Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (19 page)

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.

“What is it
about
you?” she murmurs at the next surfacing. “What’s happening to me?” When they lock lips again his pelvis drops and scoops into hers like a spoon driving into soft ice cream, pure motor reflex from the lower brain stem. He pulls back at once.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She watches him for a moment, then her eyes lose focus and some settling or shift in her lumbar regions signals he can press in again.
Home
he thinks, leading with his crotch, and her core seems to part and flow around him. They’re trembling. It’s so hard not making any noise. On the other side of the backdrop people are talking and carrying on with their idiot lives. Faison seems near tears as she grabs his lapels and wraps her legs around his waist, cowgirl boots and all. He clutches her from below, her compact little bottom fits neatly in his hands and he conjures up a mental picture of that, his hands full of fabled hot-pants ass and it strikes him in a blaze of exploding pheromones,
Holy shit, I’m making out with a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader!
Faison, meanwhile, has forged ahead, she’s rolling her hips and breathing mansions of glory in his face and on this day Billy will let himself believe he’s special because she comes in fewer than a dozen strokes, with a mighty clench and up-curving heave, a dolphin squeal stuck deep in her chest. That last torque of her hips nearly breaks his back, at least that’s the way it feels as he hangs on with every bit of life’s breath squeezed out of him, his vertebrae popping like bubble wrap. Then it’s done, except for a few lingering aftershocks. Like a shipwreck survivor dragging herself onto a beach, Faison releases first one leg, then the other. Her boots find the floor. She slumps against him.

“You okay?”

She mumbles something, then glances to the side to make sure no one’s watching. “My God,” she murmurs, and like a child whose attention is wholly elsewhere, she reaches up and gives his Silver Star an idle pull. When she draws back and looks up at him there are tears in her eyes.

“I’ve never moved this quick with anybody,” she whispers. “But it’s not wrong. I know it’s not.”

He shakes his head, which of its own accord tips toward her. “It’s not,” he mumbles into her hair.

“It’s just you, something about you. Maybe it’s the war.” She grabs him by the short scruff of his neck and gets him where she can see his eyes. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

He forces himself to meet her stare. In a second or two his retinas ache.

“You have an old soul.”

He thinks that might be from a movie but doesn’t mind. There may even be a kind of truth in it, the way Iraq ages you in dog years. He gives her a tug and she promptly collapses against his chest.

“We better go,” she murmurs.

“You’re incredible.”

She sighs. Neither of them moves. The voices are moving away, toward the back of the room. His erection is active and painful but apparently there’s just nothing to be done about it.

“I’m gonna be honest with you,” she whispers, “I’m not a virgin. I’ve had three boyfriends, but they were all long-term relationships. I’m not casual with my body, I just want you to know that.”

He nods and dips down for a whiff of her neck. Beneath the floral scents of perfume and soap he discovers a dense, rooty smell like sweet potato paste. Her smell. He can’t remember ever being so happy.

“It’s a really serious thing for me,” she whispers. “Being intimate with somebody.”

“Me too,” virginal Billy mouths into her neck.

“But it’s like if you really care about someone and trust them and know they feel the same way about you, I think it’s okay to be physically intimate. But it takes time, you know? To build that kind of trust. It doesn’t happen after one or two dates or a couple of weeks, it takes
time,
a real commitment to honoring each other. Like for me, just where I am in my life right now, I need to be with somebody for at least three months before I get to the trust point.”

All of which seems like a lot of information, but Billy doesn’t mind. He knows what his fellow Bravos would say: Let’s fuck now and I’ll owe you three months.

“That’s all right,” he whispers. “But I’d sure like to see you when I get back.”

She lifts her head. “Back from where?”

“Well, Iraq. We’ve gotta finish out our tour.”

“You—
what
?” She’s still whispering, but barely. “You’re going
back
? But nobody said, wait, everybody just
assumes,
oh my God, yall were done. Oh my God. When are you leaving?”

“Saturday.”

“Saturday?”
she cries, her voice breaking. She lifts her hair with one hand as if to rip it out, an ancient gesture that makes Billy weak in the knees.
Only women,
he thinks—only his mother, his sisters, and now Faison, only they have ever shown real grief for his sake, and his eyes burn with gratitude for all womankind. Faison rises on her toes for a furious kiss, and Billy’s erection, which had been napping at half-mast, instantly springs to attention.

“Oh my God,” she whispers, “if we could just—”

“Cheerleaders!” barks a female with a drill sergeant’s voice, “form up in the hall!”

“Oh shoot, I’ve gotta go.” Faison gives him a last kiss, then cups his cheek with her hand. “Listen . . .”

“Give me your digits.”

“I just got a new phone!” Meaning—???? “Come find me, I’ll be at the twenty-yard line.”

She pokes her head past the backdrop’s edge, then turns. “
Billy,
” she murmurs, and tries to smile, but falters when her eyes meet his. Then she’s gone.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS
MADE A SHITTY MOVIE

BILLY HAS NO IDEA
how they got here. That part is blank, like a concussion knocked him clean out of time’s flow into the next half hour, for he finds himself deposited on the playing field. The Bravos, Norm & Co., they are milling around the flats near the end zone, deep in the stadium’s horseshoe curve where the wind tears around in stinging freshets and flukes, a regular toilet bowl of rotary action down here. The transect of sky through the open dome is the color and texture of rumbled pewter, an ominous boil of bruised sepias and ditchwater grays that foretells all kinds of weather-related misery. “Gonna snow,” says Mango, their winter-conditions expert, “I can smell it,” but nobody pays any attention to him. Their little huddle is a-swirl with movie talk. Something has happened, Billy infers, new developments have been breaking while he was otherwise engaged. Howard and Grazer are out, apparently. Hanks is definitely out, Stone was never in, and Clooney’s people keep assiduously not returning Albert’s calls, but suddenly looming in the breach is Norman Oglesby with the promise, or let’s say the
potential,
or at least the not-so-far-fetched
possibility,
of robust millions in production financing—

“He’s intrigued,” is how Albert puts it,
intrigued
implying a level of interest higher than running your yap but short of laying the actual lucre on the table. “He likes the idea, and he likes you guys. But it’s early days yet.”

Early days, but Bravo has only two left, a woefully short fuse in the labyrinthine world of the movie deal. First
this
has to happen and then
that
has to happen and then about thirty more things simultaneously or in sequence without any previous item crapping out on you, the process fed, as far as Billy can tell, by outrageous verbal plyings of fear and greed. You make it happen by convincing everyone it’s happening, belief in the first instance being a vaporous construct of duplicity, puff, evasion, cant, and bald-faced lies. A con, in other words. Not that Billy thinks less of Albert because of this. It seems the process has huge margins for treachery built in; everyone just assumes everyone else is lying until a critical mass erupts from the sheer tonnage of bullshit put forth, and then they aren’t. Lying, that is. A sort of truth has been made to happen. Whether this business model has anything to do with the quality of the product that Hollywood turns out, Billy hasn’t had time to consider.

Someone, somebody’s
people
—Hanks’s? Grazer’s? Swank’s?—said it didn’t matter shit, or actually what they said was
nickels out of a monkey’s butt,
that the Bravo story is true, that
truth
is a
nonfactor
in the pricing of the deal. Which offended the soldiers, but Albert told them to shake it off. “They’re assholes,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Except the assholes always seem to be the ones with the money. At the moment Albert is standing off to the side, briary hair clawing the wind as he takes a call. Equidistant on Bravo’s other side, Norm is having his own cell session.

“Maybe they’re talking to each other,” says A-bort.

Dime just shakes his head and hunkers down against the cold. He’s slumping. He’s bored. His energy is low. Major Mac has wandered over to the sideline, where he stands gazing up at the goalpost as if signs and wonders are being revealed.

“Tole my moms I’ma buy her a car,” Lodis says. “Hunred thousand, Momma, go on up to the lot and pick it out! She pick it out and now she sittin’ at home, wonderin’ where the money at.”

“Look,” Crack says to the squad, “Norm’s loaded, right? Pretty much a billionaire, right? So all he’s gotta do to get the movie going is basically write a check.”

“Write
us
a check,” says Day. “Our story, yo.”

“True that. And like as soon as fucking possible.”

“Don’ forget Wesley Snipes gonna play me!”

“Your momma gonna play you.”

“Fuck that, she’s not ugly enough. Urkel plays him.”

“Richard Simmons. Dark him up.”

“No, that black midget dude, the wrestler. Master Blaster.”

“So why won’t he write the check?” Crack whines, appealing to Dime. “Like, just write it, bitch, don’t you wanna support the troops? How do you get a guy like that to put it out there?”

Well, Billy thinks but doesn’t say, we could walk over there, pick him up, turn him upside down, and just shake him until all the money falls out. Dime is unresponsive through all of this. It’s a classic Dime funk, not unheard-of when he’s bored or his blood sugar dips, but he’s funking right at the moment Billy needs his counsel most, namely, what to do with the miracle that’s just blown up his life. Thoughts of Faison crank his brain the way he’s heard crack does, a power-ball straight to the neural pleasure zones, and while it’s not the full-system freak-out of the hard-core fiend he is definitely feeling things he cannot control.
Dude, she was into you.
Fuck that,
she GOT OFF on you
. It occurs to him to wonder was it even real. It’s too perfect, just exactly the sort of delusion a desperate soldier would dream up, your normal, frustrated ADD grunt whose inner life is mostly overcooked sex fantasies anyway. But then self-doubt has always been there for Billy, self-doubt and its cousin the berating voice, these faithful companions have always been on call to help him through the critical junctures of his life, and yet, and yet . . . his lower back hurts like hell. Her scent lingers on his hands and chest. Strands of reddish-gold hair glint on his sleeves like signals from a distant mountain range. So if he’s not delusional and not on crack, what is he supposed to do? To make it real, that is. To make it stick. He needs to consult with his sergeant as soon as possible, because time is of the essence.

“Boys, things are looking up,” says Sykes. Half a dozen cheerleaders, none of them Faison, are heading this way, plus Josh with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He walks up to Bravo, unslings the duffel, and dumps a bunch of footballs at their feet.

“What’s this?”

“These are your balls,” says Josh.

Our balls.

“Yeah, they want you guys holding footballs when we do the shoot.”

A couple of Bravos grunt, but nobody says anything. They eye the footballs, nudge them with their toes, gaze off into the distance as if none of this has anything to do with them. Billy waits for an opening to speak with Dime alone. The cheerleaders sheep together nearby, shoulders hunched, legs pressed together for warmth, pom-poms clutched to their chests like giant muffs. Bravo shoots longing looks that way, but no one quite musters the courage to walk over there.

“Yo, Josh, any word on halftime?”

“Not yet. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something.”

“You’re gonna look out for us, right, Josh? Don’t make us do anything lame.”

“Or hard.”

“Or hard, right. We don’t wanna look like a bunch of morons on TV.”

“No worries, guys,” Josh assures them. “I think it’s going to be just fine.”

An especially chill gust shuts everyone up for a moment. “Why we gotta wait out here in the
cole
?” Lodis wails.

“The network said their guys would be here,” says Josh.

“Well they ain’t!”

“Hang loose. I’m sure they’ll be here in a minute.”

“Put Norm on they ass.”

Everyone turns and looks at Norm.

“Who he talking to?” Day asks. Josh furrows his brow, as if the answer will come with sufficient concentration, or the pretense thereof.

“I’m not sure, actually.”

“Whyn’t you go find out, yo.”

Josh staggers a little. “I can’t do that!”

Day gives him a sour, pitying look. “Whatchoo sayin’, you can’t walk?”

“Well of course I can walk.”

“Then cruise on by, thas all I’m sayin’. He talkin’ about makin’ our movie or what, all we wanna know. Think you can handle that?”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly ethical.”

Day snorts. He’s not above using his cool as a bullying tool when it comes to finicky white-boy sensibilities.

“Look, you see the man standin’ right there. He in public, right? This confidential, he go inside, slip off someplace private.”

“Uh, maybe. But I’m not sure what it would accomplish anyway.”

“Come on, man, intel! Knowledge power, every motherfucker know that! Just walk on by like you got business over there, ain’t no thing. Your job be looking out for us, right? It’s cool, just walking by. He ain’t markin’ you nohow.”

The other Bravos join in, mainly for something to do; they cajole and browbeat so relentlessly that at last Josh consents. With actorly nonchalance he saunters past Norm, loops around the entourage, greets the cheerleaders, then swings back toward Norm, in whose vicinity he casually kneels to tie his shoe. The Bravos follow every move.
A hundred thousand bucks.
By the time he returns they’re climbing out of their skins.

“He’s getting the injury report.”

Awww fuck. They’re dying out here. Billy scoops up a football and flips it at Dime. “Hit me!” he barks, and without waiting to see if Dime actually catches the ball Billy sprints off with an agonal
aaagggghhhh,
legs churning through all the arterial muck of the day’s heavy intake of food and alcohol. Three, four steps and his legs start to get it, his arms gear into the rhythm of the stride. He jukes through random people standing along the sideline, breaks left across the end zone and looks back. The ball—shit!—is right on him, tightly spinning like a drill bit’s business end and in that split second he sees everything, speed-loft-trim computes to ETA while his eye travels the ball’s trajectory back to the source, the big bang of Dime’s arm and the suddenly animate genius of his snarling face, like a Viking leaping ashore with ax in hand.

He’s unloaded a real bullet, too. The ball sings like silk tearing along a seam and Billy knows there will be no mercy in it, but he does just like the pros, eyes it all the way in and folds his stomach around the blow, a smothering
oooooph
—

Touchdown. He throws the ball back to Dime and angles deeper into the end zone, legs stroking, lungs feeding on fresh cold air. It feels so good to run, to just: run. Dime leads him too far with the next pass and he has to stretch, full extension in midstride and—
hands
! A cheer rises from the end-zone stands as he pulls the ball in, and Billy breaks off a little touchdown dance, uh
huh,
uh
huh,
taking it to the
house
. On the next pass Dime waves him long, then launches a bomb that floats over Billy’s head and into his arms, like rocking a baby the way that ball cuddles up to him, and the end-zone crowd sends up another cheer.

Billy is on. He’s feeling it. There’s a tingling sentience in every inch of his body, his receptors keyed to near-orgasmic pitch with a corresponding sureness of motor control. Is this how professional athletes feel all the time? Such pleasure in the sheer physicality of every moment, the meaty spring of your feet off good firm turf, the razor-strop of cold air in and out your lungs. Even food must have a heightened savoriness for them, and sex, dawg, don’t even talk about it. Naturally he hopes Faison is watching, and there’s the half-conscious thought that she did this, their encounter somehow altered his brain chemistry with one result being this quantum boost to his athletic skills.

He pivots, plants his feet for the throw back to Dime, and finds one, two, three footballs sailing at him, air support for an all-out incursion onto the field. Mango launches a line-drive kick that screams past Billy’s head. Lodis rams into Sykes from behind, knocking him to the ground. Crack and A-bort go long for a pass from Day, elbowing and trash-talking stride for stride, stumbling, nearly falling they are laughing so hard. “Jerry Rice,” Dime says as he jogs past Billy, then he kicks into gear and goes streaking off, looking back for Billy’s pass. The end-zone crowd is really cheering now and why not, what fan hasn’t dreamed of doing this very thing, a hell-all dash around the Valhalla of pro football fields? Bravo falls into a loose game of razzle-dazzle, modified tackle-the-man-with-the-ball with fluid or basically nonexistent teams and no apparent goal, just a bunch of guys tearing around the end zone, slamming into each other and laughing their asses off. And if it was just this, Billy thinks, just the rude mindless headbanging game of it, then football would be an excellent sport and not the bloated, sanctified, self-important beast it became once the culture got its clammy hands on it. Rules. There are hundreds, and every year they make more, an insidious and particularly gross distortion of the concept of “play,” and then there are the meat-brain coaches with their sadistic drills and team prayers and dyslexia-inducing diagrams, the control-freak refs running around like little Hitlers, the time-outs, the deadening pauses for incompletes, the pontifical ceremony of instant-replay reviews, plus huddles, playbooks, pads, audibles, and all other manner of stupefactive device when the truth of the matter is that boys just want to run around and knock the shit out of each other. This was a mystery Billy’s mother was never able to fathom. After having two daughters she couldn’t accept why from the earliest age her son would purposely slam into walls, doors, shrubbery, wrestle the ottoman around the den, or spontaneously tumble to the ground for no apparent reason other than it is there. Football seemed a constructive outlet for this impulse, and at various times during his youth Billy played organized ball, “organized” being the code word for elaborate systems of command and control where every ounce of power resides at the top. It seemed that football must be made to be productive and useful, a net-plus benefit for all mankind, hence the endless motivational yawping about teamwork, sacrifice, discipline, and other modern virtues, the basic thrust of which boiled down to shut up and do as you’re told. So despite the terrific violence inherent in the game a weird passivity seeped into your mind. All those rules, all the maxims, all the three-hour practices where you mostly stood around waiting your turn to be screamed at by an assistant coach, they produced an almost pleasurable numbness, a general dulling of perception and responsiveness. In a way it was nice, constantly being told what to do, except after a while it got boring as hell, and at a certain age you started to realize that most of the coaches were actually dumb as rocks.