Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

by Ben Fountain

  The group shivers with a titillatory chill. Only Margaret is unmoved. She stands there watching Billy with those huge blue eyes that won’t cut him any slack.

  “I’m sure I was,” he answers. “I know I was. But it happened so fast I didn’t have time to think. I just did what my training told me to do, like anybody else in the squad would do. I just happened to be the guy in position.” He assumes he’s done, but they’re quiet, still primed for the payoff, so he has to think of something else. “I guess it’s like my sergeant says, as long as you’ve got plenty of ammo, you’ll probably be okay.”

  This does it; they throw back their heads and roar. In a way it’s so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they’re happy, they love him, everybody gets along. Sometimes he has to remind himself there’s no dishonor in it. He hasn’t told any lies, he doesn’t exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied.

  New people join their group, others leave in a vigorous round robin of socializing. Billy is constantly shaking hands and forgetting people’s names. Major Mac and Mr. Jones are talking near the cold buffet; Mr. Jones seems not to realize that the major couldn’t hear a tank go by. Beyond them is the high-powered group of Albert, Dime, Mr. and Mrs. Norm, and several of what seem to be the gathering’s heaviest hitters. Albert is laughing, quite at his ease, and that’s as it should be, Billy reflects. Albert swims with the Hollywood sharks, he can handle this Dallas crowd standing on his head, but it’s Dime who Billy focuses on now, the way he listens, holds himself, slips in a word here and there. “Watch him,” Shroom used to tell Billy. “Watch him and learn. Davey’s spooky. He knows how to see in the dark.” According to Shroom this was Dime’s particular gift, this intuiting ray he brought to the war, but the only way he could develop it was by testing himself, always putting it out there. The insurgents couldn’t kill large numbers of Americans as long as the troops stayed on their bases; the flip side was, the only way the Americans could track down and kill insurgents was by leaving their bases, which made the whole business of patrols and checkpoints and house-to-house searches an exercise in the using up of nerve. But it was a form of war Dime forced them to accept. Bravo dismounted more than any squad in the platoon, in the entire battalion, probably. They could be anywhere, and Dime would order them clear to walk a couple of klicks with the Humvees lagging, following at a crawl. “You won’t know shit sitting inside that damn box,” he’d say. They were gambles, these little forays, they could easily get you killed, but they were Dime’s way of banking knowledge, instinct, experience against the day when everything and everybody would be on the line.

  Not that the Bravos liked it. Plenty of days they hated Dime for putting them out on the street. It seemed so pointless, the risk far out of proportion to the possible benefit, but if any Bravo bitched Shroom told him to shut up and do his job. So out they’d go, tromping through markets, humping down side streets, randomly walking into houses to find what they might find. One such day they’re on the street and a small gang of boys approaches, they’re fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, aspiring hustlers with fuzzy mustaches and not much better than rags for clothes. “Mister,” they cry, swaggering up to Bravo, “give me my pocket! Give me my pocket!”

  “What the fuck,” Dime says, staring at them.

  “I think they want money,” Shroom says, turning to Scottie for confirmation. Scottie was Bravo’s interpreter at the time, so named for his resemblance to the former Chicago Bulls star Scottie Pippen. Scottie speaks to the boys.

  “Yes, they want money. They say they are hungry, they are asking you to give them money.”

  “ ‘Give me my pocket’?” Dime laughs.

  “Yes! Yes! Mister! Give me my pocket!”

  “No, no, no, that’s fucked, that’s not the way you say it. Tell them I’ll teach them how to say it, but we aren’t giving them any money.”

  Scottie explains. Yes! the boys cry. Yes! Okay yes!

  So there in the street Dime conducts a little English lesson. “Give me money.” Repeat. Give me money. “Give me five dollars.” Give me five dollars. “Give me five dollars, bitch!” Give me five dollars beech! “Thank you!!” Thank you!! “Have a nice day!!!” Haf a naice day!!! The boys are laughing. Dime is laughing. The rest of the Bravos are laughing too, laughing as they scan rooflines and doorways with their weapons raised.

  “Thank you!” the boys cry when the lesson is done, and each boy ceremoniously shakes Dime’s hand. “Thank you! Mister! Thank you! Give me money!” And so they’re bellowing as they walk down the street, Give me money! Give me five dollars! Give me five dollars beech!

  “Wow,” Shroom says in hushed, trembling tones of New Age feelingness. “Dave, that was just beautiful, man. That was a beautiful thing you did.”

  Dime snorts, then lards up his voice with smarm. “Well, you know what they say. Give a man a fish, he eats for today. But teach a man to fish—”

  “—and he eats for a lifetime,” Shroom concludes.

  Over time Billy came to see this kind of humor as another facet of his education in the realms of global bullshit. Abruptly he feels Shroom’s loss like an awl in the gut, meanwhile noting on a parallel mental track how grief comes and goes, fattens and thins like the moon freestyling across foreign skies.

  “I don’t like it,” March Hawey is telling the group. “I think it’s bad psychologically and bad strategically. It’s fine to keep the American public aware and all, but you keep harping on the terror thing twenty-four/seven, after a while you get a negative feedback loop going.”

  “But March,” a woman objects, “they want to kill us!”

  “Sure they do!” March cuts Billy an amused look. “The world’s a dangerous place, nothing new in that. But you keep putting it in the public’s face, terrR, terrR, terrR, that’s bad for morale, bad for the markets, bad for anybody.”

  “Except Cheney,” someone quips, and the group titters.

  “Right,” March allows with a slow smile. “Ol’ Dick’s got his own way of doing things. He and I’ve been friends a long time, but I have to say, we haven’t talked in a while.”

  A Jack and Coke arrives for Billy. How did they know? Somehow they knew. He nods and sips his drink and makes agreeable-sounding noises as people express their thoughts and feelings about the war. Here at home everyone is so sure about the war. They talk in certainties, imperatives, absolutes, views that seem quite reasonable in the context. A kind of abyss separates the war over here from the war over there, and the trick, as Billy perceives it, is not to stumble when jumping from one to the other.

  “I’ll say this for nina leven,” a man confides to him, “it shut the feminists up.”

  “Ah.” Billy consults his drink. The feminists?

  “You bet,” the man says. “They aren’t so interested in being ‘liberated’ now that we’re under attack. There’s certain things a man can do that a woman just can’t. Combat, for one. A lot of life boils down to physical strength.”

  “Maybe we need a war now and then to get our priorities straight,” a second man says.

  Clusters of subconversations orbit the main conversation, which is always about the war. Billy meets the man who owns—Coolcrete? Pavestone? One of those backyard leisure surfaces. The man tells Billy that the recent uptick in insurgent attacks is a sign that the tide is turning our way. “It shows they’re desperate,” he says. “We’re hitting them where it hurts.” “Could be,” Billy concedes as an oak log of an arm falls across his shoulders, and their host, Norm himself, is snugging up to him. The group falls silent. Anticipation beams from every smiling face.

  “Specialist Lynn.”

  “Sir.”

  “Is everything satisfactory?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s all good.”

  People laugh as if he’s said something terribly witty. Norm squeezes the back of his neck, gives his head a couple of shakes. “What an honor,” he tells the group, “what
a privilege, having these young heroes with us today.” Billy catches a yeasty whiff of bourbon on Norm’s breath. “They are the pride and joy of our nation, and this one”—he gives Billy another couple of brain-rattling shakes—“this young man, well, let me put it this way. Is anybody surprised that a Texan led the charge at the Al-Ansakar Canal?”

  The group answers with a sharp burst of applause. Everyone in the vicinity turns and joins in. Billy is helpless, Norm has him pinned like a specimen to a board and there is nothing to do but stand there and smile like a shit-eater caught in the act. “Look, he’s blushing!” a woman cries, and it must be true, Billy can feel the heat pulsing off his face. Thus misery is taken for wholesome modesty.

  “I think we’ve got another Audie Murphy on our hands,” March says, grinning at Billy. “Now there was a great American hero. And a Texan.”

  “He’s a hero,” Norm agrees, hugging Billy close. “That’s why he wears the Silver Star. And I have it on good authority he was recommended for the Medal of Honor, but some desk jockey at the Pentagon shot it down.”

  A zithering hum of disapproval roils the crowd. Billy hopes none of the Bravos is watching, but there is Dime placidly taking it all in, and Albert is smiling, no, smirking when he catches Billy’s eye, and in this way Billy is given to understand the source of the leak. As soon as he can Billy excuses himself and heads for the nearest bar. Coke, he says. Just a plain regular Coke. After a minute Dime is squeezing in next to him.

  “Billy, don’t be flaking.”

  Billy lifts his chin. “That was bullshit.”

  “What was bullshit?” They speak in barely audible murmurs.

  “That. The Medal of Honor shit.”

  “Oh, that. Billy, chill. You’re a certified star.”

  “Albert—”

  “Albert knows what he’s doing.”

  “How the fuck did he even know?”

  “ ’Cause I told him, dipshit. Any booze in that drink?”

  “No.”

  “Good, I want you halfway sober for halftime. And no they haven’t told me what we’re supposed to do.”

  Billy hunches over his drink. “It’s all bullshit.”

  “You’re being awfully touchy, Billy Sue.”

  “Why the fuck did you tell him?”

  Dime doesn’t even bother answering that. They stay turtled up to the bar. The moment they turn away people will start talking to them.

  “You know that old man you were talking to?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “March Hawey.”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Mr. Swift Boat himself. Dude’s famous.”

  Billy stares straight ahead. He won’t give Dime the satisfaction of knowing he didn’t know.

  “Richer than God, and talk about tied in. So watch yourself around him.”

  “Why should I watch myself?”

  “Because in case you haven’t noticed this is a highly partisan country we live in, Billy. Those guys are smart, they know who the enemy is. They aren’t fooled by a couple of bullshit war medals.”

  Billy glances at his chest, considering his medals in this possibly sinister light.

  “I’m not the enemy.”

  “Oh hooooo, you don’t think? They decide, not you. They’re the deciders when it comes to who’s a real American, dude.”

  Billy takes a sip of his Coke. “I’m not planning on running for president, Sergeant.”

  Dime nods, studies the skyline of liquor bottles behind the bar. “You wanna know what my old granddaddy told me once, Billy?”

  “What.”

  “He said, Son, you want to live a good life, do these three things. Number one, make a lot of money. Number two, pay your taxes. And number three, stay out of politics.”

  With that Dime picks up his drink and leaves. Billy tries to enjoy a quiet moment by himself, but his headache comes thundering into the void. He wonders if it’s a migraine—how would he know? A migraine or something worse, something tragic and fatal, a brain tumor, cancer, a massive stroke. Poor fella. So young. Died a virgin. Tragic. In any case the headache is practically bad family history by now, a terrible pain and burden but who would you be without it? Cheers and applause suddenly roll through the suite, and too late he remembers not to turn from the bar.

  “They just showed you on the Jumbotron!” a woman exclaims, and for a second Billy despairs—they showed him huckled up to the bar?—then realizes it was a repeat of the American Heroes graphic.

  “I think it’s wonderful yall are being honored today,” the woman enthuses.

  “Thank you,” says Billy.

  “It must be so exciting, traveling around the country!”

  “And all at taxpayer expense,” a man—her husband?—adds. He chuckles, which means it’s a joke. Ha ha.

  “It’s nice,” Billy says. “It’s been an experience. We’ve met a lot of nice people.”

  “What stands out in your mind the most?” the woman asks. She is a bright-eyed, professionally peppy blonde of indeterminate age, blessed with dramatic cheekbones and a smile like silver lamé. Billy would guess she’s a sales whiz of some sort, a high-powered realtress or Mary Kay honcho.

  “Well, all the airports for sure,” he says. This gets a laugh from the group, seven or eight people have gathered now. And all the malls, he could add, and the civic centers and hotel rooms and auditoriums and banquet halls that are so much alike across the breadth of the land, a soul-squashing homogeneity designed more for economy and ease of maintenance than anything so various as human sensibilities.

  “I really liked Denver,” he goes on, “with all the mountains and everything? That was a beautiful place. I wouldn’t mind going back there and spending some time someday.”

  “Weren’t you in Washington?” the realtress prods.

  “Oh, yeah. Washington was awesome, definitely.”

  “Isn’t the White House so majestic?”

  “It is, with all the history and everything. And I guess I never thought about people living there? I know, like why do they call it the White House, duh. But it was amazing, more like you’d expect a really elegant mansion to be.”

  The realtress agrees; she and “Stan” have been guests of the Bushes several times and it is truly an awe-inspiring place. Was there a dinner? There wasn’t? That’s a shame because formal state dinners are really quite the production, what with all the pomp, the protocol, the mingling with royalty and heads of state. Maybe next time, Billy says. Then someone asks are we winning and that opens the floor for discussion about the war, and Billy gets passed around like everybody’s favorite bong. Why are they killing their own people? Why do they hate us? Why is it always seventy-two virgins? His brain switches to autopilot and his eye wanders. He spots Lodis over there, babbling about God knows what while his audience listens in polite horror. Then there is Crack hitting on someone’s teenage daughter and doing pretty well from the looks of it, and Sykes staring clench-jawed into empty space, and Albert yukking it up with Mr. and Mrs. Norm. It dawns on Billy that his headache might be purely psychological, the naked ape of his mind asserting itself like the gorilla in that Samsonite commercial.

  “ . . . it’s a code of honor that goes back to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, we don’t attack unless we’re attacked first. We aren’t barbarians. We didn’t attack on nina leven. Or at Pearl Harbor, for that matter.”

  “No, sir.” Billy reenters the world of conversation.

  “But when we are attacked, there’s hell to pay, am I right?”

  “I guess you could say that, yes sir.”

  “I mean, if someone shoots at you guys, say you’re on patrol and a sniper gets off a couple of rounds, what do you do?”

  “We hit him with everything we’ve got, sir.”

  The man smiles. “There you go.”

  Hey! Hey! Hey! People are shouting for silence, it is the summons for all persons to shut up and attend the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Everyone turns
to face the field. The sky has darkened to primer gray, a kind of dull celestial blister capping the stadium’s paper-lantern glow. The light pools and thickens at field level in a lime-tinted aspic sheen. The singer and color guard step out from the home sideline with its legions of players, coaches, refs, medias, and VIPs, along with a circus train’s worth of equipage. They could be an ancient army laying siege somewhere. The color guard presents the flag. The Bravos scattered about the suite snap to attention.

  Ohhh-oh, ohhh-oh, ohhh-oh, an echo banging around the bruised hollows of your brain, ohhh-oh as if you’re standing at the mouth of a cave calling tentatively, hopefully into the dark. Ohhh-oh, anybody there? Ohhh-oh, ohhh-oh, ohhh-oh. That gulpy reggae drop-beat, ohhh-oh, Pavlovian cue for bursting of dopamine bombs and xylophone trills up and down your spine. Then the trapdoor springs beneath your feet

  followed by the save, the safety net bottoming out and that wheee of a launch into the higher realms

  Thence to the ritual torturing of a difficult song. The singer is a young white woman, raven haired, slight of frame, a C&W warbler with a classic high-plains heartbreak twang. Billy heard somewhere that she is the latest American Idol, and like all the American Idols pint-sized or not she is blessed with a huge barrel vault of a mouth.

  WHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTT

  so

  PRRRRRROOOOUUUUUDDDDLLLLLYYYYY

  Billy holds his salute. He makes it a point to think about Shroom and Lake and the hot red blur of that terrible day, but he’s also, because he’s young and still hopeful for his life, scanning the sideline far below for Faison. He systematically ticks his gaze from one cheerleader to the next, no, no, no, no, a dozen no’s then yes and his head spins like a car on ice, an airy whoosh into sideways acceleration with all the nausea, the panic, the full butthole pucker, it is a roller-coaster ride to oblivion. Then his eyes snap back to their sockets and aim straight for Faison, sturdy little Koosh ball of female plenitude with that slash of amber hair like a lava spill, her right-hand pom-pom held to her heart. She is singing, even from here he can see her mouth moving, and so powerful is the bond between them that he leans several inches in her direction. Dude, she was into you. The singing triggers a soft detonation at his core, molten parts of him are flying everywhere and his ears ring to the tune of blast harmonics that only he can hear, but what is “The Star-Spangled Banner” if not a love song?