Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

by Ben Fountain

  Someone pushes Billy onto the catwalk, then pulls him up short of the opening. The noise out there is just tremendous. He looks to his right and sees more Bravos similarly positioned, and at this instant he wishes he was back at the war. At least there he basically knew what he was doing, he had his training for guidance and the entire goddamn country wasn’t watching to see if he’d fuck up, but this, this is all wing-and-a-prayer shit. Middle level a voice is yelling in his ear, turn left and look for the purple X. Abruptly the music gears down to a meat-grinding crawl, kah-thunka, kah-thunka, it is a trash compactor mulling over more than it can chew. On the lowest tier of the stage Destiny’s Child is standing in front of three Prairie View drummers, the girls have taken the sticks and are pounding out the beat with the flailing elbows and lunging stance of fashionable women trying to jack up a car. By the time Billy gets stiff-armed onto the stage he’s barely breathing. It’s like stepping into a sun-filled cumulus cloud, a dazzling, cottony glow all about your person and nothing but air beneath your feet. He moves right-oblique toward the center stairs and arrives, small miracle, in sequence with the other three Bravos and everyone is marching more or less in step. He hears a rushing in his head and not much else. Directly in front of the stage the Drill grunts are doing the overhead rifle toss with fixed bayonets, the fuck, they could kill themselves and wouldn’t that be the shit, stabbed through the eye on live TV with your own bayonet!

  Need me a soldjah, soldjah boy

  Where dey at, where dey at

  Billy is last in file, thus he ends up on the purple X closest to center stage. Right face, halt. The rest of the Bravos have somehow appeared on the bottom tier, Dime-Sykes-Mango-A-bort all in a row. Soldjah gonna be real fah me, Beyoncé sings against Michelle’s and Kelly’s bass-line chant,

  Soldjah gonna be real fah me

  Yeah dey will, yeah dey will

  Soldjah gonna get chill fah me

  Yeah dey will, yeah dey will

  They are serenading the bottom-tier Bravos, slinking and spooning about on dainty cat feet, mewling minor-key trills of do-me angst. The entire stage has become a blowup of foreplay aerobics, rocket thrusting, shadow humping, knurling hips and ass, here on the second tier the dancers are twurking Bravo and not a damn thing you can do except stand at attention and get pole-danced in front of forty million people. It’s not right. Nobody said anything about this. What might be merely embarrassing in real life is made obscene and hostile by TV. Billy hates to think of his mother and sisters watching this, then one of the guys starts dancing a little too close, punking Billy with glide-by swivels and squats. Like I really wanna see your junk, fool! Billy gives him a look; the guy smirks and spins away. Then he comes back around, and Billy speaks with all the feeling he can jam through his teeth:

  Fuck off.

  The guy laughs and he’s gone again. The beat quickens as a line of Prairie View drummers comes marching down the stairs, boom-Lacka-Lacka-Lacka boom-Lacka-Lacka-Lacka. The Drill grunts are doing the Queen Anne Salute while troupes of smiling dancers decorate the flanks with jazzy kung fu moves. Down on the bottom tier Sykes is weeping. For some reason Billy is not surprised, he only hopes it will be over before all the Bravos lose their minds. Destiny’s Child regroups at center stage as a gathering storm of lights and fireworks signals crescendo time. Sykes’s back is a heaving pantomime of sobs, yet he maintains strict attention, chin up, chest out, and he has never seemed so brave or dear to Billy as at this moment.

  I ain’t scared, I’m comin’ through,

  I ain’t scared, I ain’t scared,

  Big man can’t you handle this good love I’m offerin’ you?

  Far across the field the Cowboys cheerleaders have formed a kick line, and even at this distance, through the haze of sleet and fireworks smoke, Billy’s eyes go straight to Faison, his groan a mere drop in the ocean of sound. Destiny’s Child is mounting the stairs, pausing every few steps to throw sassy looks over their shoulders, T&A bait for the TV cameras. Billy doesn’t so much as twitch when they pause on his tier, a fulmination of animal heat roaring at his side. For as long as they pose he doesn’t move, but once they’re gone he raises his eyes to the sky, then lifts his face a few degrees to get the weather’s full effect.

  The sleet stings, but he doesn’t blink. He lets it come, the spray of ice like a billion needles showering down on him, then it’s like the sleet is dangling and Billy’s flying through it, zooming toward some unnamed but promising place. Everything else falls away and he’s happy, free, the sting in his eyes is all speed and upward motion. It feels like escape velocity. It feels like the future. He’s still standing there, rocketing toward the world to come, when Day taps him on the shoulder and says halftime is over.

  IF IN THE FUTURE

  YOU TELL ME THIS IS LOVE,

  I WILL NOT DISAPPOINT YOU

  NO ONE COMES FOR them. They gather around Sykes and wait as instructed for the woman in the Russian officer’s cap, but Bravo has fallen through a crack in the collective mind and so they stand there marooned while a roadie crew swarms over the stage and ash from the fireworks settles on their heads. They have been through the wringer of a world-class spectacle and need some time for their nerves to recover. Like, about six years might do it? Bravo is roasted, toasted, and ready to pop, or maybe already popping in the case of Sykes, who sits himself down on the bottom step and weeps sparklers of racy little hopeless tears. “I don’t know why I’m fuckin’ cryin’!” he squawks when Lodis asks. “I just am, dammit! I just am!”

  “You guys have to leave,” the roadie foreman barks at Bravo.

  “Well fuck you too,” Mango mumbles as the guy stalks off, and the Bravos stay put. Day and A-bort sit down on either side of Sykes while the rest of them mill around feeling torn and frayed, fluttery hands shoved deep in their pockets.

  “Dudes, we finally saw Beyoncé,” Crack points out.

  “Woo, ain’t we special.”

  “Yeah, but we saw her up close.”

  “Uh-huh, she’s hot and everything. But I’ve had better.”

  They manage a few yuks at that. Billy finds himself standing next to Dime, and confides:

  “Sergeant, I feel sick.”

  Dime gives him a once-over. “You look okay to me.”

  “Not like sick sick. More like bent. Baked.” He taps his head. “Halftime sort of skitzed me out.”

  Dime laughs, at-at-at, a machine-gun rattle high in his throat. “Son, try to look at it this way. It’s just another normal day in America.”

  Billy’s heart melts a little at that son. The stage is disappearing around them like a mortally wounded ship beneath the waves.

  “I don’t think I even know what normal is anymore.”

  “You’re fine, Billy, you’re fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, everybody’s fine. He’s fine.” Dime nods at Sykes. “Everything is fine.”

  Billy looks at Sykes and starts to ask, Yeah, what are we going to do about him? but the foreman is coming at them again, snapping at Bravo to get the hell off his stage.

  “So where we supposed to go?” Crack snaps back. “Nobody told us where to go.”

  The foreman stops, spares them a harried moment’s regard. He’s well over six feet, bearded, broad shouldered, with a face slack and frowzy as a blown-out air bag, but there’s a shot of chemical voltage in his eyes, the crazed-lumberjack look of the veteran roadie. His gaze lingers for a second on the hot mess that is Sykes.

  “Look, I have no fucking idea where you’re supposed to go, but you can’t stay here.”

  “All right, Rufus, tell you what,” Crack answers. “We’ll go right after you’re done sucking my dick, how about that?”

  Later, thinking back on it, Billy will be struck by the fact that he never saw an actual punch being thrown. It doesn’t last long—ten, fifteen seconds at most? Though in the way of such things it seems to go on for hours. At first the foreman tries to lift Crack like he thinks he’s going to bodily throw him off the stage, so
he’s bigger than Crack but not that much bigger, and what a bummer it must be for the guy when he finds himself locked in a young-buck clench. For an instant the two men hardly move. Only their bulging eyes and necks betray the tons of thrust at work, then they’re twisting, spinning, they are the hub of a free-radical swirl of bodies that slides off the stage onto the field. People are pushing, chesting up, there’s much half-assed shoving and garbled smack talk about who dissed who and who crossed whose line and of course everybody’s gotta have their boy’s back. A melee, you’d call it. A fracas. Not quite a throw-down brawl right here on the sacred turf of Texas Stadium. Billy is skying on a full-bore adrenaline rip as arms, hands, faces go crashing by, then there’s Dime stroking past like a man swimming rapids, pushing through bodies to pry Crack clear. A roadie swipes at Dime’s back and Billy grabs his collar and there’s the guy’s wild look as he twists around, and Billy thinks: Whoa shit, don’t let go now. The guy reels as Billy rides him from behind, riding, riding, he wishes it didn’t look so much like he’s humping the guy but he hangs on until the cops wade in, and all it takes is a word from Dime for Bravo to disengage, “like a bunch of excellent hunting dogs” as he likes to say of his squad.

  Casualties, minor. Crack has taken an elbow in the eye; Lodis’s lip is split and bloody; Mango’s ear tenderized by a roadie headlock. The cops herd Bravo down the sideline and hear out their story, then send them packing across the field toward the home sideline. “Somebody over there can tell you where to go,” the cops say, so like the remnants of some long-lost jungle patrol Bravo makes its straggling way across the field. They’ve passed the first hash mark when Billy looks up and sees, oh mother of mercy, Faison coming out to meet them, her head cocked at a questioning skew, face full of concern. She’s pumped, Billy can tell. This is a girl who likes her drama.

  “What happened?” She peers up at him, touches his arm as they meet. The rest of the Bravos lapse into reverential silence.

  “It was stupid, just this stupid little thing. We kind of got into it with the roadies over there.”

  “Were yall fighting? We couldn’t tell if yall were fighting or goofing around.”

  “I guess we were fighting. Though you couldn’t call it much of a fight.”

  “All we did was ask if we could help!” A-bort says, and everybody yuks except Sykes, who breaks down all over again.

  “Are you hurt?” Faison asks Billy, then she’s speaking to all the Bravos. “Is anybody hurt? Oh my God, look at your lip!” she cries at Lodis. “Who’s supposed to be taking care of you guys?”

  She’s incensed to learn that Bravo has been left on its own. “All right,” she says, turning, motioning Bravo to follow, “yall come with me, we’ll get this figured out. I can’t believe they just left yall stranded out here, that is so NOT the way we treat our guests.”

  The Bravos clump about her in a loose bundle, murmuring their thanks. “Listen,” she tells them, “that stage crew? We’ve had problems with those guys before, it’s like they think they own the place. They almost beat up Lyle Lovett a couple of weeks ago, they were like, Get off the stage! Get off the stage right NOW! And Lyle and his guys had all their equipment up there, it’s not like they were gonna just walk off and leave it. Lucky security was right there or we mighta had a situation.”

  “I think they’re tweekin’,” says Mango.

  “They sure act like it, don’t they, they act like they’re on something. Somebody ought to speak to management about those guys.”

  More cheerleaders are coming out to meet them, and it dawns on Bravo that this might turn out all right. A kind of mixer develops there along the home sideline, Bravos and cheerleaders chatting it up while calls are made upstairs on the soldiers’ behalf. The fracas gives them something to talk about; the cheerleaders are shocked at first, then indignant as the story gets around, the flip side of which is a bonus serving of sympathy for Bravo. Ice is fetched for Crack’s eye and Lodis’s lip. A couple of cheerleaders tenderly probe Mango’s rug-burned ear.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Faison asks, nodding at Sykes. She and Billy are standing somewhat apart from the others.

  “Oh, that’s Sykes.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  Billy considers Sykes, who’s squatting in the lee of a portable equipment locker, quietly weeping.

  “He misses his wife.”

  “Wow.” Faison seems impressed. “Really?”

  “He’s kind of an emotional guy.”

  She keeps glancing over at Sykes. She’s fascinated, or perhaps just troubled that nothing’s being done about him.

  “Does he have kids?”

  “One on the ground, one on the way.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t imagine. Do you think I should go over and talk to him?”

  “I think he just wants to be alone right now.”

  “You’re probably right. Sheesh, the sacrifices you guys make! How long did you say you’re gonna be over there?”

  “Through next October, unless we get stop-lossed again.”

  “Oh Lord.” It comes out as a kind of rattling moan, oh Lord, like she’s rollerblading on a gravel road. “And you’ve been there how long already?”

  “We infilled August twelfth.”

  “Oh me. Oh my God. You must dread going back.”

  “I guess. In a way.” Somehow their faces have ended up mere inches apart, and this seems like the most natural thing in the world, as basic as wind, tides, the magnetic north. “It is what it is, I guess. But we’ll all be together, that’s something. That counts for a lot, actually.”

  “I think I know what you mean. There’s that whole bonding thing when you’re challenged as a group.” While she talks Billy is trying to memorize her face, the supreme excellence, for example, of the delicate butterfly clasp of the bridge of her nose, or the smattering of freckles high on her forehead, the way their gingery carotene tint matches her hair exactly. The desire comes over him to stretch his mouth wide open, as wide as a lion’s, say, and tenderly hold her perfect face between his lips for a while.

  “Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing might be a mistake. I mean, I think we ought to be fighting terrorism and everything, but it’s like, okay, we got rid of Saddam, maybe we should just bring our guys home and let the Iraqis work it out for themselves.”

  “Sometimes we think that too,” Billy says, remembering something Shroom once said: Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.

  “Ha ha, no doubt.” She peers past his shoulder. “The second half’s gonna start in a minute,” she says, then pulls back and looks Billy in the eye. “Listen, can I ask you something personal?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you seeing anybody?”

  “Not me,” he allows bravely, with breezy resignation. He doesn’t care if she knows he’s not a player.

  “Me either. So how about if we stay in touch.”

  “Ye-uh,” he says, half choking on it, then “yes. Yes, I think we should.”

  “Good.” She’s suddenly very brisk and businesslike. “You’ve got your phone? Get out your phone and I’ll give you my information, then call me and leave a message so I’ll have yours. Because, frankly, I don’t wanna lose you.”

  She says it just like that, a casually earthshaking statement of stupendous fact. Him, Billy, a person not to be wanted lost! His life has become miraculous to him. Maybe he should just go ahead and ask her to marry him.

  “What’s your last name?” He’s got his phone out.

  “Zorn.”

  Billy clears his throat.

  “I know, everybody thinks it’s funny.”

  Billy says nothing.

  “It means ‘anger’ in German.”

  “Roger that,” he deadpans.

  “Stop it! You’re so funny.”

  She’s at his side, their heads practically touching as she watches him key in her information. The phone gives them socially acceptable cover for standing so close, good thing because it’s
happening in front of thousands of people. Billy breathes deep, pulling in her clean outdoors smell, the sharp vanilla tang of snow and winter wind. It’s as if she’s absorbed the sweetest essence that the season has to offer.

  “Who’s Kathryn?”