by Ben Fountain
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”
Hawey turns to the game. It seems he’s lost his train of thought, but a moment later he’s coming back at Billy.
“Is it true they put you up for the Medal of Honor?”
“My CO did, yes sir.”
“What happened with that?”
“I don’t know. Higher tubed it, that’s all they told me.” Billy shrugs. Whatever bitterness he feels is mostly secondhand.
“You know, I was never tested that way. Was too young for World War Two, though I remember it well. Now, Korea . . .” Hawey clears his throat, lets the thought die a natural death. “You know things most of the rest of us will never know. The experiences you’ve had, you and your buddies . . .” Again he fails to finish the thought. Billy knows what they mean, these false starts, these snags of the psyche that stop a certain kind of Victory Tour conversation dead in its tracks. The old men struggle, and he can’t help them. There’s nothing he can say. He’s learned it’s best just to act like nothing’s going on.
“Well,” Hawey says with the forced good cheer of a man shaking off bad news, “I’m just proud to be able to spend this time with you. Nineteen years old, hell, I didn’t know my ace from my elbow when I was nineteen.” He wishes his grandsons were here so they could meet Billy and see what a fine role model etc., etc., the laudatory verbiage is all fine and good but Billy would rather be learning something useful and new, or how about a job offer, that would be nice. Come work for me! Let’s get rich! I’ll show you how it’s done! Hawey is still gassing about his grandsons when Faison flashes onto the Jumbotron, a Mount Rushmore–sized Faison leaning into the camera, smiling, tossing her head, shimmying those glorious pom-poms right in Billy’s face and he can’t help it, he sags in his seat and groans. In an instant Hawey sees what’s going on.
“Um-umph, now there’s a healthy girl.” He chuckles and taps Billy’s knee, acknowledging the things a young man needs to stay alive. “Goodness gracious, look out now. Norm’s got some show dogs, don’t he.”
BILLY AND MANGO
ARE OUT FOR A WALK
AT THE END OF the first quarter they are asked to leave the suite. The Mexican ambassador is coming with his sizable entourage and the place is already packed to code, so somebody has to go. Norm apologizes. He seems truly distressed. “You should see the security this guy rolls with,” he tells Bravo, shaking his head. “I guess it’s a drug war thing, but still. We’re not too shabby on security ourselves.”
“Plus you’ve got us,” Sykes points out, “sir.”
“That’s right! We do! We’ve got the finest fighting men in the world right here! Oh man, if there was any way you guys could stay . . .”
Bravo is cool with it. Bravo could give a shit, basically. After big good-byes and a final round of applause Josh takes them back to their seats. Out come the cell phones, the iPods, the spit cups and dip. It’s raining, sort of, the air pilled with a dangling, brokedick mizzle into which umbrellas are constantly being raised and lowered, up, down, up, down, like a leisurely game of whack-a-mole.
“Whoa, they scored.” Mango nods at the Jumbotron. Cowboys 7, Bears 0. “When did that happen?”
Billy shrugs. He’s not cold, which isn’t to say he would mind being someplace warm. He finds two new texts on his cell. Kathryn: Where u sitting? Pastor Rick: U r in our prayers 2day this special day of thanx. Lets talk b4 u leav overseas. Pastor Rick, the tanned, portly founder of one of the largest megachurches in America, did the invocation for Bravo’s rally at the Anaheim Convention Center. In a moment of—weakness? delirium?—Billy sought him out after the rally for an emergency counseling session. Something in the invocation had struck Billy as real, and while the rest of the Bravos signed autographs and posed for pictures, Pastor Rick and Billy sat down backstage and talked through Shroom’s death. Shroom lying there wounded. Shroom sitting up. Shroom collapsing in Billy’s lap, then his eyes zeroing in on Billy with such urgency, with so much pressing news, then the fade and his soul releasing, whoom, as if the life force is a highly volatile substance, contents stored under pressure.
“When he died, it’s like I wanted to die too.” But this wasn’t quite right. “When he died, I felt like I’d died too.” But that wasn’t it either. “In a way it was like the whole world died.” Even harder was describing his sense that Shroom’s death might have ruined him for anything else, because when he died? when I felt his soul pass through me? I loved him so much right then, I don’t think I can ever have that kind of love for anybody again. So what was the point of getting married, having kids, raising a family if you knew you couldn’t give them your very best love?
Billy cried. They prayed. Billy cried some more. He felt better for a couple of hours, but as day turned into evening and the hurt seeped in he found there was nothing for his mind to hold on to. What exactly had the pastor said? Billy remembered only the sound of it, a gauzy pambling and tinkling like easy-listening jazz. A couple of follow-up phone calls yielded similar uselessness, but now Pastor Rick won’t let him go. He keeps calling, texting, sending e-mails and links. Billy gets what’s in it for Pastor Rick; it’s cool for the reverend to have a “pastoral relationship” with a soldier in the field, it gives him cred, shows a stylish commitment to the issues of the day. Billy can hear the good pastor of a Sunday morning kick-starting his homily with a piece of Billy’s soul. “I was communicating the other day with one of our fine young soldiers who’s serving in Iraq, and we were discussing blah blah blah . . .”
Billy answers Kathryn, deletes Pastor Rick. Here on his right, Mango can’t get comfortable. He hunches over, flops back, peers left and right, twists around for a buggy look behind.
“Goddamn it,” Billy says, “be still. You’re making me nervous.”
“So stop being nervous.”
“You looking for something?”
“Yeah, your momma.”
“Fuck that, your momma. My momma’s a nun.”
Mango laughs and sits back. He checks out the game clock and groans. Being honored feels a lot like work and it’s worse out here on the aisle, sitting point for the Bravo-citizen interface. Yes sir, thank you sir. Yes ma’am, having a great time, absolutely. Billy passes programs down the row for everybody to autograph and has to make conversation while they come back. It’s getting better, don’t you think? It was worth it, don’t you think? We had to do it, don’t you think? He wishes that just once somebody would call him baby-killer, but this doesn’t seem to occur to them, that babies have been killed. Instead they talk about democracy, development, dubya em dees. They want so badly to believe, he’ll give them that much, they are as fervent as children insisting Santa Claus is real because once you stop believing, well, what then, maybe he doesn’t come anymore?
So what do you believe in? Billy doesn’t so much wonder as feel the question thrust upon him. Ha ha, well, okay. Jesus? Sorta. Buddha? Hm. The flag? Sure. How about . . . reality. Billy decides the war has made of him a rock-solid convert to the Church of What It Is, so let us pray, my fellow Americans, please join me in prayer. Let us pray for the many thousands gone, and those to follow. Let us pray for Lake and his stumps. Pray for A-bort’s SAW, that it may never jam in battle. Pray for Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld, father, son, and holy ghost, and all the angels of CENTCOM and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pray that it’s really about the oil. Pray for armor for the Humvees. Pray for Shroom, who may or may not have eternal life in heaven but who is most definitely fucking dead here on planet Earth.
Billy sits up. He supposes he’s been flaking. He cranes for a look down the sideline where Faison should be, but he’s too close to the field and doesn’t have the angle. For several minutes he tries to concentrate on the game, but it’s too slow, like riding an elevator that stops on every floor. It’s not like you’re supposed to watch the actual game anyway, no, you watch the Jumbotron, which displays not just the game in real and replay time but a nonstop filler of commercials, a barrage of sensory
overload that accounts for far more content than the game itself. Could it be that advertising is the main thing? And maybe the game is just an ad for the ads. It’s too much anyway, what they want from it. Such a humongous burden the game has to bear, so many advertising dollars, such huge salaries, such enormous outlays for physical plant and infrastructure that you can practically hear the sport groaning under the massive load, and the idea of it stresses Billy out, the gross imbalance triggers a tweezing in his gut like the first queasy tugs of a general unraveling. He thinks back to his Moment in the equipment room, when all those cumulative tons of gear tried to smother him and there was Ennis doing the play-by-play for his demise, babbling about size-style-color-model-quantity and everything crammed into that ten-minute spiel, in one breath it seemed like, and even now Billy can feel his chest constrict.
He figures Ennis for batshit, but who wouldn’t go crazy holding all that inventory in his head. Billy has these visions sometimes, these brief sightlines into America as a nightmare of superabundance, but Army life in general and the war in particular have rendered him acutely sensitive to quantity. Not that it’s rocket science. None of the higher mathematics is involved, for war is the pure and ultimate realm of dumb quantity. Who can manufacture the most death? It’s not calculus, yo, what we’re dealing with here is plain old idiot arithmetic, remedial metrics of rounds-per-minute, assets degraded, Excel spreadsheets of dead and wounded. By such measures, the United States military is the most beautiful fighting force in the history of the world. The first time he saw this demonstrated up close and personal sent him into a kind of shock, or maybe what they mean by awe. They were taking small-arms fire from somewhere above, sloppy, sporadic, deadly nonetheless. Finally it’s sourced to a four-story apartment building down the street. There are flower pots in the windows, laundry strung from the sills. “Call it in,” Captain Tripp radioed to Lt., so Lt. calls in the strike, two 155 mm HE rounds engage and the whole building, no, half the block goes down, boom, problem solved in a cloud of flame and smoke. So screw all the high-tech, precision-guided, media-whore stuff, the only way to really successfully invade a country is by blasting it to hell.
“Let’s bounce,” Billy murmurs to Mango, and they’re off, burning up the stairs two at a time.
“Where we going?”
“To see my girlfriend.”
Mango snorts. On the concourse they hit Papa John’s for beers, then start walking.
“So where’s this girlfriend?”
“You’ll see. Shut up and drink your beer.”
“You never told me about no girlfriend, dawg.”
“Well I’m telling you now, dawg.”
“What’s her name?”
“You’ll see.”
“She hot?”
“You’ll see.”
“She’s here?”
“No, Arizona. Of course she’s here, dumbfuck, how else we going to see her?”
The concourse is teeming with fans. The natives are restless. It has been a frustrating game thus far and they blow off steam by spending money. Happily there is retail at every turn so the crowd doesn’t lack for buying opportunities, and it’s the same everywhere Bravo has been, the airports, the hotels, the arenas and convention centers, in the downtowns and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.
They take the section 30 tunnel off the main concourse and bomb down the aisle, shooting the gap of this human sea of fannies in the seats.
“Billy, where we going?”
“She’s down here.” Billy is sucking in deep drafts of air, oxygenating his blood to counteract the booze. God forbid his new girlfriend should think him a drunk.
“Billy, what the fuck.”
“I told you she’s down here.”
“Billy, dawg, come on. Dude, you’ve lost it.”
“Unh-unh, she’s down here. She’s a cheerleader.”
Mango actually screams, which makes it all the sweeter when Faison gives a little jump and yells Billy’s name. The front-row walkway sits a good ten feet above field level; Billy leans over the railing and calls down to her.
“Now are you cold?”
She grins and shakes her head, hair tumbling everywhere. “No, it feels great! They say it’s supposed to snow!”
“This is my buddy Marc Montoya.”
“Hi, Marc!”
“Say hello, numb nuts.”
“Hello!”
“I’m so glad yall came to see me!” she calls up to them. “You havin’ a good time?”
“We’re having a great time! Hey, you were on TV! They showed you on the Jumbotron!”
Seeing how happy this makes her crushes him a little. This is where the vital part of her energy goes, into the semi-mystical, all-consuming, positive-thinking hustle for exposure and notice, the miracle moment of prime time that will lead to the big break. She wants to be on TV. She wants to be a star. So how a common grunt like him is supposed to compete with that—
“You looked great,” he tells her, and she beams. “That trippy little step,” he says, and breaks out a male approximation of her pom-pom routine, and this is funny, a U.S. soldier in dress uniform doing a shimmy-shimmy hip-slip sideways glide. She laughs; Mango is laughing too, half-draped on the railing he’s laughing so hard. Billy has never known such happiness, and if thousands of fans at his back are watching, no matter. Let the entire world be witness to his love, except now a couple of security guys are walking up, telling the Bravos they have to leave.
“What, you don’t like my dancing?” Billy says, but they just stare, all badass and bacdafucup, two doughy, middle-aged white guys with CORVINGTON SECURITY printed on their nylon bomber jackets, service-issue .38s bulging at the hip. Billy laughs. This makes it worse. He would guess they are moonlighting cops from some hick suburb, for they emanate the worst of both worlds, rural sloth plus urban malevolence.
“We’re not terrorists,” Billy deadpans, pushing it.
“Move,” says one of the cops. “Now.”
“We’re just talking to my friend down there.”
“I don’t care if you’re talking to the president, you can’t stand here.”
“You’re blocking their view,” says the other cop, indicating the front row. “These people paid good money for their seats.”
“What if they paid bad money?” says Mango, getting into the spirit, and the careful way the cops turn to him hums with all kinds of possibilities. For nothing Billy would gladly bust their heads, it’s that fast, adrenal valves shoved full on and his brain hot-wired every which way, and wouldn’t that do it, he thinks, busting their faces in, putting the truth of himself out there for all the world to see. If they make a move—but they don’t, and Billy’s homicide moment passes. He calls over the railing to Faison:
“These guys are saying we have to go.”
She’s walked over and is right below them now. “I think you better.” She’s worried, Billy realizes. She’s fearful of a scene.
“So I’ll see you!” he calls down.
“At halftime!” She sends up a killer smile. “I’ll look for you on the field!”
He doesn’t understand but nods anyway. Sure, on the field, in the stands, Brazil, wherever. He feels like he’s known her all his life and loved her even longer. The Bravos mad-dog the cops with one last stare and head for the main concourse, where Mango staggers around like he’s been maced. “Billy,” he moans, “Billy, Billy, a cheerleader? Oh God she’s fuckin’ beautiful, Billy, how’d you get with that?”
Mango’s slavering makes Billy cherish her even more. “I don’t know. We met at the press conference and just started talking.”
Mango turns wistful. “She really likes you, man. You can tell just by the way she looked at you, all warm and chewy and everything.”
Billy wants to go straight back and see her again. Their hump session could have been a freak of nature, but this second encounter proved some thi
ngs. Maybe there’s hope for his love life after all. Maybe it didn’t end with Shroom.
“Dude, you gotta get with her before we go,” Mango says.
“Don’t see how. We’re on post as of twenty-two hundred. Plus she’s a Christian girl.”
“Fuck, you kiddin’ me? Christian girls fuck like rabbits, vato. If you’re gonna give up sin, you gotta sin, you know? You better go for it now, ’cause by the time we get back she ain’t gonna know you, dawg. She’ll be fucking some linebacker and you’ll be like, Billy who?”
“Thanks, asshole.”
“I’m just sayin’! You better hit it while she’s into you. That’s just good advice.”
Billy’s cell rings. He checks the screen. A-bort.
“Yo.”
“Where the fuck are you guys? Dime is pissed.”
“We went for a walk. We’re on our way back.”
“They went for a walk,” A-bort says off-phone. “They’re on their way back.” Billy can hear Dime’s growling response.
“He says get the fuck back asap.” A-bort pulls away again. “Hang on, they’re briefing us on halftime.” Another pause. “What the fuck. They’re saying—uh.” Pause. “Oh Jesus.” There follows a longer pause, then A-bort resumes in a hushed voice. “Dude, you don’t even wanna know what they’re gonna make us do.”
RAPED BY ANGELS
BILLY KNOWS THEY ARE truly in the shit when Lodis gives him a cockeyed grin and leans close, like he’s about to impart some awesome piece of wisdom. “Billy,” he mumbles. Bih-yee.
“What.”
“Biy-yee.” Lodis is so far gone he’s in Buckwheat mode. “Man, where we at?”
Dear Lord. “Lodis,” Billy murmurs, “we’re down on the field. We’re gonna do some drill, got it?”
Lodis grins and bobs his head. He’s practically drooling.
“How many drinks you have up there?”
“Wonh’ tha’ many!”
Day peers around Crack. “What’s his problem?”
