Stovall was sort of a big deal, with all the oil they were pulling out of the ground.”
“So how’d she do?”
Faison shakes her head. “Second runner-up. Everybody said she should’ve won, but the fix was in. You know how those pageant deals work.”
And with his vast experience in beauty pageants, Billy eagerly nods. For the moment people are leaving them alone.
“Not much you could call a big deal about Stovall these days.”
“That’s what I hear. Haven’t been since I was a kid, but when I saw one of the Bravos was from Stovall, I was like, Hey, Stovall! I felt like I kind of knew you in a way, I mean, Stovall, come on, out of all the places a person could be from? It just seemed funny.”
She grew up in Flower Mound, she tells him, and works part-time as a law firm receptionist while paying her own way through UNT, a mere six credits to go before she earns her degree in broadcast journalism. He guesses she’s twenty-two, twenty-three, a compact, curvy package with a pert, inquiring nose, green eyes strewn with flecks of amber and gold, and the kind of cleavage that makes men weep. At the moment she’s telling him how much his comments at the press conference meant to her, but he barely hears, so absorbed is he in the beautiful shapes her mouth makes as it forms the words
“You were so incredibly eloquent up there.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“No, yeah, you were! You put it right out there and that’s strong, a lot of people can’t talk about those kinds of things. I mean, like, death, your friend’s death? And you were right there with him? It can’t be easy talking to a room full of strangers about that.”
Billy inclines his head. “It is sort of weird. Being honored for the worst day of your life.”
“I can’t imagine! A lot of people would just shut down.”
“So what’s it like being a cheerleader?”
“Oh, great! A lot of work but I love it, it’s a lot more work than people realize. They see us on TV and think that’s all there is to it, just dressing out for the games and dancing and having fun, but that’s really just a very small fraction of what we do.”
“Really,” he says encouragingly. He feels light inside, refreshed, a physical state of hopefulness. Talking to this beautiful girl makes him realize just how precious his unremarkable life is to him.
“Yeah, community service is really the main part of our job. We do lots of hospitals, lots of stuff with underprivileged kids, appearances at fund-raisers and stuff like that. Like right now that it’s the holidays? We’re doing four or five service events per week, then practice and games on top of that. But I’m not complaining. I’m grateful for every minute of it.”
“Did you do the USO tour last spring?”
“Oh my God NO and I SO would’ve gone but I only made the squad this summer. Listen, I’m DYING to do a trip like that, no way they’re gonna keep me off that plane next time it happens. The girls who did it? They came back so enriched and that’s the thing about service, people say, ‘Oh, you’re so good to be giving so much of yourselves,’ but really it’s the other way around, we get so much back. To me that’s been the most satisfying thing about being a cheerleader, serving others. The spiritual aspect of it. Like it’s another stage in the journey, the quest.” She pauses; her eyes hold Billy’s for a long, searching moment, and just before she speaks he knows what’s coming.
“Billy, are you a Christian?”
He coughs into his fist, looks away. The confusion is genuine, but he rarely goes to the trouble of showing it.
“I’m searching,” he says finally, dipping into his repertoire of Christian buzz words, which, thanks to growing up in small-town Texas, is extensive.
“Do you pray?” She’s become softer in her manner, more solicitous.
“Sometimes. Not as much as I should, I guess. But some of the stuff we saw in Iraq, the little kids especially . . . Praying doesn’t come so easy after that.”
So if he’s laying it on a little thick, so what. His sensors haven’t picked up a false word yet.
“You’ve been tested in so many ways, I know. But a lot of the time that’s how it works, life gets so dark until we think all the light’s gone out of us. But it’s there, it’s always there. If we just open the door a crack the light comes pouring in.” She smiles and ducks her head, emits a shy chuckle. “You know how we kept looking at each other during the press conference? And I was thinking to myself, Now, why out of all the people here does he keep looking at me and I keep looking at him? I mean you’re cute and everything, you’ve got gorgeous eyes . . .” She giggles, regroups her seriousness. “But now I think I know why, I really do. I think God wanted us to meet today.”
Billy sighs, his eyelids flutter and his head tips back, meets the wall with an understated thunk. For all he knows every word she says is true.
“We’re all called upon to be His lights out in the world,” she continues, brushing a pom-pom against his arm, and thirty seconds into the story of how she came to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Billy quietly, slowly, firmly, reaches underneath her pom-pom and takes her hand. Because, why not. Because he’s moved. Because in two days he’s
back in the shit and what’s the worst that can happen compared to that? Faison doesn’t falter, in fact her rate of speech gathers speed. Her sternum lifts and swells; hothouse blooms of plum purple and fireball red dapple the regions of her face and neck. Her pupils dilate to twice their former size, and faint, shallow pantings swirl and ripple through her words as if she’s just trotted up five flights of stairs.
Billy is stepping backward, pulling her with him. One, two, three short steps and they are cached in the small dim space behind the backdrop’s flared edge, so that someone would have to stand flush with the wall in order to spy them out. Billy pivots, Faison’s back snugs up against the wall, and now she isn’t talking anymore. Her face is puffy, slack, a new thickness has filled out her cheeks and lips, the suddenly heavy swag of her free-swinging jaw. She could be falling asleep, she’s that yielding, and leaning toward her Billy knows that six weeks ago he wouldn’t have conceived of such a move, much less followed through. Three weeks ago, same, three days, check, so evidently something has happened to him. He keeps his eyes open the whole way in, and Faison’s eyes gradually merge into a single brilliant ball like a picture of Earth as seen from outer space. The first kiss feels like a pressure release, like bursting a bubble with a touch of the lips. He pulls back and discovers pleasure in the restraint. They stare at each other from a couple of inches’ distance. She seems stoned, out of it, then lifts her face and they kiss again. He wants to tell her how amazing her lips are, softer than anything he’s ever touched. Did you know he wants to say, but the tool is otherwise engaged as they linger, mouths drunk on soft-tissue probings, then it’s like a starting gun has fired because they’re going at each other like a couple of sophomores under the bleachers, a high-energy bout of gymnastical making out that seems to have as its goal the cramming, the actual forcing of their entire bodies down each other’s throat.
“This is crazy,” she whispers when they come up for air. “I could get kicked off the squad for this.” With that they fall on each other again, and for as long as it lasts Billy wants nothing more.
